Yeah, I guess you're right. Rather than take what's right here right now and run with it we really should be living in a future that obviously hasn't happened yet (that's why they call it the future, I believe), and is defined by the random projections of very random people who dare not visualize a better sort of future, because, after all, entropy, stasis and death is where everything is headed anyway, no matter what now may look like and now matter what we do with it.

We should be visiting death row prisoners right now and telling them that Last Meal is full of saturated fats and probably peanut butter, too, and it'll kill them. That would be the right thing to do; way easier than trying to eliminate the death penalty.

You're absolutely right. We're all fucking doomed. Thank god you came along and reminded me of that just before I invested in this New Possibility.

Oh...shit...I already did. Guess I'm twice doomed then, whereas you -- you have all that presumed death doom destruction to look forward to. Some volk just have all the damn luck. I just keep hearing the voice of Hakim Bey, and it's driving me crazy, because it sounds so true when he says in "Utopia":

You know what everyone's greatest fear is? It is that all the dreams we have, all the crazy ideas and aspirations, all the impossible romantic longings and utopian visions can come true, that the world can grant our wishes. People spend their lives doing everything in their power to fend off that possibility: they beat themselves up with every kind of insecurity, sabotage their own efforts, undermine love affairs and cry sour grapes before the world even has a chance to defeat them... because no weight could be heavier to bear than the possibility that everything we want is possible. If that is true, then there really are things at stake in this life, things to be truly won or lost. Nothing could be more heartbreaking than to fail when such success is actually possible, so we do everything we can to avoid trying in the first place, to avoid having to try.

We really need to find these people who think like that and root them out, hunt them down and kill them. They're the real terrorists, the ones who keep telling us our fate is in our own hands. Bastards!

Thanks again for the breath of fresh carbon monoxide.

What a lot of us are really tired of is people pissing and moaning that either nothing will work, nothing will happen (never mind that stuff already has begun to radically change in the past two days, more than it changed in the previous eight years), but that since Obama became president "I still have diabetes" or "There's still hunger in the world" or "Injustice still exists", etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Where was the crew who could make the difference up til two, three days ago? Doing the same damn thing, pissing and moaning. Now we have a visible beginning and those same "humanitarians" are doing their damndest to sabotage the effort even before it's off the ground.

What this Presidency represents more than anything else is the fact that everything that needs to be done can be done, if only every single one of us will just stand up and do part of it. The goddam President can't knock the world off its axis by himself, in what will shortly have been 36 hours.

Are we tired of things being fucked up? Hell yes! That's why we brought about this highly symbolic change, this tabula rasa, this President as projection screen for our collective sense of what we can do, not what we can't.

See?

For the record, I cry at a lot of movies too, and I certainly cried during the inauguration of Barack Obama. However...

Anxiety after a long period of actual chaos almost doesn't make sense, to be blunt. We were better off the moment Barack Obama became President. Race is great fodder for conversations, but the real work for us is to start pushing behind the great wheelhorse of state as someone with more than half a brain is steering, secure in the knowlege that this can only get better, because we were previously circling the drain. That was the time for whimpering and dread, but we were instead in grumpy denial; some perverts were even enjoying the ride.

There is no rational case for despairing that we can't turn our act around. This isn't 1929 nor 1933 nor 1941 nor any other Bad Year. It's a damned good one, after a series of progressively worsening ones over an eight year period during which things could have wound up being far, far worse than they did.

I feel no fret, no "twinge of anxiety" over whether or not we can slowly and carefully back away from the edge of that abyss. The President has already demonstrated tremendous resolve. This is hardly the time for hand-wringing. That time passed while we were all being gluttons and idiots and laughing at the "fools" who were leading us, the all-too-willing, to the brink. Time was on our side. Now we also have a leader who is with us, to some extent even in spite of us.

Cringe in private, please. This is the hour of American resolve to be celebrated even as it is flexed. It may feel funny, but we'll get used to it quickly enough. We may even grow to like this knowing that our fate is, as it always has been, in our own hands.

My response to Brightstar - The Resurrection was posted as "no name given." I have no idea how that happened. Maybe it was an Act of God. Anyway, that's my piece of work, AJCalhoun, resident Devil's Advocate. I always sign my work (if with a pseudonym).

Just wanted the record to reflect that.