{"id":1243,"date":"2008-08-27T12:42:57","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T17:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=1243"},"modified":"2008-08-28T06:48:37","modified_gmt":"2008-08-28T11:48:37","slug":"the-democrats-getting-real-or-hoping-against-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/astrology-eric-francis\/the-democrats-getting-real-or-hoping-against-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"The Democrats: Getting real, or hoping against hope?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader:<\/p>\n

Quite a few times this election campaign season I’ve had to explain to people why I think that hope is not enough. I can make it really simple: does hope motivate you to do anything? Or does it motivate you to, well, hope some more?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Eric<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Hillary Clinton’s speech last night, though widely revered as being the reprise of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to me seemed more like a high school political campaign presentation calling for school unity. Meanwhile, the principal and the school board do whatever they want.<\/p>\n

It would be nice if we had a different political system, one slightly less prone to being totally sold out. But paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, as I am fond of doing lately, you don’t go into an election with the political system you want, you go in with the one you have. And the one we have reduces the game to this apparent battle of the Dems versus the Pubs. There are significant differences (particularly where Supreme Court nominees are concerned), but they don’t surpass the limits set on the evolutionary stage of humanity. Given the choice, most people will opt for something they perceive is in their self-interest rather than in the collective interest.<\/p>\n

“I want you to ask yourselves: were you in this campaign just for me?” Clinton said. “Or were you in it for that young marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage?”<\/p>\n

Yes, this sounds good. But she’s still personalizing the issue, to herself. It is not big of her to support Obama and it would not be big of her husband to drop his apparently sizable chip on the shoulder and do the same. It is common sense; that is what we need to do. If we really believe that the survival of our species is at stake on some level — and I don’t think we really believe it, we just wish we did — the issues would be a lot bigger than this.<\/p>\n

Where, for example, is the rage at the Bush administration getting the country not into one Vietnam, but rather two of them? Well, to admit that, the Dems would have to take some responsibility for not having done anything to stop them. Where is the rage at not one but two stolen presidential elections? To express that, the Dems would have to buck up a little adult awareness and admit that they didn’t fight the complete subverting of even the illusion of our electoral process.<\/p>\n

And what guarantee do we have that it’s not going to happen again? Hope? Who exactly are we hoping is going to do what?<\/p>\n

I think we have to work to get the most possible votes for Barack Obama. Elections are easier to steal when they are close. They are theoretically nearly impossible to steal when it’s a landslide, but hey Nixon proved that point wrong in 1972, the most impressive stolen election of them all (that was Watergate). Yet we need to work for a lot more than that.<\/p>\n

The most difficult thing to do in politics is to see yourself as a meaningful part of the process. Voting, which is emotionally driven and being sold to us as such, is satisfying like a pacifier. Justice, externally dramatized, is a never-ending struggle against an adversary that is merely self-interested. You can appease yourself by “caring” but that does not give you a sense of justice in your heart, or even the authentic thirst for it.<\/p>\n

Yours & truly,<\/p>\n

\"Eric<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader: Quite a few times this election campaign season I’ve had to explain to people why I think that hope is not enough. I can make it really simple: does hope motivate you to do anything? Or does it motivate you to, well, hope some more? Hillary Clinton’s speech last night, though … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[13,111],"tags":[140,52,135,141,130,35],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}