I don't know how many people who were not Republicans watched the RNC on t.v., but I watched the major speeches on my computer.
I threw out my t.v. about six months ago when I just couldn't take the NOTHING that it had become even one more minute.
I saw, at the Republican National Convention, old white men and a sprinkling of old white women and a few white youth in the crowds.
What I heard as a universal message was "attack the opposition rather than speak of anything about my future" in America. I want to hear plans, ideas, and more real promises of real action from both candidates. I am made more optimistic by Obama's inclusionary speeches than by McCain's exclusionary ones.
I want this new wave of enthusiasm for new ways of handling old business to prevail, but I want ideas to be followed by specific and targeted positive actions. I want the youth to take over politics once again and move this nation forward rather than backward as old men tend to do.
Old men look backward at what was and want to return to that old place and they find that they cannot unless they force this retro-activity on forward looking youth. They enforce the retrospective by using rigid laws, rigid outlines of behavior and rigid old and failed responses to new occurrences.
Rather than fearing youth and trying to curtail their activities, they should embrace them and include them in their laying out of the future.
Everyone has become apathetic about the possibilities for change because each new government elected refuses to be the ONE to make real changes happen. Each one refuses to stop the old political machine from just rumbling onward, forward, crushing newness and fresh ideas and new methods under its elephantine feet, and under its asinine hooves.
I know what the American people want. They want taxes to be fair to the taxed and that means that the higher earners pay more and that corporations receive no more special non-taxation clauses, it means economic justice, the old kind where those who have help those who have not, like good neighbors and like solid families used to do. See, there goes old me looking backwards!!
Americans want corporations to be businesses and not more, at least, not the huge lobbying machines that guide the government. They want those corporate businesses to build America and not to tear it down. They want Capitalism to become less carnivorous than it has recently been. They want to build things again and to be proud of what they build again. They want equity and not equity loans, they want paydays and not payday loans, they want educations for their children and not educational loans.
This new America is becoming a habit which forms a cable, which we daily weave with a newly formed thread a day, until at last, it cannot be broken. We must break it now while it is still breakable or forever be caught between its threads and pulled down, under the heavy water of American stagnation by the anchor of the status quo that is attached to its bottom. Horace Mann said the beginning of that quote and I added to it.
The world in which we are competing has changed radically and we are still using the old white men's methods of competition, or the new underhanded ones that they invent daily to try to maintain their power over us, over other nations' choices and over our economy. Throw the bums out was said an old political refrain and is new again at each election time.
Young children need good day care centers that do not cost their parents every dime that they earn each week. We need good schools that don't have one rigid rule for achieving success, but allow more innovation and neighborhood participation. Parents need to be educated to support their children by involvement in the schools and taught away from attacking the schools that try to educate their children.
Old people need to be protected from the circling sharks, allowed to stay in their homes as long as possible, as fearlessly as possible and they need to find help for that to remain true until they change their minds about living alone in their homes. They need to have medical costs not take food out of their mouths and not take house payments out of their bank accounts. They need to be able to choose to see a doctor rather than choosing not to see one as they have no money to do so and dying earlier than those who have a lot of money.
Living, or trying to, should not have to be such an enormous act of courage, but rather a milder daily activity than that. Americans are still more innovative than other nations and we must utilize this ability before it is totally educated and governed out of us.
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