| 28 April 2006 Green I have a confession to make. I woke up green. I could see the color on my arms, and spreading across my face in the mirror. This is not a good development for a man who lives in a building known as Big Pink. It clashes. There is nothing to do but accept the consequences. As of this morning, I am announcing that I am personally responsible for the man in the White House, and his Vice President and his Secretary of Defense. I am personally responsible for Global Warming, and the attendant violence swings in the weather, and you may as well take it all the way. I take full responsibility for the drowning of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The buck stops here. If no one else will do it, I will. I have voted for the Republican at the top of the ticket since I earned the franchise to vote in the mid-term election of 1970. I believe I voted for Richard Nixon in 1972, so you can add Watergate to my list of crimes. I voted for Ronald Reagan twice, and was proud of my Cold War Service, and I am still waiting for my victory parade, even if I miss the vanquished Russians. I certainly prefer them to the tin-pot dictators who are awash in petrodollars, rich beyond their wildest dreams. And some of their wildest dreams are to murder us in our beds. It is time to come clean and ask you to do the same thing. My commitment to the Grand Old Party has been wavering for more than a decade. Privately, I wondered at what we had done in the first Gulf War. We had ejected the aggressor from Kuwait, and I wondered why we abruptly stopped at the border, with the beast on the run. We could have been in Baghdad in a week, and we could have avoided the messy little revolt we sponsored the next year that left Saddam standing, and the all those Shias and Kurds dead in the north and south. As a creature of the government, I held my silence, and kept my loyalty to those elected to lead us. I did not like Bill Clinton because he made me uneasy. He was too much like the rest of us to be fully trusted. He was smart, sure, but seemed to have no core set of beliefs except what was expedient. It was not until I got up this morning that it really hit me. I am tired of leaders who are fervent believers, yet seem to believe only in the hand of Providence to guide the ship of state, with the assistance of fellow believers. I want a smart leadership that can make compromises and work the ponderous levers of the government. I you think I woke this morning and decided I wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton, you would be wrong. I don't trust her any further than I can throw her, smart of not. But I am confessing my life-long complicity to the Republican Party, and renouncing it. I did not vote for open borders. I did not vote to mortgage my future to the Chinese. I did not vote to change the earth's climate, and I did not vote to bankroll the Global War on America. At least I did not intend to. So it is not an easy thing to acknowledge that I did. I know that Hugo Chavez, that little pipsqueak, has got us by the short-and-curlies, I am tired that our good kids in the 82nd Airborne seem to the recurring answer to our bankrupt energy policy. Maybe it is the howl about the “windfall profits” that the oil companies are making that set me off. It is so lame and so business-as-usual. Why would you whip a dog for acting like a dog? The people I elected have followed a course that guaranteed this would happen. I think we should tax the Executive Branch, starting with the ones that grew up in the oil business. I want someone in this town to stand up and say that gas will immediately cost $4 bucks a gallon, and float a dollar surcharge above the market price to encourage creative approaches to wean us off imported crude. I want wind power and investment in clean coal technology, and better and safer nuclear power. I want to be able to drive a car powered by vegetable oil, just the way Dr. Diesel invented them to be. I want significant investment in geothermal and natural gas infrastructure. I want to bail out the automakers in Detroit, since we will have to do that anyway, and get on with it while the bailing can provide some common good here at home. I want someone to take this seriously. We are a cleaver and indomitable people, or at least used to be before we super-sized our lifestyles. It is about time we shed the lethargy that pervades the true believers here in Washington. If we cannot accept the evidence of our senses that the world's weather is changing, we should be doomed. If we are so weak-minded that we cannot understand that we are funding the weapons programs that can be used against Europe next year, and against us the year after, then we completely deserve what is coming. The only people fighting the war are some brave enlisted kids, led by some increasingly jaundiced Captains and Majors. No one else is even close to being engaged in the battle for the future. As of this moment, this morning, I declare my independence. I may be personally responsible for everything that has gone before. But no longer. I cannot say that I am going green, despite the evidence of my senses. That color has a legacy of feel-good pacifism that is just as much a recipe for doom and the cynicism of Karl Rove. I want to form a coalition of people who love this earth, and love this country. I want to join a swelling tide of people who are clear-eyed enough to see the disaster that is slouching toward us. I want to reject the corrupt Republicans who replaced the corrupt Democrats of yesteryear. There will be plenty of time for corruption later. We have to save the Republic, and the planet first. There may be time to mobilize and triumph. It will not be easy. But the earlier we start, the less pain there will be in the long run. But Lord Maynard Kenyes had a saying about the consequences of the long run. I am not going to wait until 2008 to figure out a policy that works. I am willing to tinker a little bit, and maybe act like I care about the future. What about you? Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |