This country trades in illusions of efficacy. My friend's father used to burn boots in his fireplace. He said he'd done some research on global warming, thought it was on balance a good thing (never liked San Francisco much anyhow) and wanted to do his bit to help it along. I have my own temptations to take elderly Republicans drinking on election day.
But let's hold on to something. The choice the country faces this election, and the tight race, reflect features of our country's character that are, to put it mildly, damn spooky. Whoever wins, huge amounts of good stuff are going to be lost. That's a big trend, impossible to buck. We all have some responsibility to oppose idiocy in the manner of Bullwinkle the Moose facing the buffalo stampede, holding up five fear crazed fingers and saying 'Whoa." But that responsibility is tiny compared to the responsibility we have to work in those corners of the world in which we may actually preserve, protect, and change something. Some of us have a link somehow to real originality, to folks whose generative capacities are fully alive. We must protect these people. Any reconstruction of the world depends on them. Some of us have in our care one of the great traditions of humane thought and action: philosophic conversation, meditation, pottery, storytelling, romantic love. We must grow that out, as we grow out the seeds of forgotten species. These are resources we will need for reconstruction, and we cannot invent them from scratch.
So: everybody vote, and then go home and make something or think something or call somebody.
Posted by shea0017 at October 29, 2004 12:52 PM