Election 2012: Lurching Towards Infamy

It’s that special time of year – that season that happens every four years in the US – when ordinary citizens thrashed into a state of hysteria, a near madness brought on by two long years of endless campaigning and speculation by an audience-hungry mega-media, (“Just look what this dickwad did!   Aren’t you shocked?  You didn’t see it?  How about if we play it 20 more times??!), finally lurch into the voting booths to elect our next President.    

The scariest part?  We are actually so crazed and strung out that a lot of otherwise sensible, normal human beings are actually planning on voting for Mitt Romney.   Yes folks – people are seriously considering electing a President who wants to resume the policies of George W Bush – the guy who brought us the global financial crash and the great Depression of 2008!!    Somehow, an attack on the US embassy in Libya “proves” Obama is incompetent and untrustworthy - yet 9/11, the worst terrorist attack on American soil, made “W” Bush a hero?  How is that exactly? 

The only explanation that makes any sense is that people have actually lost their minds.  We are actually whipped into such an irrational frenzy that no one is actually considering how President Romney will be able to stack the Supreme Court – so Citizen’s United – remember the decision handed us by the Bush Supreme Court which allows for Corporations and wealthy individuals to dump unlimited funds into campaigns? - will not only remain the law of the land but no doubt be reinforced with other anti-Democratic laws both equally heinous and way worse.  (Ladies, how about being convicted for murder after terminating an unwanted pregnancy?   Under Romney/Ryan this is a real scenario.)

As I write this we are hunkered down at home, bracing ourselves for the juggernaut “Hurricane Sandy” a Category 1 hurricane /winter storm guaranteed to wreak havoc on NY and Long Island unknown since the Hurricane of 1938.    We are both stressed and unwell but the impending storm has little to do with this.  Neither one of us can sleep at night and I am coming down with what looks like a case of Shingles.

Obama does NOT approve of the Citizen’s United decision.  If elected to a second term he would work to replace some of the worst Justices on the court and reverse this decision so our next election isn’t co-opted and held hostage by billionaire clowns like Sheldon Adelson and Charles and David Koch.  

Because of the Bush tax cuts these wealthiest 1% now have more money at their disposal than they probably ever had.   More money than could ever be spent in multiple lifetimes.  They’re certainly rich enough to “create” enough jobs to put the entire world back to work.  But they haven’t done it.   Why? How much longer do we have to wait?    Are they punishing us for electing a Democratic President?  Why should these people have so much power in the first place?    How about bringing all that money back into circulation through TAXES – you know – so it actually gets spent here in the US instead of being hoarded in the Cayman Islands??

Why do Americans do this?  Why do we continually elect Presidents who will NOT act in our best interests – only in the interests of their rich buddies?   We vote for Presidents like “W” Bush – or don’t bother to vote at all - and then when things get worse and worse we mutter about how we need some kind of bloody “revolution” to change things – when all we had to do was think about what we were doing before voting!    When you challenge people on this they come up with ultimate cop-out “oh they’re all crooks.”  “Why bother?” they say which is code language for “I hate having to actually think or take any kind responsibility for the world we live in” - as if it’s just a matter of who to blame.  And if they’re “all” crooks why not vote for the guy who’ll at least get you affordable healthcare and a break on your taxes (Obama) instead of the guy who wants to privatize everything (Mitt) and f*ck you 6 ways til Sunday???

How Paul Ryan can run on a platform of fiscal responsibility is a complete mystery.  Ryan has already served in Congress for THIRTEEN YEARS – in which he okay’d two disastrous wars, two huge tax cuts, and a prescription drug entitlement that created the bulk of our current (massive) deficit.  At the time, under “W” Bush’s presidency, Ryan said the spending was needed to stimulate the economy – then proceeded to blame Obama for the mess he helped create (and still having the nerve to request $20 million in stimulus funding for his district.)

The rest of the world is watching in horror.  A Romney/Ryan administration will no doubt mean starting more wars – possible even a disastrous confrontation in Iran – all in the service of enriching war profiteers and starving our already bled-out system and using it for currency to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – which is what the GOP has wanted all along.  Since FDR first implemented the social safety nets in the 1930’s – since Lyndon Johnson brought us Medicare - their biggest wet dream is to be rid of these simple things that have kept so many people from starving and dying in the street.  Because they do not care.  The Koch brothers, the Bushes, the Romneys – these people will roll up the iron gates and hire security guards with guns and retreat into their luxurious caves - and as for us – well we can all go f*ck ourselves.    They will drive over our broken bodies in the street.   Because with Medicare replaced by “vouchers” worth $6,000 per year that’s exactly where most of us will be.

Why do we root for scrappy underdog heroes like Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter and George Bailey at the movies and then elect Darth Vader, Sauron, Valdemort and Mr Potter to run everything in our real lives??  Don’t let it happen this time!  Elect the guy who really did come up from “nothing”, the man whose had to work all his life, the man who helped people as a community Organizer, Vote to Re-Elect Barack Obama!! 

9/11 Again

Here it comes.  Like it does every year, the dreaded annual ordeal, but this is Year 10 so everyone is pulling out all the stops.  Plastered in all the shop windows and delis across town: "we will never forget!"    

Like I could ever forget.  Like any New Yorker could forget any of it without brain surgery.    Like they'll ever LET us forget.

I was in a basement office on West 72^nd Street with my co-workers and we sat frozen at our desks all day listening to the whole thing unfold on the radio.  We knew people who worked at the twin towers, some of whom were lucky enough to escape.  An old friend who worked across the street at Lehman Brothers had taken the day off – and actually saw the second plane hit from a car in midtown traffic. 

After work I went to see my father who lived on 23^rd street and I stopped at Union Square park at 14^th street along the way.  I remember the hellish yellow glow on the horizon from Ground Zero, miles away, the hideous smell, the anguish of the people gathered in Union Square, the anger and dread knowing that somehow Bush and the neo-cons would use this tragedy as currency to start a war in the middle east.  

When I finally visited the WTC site months later I wept, remembering all that had been there and all the people who were now gone.  Years before, living in New Jersey and working near Wall Street, my commute took me through WTC plaza every day.   I will never forget the scale of those buildings, how the immensity of them was breathtaking, approaching them on the street.

Make no mistake, it was a terrible day – but it was also just one day – and we lost just about 4,000 civilians.   By 2004 roughly 100,000 civilians, many of them women and children, had been killed in Iraq by coalition forces.   And that was 6 years ago.  The death toll in Iraq is now over a million– with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives – and babies are being born in Fallujah with no eyes and two heads from the use of chemical weapons like depleted uranium.  Is our suffering more important than theirs?   Is what we lost somehow more special or exalted because it happened here?

So how are we supposed to act?  What are/were we supposed to do?   Well what do people do after any atrocity is committed against them?   What did we do after Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz? What did we do after Hiroshima?  Or Wounded Knee?   Or the massacres in Rwanda?  Or Darfur?  Do you celebrate it ever year like a holiday?  Do you have 3-day sales and sell picture books and show documentaries replaying the tragedy over and over so you can relive it all over again in full color?  Or do you pick up the pieces and try to go on with your lives?  And maybe you ALLOW yourself to forget – just a little bit each year – just enough so you can recover and find a way to start over again.    Because to do otherwise is to consign yourself to the world of the dead – to the people whose lives truly have ended and who have no control over how the memory of their last hours will be used.

May 22nd 2011 is "We're Still Here" Day!

As many of us have been made aware, Evangelical Christian Harold Camping has predicted the Rapture will occur on May 21^st, 2011 and the end of the world will follow, with a series of natural catastrophes over the next five months, culminating in a grand finale "End of All Things" on October 21^st, 2011.

Either way I figure it's a Win Win situation for every body else since one of two things will happen on Sunday May 22^nd, 2011:

A: The day will dawn - same as usual - and we'll be able to have a nice weekend and go on with our lives…

B: The Rapture really will happen, Camping et al will get sucked up into the Great Reward and we'll be able to have FIVE WHOLE MONTHS of peace and quiet with no more Harold Camping and "Family Radio". Think of it: NO MORE people shoving pamphlets in your face and lecturing at you about how you're going to Hell! NO MORE "preachers" screaming at you on the subway! NO MORE 700 Club! NO MORE bombings and shootings at family planning centers!

So on May 22^nd, 2011 let's all get together, celebrate and drink a toast to A: life itself "warts and all" or B: no more Harold Camping!!! Huzzah!