Category: Political

I have been heavily involved in political issues recently, all of which have added to an already overstressed mind and body. I look forward to the elections on Tuesday for no other reason than it will be over. As this CBS Report states, the might of two parties, the same media company behind Swift Boat Veterans, and every foul person calling themselves a ‘journalist’ has converged on this state and examined us like bugs under a microscope. Yes, and told us how we should vote, too.

(In the middle of all this, we now face the possibility of some jejune wannabe journalist sticking cameras in our faces while we’re standing in line at the polls; for no other reason than some people think adding to the problem and the confusion and the stress ‘helpful’.)

The Missouri Baptist had their annual meeting this week. I don’t even have the energy to mention the proclamations coming out of this event (this, this, here, and here.) When you realize this organization is part of the largest protestant organization in the US, it’s enough to make you want to knock on the doors of our Canadian neighbors and beg to be allowed in.

The lack of brotherly, and sisterly, love is not limited to just the Baptists: Archbishop Burke, leader of St. Louis Catholics, states that people like me who support Amendment 2 are the agents of the culture of death. His priests have been handing out signs for lawns, and telling parishioners how to vote. The signs are so thick on church property, it’s a wonder the moles have a place to dig. They don’t just disagree with people like me–they despise people like me.

What’s particularly sad is that the Archbishop’s people have been deliberately spreading confusion about what the amendment 2 states–saying that state funding will be used for this research, when there is no indication at all of this. Saying that adult stem cells have been used to treat Parkinson’s, when there is absolutely no fact to back this up. They aren’t relying on their faith to advocate this bill–they are relying on miscommunication and untruths. They have been relying on lies. This from the leader of the Catholic church in this entire area.

(I wanted to point to this article in Rolling Stone Magazine which calls the current congress the worst in history. I wanted to link to the person’s post where I found this article, to give him credit for the find, but then I remember he’s Catholic. Considering the nature of this post, I felt I would be doing him a disservice to do so.)

Regardless of how this vote goes this week, we can no longer ignore the elephant sitting in the corner that is religious influence on politics and government. People are not always going to be able to complacently have their ‘faith’ and their ‘science’, because in too many cases belief in one denies the existence of the other. Members of a church may have to consider challenging the precepts of the church, and individual churches challenge their association with a larger body. Basic human rights can no longer be pushed aside in the interest of ‘culture’ and ‘belief’, and the religious faithful cannot be allowed to determine how the rest of us live or die; how and when we have children; who we can love; how we dress; destroy our world in the interests of ‘being fruitful, and multiplying’; reduce our science to superstition, and bind our ethics to obscure passages in ill-interpreted religious texts.

This issue is not just one that belongs to Missouri or the midwest: what’s happening in Missouri is just a taste of what the rest of the country, the rest of the world, is having to face in the upcoming years.

Based on my own experience, I can attest to one thing: events such as these drain your hope, your joy, and your spirit–whether you call such ‘soul’, or not.

I find it ironic that one of the most religious states in the union has a city considered to be the country’s most dangerous city. Ironic and sad, because many of our problems in this city are curable if we focused on these instead of denying gay rights and turning the clock back with both our education and our medicine. We don’t because, to be blunt, most of the victims of crime in our city are black. We read of a young white student who gets drunk and wraps his car around a tree, and we come out with flowers and create commissions to study teen drinking and cry out about a general loss of moral fiber in America, which has led to such drinking; we read of a young black man who is shot in drive by shooting and we hear….nothing. Silence.

It is said that Missouri acts as a macrocosm for the country as a whole, because how we vote reflects how the country votes. If this is true, then our country, like this state, is headed towards a crises of faith, and by that I don’t mean people not believing; I mean people believing too much.

We get sidetracked on moral issues, while more important problems are shunted aside, such as the Iraqi war, global warming, the growing number of people within poverty levels, the disintegration of our inner cities, an increasing racial disparity, our country’s economic and educational decline, lack of quality health care for 45 million Americans and so on. Even now, with the British report of alarming environmental shifts and increased violence in Iraq, Bush is running around the country talking about the importance of keeping Republicans in office because gays are being allowed to marry in New Jersey. Seriously, is this really the most important issue facing Americans? Regardless of your personal beliefs?

We have the evidence of our eyes as regards to global warming, and the evidence of numbers of dead in Iraq–not to mention there isn’t a person who probably doesn’t know someone who has no health insurance; or who has been laid off; or can only get a part-time job because fulltime jobs are disappearing. More than that, we’ve become a country that condones torture and have given away most of our legal rights within our court systems, as we increase a growing deficit between us and China, weakening our own economic stability.

By focusing on moral issues, by encouraging fear of the unknown and fear of the different, corporations can do what they want in this country because all they have to do is get some politician, and yes the Republicans have shown themselves to be most willing in this regard, to point out the Muslim threat, wave abortion or gay rights, and now stem cell research and we’re off and running while they quietly rape our country of its resources, its labor, its spirit, and its soul.

There are at least two, and I believe more, webloggers who have been expertly trained by so-called ‘conservative’ think tanks in how to direct and misdirect communication in weblogging so that the focus is on immigration or the Muslim threat because if we ever stopped to look around ourselves, we’d realize how many of our basic protections and rights have been eroded. So like the hamster on the wheel, they keep us spinning and spinning. In that, they’re aided by technology, which just adds to the noise.

Do I think the Democrats would do any better? I think they would provide a necessary balance for the next two years, and at that point in time, we can re-negotiate. I’d like to see Democrats take Congress this election, but if they don’t get their act together then we’ll see about kicking them out in two years, and putting in a Democratic president and Republican Congress. If the Green Party could gets its act together, I wouldn’t mind seeing a third party enter the lists.

In other words, start showing that we the people they supposedly serve are not going to be led around anymore–that no party has a lock-in on the people. They have to earn it, and by that I mean work for it; not spend all their time in expensive lunches with lobbyists, while they toss out a gay or abortion flavored bone from time to time for us to gnaw on like the good dogs we are.

There will always be extremes: pockets of people who will vote a single issue or a single party regardless of what happens around them and we can’t do anything about these people; I don’t think most of us fit in the extremes. We’re bombarded by mixed messages, we’re pushed about on all sides, we’re afraid for our jobs and our families and the environment and the safety of our world, and politicians on both sides prey on this fear but we don’t have to be manipulated.

All we have, is each other. Even when we disagree, all we have, is each other. We need to send a message this election, and if that doesn’t work, we need to re-send it two years from now.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I think at times this medium skews attention to that which furthers acrimonious debate than anything truly useful or important. While we focus on how far we can take the Foley thing (including David Brooks equating Foley’s actions with a character from a play), gun shots are heard along the Korean border, and North Korea prepares for a nuclear bomb test. How to explain the lack of interest? It isn’t Google, it doesn’t sell, and one won’t get acclaim for such plain writing as, “this really scares me”, but this really scares me.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Two excellent posts from Sheila to pass on:

The latest covers the Lieberman defeat and the ludicrous accusations that the Joe Lieberman site was hacked. As was discovered and discussed in numerous publications, the Lieberman campaign hosted the site on a cheap server, and then paid the price when it received too much attention.

Lieberman stood for something once upon a time. Whatever it was he stood for, though, was lost in the 9/11 attacks. He lost his perspective, and now he’s lost the race. Running as an independent, as he has threatened, just shows that he’s about to lose the one thing left: his dignity.

On the other hand, the ‘people’ weren’t entirely the winners, as has been proclaimed. The Lieberman challenger, Lamont, may have made effective use of the grassroots to run his compaign, but he also made a great deal of use of his personal wealth. He wasn’t exactly one of the little people.

Still, hopefully this will shake up the Dems enough to force the party into something other than Republican Light.

Personally, I preferred Sheila’s other story, on juke boxes and a new documentary associated with juke boxes. I loved the boxes from the 40’s and remember fondly the cafe we used to go to at the junction of this highway and that; with its juke boxes at the table, which always left me wondering: how did the system know which song to play next?

The first story is about more important doings, but I’m finding that everything there is to be said about politics and the world at large has been said already: we’re just each taking turns shuffling the words around, some better than others.

The juke box story, now that topic was fresh.