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I bring up an essay I’d written entitled “Priority Number One” at the risk of appearing shamelessly self-promotional. However, it still is an answer no one seems interested in pursuing. As it says in the essay, The Electoral College isn’t just about the presidential election. It sets the pace for the rest of the political system. The Electoral College doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the person the voters want to be president will be president. It does, however, help keep things within the two branches of The Corporacracy. Of course, throughout election night, we continuously hear “red” and “blue”, as if they’re the only colors of the spectrum. Map upon map on lamestream networks is splashed with red and blue. The lamestream media isn’t even finished with its report on the presidential race loser’s lame concession speech before it’s asking who the Democrats and who the Republicans are going to run four years hence. Millions of people have to march on Washington doing physical damage, maybe even “taking one for the team. We don’t need hundreds of people doing this while millions of people stay home and, when they see the news clips during breaks from “American Idol”, say, “What crazy jerks those people are. They’re so destructive.”As if it’s not destructive to destroy Iraq. As if it’s not destructive to destroy social programs that help people who didn’t make it to the Boards of Directors of Dow Chemical, Hewlett Packard, Monsanto, Panasonic, Sanyo, Mobile/Exxon, BP, etc., etc., etc., People spent time in jail during the Civil Rights movement in the sixties. People spent time in jail during the antiwar movement in the sixties. Four students were killed in 1970 at Kent State Universtity during an antiwar rally.We can’t get enough people to agree on what has to be done to stop the madness in 2007, but too many are still waiting for Congress, whose members are truly protected by The Electoral College, to do something heroic. “Write to your member of Congress, write to your member of Congress, write to your member of Congress”, the same old same old. No one writes to his or her member of Congress. They write to college kids doing co-op work for their college Political Science classes or doing intern work, hoping to catch the eye of the boss and move up in the field of politics. They’re learning how to seriously go one on one with lobbyists. All are trying to get gold stars and passing on our concerns to the untouchables that we hire isn’t necessarily the way to elbow past the others, stomping on their coworkers/competitors. Getting the people’s message to Ellen Tauscher or Barbara Boxer or Dennis Kucinich or any one of those phonies, left or right, isn’t going to get “staffers” a gold star. So where does the caring about the phone calls, letters and emails stop? When we write them, that’s when it stops.What will it take to remove the theatrics from our political system? It will take opening up the system to people who care and who have a realistic chance of winning. It will take opening up the debate to people who won’t give a damn about and won’t respond to elementary school like personal attacks. It will take people who will force the other “players” to talk about the issues and answer the question, “If we do it your way, how will America and it’s citizens succeed?” We can win. We can get our country back. Working within the system isn’t the way to do it. Let’s face it, those in the system aren’t even working within the system. Why the hell should we work within the system when, in reality, there is no more system, merely a delusion of one. As long as we're told to write to our members of Congress, we’ll be extras in the wonderful performance which they enact daily for the entertainment of themselves.Contact your member of Congress? What a joke.
Song sample for August, 2008 What The President Say from the cd War And Other Love Songs. Michael Bonanno is a published poet, essayist and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of his poetry can be found at The Poetry Corner at OpEdNews.He is an associate editor for OpEdNews. Bonanno is a political progressive, not a Democratic Party apologist. He believes it's government's job to help the needy and that leaving the people's well being to the so called "private sector" is social suicide.His CDs may be purchased at CD Baby.
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