How can we be doing this?

It is just barely today, October 31. I have been surfing YouTube for a couple of hours, bringing up favorite songs to cheer myself up after the horrors of the day, by which I mean the completely irrational, spirit-negative religiosity of Liberty University students working against Barack Obama and calling down doom upon him.

Even if only half of what Mr. Obama says is true, even if only one-quarter of what Mr. Obama envisions gets done, it is a start. And even if he were the worst of scoundrels, he would not deserve the ill will being pointed his way. In fact, if only half of his words are true, then he must be seen as the most humanitarian of the current seekers for public office in America.

To deny his vision is to affirm greed, avarice, exclusionary politics, segregated culture and a rubric of us vs. them.

So I simply must ask, if you deny Obama's vision, how can you live with yourself if you vote to exclude the downtrodden, to deny any human in this country, on this planet, the basic necessities of life? How can you live complacently when so many lack clean water, food, basic health care, shelter...whether they are sane, crazy,white, black, yellow, American, Latvian, Bosnian, Darfurian...anyone? How can you possibly cast a vote for a man (and unfortunately a woman) who sees everything in terms of us and them? How can you? How can you deny your own humanity so completely?

Please watch the video of Phil Collins singing "Another Day in Paradise." If you can watch it without at least a tiny movement of your heart outward, if you can hear it without your inner self being tugged to remember that all are not fortunate, cared for and loved, then stop reading. Go and cast your vote for doom.

If it touches you in the least, then please read on.

***

I lived in New York City for a good portion of my life, and it is my birthplace. I rarely gave money to panhandlers, but sometimes I did. I had a hard time making my way between my heart and the dictates of the limousine liberals I hung around with, some of whom were Rolls Republicans, in fact. Mea culpa. I admit that I was diseased with a relative lack of compassion. But I could not ignore the demands of the planet and its humanity totally. I channeled it through tithing to my church, granted a very liberal Episcopalian church, but still...I avoided contact. I avoided being upset in a very earthy manner by the poverty and disease and distress that surrounds every block of New York City, even now, even years after Rudy Guiliani made it a Disneyland for the well-heeled. (I don't mean to dismiss Guiliani's accomplishments, which were many, and his finest hour, which was after 9-11. But the city was sanitized, making life easier for the middle class and above, putting true poverty beyond their field of vision.)

There is a solution on this planet. Perhaps it begins in this nation; it has certainly almost ended here. We have no money for ourselves at the moment, or so it seems. We have given no care to ourselves. We have denied health care to the poor and broke, we have watered down education until we are raising a nation of morons, much to the distress of dedicated teachers caught in the need to teach and to make a living, and the knowledge that they are unable, by government mandate, to educate those in their charge. We have closed our borders to the needy; we have richly rewarded the rapacious. We have heaped calumny upon the head of those some consider "other" in futile attempts to make people see truth as lies, lies as truth. We, by electing and accepting leaders a pack of wolves would have justly torn to shreds as useless at best, harmful to the pack at worse, have put ourselves in harm's way, and with us, the rest of the world.

If we cannot help ourselves, we cannot hope to help others, the others who have come to rely on American generosity and innovation. We cannot help those we owe assistance by virtue of our great natural gifts; our melting pot of fine minds and vibrant cultural expression, our vast land area full of wealth of every sort. We must help ourselves. We must help ourselves to leadership that pays more than lip service to the word compassionate; we must help ourselves by educating our children, providing minimal sustenance at least for the unfortunate, and holding to account those whose greed has brought us all to the brink of disaster.

Vote your conscience, but please take care to educate that conscience first in what a conscience is there to do--keep up from doing harm to others no matter what the cost to ourselves.