Well, Well, Well

My parents listened to Peter, Paul & Mary all the time when I was a little kid.  This song must have lodged in my memory because it bubbled up the other day and has been stuck in my head ever since.



I'm not sure if it has anything to do with that kid shooting all those people in Arizona or not, but I've been bumming out about that incident.  Hard to believe it was only a little over a week ago. I was up in Connecticut with VeryMissMary at the time and she doesn't have a TV at that house, but I read about it on the internet.  I like the internet better anyway because TV news is noisy and full of shit.

That was a hard weekend all the way around because the traffic jam from a terrible accident turned a two and a half hour drive into a nine hour nightmare on account of the snow storm.  One thing I didn't learn in Texas was how to drive in a snow storm.  Hurricanes?  No problem - but driving in snow storms still scares me, especially after dark when you can't tell the difference between pavement and black ice.  You have to operate as if you're in danger every moment because, in fact, you are.

There's all kinds of scary weather and earthquakes and stuff happening around the world lately kind of like this verse:

World's not waitin' for the Lord's command,
Buildin' a fire that'll sweep the land.
Thunder out of heaven, comin' Gabriel's call;
And the sea's gonna boil and the sky's gonna fall.

Looks like we really might be reaping what we've sewed.

You really have to wonder about a country where people Go Postal with enough regularity that there's a colloquial expression like Going Postal.  Maybe this country is filled with lone, crazy people and occasionally one of them gets a wild hair and starts shooting like at Virginia Tech, or Columbine or Ft. Hood.  Sometimes youngsters get into the act and shoot up their elementary schools

Who knows why Jared decided to shoot all those people - but the fact that he had a cartridge with 31 bullets in the gun he bought legally shows a lot of collective effort went into killing those people at Safeway on a Saturday morning.  There's a lot of collective effort behind all the military suicides, too, if you ask me.  But as noxious as political rhetoric has been lately - especially from Teabagging Republicans - Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of them simply give voice to the worst aspects of our society.  The thoughts they express are already wide spread or they wouldn't find an audience.  They didn't have any more to do with that shooting than Marilyn Mason had with Columbine.

I'd like to think there's a Silent Majority out there who won't speak up for all the reasons John Stewart outlined at the rally - but it's just as likely that nobody speaks up because they are too tired from working 16 hour days or too deeply in despair from not working at all.   Even if a person's life circumstances are okay, being bombarded by sound bites from pundits and politicians is enough to drive you nuts.  Plutocrats have a vested interest in keeping us divided and despairing.  A Spanish sociologist named Pablo Ouziel describes our isolation.

Serious events and acts are taking place everyday which merit serious social debate, yet because of the fact that our societies are deeply fragmented, broken and clashing between each other, we are unable to grant ourselves the necessary pause, required for conciliation and unity.
Because of this, we are easy to control as a mass of isolated individuals, which is held together by norms and regulations, bureaucracies, military and police, and concepts such as the nation state, the church and the corporation.
If we are to stay in this model of society, I fear we will live in perpetual war until we destroy ourselves by not paying attention to the fact that something is drastically wrong. (http://walled-in-pond.blogspot.com/2009/06/triumph-of-triviality-weapons-of-mass.html)

Our alienation from each other prevents us from working collaboratively with our friends and neighbors so that our voices have as much influence as Sarah Palin or her BFF Glenn Beck.

On the airplane home from Texas, Velvet and I had to sit next to some skinny, bleached blonde cunt who had a deck of BP playing cards.  Any thinking person would realize that BP is an offensive affront to this entire planet and everyone on it - but not that bitch.  She carries BP in her handbag.  Something is drastically wrong, indeed.  The same society that enabled the Deepwater Disaster enabled Jared Loughner of Arizona.  It's not Sarah Palin's fault, or Rush's or Glenn Beck's either.  It's the fault of a society that pays them to speak in the first place.  

I joined a group today called RootsAction.   It's an independent organization supported by Daniel Ellsberg, Cornell West, Jim Hightower, Naomi Klein and other progressives.  The introductory page reads:

The 2010 election showed that you can’t beat heartless Republicans with spineless Democrats.We need a fresh approach to defend the public interest. Our country faces a far-right Republican Party that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, and a Democratic Party whose leadership is enmeshed with corporate power.  
RootsAction is a new online initiative dedicated to galvanizing millions of Americans who are committed to economic fairness, equal rights, civil liberties, environmental protection -- and defunding endless wars.

I'll drink to that.