Where Do We Stand?

It's strange to be traveling when you're not traveling at all, but sitting in your daughter's apartment 2500 miles from home. Meanwhile, the world is spinning more rapidly than anyone seems to be noticing.

Protests: in many large cities, across the country, young people are standing up again, after decades of complacent malaise. Barack Obama motivated them, then dropped them and possibly lost them to a brand new movement. While he was being nice, instead of being right, it was impossible for people not to see that they had gotten stabbed in the back by everyone in power-- not right, not left, not center, but everyone.

It was easy to blame 2000-2008 on George Bush. We can do it still if we want and we'd be at least half right. But when piddling and watered down reforms become the best the system can offer, the system needs to be changed.

When the people who caused an economic meltdown are the same people who remain in power, new people need to be found as leaders.

When a very small elite (and we count ourselves within that elite) get to share practically all the economic blessings of a mega-wealthy society, there remain some sizable crumbs to be doled out to everyone else. But when those miserable crumbs themselves fall to cutbacks and resizing and shifts to overseas production and changing priorities and wars of occupation, the rest of society is going to react. 99% is a lot more than 1%, even if the fondest dream of many in the larger group is to someday get closer to the smaller group.

The question Plotnik has been asking himself is where does he stand? He lives a comfortable life in the Educated Bubble, as do just about everyone reading this blog. Some have somewhat more, some have somewhat less, but everyone has -- enough.

We all lost when the economy tumbled, but most of us still have enough. Where do we stand?

We all know congress is a sham, that they are out for re-election, not change. We know that as clearly as we know our own names. Where do we stand?

It's easy to laugh at Michelle Bachmann and the Tea Party. It's easy to laugh at the nameless youngsters 'occupying' Wall Street for a few hours or days or weeks. But we know we agree with plenty of what they all say. It's easy to figure out what we are against. But what are we for?

Things are happening. Decisions will be made without us as long as we chuckle at everybody who is shouting to be heard. The Great Plotnik doesn't know what he wants either, but his gut feeling is both right and left are going to join eventually in a huge chorus to throw out the amorphous middle. And then we'll have to choose.