I spent the first two years of the Bush administration in a kind of stupefaction. In fact, it began even before Bush’s inauguration, which I watched in bed while my wife covered her head with a blanket and her ears with a pillow.
To be blunt, although I was already one of the most cynical political observers out there, I simply was not prepared for George W. Bush to become President of the United States. I had not thought it possible.
And when I came home from work and watched the news on my television, I found myself shaking my fist and hollering at the talking heads who were bending over backwards to ignore the elephant in the room. Bush was just a figurehead, and the powers behind him were radically different than any Republican powers before them.
I just kept getting madder and madder. And then something snapped. I gave up on what I was attempting to do, which was to write a book about the intersection of religious fundamentalism and terrorism, and I decided to go organize voter registration teams in Missouri. Plans changed and I wound up in Florida, and then Pennsylvania. But the point is that I had to do something. I needed to get away from my television and out in the field of battle. For my sanity.
This blog is about my sanity, and your sanity too. Anger has its place. Anger can motivate. But if anger doesn’t lead to action, well….from John Prine’s Bruised Orange:
Throw your hands in the air, say what does it matter?
But it don’t do no good to get angry,
So help me I know
For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter.
You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own
Chain of sorrow.
I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there.
I sat on a park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair
And my head shouted down to my heart
‘You better look out below!’
Hey, it ain’t such a long drop don’t stammer don’t stutter
From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter
And you carry those bruises to remind you wherever you go.
With the short days and lonely holiday season, John Prine has been speaking to me. More than ever.
More John Prine:
ps…when John Prine starts speaking to you too much, it’s usually a sign that you need to go have some fun… 🙂
OK… but Prine offers advice for those of us in your position (after all, aren’t we all just soldiers on the way to Montreal?):
But then there’s this:
John Prine is another whose words seemed quaint for a time, but are coming back to haunt us. Remember this?
thanks Boo and Cabin Girl
Bewildered, Bewildered you have no complaint
You are what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t
So listen up buster listen up good
Stop wishin’ for bad luck and knockin’ on wood
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/tabs/prine-john/dear-abby-2723.html
I talk and write a lot about the future (hence the name.) Prospects for the long term future are even bleaker than the Bush administration, if that’s conceivable. But my mantra is that hope is a committment, not an emotion or a prediction. The future is tomorrow, hope is always today.
It starts with a committment and a vision, then a plan and acting to further the plan and live the committment. Plans change, but the vision and the hope remain and renew themselves in action.
I’m with you on anger. Anger can be temporarily motivating, but if it takes over, nothing comes of it but violence and more anger when things don’t change fast enough.
You have to enact the future you want, as best you can. That’s why I have to laugh at people who motivate each other to go to peace demonstrations by saying, show your rage. Rage can be heartfelt but it can be tactically effective only when it’s controlled and balanced. Ultimately it can poison the future you’re trying to build. To get peace, you have to become peace. Which means in part, a commitment to other forms of settling disputes and grievances. It also means action. “Peace activist” is not a contradiction, not even ironic. The words go together. People like the Bushites count on their opponents getting angry, making angry mistakes, and getting tired, disillusioned and apathetic.
In keeping with the season:
I heard allah and buddha were singing at the savior’s feast
And up the sky and arabian rabbi
Fed quaker oats to a priest.
Pretty good, not bad, they can’t complain
Cause actually all them gods is just about the same
“Do something” means any action that educates and informs the electorate, at least from now until the election cycle hits full-tilt boogie (March?) I think part of the job is to work towards coordinating the information across progressive blogs/media.
Maybe that translates to adding a cross-post box on the right to carry other writers. Or working towards that “AP” of progressive articles/writers that actually broadcasts news releases.
We need to somehow reduce the overlap and duplication, but given what you wrote this morning, that could be a long time coming.
Eloquent post BooMan. And Captain Future’s comment is the perfect coda to it.
Sounds like you’ve been having one of these days:
Altogether folks, for BooMan, on the count of three:
why I’m angry:
“This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law…. The other road is the path of least resistance” in which “we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us…[and] close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking…and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system.”
Of course, knowing who made that statement will make you even angrier.
BooMan, like you I couldn’t believe Bush had won, nor the manner in which he had won, but I thought he would be marginalized and Dems would soon reclaim the Congress in 2002 once his ineptness became apparent.
Well, we all know what happened next, that event that changed everything and energized this president to run roughshod over our Constitution and our rights in the name of national security.
If we survive the coming decade we will look back at this time as a period of deep shame. The only benefit is that so many of us have awoken from our apolitical slumber and taken action to revive a true progressive politics again in this country, one that had been missing since the days of Jimmy Carter. I salute you as one of the many Paul Revere’s of the New Progressive Movement. Keep on keeping on my friend.
Good old Tom DeLay, if I recall.
And it doesn’t make me angry because he is now being fitted for his orange jumpsuit. And his statement stands as a useful indictment of the current corruption and criminality of the Republicans.
Shhhhhhhh!
Not so loud. It’s a secret.
;0)
Hey Boo? Maybe it’s time to take a just teensy little inventory of all you HAVE done, and are still doing, including all the work of creating and hosting BooTrib, thus giving hundred and hundreds of others a place to come to join forces, thus becoming even more empowered? And at the same time you did this, you created an even larger extended family/community of people who care for and respect you, so that when you get to feeling low, there’s plenty of others to lean on.
There are many things this insane, corrupt administration has absolutely NO power over, and all of them live within each one of us. WE get to determine the quality of our lives, as experienced from the inside out, regardless of what f*cked condition the government is in.
Time always tempers the pain of loss and change..and there’s only courage in being wise enough to lean awhile to catch ones breath.
I’m here reading every day, although I don’t post every day, because that’s exactly my story too. Even the John Prine part. An old girlfriend of mine, still a friend, used to date him (after she left our small city and moved to New York). I first saw him sing in the 1970s. There are only a handful of songs I know cold on the guitar and still play–one is “Angel From Montgomery.”
I remember distinctly the time Bush rammed his “selection” down our throats.
I had been following the legal debacle following the election. I did not know the man. I had not been political up until shortly thereafter.
My family went to see “Lord of the Rings 1”, which just happened to be released at that same time.
I remember sitting in the theatre seat, the movie unfolding, and the horror sank in at that time. Like I said, I had been un-political – a novice, and innocent.
But the gut-wrenching feeling I got when images of Bush and Cheney kept merging with the Orcs and Sauron, were the motivating factors in the deflowering of my political innocence and the trust of inherent goodness in every human being (I still believe that, but not quite as naively as I did then).
It was all subliminal/subconscious, but it changed my life forever.
I often wish I could go back to before then, but I realize it needed to happen, and I wish and hope that more citizens will experience this same type of painful awakening dream. At least I feel informed, and look for ways to do what I can whenever I can.
That was almost exactly my feelings. As I watched the debates it was as if the pundits had access to another dimension, or something, where black was white and black was white, insanity was sane and sanity was just plain insane. Everytime i thought Bush was licked by Gore on a point of reason.. the press honed in on the fact that Gore sighed..whereas everyone knew that they’d have a good time sharing a beer with george (Never mind that Geroge was an alcholic that would never again sharea beer with anyone).
Does that “Beloved Community” remind you of something, Booman?
Pitt Does It Again
William Rivers Pitt | Silent Night
William Rivers Pitt: The only war on Christmas happening in the last week was fought by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are away from family and in harm’s way, many for their second or third tours. Take a silent moment and consider what you will do in the New Year – what you will give – to bring about the peace on Earth that Cindy Sheehan spoke of.
And ‘Please’, for the New Year follow Pitts Request!!
unfortunately, but this is so. And it is good to be alive now because we all will do what you did….just get going. And, we are the people we’ve been waiting for. That angst you feel? Echoed millions of times around the world now by others who are sentinent. Even the indigenous people are coming now to tell their stories and let us know, things that have to now be told for the world’s survival.
Thank you for this space to be angry, hopeful, strategic, informative. That in itself is a huge, huge thing for many many of us!
Robert Steinback | Fear Destroys What bin Laden Could Not
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/dave3_038.htm
The snow finally arrived in my little conservative pot-hole in upstate New York . As much as I detest winter and the cold, there’s something incomparably peaceful about a late December night as the snow falls. The quiet is so intense that you can almost hear the flakes touch the ground. The only thing breaking the silence is the sound of the chains of a lone snow plow in the distance or, if the hour is early enough, the bells of one of three churches in my neighborhood chiming a Christmas carol. It’s kind of Norman Rockwell when you get right down to it. But there’s a problem.
Right now, on this very night while I take in the quiet warmth and comforting seclusion with my family this holiday season, somewhere out there is a man far from his loved ones. He wears a hood and his hands are bound behind his back. He lies bruised and naked in a dark, cold makeshift prison cell. The echoes of his screams still ring in his ears as immeasurable fear overtakes his very soul.
This just seemed the appropriate place to share this.
jf
Bravo Boo, glad to hear you enjoy John. I’ve known him for quite a while, and glad his new album is out, and just in time.
It seems as though the battle here at home is growing in aspect of the number of Anti-Bush soldiers, and it’s about time. This time We will prevail ; )
Kudos, and keep listen’n man, it does a body good ; )