Whose Issues?

“We can’t let the Democrats take our issues. We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives and co-opt the middle and win these elections. We have to get the attention of our incumbents and candidates and make sure they understand this.” -- Robert M. Duncan, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, in a New York Times article published May 15, 2008.

But they are conservatives Mr. Duncan.

Have you seen the Political Compass? http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008

and http://upword.blogspot.com/2006/11/left-or-right-liberal-and-conservative.html

All of our candidates with the exception of Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich on the Left and Mike Gravel on the Right fall in the Right leaning Authoritarian (North East) quadrant of the compass. Heroes like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, and the Dalai Lama, are solidly in the South West quadrant.

And anyway, “our issues”? Humanity has issues. This country has issues. We, the people, have issues. The ways the powerful have been addressing our issues has been disastrous to all but the very wealthiest, and now, the wrongdoing is beginning to catch up to the bottom ranks of the wealthy and powerful.

I never did believe in “trickle down”. Guess what guys! The problems of the poorest of the poor have been moving up as in a capillary tube affecting the ranks of humanity that have felt safely above things like homelessness and hunger, and loss of dignity. The blood stream of America is feeling the illness of our economic and environmental policies--policies that favor the corporation over Mother Earth. How long did the greedy extractors of resources think this could go on?

Its OK though. We got your back, people. It turns out that in this country at least we still have control of our own back yards. We can grow uncorrupted food and eat well. We can collect, store, and use clean water. We have the social freedom to gather together and share these skills. We can object and occasionally have an impact when our air is polluted and our children suffer from asthma. We are so much better off still than those whose homelands, gardens, water, and voice have been taken from them by our and other corrupt governments.

This good life however is going to begin more and more to engage the work of our own hands, the person to person networking, local economy, and community cooperation that we been leaving to “activists”. The rest of us are going to have to get involved, open our eyes and find out what's going on. Where will your food come from, where will your prescription medications come from, where will your clean water come from, where will you get medical care, when we can no longer do business as usual with trucking and shipping, and big corporate processing of everything that comes into our homes?

My granddaughter Deija posted this link on her blog. Its simply powerful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-_LBXWMCAM