Letter to the LA Times

Republicongress is about to pass a budget this week, under the radar, and out to sea to benefit the likes of corrupt retired CEOs floating by on their yachts, drowning programs like healthcare and education even further down the fiscal priority scale. Enough is enough. I am officially mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!

I’m so mad, I can resist your labels. No, I'm not your stereotypical angry, biased media-loving liberal, even though I did invoke a quote from a classic, biased media-inspired film to close my opening paragraph of a letter to the liberal-slanting Los Angeles Times. Truth is, I’m just a faceless American citizen who really can’t take it anymore, let alone ingest any more talking head debates or news analysis. After November’s returns, I sat with my mouth open in disbelief, denial, and it closed in disappointment and defeat. Apparently, we’ve given the Republican Mafia enough capital to make destructive, lasting changes at home and abroad, and we could all go into details as to why this makes us sick.

But I’m fed up with the news feed, searching for a conspiracy between Bush and Greenspan, reading first-person accounts of soldiers in Iraq, widening my eyes at Tom Delay’s lobbyist-paid European golf tour. I’m tired of trying to rise above this madness by intellectualizing it, especially when it won’t cut off the political capital. No matter how many brilliant Seymour Hersh indictments I read, I still don’t understand how to translate this political passion from words on a page to action, impact, and what remains of justice in a society governed by ownership, value, and competition rather than compassion, goodwill, and integrity.

But for now, I have no choice but to attempt a shift from passive analysis to anger without giving up my magazine subscriptions. But even without them, I'm still an angry young worker who doesn't want to divert any of her hard-earned Social Security money to corporate-investment America, an institution she doesn't trust as far as FDR could budge from the Presidency during his four terms. I'm an angry, honest citizen who doesn't appreciate being lied to about my country's reasons for sending its military into a hostile region without an exit strategy. And most of all, I'm angry about this sham of a budget that Congress is trying to sneak past us this week, in the nick of time, just before the slow motion media begin writing the front page headline, "Bush Signs Budget."

Actually, come to think of it, go ahead and label me. I'm an angry liberal, and I'm proud to be angry about the way my tax dollars will be spent--on a budget that perpetuates the very same greed mechanisms that put the current Administration in power. My angry words may not reach the dead air in the Capitol, but it is my hope that they will transcend these pages because, until I learn how to lobby, this is the only way I know how to take action.