Tourist Activities
Mar
9
Written by:
3/9/2010 9:47 AM
While many of you are bravely manwomaning the bully pulpit, the trenches, the streets, or the odd freeway overpass in the cause of salvation I in contrast recede into a morass of despair. I have followed the guidance of Chris Hedges to comprehension yet slacked off on his command to fight anyway. As they say in the shipyard, my purchase on the ascent to salvation is two-blocked. Yep, I’m a late comer to reality. I want off. Like that character in the Michener book, a pottery expert who got wrapped up in Zionism (The Source?). One day she had had it and decided to go back to Chicago and just be a woman. Well, I just want to stay in my workshop helping my wife do stuff. The reason I did not title this post after Michener, some cute phrase combining pottery and sex, is that for years I have been irritated by those freeway advisories for next exit that read “Tourist Activities”. Finally, here’s a chance to ridicule those signs. I need to piddle away some time. I want to pretend for a day or so that everything will be all right. I want to leap out of my car at the next exit and jump up and down.
Dear, dear Vashon. My home since 1969. My refuge from Boeing for the final twenty of thirty four years. My introduction to apple trees, the home of my children’s formative years, the home created by the selfless toil of my wife at the nursing home and then by a lousy commute, the place we put down roots in hardpan, dear, dear Vashon, you are sinking this island in the quicksand of denial. In spite of overwhelming evidence that this island, this county, this state, this country, and this world will in my lifetime – I’m eighty eight – undergo extreme change you persist in denying life support to Vashon. You persist in not taking even the first faltering steps toward a dual currency, toward a local single payer health system, toward agrarian reform, toward facing the cause of the drug problem, toward facing the god awful ferry lines, toward taking even a shred of responsibility for the US slaughter of Muslims from East Timor to the Mid East to South Asia. You persist in leaving those vital actions to individuals. Just so, individuals raise money for Haiti while the community of Vashon pretends it is unaware that the US has deliberately for years, and still now, taken every measure to ensure that Haiti remains impoverished. You the community of Vashon know we do so and know why we do so, yet you remain silent. Dear community of Vashon, you decry Glacier, now Cal-Portland, yet it is you who does the more harm to our precious island.
The community council should be dissolved and its county dole cut off. A referendum should be held on a new body whose purpose would be to find consensus on island priorities. The nucleus for the referendum should be whoever shows up twice a month at a designated place. I leave that for somebody to suggest.
1 comment(s) so far...
Re: Tourist Activities
Great post. I myself wonder all these things about the astounding denial. I have to go off island to find some frontliners doing something. Ground Zero is working on nonviolent stoppage of nuclear weapons. May they integrate the urgent need for anti oppression process, which the GP has NOT, among other Vashon orgs. I keep plugging away and have found Richard Curtis not very well educated about the importance of anti oppression. In fact, most white northwest activists do not have anti oppression skills. No wonder all is white, tho not right.
By swaneagle on
3/9/2010 11:59 AM
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