A personal note to my friends (and otherwise) at DU

[wcepler]

This is a piece I've been soul searching about for the last few days. Don't worry, it's not going to be "true confessions" or anything particularly awkward, but it is going to be a very personal statement. However, even though it's going to about "personal issues", I'd like to think it will be useful to many folks in a variety of ways.



Lately I've written 2 or 3 pieces about the "tone" set by Obama's appointments to date. For me, they have been excessively right wing dems, even though it can be argued (from the polls, etc.) that the people whose passion, money, and elaborate infrastructure, created over several years, got Obama through the primaries and elected him President were progressives and moderates.



However, alas, anything remotely "left wing" is once again a dirty word, and several of Obama's appointments can't seem to let a day go by without trashing progressives.



So, lot's to be concerned about and, yes, a little outraged if you believe that Obama's collective "team" (now nearly totally completed) is far to the right of the people who elected him.



Of course to be fair, the bigger picture of this is the fundamental tragedy of America, i.e., that "both" of our political parties are far to the right of the vast majority of American citizens and voters. Indeed, millions of Americans now realize that it's absurd to talk about our "two party" system, since the 2006 dem congress proved once and for all that practically all dem members of this congress were/are closet Republicans who slavishly obeyed Bush's slightest whims about EVERYTHING.



But, having said just a few things about some contemporary political issues, may I go back to the personal "sharings"?



Like most even moderate Americans, I have been increasingly horrified by watching the murder of our Constitutional Republic,the gestalt of ecosystems necessary for human existence, the American economy, and most of all the slaughter of our children in the Bush/Cheney money cow oil wars for the elites which have already murdered tens (hundreds?) of thousands of innocent human beings (with the standard percentage of children).



And gradually, gradually I began to write pieces which tried in some small way to rise the challenge of ATTACKING these pug/fascist devils from hell (who the 2006 dem congress showed were equally bought and paid for dems).



The more I ceased to "repress" the political events of the Bush years, is the more I found myself overtaken with moral/rational outrage. I don't know what other word to use. What other word "could" be used, when witnessing such utter, cancerous evil? If religion is right about the "anti-Christ", who better fits that identity than Dick Cheney?



I guess I'm fading in and out in this writing, moving from the "personal" to the political/factual, so I hope you will be patient with me.



I think the MAIN thing I'm struggling to put into words is that as I ceased to repress the agonizing reality of corporate fascism combined with religious fanaticism, I found a voice that was in a kind of permanent "attack mode". Now I don't apologize for that; indeed, I consider it one of the high moral/rational peaks of my life that I dared to take on these monsters with the full force of patriotic rage.



I often got into trouble with my total commitment to fight the good fight (and the word is spelled F I G H T!), and found myself increasingly alone with many of the pieces. My take on that is that, say, two years ago, it was almost as if you had to take your life into your hands in order to acquire ramming speed as you crashed into the neocon/fascist juggernaut. Thus, even though many comments were overjoyed that certain monstrous things were finally being put into words, I suspect (and it's only a suspicion) that sometimes the responses were thin because of raw and totally realistic fear.



After all, these ultimate criminals had almost certainly murdered Senator Paul Wellstone, sent anthrax in the mail to only high profile democrats, kept slaughtering our children in their money cow oils wars, and MOST OF ALL, almost certainly engineered 9/11 -- with a little help from their Saudi friends, since the Saudi Royal Family and Bush Royal Family are joined at the hip (as are Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush).



"Attack mode" is the operate phrase here, and it's exactly what I want to talk to you about now.



After a couple of pieces about my reservations about Obama's appointments (which continue to worry me), some of the feedback (and I thank you for it) jiggled me into the awareness that basically EVERYTHING I had been writing was "locked" into attack mode. Hence, my comments about Obama, etc., were still in that mode as well.



Now the personal part of this is that after much soul searching, I realized that this formerly kick ass and courageous (if I may say so) style of writing was inappropriate and even probably counter productive when writing about any "reservations" about Obama's appointments, because the "anger" was excessive to the content.



But here I hope my DU friends will forgive the ongoingness of attack mode writing after it had already served its purpose. It's like I was coming back from the political trenches, in which I was literally "warring" (albeit verbally) with the Bush/elite/psychopaths and religious fanatics.



Please understand that it takes a little "chilling out" when you crawl back from the front lines and find yourself in a fundamentally different world. And the world I am struggling to crawl back to is simply no longer the world where Cheney was King of America for eight straight years.



So if my aggressiveness in a few earlier pieces about Obama and his appointees seemed counter productively "over the top", I now publicly acknowledge that I agree with you, and that I am taking to heart what I'm now putting into words and will still fight the good fight as always, but will escalate to attack mode only for exceptional issues.



Believe it or not, I still basically like and trust President Elect Barack Obama and I also agree that I need to give him more time and space to be true to himself.



As an aside, I am now less worried about many of his appointees because, unlike Bush who was a puppet waiting for a hand to be stuck into him (e.g., Cheney and the neocon cabal of American traitors), Obama seems to be sufficiently grounded and centered that he's too "strong" to be puppetized and will hopefully, albeit gradually, emerge as a political force of nature who will be at least slightly (hopefully more!) more pragmatically left of center than, say, the DLC Clinton machine.



Well, I was all over the place with this one, and if you stayed with me I thank you. I'm certainly not going to throw out my political attack mode, but I will save it only for things like 9/11 and the growing evidence that the elites have long been escalating their class war into what is now an amazingly open genocidal attempt to "wean" the working classes.



Just a sample of this is the presence of poisonous foods EVERYWHERE, due to systematically removed governmental protections, Bush's conscious murder of New Orleans by steadily allowing the levees to fail, the systematic degeneration of our atmosphere, rivers, and lakes into toxic tragedies, once again due to the nearly total removal of America's environmental protections. And oh yes, relatedly, the dumbing down of American citizens by a wholesale dismantling of America's educational systems and the virtual under funding out of existence of what once upon a time (now over!) was the cutting edge of American science.



In short, the elites clearly think they need to "wean" the middle and lower classes of America, which is reminiscent of the forced inoculations of Africans by European agencies which is indubitably related to the sudden epidemic of aids. Too many blacks for certain malevolent European whites?



Lastly, the 2006 congress of dem/pug Bushiviks, has once and for all made it crystal clear that even Bush and the Republican Party are now and never have been the true "causes" of America's political system/prison; rather our congress (with some rare and courageous exceptions which prove the rule) is simply a seething mass of elite "tentacles”.



So, bottom line, the old words still say it best. The tragedy of America and the entire planet is still the 6,000 year old one-sided conflict between the "Haves" (who always win) and the "Have Nots" (who always lose). Yes, the wacko religious fanatic’s come in and out of this in usually temporary and minor ways, but the true Heart of Darkness is still that ancient conflict between the fundamentally defenseless and the 1 or 2 % of national/international vampire elites.



Hence, the attack mode is still 100% appropriate for things like 9/11 and the satanic elites (with their increasingly obvious genocidal agendas), but I've decided its100% inappropriate for tracking the emerging Presidency of Barack Obama, on which I will still occasionally comment, but NOT in attack mode. Indeed, hopefully if and when I do address Obama issues, it will be to reinforce the positive.



In short, I've decided that many of you were right and I should give Obama more of a chance, and if I significantly added any tension or stress to your life by those earlier pieces, I'm truly sorry for that since the whole point of these internet town hall meetings is ultimately one of community and the working out of realist strategies to save America and the Earth from the never-ending elitist strategies of infinite greed.



However, to keep the Bush's, Saudi's, Rothschild’s, Rockefeller's, Murdoch's, etc. (i.e., the collective human cancer of literal God's and Goddess’s of our one and only planet) from dragging the human species into extinction, there is NO LIMIT to attack mode.



So even though I’m still a committed “progressive” (increasingly I think these appellations do more harm than good, don’t you?), and still believe the ONLY two party system in America is between the American Dictatorship of the Rich (vs) what hopefully one day will be a full blown Progressive Party which finally expresses the true will of the American people (not the multi millionaire and multi billionaire elites), this is one liberal who will henceforth back Obama to the limit.



Partly because I still just “like” the guy, but more importantly because I fear the greatest adversary of President Elect Obama isn’t going to be the Republican Party per se, but a Congress of elite dem/pug puppets who will fight him at every turn, and for this oncoming fight for America’s soul, I plan to mount the barricades for our symbol of hope -- Barack Obama.



We should never forget what a hate filled congress did to Jimmy Carter.

*********************************************************************

Solidarity, W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

<http://theliberationofrealism.blogspot.com/>

[Sarah Ibarruri]

1. Thank you. I'm going to guess that Obama is trying to make a gentle transition from....

our country having become right wing (which it did, let's not deny it - we Americans are not too bright), to our country once again becoming free and left-wing, the way our forefathers wanted it when they ran away from the dictatorships in the countries they came from.

I call myself a liberal, and voted for Obama expecting CHANGE. CHANGE means getting away from all those right wing extremist ideals, including DLC right wing ideas.

IF it doesn't appear that way within 4 years, I have my vote in my pocket and plan to use it.

[Cleita]

2. I think many of us feel like you, however, keep in mind that

this new administration coming in, isn't criminal nor beholden to foreign oil interests like the present one. We have a President who has an intellect and who I believe will be in charge not a puppet of a shadow government. I also believe he will move away from his right wing philosophy in the year to come. He can't be an effective President without doing so. Also, to paraphrase Arianna Huffington on something that she said on the radio yesterday. She said something to the effect that he has promised that he will make the decisions and his appointees will carry them out for him, so she says we should give him a chance be good on his word before we start slinging stones at him. Wait and see what he actually does and we can't do that before January 20th.

[navarth]

3. I don't think you've done anything wrong. We have to keep our guys honest too.

You keep on keepin' on, Bill.

[bbgrunt]

4. I concur except that they don't want to "wean" the

middle class, they want to murder it and depopulate the world.

It is no time to lighten up on the attack mode. All the outrage outrage OUTRAGE that people are now feeling as the real agenda comes into focus, is still a dim shadow of what is yet to come.

[bain_sidhe]

10. Yeah, I think the right word is "cull," not "wean." n/t

[wcepler]

12. yes, the work is cull

Alas, I agree. The word is "cull". And they're doing it so openly! But then, they're Gods, right?
Well, their spider web may cover the planet, but the spiders are few and all we need is just a little more collective human consciousness about their limitless evil and how they are dragging the human species into extinction, and we'll by God come up with some kind of political/social insecticide that levels the playing field.

And yes I DO think this is not only possible, but inevitable. The only alternative to "extinguishing" (whatever that means) the elites is going over the waterfall of species extinction, and I just don't think 99% of the human race will ALLOW that to happen, do you?

You know, when the rubber REALLY hits the road, everything changes. And if the price of another century of an elite controlled planet (or hopefully much less) is watching the human race turn into cattle or corpses, the elites may run, but they can't hide. We'll get the bastards in the end. They should do a little reading about the history of France. The Gods and Goddesses game can only go on for so long, and then I think the word is "revolt". And I can feel it in my quarks the critical mass that triggers the revolt is actually very close.

When you and your family and your world is going down for the third time just to keep the Paris Hilton's in $100,000 designer clothes, the s___ WILL HIT THE FAN, and all the rules of the elite constructed political/social game will be beyond meaninglessness.

The elites are going the way of the Dodo bird.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

5. Your post had me sitting bolt upright.

So much of what you say resonates with me.

Heartily recommended.

[asjr]

6. I could erase your name and replace it

with mine! I have felt lost for the last 8 years. Lost because no one was able to stop it. Or, tried to stop it. We have been under Republican rule for so long I considered it inevitable. But, I stop to think about it and am ashamed I did not write more letters, didn't march in front of the White House and Capitol Hill every day for the last 8 years, didn't call or write every media outlet in the world, didn't make myself a one-woman army and abolish the Republicans. I still think Wellstone was helped out of this world. Yes, I think--I KNOW--Democrats won both 2000 and 2004 elections and nothing was done about that. Barak Obama may be the clean page in the Constitution that will help us get back on track, but we must help him. Barak Obama may be our last chance for survival.

[abq e streeter]

7. While I've not always agreed with you

and felt you were too extreme sometimes, I've agreed with you completely a a hell of lot more than not, and continue to...In solidarity with you, WC; keep holding ALL of their feet to the fire...

[OutNow]

8. Constant Attack Mode can backfire on you and your health

In the past 10 years I've gone from political activist to mostly passive. It is not my choice. The constant high stress level from both my job and my political activism most likely led to my current poor health.

If you are over 40 you should have a complete physical checkup every year. If you feel exhausted all the time, even after a good night's sleep, you should talk to a doctor about it. Many auto-immune conditions such as myasthenia gravis and lupus have no known reason for onset and no cure, but often attack during a prolonged period of stress.

This is what happened to me.

My advice: save your "attack mode" for times when it is really needed. (Hint - it is not really needed 100% of the time even if it seems like it is.) Take time to enjoy your family and your friends.

PS. My company has a generous vacation policy. In the last few years many people did not take all the vacation days they had coming because they didn't want to fall behind on their projects. This caused the company to crack down: they required employees to take all their earned vacation. Why? They explained that people (at least to our HR department) are just like machines. Machines need periodic maintenance to work well. If you fail to perform the needed maintenance the machines will fail. The company did a study and concluded that the employees that failed to take vacation also failed via increased hospital stays, mental problems, substance abuse, etc. While I found their analysis to be cold and calculating, I decided that they were correct. Vacation (down time, relaxation time) is not a benefit as much as it is a necessity.

[wcepler]

11. thank you so much for you solicitous remarks

OutNow,

Thank you so much for your solicitous remarks. In point of fact, something very similar to exactly like that DID happen to me around 3 years ago, and I've been recovering from it ever since. I'm much better, but still fighting to get back to 100% (or more!).

It reminded me of a line in a John Lennon song: "Life is what really happens to us while we're making other plans." God, is that true or is that true?

So your advice is excellent and I encourage others to take it seriously as well.

I usually save my submissions for the weekends when I get enough sleep and when I can exercise, etc.

It's also complicated in the sense that I think (am I deceiving myself?) that firing off a good shot for America is healing and centering to me.

In any case, please once again accept my thanks for your kind concern. We are all brothers and sisters after all, are we not?

peace, Bill

[Shiver]

9. A very good post, I agree with you completely.

With some exceptions about the Cabinet. Steven Chu and Shaun Donovan - Energy and HUD respectively - seem very progressive. But that's beside the point.

What you have come to realize is what I did a few weeks ago, actually the day after the election. Attack mode has been on for so long, switching it off feels almost unnatural. When I did, though, I came to a realization:

I've been angry for eight years. I don't want to be angry any more.

[balantz]

13. K&R. Don't let your guard down.

Relax from attack mode to hyper-vigilance, but be ready to attack when and where necessary. As you have so succinctly pointed out we are in increasingly dire times, whether or not a Dem is in the highest office. And, I am in complete solidarity with you on 9/11 being an inside job, though I see the bin Laden story as being a part of the official lie. And because I see that event as what precipitated many of our current ills I have to lament that NOBODY in power is willing to open that door and expose the truth about our situation. Until that is addressed we are held hostage to the corporate elite and their "spider web" of an agenda.

[wcepler]

15. 9/11 -- the beginning of the beginning which now should be the ending of the ending

Oh God yes, 9/11! Until we radically deal with this infinite treason (aided and abetted by God knows what agencies in the Middle East), America will have no soul. The evidence is OVERWHELMING (pictorial, scientific, on the spot observations, etc., etc., etc.) that it was absolutely a treasonous inside job.
And as you precisely say, these last eight years of totalitarian horror 100% started with 9/1l.

Probably the most important fact about 9/11 is that Obama will NEVER deal with it, nor will any governmental department. There will never be any 9/11 "committees", since they know the explosion of patriotic rage would trivialize Mt. St Helens.

This is the first event in American history that would "redefine" our country as much as the Civil War. Indeed, it could well start a kind of 2nd Civil War.

The bottom line is that ONLY patriotic Americans can or will deal with 9/11 INDEPENDENTLY of our candyass "government" and our candyass politicians.

As the Zen people say, if you don't get it from yourself, where will you get it?

Bill

[Waiting For Everyman]

14. I can relate to your "attack mode". Lots of Dems probably have ptsd

from the last 8 years, truth be told. I'm clear on backing Obama vs. the DLC and RWers, and I agree that he's no cupcake pushover - I don't worry about that unless something drastically changes, which I doubt.

But I do stay in attack mode too far (sometimes) about the conservative economic pov, moreso here because I feel like if even Dems don't understand then we're doomed (just a feeling, not reality). I too, just in the last day or so, am conscious of the need to back off of that intensity.

Thanks for your thoughts, you said it well and I think you identified somewhat of a general syndrome. Some seem immune to it, but some of us aren't.

[BeFree]

16. I forgive you

What you say makes good sense and explains well the actions of so many these last few weeks.

The attack mode was really all we had. The atrocities visited upon our people by the government left us feeling cornered.

We now have this window of opportunity to get the hell out of the corner. Some of us saw clearly the opening, but others still felt totally cornered, and lashed out at anything that moved.

The only good that has come from all this, besides the personal evolutions (such as yourself) is that all the ruckus gained a good deal of attention and subsequent responses, letting us know we are being heard, which is in itself yet another window to the way out.

Congrats on your awareness and self examination and ultimate evolution.

[HillWilliam]

17. I've always said there's more room out than in

and once you've cleansed -- if you can successfully cleanse -- you get strong. I think we're all going through some sort of cleansing. I'm certainly going through mine. There's so much dross around us, so much damage we never thought we'd in fact have to face.

But here it is.

A friend of mine a long time ago had a cleaning service. I asked her what she did when faced with a really tough job. She said simply, pick a corner then clean to the middle of the room. Go to the next corner and clean to the middle of the room again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually, it all gets done. But the trick is starting in one place, digging deep, and going all the way out.

I have faith in the next administration. There is a decades-long mess to straighten out and I have the full understanding we won't be able to start the "undoing" in a single administration, nor in a few Congresses. We'll have to keep fighting and cleaning for years yet.

But the last two elections have shown -- amply -- that we can and we shall.