Counting the Good

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

There’s no denying that we are in for quite a ride in the coming year with a newly configured Republican House of Representatives doing all it can to impede actual governance and political progress. This looks to be an awkward political shift, and it will take our attention and devotion to clear-thinking and activism in order to keep some bit of balance in the coming months. Still, I’m happier living the Chinese curse of interesting times than something akin to medieval humdrum, aren’t you? And this escalating energy seems necessary, as well.

It wasn’t long after the Supreme Court broke legal, not to mention ethical, precedent to hand the Bush family a win that my political antennae went into full-tilt-boogie mode; up until that point, I was spiritual wonking, my political instincts on cruise control, not high alert. I mark a full decade of renewed political activism this year, and this post will celebrate the change that has us so discomforted. After decades of entropy, this nation is awakening, cranky as predicted but hopefully not so lethargic it can’t count its many blessings.

Important to remember that change itself is not a political talking point. It’s cyclic, dependable and necessary, and any ‘refudiation’ of change is a contradiction in terms. Change can be either productive or defeating, but life does not occur in a vacuum. Change always comes along to renew forward motion. After Obama campaigned on change, the Republicans used it for their own 2010 ambitions, attempting to harness the pseudo-populism touched off by anxious Libertarians, mistrustful right-wingers and greedy corporate types into a makeshift Tea Party. Change is an equal opportunity energizer, and it’s here to stay.

Next we must keep in mind that Republicans do not govern, they decimate governance; we have yet to learn that. Perhaps that’s something, similar to feminism, that must be personally relearned generation after generation, but we do ourselves harm with each iteration. We can’t jump this intellectual hurdle until we are able to adequately assess the damage done to us by predatory capitalism and ruthless corporatism in tandem with theocracy, while connecting the dots to the party that has, again and again, chosen to champion this particularly virulent form of commerce over the wellbeing of the American people.

Still, like Scarlett O’Hara, I don’t wish to deal with that on a day such at this. I’ll table that topic until later, giving a nod to future hopes and struggles by quoting historian Lawrence Goodwyn, who makes our coming challenges clear in his fascinating interview on the dynamics facing Obama:

“In the short run we are going to take a painful caning right across our backs. I know of no democratic defense against organized corporate lying, backed literally by unlimited corporate financing of said lies. However, a measure of poise reveals that, even in politics, conceptual deception eventually contains self-destructive elements. The 2010 version of GOP sloganeering is so demeaning and even insulting to the sense of self of run-of-the-mill voters that it will generate at least a slight measure of backlash even in the course of a single electoral season. I do not immediately see how it can be sustained for two seasons for it leaves no workable politics for its advocates to advocate — as incoming Republican beneficiaries will learn in their own good time.”

In order to understand how far we’ve come in mere months, I’d like to point you back a full decade to the moment when George Walker Bush took office, setting his political machine into action to begin pulling apart government. On Day One, Dubya began salting committees and agencies with those who were chosen to weaken and obstruct rather than implement the laws of the land. Day after day, month after month for eight long years, Dub’s machine bent and broke every regulation, safeguard and safety net it could find. It greased palms, huddled with those of like mind to tear the social contract asunder, spent wantonly, and left very little but chaos in its wake. We watched it happen, many of us mute, day after day, month after month until we could take no more. Please take a moment to appreciate the shock and awe implicated in that neo-conservative assault on the American Republic and how extensive were the eight-plus years of damage sustained.

What I’d like to look at today is what we’ve accomplished in the last two years, because I’m fairly sure most of us are unaware of all that’s been remediated. We may have found maintaining the hopey-stuff daunting, as Palin was quick to poke at with her forked tongue, but the changey-stuff has been impressive. Sadly, I suspect we would have been made more aware of just HOW impressive if it had been accomplished by a Caucasian president and, while I sense little racism on the left, some of that must be attributed to an impatient Dem base that’s quick to criticize rather than confirm. I know much that Obama’s accomplished feels diminished to the base, whose hopes were dashed for a public option, for closing Gitmo, for drawing down in Afghanistan and for a vastly different Department of Justice, to name a few. Still, history will not treat us kindly if we overlook how far we’ve come and how quickly. I invite you, then, to check the progress of the party these last two years and then reassess your feelings. I think too many of us are feeling what we’ve been programmed to feel by a willing press and opposition party, even as we’ve made steady movement toward our goals.

If I were to list the accomplishments with descriptions, we’d be here a long while, so I’ll just list them and you do the Googling, if you’re interested. Some have an up/down side that lefties find disturbing but, by almost any mainstream standard, this is an extraordinarily impressive list:

• Stimulus bill, generating over 2 million jobs and funding public projects
• Eliminating wasteful spending, including F-22 fighter jet program and passing 60% of proposed cuts
• Stem cell research
• Sotomayor appointment to SCOTUS
• Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
• SCHIP expansion
• Public lands bill
• Credit card reform
• Lobbying, ethics and transparency legislation
• Kagen appointment to SCOTUS
• Hate Crimes Prevention bill
• Tobacco regulation
• National Service creation
• Health Care Reform
• Troop level draw-down in Iraq
• Restored compliance with Geneva Convention
• Ended military stop-loss policy
• Financial Reform
• Creation of Consumer Protection Bureau with Elizabeth Warren appointment as special adviser
• Restructure of the student loan program
• US support of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Do you want more? Here’s a handy list of one hundred things Obama has accomplished, with links. Here’s another, a broader summation of a Wikipedia article. You need to peek in on these, because they are things you don’t hear about but SHOULD know as an informed citizen. Not only has this man changed the direction of the nation, as well as its tone; he’s presided over the biggest market rally of any newly elected president in more than 45 years. Can you explain to me, then, why we continue to call him a young, inexperienced and largely naive president? Blowing away the meme that he’s foundered in this last year, historians are calling this latest congress the “most active law-making congress since the era of Johnson’s “Great Society” in the mid-60s.”

And as if that weren’t enough, turning the notion of what a ‘lame duck’ congress can accomplish on its head, in these last few weeks 9/11 first responders were given long-awaited health benefits, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, tax cuts were extended to include the majority of Americans along with unemployment extensions, and the START Treaty was ratified, soothing US/Russian relations.

Barack Obama will be putting together a State of the Union message in the next weeks. He has a thick dossier of accomplishments with which to flesh out the nation’s progress, yet I doubt we’ll hear much about them since they don’t seem to generate any revenue for FOX or gossip power for the Inquirer. We need to do our share to break through the wall of bias that keeps this man in the proverbial shadows. It’s beyond absurd and embarrassing to me that this nation cannot take a more balanced assessment of both the president and his party, giving them their due for those times in which they bucked the system to put the people’s needs first. Please take a hard look at what the left HAS done in the last two years, because it will change how you see the news cycle, our near past and, perhaps, the future.

2011 is going to be a pivotal year, so let’s begin by being thankful for how far we’ve come. With hard work and determination, this can be a year when ‘truthiness’ dies a deliberate and deserved death and our own citizens demand a stop to the double-talk and cynicism we’ve been suffering for decades. 2010 was a year for revelations — perhaps 2011 will be a year when we tell one another the truth about what we’ve learned, discover how to ride the waves of change that pound the shores of our consciousness, and prepare ourselves to make real progressive shift in 2012.

Here at Planet Waves we wish you a year blessed with opportunity and adventure, with healing and happiness, with peace and plenty. We’ll be here, standing with you, to track where all this goes, reporting what we see and sense and encouraging each other … and you … to make the most of it. If we start our year focused on blessing and continue to look for it, encourage it, we can create a surge of energy that contributes to an extraordinary year.

That’s my prayer for us all on this Happy New Year, 2011 … and counting.