The Focus of the Fittest

( – promoted by undercovercalico)

I have been neglecting you lately here, but I have picked up a few odd jobs the last few weeks, and my blogging time is seriously limited. I wrote this Saturday, so I hope you don’t mind left overs 🙂

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Wherein Diane Ponders about the Focus of Electoral Politics.

I miss the Iraq Grief Diaries. How quickly we forget these things, the soul-wrenching Truths that once bound us together.  We were once united trying to stop these atrocities.

Hardly anyone talks about the War anymore, even with the breaking of the Pentagon Papers admitting we knew there were no wmd’s and NO al queda connection.

They sure broke that story at the right time, huh?

Yeah, no one was listening for the most part.

But they are listening to everyone else.

I remember a time when we were United, enraged over Illegal Spying and Wiretapping in this country.

A few, like an NPR report I heard questioned the data-mining that caught a NY Governor using a call-girl’s services.

So instead, they focus on how much he paid, and how she looks, and no one asks who the other 300 numbers on her phone list were, and if it was a legal search in the first place.

To the delight of the Right, we on the left spend our days grinding glass to sand over the words of bit-players in campaigns and quibbling about Race.

Nothing divides like a good Race argument, nothing divides like sanctimonious denouncing of other’s ill-spoken words.

It sure keeps us from talking about the issues.

A Pastor said “God Damn America” irrelevant words spoken with anger and hurt.  So what? He has no power. But as we micro-dissect that we forget that a person WITH Power damned something much more valuable… the thing that once made us “America” in the first place.

So why are we not focused on asking those vying for our support just what the fuck they intend to do about restoring it?

I remember when we were united by our universal utter revulsion at the fact we torture, we detain without charge, habeas corpus was lost and we were monsters in a world in which we were supposed to be moral and leaders.

Appalled, we were by images like this, appalled that we would treat humans like this:

If either Candidate wants to denounce something publicly, this would be the thing to denounce.

We are so easily diverted. My attention, too has been diverted by the minutia of Game Show Contestant Politics, and the people who love them.

Of course, I was always an outsider at the water cooler when the topic of the day was “Who got voted off the Island last night on ‘Survivor’?”

But still, I started a series on Water Wars, and never finished it, so unfocused I became with the hoopla.

Remember when we talked about Global Warming and the fresh water crisis? Shit, the last time I talked about water of any kind, it was whether or not Clinton’s tears were genuine.

Talk about irrelevant to the scheme of things.

I really don’t have a point, I guess.

I am not blaming you any more than I blame myself.

I just am disillusioned, for prior to this cycle, I had thought, dreamed, dared to hope that these real issues would be addressed. Addressed, perchance, by those hoping to gain our votes and restore to pristine the damages done in these last 8 years.

As someone said yesterday “You can lead a horse to the bar… but the bartender will inevitably say…”

I don’t know how to make my dream come true.

I guess thats why it was only a dream.

We would all be united, heard and someone, some candidate would actually address the REAL issues, the Damage Done.

That some one would speak for us. That we would all be joyful.