There's a bird chirping outside my window this Monday morning, New Year's Day 2007. He is chirping a sweet unencumbered song, happy to have survived the deluge of fireworks that exploded all over the neighborhood last night. Sweetly unencumbered, not aware, of the malaise of hate and division, killings and wars being spread on this planet by the United States very own son of Bush.
Sweet bird chirping so innocently, not aware that he could be the next victim of this Bush world just because global warming might wipe away his tree to rest on, or the food he eats, or the luscious green of the landscape from which he draws his straw to make his bed for his children to come.
There is a bird chirping outside my window, so innocently unaware that Bush is a butcher, a barbarian, a man pathetically void of compassion or empathy for any sort of life that he might just well take a rifle and hunt down a bird or two just for the sake of hunting, just to sow or show his prowess ... just like the propagandistic prowess he likes to flatulently flaunt when diarrhea comes spilling out of his mouth: "terror, terrorist, killer, killings, hunting, hunter, hunted ..."
There is a bird chirping a sweet song outside my window-my window and yard beneath it filled with the early morning mist of life and the promise of a New Year into which we carry the baggage of the Bush maladministration and the Bush Crime Family.
I wish I could feel as unencumbered as the sweet innocent bird singing outside my window at the start of this New Year. I don't. I already feel dragged down by the weight of unfinished baggage, the enormity of all which has to be righted by a democratic congress which promises to do much but does not have the spine to confront Bush, or his Crime Family, or speak truth to power. I feel dragged down by a congress which seems to be emulating Gerald Ford's silence not only over Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq, but over Bush's dismantling of our constitution, his creationism of a spy system to spy on Americans, his fear mongering and fear planting, his upper hand.
I feel just about an almost certain hopelessness in a congress which buys into the Bush fear planting and lets him goad them into the incredible position of, "you are with us or you are with the terrorists" ... a bullying he may have learned when he told his father something about going, "mano a mano" over some differences of opinion between the two of them regarding Bush's drinking and/or higher education prospects or projects.
There is a lull. A certain empty hole, a something that brings no anodyne to mind when I think about how the propaganda media, the empty talking heads, are sweeping 2007 under the rug and fast forwarding the year to the end of 2008 when a new president is supposed to be elected. And yet, has the propaganda media been paying attention? It is Paul Levy who has said, "Bush has no intention of voluntarily leaving Iraq." Does anyone believe he has any intention of vacating the oval office?
The Bushes want power. They want power so bad they are willing to send 3,000 young men and women to their death without batting and eyelash. They are also willing to hang Saddam Hussein for crimes in which Hussein was their paid for accomplice. They want power so bad that the elder Bush has said that if Hillary runs he will beat the hell out of her if she runs.
There is so much to be settled in 2007 and to be made clear and yet, so many are already sweeping it under the rug. Treating it as an inconvenient comma, an inconvenient parenthesis wedged between 2006-a year for which we Americans have much to atone for-and 2008, a year of good expectations but only if we play our cards right.
I, unlike the bird chirping outside my window, start the new 2007 year, not with hope, but with a question in my heart.
Why is the propaganda media, and why are the talking heads, hiding 2007 away, locking it in some dungeon, away from light and away from life?
Teresa Simon-Noble is a computer activist for peace. She is a former mental health clinician. A poet and a freelance writer. Her work has been published in several online publications.
