Memes baby, we got memes. Memes, Paradigms, Conventional Wisdoms, Tropes, Dopes and Hope.
But mainly memes, we are soaking in them. We are waist deep in the big paradigm and the water is still rising, apparently. HELP! I have fallen into Conventional Wisdom, and I can’t get up! If only there was a fast and easy way to get rid of these tropes that make laundry day such a chore! Will no one rid me of these troublesome dopes?
At this point hope is all we have, as we try to turn the Fundy Tide left over from the decade of disinformation. I come to this sentence not to bury the Bushshit, but to praise it. It was some damn effective Bullshit.
We are still soaking in that too.
We are still reacting to Bush. To the reality that Bush and Cheney and Rove concocted, perpetrated, and imposed upon us and the world. Even after it has nearly destroyed it. The greed of the rich is still good and necessary for the economy, the greed of the poor is still tacky and unseemly. Brown people are still the enemy and encased in ICE and held in torturous circumstances in Bagram.
We are still hacking our way through the thickets of illogic and fear towards the hilltop of reason and the rising sun of a new day. Still wandering in the desert of republican power, even as they fully reveal themselves for the noxious stinking pool of quicksand that they have always been. And yet we keep wandering in circles back to the same pool. The muscles of our Right legs have been more developed than the muscles of our Left legs, you see, and so without a reference point to head towards, we walk in a circle, with the muscle of the Right propelling us round and round.
LOOK! we shout. Over there! Freedom, Justice, Salvation!!! There it is! That is our reference point! There is our way out! All we have to do is shed this baggage and make for it post haste!!!
Oh no, we can’t do that!!! What would the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE think if we just told them to STFU and get out of the way??? The Villagers might burn us if we yell too loudly and wake them from their slumbers! Or…or…maybe even….gasp….The Very Serious People who have been proven wrong over and over and over might not respect us!
Or even worse….if we tell them we are angry, we might become a mob……somehow.
The whole frikking world knows that things are bad. The whole frikking world knows that it is bad because of Bush. The whole frikking world except the Very Serious Villagers and their lackeys in the Merde Stream Media knows that the remaining Republicans are pushing the same damn ideas, memes, tropes and conventional (but WRONG) wisdom that fucked every goddam thing you can possibly think of up. And thanks to the law of Unintended Consequences, they have fucked up things we CAN’T even think of!
Yet here we are. Still huddled in our caves of color coded fear….as one man, one brave, smart, VERY patient man fights our battles for us. As he fights, we huddle in our caves and hopes he saves us. He has called us to the battle lines, summoned us to the barricades, and yet we huddle still. He has given us our assignments as clearly as he can while using the politicode that HE is forced to use. Yet we do not heed his call.
He has told us to challenge the conventional wisdoms that he in the position of power cannot safely challenge openly. He has told us that we can and must challenge HIM to do so. He has told us to Make Him Do It. He has told us to raise our voice and use our power, people power, the power of the Citizen, the power that got him elected, the power of millions yelling for change.
But instead, we huddle behind his skirts and WAIT.
WAIT for him to fight the battles, Wait for him to slay the monsters, Wait for him to lift the non-existent rock blocking the exit to this cave of fear that we evidently need. Since we evidently are comfortable only when we are seeing the Shadow of the True Forms of the world in which we live.
This man, this hero that history has sent us to lead us out of the Bush Swamp and to the mountaintop, is OUT THERE doing all one man, doing MORE than what one man can do.
And he is virtually alone.
Because now that he is the government, any attack on the government is seen as an attack on him.
Barack Obama does not want your defense, he does not want your sympathy, he does not want you to follow him. He wants you to fight BESIDE him, not follow him.
He wants you to get off your ass and fight and yell and scream the things that he cannot scream.
Republicans are stupid and have nothing to offer.
The Press is stupid and dumbed down from the bush years and has nothing to offer.
EVERYTHING NEEDS TO CHANGE
NOW!
He can’t change it, Congress can’t change it, the press can’t change it.
ONLY YOU can change it.
War, torture, corruption, financial collapse, a broken press, destructive republicans, destructive democrats. It is all broken, They are all broken….and theirs is only the illusion of power. THEY are at the end of their rope and hanging on to the past, the Memes, Paradigms, Conventional Wisdoms, Tropes and Dopes of the past by their fingernails. And the future is staring us in the face and challenging us to DO SOMETHING DAMMIT!!!
A HUGE power vacuum exists. All the old power is ready to topple and crumble at the slightest push. There is only one Power left.
People Power.
And Obama is waiting and hoping and praying for us to pick it up.
Yet we still huddle in our caves, waiting for HIM to do something about it.
But, but but……WHAT should we do, buhdy???
Well I guess that is the first thing we need to do isn’t it, figure out what the fuck to do! I am just a schmo like all of you, I don’t have all the answers, neither does anybody else.
Even Obama, so waiting for him to fix it ain’t gonna work.
And neither will respectful silence or patience or trying to be acceptable in the sight of Very Serious Villagers.
I will tell you the first thing we have to do, BREAK OUT OF THE FUCKING CAVE…..and make some goddam NOISE goddam it. You are pissed off and frustrated, we all are. So YELL!!!
And let the sound of your voice, raised in responsible anger be your guide. Once we break out of the cave, once we break out of the fears of the past, once we break out of the fear of our own power (are you a mob? No, and neither am I, so stop fearing yourself too) and find our voice, the Way will become clear, I promise.
The bad bad Bush boogiemen are gone. It is safe to come out now. Really, I promise. All you have to do is be you. A citizen in a democracy, with all of the power and responsibility that entails. Which means that only YOU can save you.
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When Obama repeats over and over and over the word “responsibility,” he is talking to us, not “them.”
You said it my man!
Oh and this:
The President is not the only one. There are the ghosts of some guys you might have heard of, they are commonly called the Founders or the Framers, that are out there in the ether waiting for their actual and spiritual descendants to stop being self-defeating and make a ruckus!
I think this is one of the most difficult obstacles to real participatory democracy right now.
Because during the past eight years we really WERE attacking Bush and Cheney, not just their policies, but the criminal individuals themselves.
When I look at the victories of progressives over our country’s history, they were always made by activists pushing against the powers that be, yet in the case of FDR, LBJ, JFK, etc., the leaders were able to acknowledge the will of the people and help make their desires into law.
I also think that because Obama is so likeable and admirable, it’s tough to look beyond that and see ourselves as equal to him in citizenship if not in individual power. To walk beside him instead of following — that’s something we haven’t been able to do for a very long time.
Want change you can believe in?
Follow the leader:
What’s the problem? Authoritarianism is for wingnuts who need someone to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong, isn’t it?
because it seemed like the hero would turn out bein’ God. But when it turned out to be Obama I lost interest.
It just goes to show ya that nothin’ good comes from readin’ all the way to the end. That’s why I quit readin’ past Leviticus in the Bible.
as we say in Texas. ha ha.
I love you guys.
We do have some “attitude adjustments” to make.
And, we do have the means of conveying our thoughts right on the WH website. I read that Obama receives some 40,000 communications from Americans each day and he has a staff that reviews each and every one of them. The ones chosen for addressing are limited to what they (the staff) consider the top ten.
We’re not real happy with the way things have been going lately, mostly internationally. An upsurge in Afghanistan — gotta’ make sure we get in on those pipelines, you know — more money spent on another war of aggression, which Afghanistan was, as well. It was on the neocons’ “map” just like Iraq, long before 9/11. Oh, and speaking of Afghanistan, “benchmarks” are being set for it, as well. Iraq should not be lingering on another three years before pulling out — the Iraqis want us out.
The issue of climate change, etc. and Obama’s strong position to try to cap the carbon dioxide emissions has been met with fierce opposition and that effort, too, may be watered down even to be insufficient for the Kyoto protocol.
The torture that continues in the detainee prisons.
We, too, should ban our own nukes, just as we require other countries to do.
The immigrants’ detention and treatment.
The further bailouts for Wall Street and the banks.
And, of course, ACCOUNTABILITY!
Alright, those of the issues, off the top of my head, that I believe concern us all the most.
So, what I’m thinking about is doing something similar to the letter to Eric Holder kinda’ thing. List the issues in good structure and address them to Obama, with appropriate prologue, etc. and then, all of us sign off on it and post it on his website.
Just a thought!
“unhappy with” situations. I created one above! If anyone has another one or more to add to the list, then post that directly under the list I created.
After we have all the “unhappy withs,” we should choose the most important ones and commence “fine tuning” the language for each “unhappy withs.”
Help,
I tripped, & I can`t come down
by Terrance Heath titled Time to Deliver comes a quote from de Tocqueville:
all of this is on (at least) two levels for me.
At the surface, there are very obvious changes, improvements, revisions, restorations, that really need to happen in terms of policy, direction, programs. Government. Common sense, pragmatic solutions, forward motion.
Laws.
More important, and much more challenging, is the deeper level of real change. Core principles, re-establishing and enacting in practice our core values as a nation, as a people. Transcending the whole Us vs Them meme. Recapturing respect, dignity, empathy, decency, in the way we abide one another and share this realm. Society ( more so than “government”).
And Rule of Law.
My sense all through 2008 campaign time was that Obama struck that chord in a whole lot of people, me certainly. And thats one of the reasons he won the election.
In that campaign there was (to some extent at least) a singular focus, a primary goal. As Ive said before, after that goal was achieved, we scattered. S’okay.
So, that… that is the most vital challenge I see before us now. That transcendance, transformation. I dont know if it can be “directed” or if it is just… more of a movement, a progression, that is helped along by pockets like DD and others. In whatever way I can contribute or even just participate in that, I’m in.
I’d still be interested, buhdy, in Part Two of this:
https://www.docudharma.com/show…
should make each and every one of you feel a little more empowered. This is quite powerful!
h/t David Swanson
http://www.findingourvoices.com
Big bad Bush is “gone” so one must think things will change. Things will change but not for the better.
Valtin is doing the torture non-change thing.
Everybody is doing the financial non-change thing.
I have to point out the Satanism of a “new” regime in these dire times promoting such things as criminalizing gardens.
I have to agree with Bob.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…