On complacency

[Wildewolfe]

Tuesday we move into a new era. Hope dawns for many that some things may in fact change.

For all of my adult life I’ve watched American’s slowly lulled into the complacency and dream state that finally resulted in the nightmare of the last 8 years. At the same time we very slowly take baby steps in social consciousness with every gain in rights or acceptance matched by a half step backwards. It’s easy, when you are fully enfranchised, when you have full legal rights to say to your not so lucky friends here “but look how far you’ve come” and “it’s getting better” or worse yet “it’s not the right time”. It’s much harder some times to step up with them and “rock the boat” now when we stand on the beginning of a hoped for legacy of new social progress.

Our entertainment matches our progress or lack of it at times. I’ve seen quotes the last few days of its “just entertainment”. The show of course was 24. Most of the folks here have no qualms about calling for the heads of the outgoing administration for the use of torture. How many will sit on the edge of their seat to watch simulated torture for entertainment value and it’s “just” application. We talk about the RW media all the time and mostly we talk about the news. But over the last 40 years the entertainment has made us so desensitized to violence and torture and brutality that now it’s a spectator sport and when the RW press calls it enhanced interrogation methods the vast majority of the population doesn’t even blink. After all Jack Bauer did it first. Just entertainment. So much so that when we went to war, the embedding of reporters and controlled news flow coming out of the theatre brought news as entertainment to all time ratings highs and launched the Fox news network to pseudo legitimacy.

Not all entertainment used the same topic for titillation though. Battlestar Galactica put the same content up for all to see in brutal shocking manner but it did it to make you think and to make you uncomfortable. Some got the message. Some just glazed over a little bit more.

We’re lulled daily by news reports that cater to ratings and not truth. To profits and not values. We vote daily with our pocketbooks and our ratings to support the very things we oppose. Why? For the same reason, we’ve as a people been lulled, cheated, stolen from, abused, walked on, had our rights taken from us, been denied rights that should be no brainers, for so long that it’s the status quo. We’re used to it.

We’re besieged by daily reports of financial collapse, of brutal wars and police actions in far away places. Of murders that happen someplace else to someone you don’t know. All by a smiling anchor presenting it spoon-fed on a repeating loop. Just enough to numb you to all of it, and not enough to trigger the fury and anger that the real reporting of those events should elicit.

Along comes a man named Barrack Obama. He promises change. He wants to hear from us. He wants to listen to dissent to hear the various points of view. It’s controversial. It’s revolutionary. It’s scary. It’s exactly what DU was destined to become, a voice or voices of that change. I’ve marveled over the last few years on the eloquence on which those here can speak on any number of topics and the passion with which the thousands of users here respond and speak their minds, DU a poll, get involved in this or that cause to support the truly good things that our country represents. The folks here by and large are not the complacent lulled uninvolved man on the street. There are folks here that care.

But then something seemed to happen. We won. Wow. The permanent republican majority is (hopefully) a thing of a nightmare past. There’s a new sheriff in town and things are gonna change! One thing did seem to change. There’s a bit more complacency now. Wait and see. Don’t bother the man. He has a plan. It’s political suicide to do .

This is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing, what our PE wants us to be doing and what we have to be doing to reverse the course of the tragedies of the past so many years.

I expect great things of President Obama don’t get me wrong. I expect some compromises I won’t like too and some honking flat-ass mistakes that will leave me scratching my head going WTF?

Where does that leave us? The exact same place we would be as if McSame had won. We need to be vocal in our support, demonstrative in our disagreements, and always always always we MUST MAKE OURSELVES HEARD.

When he makes a choice that minimizes one of us we must speak up about that choice and say This is Wrong!

When he makes a choice that supports the constitution and brings back the rule of law we must equally speak up and say This is Right!

There has never been a more important time for DU than right now as we move into a new age. For the last 8 years we got to bitch, moan, piss and complain and for the most part it made us just feel good about ourselves. It did nothing to change the Bush administration policies. Now your voice means something. Now you, the ones of America that have been actually awake and not lulled, get to speak up and be listened to. Might not always get what you want, no one ever does and politics always has the damnable compromise in it, but now more than ever before in it’s history, your voice and activism will matter.

Don’t go silent because we won. Don’t tell others to sit and wait. Help them with their message as well, don't just agree and do nothing. Be active and let our new President know how we think, how we feel on the issues. I assure you the other side will swamp him with praise and derision depending on the circumstance. The battle for our country Started with the election of President Obama, it didn’t end there.