{"id":62532,"date":"2012-12-04T17:10:24","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T22:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=62532"},"modified":"2012-12-04T17:10:24","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T22:10:24","slug":"totentanz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/totentanz\/","title":{"rendered":"Totentanz"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been filled with a poignant melancholy these days, reflecting over the past year with my heart as mirror. It’s almost breathtaking — this year everywhere I turned there has been a death: my best friend’s lover died of bone cancer; my brother-in-law’s mother died peacefully in her sleep; a member of our theater company lost her mother to cancer; an old friend from work died suddenly of a heart attack in her bathtub at the age of 48. An old work comrade finally succumbed to her years-long bout with pancreatic cancer.<\/p>\n

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The realization of the closeness of these endings shocked me. I’ve been clawing through this year like a coal miner, watching the signals coming from political, artistic and social spheres for what was to come, what was to be done. <\/p>\n

Yet, as I plowed through this year cognizant of what was going on around me, I never gave myself emotional time for processing what was happening in my life. The emotional impact on me was not expressed, afraid that once I started grieving, I would not be able to stop. Time this year was not a linear progression of days, but a broad ballroom of change dancing around me, with death taking partners close to my most inner circles. It was an expression of Totentanz<\/em> — the Dance of Death. <\/p>\n

On a larger scale, this was the year that witnessed the beginnings of the end of an era, and the birth of something new yet to be fully defined and named. Imagine this: over forty years ago the rise towards America’s current conservatism began, accelerating around the time of the Nixon ascendancy, and building to a head after Watergate, and the Ford and Carter presidencies. A recession hit the economy, plunging the market into its first big crash since the 1920s. An anti-tax movement in reaction against government was fully underway.<\/p>\n

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Fast-forward 40 years later and we’re witness to that era in a slow death spiral. We do need government. We do need tax revenues. We do need government regulation. California voted Yes on Proposition 30, a tax increase initiative. As of this writing, Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has been approved for a seat on the Senate Banking Committee. Her appointment to this post has been every Wall Street banker’s nightmare since her first appearance in the public arena as leading advocate for a federal Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau (CFPB) — an agency established to protect consumers from the kind of banking, brokerage and loan industry fraud that led to the economic collapse of 2008. <\/p>\n

It is dawning on Congressional Republicans that the White House not only fully expects that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will expire, but that new revenues will not be entirely off the backs of the middle and working class. And they have a mandate to support that<\/p>\n

Make no mistake, conservatism is not over, and progressivism is not yet a completely viable movement, not by a long shot. Though the voters rejected the extremism of the Tea Party anti-government movement of 2010, there is still enough of a Tea Party (corporate) movement and interests to keep their agenda front and forward in political discourse. The attraction towards progressive ideals is still burgeoning, with a majority rising among moderates and even some conservatives across the country. <\/p>\n

Yet there is still too much overt and subconscious cultural noise and social pressure for people to let go and let a truly complete socio-economic revolution sweep up this country as envisioned by the Occupy Movement. But labor unions are gathering steam across the country, starting with strikes against Walmart, and now fast-food industry workers are uniting for higher wages. Something is beginning, maybe bringing us back to a more balanced square one.<\/p>\n

Major corporations still have front door access in Congress and the White House, and hold the microphones of major media, including MSNBC. There are too many who have been so conditioned not to think for themselves that it’s going to take nothing short of re-programming to get them to see reality. The Democrats, now in a more commanding majority in the Senate, begin a slow, anxiety-laden and tentative process for filibuster reform. Whether it’s the bully Republicans they fear or not, the electorate of 2012 recognized even before the election how stuck we have become. <\/p>\n

That is the shape of the grand ballroom we have today.<\/p>\n

There is so much more for our government to do. It seems their first order of business is to wake up to that fact. You might grind your teeth with angry impatience, but government is a slow and cautious beast, kind of like a tree sloth. It’s unfortunate, but without some kind of direct political action and involvement by us, it may take the actual condition of the Earth and her people to do what politics cannot: bring those who are reluctant and fearful face to face with reality. Even then, we’ll still need to drag them off so they can sulk in safety on ground high enough from the floodwater’s grip.<\/p>\n

Reality begins with recognition that some ideas and ideals — once considered the canon of conventional political wisdom — have died in the eyes of the majority before leaders can begin to visualize credible responses to the broader challenges ahead. A process of grieving is implausible in the ego-driven world of politics, but in order to come to a place of dealing more credibly with reality, maybe this has to be done. This process needs to replace plowing ahead with what they think they have to do to protect themselves, their select constituents and their special interests, otherwise we may find ourselves with a large number of brooding expatriates living resentfully and bitterly in their own country, longing for a time that has long since died. <\/p>\n

Some may grieve and come to a clearer focus, others may not. Time will tell. It still takes two — parties, in our current political context — to partner up and dance in the great ballroom of democracy. Only some may face the consequences, seeing the end of their cherished values and ideas. Some will not. But everything dies. It is the nature of humanity, history, politics and the world. Letting go and moving on is natural, if allowed to happen. What we’re watching going on around us is that kind of processing (or its denial), on a political scale that bears our witnessing and presence in order to make the best transition happen more easily. <\/p>\n

The music is changing, as well the players. Escort out the old for the new. How appropriate for an upcoming solstice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The realization of the closeness of these endings shocked me. I’ve been clawing through this year like a coal miner, watching the signals coming from political, artistic and social spheres for what was to come, what was to be done. Yet, as I plowed through this year cognizant of what was going on around me, I never gave myself emotional time for processing what was happening in my life. The emotional impact on me was not expressed, afraid that once I started grieving, I would not be able to stop. Time this year was not a linear progression of days, but a broad ballroom of change dancing around me, with death taking partners close to my most inner circles. It was an expression of Totentanz — the Dance of Death. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62532"}],"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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}