CHANGES

"Changes"

I still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets…

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the stranger)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the stranger)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man…


I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence and
So the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware
of what they're going through…

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the stranger)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't tell them to grow up and out of it
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the stranger)
Ch-ch-Changes
Where's your shame
You've left us up to our necks in it…



Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the stranger)
Ch-ch-Changes
Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the stranger)
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon you're gonna get
 older…

DAVID BOWIE Lyrics

           

 I still don’t know what we were looking for.  Did we really think our public servants would serve us?  What, in the recent past, points to any sane, well-placed hope of that?   It seems it has all been said.  It seems futile to see our representatives as the heirs of those who wished that America be better.  It feels familiar, this almost indifferent despair, an oxymoron metaphoric of  “OUR PUBLIC SERVANTS.”   

This “sequester,” a word more appropriate to its application defining the forced isolation of jurors to prevent tainting the process of coming to just decisions, was hopeful in the extreme, and hopeless in reality.  But, to be sure, we have come to know that those so entrusted with the real well-being of real human beings would default, would disappoint, would destroy. 

And, I do believe, this dangerous group, capable of saying anything, doing anything—no matter the dire consequences, no matter where the pieces of shattered reason and civility will scatter—are bucking real change.  Yeah, change that they do not want to accept.  Change that scares the hell out of old, rich, powerful, white men.  Change that feels like a battering ram to their elite status.   Colorful change, not exactly the shades on their conservative palettes.  So, we get fucked, filibustered, and hear fanatical, fantastical rhetoric from token characters, like Republican Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who bears frightening resemblance in the lack of reasonable, needed boundaries in his impassioned and irresponsible rhetoric, as much as he does facially, to Joe McCarthy.

         “Friends Of Hamas?”  Are you fucking kidding me?  Or is it now, “…are you now or have you ever been, Chuck Hagel, an anti-Semite on terrorist payrolls?”   Thank you, Breitbart and bloggers for that sarcasm-turned-red meat sound bite, used, I hope, to the outing of the severely insane and dangerous in our legislature and their equally insane and dangerous constituents.  If you are that hungry, if your constituents are that hungry for hatred, lies, distortion, and destruction, I’ll sit by while public opinion against you gathers to critical mass, and sell tickets to your public damning.  IGNORANCE ought to be combatted, not used as a "viable" political strategy!!!  FOR THE AMERICA OF LINCOLN:  IGNORANCE IS NOT AN OPTION!!!  STAGNATION IS NOT AN OPTION!!!  We grow from CHANGE!!!  I so wish now that I was blogging way before coming back today, and that my blogs would have been so highlighted.  For honesty and well-considered insight, for bravery not bullshit.  For an embrace of the changes that the fearful crazies are falling all over themselves—and us—to buck.  To all of you I say, that the people that you spit on are quite aware of what they’re going through as they try to change their world.  Where’s your shame?  You’ve left us up to our necks in it…A million dead-end streets you lead us down...Trying to make us lose belief in CHANGES.  I stand committed to see you choke on CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES!

            Change.  The Catholic Church’s pope is “retiring.”  Not in the code book, Benedict.  In a world that has always been devastatingly influenced by religion, as much, if not more, as it has been healed or aided, this is a dangerous, disturbing development.  You should have, from the beginning, from your days as the Prefect of the Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith—otherwise known as the Holy Inquisition, which we all agree, needed a make-over—when you stated that sexual abuse cases must be directed to you, to your office, you should have defrocked “priests,” had them put to trial, and made to register as sex offenders, after serving prison sentences.  Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa...You protected them over the children—THE LAMBS OF GOD!!!  And then the Conclave makes you the Good Shepherd???  So inured are you and the Vaticanisti to the prevalence of this horrific crime, you accept the white dress and the scepter, but you must also accept the SIN!!!  Since God is truth, where’s Truth now, then, throughout your prefecture and papacy???  If God is love, where’s the Love for those victims?   You, so erudite, so brilliant, so much better suited for professorship, why did you accept the papacy if you could not live it out until death, suffering as Jesus did, unto death?  You abdicated responsibility in every way that most matters, if we are to believe in the basic tenets of Catholicism, decency, and the essence of God.  Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa...  And now you abdicate when a “reformed,” “modernized” (a shout out to the Second Vatican Council; now I believe we need a Third) ancient religion can serve as some kind of balance to the fanaticism of extremism in Islam—the fast growing religion in the world, with this small segment terrorizing its true adherents and the West, the East, the North, the South.  So, now off you will go to a cloistered nunnery, take the robes of a monk, and retire from the world for a life dedicated to prayer.  Well, pray hard, Joseph Ratzinger.  Pray for something good to come from the abdication of implementing canonical law, protecting criminal “priests,” but, most of all, pray for those Lambs of God and the renewal of goodness, and greater progressivism (yeah, right), and the uplifting of women religious (yeah, right!), and inclusion of homosexuals (YEAH, RIGHT!).  Again, CHANGE is a motherfucker.  BUT, so is karma (a most catholic—read that as small "c," “universal”—Truth, which has its counterpart in Catholicism as well, but does not nearly sound as clean, clear, or pretty...Purgatory anyone? How about Hell...).  Yeah, the children that you spit on are quite aware of what they’re going through.  Where’s your shame?  You’ve left us up to our necks in it…A million dead-end streets you have led us down...Trying to make us lose our religion as you fight CHANGES...

            I don’t know what I was looking for.  Decency?  Constancy?  Consideration?  Fairness?  Humanity?  That those who take SACRED oaths to SERVE, in Congress or Conclave, ought to adhere to them and do their just service?  To expect is to risk disappointment.  BUT, why should we abdicate the reign of Reason, and believe it is too much to expect?

            I don’t know why I waited so long to commit to writing again.  I have been falling under the well-designed acts that the unreasonable hope will lead to despair.  I admit, I have been feeling that the weight of “fighting the good fight,” in a world so ass-backwards, so difficult, so filled with power in the hands of the irresponsible and selfish has hurt me, held me under.  For that, for my “abdication,” I am sorry.  But, at least I found the strength to surface.  I hope I can hold my head above the troubled waters for more than just a little while.  Change is a motherfucker, but, at least I’m fighting the good fight: to try to make it happen.

Thanks for reading,

Joan