birth of a blog

It started with a stolen election. Not the first, probably not the last, but without a doubt a historic one. The second millennium of Christendom ended with a bang, and since a dimestore cowboy had freebooted his way into the executive chair, it sparked a third world war, one that is just now ramping up and shows no signs of ending for a very long time.

Times that try men's and women's souls. Electronic gadgetry, along with older, less hightech, more time-tested methods of bullying voters out of the polls, were leveraged into a corporate takeover of the American state. Some of us watched it happen, day by mindblowing, gutwrenching day, watched it unfold before our very eyes. We fought and screamed. We are still fighting, kicking and screaming. We are also thinking together, talking low and taking our stands.

Most of America did not watch, do not even know it happened. The press corps of corporate syndication said look the other way, watch that spoof of real news the Peterson trial, gawk at Desperate Housewives. And so America is choosing pop culture over democratic culture, Walmart consumerism over global justice and world citizenship.

This blog, like many others, is being brought to birth amid the mouldering embers of the latest strike on native soil in GWBush's war of terrorism on every fragile living thing that is good, just, noble, beautiful. Friends will be invited to join, and I hope it will become yet another gathering place for us to think out our radical revision of this American life. I will be publishing my thoughts and visions, observations and complaints, my darkest fears and most brilliant glimmers of hope.

It's time for clear thinking and radical action. Radical -- from Latin for root: let's get our fingers dirty in the gardens and the wastelands of this five hundred year old NEW WORLD of dark tragedies and lofty idealism. Let's pull and tug and grasp it by the roots, and get the grassland prairies, the forests, the wetlands to flourish with the evergreen of democracy again.