After the Pledge of Allegiance

I’ve been a news and current events hound since my awakening to vileness of Bush & Co., and all the issues surrounding his rise to power. If nothing else, hating him and his fellow Christian crypto-fascists riles up my passions and makes me feel alive. The downside is that I’m becoming a junky for those passionate feelings, any passionate feelings really. To compound it I’ve started reading internet weblogs and political blogs and alternative news sources, which are an endless chain that can never be followed to any satisfactory ending. So many good thoughts and ideas, so many political and social abstractions, and so much to think about. Trying to understand hurts my brain and sometimes rips my comprehension to shreds. What’s the right thing to say to an Iraqi sixteen year old girl who has a car in the street in front of her house full of bullet holes and gouts of innocent blood? How do I reply to the twisted wisdom of people who carry their ideological agenda like a gigantic American flag? There’s a sickness in the world. An age-old sickness that now has a means of spreading itself across the globe via TV and the internet. I long for our previous world; the world of worked-for access to knowledge—you know, back when to fully understand anything you had to sit down with a book and read. I hate the time in which we’re living. I feel like the world has been hijacked. I want the past back, and not in a sappy, nostalgic, Saturday Evening Post sort of way either. The past in which there was a genuine caring for the common men and women who worked for a living--in other words, a real republic. Maybe it’s just a longing for innocence, but whatever it is I want it back. Time is what we lack today—time to digest and think about how we feel before our understanding is swept away beneath us. Previously, I would read books (poetry, fiction, history, et al), perhaps read The New Yorker, and see no TV at all (I didn’t have one for twelve years)--now my brain is overwhelmed with input. Sometimes I hate myself. Is there anyone else out there who feels the same way?
Forgive my griping. I’m going to go and get a shower now and see if I can make myself feel clean and good.