Grumblings from DC

Fear is high up on my list.

Sadness is right next to it. It's not frustration, surprisingly enough--I think I had just become resigned to the thought that the average person in the US is underinformed, uninterested in the world, and watching out for number one and number one's own view of the world, to the degree that every other person out there, and the space in which they live, becomes unimportant.

I had already become pretty convinced that we're headed towards a major painful split, and that there's little reconcilitation happening. even though there's still some sense that there's a majority of people who are levelheaded and decent, they're uninformed and unwilling to become more informed--not that they're going to be getting better information in the mediascape we'll be getting.

i had made a decision last year that I'd be living in europe within a few years. this has accelerated the process--I just don't think that it's going to get better before it gets much, much worse. Already there's rumbling around here about plans for war in Iran. There's emerging talk about tightening the grip against Castro, and I can only imagine what shape that might take with this batch of neocon zealots running the show. The one republican who was standing up to the far right wingers on the idea of supreme court nominations (Arlen Specter, of all people) just got spanked back into submission.

There seems to be no viable opposition to what is most certainly going to be a very right wing agenda. Moderates are too scared of upsetting anyone--particularly the right wingers, lest they be labeled babykilling liberals. Liberals are too dejected to dig out of our collective pile of tear-soaked kleenex and mount any kind of challenge. Libertarians are too much against organizing to matter--and too much attached to the idea that being a social liberal and economic conservative can still fit within the framework of the republican party to actually try to form some kind of coalition with anti-right-wingers.

The Netherlands may be where I need to be. I'll be checking them out over Thanksgiving.