It’s Wednesday night and cold in Wisconsin.
But I am thinking about going.
Did you know? Watch this historic moment here.
I am astonished that we have political leadership that just pulled democracy off the table. That right after I saw that breaking news broadcast there is a goddamn show on Charlie Sheen and celebrity rehab.
America, amigos, please. Wake up.
We have a crisis that meant no Wall Street organization was held to the fire and in fact, were bailed out – when, even if they are some “great economic minds” we must protect and not punish, how can they also be the same individuals, of the same organizations, of the same pedigree overseeing the bailout? This is called justice? This is called reform? This is called “a necessary evil” and not anything that needs to be corrected?
Yet we have a million people thrown out of their homes this last year, a number that’s been increasing, and without much reprieve – many of these individuals bamboozled while leading financial firms profited – and this is called justice? Right-sizing? A free and fair market – as opposed to a ravishing on our fellow Americans, on their loss of peace and prosperity, and promise? Leaving those largely without with even less and those largely with yielding higher returns, protected lower tax rates?
We are an America with less than a 1000 individuals in this country that have the majority of the wealth – I’m not talking Central America or South America or India with such divides. I am talking the United States of America. Where highly concentrated, beyond your generations’ generations wealth, had a tax break (in this economy) protected as if it was the breath of liberty itself.
THAT we can afford?
And we can afford the growing number of homeless, the reality that none of us has any sense that a job means security and in fact, even with a job, your pension or retirement or health care options have been severely slashed – if existent or even expected at all. We can accept that our schools service those that navigate, not those that need to learn, for that reflects the values of the cutthroat heroes and policies and now politics we seem to now be supporting?
So you may not be union. You may think all for one and one for all only when they’re dying in Iraq – and even then most of us haven’t signed up. You may think “it’s not my problem; someone else will deal with it; it doesn’t effect me.”
When a government in this country, started with the premise of delivering liberty – even if imperfect, even if always having to right itself, but always pushing the call that we can be a free, just, self-governing people – allows government to occur without the people: that is tyrannical.
There are hard choices. But there seemed to be due funds to bail out those that created a hole. Organizations and institutions, companies and firms now have free speech – and collectively lobby with a force that resembles an ocean swell at our political representatives…when you as a constituent usually get a letter. A chance at a town meeting. Maybe one little vote. And to watch as there are not due funds, apparently, to allow free people’s to collectively converse – even if we transform how that is done or acknowledge cuts or serious reductions.
Congratulations, conservatives. You won.
In the shadow of liberty cracking its way across Tunisia, Egypt, and the Middle East, in the inspiration of our forefathers, I wonder how the word collective could not be seen as truly part of a people’s power. And if you are up against the definition of our society here in the US as one that does not give to those who give to all (while expecting of both they and our policymakers to bear the burden and brunt), one that does not work to perfect our union in dialogue and via the non-violent rules of the legislative process, one that does not blink at injustice but swallows hard and furiously watches the patterns of celebrity instead - what are you left to say?
My only thought is the standard: I’d like my country back. The one we promised in the beginning. And I’m going to think about heat packs, my scarf and boots. My copy of the Constitution. And determine how we are still free when it seems as if liberty is bought - and as if the small chips that collectives in free enterprise or public entities (not their numbers, not their pay, but their right to speech as a collective, the right that every corporation now has, unmatched by any other entity) is dissolved.
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