To mitigate the risk of this website veering toward an overly-earnest and annoying auto-drip exponent of political rhetoric--I’m going to make a few confessions. First, I’m a lapsed patriot, a recovering Bush-wacker and failed flower child. I’m not an alcoholic, but I do admit to being slightly addicted to all things that give Democratic Baby Boomers a bad name—recycling, inedible Blackberries, Jon Stewart and the obnoxious tendency to use French words I can’t translate, like “milieu” and “tete du fromage.” (cheese head—I looked it up) Secondly, I live in Idaho--the media-spun birthplace of the Aryan Nation and potatoes as big as Sasquatch’s feet. Dead-in-the-red Idaho, as we lonely Democrats refer to our home, a state with an electorate so firmly entrenched in the Republican fold it hadn’t seen a campaign visit from a Presidential candidate in the last four races— until Barack Obama visited in October of 2009.
Living in a state with only one area code has its advantages. The vast pastoral landscape with few inhabitants, forces a mind to wander independently in every direction. And like those astronauts who see the earth from space and then become Buddhists, the long distances between porch lights after dark has a galvanizing effect on how you view the populace. I lived in a large Northern California city for thirty years and met two neighbors who both moved away. I now live in a town of seventy-two people with no stoplight and one gas station. I know almost every person in town, as well as who successfully passed the last kidney stone. As a left-leaning, anti-war, vegetarian, humanitarian journalist, I follow “Smith and Wesson is my car insurance” bumper stickers to the city council meetings and vote with the other eleven Democrats in the entire county. But the rancher next door visited the first day I moved in and invited me for over to taste his wife’s prize apple pie (this really happened) And in eight years, between assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Myanmar, I’ve learned how to oil a tractor chain, castrate a bull and how, in a nasty blizzard, neighbors will sit at the end of their driveway with their pick-up headlights glaring so you can find your way home. In other words, I learned to speak Latin — the language of “E Pluribus Unum” –“Out of Many, One” Hence, my unlikely evolution into an Idahoan explains how the vision behind this joint vision of Republicans and Democrats came about.
This is not an advertisement for bucolic bliss idealized by a concrete refugee. We are entering the scratch and sniff period of Obama’s administration—a time history might one day refer to as the “Peace, Love and Foreclosure Era.” Unfortunately, I’m still waking up each morning in a cold sweat. Without a military-industrial-complex complex, without an Iraq angst to grind, a Cheney goat to scape, a David Letterman Top Ten List of Bush guffaws to brighten my condescending attitude—I feel unmoored. Everywhere I look, everything I read says, “HOPE” but nowhere in the largest lay-offs and deficit reports can I find an example of what “HOPE” means--except symbolically, in the election of one very human, very intelligent, African-American man.
Watching the inauguration, I’ll admit, I cried –but truthfully, the source of my tears was as much euphoria for future possibilities as it was just plain relief the last terrifying eight years were finally over. It’s like we Democrats have been chained in our seats during an endless Ibsen Play. Obviously, anybody who created the pistol-toting, housewife-gone-bad, Hedda Gabbler, spent way too many Decembers in Norway, where every day is a drizzly night and everybody’s crabby and your feet are always cold. So now that winter of our discontent is over, a new spring of Republican discontent will surely begin if something doesn’t change. Indeed, we are being asked to cut up our credit cards, participate in a kind of emotional layaway plan, promising better times if we delay gratification and suicide over our shrunken 401K. And I almost feel better, sitting back, feeling forgiven for my deep debt. The only problem is, just like the former eight years — I’m weary and wary. “Hope” is something I do when I’m waiting for bread to rise—and I still have to punch it. Forgive me for paraphrasing Yoda, but I can practically hear him imitating my Jewish mother as I debated whether to divorce my cheating first husband, “there is no hope, dummy, there is only do.”
So what do we do now besides “hope?” I’m not sure. That’s why I came up with the idea of the website, the blogs, the billboards. I “hoped” you might know, so I turned my hope into an active verb. Consider this site a “Field of American Dreams,” with a hint of my mother’s common sense. “Build it, dummy and they will come.” In this moment of dewy political optimism, such a dour admission makes me sound like the Fox TV Anti-Christ, an outright miserablist and poster child for bad news—and I’m sorry, but from the hole we’re in, the sky still appears to be falling with the NASDAQ. Obviously, I’m not a pessimist or this site wouldn’t exist. However, unless our one great African-American hope is capable of stepping into a phone booth and flying out as a superhero, he could use some help. Please understand, I absolutely believe Barack Obama is the best man for the job. I adore the guy. However, some of the Republicans participating in this website don’t agree. No matter how you voted, a stack of troubling facts remain true: We’re all facing the worst economic meltdown since the depression, two wars and global warming--and in case you’ve been too busy texting to notice, there are only about three phone booths left in the entire country. Scant real estate for superheroes. And speaking of depression, statistics show there are more people in America on anti-depressants today than anytime in history. Nobody needs to be a mystic to understand why. Regardless of whom you voted for in the recent election, WE THE PEOPLE have just received a shot of Red Bull in the arm, an inoculation against cynicism. What we need now is a kick in the pants. All Hands on Deck, America! Welcome to, “BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE.”
Living in a state with only one area code has its advantages. The vast pastoral landscape with few inhabitants, forces a mind to wander independently in every direction. And like those astronauts who see the earth from space and then become Buddhists, the long distances between porch lights after dark has a galvanizing effect on how you view the populace. I lived in a large Northern California city for thirty years and met two neighbors who both moved away. I now live in a town of seventy-two people with no stoplight and one gas station. I know almost every person in town, as well as who successfully passed the last kidney stone. As a left-leaning, anti-war, vegetarian, humanitarian journalist, I follow “Smith and Wesson is my car insurance” bumper stickers to the city council meetings and vote with the other eleven Democrats in the entire county. But the rancher next door visited the first day I moved in and invited me for over to taste his wife’s prize apple pie (this really happened) And in eight years, between assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Myanmar, I’ve learned how to oil a tractor chain, castrate a bull and how, in a nasty blizzard, neighbors will sit at the end of their driveway with their pick-up headlights glaring so you can find your way home. In other words, I learned to speak Latin — the language of “E Pluribus Unum” –“Out of Many, One” Hence, my unlikely evolution into an Idahoan explains how the vision behind this joint vision of Republicans and Democrats came about.
This is not an advertisement for bucolic bliss idealized by a concrete refugee. We are entering the scratch and sniff period of Obama’s administration—a time history might one day refer to as the “Peace, Love and Foreclosure Era.” Unfortunately, I’m still waking up each morning in a cold sweat. Without a military-industrial-complex complex, without an Iraq angst to grind, a Cheney goat to scape, a David Letterman Top Ten List of Bush guffaws to brighten my condescending attitude—I feel unmoored. Everywhere I look, everything I read says, “HOPE” but nowhere in the largest lay-offs and deficit reports can I find an example of what “HOPE” means--except symbolically, in the election of one very human, very intelligent, African-American man.
Watching the inauguration, I’ll admit, I cried –but truthfully, the source of my tears was as much euphoria for future possibilities as it was just plain relief the last terrifying eight years were finally over. It’s like we Democrats have been chained in our seats during an endless Ibsen Play. Obviously, anybody who created the pistol-toting, housewife-gone-bad, Hedda Gabbler, spent way too many Decembers in Norway, where every day is a drizzly night and everybody’s crabby and your feet are always cold. So now that winter of our discontent is over, a new spring of Republican discontent will surely begin if something doesn’t change. Indeed, we are being asked to cut up our credit cards, participate in a kind of emotional layaway plan, promising better times if we delay gratification and suicide over our shrunken 401K. And I almost feel better, sitting back, feeling forgiven for my deep debt. The only problem is, just like the former eight years — I’m weary and wary. “Hope” is something I do when I’m waiting for bread to rise—and I still have to punch it. Forgive me for paraphrasing Yoda, but I can practically hear him imitating my Jewish mother as I debated whether to divorce my cheating first husband, “there is no hope, dummy, there is only do.”
So what do we do now besides “hope?” I’m not sure. That’s why I came up with the idea of the website, the blogs, the billboards. I “hoped” you might know, so I turned my hope into an active verb. Consider this site a “Field of American Dreams,” with a hint of my mother’s common sense. “Build it, dummy and they will come.” In this moment of dewy political optimism, such a dour admission makes me sound like the Fox TV Anti-Christ, an outright miserablist and poster child for bad news—and I’m sorry, but from the hole we’re in, the sky still appears to be falling with the NASDAQ. Obviously, I’m not a pessimist or this site wouldn’t exist. However, unless our one great African-American hope is capable of stepping into a phone booth and flying out as a superhero, he could use some help. Please understand, I absolutely believe Barack Obama is the best man for the job. I adore the guy. However, some of the Republicans participating in this website don’t agree. No matter how you voted, a stack of troubling facts remain true: We’re all facing the worst economic meltdown since the depression, two wars and global warming--and in case you’ve been too busy texting to notice, there are only about three phone booths left in the entire country. Scant real estate for superheroes. And speaking of depression, statistics show there are more people in America on anti-depressants today than anytime in history. Nobody needs to be a mystic to understand why. Regardless of whom you voted for in the recent election, WE THE PEOPLE have just received a shot of Red Bull in the arm, an inoculation against cynicism. What we need now is a kick in the pants. All Hands on Deck, America! Welcome to, “BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE.”
