2007 IN REVIEW – POLITICIZATION OF A PONDERER

In January my home here at the Dawg Ranch was flooded to two feet deeper than the surface of the pond, yet the fish all remained. A week later a rare snowfall blanketed the land and froze that pond to an ice rink surface for toads.

February welcomed this still snazzy iMac to be my broader window on the world outside my Dawg Ranch digs with its inclusion of iChat video as a way to see my friends during our conversations, although its log in process is has been dysfunctional for the past eight months.

In March I discovered Cornel West’s dynamic vision of socialism and his optimism for grass roots democracy among the disenfranchised youth of the US. The toads taught me how close to the cycles of the moon their behavior is timed. Continued rains threaten to create a rain forest amid the rolling hills of Tejas.

April fooled me by showing me the satiric ditties of Roy Zimmerman while taking away the life of my favorite role model of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Troutsky gave me the Thinking Blogger Award which I dutifully passed on to three, Pisces Iscariot, Bobby Lightfoot and Mr. Daymon at 22 Over 7, out of the five that fell to my lot. I have since discovered Karoline in the Morning and so have only one more to name.

Amidst a rare sunny day in late May and a gathering of friends, I began getting e-mails expressing a born-again evangelistic zeal in my formerly rational 40+ daughter to save me from hell by accepting Jesus as my savior. Encouraging this post,

Our debate of late
Has centered the tongs on the truth
The essence in that block of ice
Is directly between
So it can be seen
Jesus wants us to let God in.
Buddha wants us to let God out.

The dynamo
Behind the spark of life
As we reward our selves
With the karma laden canvas
We paint with our lives
Of what we think we see —
And of who we think it is
That sees it.

One thing
Endlessly dissectible
Eternally one
No matter what is done.

She has yet to acknowledge the poem or desist with passing ammunition to onward Christian soldiers.

Much to my surprise, my search for confederates in remote viewing research among my blog buds of yet curious minds got the treatment of a fart in church judging by the lack of response to the June post.

I declared July 20th the 176th day of rain in 2007 in exasperation of having too much water ruin my spring garden and retreated to the cyber world of Uru.

In August I found John Pilger to be a great reminder of the purpose and possibilities of journalism in an interview on Democracy Now. A week or so later Amy Goodman interviewed Naomi Klein about her book on the Shock Doctrine.

In September I tried a second blog, Canary in a Cave, in an idealistic, hardly realistic attempt to separate politics from nature, which didn’t last a whole month due to the political nature of mankind’s approach to nature of any kind.

October saw an expansion of a mutual exploration of truth evoked and encouraged by Red Dirt Girl and this quote from Joyce Carol Oates,

"The experience is there, the reality is there,
but how to get at it?
Everything I type turns into a lie
simply because
it is not the truth."

In November I discovered the political compass and have gotten pretty excited about its possibility of waking up an all too complacent US citizenry to the disparity between their best interests and the government agenda demonstrated on the political map by plots of presidential candidates in complete opposition to the fourteen readers who voluntarily contributed their coordinates to the data.

My conversion to a bona fide political animal was completed in December as I decided to vote in the 2008 election for Dennis Kucinich. I doubt I will vote for any other candidate if he isn’t on the ballot in November.

Overall I fondly remember making great new friends amongst my blog buds as we all rued the further continuous sinking of the US into global fascism. The unique capabilities of the interweb to generate lateral communications between individuals who formerly depended on vertical top-down government representation through the news media is slowly being realized to have the power to neutralize governments’ practice of settling their arguments using their misrepresented citizenry as canon fodder to out shout one another.

I wish you all peace, love and happiness in a more alert new year.