Democracy Anew

The women's revolution comes home

  * Feeling a kind of lift, actually a very big emotional lift, after last night's interchange which was not a debate and never will be when there is that frumpy contentious clueless incredibly stupid man on the podium.  That lift feels like the beginning of an emergence from the less-law generation, a political generation that began with the appointment I'm going to say, of Ronald Reagan the actor the ham actor, second rate actor, with the less-law Republicans reigning in their version of democracy which to them quite obviously means less law governing their narcissistic actions - a bunch of relatively clueless white males who rely on a cloistered and isolated bunch, including their wives to bolster them up and keep them going, looking quote respectable - a long crappy tradition of men using women in all kinds of bad ways that they try to make sound good. And all the equally clueless possibly emotionally crippled followers. What a sham. I'm through with all of it. Lived through all of it. 

 * Unfortunately for them and the rest of us, way too many women bought into their status as such, later to become more aware and less held in by all the so-called norms of the day. How the culture around you can rip and bind you so mercilessly, so comfortably, so cluelessly. Which is part of why we have that 40% or so of recalcitrant people living in a democracy that they benefit from all the time without acknowledging and being grateful for what they do have while improving it as we all can, without the rancor and without the drama. That's what the middle is for, and that is where I reside because I've been exposed to the other edges, particularly the lefty one in some great detail.

And yet a fair question is what would we be like, what would we do, could we do, on the subject of the left and right wings of the democratic eagle?

That is certainly where laws are needed to tone down the excess - and more basically - education for citizenship which covers quite a lot of ground, and definitely includes ongoing citizen education not just with every voting cycle but all the way through the lives that we share and live around and through. Corporate media are you listening, at all?  You so called reporters should have to be licensed and educated for what you are doing.

* And let us consider that basic education involves our ability to humanly express our humanity, the arts, the social sciences, music; these are resident in some way in every single human being and work wonderfully to bring us together in ways we might not ordinarily expect or even consider. 

* Shall we start looking at republicanism as an ism? I certainly am doing this along with millions of others. There is really nothing there to replace it and why replace it at all? Isms seem to always end up as traps becoming institutionalized and relatively unquestioned quite often until they have become unusable or seemingly unstoppable in a bad way. 

Is there some deeply ingrained reason for any ism at all to take hold? 

* Having just seen a sign on somebody's rear window that said Make America Grateful Again I am wondering what people are consciously grateful for … and does your political leaning affect what sorts of things give you gratitude? If it is excess, can you even define excess? If you are an insatiable user of people, things and resources maybe you cannot. And maybe you should set yourself aside for a long period or whatever it takes to do that honest assessment. Here I am wondering if quite a great many people know how honesty works and how it feels and whether it is present in any even moderate degree in yourselves. In my observations of however long I have seen a psychological underpinning to all of these questions and observations and that psychologists with any grain of truth in them have been looking at, despite the republican-esque clamp downs of the American Psychiatric Association to keep essential truths out of the public conversation, such as the obvious mental insufficiency of one of the present and very much older candidates for president. You APA people, if I were in a suing mood, would be answering to immense and grievous harm to the whole democratic system that must include essential information. Change your ways or disband, or change your rules in accordance with a contextual need, in accordance with fairness at the very least. Psychoanalyze yourselves for your protective excesses.  

* Looking at the fact of our system here being a republic, and run in a democratic way, as a generator of the party names, what can Republicans do to return or advance to better meanings and operating principles embodied in our original setup as we must, must! observe as a starting point only. The original founding fathers could not possibly have seen all the changes that come at us cyclically in the intervening 248 years. Get real Republicans. So everything that we now live in and with and through has got to be reinterpreted from a change perspective, because guess what, change is always happening. Educate for change as well as stability. That requires a definite inner blend of honesty with acquired knowledge, with lived experience, with forward-looking ways of our being a truly democratically run civilization, and as Gandhi in 1947 put it when asked what he thought of Western Civilization, said “It would be a good idea” and Ben Franklin wondered if we could keep it. 

Let's keep it.

Deep condolences to all survivors of 9/11/01. May we mind our own damn business for starters. Reform begins at home.