Peace on Earth, Good Will toward those who can afford it

I go back and forth with regard to my feelings regarding the criminality of the Bush Administration and what we the people should do about it. Sometimes I want to rant and rave with my utter frustration (and sometimes I do). Sometimes I want to merely despair and leave this country forever. Sometimes I want to take up arms (I do not own guns, and I am wont to interpret the 2nd Amendment as being about a well-ordered Militia, not about gun ownership).

Sometimes I listen to reason. I hear my brother who believes stability is paramount, not patriotism; not our Constitution. I hear seasoned scholarly activists cautioning us not to be too hasty; not to despair; not to consider this our worst hour. I hear my daughter speak of her ideology (which is more or less in alignment with mine), but I also hear her speak of friends antithetical to that ideology, as it that makes perfect sense.

I am truly torn. One part of me remembers the sage Taoist advice, "this too shall pass." Another side reminds me that our founders quelled such rhetoric as a form of giving succor to the Tories. And I don't know what to think.

The company I now work for employs the marvelous services of Cigna Insurance. Now I know these bastards are not the only ones who routinely allow, and even encourage, teenage kids to die in the interest of feathering their stockholders' nests, but I'm picking on them because this latest story comes close to home for me since these bastards could do it to me and the ones I most love too now. What enrages me is the complicity of our government in this obscenely evil corporate greed.

So do we seek the forcible overthrow of these criminals? Do we continue to hope our elected officials grow a pair and in turn use constitutional means to oust and incarcerate the defilers of our democracy? Do we take to the streets and hope the corporate media airs a second or two of our ire before doing a fade to a Wal-Mart ad? Do we try to work from within; do we give the benefit of the doubt to the spineless, co-opted politicians who sit figuratively opposite our opponents in Congress?

I am too angry to make a rational argument for constrained compromise; for patience; for belief in the sure and certain inner workings of a democratic framework. Our world's history is too replete with stories of corruption, and too impoverished in stories of the success of liberty, for me to place much hope in the inevitability of the triumph of the democratic system. Another Boston Tea Party seems to me to be the only course. Destruction to the traitors to our liberty!

Or is it just Merry Christmas?

It's snowing outside as I write this. Falling snow has a way of bringing serenity to dark moods. I'll try to find that serenity. But there should be no Merry Christmas for Bush and Cheney. They need to rot in the polluted coal and oil that has ever been the only lining to their stockings. I won't say more because these traitors have usurped our land and redefined treason. One day though...