Reply #98: Since you do have the time & nothing much to lose, my concrete suggestion

[Sick_of_Rethuggery]

to you would be to form a network of youngish people throughout the country and run 435 + 100 fresh new faces for Congress.

Look, you are absolutely right in your analysis -- but by the same token, you also have a lot more to gain if you can turn things around.

Not the least of which is saving the very planet itself.

You may run from here because you are forced to, but which part of these earth is now safe from the deadly clowns' reaches?

This cannot be done just by the young people, I agree. But older people have either gone too far down the wrong path (like those currently in power) or are too apathetic and fatalistic about it (like those currently not in power :-)) and the vast majority not in either of these two classes are either too blase or too busy to bother undertaking the enormous task of re-orienting the nation.

You all, on the other hand, have much to gain by investing a few years in setting the world right again -- it is your life, we screwed it up alright, but you are going to pay one way or the other. So you have to provide at least the fire -- and at the same time, put the fogies on notice that it is your world and you are here to claim it.

While we did screw it up, we did give you the internet: use it to organize a revolution and throw the bums out.

I am NOT being facetious: I am not normally a revolutionary. I have saved up enough from my short career thus far to live the rest my life frugally, esp in India; I would like nothing better than to go back to India and settle down in a lovely village and read all the books I am planning on taking back with me.

However, I feel now that I cannot rest until this inane phrase "popular war" (and all that it represents) is retired forever from this country (I honestly do not know any even semi-advanced nation where war is measured by popularity -- there is something fundamentally wrong with this notion -- most people think of their defense forces as just that: defending forces). My other mission is also to make education the largest single expenditure of the Government :-) (I am not *that* old ;-) so I can still dream)

I will personally come help you barnstorm and take the country back to the future: this is my pledge to you on behalf of all the students that I have felt immensely sad about over the years of my teaching (I went to a top-rated university in India that was subsidized heavily by the Govt and the small tuition fee was paid by parents and my heart really aches for my students here in the US: the Govt does not think it important to pay for education, the parents most often cannot afford it and so the vast majority of them struggle through college in some numb determination to get that scrap of paper that might one day in some distant future earn them more money -- I would rather they thought about the hashing function I teach them about in class and give flight to youthful imaginings of a peaceful and peaceable world).

Caution: Do not feel that I am bad-mouthing my adopted country (I reserve that for only the neocon fundamentalist bigots :-)) I have always felt that I am an American in spirit and am rather offended by the trashing of it by people who profess false patriotism.