{"id":36777,"date":"2011-04-09T03:50:57","date_gmt":"2011-04-09T08:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=36777"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:03:27","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:03:27","slug":"ours-to-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/ours-to-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Ours To Win"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz - the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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%<\/a> as Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz detailed in Vanity Fair.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mark Morford<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We have irradiated water being dumped into the ocean and so many dead whales and dolphins in the Gulf that the government has thrown a gag order on scientists. We’re contributing to a third war in Libya while the one in Afghanistan seems about ready to implode, and the one in Iraq refuses to give up the tit of US troops and funding. Our national infrastructure is not only in poor shape, it’s dangerously so, even as funds dry up for repairs that will cost billions each year far into the future. The corroded bridge that failed in Minnesota a few years ago was the canary in the coal mine, ignored, while only two of our 65 nuclear facilities are in compliance<\/a> with federal fire regulations and many appear unready for future use. Synthetic biology created by Monsanto and its corporate allies is altering food source, perhaps forever, and we have a financial class whose only interest in keeping us alive is to bleed us from a thousand surcharges; this is called “business as usual.” That’s just the tip of our iceberg. Let’s hope this is the darkness before the dawn, because I refuse to believe I signed up for some home-grown version of Road Warrior.<\/p>\n

An obstructionist minority party is holding up government funding for the final months of this year, squabbling over less than one half of one percent of the total budget in order to drive a stake through the heart of Planned Parenthood. As I write, abortion is the issue, but by the time you read this, it could all be moot if the Dems acquiesce to further budget cuts in order to save women’s health options. Both parties can then look like heroes to their base. Such is politics: a smattering of Kabuki here, a bit of real skin in the game there. Those few politicians who have a conscience must pay a heavy penalty for public service, but I don’t think there are many of them on the Hill. Once upon a time in this nation, as in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington<\/em>, corrupt politicians were expected to have the good grace to put a gun to their heads in shame when exposed. Now, they just issue a press release, lie their butts off and live to pay off hush-money another day.<\/p>\n

Corruption is in the eye of the beholder, of course. Accusing the Dems of being ideological partisans, the Pubs continue to push us all toward the edge of their ideological cliff. Michelle Bachmann rallied her Baggers with an attack on the Blue Team this week, doing the near impossible — speaking out of both sides of her mouth at once. “It appears that they’ve decided that they’re going to take two feet and put them in the mud and not move one tiddlywink,” said the Minnesota Rep and possible 2012 candidate. “They’ve stated they want to shut down the government, and they want to blame it on you.” Whereupon the group, holding signs for shutdown, began to chant “Shut it down! Shut it down!”<\/p>\n

Stranger than fiction? Of course. But don’t blame us, they would protest angrily. Don’t blame us when the troops go without pay or the national parks close or the White House continues to run with only Barack, Joe and the Secret Service rattling around the West Wing. The Dems brought this all upon themselves when they refused to meet the demands of the minority party.<\/p>\n

Next we’ll be faced with raising the debt limit, which will cause a monumental clash between the Baggers and the reality of a diminishing dollar and a shaky global financial system. Then we will come to blows over Pub golden boy Paul Ryan’s budget proposal to kill government and strangle entitlements by eliminating 4 trillion dollars of funding in the next ten years. Starvation diet looming ahead. Nobel-winning economist, Paul Krugman, calls it ” … a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.” Deficit hawks acknowledge among themselves the truth that Ryan’s plan guarantees a tax hike on the lower- and middle-class in order to fund further proposed tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. I suppose putting 300 million American’s to work at minimum wage WOULD fix the unemployment problem and make Ryan’s corporate masters happy. It would do little to fill the bellies of the nation, however, nor reestablish that broad-based middle-class system that brings stabilizing prosperity to all.<\/p>\n

Some refer to this proposal as “Ryancare:” a system that would all but kill off Medicare and Medicaid, throwing the seniors on the trash heap. Talk about death panels! The same pundits conclude that the unprecedented attack on consumer protections and workers rights going on in this country is just a backwards glance at the days of the Robber Barons, but they don’t take into account the fact that there were no social guarantees during that period. The kinds of civil and worker rights we must fight to reestablish today were scarcely dreamed of at the turn of the last century. The blood and sweat of prior generations bought our ability to organize in trade unions, educate our young and protect our population. The prosperity briefly enjoyed by this nation only came when a broad middle- and working-class was able to depend on laws that established equality and fair-play.<\/p>\n

The dismantling of those provisions has taken over thirty years of behind-the-curtain scheming. Always one to find the pony in the horseshit, I take some pleasure at the notion that early GOP strategists put forth a time-capsule with their name on it but did not live to see the day it would open to empower them. Their grand intellectuals are memories now, spoken of in hushed, respectful tones by a stunted GOP whose leadership exists only through the largess of the corporations and lobbyists they’ve come to serve. Ultimately, of course, they’re expendable, much as GOP Boss Boehner will be if he can’t get the Tea Party and the Old Timers on the same page. Those who live to serve the machine must produce or be discarded, along with the aging and disposable seniors who make up their base.<\/p>\n

I wish I could pull my foot out of the world in which such heartlessness exists, but this split in consciousness cannot be fixed overnight, even as the planets move into alignment to prompt a confrontation. And it won’t be fixed AT ALL unless we can summon the same determination and courage previous generations brought to their responsibilities of citizenship and devotion to commonwealth. Looking for some comfort, I remind myself that we knew in November how April would look. This is the kind of political snarl we expected, so we need to find the necessary coping skills to bridge this challenge.<\/p>\n

If you have a foot in these different worlds, you need to manage your balance carefully. In our own lives, we can be scrupulous with our thoughts and deeds, creative with solutions. In the world of politics, we need to defend our principles of equality and compassion in choosing which activist opportunities to support. In our spiritual lives, we can defuse our fears and use visualization to create opportunities to change the resonant signature of our life and times. In the silence — or music or poetry or whatever activity makes time fold for you — we will find the rest and encouragement that seems so elusive in this wobbling world.<\/p>\n

In the big picture, a stilted old version of humanity is passing away because the universe can no longer support a culture of death. Perhaps violence cannot disappear without a last burst of violence. Perhaps it works that way with selfishness and greed too. Difficult as this period in our lives is, I can’t help but think we were made for this moment; we must trust that we were equipped for it as well. When we come at this from the heart, it’s ours to win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36777"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}