07/13/2007: "A New World, I Hear Her Breathing"
Here, during the crumbling days of the Bush/Cheney/Neo-Con empire, it's time for some thought about what the future brings.
While The First Fool is increasingly irrelevant, even to his conservative base, and The Evil Veep hunkers deeper into the bunker of his angry rhetoric, the damage that they have done to the world and our country becomes clearer. After starting illegal, genocidal wars, being AWOL from diplomacy in every part of the world, and bullying countries large and small into exploitive trade agreements disguised as bringing prosperity to the Third World, two terms of President Weenie have proved to be a boon to oil companies, defense contractors, and terrorists. There is nothing corporate America loves more than a good, long war. And there is nothing the terrorists love more than the kind of hate generated during King George the Lesser's wars of Imperialism.
Here at home we have learned that our leaders ignore our health care, our elderly, our young, our helpless, and our veterans because they are too busy performing political fellatio on big businesses like BIG PHARMA, BIG OIL, BIG AGRA, BIG MEDICAL, and, of course, BIG DEFENSE.
Americans seemed to be happy, for a while, to let all this happen.
Sady, if a Democrat is elected to the White House next year there will probably be little change. The leading candidates are, like The Creep and the Veep, wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate America. Until there is a great groundswell of dissatisfaction, a few Democrats, even if they wanted to, would not be able to fix the shattered Humpty Dumpty that America has become.
If change is to be made, it will be up to us.
I recall hearing Arundhati Roy, the Indian activist and the author of "The God of Small Things" say once that the only way to bring about change is to "make the Empire bleed". No great change has ever been brought about by just asking. The English did not wake one day and decide to give India freedom from colonial rule. All social upheaval--ending slavery, giving women the vote, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, or ending the Vietnam war--all required one ingredient: courageous struggle. It will be the same to change the police state that we have become. It will not come soon, but, with home it will come.
Here are some words of Arundhati Roy from a talk she gave on January 28, 2003 in Brazil
What can we do?
We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar.
We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government's excesses.
We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair - and their allies - for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.
We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass.
When George Bush says "you're either with us, or you are with the terrorists" we can say "No thank you." We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.