Just after Earth Day, Robyn (using her best ‘stern’ teacher voice!) gave an assignment in The Morning Muse
Is there a Universe Day? If not, why not? Write a five-paragraph essay on the topic.
(Important note! I am not asking for five paragraphs!)
I would like to develop that sort of interactivity more, it is an intriguing little shift on (hahaha!) “traditional” blogging. Doing something similar would also be very useful to me, as a blogger. I have lived in Hawaii and then Mexico for the last two years, (soon to be returning to the States, btw) and though Hawaii is technically part of America, the small town in which I lived was …not.
So I am out of touch, even more than usual (!)… with what ‘The Typical American’ is thinking. A LOT has happened in those two years! And though I don’t think anyone here at DD would think of themselves as a ‘typical’ American, ALL of you have your finger on the pulse so to speak, more than I do!
This was also inspired by reading a piece on Think Progress in which one of our favorite people, Karl Rove was quoted as saying…
ROVE: The American people are prospective. They’re always looking forward. So if you try and say John McCain is George Bush, that simply lacks credibility with a wide number of Americans. All they know about John McCain is that he’s the maverick Republican senator who has often crossed swords with Bush and in fact ran against him in 2000. So I’m not certain claiming that McCain is Bush and therefore you ought to vote against McCain because he is Bush is a very credible argument.
(video at the link)
I also read somewhere recently, a quote from an ‘average Republican’ that said something like…”when you look at the shape the world is in these days, I think you have to credit the President with doing a good job.”
I don’t want to poison the well, but I do want to frame the question in a way that makes it relatively easy to answer, so:
Considering the way they get ‘the news’…and…In light of nearly eight years of Bush, the current economy, the war, torture and spying revelations, and the ongoig D vs R political divide…what do you think Americans think about America now? How do they view its place in the world and how do they view the “State of The Union?”
What is the “mood on the street?”
Feel free to write as little (really!) or as much as you wish and… thanks for contributing
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Any volunteers for Funkalicious Friday tonight? I like the idea of people getting to share their DJ skills after 73V did such a great job last week!
Don’t be shy!
about some Americans… there are some people who don’t know what they think until Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh tell them. But Karl Rove , and Rush Limbaugh (his less bright soul brother), are getting thru to fewer and fewer people all the time. Most people aren’t totally stupid… but there is that roughly 25% who will always be the walking brain dead.
Americans are increasingly matching the rhetoric with what they can actually see and are looking for news sources that jive with that. Even though Republicans have a cult mentality and always revert to type, more and more they are smelling a rat… that rat is Karl Rove. (Have you ever wondered why his name is spelled with a “K”? Would little Carl Rove have grown up to be a Nazi?)
I don’t think most Republicans like John McCain, really like him, and even here in his home state of AZ, Obama is closing in on him. So the pulse of the American people??? …skeptical.
I still got beer in the fridge from Black Thursday.
When confronted with shit like that I start to wonder what exactly is in the water or is it some kind of subliminal mind control frequency coming from the cell phone towers.
Jeane Palfrey ought to be tonight’s “news” search keyword.
DC madam gets suicided. Wonder where the little black book is?
How do I feel about America? Well they won’t let me emmigrate cause I’m too old. Survivalist preparations are ongoing. The neighborhood martial law watch group met Monday to discuss the recent drug raid at the local high school. I feel alone in a nation of zominals, sheeple we call them.
some of whom just don’t get the enormity of the fix we’re in. they still see it “local” and have no idea that the food fights across the ocean will reach us…
i was trying to convince them to shop in pairs to save gas and they thought that was going overboard. and yet they understand how absurd it is for people to be driving SUVs… BUT it’s the cost of gas, not the impact of those cars.
my real deep belief is that people will get it. but nobody has really talked to them about it. we have this line we won’t cross in discussing politics with our family/friends/neighbors.
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…
so we have to make some relationships that incite people… benefits vs. CEO pay… taxes to Halliburton vs. welfare…
people still think that poor people are sucking our tax jobs and that immigrants are stealing our jobs. the biggest industry in the US right now is DEBT… we have no product pipeline…
okay. maybe i’ll stop now… you said keep it short. but it’s all the coffee i drank.
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…
the conversation here in Iowa.
1. Gas prices
2. Flooding
Gas prices are almost universally blamed on Bush and the Iraq war (left, center, and some on the right). If a righty tries to defend Bush with “it will get even worse if we pull out of Iraq,” everyone else groans and rolls their eyes. Hardly anyone I know doesn’t seriously consider a hybrid for their next vehicle, and that includes hard-core redneck SUV drivers like myself.
We don’t know why God is punishing us with so much rain (people SAY their sinning hasn’t increased lately but I’m skeptical). I wish I had started an ark business about two months ago. Global warming is getting more serious consideration as to whether it has forced the jet stream farther north, which in turn drops more moisture in the midwest and less in the southeast.
huh, weird. I can’t believe Brooke was thrown out. She seemed so nice.
Anyway, I’m pretty pissed about gas prices. The torture isn’t helping as much as I had hoped it would, and for now I’m bored with beating the crap out of Arabs in Iraq. It’s starting to look like Bush and his bunch are almost as bad as those fuckin’ liberals . . . ha, did you see that? Spit his drink halfway across the room. Funny. . . Maybe Obama will be all right, even with that ridiculous name, but he needs to quit hangin’ with the wrong crowd . . . Hey, that’s that little girl who went missing last year . . . What the hell? Blank screen . . . Honey, did we pay the cable bill this month?
From the senior set
In our neck of the woods the rural red, mostly retired moved to the area during the boom of the 80s and early 90s near Branson Missouri
They brought up most of the timber land. Then cut and sold timber in the last 4 years just to live the way they hoped to when they retired. The forest that is in private hands is going, here in the good ole USA, not just in the rain forests of South America
I think it is dawning on them that the nest eggs they thought they had
are rotten eggs caused by the slime that drips out of DC
Some say they been through this before, so they will do the best they can .
To old to change I guess.
Two families of our acquaints have taken the grand children so the parents
Can work in the city.
Some are mad and fight with the power that be,
But it seem all they are getting is more rotten eggs.
It isn’t working
With land prices in the hole, they can’t sell
Nobody wants to buy
A lot of us can grow some of what WE need But WE can not grow
Toilet paper
So I guess you could say WE do not have enough to wipe our ass
After the powers that be has stolen most of it……..
in the midwest, I’m usually pretty “off” in my understanding of where folks are these days.
But my bad news is that even my so-called “liberal” friends really don’t want to talk about what the US is doing and just how serious things are. Of course for them, either Hillary or Barack will fix it all and then we’ll get back to the way things were in the 90’s. They like to rant about Bushco, and they tend to see all our problems as his fault.
I get tired of sounding like chicken little all the time. They generally either want me to shut up or they laugh at me. So I pick my times and places to throw a little gas on the fire.
On the other end of things, I’ll be spending next weekend in Texas immersed in wingnuttiaville. You really don’t need to hear about them, so all I’ll say is please pray for me.
most of the people i interact with regularly are the families of my daughters’ schoolmates and teammates….
she left the catholic school 3 years ago, but still participates in the sports programs run through the parish (theyre much less competitive than any other programs around here)…and the particular parish we live in is very blue-collar and becoming more integrated by the minute, but is a typical 50’s era suburb with tract housing and 2 liquor stores per mile on the main road… the interesting thing about the parish is that it cant fill the school, so the school is co-sponsored by the hoity-toity parish that’s further out into the ‘burbs, and much less integrated… waaay redder, with a smattering of ‘reagan dems’…
what used to be spirited discussions of politics have dwindled to lack of eye contact and uncomfortable silences…but if pressed they will all still defend the admin and the war. their heart isnt in it, though, so i try not to give them too much encouragement to defend it. i think they just need their space…and delaware voted for gore and kerry….so im not too worried. we still have rep. castle to deal with (that’s what possum’s trying to do)…and we’re working on it…
the schools the kids are in now are public though…one for disabled kids where ‘no child left behind’ is outwardly laughed at, and where the serious lack of medical options as well as educational options is openly discussed, and blamed on the republicans. many of these folks, like me, are swimming upstream in their dailies, and hardly have time or energy for ‘bigger picture’ issues…we do what we can…
the other kid is in a school of the arts. ’nuff said?? about as liberal as you can get….from the single-parent, lesbian dean right down to the gay couples that make out in the hallways…..from the abstinence-only health classes where the health teacher basically tells them where to get all the other info they need though she cant teach it to the independent student health service that is separate from the ‘nurse’s office’ and is right in the building….that ‘front’ is pretty ok… theyre the ones who allowed my kid to use a picture of cheney to represent the word ‘demon’ in their fall production…. 😉
i figure the more info you have the better…..
greetings from red red SC!! this is the state that usually calls any election for the R before i get home from voting (appx 9AM)….
hmmm, recently (last decade) there has been a large influx of hispanics…this has stragely enough broken down barriers between black & white! last night at some function for my girls graduating class fully half the kids were black…this is a private (non-state) college that has lutherans involved somehow (sponsored?) 30 yrs ago there were maybe 6-7 blacks at this school….
the younger people have interracial marriages….this used to be strange & unusual as little as 10-15yrs ago….
everyone is bitchin about gas prices, food prices, the war in iraq…. the manager at the grocery said ppls buying habits are changing….more ppl are buying lots at one time (like i do) & shopping less frequently…. lots of ppl are talking out loud about ‘that bastard’ (bush) & how he lied to us….lots of bitching about multiple tours for ‘our boys'(weekend warriors was nearly a way of life here….many many men are in national guard….many are pissed they’ve been shipped overseas~ how is that guarding the nation?……I’m not hearing much on torture tho-
a question…or two?
why are you leaving mexico? where you goin?