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Doom and Gloom


Scott Brown, former Cosmo centerfold, is now the junior senator from Massachusetts, and more people should have seen this coming and took proper counter-measures, but like so much of what goes on in the lower 48 these days, the idea that the Republicans could have a credible chance to take Ted Kennedy’s still warm Senate seat never occurred to anyone.

Anyone but the people of Massachusetts.

After decades of Kennedy home rule, did no one stop to think that the people wanted change? And would take any change regardless of the form it took?

Brown is not change but for the fact that he isn’t a Democrat, and he effectively used the tools of fear-mongering and the idiot belief of the masses that tax cuts are the cure for everything.

Did you know that during WWII our parents and grandparents were taxed at rates that would make a Canadian gasp in horror? Say what you will about the seniors in the U.S. about their entitlement attitudes, but when the times were tough – they knew how to step up and sacrifice. Their children and grandchildren? Not so much. My peers on either side seem to think that entitlements are things that the lazy (and by lazy they really mean minorities) suck out of the paychecks of the hard-working, god-fearing middle class (why does everyone think they are middle-classed?) while ignoring the fact that tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare are the biggest entitlement programs going.

“We want big government out of our lives! That’s what the Founding Fathers intended!” is their rallying cry as they worship at the feet of Fox News.

But what they mean is “we want to keep our money because we are greedy, fat and need to be allowed to consume at obscene rates”.

They don’t seem to notice at all that the government is telling them where they can travel or whether they can use artificial means of birth control or how to raise their children or what they should think about their neighbors. As long as nothing stands between them and consumption, all is well with the world.

The world. People in the U.S. don’t notice at all that they are reviled by most of the world as glutinous god-freaks who have no concept of civil liberties or human rights and are a nation intent on forcing their anti-community ways on the world by force if necessary. They believe the rest of the world is being deluded by their governments while not realizing that people outside the U.S. have better access to news than they do. The media slants extreme right or extreme left, with the right being the loudest voice, in terms of news outlets in America. They are bombarded with agenda laden information masquerading as news all day long.

It’s depressing, as my friend Sarah commented on my Facebook feed. And I agree. I don’t know how intelligent people down there face the day knowing that each day is bringing a country, that they are essentially trapped in by accident of birth, to ruin.

Scott Brown will head to The Hill and help destroy the only hope millions of uninsured have. There won’t be health care reform in the U.S. and I want to be surprised, but I am not. Most of the adult population in my native land are narrow-minded bigots, and I should cut them some slack because they were raised to be the way they are. I taught public school long enough to know that most people are just too intellectually limited to fight the indoctrination.

When they write about yesterday’s election from a more rational point of view – decades from now – it will be seen as a watershed moment in the decline of a once great idea of democracy as the foundation for a nation.

#fridayflash – Birdsong


the berry picker by kym gouchie

Filling the basket required a consciousness most neglected in Bird’s opinion. Inattention spoiled the berries by degrees, tainted their potency. Plinth berries spoke ,to those who listened, but young ones now skimmed surfaces and denied whispering existence.  Bird knew sentience flooded the world with a rumbling force that rivaled the periodic tipping and tossing of the foothills her flock called home. She sighed. Caught in a world of rock and scrub, the Pilnth stood out and Bird, who stood out too, appreciated the companionship.

Counting mattered too. Baskets filled differently each time. Bushels changed with seasons. Light and water altered the berries heft, texture and hue. Dark winter rubies became airy rosettes with the first solstice before summer warmed and deepened them for the early autumn harvest.

Squatting in the traditional pose, Bird hummed a counterpoint to her companion’s joyous warbles. Tense when she began, the melody melted her, seeping down to her marrow like the poultice she’s prepared and administered to the trees root system. She rocked on her heel in time with the swaying branches.

Few Plinth’s spotted the mountainside. Traditionally seedlings harvested in late spring were replanted for daughters hatched the previous year. Out of favor for many season’s, Bird’s was among a handful left, and aside from Letty’s, Bird tended them all, but hers was the only one that sang. The others silenced by disinterest, disbelief or death. To Bird, it was all the same.

Haiti was a Tragedy Already


And where were you? Certainly not glued to cable news or Tweeting/retweeting links to organizations looking for donations to aid the Haitians now that an earthquake has heaped insult on the misery of their lives.

In spite of his idiocy, the most soulless Rev. Pat Robertson, a great number of Americans will watch the drama du jour in Port-au-Prince via Fox News, or whatever channel their political ideology requires they watch, feel terrible. Because even if they are unemployed and technically squatting in their yet to be foreclosed homes, they have a sense of “there but for the grace of God, go I” and “at least I am being allowed to squat in comfort, because my bank is too afraid of economic collapse to evict me, and not living in a shanty shack on a mud hill”. Except for those things, they will be could be one of those poor wretches someday.

And they could. Remember Katrina? The Superdome? Thousands of soon to be abandoned strip malls have the names of the homeless of tomorrow written all over their walls.

So the privileged (like Will and Jada Smith who are bravely auctioning off some personal art) and the not so much anymore (who never owned art anyway)  will dig not too deep really or deeper than they probably should to send money via the growing number of aid efforts to line the pockets of the incredibly corrupt Haitian government, who might let a bit of this lottery booty trickle down á la Reaganomics to the crushed and dying in the mud-they-used-to-eat Haitian earthquake victims.

And I know how cynical I sound.

But Haiti was a hell-hole where people were so hungry they ate mud. The hills around Port-au-Prince were stripped to build shanty towns which promoted a topsoil erosion that literally has left a brown ring around the island that probably shows up on Google Earth. The government is corrupt and lest we forget, the Haitians are the ones piling into leaky boats and making the dangerous trek for the U.S. coastline back in the 90’s.

If there’d been no earthquake the other day, Haitians would be filling the empty tummies of their toddlers with mud today while Americans got fatter on fast food all the while totally oblivious to the Haitian plight.

And I am not against helping out a neighboring country in its time of need. We should do all that we can. My late father, for example, sent money every year to a Catholic church in Haiti and left instructions in his will for a final donation from his estate. Haitians deserved help before despite Pat Robertson’s misinformation about them having made a pact with the devil* and if they’d just embrace Christianity they could be as enslaved to tourism as their Dominican Republic neighbors.

I just find it sad, and telling, that we can ignore suffering that isn’t catastrophe based. Americans do love their drama. And a good disaster is better than watching the first rounds of American Idol, which I am assured are too boring to bother with.

This is sweeping generalization, of course. Like my father, there are people who care enough to help even when the in crowd isn’t paying attention.

*Which is Assembly of God-speak for being Catholic as 80% of Haitians are.