ready when the time comes

From my blog post of 28 October 2009

I don’t like where our culture is headed. Our nation was founded on principles that I believe were on "General God’s" side. The colonies overthrew the oppressive forces of the British empire. Things have changed. Or more accurately, Plus ça change plus c’est meme, that is, “the more things change the more they stay the same.” I feel as though it’s 1773 all over again, and the forces of empire once again have the upper hand. They lost in 1776 but never left, which is why, for example, slavery wasn’t eradicated til nearly 100 years later – we didn’t form “the perfect union” right off the bat.

In the last 50 years the forces of greed have gained strength. They are relentless, will stop at nothing, and threaten to overwhelm.

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from comment I left someplace or another at some point

Slavery is back in the U.S., in the form of desperate immigrants. So much for slavery having been eradicated after the Civil War. It's back. I guess in 2008, we are the new abolitionists? Someone has to stand up.

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Not just desperate immigrants.

The time I heard William McDonough speak at a conference at Liberty State Park, I remember him remarking that children today (at the time - c. 1997) don't know where basic fruits & vegetables - such as a tomato, or an apple come from, in the sense of how they grow - vine? tree? etc., etc.

In 1997 we assumed that first graders knew what a tomato was, even if they didn't know how it grew.

Now, in Everywhere, U.S.A. they can't ID a tomato, or an apple, etc.

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From some comment I left some place or another

For the last 40 years, Republicans have pushed a cultural definition of a populist Republican "us" that linked Democrats to a "them" identified as "elitists." In this way they have obscured the reality that the GOP has been working to abandon its moderate “conservative” philosophy and pursued a radical course rightward, working to exponentially magnify the power and influence of their traditional patrons - the economic elite.

Forty years later the GOP is no longer able to make the Big Lie work. As David Foster Wallace told the WSJ recently, “The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.

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Those first graders?
Maybe they just need the poor man's teleprompter.
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Don't get me started.
Swat. Lemonade.