A BETTER LIFE IS POSSIBLE
It is election day in the United States. My wife has something to say:
GUEST BLOG FROM GERRI JARDINE:
TODAY is either the day hope reigns or the start of the revolution. In a mere three years we have become a nation of extremes and extremists. Many of us sit dazed in disbelief that, rather than spend the years evolving, we have spent them countering fundamentalism and war and fabricated fear. Alert levels go up and down, as if on a whim, and we still don't know what to fear, or whom. Some of us have contingency plans to resort to in the face of re-election. Others stockpile duct tape and hunker before the latest poll. Will we all plead for the implant in another four years or will we carve a real democracy from the rubble of our conviction?
So many things conspire to blind the constituency, to keep them coming back: the fear of anything new; ample goods and a comfortable chair; easy money or the illusion of it; greed and the incessant want produced by the choir of commercialism blaring from the ever swelling screens, even when most of us have enough, enough; want of blood in the form of scape-goatism because our big screens and big cars and big bellies make us feel insignificant, impotent and numb faced with so much canned beauty, so much false bravado, or at least the loudness of Springerism, that masks the monologue playing in our restive heads that tells us, if we would only listen, if we could only hear, "Life can be better than this! Life can be good."
Gerri Jardine is a poet who makes wonderful soup.
Email her at: yogadakota@yahoo.com
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