By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
There’s good news this week, and there’s bad. That’s typical of any week here on Terra, business as usual all around the world. These days, however, we humans are surprised by the good, caught off guard when things look up. We’re exhausted by constant vigilance against loss, wary of promises that fail to materialize, and disgusted by the callousness of our politicians and, worse, our culture. And that’s the bad news. We’ve become accustomed to disaster, anticipating the worst. We don’t expect a sunny day and a smooth sail, and because we’re not looking for the rainbow, we seldom find it.
It takes a sure amount of dedication to find the pony in the horseshit, given the overwhelming glut of problems within the system, assaults on the environment, and the continued press of the corporate hierarchy for more-more-more, even while pleading victimization at the hands of the great unwashed (us.) The uphill battle and marginal success of those who fight tooth and toenail for the good of the public sector leave us wondering if we will ever recover from the unraveling that began well in advance of the dreaded (if imaginary) turn of the century Y2K predictions and have more than exceeded them.
At the congressional level, we can’t get no satisfaction; at least at this point. Those of us anxious for reform have become accustomed to celebrating anything that keeps the status quo, rather than more reports of slippage. For instance, the Farm Bill has finally passed, eliminating billions more in SNAP funding, while a quarter of our children are food insecure. Making mere cosmetic changes to the incentives and subsidies farmers have enjoyed for decades, the bill creates a new insurance work-around in order to continue what Mother Jones calls “scorched earth ag” policy. But pundits are celebrating having actually passed a bill through both House and Senate, even though nothing much changed to bring us closer to ecological stewardship, food sustainability, or elimination of corporate handout.