Dollars that is.
Perhaps I don't get out enough. But having no face to face conversations with my political peers and seeing the world through the eyes of liberal bloggers, I became and continue to be apprehensive that we are a nation of complainers. Exposing wrongdoing is not complaint even if your post repeats the news but extends the reach of the news. Making sure people all know you are wrought up and indignant at the wrong doing will only change the minds of people who barely have one. Conservative talks shows seem ample demonstration of that.
Not that it hasn't been fun finding clever new ways to describe the mendacity and iniquitous selfishness permeating the politics and corruption Bush has brought out of the boardrooms and the woodwork but what has that changed? Who hears your message when you are the only one who wants to hear it? If Rove has found Bush and Cheney a way to appeal to the worst in us, those of us not seduced must do more than complain unless we want Rove's strategies to be rewarded again or at least not loose as soundly as they deserve.
Am I saying you should do something? Yes. Yes, even if by proxy, even if you can't leave your keyboard. You could give money to people who are at the fronts of the sometimes pitched somtimes simmering battle to keep elections honest. You could support news organizations that work as hard at not being bought or swayed by any outside money as they do at pulling together their stories. [I give Truthout.org about $100/yr and about the same to my local PBS which produces Frontline and airs Charlie Rose for me]. You could scroll down to STATE BLOGS on the left sidebar of myDD and click through to the blog for your state...they have lots of things for you to do (well, in Massachusetts they do ;-)
I bet lots of you give at least a little, let me know what you think the worthy causes are. With only eight comments in two weeks, I know my little cause [which, I admit, just puts a $pear point on what is basically automated complaining] is going to be my own little project for a while. That's OK. I wanted to keep my PHP/mySQL up to snuff anyway. I am just going to go forward with this as time and cash permit. Is the threat of a boycott amount to "doing something". Not sure. To control where we spend our money is a kind of power we all possess to the extent we have any money. One could say there are the vote$ you give and the vote$ you withold and each could cause change. The witholding might seem easier to do if you haven't got much money to spend. That rich people are conservative is only an average blurred into a generalizaiton. That poor people won't vote conservative is an assumption utterly flattened in the 2004 election if not others. In other words, whoever you are, you are not too poor nor too rich to get behind liberal concerns for injustice, favoritism toward the wealthy or the despoilation of nature with something more $ub$tantial than complaints.
I am perfectly damn serious. I don't "like" paying all the taxes I pay. Wealthy people don't become greedy because they are wealthy, they can just afford to exercise their conscience [sick and selfish or munificent as they are endowed] more effectively. Making a good income and being against all kinds of taxation is inconsistent and selfish unless all the tax is being misspent on wars and the already-rich freinds of the governemnt officials in charge of spending.
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