PROLOGUE

November 5, 2012:

"Despite all the hardship we've been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I've never been more hopeful about our future; I have never been more hopeful about America ... I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside - that despite all the evidence to the contrary, that we have something to keep fighting for. America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try."

     - President Barack Obama, from his victory speech on Election Night, 2012.

April, 2016.

From 1999 through 2014, the age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States increased 24%, from 10.5 to 13.0 per 100,000 population, with the pace of increase greater after 2006. [...] Suicide rates increased from 1999 through 2014 for both males and females and for all ages 10–74. [...] After a period of nearly consistent decline in suicide rates in the United States from 1986 through 1999, suicide rates have increased almost steadily from 1999 through 2014. While suicide among adolescents and young adults is increasing and among the leading causes of death for those demographic groups suicide among middle-aged adults is also rising. [Footnotes deleted]

     From CDC study "Increase in Suicide in the United States, 1999–2014"

Friday, June 3, 2016.

"[May’s job numbers were] considerably below both expectations and the pace of growth in recent months ... This month’s report is a reminder of the important work that remains to sustain faster growth in jobs and wages, including investing in infrastructure and job training, implementing high-standards trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and raising the minimum wage.”
     - Jason Furman, Chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, commenting on the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report showing the US economy created only 38,000 new jobs last month as 500,000 Americans stopped looking for work.

Movie Quote:

"You can't change your lives. And that is the terrible and secret fate of all life. You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into."

     - Detective Rust Cohle, fictional character portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the HBO Series True Detective, 2014

My Thoughts, Today, About this Hope Stuff

Last night I spoke to a friend about the way our country has deteriorated in our lifetime. She spoke of her troubles and I spoke of mine. We talked about how easy it is to allow oneself to slip into despair at the direction our nation has taken. She and I agreed that since the Democrats regained the White House in 2008, the veil that obscured the truth from us has slowly been lifted, especially this year. And the last dangling shreds have been ripped away and we can see clearly now that the Democratic Party, despite all its claims tot he contrary, no longer represents ordinary Americans.

FDR's party of the New Deal has become an engine for turning the country into an oligarchy where the rich rule over us by pulling the strings of the politicians they buy in much the same way investors trade in any other commodity. And the biggest buyers, the ones who invested in Barack Obama, became a President who rewarded their investment in him. They obtained numerous benefits, including enormous profits, even as he failed to deliver the goods to the rest of us.

Now those same persons, human and otherwise, are investing heavily in Hillary Clinton. Indeed, many of them have been doing so for a very long time.

After I got off the phone I thought a lot about all the hope I've seed drain away from so many people I know or come across on a daily basis, people that today's version of the Democratic Party ignores, shuns, and all too often maligns. So many people struggling to find hope in a world where the only changes they know have gone from bad to worse. What hope they might still retain is being eaten away because not enough people in control of our two party political duopoly give a damn about what happens to them, only that they vote the right way.

I see it in the eyes of the young men and women who prepare the coffee I buy every morning, struggling to smile through their day, which often includes fitting their work schedules around attending classes at local community colleges, while they slip further and further into debt.

I see it in the daily panic attacks suffered by the 34 year old man who lives with us, a sexual abuse victim who was kicked out of his home at the age of 16 by his parents when he told them he was gay. Despite severe mental disorders, including OCD, PTSD, past heroin addiction and psychotic episodes that resulted in short term psychiatric hospital admissions, his social security disability claim has yet to be accepted. He gets a little cash assistance from our county because he attends an outpatient substance abuse facility, he gets Medicaid, and $200 in SNAP benefits (i.e., "food stamps"). But that's isn't enough to survive. He'd be starving and homeless if we hadn't taken him in.

I see it in the tired, sagging eyes of retirees long past the age of 65 who continue to work to supplement the meager amount of social security benefits they receive. I watch them at the checkout aisle in the supermarket, their wrists and elbows encased in braces because of their arthritis or the repetitive motion injuries their jobs invariably entail, or hading out Happy Mills at Micky D.

I see it in the earnest faces of young minority youth fighting for the chance at a better education, even as the schools they attend literally crumble around them. I hear the mistrust and anger in their voices as they reluctantly describe the constant suspensions and punishments they receive for the least infraction of the "no tolerance" disciplinary rules that their school district adopted. Rules that all too often cause kids to drop out, do drugs, join gangs and ultimately fill up the cells in our private, for profit prison complexes.

I learn of it in the story told to me by a thirty-something local deli clerk about his younger brother who came down with cancer, and had to beg for donations on a gofundme site because his medical insurance didn't cover the full cost of his ongoing treatment. The same clerk who cannot get more than 30 hours of work a week from his employer at near minimum wages (less than $10 an hour), so that he and his wife are forced to live at home with his parents.

I discover it when I listen to my mechanic, a Trump supporter, talk about the difficulties he's had getting new clients and collecting from old ones because no one has the money to pay him. I hear him rage against his own party, angry and lost and looking for someone to blame.

I feel it in my own shame at the poor state of my teeth, cracked, missing, rotting away because we don't have the money to pay for what it would take to fix them, not when we have to pay so much in other medical expenses for my wife, my daughter and I.

I see it in frustration on my son's face, a brilliant student who graduated from college with honors in two degrees, Japanese and Psychology, when I visit him at his retail workplace, another barely above minimum wage job. Only recently did he begin to receive full time work, but that could vanish at anytime, at the whim of some executive he will never meet.

So forgive me for the my negativity, this shortage of the abundant hope that President Obama spoke so eloquently about nearly four years ago. I have been offered hope for years by politicians who make promises to do things that would provide a positive benefit to my life, only to see them renege on those pledges the minute they are elected to office.

You see, I never had enough of money to give them, money they need to stay in office. And so the multinational corporations and their lobbyists, who freely give them barrels of cash, end up "influencing" my representatives to vote in favor of all the bills that are killing our country. The trade deals that have destroyed our economy. The state politicians who helped proved public real estate developers build ever more high end homes no one can buy or erect strip malls that cannot find tenants. State legislators who favor private companies to run our public schools. Congressional representatives who have done everything possible to stunt our investment in clean, renewable energy.

So, screw hope. Hope hasn't gotten us what we need.

All the hope in the world isn't going to stop the planet from warming, the seas from rising, heat waves and droughts from fueling ever more extreme wildfires, or large precipitation events and super storms from wrecking havoc and causing 1000 year floods every year.

All the hope in the world isn't going to end racial profiling and paramilitary style police operations in minority neighborhoods, or end the violence that is rampant in those communities thanks to governmental neglect and private but "legal" con artists who profit off those people's misery and poverty.

All the hope in the world isn't going to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, from our roads and bridges to our electrical grid to our out of date cyber platforms.

All the hope in the world isn't going to end the depression and mental illness which ruin lives, or end income inequality and our perverted system of upward redistribution of wealth to an ever smaller increment of individuals and mega-corporations.

All the hope in the world hasn't brought us a health care system that treats everyone fairly, that lowers costs and ends the ravenous greed of the for profit, private insurance and pharmaceutical industries who fleece us like sheep.

We need change more than hope. And sure, we need leaders who will work for the changes we need to have a sustainable economy, and a more just society, but more than leaders we also need each of us to work for that change. Now. Today.

Bernie Sanders has sparked not only enthusiasm for his candidacy, but also the desire in so many of us to make the change we want to happen come to be. Not change by so-called incremental bits and pieces, and not change that will take a generation to come to fruition. We don't have the time to wait for old style neo-liberal policies to be shown they are wrong. We already know they have failed us. We need change now, before it is too late.

Because too many people already suffer daily from the effects of our current dystopia the one there for anyone to find if they only look. That has to end before any more children or adults patiently watch their lives fall into ruin, or before anyone else dies waiting and hoping for those changes that never ever seem to arrive.

A Digression, sort of

I know some of you saw my True Detective quote above and wondered why I put it there. It's pretty damn depressing to hear anyone, even a non-existent person say our lives can't be changed, and that we are trapped in a waking nightmare of a world. Well, I included that quote because collectively, as a country, too many of us have spent far too long acting as if what Detective Rust Cohle said in a TV series is true, that change is impossible.

We've silently watched as our futures and the futures of those we love have been ground into dust. Watched as our democracy was stolen from us. Watched as our young men and women were sent off to wars we had no business fighting. Watched as our planet lies suffocating under the toxic fumes of an outdated energy generating technology that is literally killing us. Watched as racism and bigotry and hate have made a grandiloquent and very malignant comeback into our public discourse.

Time to stop watching. Time to stop hoping some politician will save us. Time to stop believing (or acting as if we do) that we lack the power to change our lives for the better.

The Big Finale

I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter. I want people to vote for him on Tuesday, but even moreso, I want to see the movement his candidacy awakened from its near fatal slumber continue, whatever comes next. So, let me end on a Bernie Sanders' quote, not about hope, but about change.

"Real change never, ever takes place from the top on down, it always takes place from the bottom up."

     -Bernie Sanders, in his campaign ad,
Be the change you want to see.

Amen, brothers and sisters.