We've reached Oz, my friends, travelling the Yellow Brick Road

I've changed the look, name and feel for this blog. To mark the changeover, I thought I better put an entry to announce the new direction of this blog. While it may still have some political news, war news, I have other blogs (too many) where I can contain political items, Blue Tones, and war items, Dying to Preserve the Lies. There is Back in the Days, Everything 1950s and 1960s along with several other of my blogs for other topics.

So where will I take this blog? Well, with the ground truth now being we do indeed have the uncertainty of Bush for another 4 years, it firmly looks to me like our country has indeed taken the Yellow Brick Road and wound up in Oz with the Wizard at the controls. When I had hope that the Wizard would be exposed for what he was, I still had hope for our country righting it's course direction. There was the slim margin of hope that the vote fraud, the electronic machines that put votes for Kerry into the Bush column in the hundreds of thousands across the states, the voter suppression and disenfranchisement done in very deliberate ways with very deliberate methodoly, that when all this was exposed and the public understood it had not gained the President it voted for but the imposter Wizard, that the country would indeed right itself.

That hope flittered away after Senator Barbara Boxer along with Representative Tubbs-Jones (two courageous women) stood together to contest the elector votes in congress and no other Senator stood On Record as contesting the vote, although had supportive things to say for Senator Barbara Boxer, and some few Representatives did indeed go on record as contesting the elector vote. So the elector vote went on record as noting George W. Bush as re-elected, for which I am entirely certain he will dismantle what's left of what was great about our country. Yet history was made, and the congressional record does show now the concerns, the proven concerns of a voting process that was highly manipulated by less than savory tactics to downright criminal vote tampering.

Now we do live in Oz, and unreality continues to become reality. Alternative universes exist side by side with mainstream media proclaiming the Bush alternative as the only universe and either a lazy or unwilling public (generally speaking) continues to assimilate the lies being told and integrating the lies into themselves as truth. Many of us see the Bush universe for what it is and know the lie after lie, deception after deception, and feel strongly the disconnect that goes with having to travel with one foot in one universe and another foot in an alternative universe.

So while in Oz, I need to resume my "life", what there is of it in these peculiar times where up is down, black is white, and find ways to continue the resistance while getting on with some of the normalcy of my life. The life I had before Bush invaded Iraq, before our young were dying in a foreign country that did not a thing to our country, before the torture of Abu Ghraib, before the carnage and killing of up to 100, 000 Iraqis themselves families with wives, husbands, children trying to live under the mantle of the Occupiers, before the campaigning that showed the worse of the worst side of politics, before the moral values people imposed their own immorality upon the entire country, and finally, the election which showed the near-end of democracy in being an election of the people, by the people and for the people.

Mourn I shall, continue the good fight, I shall, and along the way, there are still some cherished freedoms I have the priviledge to enjoy while my own son-in-law and nephew return for their second deployments in Iraq in the namesake of democracy. They know it for what it is, and I've known it for what it is from day 1 when this President invaded (illegaly) a country who was no threat to our own. Now all the troops are caught up in the undeclared draft while our own country cheers on the support the troops rally cry which is far from patriotic or national pride, rather the shame of our nation. For clarity sake, let me say here that I Do know how to separate the warrior from the war so I do not demean our troops, I demean the country that permitted this to happen and continues to live in willful ignorance about the facts of Iraq. I uphold the troops who are tightly constricted and conscripted with very little wiggle room for doing other than carrying out the mission and orders but I do not uphold the President who is the sole person to hold accountable and responsible for this horrific carnage to our troops and to a country scapegoated to be the Great Satan, the great evil-doers. The Great Evil-Doer presently occupies the White House and rules in Oz.

I shall go about now finding those precious gems among the dungheap. I've lived through the dungheap before, I shall again, but this is way beyond the safety or well-being of my own life, it's much bigger than that and so I tread new ground in that I am not dealing with the dungheap alone this time as we are all in it now. Life in Emerald City then, while the Wizard is at the controls, and how to survive it and hold onto humanity and dignity. There are still choices, many actually, and once I heard it said that even among the concentration camps, when people had been stripped of everything by their fellow human beings, they exercised their limited choices even when sometimes the only choice was how to die.