End of the year

Last year at this time I was busily preparing a list of top stories for the year 2003. This year I'll let Project Censored do the heavy lifting.

The year 2004 will be remembered for the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Everything else seems trivial.

My sons and I have been preparing a quilt commemorating the years 2003 and 2004. We are adding buttons or beads marking large earthquakes and active volcanoes to a cloth map of the world. [We use larger beads for earthquakes over 7 on the Richter scale--I don't know what we will use for 9. Tim has an idea for marking concentric circles around the Sumatra epicenter to show the tsunami.] I will embroider major hurricane and cyclone paths on their proper places. I am not sure how we will mark wars and incidents of terrorism. We also need a special marker for the space shuttle that fell from the sky early in 2003. I need special markers for 'velvet revolutions' in Georgia and the Ukraine, too. I thought the election in the United States was going to be a big event worthy of a marker--instead, I found out how much work we have to do still. Politics in this country has been so 'dumbed down' that I fear fascism is just around the corner--a red, white, and blue pseudo-fascism [links to David Niewert's 7 part series 'The Rise of Pseudo Fascism,' my nominee for the best blog series for 2004]

When I received a phone call from the Kerry campaign before the primary in Oklahoma, I was impressed by how competent it was. I couldn't have been more wrong. By stressing the Vietnam War 'heroics' and then not successfully countering the Swift Boat Liars, Kerry doomed his campaign. Kerry's strengths--his role uncovering the Iran-contra drug connection and the shady BCCI terror financing network--were ignored in favor of a tepid 'anybody but Bush' message that didn't convince anybody in the undecided, apathetic middle. After I signed up with the Kerry campaign, all I received from them were solicitations for donations. Admittedly, Oklahoma was not a battleground state, but was there nothing to do locally? One 'progressive' Democratic group in Oklahoma that I flirted with focused on homosexual rights and Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 911. Boy, that's the way to win votes here! For more on the incompetence of the Kerry campaign, read 'It's the incompetence, stupid' by James Verini at Salon.com [subscribe or watch an ad] Here is an excerpt:

Most of the Kerry supporters I met on the campaign trail, meanwhile, were really just Bush-haters. The lack of knowledge or even curiosity about Kerry, his career and his proposals, was astonishing. Almost no one working alongside me had the slightest inkling of Kerry's policy initiatives (clearly laid out on his Web site). No one knew what he'd done in the Senate. Many volunteers, even some paid staffers, didn't know how long he'd been a senator. In the Bush offices I visited, posters of the president and vice president were plastered all over the walls, as were posters of Ronald Reagan (strangely, or maybe not so strangely, in one office the Reagan posters outnumbered the Bush posters). But in the four Kerry-Edwards offices there was not so much as a snapshot of either man on public display.

[snip]

The precinct captains, whose job it was to decide which precincts to target, and to divvy those precincts up and shuttle canvassers to them, were for the most part poorly paid kids in their early 20s, just out of high school or still in college. They, too, seemed to have only the vaguest idea of who Kerry was or why they working for him, outside of a nameless dread of the future. They were committed but left largely unguided and, it appeared to me, uninspired by their superiors, and they had none of the unshakable confidence I saw among the Bush team. The result was that they goofed off a lot. And who could blame them? After spending half the night putting together address lists, they were met the next morning by bands of mostly untrained, uninformed canvassers.

No one bothered to brief the ground troops on how to be persuasive or to even get sufficient fact-sheets into their hands. And they didn't take it upon themselves to get educated. I routinely toured neighborhoods with canvassers who were struck dumb when a door opened and an undecided voter asked for specifics.

"But what does Kerry want to do about unemployment, exactly?"

"Um, ah, um..."

"How many people have lost their jobs in the last four years?"

"Ah, um, oh..."

Of course, there were answers to those questions. Kerry proposed tax credits for new jobs created by manufacturers. He wanted to introduce Buy American guidelines in the defense industry and penalize American companies outsourcing jobs overseas. Bush oversaw the loss of about 1.2 million private-sector jobs and allowed 4 million Americans to descend below the poverty line. These facts, which took about two minutes to find out, had the power to sway undecided voters -- I know, because I swayed many with them.

Perplexed, I approached a volunteer coordinator and expressed my concern. The party doesn't have the time or money to train callers or canvassers, is what I was told. But this clearly wasn't true. This particular office was awash in paid staffers who seemed to have nothing to do.

I admit that I was a lot like the campaign staffers described in the article:

No one could imagine a Bush win. The prospect was unthinkable. How could America reelect him? It couldn't. So it would elect Kerry. It must.

For a slightly different perspective, Howard Zinn asks liberals/progressives to 'Harness That Anger:'

What to do now? Harness those fierce emotions reacting to the election. In that anger, disappointment, grieving frustration there is enormous combustible energy, which, if mobilized, could reinvigorate an anti-war movement that had been slowed by the all-consuming election campaign.

It is in the nature of election campaigns to siphon off the vitality of people imbued with a heartfelt cause, dilute that cause, and pour it into the dubious endeavor to propel one somewhat better candidate into office. But with the election over, there is no more need to hold back, to do as too many well-meaning people did, which was to follow uncritically in the footsteps of a candidate who dodged and squirmed on almost every major issue.

Freed from the sordid confines of our undemocratic political process, we can now turn all our energies to do what is discouraged by the voting system--to speak boldly and clearly about what must be done to turn our country around.

And let's not worry about offending that 22 percent of the country (we don't know the exact number but it is certainly a minority) who are religious and political fundamentalists, who invoke God in the service of mass murder and imperial conquest, who ignore the Biblical injunctions to love one's neighbor, to beat swords into plowshares, to care for the poor and downtrodden.

Most Americans do not want war.

Most want the wealth of this country to be used for human needs-health, work, schools, children, decent housing, a clean environment--rather than for billion dollar nuclear submarines and four billion dollar aircraft carriers.

They can be deflected from their most human beliefs by a barrage of government propaganda, dutifully repeated by television and talk radio and the major newspapers. But this is a temporary phenomenon, and as people begin to sense what is happening, their natural instinct for empathy with other human beings emerges.

My resolution for 2005: I resolve to not let cobwebs accumulate at Ghost Town Orange in 2005. I must speak boldly and clearly about what needs to be done to turn our nation around. I am not as cheerful as Mr. Zinn about the 'natural instinct' of people for others, but we still must do what we can.

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)