I think I’ve told this story before: Once had a colleague, once, used to call in IT when his computer would break. And the IT guy would stand over my co-worker and painstakingly explain what exactly had gone wrong, and how he intended to change this or that to make sure it never happened again, and it would go on for precisely as long as CW could stand it and then he’d get up, look the IT guy right in the face, and yell, “FIX IT!”
We don’t care who had to give what to get what, out here in the world where it’s cold and we’re broke. We don’t care how important this is politically to anybody, or why what we were promised — fixing a broken health care system — has now been watered down to an expansion of the current health care system we’re required to subject ourselves to. We don’t care that some conservative Democrat had to explain it to his district, or somebody somewhere pissed Joey Lieberman off by calling him a dick on her blogso there motherfuckers eat it for breakfast and lunch, or that Harry’s trying really hard, or Obama never promised this or that or the other thing.
We just want them to FIX IT and not make us a party to their unending bullshit.
p>Maybe that’s childish. Maybe everyone I know should be invested in every single turn of every single screw, especially the screws currently sticking us to this big wooden cross, but honest to God, people are working three jobs just so their kids can have something, anything, under the tree this year, or maybe go to community college for a year or something, or stay in their homes. I have several neighbors in foreclosure right now. And everybody’s tired, and everybody’s scared, and everybody I know is about ten seconds away from catastrophe, and that catastrophe might right now be lurking in somebody’s lungs, or bones, or heart.
We elected these people to FIX IT and they’re not gonna do that. At least, the watered-down bill they’re going to pass in the Senate won’t do that. Not even close.
But my question is always: What’s next? Given everything we know, and everything we think we know, and everything we’ve been saying all along, what’s next? Because we can’t stand here bitching all day long about how we were betrayed. I’m giving us a statute of limitations of probably next week sometime, or whenever Joe pulls his dick out of America’s ass, so I’m not saying don’t be pissed, I’m saying … we’re pissed, then what?
Because as much as I sympathize with everybody sayingkill it and move on (and I do) and everybody sayingfuck this and I’m done (and I do), we have what we have and anger isn’t a plan. I feel in some ways like I felt in 2004, just after the election: Lots of people are going to get unnecessarily dead from others’ stupidity and venality, and we tried our best to stop it, and we failed. But we can’t sit here forever. It’s the governing principle of my entire life: Get back up. Even if you don’t know what for, even if you don’t know where to go from here, get back up. I said it in 2004 and I said it in 2005 and I said it every other goddamn day in 2008 when we were losing on FISA and I’m saying it now. We don’t have any other way to do this. We don’t have any other choices.
What we can choose, however, is where we go from here. What do we do next? Do we celebrate getting any kind of bill passed at all, even a toothless one like this, and work on pushing to improve it? That would certainly seem to be the easiest thing to do. Do we primary the SHIT out of Lieberman this time and every other worthless spineless conserva-dem on the planet, organize moneybombs and the like? That would be the most satisfying, to me at least. Do we forget politics, and turn to charity, and help those who do give a shit, since our politicians clearly don’t?
I’m honesty asking. I don’t have the answer.
A.