Mired in Mediocrity
I guess it’s because, I am becoming more and more pessimistic and disenfranchised. It’s not that I don’t still believe in the power of the people, and the spirit of revolution, but as I watched all the trite exchanges of people on the streets today, I realized that this country is mired in mediocrity.
As bad as I, and many others, like to make Bush out to be, he really isn’t that bad. Not bad enough to get people out into the streets, not in the hundreds, but in the hundreds of thousands. And the same with Clinton before him. As crazy of a liberal as the Rush Limbaugh’s painted him, he didn’t raise taxes to 80% so that all those deadbeat welfare recipients could dine on sushi every night. And Bush isn’t abolishing legalized abortion, while hacking every federal program so that the money can be spent on oil exploration.
Clinton was a little left of center and Bush a little right of it and neither far enough off to really rile the masses. And while this is good for stability, I am not convinced that it actually brings us any closer to being anything great either.
When was the last time that people were really excited with what was going on in this country. Where are the ticker-tape parades of yesteryear? Now all we have are 500-1000 people standing and chanting at cars, only because the president is in town. All for what? The following is the longest mention of the protests that I could find.
Oddly, Mr. Bush faced war protests in Utah, where he took 71 percent of the vote in his 2004 re-election race, making it the reddest of Republican-red states. But Salt Lake’s mayor, Ross C. Anderson, a Democrat, organized a protest in a park near the V.F.W. convention, calling on people who oppose Mr. Bush’s Iraq and environmental policies to gather around him.
Mr. Anderson, in an interview on CNN, called the president’s policy in Iraq “just a disaster” and said that the war there – begun in a quest for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist – had “created more enemies” for the United States.
Television images of the Salt Lake City protest showed a quiet, orderly protest. The Associated Press estimated the turnout at 400 or 500. A spokesman for Gold Star Mothers said the turnout was closer to 1,000.
Bush Tells Veterans That Iraq Policy Will Make U.S. Safer
by David Stout of the New York Times
As much as I admire Rocky Anderson, especially for having the audacity to explicity call on the activists of this city, in such a red state, to get out and protest, I don’t feel like it can achieve anything. Sure, in a couple of years, people will fight bitterly to install someone less right that Bush, and they might succeed, but will that really change our course at all?
I realized today, as I mulled over the possibilities of eggs and molatav cocktails, that just like a few hundred people standing on a corner, waving signs and preaching to the choir, doesn’t make a revolution, nor does a riot. What does make a revolution is radicals. Lets accelerate this ship of state. Get off of the sandbar and kick in the horsepower. Sure, we’ll hit some big waves and some unwanted ones for sure, but at least we can stop staring at that damn boring marsh over there and possibly discover uncharted waters, new lands … greatness once again.
