By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It’s always been helpful to me to focus on the big picture. In order to fix a problem, one has to find the root cause. Journalistic questions of who and where fall back to the larger concerns of how and why, providing some rationale for the events we see around us. That’s been harder to track in the years since we lost touch with reality. Remember the fears around Y2K? It took ten years for them to fully ripen into chaos for the little guy, who had typically squirreled some cash under the mattress and filled the pantry with water and canned goods as hedge against disaster. Now, those who thrive on chaos are doing quite well for themselves, while the little guy has run out of both cash and supplies, and struggles to procure either.
As nervous as we were when 1999 rounded the corner into a new century, I’ll bet very few of us thought things would come to such a pass in 2011. Those who envisioned 2012 as a shifting of consciousness didn’t foresee questionable sanity in the nation, nor did we have a clue that the earth changes we’d expected would be denied by fully half of our United States Congress and their constituents. From a spiritual point of view, I’ve always felt as though I had a foot in both worlds; now, it feels as if I’ve also got a foot in each of America’s current realities. We’re living in the world where making the household budget meet the household needs requires a big dose of faith and a dollop of magic, while the world we keep hearing about thinks it’s time we did our share of sacrificing for the common good of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% as Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz detailed in Vanity Fair.
This week No-Drama Obama threw his hat back into the ring, asking us to reelect him as progressive leader, a job that — despite remarkable accomplishments that historians will glowingly describe in years to come — some of us think he’s barely begun. The Goliath that has us pinned down at the moment needs a David with a bigger slingshot. The quandary is that few have the chops to run against him, and we’re staring down the results of knee-jerk disappointment in liberal solutions now. Tea Baggers (as Bill Maher says, I’ll quit calling them “Baggers” when they quit calling Health Care Reform “Obamacare”) were the result of that experiment, much as George W. Bush was the pay-off for attempting to install a third-party candidate in ’99.
Mark Morford aptly describes likely 2012 opposition candidates as ” … all birthers and paranoids, adulterous slugs and ditzball sociopaths, fringers and terrified Mormons, a bloody madhouse clown car of cutesy whiffleball glop.” Fun to watch and fine fodder for those who would rather the public lose itself in bread and circuses than attend to dangerous realities. I expect I don’t have to recount them for you, but they do provide a bit of stark illustration.