Five months to the day ...

So it has been 5 months to the day since I put up my last blog. Nearly half a year. I said before that I didn't think I was really cut out for this blogging thing. It was a pleasure though to go back and read my last blog. A couple of weeks ago I posted a note up on my Facebook wall. Granted it was a piece that I'd written almost 3 years ago that I'd come across while wading through the never ending paper deluge that follows me through life. It too, was a pleasure to read. I thought, you know not many people have seen this. Its good for a few sentimental tears. I should share it. To the best of my knowledge only my youngest daughter has seen it, or at least was the only one moved to comment on it. I know it's good when I read something that I wrote and it still brings a tear to my eye.

I guess I want the same response from my blog as I got from Bill Moody's eulogy or the letter I read at my eldest daughter's wedding. People came to me and shared their tears with me, letting me know that they could feel the love that I feel, that my words touched their hearts and minds.

I know that this blog reaches few readers. It's lack of regularity and iconoclastic focus no doubt don't help it to gain notoriety. I keep thinking that I need to communicate with more people. I know there have to be others out there that are as outraged and angry as I am. They're the people who I know I can reach because I've done it before.

I am like a lot of Americans, politics gives me the creeps. For the most part, I've thought politics doesn't seem to impact my life on a day to day basis. Yet, I am coming to realize that is not true. I've been paying attention to politics pretty intensely now for almost a year and a half. It started when I realized that in order to serve my community I had to actually involve myself in my community.

Initially, I did that by volunteering with my county democratic party organization. I found that I was not well suited to that degree of participation. I did not have the will to put up with bad behavior on the part of others. I wasn't willing to throw out my rationality or principles in the name of political expediency. On the other hand, I did find that at least some others thought I had some leadership skills and it has lead me to much more aware of just how much of my life is being impacted by politics in my country.

Unable to function in a political party environment effectively but knowing that I still needed to involve myself in my community, lead me to volunteer in an environment where I knew I would excel. I went back to elementary school! Finally, I was around folks that I could understand and provide some modicum of service to, first and second graders.

I expanded upon that by volunteering with a local community center providing socialization and recreational opportunities to special needs folks. A couple times a month, I take my collection of drums and other instruments to the center or a park and encourage these wonderful people to be loud and outrageous.

I was at a loss when school went out of session. Dropping from 12+ hours hanging with all those wonderful elementary types was tough. Fortunately, a Sun Dance at the end of June, provided me with a whole new opportunity to be of service. My wife and I traveled to near Dunseith, North Dakota.

There I had the great fortune to meet a fantastic community of people and to share a very spiritual five days supporting the Sun Dance. My experience as I slammed an ax into the tree that was to become "Lone Man" was awesome and lead to my commitment to fast with the dancers for the next four days. Due to health concerns, I did take water during the fast unlike my brothers and sisters who suffered without. It was an extraordinary few days.

Finally, arriving back home at the beginning of July, I was once again bereft of community engagement, aside from the couple of hours scheduled to work with the Max Higbee Center. Fortunately, my wife's desire to check out the Ferndale Farmer's market one Saturday lead to an encounter with a very energetic woman promoting the not too recently established Ferndale Community Resource Center (FCRC). A subsequent meeting lead to more meetings, so now I am engaged in helping to set up an Internet presence for the FCRC and donating some embroidery to its parent organization the Ferndale Community Service Cooperative (FCSC). There's been some talk of getting on the board's of one or both of these organizations.

The good news is that school starts in about 10 days. I've been told that I should contact the school in the middle of September after they have a better idea of their volunteer needs. Woohoo! Maybe I'll get to hang with Kindergartners along with the 1st and 2nd graders.

Still there is all this outrage and anger I am feeling. It stems from the very sick political machinations have and are being played out daily in our national politics. What Reagan, Bush I & II, Cheney and the Republican Party in particular have done to this county appalls me. The redistribution of wealth from the middle classes and poor to the obscenely wealthy, the disemboweling of the few legal protections we had by immoral, greedy corporate predators in the financial, energy, pharmaceutical, insurance and health care industries, to mention just some, truly sickens me.

The salaries, bonuses, and other rip offs that are being awarded to CEOs, CFOs, COOs and other management plutocrats in the corporate world is obscene, outrageous and without any valid justification. The good ole US of A is not the democracy that I loved. It is in fact a plutocracy or or tipping over into being one. Money talks and the people with all our money are the bankers who ripped us off big time with the financial crisis they created and it's the bail out; the health care industries, who feathered their beds to the tune of a thousand fold increase in their profits in the past 8 years alone; the oil barons who led us into a war in Iraq, lying to us all the way; the main stream media which is owned and controlled in-toto by corporate interests; and finally the lobbyist and bought and paid for politicians, who've facilitated this wholesale theft.

There is so much more beyond economics that we've lost in the past two generations. My parents were children of the depression. The social contract that FDR established with them, and Kennedy and Johnson extended is being torn apart by the people that Eisenhower warned us about.

I am outraged, angry and increasingly hopeless. Obama, today's great hope, appears to be selling us down the river, assisted by Rahm Emanual, the Blue Dogs, ConservaDems, the Republican Party and the obscene right wing media (Oh yeah it appears there is no real left wing media, unless you count the paltry few, The Nation, MSNBC, Air America, and PBS. Thank god for the left wing bloggers.) Fox News, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and others the right have successfully entrenched in talk radio.

Having vented I don't feel any better. All I know is that I am doing what I can now. I am trying to stay informed about what is going on in politics and I AM SHOUTING AS LOUD AS I CAN TO ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN.

"Get involved, express yourself, write, call your Senator, Congressman, President, local political leaders, your neighbors, anyone who will listen. Take back our country from the plutocrats and crazies."