Arise ye pris'ners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world's in birth!
No more tradition's chains shall bind us
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall;
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We have been naught we shall be all.
Refrain:
'Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The International Union
shall be the human race.
lyrics from The International
It's times like this that give a girl pause. The financial world is going glug, glug, glug and many of us saw this coming years ago, as the natural result of snaky trades and buy-ins. The problem was, no one was taking our phone calls, reading our letters, or our emails.
I can forgive the Current Occupant a lot, but I have a hard time forgiving him for hitting my country head on, then racing off, leaving it bleeding in the road, tire tracks across its broken back. It'll be a long time coming before I write that one off.
When my family first came to Washington DC, my father needed a job. So, before we went to the apartment we had rented, we pulled up by the curb next to the senate office building, and went in to see our congressman. We didn't have an appointment but the senator was in and seemed glad to see us. That's about all I remember, except that we did it. "Why not?" my father asked later. "I was his constituent. Who else would I go see?" Every week, my father and grandfather both wrote their congressmen, chiding them about certain bills, patting them on their backs about others. And every afternoon, you could see Harry Truman taking a quick stroll on the sidewalk around the White House, snapping off answers to reporters as he breezed along. I can go on, I suppose, and tell you about the hours I spent sitting in the visitors' area in the senate chambers, eating in the senate cafeteria. I could tell you how Linda, LBJ's daughter, let us park our car in her garage when we were garageless, or how my little sister spent a happy afternoon in Hubert Humphrey's office and had his full attention. Back then, the government seemed as near to me as the cat snoozing on my desk now.
I haven't felt the government was mine for a long, long time, not the way I used to. And although I thought Clinton was an improvement over Daddy Bush, I never thought he was part of my government. My government no longer exists, and hasn't for a while. I don't know when it got spirited away, when it became separate and apart from all our lives. When it was no longer responsible to us, for us. It's gone now, shattered and scattered like blown cherry blossoms on The Mall, and while some of us care, the rest, it seems, prefer to be governed by a faceless entity...preferably an entity with prerecorded messages and some entertainment value during election years.
But it no longer matters what any of us want. We're all in deep weeds now, and I'm not sure where we go from here.
And I'm pretty sure no one else knows either.
I can forgive the Current Occupant a lot, but I have a hard time forgiving him for hitting my country head on, then racing off, leaving it bleeding in the road, tire tracks across its broken back. It'll be a long time coming before I write that one off.
When my family first came to Washington DC, my father needed a job. So, before we went to the apartment we had rented, we pulled up by the curb next to the senate office building, and went in to see our congressman. We didn't have an appointment but the senator was in and seemed glad to see us. That's about all I remember, except that we did it. "Why not?" my father asked later. "I was his constituent. Who else would I go see?" Every week, my father and grandfather both wrote their congressmen, chiding them about certain bills, patting them on their backs about others. And every afternoon, you could see Harry Truman taking a quick stroll on the sidewalk around the White House, snapping off answers to reporters as he breezed along. I can go on, I suppose, and tell you about the hours I spent sitting in the visitors' area in the senate chambers, eating in the senate cafeteria. I could tell you how Linda, LBJ's daughter, let us park our car in her garage when we were garageless, or how my little sister spent a happy afternoon in Hubert Humphrey's office and had his full attention. Back then, the government seemed as near to me as the cat snoozing on my desk now.
I haven't felt the government was mine for a long, long time, not the way I used to. And although I thought Clinton was an improvement over Daddy Bush, I never thought he was part of my government. My government no longer exists, and hasn't for a while. I don't know when it got spirited away, when it became separate and apart from all our lives. When it was no longer responsible to us, for us. It's gone now, shattered and scattered like blown cherry blossoms on The Mall, and while some of us care, the rest, it seems, prefer to be governed by a faceless entity...preferably an entity with prerecorded messages and some entertainment value during election years.
But it no longer matters what any of us want. We're all in deep weeds now, and I'm not sure where we go from here.
And I'm pretty sure no one else knows either.
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