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feel tired-- to depress you, demoralize you, disempower you, and--worst of all--disenfranchise you. The three D's of hijacked democracy.
It's a very clever sort of brainwashing. You can sit there arguing with your TV and making rude noises when Bush or Condi or Rummy, or one their ridiculous Bushite 'pod people' in Congress, come on. You know they're lying, posturing thieves and warmongers. You may even know that their power is illegitimate, that they've stolen three elections in a row, and even how they did it. But you will see no challenge to them there. You will see them treated with respect, while they lie through teeth. And you won't see any of your opinions or questions considered there--not on that TV station nor on any TV station. When you open the newspaper, all the "news" will be framed to support war and paranoia and theft by the rich. Maybe on the editorial page, you'll find an occasional column that addresses an issue of concern to you in a thoughtful way. Most of the content there is rightwing or extremely rightwing. You'll never see a socialist perspective there, and rarely anything on peace or justice. And the radio is even worse (with the exception of our wonderful AAR). Rightwing insanity.
You are an American progressive--a member of the overwhelming majority in this country that despises the Bush junta (65% to 70%), opposes torture "under any circumstances" (63%), opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, before the invasion (56%), and opposes it even more now (over 70%), that overwhelmingly opposes any U.S. involvement in a widened mideast war (84%!), and that in fact disagrees with the government on virtually all major policies, foreign and domestic, way up in the 60% to 70% range.
And yet you think rightwing 'christian' and political fundamentalism and fascism are on the rise in this country, don't you? You may even think that 'christian' wingers are now the "mainstream." You often feel alone and isolated in your progressive views. You feel hopeless about winning elections. You may think OTHER Americans have gone crazy. You poke the body politic and you find wingnuts, never thinking that you might be smelling them out, zeroing in on them, with some remark that sets them off, or some attitude or artifact (a political button, a haircut) that draws you to them or them to you. Then you cite them as an example of how bad things are: All your fellow Americans are "sheeple," are stupid, are uninformed, are uncaring. The "Nazi youth" are marching! Americans are sieg hieling to the Great Leader. It grips you with fear--for yourself, your children, your friends. You hear bigotry or brash ignorance from some random person--or maybe even one of your relatives--and can't win arguments against it. They're not interested in facts or reason. And you despair. It fits with everything on TV, everything in the newspapers, and almost everything on the radio. This ignorant, bigoted, Nazi person has taken over America.
And you get very, very tired. There is no way you can win against this. Nothing you do makes any difference.
And you turn on the TV, and there is Bush or Cheney, still lying and getting away with it, still killing people, torturing people, stealing all our money. You know it. But nobody else in the world seems to.
What you can't see is that it's all smoke and mirrors. The war profiteering corporate news monopolies, in cahoots with the Bush junta and other corporatists and warmongers, have convinced you that you are a member of a minority. You may realize that it's not true, intellectually (especially if you take a gander at opinion polls over the last several years). But they have convinced you EMOTIONALLY that this small rightwing bunch of nutcases, who have always been with us, and their multi-billionaire promoters, now represent prevailing opinion.
They FIDDLED their exit polls on election night, to MATCH the results of Diebold/ES&S's trade secret vote tabulation code--possibly the worst journalistic crime I've ever witnessed. But worse than this is what they have done to the great progressive American majority in our souls, in our hearts and emotions. They have broken our hearts. They have rendered us tired and depressed, seemingly helpless before an onslaught of unnecessary horror and criminal actions that boggle the mind.
Bush has been at about 35% in approval polls for over a year--starting at a meager 49% of the very day of his second inauguration (the lowest approval rating in history for a recently elected 2nd term president) and falling precipitously from there, with little or no bounce from ANYTHING he says or does. SIXTY-FIVE PERCENT of the American people CONSISTENTLY disapprove of him--and it gets up to a whopping 80% to 90% on some issues (mideast war, the deficit) and you feel oddly alone and out of sync with the rest of the country.
Maybe it's partly the Democratic Party leadership that makes you feel this way. They ACT LIKE a minority party. They should be kicking butt. They don't. They are mysteriously SILENT on Bushite corporations having taken over our election system, with TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, and virtually no audit/recount controls, in all the expensive, shiny, new, electronic, election theft machines. Their silence, ineffectiveness, collusion, corruption, and lack of focus on democratic principles and on our common progressive values adds to your fatigue. How can you fight the news monopolies, and the Bushites, and THEM, too? It's overwhelming. You try and try to influence things for the better. Things get worse.
Well, I think the answer to such fatigue is a self-assessment: How many hours do you spend letting them brainwash you? Of course you are resistant on facts. You know the facts. But how resistant are you to the IMPRESSION that rightwing fascism is on the rise? How are the subliminal messages getting to you? You never hear a radical view. You never hear a socialist view. You hardly ever even hear a liberal view. You never hear real advocates for peace. And you hear all of these things reviled and marginalized. Bush is God. War is God. And God is not on your side. God, too, has been hijacked.
And of course you hear not a word about election fraud--the most black-holed story of all. And the heart of the matter.
I would limit yourself to five minutes of this--or throw your TV away altogether. And get satellite for AAR. Really. And give up reading the NYT and subscribe to the Lonestar Iconoclast (great little leftist newspaper, in Crawford, Texas!). Unplug from the bad, and plug into something good and honest and true. Because if you are tired, as our once wonderful country faces the greatest crisis in its history, then there is something wrong with you. You should be full of fighting spirit. You should be strategizing and plotting their downfall. They've gotten to you--below the surface, in the unconscious. This rickety junta, with barely any support among the American people, and none in the rest of the world, has convinced you that you are powerless against them. It's not true! You are living in BushWorld. Get out of it! Prick the bubble!
And the other remedy is ACTION. Get on board the Absentee Ballot voting protest. Help other Americans see that there IS a way. Bust the machines--Vote Absentee! Flood election offices with paper ballots! MOUNTAINS of paper ballots. Force them to deal with it. Vote--but throw a monkey wrench into this rigged system at the same time. AB voting is already up to 50% in Los Angeles. Make it bigger. Push it nationwide. If everybody who despises Bush--70% of the American people--votes Absentee, we can bring this rigged election system down.
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