We have more than Iran and Bush to contend with. The ideas and principles we have at risk at this time in our nation’s history are many. When we were in an adversarial role with the Communist powers during the Cold War, it was incumbent upon the United States to always put their best face forward. We were in an ideological war of ideas and acts, a war of freedom over tyranny. To win the war, sometimes we had to lose some battles. We had to have a more open transparent type of government than our adversaries did. Over the long run, we won the Cold War, not because of our sheer military might which was extensive, but because the majority of the world saw us as preferable to government that worked in the shadows and sought to gain their peoples allegiance through fear rather than solidarity. Our role was deceptively simple, to take the moral high ground whenever possible, even if it meant losing a small engagement in a wider war.
We are at a different place, in a different time in our history. It is no longer one enemy or one ideology, it is many enemies with many ideologies. It is not enough to be better than one or two different nations, the world has asked us to back up what we preached for so many years. The world is asking us to prove that our way is the better way, that our principles and ideologies do indeed work in a complicated and violent world, that the planet won when the Cold War ended in our favor. As of this point in time, it doesn’t look as if it did. To date, The United States of America has done nothing to lead the world out of poverty and war, away from starvation and disease, only adding to all the problems that we as humans face on the globe. This is the result of 50 years of Cold War. If you believe that what we have today, at this time, is the best that human nature can provide, then I am so glad I am who I am. If you believe as I do however, that we can do better, that we can become the light of the world after temporarily losing our way, then we now must plan to form a loose political union that will put the Democrats on notice that the time for game playing is over. The time for business as usual was yesterday, that if you are not part of the solution, than you are part of the problem. The days of going along to get along were our father’s politics. This is the BRAVE NEW WORLD that Huxley talked about. We have choices, we have always had choices.
What choices we make however, are the choices we should be making of our own free will. We can’t hardly expect to listen to someone that has accepted 66%, fully 2/3 of her campaign contributions from Special Interests and Corporate PAC’s, to really vote against these interests in order to do the “peoples” will. It is against human nature. It all goes back to the money, all of the time, every time. This is the reason that we need to cover ourselves in a loose political organization that can bring people together to fight off the excesses we see in Washington DC on a daily basis. There are organizations that work outside of political parties that have power. Some of them however, take the position that there are only two real entities in the political world, the Democrats and the Republicans. If an organization such as MoveOn would threaten Democratic candidate with throwing their support to say a Green Party candidate if they didn’t change a position that was obviously wrong (say the support of the War in Iraq) , then think of the ramifications that would have instead of always taking the lessor of two evils. The trouble with almost all of these PAC’s is that they are controlled by a political party, and the hope of getting them to act in the interests of the people over those on politics is almost non-existent. They gain power by cultivating political favor, not by being gadflies. These organizations don’t realize that they are not part of the solution, but part of the problem.
