Backing Off The Brink

Today I had an experience that has become somewhat common to me in the last seven years. Listening to independent talk radio I heard another litany of deceptions that the Bush administration and those who support it are perpetrating. In a moment of frustration I felt like throwing my hands in the air and crying, “We’ve been exposing these things for years now! There aren’t drug-soaked hippies demanding that we get out of Vietnam anymore…we have nonprofit corporations, independent media, and protest media populated with very intelligent and hardworking people striving against the Bush agenda but the neocon machine goes on. It’s not working!”

It’s at times like this that I have to stop listening to the radio for a while. The helpless frustration has nowhere to go, and if I feed it, it only grows bigger.

Yet there’s a part of me that can’t give up. Giving in is tantamount to giving tacit permission for them to continue. So what to do?

Well, if the emotion gets intolerable but the principle needs to be held to then the emotion must go. I must become a dispassionate participant holding together the principles of democracy that remain. But I can’t afford to become one of those cold fish who can recite endless statistics with no give in any area; a computer can do that. I guess I just have to contain myself, not let passion overwhelm my purpose, not give in to the Dark Side but calmly allow positive creation to push and guide me.

The facts are abundantly obvious. The Bush camp started wars for a reason: it benefits them. They lie about intentions and operations for a reason: they get away with it and it benefits them. They enact policy that detracts from the common good for a reason: it benefits them. They take away others’ freedoms in order to increase their own. The consolidation of power is everything. Profit is more important than benevolence. People who get in the way – be it politics, protests, or the unfortunate soul who happens to be where the bomb lands – are expendable.

The Bush doctrine has proved that greed is a strong motivating force. They have also proved that greed doesn’t have a limit. No longer content to wait until international treaties bring them higher yields, they have resorted to merely attacking and taking as they wish, and richly reward those who build the machines and support the effort to accomplish it.

A part of me wants to think that God will deal with their souls justly and there’s nothing stronger I can do, and then wait for it to happen, but even if that is the final outcome for them individually it does nothing to protect and preserve the nations that they are raping and pillaging along the way. Including our own.

And so I must continue to write, and to let people know where I stand and what I see. I have to do whatever is necessary for me to not give in to hopelessness, and if the swamp is up to my neck and slogging through is tedious and so very slow, then I must keep moving at whatever pace I can. To stand in the muck and cry doesn't get anybody anywhere.