A Modest Proposal

Four more years. My God, four more years.

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Well, we can sit here and gripe and cry about it. We can rant & rave about tactics and candidates' errors and "those idiots" -- all 58 million of them. We can sulk and cry in our beer and throw up our hands in despair.

Or we can try to make a difference over the next four years. Herewith, my modest proposal:

Let's get off our butts and DO something!

Do you know who your representatives are? All of them? Go to www.congress.org. You can find your national AND state reps. With contact info. See what legislation is pending; even click on a link to read the entire bill (have aspirin ready). Find out who serves on which Congressional committees. You can even sign up to get a weekly email showing your representatives' key votes. And then --

You hold their feet to the fire. You pay attention to what they're up to, and let them know what you think. Regularly. By email, by snail-mail, by fax, by phone, by showing up at their local offices. You speak your mind, and remind them constantly that you vote (and you DO vote!).

Write a letter to the editor of your local paper; make it on something you feel strongly about. And then do it again. And again. And again.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Washington D.C. is the only place that counts. Learn, if you don't know already, what's going on in your local area. Go to a meeting of your favorite (or least un-favorite) political party; heck, make the occasional contribution, if you can. Find out what your City Council is up to. Your county commissioners. Your state Public Utilities Commission. Your governor.

Yes, I know you have a life. No one can be 100% on top of all of this. (I certainly haven't been. ) Pick a topic, or a politician, or a congressional committee -- pick anything that matters to you. Learn what's going on. Share that knowledge with others. And scream to high heavens when something stinks.

Bush has four more years. OK. That's four solid years to hold him and his cronies accountable:

• accountable for every lake & river that's been ruined because the EPA has been defanged;
• accountable for every child who goes to bed hungry because their parents make an obscene minimum wage, or no wage at all because their jobs have been exported;
• accountable for the working poor who have no access to health care;
• accountable for every body that comes back from that unprovoked war we went into under false pretenses;
• accountable for every dollar Halliburton steals from this country;
• accountable for, to steal a phrase, what they have done, and what they have failed to do.

And keep doing it. Week after week, month after month. Make it a habit.

Many of us who give a damn can point to a defining moment in our political development. My daughter's, I think, was when she first heard Paul Wellstone speak. Mine was a generation earlier, a horrible long night when I was 14, spent curled up in a bentwood rocker, watching news broadcasts all night until the news came that Robert F. Kennedy was dead.

Something died in some of us that night. But something stronger had already been born -- the conviction that the political process IS worth working; that individuals CAN make a difference; that things CAN be made better, if only enough people care.

So, thank you Bobby. And thank you, Paul. We lost you both too soon, but the lucky among us learned lessons from you as from no one else. And if we live them, and pass them on, then your work, and your lives, were not in vain.

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw