(and another thing)

as the late, great elvis presley once sang, "a little less conversation, a little more action please."

something's brewing--i feel like we're hitting a perfect storm / critical mass with many significant things falling into place; who is it that sings "a change is gonna come"?

well, i haven't gotten it together enough to lay it all out quite yet...suffice it to say my largest aggravation as of late would be talking talking talking, but nothing happening. there is no excuse for apathy, inaction, etc., if you really believe what it is that you say.

here's something else, a letter printed in this week's new york times magazine.

If the national news media have served to "contain" the outright lies served up by this administration, to package them in such a way as to make them seem within the parameters of acceptable political discourse, haven't satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, however inspired, also served to contain our outrage at this process by packaging our potential for anger in exquisitely written and produced comedy?
Parallels with the Roman Empire are instructive: I wonder if something similar happened when Roman citizens, unable to act meaningfully against the original fascists, resorted to honing their wits rather than their weapons?
Daniel Shannon, Syracuse

1. i wish i had written the letter.
2. this explains why fox will air the family guy, the simpsons, and south park reruns but will still be in the pocket of bush co. it's like the gypsies in 1984, or the virtual boxing matches in the movie the island: if you focus anger and aggression somewhere else, as a diversion, rather than allowing us to focus on the source of the anger--well, it goes away. note that fox isn't airing any of michael moore's movies, or the fog of war, etc. no one is.
3. this also explains why approval for the war in iraq is far below 50 percent (i believe i last heard 27 percent) yet there is no tangible visual extension of this. the american public doesn't approve of the war, the death toll (on both "sides") grows higher each day, and yet there is no outrage. shouldn't we be angry?

i'm angry. i'm sick with it. last week my sister attended the funeral of a 23 year old woman who served alongside my brother-in-law, brent. she was newly married. she was beautiful. she was killed in iraq when a suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into her humvee; it impacted at her door.

i cannot wait to act until i am at a funeral for someone i love. this is the critical mass instant. this is the moment, like in chemistry, where we have reached the supersaturation point, and all the particles are falling out of solution. i'm not the only one, i know this. but where is everyone else? why are we all ruminating the beauty of bob dylan's new album but forgetting that he also wrote "masters of war"? neil young wanted to know where the protesters have gone, why, if this country isn't behind the war, we aren't speaking out against it. why are the college campuses silent? why do we pretend this isn't happening? one explanation is above.

listen: my friends rachel and jeff were in palestine this summer. you know, we hear all the time that after a suicide attack in israel, the citizens/gov't clean up and rebuild immediately. like it never happened. and it's not a "don't let the terrorists win" thing, really; rachel told me that everyone in israel continues their lives each day as though nothing is unusual, as though the government isn't bombing the gaza strip, etc etc...and i don't want that to be us.

i don't want us to be complacent, to give our approval to this madness by simply being too busy or too apathetic or too jaded to voice our disapproval. really, the parallels to germany before the rise of the nazis is terrifying. what's the adage, that the horror of the nazis was made possible by everyday people like you and i who sat and did nothing?

we are sitting. we are doing nothing.

maybe it's hard to look at the horrors of the world and really take it in, allow it all to be real. when i look at my sister, my brother in law, it is difficult for me to reconcile the person who was in a war (is in a war), to imagine what they did or what they are doing, and still see them sitting on the carpet playing puzzles with my daughter, or changing their own children's diapers. but it is all real. it is more real for the soldiers and the iraqi civilians than we can ever fully understand, but that's no excuse for not trying.

i can't be complicit. i can't allow it to continue. i can't allow people to sit and watch.