Where oh where oh where do I start?
Over the next couple weeks I will have a fair amount of time to write so I will be blogging about lots of things that have happened in the last few weeks when I have not been able to post, but before I start playing catch up I thought I should warn regular readers about my state of mind and what has been going on with me. There are three key things I have to work toward: taking back the media, taking back the religious discourse, and taking back the Democratic Party. I’m hot under the collar about these things. These are processes which we have to regain control of or authority in before any change can really occur.
I came to a realization that my personal situation had some parallels with our political situation. I have to take care of myself and fix some major problems inside myself (such as the gall stones that have convinced me to let them cut my gall bladder out early next week) before I will be able to truly be effective in my interactions with the world. Similarly we have to remove the corrupted elements of our representative democracy before we can be an effective player on Team Gaia.
At the end of February I awakened one night with horrific pain under my ribs on my right side that shot through all the way to the back that I can only describe as on par with the severity of pain involved with labor & birth. A few days later I found out my elderly (over 90) mother fell and broke her hip. This was while I was attempting to organize an International Women’s Day vigil, a progressive fast between that day and the Tucson’s March 18th rally and march on the 3rd anniversary of the war in Iraq for which I was also hoping to stir up a significant pink presence. I was also planning a stop in Tucson by one of the Iraqi women who began a speaking tour of the U.S. in March and April as a part of the Women Say No To War campaign. I dropped everything and went back to the Mid-West. Women’s lives (and many men’s lives too) get very complicated when the squeeze of career, children, and arranging for or providing the caretaking of an elderly parent really tightens down.
At some point, as I was sitting in the wifi connected coffee shop in the rural town in which I grew up, I experienced an epiphany and realized that not only do I detest the actions of the entire Bush Oligarchy (oil-igarchy?) I am personally pissed off at Bush because he is forcing me to put so much energy into pro-peace activities to counter their evil doings that I am not able to do the things I’d really like to be doing . I would really like to be arranging my poetry into a coherent manuscript, researching and continuing work on a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter, finishing several art projects, hanging with my teenage daughter in these blink of the eye moments before she heads off to college, doing sorely needed repairs on my home, getting several of my websites either up and running or back up, and countless other really important things. Not only are the policies of these vile men and women screwing up the world I live in to levels that may well signal the end of life as we know it, but my personal life and well-being within the moment are being impinged upon.
I need to act. It is a real need that has to be fulfilled. The only way I can explain it is in the colloquial language of the place where I was raised. I heard a call. And paraphrasing my folksinger friend Carrie Newcomer says, “when you hear/feel this type of call, you have to answer.” It is that simple. Who places that call and how it is placed are up for debate, but for me it is connected to those spiritual level things that are based in belief systems and not in logical & scientific systems of knowing.
I’m not hiding my religious beliefs any longer. I’ve always thought that my religion, how I interact with the world of spirit and flesh, was nobody’s business but my own. I still think that. But my beliefs that come from that personal understanding of religion (I’m very Protestant in that sense, I guess.) That understanding translates to my morality and my concepts of worth, my values if you will. I am sick and tired of corrupt, carpet-bagging, war-mongers calling me morally bankrupt and insinuating that my values are somehow tainted. I am a good person, at peace with the deity as I understand her, and I am gonna get righteous on people’s asses when they try to pull that crap on me! Conflict resolution is a good thing, but be cannot compromise on our beliefs. Negotiations necessary to the ultimate declaration of peace will require great diplomacy, but no one should have to compromise their faith and bend to the will of another person’s faith in the pursuit of that peace.
I’m tired of imposition by others into my right to believe and act in virtuous ways as dictated by my religion. Bush and his cronies are not only occupying Iraq, they are attempting to possess my soul. They are demons. Am I going too far? Okay, okay, but I do like theatrics. But you get my point. Gonzales, for example, doesn’t give a *bleep* about child pornography, he is orchestrating a campaign to restrict internet freedom and privacy and is using an issue with a moral hair trigger to do it. The method is the same one used by this administration time and time again. They justify an action by inciting a mob mentality and then turn around and lynch the folks who were in the mob. Family values and the “abortion issue” were mere propaganda tools to divert the populace from stolen elections, illegal consolidation of power in the presidency, steering away from combating the real terrorist threats against our country, destroying the Bill of Rights, and setting up a completely corporate ruled fascist state. This has been enabled by Democrats who don’t stand for anything and journalists who value their checks cut by corporate media more than their integrity.
We’ve got to multitask, keep the faith, and recognize that we are working on product and process simultaneously.
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