dimanche 17 février 2008

Midnight in America...Waiting for the Other Shoe...And Considering Obama Among the Wreckage....





...This is the America of the lucky, folks...the luck of the Russian-Irish/Catholic-jew, where a girl from Brooklyn wakes up in a cottage in the woods to find that her young hens have decided to start laying...
How did I get here? Pure luck...hard work...kindness in the face of anger and dysfunction....but, probably really just sheer tenacity and luck...
It's that pie-in-the-sky America that is hard for me to understand; like the lottery and the forces of nature that decided not to flood my basement or throw a tree on my house...or what made me live through it all, and how did I get through all of these years.


And its the middle management America of getting by, but looking towards the sky for the other shoe falling, while others who I have, by some sort of divine intervention crossed paths and become close with, can barely buy food or go to the doctor as opposed to heat and electricity...and what that could possibly mean in the scheme of the richest country in the world, that made me look to John Edwards as a light in the proceedings that have been grinding forth for these long months...
And now? I'm waiting, like I always do, for the other shoe, whistling to earth like the road-runner's anvil, and in that Edwards will endorse Hillary, thus making my last drop of faith just a salty circle on the sand, proving that none of this is real or true, and all we can do is the busywork of trying to move, snail like, towards some outcome that will be a blip on future historical time lines of the rise and falls of empires just like this one...
If this is the pyramid stone that we are spending our entire lives dragging across the desert in order to complete some monument to the empire, then so be it...Who ever told any of us that we were any more special than anyone else? ...our brothers and sisters who are hungry around the world, or those who live in war torn countries looking heavenward for a bomb, much less a shoe?
Its all just luck...and we could be them, as easily as they could be us...and that "myfriends" is the very foundation of our society's more socialist tendency's, which are....surprise!...the very things that make us who we are!!

I know who I am. Who are you?

I'll just enjoy my eggs for now...enjoy my chickens...and try to figure what comes next.
Of whats left in this race, besides the coming heartbreak of thinking one thing and the dawning realization of another, I like the danger of Obama. Tell me that you are not sure of his experience and if he can get anything done, and I am interested....because the safety of the same old beer with a buddy at the bar is what got us into this place, and the only times that America has really shone in its founding ideals is when some brave people took a flying chance and let the chips fall where they would. Sometimes thats a life or death decision, and sometimes its folly, but it always has historical significance, and more importantly, those moments have had a real effect on we Americans , and how we view the evolution of our society. In fact, those people and those moments have been the shining moments of discovery, invention, and the words and actions that make us who we tell ourselves we are...or who we strive to be...a more perfect union, and kinder, more humane, beings.
When I was a young girl, I stood on a crowded curved street in Chinatown, holding my mom's hand, and watched as RFK Sr. drove through on the back of an old Cadillac convertible, waving. His brother had been shot, and he could've easily been shot there in the middle of the dense crowd, moving slowly past that old orthodox church with the tiny fair in the back complete with live goldfish to win and an erector-set sorta ferris wheel, knowing the danger and still grabbing hold of the moment to say the words that would be part of history....that would change my world as yellowing newspaper clips on the wall over Mom's old radio in the dark dining room in Brooklyn, where she sat for hours listening to talk radio in her grandmother's rocking chair.

So bring on the instability and unsureness of Obama over the same old Clintonian bureaucracy any day...bring it on quickly...because I've lost my faith in almost every part of this thing that I have been hanging on to and trying to believe in. And all thats anymore left is to tell myself that this piece of history is way to tiny for us to see the effect...way too tiny to matter in our lifetimes...and the real faith here has to be that what we do today will be realized by our children and their children...right?...and, that takes a kind of faith that I may spend the rest of my life trying to muster and I blindly move forward trying to divine whats right in this circumstance...as if we could ever imagine that what would be put forth would NOT be impeachment, criminal investigation, jail...a big change....Is there even a question? I don't know how to do anything else but watch and wait and chronicle this as best I can....

easy over or scrambled?

c/p RIPCoco

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