"At Last, Left and Right.... find that they share a body. And that they both need it to be healthy. Nobody in their right mind, anywhere in the world, wants to see this country devolve into a wealthier and more frightening version of Mexico under the PRI. Demand fair elections now, for the sake of all of us who have fond feelings for the US Consitution: right, left or center. Demand paper ballots, and alert monitoring of any partisan ballot-stuffing shenanigans or racial profiling in 2004. To be the world's leading democracy, we need to act like one. We havent been living up to our hype, and we're losing our fanbase. Potentially fatal, not only to this country, but to the aims of Western civilisation since the Magna Carta."

Yes. We need to act like one. At least to keep on talking. Seeking understanding. Left, right, center. Patience for one's differences. For each soul's walk & education & experience & culture. For the courage it takes a person to speak [their] truth from the gut. The compassion each of us asks of each other, whether or not it's voiced in a contemporary way much anymore (in this time of cancelation, and displays of umbrage, and go fck yourself y' tool!, and a woe woefully diminishing sociological sense of humor).

SO true. Then. As much now? I don't know. I try to see its likeness in the people whose words today move me most. Some of those the same ones who moved me then. Only today they are ..well ..maybe less idealistic ..no, that's not the word. Less hopeful? Someone said as we grow older it gets more difficult to be sad than it is to be angry. Sadness wants to imply hope. More than anger, which leans toward reaction.

The evolution of that healthy body over the two decades (we experienced as beings) leaves me today with a memory of a warning expressed by Bezmenov sometime in the early '80s:

1• Demoralize  2• Destabilize  3• Crisis  4• Normalization. The calculated prescription of divide & conquer apparently put patiently into action some 30-40 years prior. Does prompt me to ask: Who feels like we're in what stage? And why? Who feels like we avoided it altogether? Or that it was a hoax? Or that I should shut up? 

Perhaps i read more into it than was intended. Maybe it was just about fair elections. I mean we were in recovery from the alleged (yet well documented) shenanigans that plenty Americans felt robbed Al Gore of his duly elected office. No doubt some feel it would be a completely different America (& different globally) had we experienced President Al Gore's cabinet, & platform beyond a mere prospectus. So its understandable if cleaning up the election process was the entire message. To me it read as more.

Moved by the words (the margins & between the lines), it read as so familiar to me then as if it were spoken on my behalf. True to my own thoughts. I could've said it myself. Didnt though. It was said so eloquently for me. For US. As is sometimes (in good fortune) the case with thoughts so well expressed.  I'm not sure it survived intact through the last decade or so. But I still agree with it. Coming up on 60 in a few weeks, I still try to maintain safe harbor for such a notion. We need to act like one. Not in some Borg sense. Not lockstep in fascistic horror. Not "It's my way or the highway" in ANy dystopian way. But as one people. One collective of many collectives of individual people born to unique circumstances. No way I can be totally alone in this.