(@2 PM – promoted by On The Bus)
Remember back when you were just a child and you somehow got into an argument with a sibling or a playmate? Whenever an adult would come to investigate the commotion that was coming from your general vicinity, the topic would change from one of true discord and quickly transform into a repeating of this simple mantra:
Well, you started it!
No, you started it!
No, You Did!
NO, YOU DID……and on and on it went.
It’ll all make sense in a bit. Hang in there with me, OK?
Oh, BTW. You are about to be the change you always wanted to see happen. No, really.
Come with me on our first (hat tip to pfiore8) Political Cocktail Party!
just let me say this one more thing… start having political cocktail parties and start getting people thinking about our situation and perhaps this will also enlarge their world view
We all grew up in a world where we were taught that might equals right, you should speak softly but carry a big stick, and if you didn’t start it, by Goddess, you better end it.
OK. Maybe we didn’t start the absolute shit-storm that has slowly degraded our Constitution, caused the rule of law in this country to become more of a suggestion for anyone in the Ruling Party and more of a disadvantage to those of us who are not in the top 1% of the income earners here in what used to be Our Country.
You know what? WE did NOT start it. But, being who WE are, WE are going to put an end to it. I’ll explain why WE will do just that.
OK, enough with the capital letters. You get the point.
Speaking of points, at this point in time it is no longer important as to who started it. It is important that the degradation of our lives and our way of life is stopped. Let’s take it from there.
The Revolution? It’s on, my friends!
You started it!
Back in the ’60’s, Timothy Leary told us to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Well, we have certainly turned on. We have become extremely sensitive to the various levels of bullshit that have been dumped upon us.
We have not only tuned in, but thanks to the world changing information available on the internet that allows us to communicate as easily with someone half a world away as someone in the room next to you, we have logged on.
Some of the best people I have never met, and many that I have met logged on as well. They also found a place, or places just like Docudharma to meet, and discuss, and rant and plan, and care, and love and move forward.
Because of the fact that we learned to become self reliant when we were children or perhaps some of us later as adults, we did somehow drop out.
We dropped out of the hive-mind mentality of go along to get along. Somehow, the people here decided early in life, or perhaps just recently to be strong and care about more than just the air in the personal space surrounding themselves.
We care about righting what is obviously wrong.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to decide what issues you feel are the absolutely most important to you, to this country and this world when it comes to righting the obvious wrongs that have been imposed upon us.
As a first strike, I would ask that you list in the comments on this essay just exactly what issues you think we should attack first, and why. That way we can compile this list and begin putting together action plans to do more than just talk together about these important issues, but to DO something about them.
(Hat tip to masslass. This was her idea, after all). Action items, if you will.
We can then ask groups of like minded Dharmite’s to come up with a real plan that will allow us to begin surgical strikes in reality against those issues that we deem need to be corrected, beginning Now!
From pfiore8:
…and that communication shut-down only serves the bad guys. no debate is for the short-term win. and it isn’t about winning anyway. it is about enlightenment. do you leave enough of a disturbance in someone’s mind for them to start thinking differently about what is happening…
but we need have to talk to one another in 3D. we need to e-mail our non-blogging friends with essays from here… but, as geomoo said, he gets tired of reiterating the laundry list…
Reiterating the laundry list is now something we are going to do, together. Once we have finished reiterating this list and prioritizing which issues need to be addressed right-fucking-now, we are going to stop listing and start doing something about it.
The Countdown to January 20, 2009 – hereafter known as Freedom from BushCo Day – 257days. And counting. Let’s make it count. Together.
This essay is going to be tagged as the Topic Action – Issues Project. You can find the Topics on the right side of the DD website, under, um, Topics. 😉
What we need to do is identify the Action Items that we want to address right now, and then volunteer to get together in groups that are invested in overcoming one Action Item or another.
We then need to look outside the blog and identify people, groups or even celebrities that are also invested in these Action Item issues. We put together a plan of action, draft our ideas, then contact those outside or even inside the netroots that are interested in our ideas and allow them to assist us with taking our message to the American people, any way they can.
I would like to extend an open invitation for everyone here to write essays regarding Action Items and tag them with the Topic of Action – Issues Project. This will give us a quick reference point for meeting up and reading what’s new in the world of Action Items and Action Plans.
So, once again, please leave your ideas for our “laundry list” of issues in the comments of this essay, and then start thinking about what information you wish could be disseminated to the average American citizen that they are not aware of today.
Let’s rock this! We are the change we seek. Right?
Yeah, I knew you thought so too.
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this mess?
I sure as hell am, and I’d be proud to have any and all of you, the great group of people here at Docudharma, along with me for the Revolution.
So, what will it be? Constitution? Economy? How about this – I propose we, as a group and with as many friends, neighbors, co-workers, whatever – pick an oil company (Exxon/
Mobil?) and just stop buying from them. And don’t start doing
business with them until they decide to lower the price even
if that means cutting into their billions of dollars profit.
Let’s be verbal, write letters to the editor, post on every
site you go to, make signs or anything else you can think of.
But not one dollar to the bastards until they lower the price!
258 days and counting
and we need to talk to our neighbors/family/friends about it. we must end the self-imposed moratorium on talking politics. because we can’t do it without each other…
heh. broken gov’t…
that we are paying almost $4/gallon of gas so that others can drive SUVs and Hummers. think about that… why aren’t they paying $6/gallon at the pump. All cars that get under x/miles/gallon should be paying. NOT MOST OF THE REST OF US. this is broken gov’t.
that wages are stagnant, unemployment is increasing, poverty is increasing, benefits are decreasing and yet, since 9/11 CEO pay has gone up something like 35 percent.
we need these kinds of FACTS, verifiable through our own GAO… and start painting the picture so people start to see it… that we, and they, are getting screwed by the right-to-life/family values/compassionate conservative crowd… poverty up 6 million, 28 million people on food stamps, and mother nature is winding up with resource shortages.
yeah. we better start talking to one another. but it needs to be about consensus building and resource sharing and how we fit with everybody else on the planet.
what do we do to sure up ourselves first without more damage to the planet. cause (and this is for you jess), it’s like the airplane safety thing… always put your oxygen mask on first so you’re conscious to be able to help others.
GREAT initiative. and i’m so totally proud of you both!
in a weekly peace vigil at a busy downtown intersection. Once a year, in September, they organize an event called the Peace Path, where they ask everyone to come out into the street with their signs for peace, up and down Charles Street, from the Inner Harbor to the northern section of the Baltimore Beltway.
In retrospect, where Leary got it wrong was the dropping out part. Perhaps a bit of a necessary step at the time, but the system went on without us, instead of with us in its belly causing it indigestion.
Thanks for moving stuff forward, brobin!
We’re front paged 😉
The Revolution is now officially on!!
258 days and counting
I would also point out that action diaries appear on DD fairly often, including the Iraq Moratorium by xofferson, winter rabbit’s historical diaries, jimstaro’s diaries on veterans, grannyhelen’s on Tibet, TomP on labor, etc. These could be given much more attention by the rank and file here than they usually get. They are well written and well researched and provide a way to get involved.
Witness Against War:
Single Payer Now:
United for Peace and Justice has a searchable calendar
of antiwar events throughout the year and throughout the country.
Like tomorrow….I had this discussion with masslass about knowing what the ‘enemy’ is up to, but we already know what they’re doing and they spend millions upon billions to subvertly push their messages to the masses via the tv. Paying attention to asinine idiots pretending to read the news is like paying attention to a child when they’re having a temper tantrum. Any attention paid [negative or positive] just fuels the fire/ego…plus the less participation there is all around in the most obvious propaganda machine the better… most anything worth watching anymore is online or can be downloaded anyways and missing what can’t be found would be worth it to start to shut down the hold television has on shaping the national dialog….especially for progressives…I’ve always found I’m happier and more productive when I don’t watch tv anyways…
On a similar note getting internet access to everyone should be at the top of the list too. If you don’t have the internet these days you might as well be in the dark ages…and right now is the time to start shaping what net neutrality means and to ensure the internet doesn’t get consolidated the same way tv did…
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/…
To summarize my ramblings…make television illegal and the internet mandatory 🙂
viva la revolution!
I think as progressives we need to focus on what he termed the Triple Evils of racism, poverty and war. That’s actually what pulled me into the Edwards camp, was that he made poverty a central issue and I think to move society forward it is one that we need to focus on.
“War”, or violence, isn’t just what we’re doing in Iraq. It is also the violence we wreck upon the environment (note that the environment is starting to hit back, and when it does you can be sure it will kick a** and take names). We need to practice sustainability, and get away from the mindset that says that we can just pump our way out of our problems.
“Racism”, broadly encompassing areas of homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, sexism, religious intolerance (or intolerance of religion) is something I think the blogs could be very useful in addressing. This is about information exchanged over and over and over again, and after this primary season there will be work that we need to do to fix some of the sexism I’ve seen sprout up due to Hillary’s candidacy, as well as the utter nonsense that became the media’s Big Distractions aka the Wright nontroversy.
Whatever we do, we need to have a clearly articulated goal. Action in and of itself is fine, but what can too often happen is that the action doesn’t lead to a firm solution (King discovered this in the Albany campaign). If we take an action we need to articulate what we want – i.e., what specific goal the action is going to achieve.
I’d like folks to start by perusing The King Center’s online tutorial on nonviolence as an intro: http://www.thekingcenter.org/p… Specifically, the 6 Steps I think would be helpful to map out what we want to do and what steps we should take to get there: http://www.thekingcenter.org/p…
Cuz hey, if it worked for King… 🙂
That is, a genuine opposition party to the corporate party that actually runs things in both “Democratic” and “Republican” administrations. We can get there either by forming a new party, or by taking back the Democratic Party (which used to function as the opposition to the corporate party, but does so no longer). To me, the latter course seems more doable, though that may only be because I have a slightly clearer idea how to do it: By primarying every Democrat in Congress until we get a collection of unbought legislators who will stay unbought at least long enough to accomplish something positive in Congress before they have to be replaced again. This year’s primarying of Nancy Pelosi is an excellent start in that direction (especially if it succeeds!), but the political wing of the revolution will have to go far beyond that, and not only in D.C. but in the statehouses as well.
Party reform, media reform, and campaign finance reform all sort of go hand-in-hand-in-hand, I think. But it may be that party reform has to come first, before we can get the others. Party reform will require an awake and aware electorate that will finally start voting its own self-interest instead of Wall Street’s and the corporate media’s.
understands what we’re trying to do:
We need to, as a group, focus on one item, solve it then move
onto the next item.
What I see are many very important issues… why not rally
around one..every one of us with anyone else we can drag
along? This is not to say that you’re personal issue is any
less important that any other… but until we rally
together I don’t see how the myriad of problems we face can
be solved.
258 and counting..
there have been several essays about action items here. note the ‘action alert’ sidebar. 🙂 i believe the essays were authored by Budhydharma… some good ideas in them as i recall. might be worth a re-read.
There’s a lot of valuable comments here.
Re ; capitalism. If you don’t have a ready replacement, please do not open this can of worms.
Re ; Direction to take : Article V
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
You may note this does not say, “Pass around a petition, collect signatures, put it on the ballot, if it passes it is in the Constitution.” Things are not quite that easy. But should they be? Perhaps. If this republic was created by and for the people, rather than for those grasping the levers of power.
So, why is the government delegated the power of modifying the Constitution? Is it because a revolution need be nothing more than taking this power away from government, and Naturally (!), using this power of specifying the nature and capabilities of government to correct the problems that would lead to a revolution?
The topic is CAUSAL. What is the Cause of the problem? Is it that Government (those few who are IN it) has decided to go its’ own way? Then should it not be led back?
Thanks.