Okay... so now what?

[Mythsaje]

I admit that I wondered what DU would become after the election, once we had achieved our victory against the Coo-Coo party for this election cycle, if not for eternity. The Republican brand had become ridiculous, a parody of itself, and even the politically unconscious could hardly avoid seeing it. There more recent stunts, including their attacks on Sotomayor, have left them standing on the brink of oblivion.

Yeah, I know, I've said before that I'm worried that the same crazy fuckers who've been playing this same game since Watergate are going to come around again in a few years after the American people have forgotten all of this. And I still think it's true. These people are like cockroaches. Just when you think you've sprayed them with enough pesticide to kill them dead (as if there's another way to kill something) they come creeping out of the woodwork the minute the lights go off again. Just because the Republican Party seems set to implode doesn't mean that we're safe. They probably won't implode. Like it or not, we NEED those kooky RW idiots to remind us what crazy government REALLY looks like. And anyone expecting we're suddenly going to turn into a one-party state with the Dems in charge has been consuming a little too much hope juice. They wouldn't know what to do with themselves. Actually, they'd probably tear themselves roughly in half and we might actually get some representation out of the deal. The Republicans implode and the Democrats explode.

The RW has pretty effectively seeded the culture with sleeper cells of their very own, taking over school boards, media empires, and a thousand other innocuous organizations that need "a firm hand at the tiller."

Yeah, whatever. So give them a few years and they'll crawl out and happily introduce themselves to the public again, smiling like a used car salesman who's found himself a first-time buyer with more money than sense. They'll be Joe Cool and talk about how screwed up the Democrats are (through exaggeration, hyperbole, and outright lies) while promising to "fix everything that's wrong."

We know the scenario. We've seen it before. The Republicans are nothing if not slick. And with a complicit media, it's a foregone conclusion.

So what do we do? Well, obviously we let them go on their merry way, taking with them everything they learned on THIS attempt to drive America straight into the ground with their insanely stupid economic ideology and hunger for control and NOT ONLY THAT, but also leave many of their worst stains on the Constitution firmly in place in case they might be of some use.

We treat a party that's obviously self-destructing, a veritable swamp full of pain-maddened alligators snapping at anything in reach, as if they're remotely sane. As if the economic ruin we're seeing WASN'T a direct result of their economic and political ideology put into practice. Again. We don't point this out with any clarity, but we mosey around trying to pick up the pieces even as the whole structure threatens to collapse down on our heads.

We more or less disregard the institutions and practices that have led to this state of affairs, our unwillingness to get tough with the agencies that played fast and loose with the concept of credit in this country. Not only that, we take money from the taxpayers to make sure they don't see any personal costs from the debacle. We slap their wrists and tell them to "go forth and sin no more."

We start printing money as if THAT'S a good idea.

We acknowledge that global warming is, indeed, a problem, and institute a rule that will increase gas mileage requirements over the course of several years, without using the opportunity to point out that a green energy "Apollo Project" is not only a good idea, but strictly necessary for the security and health of our country, not to mention the rest of the planet.

We drag the insurance companies into a closed room and get their input on what we can do to solve the health care crisis--a crisis that has reached this point, in great part, to their greed and lack of compassion. What people don't seem to realize is while the members of a large corporation might have actual human emotions, the corporation itself cannot. It's sole purpose in being, it's whole legal argument for existing, is to make a profit. At whatever cost is necessary that doesn't somehow end up costing more in litigation down the line.

To protect hundreds of thousands of jobs (many of them not even IN this country anymore) we bail out a foundering auto maker, knowing full well that it's inability or unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances took them TO that point in the first place.

We put any change in foreign policy on the back burner for the moment, retaining many of the same procedures for dealing with the legal niceties of such things as "indefinite detention" and evidence of prisoner abuse as the previous administration. Quite possibly for the best of reasons, but still...

No one expects miracles. Or I would hope not. But a little forward motion would be nice. Something concrete to tell us "see, we're listening to you."

A lot of these things are interconnected. The environment, the economy, election reform, health care. The debate is very much controlled by several very influential corporations, artificial "people" with no real moral compass. Unless one calls a hunger for profit strangely similar to a vampire's thirst for blood a "moral compass." Corporate personhood is a travesty and acting as though money supplied by such entities to political candidates is the same thing as "free speech" as determined in the Constitution is truly ludicrous, and the direct source of a lot of our problems.

The media exacerbates the problem because, for one, they're operating on the same "profit is king" model as any other corporation. Thus, they also lack any moral compass.

I ask, what can we do? We can write our senators, write the President, write LTTE's, scream and yell here and out our very physical windows, but to what effect? By all reports, we are on the verge of a massive environmental and economic disaster. And not much is being done about either that will have any kind of long lasting effect, much less one that's in time to prevent the coming calamity.

If we step back and really take a look at all the things we're arguing about, the fact that someone on an internet message board said something mean to us really falls into perspective. We may disagree on the details, but we can pretty much agree on one thing. Things can't really continue the way they have been. Something BIG has to change. Now if only we could all get together and decide what that is.