Lives in the Balance

“They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us everthing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars.” *

    I have been asking myself how could any thinking person who makes less than let’s say $100,000 a year possibly vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on the Republican ticket?

   And then I remembered this song by Jackson Browne.  The singer goes on to ask

 

"I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they're never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire." *

   Well we do know who the men in the shadows are. They are once again attempting to run our country and the world.   And we now know that with enough money or clout or spin, call it what you will, but in today’s world, elections are bought and sold as easily as a used car or a time share condo in Palm Springs.

     Just look at the lines people will endure to get the new iPhone, x-box game or watch a new blockbuster.  It’s hype, pure and simple.  It’s the new gotta have, can’t live without and my neighbor just bought one.  But the fundamental problem with all this is that these latest and best items are sold by the New Guard.  The Bill Gateses and Stove Jobses.  The old guard  still sells guns and bombs and fear.  While they were retrofitting the old, already proven model, they missed out on the New World Order and so now they push their product into remote corners of the globe where every villager must have a gun or a tank or a missile.  Because the people living in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Liberia and Sierra Leone just gotta have it, just like their neighbors do.  But in their cases, all too often these consumers gotta have it to survive.

   And so I am proposing that this Old Guard get out of the business of destruction and get on these new band wagons of immeasurable profit and start selling the toys and gadgets that do not kill, oppress and tyrannize people. 

    Maybe it’s too late for that.  Maybe the New World order is too firmly entrenched in these 21^st Century foxholes of innovation but when we finally stop electing these power brokers and influence manipulators, then maybe we might once and for all see in peace in our lifetimes.

   And this starts with us here, with the coming election.  Let’s not meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  Let’s reelect a President who wants to build and not destroy.  Let’s invest in renewable energy, people and America and not on spent shell casings and bombs. 

    Let’s once and for all, take these men who remain in the shadows, out of the dimness of anonymity and backstage manipulation and let’s do this before our neighbors have to pick up a “gun or a brick or a stone.”* 

    Let us not reward the men who make fortunes selling weapons and reward the man who sells dreams and possibilities and hope and the future.

    It is like Jackson said,

And there's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs.*

    You may say I'm a dreamer

    Stop the Madness

·         * From, Lives in the Balance by Jackson Browne

 

         www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ElFoD_JTx4

                                                                                                           John Stover  10-10-12