This will sound like a pebble in an ocean, a whisper in a rainstorm but I must ask you what is your guiding star? Are you pulled by politic or principle? It is a struggle, pushing you toward both ends. I know your need, your hunger for something more no matter your method, no matter your tone. Politics needs passion, it feeds upon it, draining us of our hopes, our dreams, leaving only a shell of apathy and dissent. And yet we open our veins to its jagged teeth, and yet we bare our souls to a maddening process certain to disappoint and mangle.

We are the romantics that dream of a better world, those that fight for the rights of ourselves and those around us. We are Democrats, we are Republicans, we are Independents, and we are Other. Soldiers all fighting in the same war on the same side. Soldiers following our lesser natures while engaging in bickering and posturing, impuning our brothers and sisters over petty disagreements for hollow pride in the name of “politics“, not fighting for our country but toward its unraveling .

We ought to be better, we ought to stand together and not splinter upon the burden of tiny fractures. Our cause seems unified but not our spirit, and I am bewildered by this, and I am guilty of this as much as you, if not more-my sins confessed and repented for, my behavior no doubt poised to repeat its devilish ways because we cannot be perfect but we can, with relative ease be better by adhering to our principles.

We can seek out intelligence and bravery in our elected leaders, choosing from within us the best of us to rediscover the lost art of leadership. We can respect and acknowledge the sheer patriotism that is ingrained in any person that throws body to the flames and spikes of this process, this pastime, and we can work to disavow any knowledge of those that would split our ranks for the sake of their own selfish feasts, damning not just our better angels to places of darkness but our nation to the ranks of the listless and bare. Salvation can come to those who battle not with fists and fiery rhetoric but who exercise restraint, compassion, and allow themselves the splendor of an open mind.

He’s one. One story, one splintered bit of something that used to feel whole, solid, and limitless. Futures fade faster these days and a regular guy with a strong work ethic, the kind of guy that used to find success, find a place in this country now stands on the slippery edge.

Its all necessity now, no corners left to cut. Daily calculations minus every dime and dollar from a dwindling pot down to zero while some things fall by the way side. And like that a credit report can be destroyed, and like that a house can hang by a thread, this is how someone becomes homeless, this is how good people stop paying their bills.

It’s been almost three years for him, three years of interviews and rejections, of struggle, depression, tears, and at times laughter because sometimes there’s nothing else. He’s been made harder by this ordeal, an easy smile not as quick to appear, fading fast, drowned by the anxiety that comes rushing in.

In September of 2007 it was the layoff, not unexpected after months of cutbacks. “Three months tops” he told his wife, reassuring her that he would have a job in three months. But nobody expected a downturn to turn into a crater, crushing millions of jobs, millions of lives just like his.

He was sick a few months later, his arms and legs heavy, heavier everyday while his lips lazily moved to form words that had previously seemed effortless. A little while later he was on temporary disability, this treatment and that chipping away at the disease, bringing him back but not all the way back, not sick enough to be considered disabled but not well enough to work without limitations as he always had before.

Still resumes went out, via email, in person, through the mail. More then a thousand, but less then ten thousand he estimates, with call backs and interviews few and far between. There were glimmers though, the job he had interviewed for prior to getting sick calling to offer him a job that he was more then capable of doing with only minor accomodations, their enthusiasm for him slowly sliding away as he asked for a downstairs desk due to his inability to climb stairs, “we never did hear back from them“ his wife says.

It was in the Spring of last year when the nightmare descended further down into the black and thorny, something they had feared ever since he had lost his job, his wife had lost hers. “It was like our emergency shoot ripped while we were falling” she says.

They sit now in their living room, those objects people often find solace in sold off to pay their bills and keep their house. His benefits have run out now, hers not enough for two people to get by one. Their COBRA subsidy ends soon with his medical bills still faithfully coming in, “almost daily, something, a phone call and then a threatening letter. We tell them we have nothing they tell us to borrow from our friends and family.” she recounts, a pile of bills maybe three inches thick in her hands.

Family has helped, a little here a little there but their not from the kind of folks that have much extra. They’ll get private insurance when their COBRA runs out, a little more money and a lot less coverage. They have no answer, no plan for when their modest savings account runs out, no idea what they can do that they haven’t done already in pursuit of work. “We have optimism” she says, “but not much.”

They are nameless and faceless in this piece because they don’t wish to advertise, because they feel it will pose a disadvantage to them in their pursuit of work if people know about their full struggle. They don’t want pity and they don’t want charity, they just want to keep floating, keep surviving.

They aren’t unique, no different then so many others. All lost in the anonymity of large numbers. Abandoned by the press and the politicians with their hollow and offensive pledges of allegiance and concern. But in that living room they are real, lives built up over time now torn, piece by piece by circumstances beyond their control. Its that kind of tragedy repeated over and over in this country that should shame us for allowing an absence of dialogue, resource, and intervention at a time when “optimism” dies, and lives like theirs fade away to smoke.

The paint that conveys tragedy, horror, destruction, and mayhem has become diluted from over use. A terrorist isn’t just someone who slams a plane into a building, someone who straps a bomb to their chest before boarding a bus. Now a terrorist is a kid that sets off a cherry bomb in a locker. Nazi, Fascist, Communist, all tossed around to describe politicians with no regard for the hard birth, the bloody origin of those words. Athletes, pop stars, and people famous for being famous now hold high the moniker of “hero”, sullied and weightless in contrast to its past.

Our tedious dramas that rise to mythical proportions, spread to the world by way of our self indulgent and unimaginative use of communications technology and our short fuse attention span. All guilty, all responsible for this sharp turn in our evolution. And now in the midst of yet another disaster, one that momentarily shakes us from the slumber of our typical distractions, allowing our humanity and compassion to rise to the surface we know, we must know that something will come soon to carry away our attention, lulling us back to sleep.

It is necessity, born out of the ever growing thirst for content, for news. Always feeding the beast, always ignoring the developments of yesterdays story in the interest of servicing tomorrows. Its nothing new, but its nothing good. The people of the Gulf know that soon the glare of the media will recede, our attention will wane, and our Government will find something new to fixate on. They know because “Katrina” disabused them of any contrary notion, eliminated in them the dream that help would not just come but remain until the job was done. They are on their own, a cause in need of unity adrift in a nation of individuals.

And if you think I’m being overly cynical, or inaccurate answer me this: Where was the sustained outcry of those marooned in modern age shanty towns, made up of lines and lines of trailers set down in a field, left lawless, preyed upon by drugs and crime after Katrina? Where is the ongoing, public effort, loud and unrelenting to help the relief workers who with bare hands and un-masked faces dug bit by bit to rescue and retrieve the wounded and fallen on 9/11? Even today they suffer crippling injury and illness, but they suffer it mostly in silence because no one tells that story.

We’ve got two wars in progress, an economic crisis still stepping on the throat of the under and unemployed, a Government that Left or Right ranges from worthless to absurd and we live in an age of animalistic cruelty. An era of religious fanaticism that is intellectually hazardous here and physically dangerous abroad. Bodies with no hearts found in Mexican mass graves due to the drug wars. Haiti is still a pile of rubble and ash not fixed by a star studded telethon or promises of relief and piles of dollars that have begun to diminish. In the Congo anywhere from 3 million to 7.8 million men, women, and children have died during a war that burns like an endless fire, with enough blood spilt to fill an ocean.

Yet in a world gone utterly mad, a world filled with unrelenting evil and pain we focus on our reality TV, our gossip, our fast food, our slave labor goods, blood diamonds, video games that take us to another world of fantasy or slanted reality. All in an effort it seems to run away from the screams, the tears, and the torture of our actual lives and the world around us. A world on full display to anyone who dares look, a world made small by our technology, thus robbing us of our ignorance but still allowing us and at times encouraging our apathy.

These are as much my sins as they are no doubt yours. But in this world, where there is good, where there is hope almost solely by the grace of those who rise when others fall, and stay standing while others collapse into a saccharine safe bed of permanent ease let us at least acknowledge these failings and reconcile that we have the capacity to be improved. Let us admit that while we have the opportunity to make better the wicked ways of this world, even the hope and want to do so, that when given a choice of the narrow and rickety, the rocky and hazardous yet righteous or the path of ease and comfort, of self over society, that we chose the latter. Let us pretend no more to be engaged, thoughtful beings that truly care, a silly and brief display betrayed by our typical actions. Let us do that or let us truly change, beating back a history that says no, a mindset that scatters when it should galvanize. Let us seek out our best nature, soaring towards our lofty hopes. Because in this world of good and bad, black and white-we spend to much time remarking on the struggle without entering the fray, occupying the middle, spending to much time in the fucking gray. ?

Perhaps Glenn Beck has gone one step beyond. We already knew that Mr. Beck had planned a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, a rally where, following a stirring countrified opening act Mr. Beck will reveal “The Plan” supposedly given to him by God. Yes apparently Martin Luther King had a dream, and Glen Beck has a hallucination.

While specific details of “The Plan” have been hard to come by, Mr. Beck did reveal a brief description on his website, painting “The Plan” as a “100 year plan for America that will provide specific policies, principles, and most important, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in Americas re-founding”. Whether those “action steps” will be chiseled unto a tablet and delivered to Mr. Beck upon a mountain are not known.

In keeping with the “delusions of grandeur” theme though Mr. Beck will also hand out the “Badge of Merit”. An award bestowed by Mr. Beck that will supposedly be more like the “Military Badge of Merit” briefly awarded by George Washington and not the Boy Scout patch given for helping little old ladies cross the street.

You see according to Mr. Beck the “Purple Heart” which serves as the official successor to the “Military Badge of Merit” is a creation of progressives. One that no doubt pales in comparison to the original and Mr. Beck’s update because according to Mr. Beck, the original “had nothing to do with being wounded in action”. According to Mr. Beck the “Military Badge of Merit “had everything to do with doing something of honor and integrity, something where you really put your neck out, not just getting shot…not that that’s…he was trying to build people that understood honor and merit integrity, god”.  Now is such insight from Mr. Beck, a man with as much real military service as my childhood collection of G.I. Joe action figures really worth enough to be insulted by? Yes and no.

On one hand it’s easy to see Glenn Beck for what he truly is and not be threatened or even riled. An opportunistic cartoon who has seized on a golden age of American anger and bent it to his will. Someone who uses the blind faith of his followers as a stepping stone toward the greatness his particular brand of madness permits him to believe he is fated to have. A snake oil salesman and disc jockey with amazing control of his tear ducts but sadly not his free roaming mouth. But Glenn Beck is also a dedicated weapon empowered by that growing theatre of like minded individuals who take Mr. Beck’s words as gospel without dissecting them and seeking even a hint of his numerous self serving motives.

The books, the website, “Fusion Magazine”, the television and the radio show, a burgeoning empire that paid Beck $32 million dollars last year aided by the audacity of Glenn Beck that grows with every controversial outburst. Does Beck know that when he mocks the intelligence of the President’s daughter that he will undoubtedly have to apologize for that misstep moments later? Of course, but that doesn’t dampen the free press and publicity, the focus on the “Big, Bad, Beck” that that gets him. The same is true of Mr. Beck’s comments on Wednesday, impuning the honor and sacrifices of thousands of American soldiers who were wounded or slain on the field of battle, including the U.S. military personnel who died on 9/11. Remarks made primarily to build the mythology of Glenn Beck even though they stand against his usual support of our military including his work with the Special Operations Warriors foundation.

You see for Beck the whispered contradictions and hypocrisy don’t matter. It’s the screaming headlines that advance his cause, the cause of Glenn Beck. And while that may be fine for one lone nut it is in the adoring masses, those who deify, mimic, and take his make believe antics at face value that trouble me because they just don’t seem to realize that cartoon’s are only meant to entertain, not enlighten or emulate.

“What I don’t like from the President’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,’”-Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky Rand Paul on Good Morning America, adding “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”

Rand Paul has discovered infamy as briskly as he found fame, displaying a harsh and aloof tone in relation to firstly America’s long celebrated civil rights laws and now the growing outrage over a disastrous oil spill that continues to rage out of control.

But while Paul has flipped and flubbed his initial victory tour, creating a firestorm with his remarks and then canceling on “Meet the Press” after what he called, “a long week” he may be exactly what the tea partiers want and what they should fear most.

Now I won’t pretend to hold any admiration for the tea party movement as it is ideologically the Joker to my Batman, but they do deserve respect. Raised from the cobbling of America’s individual screams, born out of frustration and a gnawing pull toward action no political force has identified with or been more in tune with America’s anger in a time of outright fear and utter disappointment the the tea party.

In many ways the tea party movement is the child of the “Hope” and “Change” movement that carried Barack Obama into office. Though ideologically dissimilar both felt the pulse of a nation, at once begging for something new and fresh, while nearly at the same point burning for something genuine, less slick, and perhaps closer to things remembered. It is in essence a forever waged war between the split personality of America, the ideologies of “the bright new horizon” and the “good old days” with different players, different labels, and the same dust ups and lack of a true resolution.

Whether the tea partiers are to be as effective as the Obama movement was in 2008 will likely be a matter settled in the coming years. But based on this primary season it appears as if they are off to a good start. That said, every movement needs a leader, someone in power who can carry the hopes and worries of a mass audience into the halls of power and create lasting change. In that and their ability to create any real legislative change the tea party has failed.

Efforts to thwart the stimulus, health care reform, and of course the election of Barack Obama himself prior to their branding as “tea partiers” have been glaring, while the reactions to those defeats have been much like a tantrum with threats and slight displays of violence that have served to keep this movement away from what it should prize above all else, mainstream appeal. A necessary evil in the pursuit of actual power.

That’s where Rand Paul comes in. The son of conservative deity, Congressman, and former Presidential candidate Ron Paul, Rand shows an appeal that flies close to the “aw shucks” regular guy persona that George W. Bush used to seduce voters (and say what you will about Mr. Bush but he was a successful politician). Its these tools that helped Rand Paul crush GOP establishment pick Trey Grayson in the primary and which make him a natural leader of the tea party movement.

And yet it is his recent statements and the ease with which tea partiers take to and applaud those statements that should be of concern to anyone wishing for a true tea party revolution. A revolution that does more then score election victories against moderate Republicans and a couple of woefully under prepared Democrats. A revolution that captures and holds the attention and admiration of a majority of people in this country.

In much the same way as it was his lack of intellectual curiosity that sunk George W. Bush, making him an unpopular cartoon here and abroad, it is Rand Paul’s intellectual rigidity that may damn him and all that hitch themselves to his wagon. Faithfully libertarian Paul is, as was mentioned before, made to be visibly uncomfortable at the thought of affirming the acceptability of the federal government’s banning of institutional racism in establishments public and private and then fiercely displeased that a President would dare use his bully pulpit to castigate a corporation, a foreign born corporation no less that oversaw one of the larger if not the largest environmental disasters in the history of the United States, raping the natural splendor of the gulf coast, depressing or deadening industries all along the coast in the midst of what is still a fragile recovery from a national economic meltdown.

Is this opening the tent and growing the movement or is Rand Paul and the celebration of him condemning the tea party to the fringes?

Such a question is not for me to answer, only pose. But if the tea party movement and Rand Paul continue to seek an American uprising, a revolution without the support of its people it will continue to feel like an invasion, loud, frightening, and easily undone by its lack of real firepower. Left or right without center is merely a group of shouters dancing in place to the song of their own voices, winning their little tournaments, feasting on the resounding cheers of a puny gathering and accomplishing little or no part of their agenda. That is unless the whole point was just to get on the ballot and make a lot of noise.