This week I listened to a young man from Peru speak truth through power about the effect of the Peru Free Trade Agreement on his country ... I wondered where have all the flowers gone. Search engine results suggested Monsanto and Exxon would know.
I also listened to Howard Dean, Chair of the DNC and Senior Strategic Advisor to K Street firm McKenna, Long & Aldridge (contact him indirectly via a web form--www.democrats.org/page/petition/chairman--or directly via email--hdean@mckennalong.com) pontificate about that ever-changing will-o-wisp called the "public option" .. I wondered where the American people have gone. Rereading an old essay suggested that Ralph Waldo Emerson knew.
In a speech delivered August 31st 1837, he said: "The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things .... The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food ... sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm .... men in the world of to-day are bugs ... are called `the mass' and `the herd."
Due to a scandalous lag in the history of ideas, we have forgotten that we are human beings first (one people, one planet, one struggle) and that medical care is a human right (UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights, 1948).
Emerson concluded "If there is any period one would desire to be born in, — is it not the age of Revolution .... This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it" (read the entire speech at: www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm).
The time is now and the question, what if, if anything, we the people are going to do? Wait for leaders in name only to approve more "free" trade agreements that lead to the slaughter and displacement of indigenous peoples (like we did to our First Nations)? Wait for them to make a patriot-act style health insurance bill law? Or ... ? The choice is ours.