Friday Night at 8: Hello, Cizzen!

This week, oy vey.

As in blogging oy vey.

So I’m really writing to myself tonight, just to get it into words and then forget about it.

You love Obama?  You  hate Obama?  You are indifferent to Obama?

Fine with me and any permutation in between.

What excites me about the political times we live in are the citizens.  Politicians are citizens, but you’d never know it with our present system.

So I’m interested in the citizens.

And not everyone is a citizen, not in my subjective view.

As buhdy and others have said, there are citizens and there are consumers.

Citizens are annoying and politicians wish we’d just shut up and go away.  They are willing to spend a great deal of money to distract us!  Please, please, just shut up and go away!  Can’t you see how difficult my job is?  I have to please everyone all the time and I can’t!  There are more important things than your concerns!  

Constituents.  Ha ha.  To the politician we are the audience.

Unless we yell.  And then they pay attention because that’s their job, that’s something they can understand.

The politicians already understand the lobbyists and others of the Ruling Class who have figured out how to get access to them.  These are comfortable and familiar relationships, and as well, because they’ve gone on for so long, there’s a fun element of winning and losing and playing the good old game.

They understand us only when we yell.

And they never like us.  That’s their job, too.  We make their job hard, who wants to be pressured on the job by folks you don’t even know, have never even had lunch with?

So I’m not waiting for the politicians to love me.  And as impressed as I am with Obama, I know he won’t love me either.  I’m a thorn in his side and he’s just not going to like me.  I mess up his plans and try his patience.  He has a big group of citizens working with him, you know, they’re very organized, the activists who have house parties and such and are a big fast machine built up over the years, a successful shiny powerful machine that works damned well, is very impressive, and it is something new in politics.  They help Obama and he talks to them every now and then.

He probably does love and like those folks.

Sigh.

I am not one of those folks.  I’m just an individual citizen.

My work is to exert my  power as a citizen to petition my government and anyone in it to address the issues I feel need to be addressed.

It’s my right and my obligation and my freedom.

It’s the politician’s job to be annoyed as hell at my presumption.

There are politicians, of course, who are as passionate about their issues as I am, progressive politicians.  It’s probably worse for them when someone like me comes around, an individual citizen, and claims the absolute right to their attention!

And when for whatever reason there’s a whole lot of us citizens approaching, well it’s even worse!

Makes me laugh to think about it.

That’s what I like about Docudharma these past few weeks, with the influx of new writers. ” Fuck Obama” has to be one of the funniest titles I’ve seen in a long time of blogging, at this place, at this time, and I cheered to myself when I saw it.

Skepticism and anger and facts from every imaginable source and opinions of zigzagging spectrums, a groping to find the truth in direct experience, not taking anyone’s word for it, no politician, no blogger, no family member, just the indvidual insistence that you have the right to make up your own mind.

I like that.  It makes me feel good.  What’s the point if you can’t be who you are?  What’s the point of being a citizen if you can’t exercise your power as a citizen?  And not just your power, your freedoms.  Lord have mercy.  How long has it been, how long?

This is a crazy essay with no end, composed of wild impressions I’ve had in the blogosphere this week.

Raining here in the Big Apple.  Happy Friday to one and all.