First, an apology.
It’s been well over a month since my last post, and that’s just wrong considering all that is going on today. The Wisconsin recall votes, uprisings and revolutions are boiling up in more countries than I can keep track of. Rebels at the gates of Tripoli. About 4% of the entire population of Israel protesting in the streets, and the list goes on. Meanwhile, the Evil Empire of NewsCorp is showing cracks. Bank of America is officially under a “death watch” while the selection of GOP presidential candidates gives new meaning to the term “peanut gallery.” Hell, they even make Dubya look like a steady, reasonable leader.
But while there are a few things to warm the cockles of those of us on the lower end of the food chain, there is also much to lament. More Americans than ever before cannot afford health care. Unemployment numbers are not improving in any significant way, and it seems that the Captains of Industry don’t really see creating American jobs as their thing. Rather, the conservative powers seek to solve the social problems of the day they way they always do: by punishing those who deserve it least.
The anger in America is almost palpable. More and more of it seems to be directed towards the appropriate entities. We still have plenty of Teabaggers and their allies whose rage is useful to the very ones who disenfranchise them, but the rest of us are catching on.
In the rest of the world, people are discovering their power and the price of change. Sometimes that price is very, very high. But they are also learning to wield non-violence with greater effect.
Will it happen here? Consider that the Egyptian protests that overthrew the Mubarak regime in only eighteen days did not happen spontaneously. They were years in the making; years of careful planning. Wisconsin has demonstrated that people can fight on the fly if they must, but their struggle has been and will continue to be at least as hard for all their heroic efforts. Some warn that several American cities are on the brink of exploding, if one compares statistics like unemployment, wealth inequity, police brutality, people on or about to lose food aid or unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, although Europe has more than enough of their own troubles, their citizens are aghast at what we American have to put up with given our barbaric health care system and equally savage system of caring for our poor and dispossessed.
There is a protest planned for October 6th in Washington, DC at Freedom Plaza to protest ten years of US war in Afghanistan and elsewhere, corporate excess, the willful neglect of our country’s human needs, and several other points that wouldn’t even be an issue in countries where the government was truly concerned with the needs of its people. The objective is to stay until things change. It’s a bold, maybe even a dangerous idea. You should be there.
The big question is, “What next? What will happen? What should happen?” I don’t have any more answers than the next person, but in the coming weeks I hope to restart things here and press on about what kind of future we can build for ourselves and each other.
