Motley Moose – Archive

I hate to do this my first weekend back, but I am hopping mad and need to vent.

Not five minutes ago, a now-ex-Facebook friend shared a photo with me.

Occupy DC yesterday was a hoot.  I had a great time.  I wish I was 20 years younger, because I really wanted to stay overnight.  But my spine just cannot handle sleeping on the ground any more.  Even just sitting on the pavement in the giant human 99 hurt.  Besides, my wonderful, handy, hard-working husband Just. Can’t. Cook., so I need to be here to feed him!

We have more occupy sites popping up — the Wilmington area, Dover, Annapolis, Baltimore, Philadelphia.  This is great.  We need the energy these gatherings generate to fuel us through the rough times we currently endure.  And we have to take this energy home.  We need to incorporate it into our daily lives.  So let’s think about this for a minute.  We need to occupy ourselves, and make this into a truly national, organic, holistic movement.

We need to occupy together everywhere.

(Crossposted from http://www.firefly-dreaming.com)

A little known fact:  I was once a Congressional intern, doing research on issues affecting the federal workforce.  It was the fall of 2007.  The season I spent on the Hill was one of the most intense of my adult life, even more stressful than going through a divorce while in a PhD program.  The nightmares I had every night that season were simply terrifying.  [Edit:  those of you who have been WYFP regulars might remember my diary “WYFP: The Nightmare Edition” that I posted in the fall of 2007.  It was written during this internship.  If you want to refresh your memory, please wait until after the boycott this week.]  Publicly, I put it down to massive stress induced by a hellish commute and the daily barrage of horror stories about outsourcing, of entire workforces being “sold down the river” to corporations and turned into contract labor.  But in the back of my mind, I knew there was far more wrong than merely ideology.  Something in the back of my head kept thinking that the entire mess was deliberate policy, that it served a purpose, and that the commonweal of the nation was not on the Republicans’ agenda.  That our very sovereignty — the ability of an informed citizenry to be heeded and respected by its chosen government, the needs of the many protected by that government — was being undermined.

Truthout published an article on September 3rd that confirms much of what troubled me so greatly that season, http://www.truth-out.org/goodb…  “Goodbye to All That:  Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult”, by Mike Lofgren, a former high-ranking GOP staffer on Capitol Hill, that rips the mask off the real agenda of the GOP.  None of this should be a surprise to any of us.