Take Paradise

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
Take paradise, put up a parking lot

Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell, (c) 1970

Often, when I read the headlines over at Huffy or elsewhere around the web, the hum of guitar strings begins deep in my brain, teasing me to channel Joni Mitchell. While the thrust of Big Yellow Taxi was environmental back in the day, it seems to me that the environment isn’t merely the natural kingdom, it’s human nature as well. Until we take on our full measure of humanness, we’re just mammals riding Gaia like all the rest. The ruined splendor of the physical Earth is coming back to bite us in extreme weather, but that is not the only price we pay for having fancied ourselves separate from her.

What we do means very little in the long term if we’re too busy paving over the paradise of this unique place and space to notice that we’re killing ourselves. It’s one thing to court disaster (climate, financial, you name it) without being aware that we’re doing it; it’s quite another to rush at it full-tilt-boogie in some kind of deluded nationalistic fog based on a paradigm breathing its last. Observing the ramifications of the destruction we’ve accomplished in these last decades, and pondering what conservatives are still determined to accomplish, puts me into a funk every time I think about it.

If I weren’t absolutely convinced that things have to get worse before they get better, I’d be a good deal more discouraged than I am. But everything I see around me is a wake-up call, every idiotic thing I read in the headlines is another vivid illustration that the political machinery in this nation is obsolete, throwing gears and billowing smoke into the air with a vengeance. For years before the sharp-edged imperative that we feel now, I told my Political Waves readers that bandaids slapped on the gaping wounds of our failing systems wouldn’t accomplish much, we needed some clean breaks with what was no longer workable. I think we’re closing in on that decisive moment, don’t you?

Just look around. We’re all in triage, bloodied from the gush of stolen treasure and unnecessary sacrifice, bruised from loss and strife, battered by wobbling enterprises and broken policies that are threadbare and failing. It’s well past time for a collective murmur of oh-shit-oh-dear. Now’s the moment for truth-telling and standing tall for what’s right. If ever voices for sanity were needed, it’s now.

Late last night I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi carried off my old man
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Today, Minnesota — suffering from billions in shortfall left by former Governor Pawlenty, now of presidential aspiration — was unable to keep its doors open. Its Dem governor could not come to agreement with its Pub legislature on the budget, although he said he’d leaned over more than half-way. The Pubs refused to raise revenue by taxing the state’s wealthiest residents. The ramifications in terms of job loss and human suffering ahead seem tragically unnecessary in my view, but not in T-Paw’s. Pawlenty urged his Pub comrades, after effectively shutting down government, to keep strong and practice tough love on an economy that supposedly funnels too much to the little guys.

There’s surely an Ayn Rand homily in there somewhere, smacking of ‘free market’ religion and ‘virtue of selfishness’ nonsense: an echo from Wisconsin or New Jersey or Michigan that sounds something like “SCREW those little parasites! Who do they think they are?” And the big guys? Well, of COURSE they’ll get theirs. When haven’t they since the advent of Saint Ronnie the Reagan? This is the New Gilded Age where nothing can come between the moneyed and their privilege. Nothing, that is, except the will of the people, once they actually understand how much has been stolen from them. Here’s a truism: stripped down to fighting weight, we’ll risk change when we don’t think there’s anything left to lose. A lot of us are there now, and the next months will bring many into the fold.

Minnesota’s dilemma is prequel to the big scary federal budget stonewall due later this summer. Even if mainstream Pubs don’t want to court this disaster, their cult-crazy Tea Bag faction is driven to “do what they were sent for.” They were sent, they insist, as ideological kamikazes to accomplish the people’s good, which is apparently to stop spending money on any public program that can be privatized. (Gawd bless Capitalism!)

Think of it as it might be articulated by Bagger presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann, or, as Mark Morford calls her, Hell’s Barbi:

No further roads or repairs to infrastructure? Fine. No police protection, libraries, fire houses? All right. No schools, public safety nets, no assistance programs for the sick and elderly, the chronically unemployed or the young and vulnerable? HALLELUJAH! (Damned socialists!)

 

And her followers all applaud! Me, I don’t understand these congressional newbies, ready to throw themselves on their swords for the radical cause. Whatever’s wrong with them is the same counter-intuitive scourge that infects Kansas and the like. Their level of delusion is a wonderment. They are not the wealthy 1% who will benefit from these austerities. They are foot soldiers for an ideology that they themselves will eventually fall prey to, like the secretary who becomes the boss’s mistress, scheming to become the next Missus, completely unaware that the very ethical compromise she made renders her next in the food chain. Can’t these people connect dots?

And I’m less than pleased with the administration for shuttering themselves in what is a purely Republican game of slash and burn. Deficit spending needs addressing AFTER our economy is stable; doing it beforehand only makes recovery less likely. Mainstream conservatives who think themselves superior because they demand tit for tat on the budget are playing with false equivalencies. Anxious to cut entitlements while furthering corporate welfare? Not a tax adjustment in sight? Really, with nothing trickling down to soothe the natives? Conservative suicide.

Perhaps all this wouldn’t seem so surreal if I regularly watched FOX News, which you must be upended and topsy-turvy to watch. Perhaps then, like Alice’s Queen of Hearts, I could believe several unbelievable things before breakfast. In Wisconsin, whose state supreme court has recently come under scrutiny because of their radical governor, a Pub justice named David Prosser had an argument with another justice, Ann Walsh Bradley. When Bradley demanded that Prosser leave her office, he put her in a choke hold. Several weeks earlier, he had called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson a bitch and threatened to destroy her.

Over at FOX, anchor Greta van Susteren did exactly what the Red Queen would do: she cried, “Off with her head!” Greta, who came to public attention during the O.J. Simpson trial, called for the resignation of (that bitch) the Chief Justice, insisting that she is “not doing her job to lead the court and give confidence to the people of Wisconsin.”

Shall we guess which one is the Republican and which is the Democrat? Flabbergasting, isn’t it? They no longer even TRY to make sense. Curiouser and curiouser, as the Mad Hatter might have muttered, mid-Tea Party. And, for your pleasure, sometimes it takes a clown prince to put a psychotic queen in her place, eh?

They took all the trees and put ’em in a tree museum
And then they charged all the people twenty-five bucks just to see ’em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Sometimes it seems that’s where we are now: no hope for the remaining trees, no hope for the frying, melting, wheezing planet or her frightened, polarized inhabitants. It feels as if we’ve come to the end of our tether and we can’t run fast enough to out-distance all that plagues us. And standing in the crosshairs of a mighty Cardinal cross and eclipse, I get the feeling that beginnings and endings somehow feel the same — life changing.

Don’t it always seem to go that we don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone.

Or maybe we’re just in the nick of time. Maybe what’s agitating just behind the wind is a new thing birthing, bringing us courage to start over while there’s still time. Perhaps now we’ve finally come to the point of choosing, the moment of radical love that either embraces everything in a mighty burst of open acceptance or rejects everything in a dreadful implosion of heart. Maybe right now is the turning point when, yes, truth-telling and standing tall for what’s right could change everything. It might even be why we came.

Life is choice. We can choose to make this the moment to tap in to our full-throated humanness, loved by God/dess as an ever-shifting mirror image of Divine Self. Perhaps this is that still point in time to welcome in an open-hearted new era that will function not on competition but on collaboration, not on selfishness but on self-worth, not on fear but on love.

Did you remember that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for? Well, this can be the moment we’ve anticipated when we activate a new way of seeing one another and the world. That would be a Fourth of July worth celebrating, wouldn’t it! Let’s take paradise back: it’s been waiting an awfully long time to welcome us back home.