What to do?

[forsyth]

Katherine has another post over on Obsidian Wings about the torture bill the President is going to sign, and the innocent people down at Gitmo. And like one of the commenters said, "What am I going to do? I'm going to go to work, come home, get dinner, sleep, and do it again tomorrow." But what can I do? The President sure as shit doesn't care. He was the one pushing for these atrocities from the beginning. The Republicans in Congress don't care, and they control the Congress. The Media doesn't care enough to even investigate this properly and put this anywhere other than buried in an editorial or on like page A58. I've sent letters to the editor to my local papers, none of them have even bothered to reply. When I discuss this with people, I mostly get told to "shut up about politics", because people either don't care or don't want to know.

So what else can I do? The people in charge are actively for this kind of evil and don't give a shit what I or anyone else thinks. I guess there's nothing to it but to get them out of power, which I've been doing parts to.

But still, fuck.

Comments

[leticia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what they all say. Which is why no one's doing anything. "Since no one else is doing anything, I can't do anything."

So what am I doing?

Not a lot. Yesterday I got a headline in the paper changed; that's something. The violence in Iraq hasn't /peaked/, I said. Do we know it's not going to continue up? The word was changed to 'surge'.

But that's really nothing at all. It's a smalltown paper, read by a highly polarized smalltown.

So I'm every bit hypocritical in challenging that statement.

I have a job; I like having a job. I'm trying to build on a long distance relationship. I have concerns that eat my money, that eat my free time, that will eat my vacation days. I 'can't' just go running off to protests - they don't hold them close enough for me to participate without missing work.

So I go on excusing myself, but, to quote Les Mis...
"Who cares about your lonely soul? We strive towards a higher goal. Our little lives don't count at all."

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Well, that was part of my point, but more of my point is it really doesn't matter what I or you or anybody else do (barring revolution) as long as Bush is the President and the Republicans are in charge of Congress. They're getting exactly what they wanted. Maybe not the results, but everything that's been done has been their choice. And unless we can get rid of the Republicans, these things will keep happening.

Ideally, this would end up discrediting the Republicans for at least a decade to a generation, but the Democrats haven't been pushing that, and the media tries too hard to be "objective", so I guess the two best things to do are to a) do whatever to get Republicans out of office asap, and b) keep pointing out this is all the Republican's fault, and choice.