Rant For a Dark Day

  

Ugh! It’s a dark day today. I’ve a feeling this is going to be our first taste of the winter rains. It’s one of those days when it never fully achieves daylight. Mid-afternoon, and I still have lights on all over the house just trying to keep the darkness at bay.

A day like this brings to mind America’s current political climate. Dark, ugly, depressing… I can’t seem to muster any excitement about Tom DeLay finally being indicted, or Bill Frist being under investigation, or the release of Judith Miller pushing the Rove/Libby/Plame affair back into the foreground. Or even the political car wreck of the hurricane Katrina response. The principals, along with right-wing media all over the country, simply wave their flags all the more feverishly and scream that the corruption, conniving, and just plain incompetence of the Republican elite are merely "political attacks" by their enemies. And the American people continue to swallow this hogwash by the (oil) tanker-truckload.

And I don’t see the Democratic party presenting itself as the solution, the calm voice of reason, in any of this. To my eyes, the Democrats either come off as needlessly piling on after the hit (**flag** Personal Foul!!) or petrified to just take the lead and go, in case no one follows. I guess they haven’t noticed that no one is following anyway… I just grind my teeth, shake my head and wonder what they are waiting for.

And the American people…what is our excuse? How many times do we have to hear Mr. Bush whine the word "terr’ist" when pontificating about the Iraq War (which does not now and never did have anything to do with the war on terror…) while conveniently forgetting to mention that we have not yet, nor have we even come close, to apprehending the actual perpetrators of the terrorist attack on our soil? Why is it that we sit and shrug our shoulders when the Republican National Committee sends out a memo calling for the"Daschel-ization" of the new Democratic Congressional leadership, but we cry out "Hey, no fair!" when Tom DeLay bawls about being persecuted by his political enemies? Why do we clutch our breasts in horror that the opposition party would dare "politicize a disaster" like Hurricane Katrina, but we slapped our hands over our hearts or snappily saluted our Commander-in-Chief when he and his administration did exactly that with the September 11th Terrorist Attacks?

Our intrepid president and his administration sit in their ivory tower and conspire to fully complete their agenda which has elevated Business, wealth, and the worship of the almighty dollar as the power that runs this country and will keep it running (so we all owe it our unfailing allegiance.) The thing at which they work the hardest, the task to which the most man-hours of the Bush Administration are dedicated, I’m convinced, is maintaining and increasing the divide between their "friends" and their "enemies." Making it all about winners and losers. Making it about backing the President and the Republican Party, because no one wants to be a loser. Blinding the American electorate with the emotional frenzy of the fight, so that they fail to see how they’re being manipulated. The real horror of all this is, how well it has worked so far.

Dark days, dismal days…no spark or glowing ember to flock around and fan to full brilliance, to drive the darkness back, to keep it at bay. The only way to maintain any sanity at all is to know that, without an iota of help from any human agency, Spring always comes around again eventually.