Over the course of the past several months I’ve been reading and thinking and reading and listening and thinking some more about stuff. I haven’t written much because, quite frankly, I haven’t had much to say and I’m growing more and more frustrated at not only the way things are but the manner in which people try to effect outcomes to change things.

Maybe it’s my personal transition from a solidly middle-class income to poor college student. Maybe it’s the culmination of many things, but I’ve come to a conclusion…a truism if you will, that goes something like this:

Nothing you want to happen to you happens overnight.

Now let’s think about this for a moment. What events happen suddenly, or seem to happen suddenly? Car wrecks, deaths in the family, job losses, terrorist attacks…the list goes on. Short of winning the lottery, there is nothing I can think of that happens suddenly that you would wish upon yourself.

The truth is, even most things that seem to happen suddenly don’t necessarily REALLY happen that suddenly. It’s a perception thing. So if neither the majority of good or bad things that happen to people, or groups of people, or situations, happen suddenly, then what the hell am I talking about?

Imagine this. You roll a marble on a hardwood floor. That marble will likely travel in one general direction until something affects its travel. If the floor is slightly unlevel, it will drift if one direction or the other gradually, gaining speed as momentum takes it left or right. If there is an obstruction, it will stop suddenly or bounce off the obstruction, and likely turn left or right, depending on the conditions of the momentum that was carrying it forward. Sometimes, due to momentum, obstruction or conditions of the hardwood floor, it will just stop.

If you take the example of the marble traveling across the floor as a metaphor for anything: your life, your causes, etc., etc., then you want to make sure that your roll your marble on the flattest, least obstructed hardwood floor you can find to ensure that; 1. You get where you want to go. And 2. You get there in the shortest time/distance possible. That, at the very least, would be the smart thing to do.

But people often aren’t always very smart, and instead of looking at the lay of the land and rolling their marble in a direction or towards a goal using the least obstructed path, most people just hurl the marble out there, in the same way they always have, relying on the hope, or emotionally driven belief that because the desired destination of their marble is right and pure and true, that their marble will defy the odds and get where they want it to go.

Rarely does this ever happen.

By the same token, rarely is the floor a wide-open, unobstructed, flat hardwood floor. More often than not, for the more complicated things in life, it’s a bumpy ever-changing maze filled with all kinds of obstructions and conflicts and things that you never imagined. And more often than not, full well knowing this condition exists; we roll our marbles out there emotionally, instead of rationally, expecting some guiding hand, or the supernatural force of our righteousness or the righteousness of our cause to carry us to our destination. And more often than not, we fail.

Think about it in terms of something just about everyone has tried to do at one point or another…weight loss. You can do a crash diet, you can do the fad diet of the week, you can buy an exercise video or ridiculous device off of an infomercial, and all sorts of other things to lose weight, but in the end, most of us don’t keep that weight off because we emotionally took some kind of short cut to our destination and never REALLY arrived at the place we were really trying to get to, just a place that looked an awful lot like it. Then, a month, or six months later, we’re right back where we were, in the first place, and we feel bad about ourselves or whatever, and we give up, or lash out at circumstance, or any other number of emotionally driven reactions that really don’t get us one damn inch closer to our goal.

So what’s the problem? The real problem is two-fold: First, we’ve taken an abbreviated path to our “goal”, whatever that goal is. Second, the goal we’ve chosen is a shortsighted, temporary goal that ignores the reality that we should be working toward a maintaining a healthy lifestyle, rather than some ridiculous and largely meaningless “weight target”.

The truth of the matter is that whether we’re talking about marbles or whatever, we have to recognize and focus ourselves on REAL goals rather than the shortcuts, and there is a process involved in getting to our REAL goal. That process, even though it’s tried and true, is more often than not, rejected by people because it’s too hard or inconvenient or whatever it is to them. Every time we reject that process we put ourselves further and further, deeper and deeper on an island of delusion that we have created for ourselves, grounded in the belief that if we just believe hard enough, the hard work it takes to actually get shit done will fade away and we’ll get what we want.

So when I look at people, regardless of education, ideology, or any other of the human conditions that we live in, who are doing things to get things done by doing them in the way THEY want to, as if to enforce their will on the rest of us, rather than respecting the process, a tried and true process, of getting shit done, and they’re frustrated, or emotional or whatever they are because if people would just listen to them the whole world would be a better place, I find myself wondering just what the fuck they expected?

The process exists for a reason, and that reason is to protect and respect all of us from the small few of us who would, if we could, unilaterally enforce our will upon the whole of us, because “ if people would just listen to them the whole world would be a better place”, which, I think, is a pretty good definition of fascism, because we all know that as long as it’s OUR will, it’s fine, but if it’s SOMEONE ELSE’S will, it’s not necessarily fine, and that process is not immediate, but a long and winding and a huge pain in the ass, because if it wasn’t, it would actually suck worse for all of us because it would seem like an immediate change, and as I said at the beginning of this screed;

Nothing you want to happen to you happens overnight.

Got it?

See, you can keep doing what you’ve been doing and keep getting what you’ve always got. You can bitch and moan to friends and colleagues, and get nowhere. If you’re a little more industrious, you can go to your favorite locally owned craft store, and build a sandwich board, and bitch and moan publicly on a street corner and get labeled one of those “bitchers and moaners”. If you’re really creative and not a total dick, you can organize yourself into a group of like-minded people forming a “bitch and moan” club that takes comfort in the familiarity of its favorite brand of bitchiness and moaniness, but ultimately gets nothing done. Or, if you KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY WANT, you can educate yourself about the issues and the process, insert yourself into that process, focus your attention on the path most likely to get you where you want to be, and slowly, and patiently build consensus around this idea until it gradually and deliberately becomes the change you wanted in the first place.

This means you don’t just hurl your marble forward and pray you don’t run into any obstacles, but you deliberately direct your marble through the maze of the process an inch at a time, knowing that the path will take you both forward and backwards, left and right, all the while grounding yourself in that ultimate goal. By doing this, keeping your perspective, and most of all, exercising patience, you WILL get to that goal eventually, despite the setbacks, obstacles, trials and tribulations that come with anything in this world that is worth a damn.

You’ve got to stay focused, and that’s hard. You’ve got to be patient, and that’s hard. But most of all, you’ve got to control your marble, and that’s, by far, the hardest part of all of it. If you do, you’ll get the thing you wanted, and if you’re really good, you’ll want something more, because the perspective you gain from the journey will make you better, and in the end, that’s ultimately what it’s all about.

… but I am glad that this year is finally almost over.

In all seriousness, this year has been just plain crappy for just about everyone I know. The economy has sucked, the political dialogue has been shrill, and everyone, whether they recognize it or not, is worse off for the wear. I’m not positive that 2010 will be any better, but I pray that it’s no worse. Here are some of the things that made me want to stab myself in the eye this year.

Republicans – I know for a fact that there are some sincere Republicans in this world. Some of them I am proud to call my friends. Unfortunately for them, and the GOP brand, they are not the ones that get phone calls from the media for interview requests. The result, is a national and state party that has positioned itself somewhere between the Know Nothing Party and a team of trained monkeys being fed a steady diet of Crystal Meth.

The GOP has been foaming at the mouth, and doing just about everything in their limited power to obstruct solutions brought by the President and Congressional leadership, while offering NO ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION, period. Yet somehow, through all the ridiculous rabidity of the GOP, the media has taken their non-position seriously, and reported it on a continuous loop as if it’s some kind of real alternative.

I hope they get what they deserve in 2010, heavy losses, but I fear that while their strategy won’t really “work”, it will appear to in the face of the next thing that makes me want to stab myself in the eye…

Democrats – If I were to write a book about the past year in Democratic politics, I think I would call it The Weakest Majority or Rudderless Politics. From the actions of many in Congress, and to a lesser degree, the President himself, one would think that Democrats have a fundamental misunderstanding of furthering their agenda or even the most basic tenets of majority maintenance.

From the ever-shifting rationales for opposing Health Care Reform to the unpopular sweetheart deals used to buy some legislators off, both houses of Congress, but particularly the Senate, seem mired in a “what’s in it for me” type attitude. It’s the kind of ridiculous self-hating stupidity that makes posts like this resonate with me, and pray for someone, anyone in the Democratic Party to show up with a pair of balls they haven’t borrowed from a lab rodent.

Some National Bloggers – I’m not really sure when it happened, but sometime during the last year I began slowly weaning myself from certain national blogs and/or bloggers. The cause, a persistent and annoying line of reasoning that went something like this: Any kind of negotiation regarding the long and grueling Healthcare debate is the complete and total abandonment of the progressives that got you elected.

Ugh.

Invoking the names of former and current “progressives” including the recently deceased Senator for Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, these individuals filled my inbox, and countered the national GOP’s steady stream of

NO!

with threats against fellow progressive Members of Congress if they didn’t deliver. Brilliant!

The issue for me is not that I necessarily disagree with the policy positions of these people, but that their tactics are nucking futs. Virtually every plea, every call for support, every post that flooded my inbox like year-long projectile vomit came from an adversarial position, littered with threats and this and that and the other, while ignoring that the legislative process is not a dictatorship, but a negotiation. With the subtlety and tact of a bull in a china shop, these individuals spent the entire year yelling “The sky is falling” instead of putting together a consistent positive message that the majority of the population, that doesn’t keep a running tally of every legislative burp, could get behind. In short, they Tea Bagged their way into irrelevance.

There most certainly is a place for issue advocacy in the political discourse. If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t be writing this right now, but for the love of God, build a message beyond a series of threats that you can’t deliver on! Keep doing the petitions, and the letter writing campaigns and the phone calling, all of that stuff is good, but don’t marginalize yourself with rhetoric that puts you further out on the crazy side of politics than the REAL CRAZIES out there. You’re not only hurting your credibility, but also your cause.

Tennessee Democratic Institutions – Coma and Aunt B have a couple of good posts up about some of the issues surrounding Democratic institutions in Tennessee, but I want to go a little further.

Anyone who thinks the issue with Democratic Institutions in Tennessee, from the TNDP down to the lowliest of lowly county parties falls on the shoulders of one man or woman is trying to deflect blame from someone who probably REALLY deserves it, that someone either being them, or someone they support. The truth of the matter is that they all have issues that have been around longer than I’ve been paying attention.

I could go on and on about all the crap that shoulda, coulda, woulda, but I’d just be rehashing posts from last November through February, so if you want to know what’s wrong, go back to those posts and apply it to just about everything that has a “Democratic” anything to it in this state, including myself.

In all seriousness, there have been some baby steps in the right direction, but from the TNDP and the Caucus organizations down to the county parties it’s just not happening fast enough.

I hope that by Jan 4th, when petitions are available for state races, there’s some kind of plan in place, at least that’s known by the leadership, that contests the 11 first term and the 10 second term House Republicans in November, in addition to dealing with the incumbents and any retirements/open seats that may come up, but I’m not all that hopeful. I haven’t seen a concerted effort from all the stakeholders to work together on anything but the House 62 special election and that was a nightmare. I hope like hell that November isn’t a replay of that.

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Here’s to hoping for a better year ahead, and for some of my “targets” to get their collective shit together. I don’t think I can stand a 2009 part 2: Electric Boogaloo.