Friday, July 07, 2006

Follow Me Here on Bush fatigue

Follow Me Here is the blog I read that's most like this one -- though FMH is more popular and more outward directed. Recently FMH wrote a retrospective post about years of blogging. I particularly emphathized with this portion ...
Follow Me Here... : 07/02/2006 - 07/08/2006

... Third, I have an incredible degree of Bush fatigue; it is not that I cannot get outraged anymore, but there is only a finite roster of ways in which a government can lie, cheat, steal, kill, destroy, and oppress. Bush and his minions have long since done them all; I have long since taken note of them here; nothing surprises me, and my outrage is constant and numbing.

And I have only a limited tolerance for my own frustration and despondency that a more effective movement of opposition has not arisen in response to his outrages. And I have no confidence that weblogs like FmH are change agents. (I don't know what would be effective activism these days, I guess, but I can no longer rationalize as I did for so long that FmH was an integral form of activist activity)...
I also started this blog partly because I felt compelled to do something about the terrible choice America made in 2000 -- or that was made for America. Something beyond campaign donations and volunter efforts.

After Bush was reelected, however, I couldn't pretend any longer that anything I wrote was going to make much of a difference. I, slowly and reluctantly, accepted that I didn't understand America.

Sure the media has screwed up. Sure some powerful people have used a lot of money and dirty tricks. At the root of things, however, is an American public that doesn't care, doesn't understand, and doesn't want to know. I can't fix that.

Like FMH I've mostly given up on political blogging. I'll toss in a few reminders here and there of the most egregious sins of this administration, but in general I'll just assume they're methodically dismantling our democracy and destroying our physical, economic, cultural and social world. Same old, same old. America has chosen, and I'm about ready to march off to Galt's Gulch (oh, wait, you don't let in our sort? Oops ...)

I do enjoy writing about ideas and trends though, and I'll keep doing that -- if only for my own amusement ...

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