I have been too depressed and angry to write anything about the latest bi-partisanship compromise by our beloved President and his gang of appeasement addicts (i.e., anyone not in the Progressive caucus) in Congress. Others have expressed my frustration with the Democrats’ lack of fortitude, their poor (to non-existent) negotiating skills, and their sheer gutlessness far better than I.
I’ve frankly avoided the political blogs for the last few days. I feel we are living in times that are only the preliminary to a far greater dystopian future for our country, much the same one as the one described by the Character V in V for Vendetta.
Allow me some poetic license to provide you a transcript of the movie script with references to England and the film;s characters removed, as right now it seems quite relevant to me:
Good evening, America. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine- the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any red-blooded American. But in the spirit of commemoration, thereby those important events of the past usually associated with someone’s death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, a celebration of a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this April the 8th, a day that is sadly all too well remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and “law enforcement” will soon be on their way.
Why? Because while the taser may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.
How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease, economic disaster, the fear and dread of your fellow citizens because they were “different” or “not like you” (a fear that so many in the corporate owned and conservatively slanted media promoted). There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense.
Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the politicians bought and paid for by corporations and the greed obsessed men wand women who run them and profit by them. Their ginned up “Tea Party” movement promised you order, promised you that you would “get your country back” and all they demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent and support for their policies, policies that inflicted pain and misery on those least able to protect themselves while allowing the most ruthless and shameless among us to steal our country and your future from you and your children.
Today I seek to end that silence. I want to remind this country of what it has forgotten. One hundred and fifty years ago a great citizen wished to embed the principle of justice and equality for all into the hearts and minds of the American People. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. His name was Abraham Lincoln, and for his troubles he was assassinated by those who would have returned this country to an evil time when the bodies of men and women could be sold on the open streets. Later his party, the Republican party, was corrupted and hijacked by wealthy financiers, greedy speculators and corporations who exploited working people and their families, working many of them into an early death because the wealth and power of the very few was more important than the hopes and desires of the many.
So if you’ve seen nothing, if the crimes of our government and its corporate paymasters, and the cowardly response to those crimes by our political leaders remain unknown to you then I would suggest you allow the the 8th of April to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates Congress, and together we shall give them an eighth of April that shall never, ever be forgot.
Forgive me employing the words of a fictional character and changing them to suit my purpose. But the truth is, we are moving toward a country much like the one shown in all its cinematic horror in V for Vendetta. I had thought that with the election of President Obama and our support for the Democratic Party in 2008, despite all its flaws, we had turned away from such a future. I now acknowledge I was terribly wrong.
We must now be the agents of change we were seeking for when we elected those Democrats and Barack Obama in 2008. Because in all honesty they are not worthy of that title, nor our trust and especially not our hope for a better future. For me, we can no longer look to them to lead. We must lead them instead (or push or pull or whatever it takes) to do the moral, the just and the right thing, because left to their own devices, and with few exceptions (and I give a shout out here to Nancy Pelosi, Alan Grayson, Anthony Weiner, Russ Feingold, Debbie Wasserman, et alia) they have proven to be hopeless and pathetic cravens.
There are too many men and some women among the Democrats who have chosen the easy path of selling their country for a few crumbs from the table of their lobbyists friends or simply afraid of challenging the lies of the Republicans and their collaborators in the Corporately Controlled Political News Media (and no, I don’t just mean Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and their many small minded wannabe hate talkers).
As the people in Wisconsin have shown, we must organize from below. We can expect no help from those who claim to represent us and champion our causes, for they have revealed themselves far too many times as utter failures at keeping their promises to defend our rights and protect our future. Time to, as the popular colloquialism goes, “move on” with or without the Democrats now in Congress and in the Oval Office.
They either do not have our interests at heart or they are unwilling to fight for us. And perhaps that is how it should be, for when has progressive change ever occurred in this country when we the people have stood on the sidelines as cheering on our “leaders?” It has only come when enough of us have said enough is enough and fought for the change we wanted by ourselves. The politicians, with rare exceptions, have always been followers who voted for change only after they were forced kicking and screaming to do what we wanted and needed them to do.
