My First Rant on This Island
2003-06-05, 10:19 a.m.

This may not be the best time of day to write, but I've got a few minutes, so what the heck.

I'm a budding poilitical mind. This mainly started right after 9/11, when I found, to my shock, the skew in my range of friends in their feelings and opinions on the subject. The event opened my eyes fully to just what's happening in Amarica these days and all of the things that have gone on in the past to lead us to where we are. It's always amazing and often completely appalling.

Nonetheless, I'm having a hard time getting myself to read books on poilitically oriented stuff-- your Noam Chomskys and Gore Vidals and such. Last night, for instance, my wife handed me a copy of 'Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta' to have me read a particularly sad reference on someone misquoting him during an interview in order to alter or distort his meaning. After two paragraphs, the knot in my stomach started tightening. I dunno if I'm just over-saturated with all the wrong-doings that are going on, or whether I'm just too over-sensitive to take it. There's just so much happening that it's completely overwhelming, and it fires up the furnaces in my conciousness labeled 'futility' and 'helplessness'.

I recently went to an ACLU meeting in the Cleveland area - because a litle preaching to the choir felt like a good idea - and managed to get equally as appalled. By god, they were singing CSNY tunes! Is this still the fucking 60's? I can only assume that the receedings were tainted by the Unitarian Universalists who hosted the event, because the ACLU meeting I had gone to previously was much more... informative. And much less hippie-throw-back. I really wanted to stand up and yell at these people. Corporate America is killing people and building pipelines as we sit here, and all we can do is sing 'Imagine'?!? Egad.

I really feel, deep down, that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way a majority of the minority is approaching this situation. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places. I read Common Dreams daily. I write my Congressmen. Is that all there is without becoming a full-time activist? Seems to me like it's either all or nothing, and I don't have the free time for 'all'. I've got enough to worry about in general.

Which, of course, is how they like it.

-- End Transmission --