Are you out there? Do you live near me?

I feel pretty lame writing this, but I am losing my mind. I need help. I don't know where to turn.

This litany of insanity ought to drive any sane person mad:

Drivers are sent to prison. Crime families and their cronies in the highest offices in the land are not. Sore-loser candidates threaten to be spoilers for us all. A nation founded on freedom cannot find it in its soul to see a black candidate as anything other than black. Anthrax almost certainly directed toward its deadly conclusion by the crime family noted above, is ascribed to a man so harassed by law officials that he kills himself; and the case is closed. We are destroying our planet and my well-educated boss sits across from me at lunch and tells me that global warming is a hoax perpetrated on us by those wanting to make money off a brainwashed public. The candidate I most respect as our next potential president seems to have lost - at least temporarily - his passion for dispensing with business as usual, and his passion for change. The state of Texas steps up its passion for executing people of color and Latin accent. Proof upon proof upon proof of criminality in our White House is swept under the rug of jurisprudential and journalistic indifference. Americans worry about the awkward re-induction of Brett Favre into professional football and beg for offshore drilling, content that oil spills will not destroy their back yards.

Then there is my profound sense of futility as I smash my head against the walls of these imponderables, only to see them multiply as if mocking me and the handful of sane persons on this planet-in-peril. I spend and send my money to campaigns that mirror, in some fleeting fashion, my preponderance for not wishing to be a witness to humankind's final, and far from finest, hour as we slip into the cesspool of extinction. Will the cockroaches' decedents ponder our civilization as they pick through our fossils a million years from now? Or will only shreds of plastic endure, and will Earth's future owners wonder what flesh could have fossilized in such an odd manner?

I observe slack-jawed co-denizens of our world shuffle like zombies in The Night of the Living Dead to stand before a Best Buy storefront in anticipation of its doors unfolding to reveal electronically bedazzling wonders to their fried cortices. I notice last night as I wander a parking lot that I am embarrassed to admit I was in, that my car is the only one of several hundred that sports a political sticker of any sort at all. Radio stations and sports teams are resplendently represented.

And this is maybe the crux of the deal: I have no idea how to contact those with whom I can share my fears, angst, and very meager hope. I know these people exist. I hear them call in to progressive radio shows. I read their blogs and I see their comments left behind like breadcrumbs amidst the noxious thorns that surround them.

But I cannot find anyone at the end of the breadcrumbs. Oh, don't misunderstand me; I do find e-people. But I need to find people of flesh and blood. I have a hole in my gut that is as big as Jupiter that needs to be filled by conversation across a coffee table, not across a cyber-port. I want to shake the hand of the man and or woman who understands and shares this sense of dread. I want to feel my hand hurt as it is bruised by knuckles and fingers that have forgotten the physical act, and are an expression of a sense of friends-well-met. Or a sense of shared hurt and worry. Or a sense of revolution.

Are you out there? Do you live near me?