By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I keep thinking about how much we’ve all changed in the last dozen or so years. We aren’t the same people who worried about the sanctity of our bank accounts as Y2K approached in 2000, or pondered the political power of the flag pin in 2004. We’re no longer the frantic parents of soldiers who find it necessary to raise money in order to equip our kids with adequate protective gear, no longer the shocked citizens who fought desperately to keep our jobs and homes as Wall Street tucked its tail and pretended it had nothing to do with fiscal meltdown. We’re citizens of the world who have finally understood that hope and change are an inside job, defining every choice we make.
I will remember this decade as the one in which we all faced visceral issues of classism, exacerbated by our unresolved — often unclaimed and unrecognized — racism. Thank the election of 2008 and the mean-spirited years since. When the truth about the economy came home to roost, Republicans exhaled a huge sigh of relief that the ramifications of Dubby’s eight years at the helm fell on the shoulders of a Democrat, branded culpable within the first days of his tenure for two wars and a nation teetering on bankruptcy. That Obama’s race made him “illegitimate” as a Commander in Chief provided the minority party a unifying flag to rally under, given the inescapable fact that American decline had roots in the GOP’s overreaching ideology. And now, five years out of the recession, we are still in a slump, largely due to those denying even so moderate a president as the black guy on the Hill a win of any kind.
At some point during the last few years — no doubt exhausted by the antics of Palin and Beck, and the posturing of Limbaugh and Baggers, et al — many of us figured out that life spent as a drama queen and victim is just too much unnecessary bullshit to bear, and gave it up for a more pragmatic personal and political outlook. And yet the old way of doing things on planet Terra simply won’t go down quietly. What no longer serves the public good, what is no longer able to hide behind the smoke of media propaganda, what has brought us to unproductive division and encouraged global instability, is easily visible if we care to look. This kind of lower-level consciousness is not, of course, by chance. It has a discernible global heart-beat — ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump — that sounds suspiciously like the ka-ching of a cash register.