My great friend, Dylan, wrote a brilliant Facebook note about the problems the United States of America faces in the near future. He, like I, hopes our nation may begin to tackle them in the 2008 Presidential election. He thoroughly summarizes the travesties of the Bush Administration and finishes with ideas about Register for Change.
With his permission, I repost his Facebook note below.
I have never been so politically pleased or confident in my generation’s political destiny as I am now in anticipation for our group to conduct ‘Register for Change.’
“Register for Change, Rally for Hope, Learn about Obama,” will be a voter registration drive and Consciousness raising event in support of Barack Obama. Simply witnessing my town’s youth participating in this election has brought back the Hope which I lost after the 2000 election.
That fateful year marked seven subsequent years of distrust, anger, pain and shame. There were moments when I was brought to tears watching my nation fall upon its sword while the meanings of words like patriotism, ‘americanism’ and the like were defiled and the people of America mislead.
It all began when I walked into my 5th grade classroom in which I had stood alone against my entire class in support of Al Gore. From such young ears I heard my calls of “Gore won,” “Gore won,” rejected. Sadly I had fallen asleep too early to know that Florida became a legal quagmire.
Then, like so many Republics before it, America put upon its highest seat a tyrant.
I will not attempt to say that I understood the ramifications of that morning in its fullest prowess. I was a young boy without much life experiences or an understanding of politics or democracy beyond lofty textbook definitions. However I believed in democracy; I believed that people got to choose their leader in this country.
I suppose that it was my mistake but I believed in those ideals. And instead of watching Democracy I saw Oligarchy. As Spartan overtook Athens, I watched history repeat as a war mongering, conservative, restrictive, hateful, vengeful and near fascist regime overtook what was meant to be Democracy reborn. This oligarchical action was displayed in the unconstitutional move taken by the Supreme Court to call and end to vote counting in Florida and hand the election to Bush. These nine sages long robbed of wisdom clad in moth-eaten robes chose the President instead of the 300 million American citizens upon whom falls that right and that responsibility.
For what I have said since my fall from confidence and since what I saw as this nation’s final fall from grace, I have been called a “fucking hippie” an “unamerican” a “traitor,” and even “treasonous.” But I will never leave my post as a warrior for the good fight.
This Good Fight as I see it is keeping the government of the “World’s Most Powerful Country” in check. I do this because I believe that in the saying, “My Country Right or Wrong is Like my Mom Drunk or Sober.” Patriotism in a republic is based on Socratism and the willingness and ability to remain loyal while loudly pointing out when your Country is Fucking Up or doing something wrong and often something criminal and furthermore being willing and able to do something to make sure that your voice is heard and that your country listens and acts on your call.
I witnessed in 2000 lies, mistruths, untruths, distruths infect the thoughts of Americans to the point of violating their own best interest. And in this, I do not mean to interpret America’s political beliefs, but I mean that in, even in the area of taxes they were lied to; they were fed lies about tax cuts and “stimulus packages” and believed that they would be in a better position because of them and received instead a government in record debt, an economy on the verge of collapse and a debilitating energy crisis. Most voters are, very understandably, politically selfish: they support what supports and helps them while facilitating what they wish to see occur and yet the goals for which the voted were neither achieved nor sought.
I witnessed in the first four years of Bush, the power of Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld’s machine as it turned a moment of national pain and global strife, a moment of death and suffering, a moment of fear and anger into an open door for their imperial goals of Middle Eastern Democratization. The first question out of Rumsfeld’s mouth at the National Security Meeting in response to the 9/11 attacks, which occurred on 9/12, were, “What about Iraq?”
I witnessed that Power ignore facts, debase truth and defile the names of it’s opposition in order to fire up a nation of hurt and understandably vengeful Americans so that they might support a war which could not otherwise have been facilitated. They were so successful that they were able to convince 60 percent of the population that Saddam Hussein, the ideological opposite of extremists like Osama Bin laden, was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
I witnessed a war meant to funnel money to Halliburton. Again, I will not back away from my beliefs and I hold this belief. They ignored military strategists and the facts which they presented. Therefore they went into the war undermanned, underequipped and without leadership prepared for the task. And this was both in the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I saw Afghanistan first as a war not meant to be won, not meant to achieve goals but to segway to the more profitable war: the one which fit better in the neoconservative agenda
In this moment I feel most shameful in the face of America’s soldiers. I am not akin to past generations who spat at soldiers. I realize that they join for reasons of their own and are charged with the high minded job of “protecting freedom and every American’s rights” and that once in battle most soldiers fight to survive, to return home and to keep their compatriots alive as well. Therefore my shame stems from the fact that this regime has usurped Rights and restricted Freedom at home thus loosing the war and disallowing the fulfillment of the soldier’s charge.
Furthermore, I witnessed the establishment of what I see as a dangerous precedent. This is the massive use of private military and security firms . Mercenaries under another name and built on a better business model, corporations like Blackwater have changed the face of the battlefield and sidestepped the rules of War like the restrictions on torture. Documented accounts of Blackwater employees using Iraqi civilians as target practice display the new face of Global Warfare.
I do admit that it is more than likely that many Blackwater-type Firms and their employees follow modern conventions on war-time conduct as policy and as a measure of goodwill. But, there are bad apples both on the corporation and footsoldier levels. Currently these “businesses” are unregulated by any national, international or global conventions, meaning that the go unchecked and I am sure that they are responsible for much of the unspoken of and unspeakable crimes. I am sure because when the subject arose, my friend, a veteran of the marines and of, what he named, “mercenary work” in Iraq, confirmed the truth of Companies like Blackwater conducting torture.
Returning to the domestic side, I watched the hand of neoconservatism extend through pocketed News Outlets. FOX is of whom I speak. As the Bush mouthpiece, the parallel to Stalin’s Soviet Pravda, FOX 5 “News” spread lies in the face of contradicting facts and open falsehoods.
However, all blame does not fall upon FOX while the brunt of the crime does. The supposed “liberal media” played along, following pre-made lists of questions. Instead of forcing accountability the press crucified their right to freedom and abandoned their responsibility to maintain and even force democratic process.
Those reporters, journalists and editors do not carry all the blame; it also falls on the American people who blindly accepted and violated the Socratic Mission they were charged with. But perhaps those with the most blame to bear behind the Neocons, their puppets and allies are the Democrats whom have been in Congress the entire time. They gave no fight to the PATRIOT ACT, to the poor planning of the Afghani War, to the crime of the Iraqi War, to the tax cuts and stimulus packages. They did not respond to the grassroots movement of protests, the cries of the intellectual elite or the pleads of the citizenry to help them regain their country.
Moments like when Nancy Pelosi said that Impeachment was off the table was crime enough, in my belief, for her to be recalled from her office. However, even I made allowance for this because I believed that the impeachment system is archaic and would not work in time. I thought that the Congress was then to made greater change or at least to fight the good fight, force Bush to veto bills which the American people would want passed. Therefore the corrupt and undemocratic nature of that leadership could be entirely unveiled. THEN, there would be less of a question about whether that leadership’s continuation in the candidacy of McCain could be positive or not.
Nevertheless: I have found my hope again with the candidacy of Barack Obama. With missions of Change, Socratism and furthering the Good Fight, I can throw my support beyond the man from Illinois.
With a strong basis in grassroots movements and a, I think, believable promise to listen to the American People, I find my hope in him. In his interview with Rolling Stone Mr. Obama put forth an expectation that the American people, especially the youth will, through the gift of the internet, organize and protest if he does not fulfill his promises. Furthermore, Obama has given a promise to attend to the people’s calls and to respect the responsibility of the Presidential Office to the citizenry. These promises represent Change that I Can Believe In.
Despite what McCain may attempt to do with the Republican Hate Machine, I hold my hope that Barack Obama will ascend to the Presidency and revert our nation to a home of civil rights where the Constitution and Bill of Rights are still the highest law.
Thusly, it was my wish which I shared with Richard Mondello, Dover Plains for Obama’s founder and the head coordinator of Register for Change, that we can do our part to help Obama ascend and raise the consciousness of our neighbors while changing the image of our hometown’s youth from little gangbanger punks with a drug habit to politically active, intellectually engaged and liberally minded citizens with a goal of fulfilling our civic duty to withhold our government to its responsibilities and remind the nation that we do not owe our government loyalty because in a Democratic Republic the government owes it loyalty to and derives its power from the people.
Register for Change.
-Dylan Young
Dover Plains for Obama
Yes We Can
Si Se Puede
Fight the Good Fight
Thank you, Dylan.