Hope, Disappointment, Despair, Outrage, and back to Hope

Admittedly, I voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, and I mostly voted against McCain in the general election, but a part of me longed for the hope and change that Barack Obama promised.  I had a young child, how could I not want things to be better for him than the way things were looking?  But it soon became apparent, and increasingly so, that change was not coming and hope might be futile as well.  Eighteen-plus months into his presidency and Guantanamo is still open, we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, wireless wiretapping has been expanded, torture methods are still on the books, DOMA stands solid, the wealth gap is increasing, average folk are hurting financially and unemployment is high.  We did get health care reform, but the health care reform we got still leaves lots of room for inflated costs, high insurance company profit margins, and exorbitant executive benefits packages.  Similarly with college loan reform and financial oversight and consumer protections.  It's been too little, too late and poorly executed.

I realize that Obama is not alone in the blame, our Congress has also done their part.  One party is obstructionist, and the other ineffectual.  Hell, I haven't even been horribly thrilled with the judiciary lately, except for in the case of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  On that issue, the presiding judge took the correct stance and even made sure her ruling had teeth.  DADT was declared unconstitutional and an injunction was declared, having the net effect of killing DADT, something that Obama has said he wants done.  Simple, right?  The judge took the decision out of the hands of the legislature and still got what Obama wanted.  Yeah!!! 

So why's the Department of Justice asking for a stay and considering an appeal of the judges decision?!  They claim they have to uphold the law, but DADT is already only sporadically enforced.  The judge's decision does leave the law on the books, but as an unconstitutional law, which would not be able to be enforced at all.  I'm not sure that there's a functional difference there?

All of this is to say that I'm really pissed off and fed up with the lies out of this administration.  Today I hit a brick wall.  I couldn't help but have a good long cry.  And then I hit the heavy bag for a while.  I hugged my baby little boy (he's five in just a couple of months!?) close and promised he'd have a better life if it took every once of fight I had in me until my last dying breath.  Now I'm sitting and watching Amandla while I write this, and I can't help but be inspired.  Individuals can make a difference.  We can change things for the better.  We can start a revolution.  We can love one another.  We can leave our corner of the world a little better than we found it.  That is all we can do, and it is all that we must do.  Let it begin with me. 

Now to complete my circuit back to some semblance of hopefulness, I'm going to have some spreadable chocolate.  It may or may not be spread on anything.

Indulging in Anthropocentrism

My mood has a tendency to vacillate a lot lately.  Not anything unhealthy, it's just been an up-side-down, topsy-turvy past few weeks or so.  Part of the problem is that I pay too much attention to the news, part is that I worry too much about other people.  On my bad days, I can be totally OK with the idea of complete human annihilation.  Plague?  Fine.  Natural disaster?  Bring it.  Famine?  Great.  Whatever gets the human population back into check, even if that means our extinction.  The world would be better without us, and we can be such frakking jerks to each other and to nature that we really deserve whatever might befall our species.  I know, cheery, eh?

And then on the good days, I have a real passion for how exactly do we educate people and get them interested and involved in ecology/conservation/human rights/something other than their damned X-Box or Wii.  We have got to do better at being stewards of the planet and each other if we're going to survive, and we have got to survive.  Without killing everything else in the process.

The bad days are usually brought on by too much news, too much bad news, too many people being a-holes- especially all piled into a few hours.  Driving in Cleveland at rush hour can also do the trick.

Good days happen thanks to being a witness to random acts of kindness, a trip to the art museum, a great concert, or a beautiful piece of prose or poetry.  Journal articles qualify as prose in this case, and have absolutely made my day more than once.

We humans are capable of such great things- creative and destructive.  As a mom, I really feel this point loud and clear.  I have had the opportunity to create life, and that's an amazing thing.  At the same time, mothers can utterly destroy the life that they created by their action or inaction.  Don't get me wrong, fathers can do that as well, but well, it's mother's day, and there's a little more cultural pressure (not that this is a good or bad thing- it's just a thing) on moms that their kids turn out "right" or "good," so I'm focusing on moms for now.

It's not a responsibility to be taken lightly.  The same is true of any creative force.  Einstein vocally opposed the atomic bomb, made possible by his work on energy and matter (the famous E=MC² equation) and Oppenheimer regretted his work on the Manhattan project after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying if he had known what it could have done, he never would have pursued the research.  There is a weight that goes along with everything we create- and that weight dictates that we do not create something for which we can not take responsibility in the future.  If we create something for which we have no desire to care or do our best in protecting, then we have no reason or right to create that thing.

Today was mostly a good day, and I'm happy to have created the people that I have, because right now, I think there is a bit of a bright light, and maybe we humans have enough potential for good to outweigh the bad, although I wonder how to encourage the good over the bad.  Maybe, if I work hard enough, I'll find the answer someday, and maybe in that search, I'll do a little good along the way.  Happy mothers day to all the nurturing women out there- no matter what you may have created- and thank you for helping create a slightly better world.