Political Compost

My brain has been busy lately-- well not always. Some of the time I have spent online doing some shopping. And I was actually having some positive thoughts about injecting a tiny bit of my own money into this lousy economy, if not locally, at least some of it for good causes, including for gifts. And I had come across a couple of awe inspiring items, one of them a work of art.

Meanwhile, as usual, I did a cursory survey of the current news, and could have sworn that I read somewhere that the Chicago Tribune was going bankrupt, which is sad, while not surprising, since most print media are suffering from the web takeovers and the general dissatisfaction with the conventional news outlets, which are dominated by corporate interests and have been losing some of their journalists, leaving the country with a Fourth Estate lying on its back with all fours up in the air, almost a comical sight if it were not so tragic.

Then I heard on The News Hour that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojavitch had been arrested for corruption―OMG!! This is so close to home, the second bad governor in our neighbor state, one right after the other, and a story that is blasphemous in its assault on democracy. This kind of stuff is starting to get annoying.

While washing the dishes, the scary thought occurred to me that some of the downfalls happening around the country in local and state governments are all symptomatic of an increased vulnerability to the cynical takeover of our most cherished and hard won values, and we have brought it all upon ourselves. I am beginning to expect to see more and more of these people in positions of power falling over like dominoes, one after the other. And what is this like for the young people who are struggling to survive in a broken economy, with fewer options for education or decent jobs, as so many corporations have shifted to international robbery? And the people holding office have shifted to shiftier behavior.

Meanwhile, stories out of the African Continent are more and more demoralizing, with disease related to lack of clean water, and conflicts elsewhere related to tribal identities, which in the past were purposefully stirred up by dominating invaders. And violence has been springing up in Asia again, some of it directed at English speaking immigrants. The world is a mess, partly perhaps as a result of global economic woes, but chiefly, it seems, as a result of Western political domination. "Humanitarian" has almost become an oxymoron, if not for just a few sane persons, now mostly living on another continent than our own. The United States has slid down off its mountain top into the ocean, where the pollution was already thick with death before we got this far down.

So my personal resolution to write in a more optimistic vein fell down there with the rest of the country. Into that morass of self pity.

In the grocery store, which I went back to today, having forgot a few key items yesterday, I find that it sometimes takes me a minor heft of courage to pass by the corn chips. And in that spirit I am going to corral myself back to the hopeful again.

Despite the frustrations of living "below poverty level," with some troublesome challenges, I am looking forward to the coming New Year. We still don't know when the slide we are in will slow down enough for us to start climbing back up again, or even if we will be so blessed. But we have already heard the greatest wake-up call in perhaps the entire history of human civilization.

Perhaps this moment in time is the greatest opportunity ever for writers to register their thoughts, their fears, their outrages, their hopes and prayers. More and more of us are writing to be heard, with the free blogosphere out there now, meaning that a cacophony of opinions are sometimes waging a war for the available ears. But, wow! Together we have composted more political garbage than ever before even thought possible.

In some ways it should not surprise us that the rotting organic matter can give off an odor. If done properly good compost doesn't do that, but we are beginners at this new, heretofore unheard of avocation, a kind of collective outcry to get the rotten apples out of the barrel so they can be recycled into new life forms. We don't want to attract wild rodents, but we are just beginning to learn how to protect the resources we have, which is a totally new thing for a profligate society.

If we look in the right places we find many, many like-minded people who are more experienced at such things, some of them in alternative political parties or parallel social and issue oriented movements. Eventually we will get to the point that we will be sharing responsibilities with each other in whole new ways. And those "short-timers," waiting for us to fire them, who are so resistant to the prevailing reality, will begin to out themselves, tripping over themselves. They are already making themselves the butt of more and more jokes, until we are all profiting from their horrible mistakes by seeing opportunities to laugh. Laughter and crying are close allies of the human spirit.

A sense of humor is the greatest of all gifts. We can keep it in our pockets, more valuable than money, more readily available than food or water in trying times such as these.