Yeah, we can be pretty provincial over here.

I think I heard that somewhere during the broadcast of one of the Olympics.

We'll miss you BelgianmadCow. Come visit anytime.

We will miss you BelgianMadCow!

I wish you the best - what is happening here is a disease everywhere.

...and your involvement. Take care of yourself.

~DeSwiss


[center]

thanks for posting one of my favorite songs De Swiss

truth and integrity will prevail ultimately..lots of crap to wade thru on the way..in the meantime, be safe, and loved, and at peace

A big loss for DU.
God Speed to you.

Thanks for all you have shared here…we appreciate the time you took to post here.

Best of luck as you move forward with important works.

Tikki

Do good.

Good journeys...

There may come a day when you feel like telling us how you're doing.

Glad you stayed around as long as you could. We'll miss you!

Maybe you can check back in from time to time? As DUer Skittles once observed: "someone's always here."

Take care.

Same as Uber Nationalism.... Dangerous... Hate the freaking term...

and good luck!

but au revoir.

And thank you for the link. That was a good post!

Believe me, many of us can't stomach that either.

Take care.

I just don't have language skills to express my outrage as eloquently as you, BMC and some of the others; I'm always in fear of being booted.

This is an inspirational and informative video. We could take a few lessons from the efforts and organizing done to feed and house people. Please do share with us when and what you want - you have much to contribute. Stay safe, be well, and hope to see you again.

I have enjoyed your perspective...and I think we need more of it not less.
But I understand how you feel about the American exceptionalism and party cheering...I can't stomach it either, but unlike you I am stuck here and have to deal with it whether I like it or not...it is like being in a family with some crazy uncles.

Good luck to what ever you do...and I will miss you.

the words apply for many circumstances...

'tis typisch Amerikaans.

Mensen hier weten niet wat het is om te worden gemachtigd voor de mensen

(hope I didn't mangle that too much)

Dag, Vriendje

Good Luck to you, safe and happy travels..

Videos like that one are very informative and let us know we're not here alone, that the rest of the world is suffering under the rule of the same oligarchs.

These oligarchs have no allegiance to country, only to power, itself. The crowd threatening them with the guillotine might just be correct, sad to say.

Oh, and when the police are marching in ranks, the best thing to do is to put little piles of material (garbage, construction debris, old cars) in their way so they have to break ranks. It tends to flummox them enough to decrease and dilute their violence against the people.

Good luck to all of us. The oligarchy has to go.

and have fun.

You have always seemed to me to be one of the more enlightened posters here, and I'll definitely miss you take on things.

I've always thought DU was enriched by hearing from those who live outside the U.S. - we are such an insular and narcissistic people! I will very much regret losing the voice of someone who has observed our political dysfunction from the outside.

I wish you all the best, there are battles to be fought all over the planet. Thank you so much for sharing your fighting spirit with us for these past 11 years! You've been an inspiration - I mean that sincerely.

You've made DU a better place.

Things are a little rough right now, but I think they'll soon improve. Please keep in touch!!!

First-Way Manny

Most of us here are just doing our best, but the place has changed since the days when we used to be unified against Bush.

Farewell,

Hekate

Good luck with your work at home. Sorry to see you go, but understand. You're good people.

Always good to hear how things are going in the E.U.

All the best!

Thank you for the link. I look forward to watching the documentary later when I'm free from work-related filters.

Covered in whipped cream.

Best of luck!

Austerity: The best answer to the population crisis - as long as you and yours don't have to suffer.

I hope you will check in from time to time to keep us updated when you feel you can.

Good thoughts to you and heartfelt thanks for all your efforts here!

I found your posts wise and helpful.

I agree that the Fan Club stuff here is really appalling, but most of those people are probably too young to have real jobs or real life experience. I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't a concerted astro-turf operation by anti-democratic forces. Maybe more than one, even.

Don't be afraid to return. We'll be working to return DU to something more in the ideal American mode...a second Enlightenment, if you will. Meanwhile, success in your ventures at home. God knows, the EU is a total mess. I just hope Europe survives it.

that privatization of healthcare and education is ongoing, apparently against the will of the people, and even though as far as I can tell no one has yet shown any cost efficiencies to be gained through privatization.

The oligarchs are using the "shock" to ram through the policies they want, even though the populace aren't really so shocked that they don't recognize what's happening.

I'm sure the people being arrested are NOT the most violent ones, but those most effective in organizing opposition to oligarchical policies.

Interesting too that the initiatives taken by the people to help themselves are the opposite of the kinds of solutions pushed by the oligarchs – the peoples' solutions are socialistic, and effective.

Spaniards find it more easy to organize than Americans do because of their lifestyle, system, and town-city layouts and transportation.

It's really hard here. Hard to get time off work. Hard because we have no real communities. Hard because it's difficult if not impossible to have cohesive friendships, pals, extended family. Everyone lives distant, everyone has trouble meeting up, it's just harder. Even getting out of work to protest is a danger here because here, anyone can be fired with no explanations.

For a long time I was between the 2 countries - worked for a year in one place, worked for a year in another. Every time I returned to The States, I was very able to notice the differences, and that's the biggest difference I noticed. In the U.S. people are pretty much isolated little fireflies with no cohesiveness among them, but not because they're necessarily bad or refuse to be cohesive. The system here does not lend itself to that, so every effort to protest or do anything, requires a gargantuan effort, which is why a protest here is so much more valuable than one elsewhere. I find anything that people do here that requires organizing, nothing short of miraculous.

strations.

I am always amazed that both French people and Americans have expressed amazement that Americans can't seem to organize strikes like Parisians can.

I so want to tell them, just for starters, try superimposing a map of Paris on a map of the US, both maps being done to the same scale. Same is true of all of France.

And the union role is very important, too. Here, the unions are running as scared as the rest of us. Maybe that will change, now that fast food industry workers are organizing?

sooo easy to protest in Spain and France!! Even I've been involved. I joined a group of teachers (of which I was a private one, but I still wanted to help the public school teachers), in a protest in Madrid. I lived in Mostoles, a town 45 kms outside of Madrid. That day I walked to the fast train, got to Madrid in no time, took the Metro, which is super speedy, and before I knew it, I was at the protest, and it was wonderfully and beautifully huge.

At the time I worked at a newly-opened private school started by a Spanish teacher in a blue-collar worker section of Getafe. The school would have an emphasis on English, so the kids could become fluent. Since it had just been opened a few days, it felt like a risk for me to be absent!!! Coming from the U.S., I have that built-in terror of losing a job that everyone has here. But I needn't have worried at all. I asked my boss, who owned the recently-opened private school at the last minute, if I could be absent. He said it was fine for me to go join the public school teachers in the protest, because he believed in teachers - he was one himself. That day, kids showed up in my classroom and just did homework for the other classes (they were well behaved) while the secretary for the school sat in the classroom with them.

I had told my boss that that same Saturday I'd open up the classroom for the kids to come at their respective hours to do the classes, and I'd have snacks for them. The kids actually preferred that because it was a different experience. So I did that. My hubby and I brought ensaladilla rusa, galletas and CocaCola, and the kids and I had an all-day learning Saturday experience, while my hubby sat in the back and provided extra tutoring. lol There was only one student who couldn't come, and I gave her a catch-up session one afternoon. The parents were very cool with it all despite the school being brand new because, being blue collar workers, they were VERY lib!!! SUCH A PLEASURE!

Can't do any of that here.

It's funny about blue collar. My parents were not so much liberal as loyal. FDR created social security and Republicans were anti-union. On the bases of those two issues alone, my entire family was Democrat, full stop. And we all know solidarity.

Were my parents liberal on all issues, though? No. But there was simply no possibility of voting anything but Democrat. If someone suggested it, my mom looked at them like they had just landed from Mars and said something very bizarre and my father looked as though he might start swinging if if this fool didn't shut up very soon.

Another thing struck me, too. I learn about most demonstrations the day after. Maybe the day before if they are large and in D.C., but who can travel that fast. So, maybe media is not as good about spreading the word in advance as may be the case in other countries? Or maybe the organizations heading up the demonstration are not as good about doing advance p.r.? I confess, though, I am not that good about reading the local paper. And, of course, the internet helps spread the word sometimes, as it did with Occupy before the media deigned to cover it.

But the unions would be key and we have weakened them so much.

always, but on the basic things, I'm with Democrats. I'm never with Republicans.

Regarding hearing about protests, that's interesting that you mentioned that, because I was thinking about it. In Spain, protests were a BIG DEAL to the media. They wanted to report all of them asap. The media never does that here. I'm not sure I understand it well, but I will say that the media in Spain heard of a protest and BAM, they were there filming, asking questions, reporting live, and it would be in the afternoon or the following day's papers. Something really really bad is ailing the media here in the U.S. It needs a healing and fast.

The hosts at MSNBC actually crossed a picket line, never mind publicizing a workers; demonstration against the establishment.

And that was defended and this board. Party of what I see as loyalty trumping issues and the best interests of the 99%. I don't get it and doubt I ever will.

I would never vote Republican, either. Don't want to and could never do that to my family, even if I did. Whatever I have, I have because they killed themselves to try to make sure my sister and I would have a much better life than they could even dream of.

I wonder what may parents (and my blue collar uncles and aunts, too) would have done with the Working Families Party, though?

Originally, their idea was to vote Democratic, but in the Working Families column, so that Democrats would get that they had to pay attention. So far, so good.

But one of their candidates ran somewhere on a separate ticket recently and got a healthy share of the vote. Not enough votes to win, but a lot more than anticipated for the candidate of such a new party running against both of the oldest, largest and most advantaged political parties.

the "emotion" of a country determines what happens in and with government.

For example, if we have a country where everyone merely goes from work to home to watch reality shows, and isn't (or can't be involved - as we've been discussing, because it's so hard to get involved with protests and such in the U.S.), the government has 2 situations:

1. Either the govt is the enemy of the people and will take advantage of that by further hurting the people; or,

2. The govt is not the enemy of the people but has no back-up, support, or reinforcement from the people, so they're left alone looking as if every decision they take was theirs alone, and the people never supported the decision to begin with. That's pretty much what's happening with Democrats and Democratic govt. Republican Americans organize much more than Democratic Americans. I think there's a reason for that: church. There's an obsession with church in this country, and the church turned right wing in the 1980s. The church became the "grass roots" organizing arm of the Republican Party. Republicans automatically meet there every Sunday for services, and without any effort whatsoever, they network, make contact, share right wing ideas, and plan, etc. Do Democrats have such an organization? Nope. Things would be different if we were able to crack down on churches and remove their tax-exempt status the moment they give the impression of supporting political ideology.

In Spain there's no obsession with church. If people go, they go independently. Church there organizes nothing and nobody. And so, in Spain one may be right wing or left wing, but the church is never involved.

Very different situation.

Do you know what I mean?

The church became the "grass roots" organizing arm of the Republican Party. Republicans automatically meet there every Sunday for services, and without any effort whatsoever, they network, make contact, share right wing ideas, and plan, etc. Do Democrats have such an organization?

we are made up by all kinds of people, and we allow ourselves to be who we are, and don't force one another to fit into a mold. We are artists, environmentalists, poor folks that love family, descendants of immigrants, rich folks with a conscience, people of black, red, and brown skin who are ALLOWED to speak of the atrocities done to them in the past rather than obligated to hide those atrocities, and many many more. Libs are not, will not be, and cannot be forced into some lockstep, standardized, non-thinking, sig-heiling model. We don't believe in that, and we couldn't be so psychologically sick even if we tried.

That's what makes it so easy for Republicans to use the church as their organizing tool, and why churches became the right arm of the Republican Party - Republicans *ARE* those lock-step, sig-heiling types. Republicans *ARE* those types that can be forced to fit into square pegs by their authority. Republicans are willing, want to, and need to fit into strict, little roles with limited rules and a heavy-handed authority. No free spirits ever allowed.

We libs can't function that way, and would be a hellish life to have to. We just can't function in that psychologically sick way right wingers do.

I say our only option is to destroy the BORG (Republicans lol) that has been in control of this country since 1981. We can do this by discrediting and taking tax exemption away from their right arm (churches) every chance we get, and also by discrediting Republicans themselves at the very core of those things they *claim* to uphold: sexual rigidity, religion, family "values," honesty, etc. etc., because if Republicans are one thing for sure it is this: hypocrites.

Oh by the way, I agree with you on boy scouts! Anything strictly male and "tough" is like that - right wing - we MAN, we TOUGH! We beat up enemy kind of thing, that's part of the right wing thinking. Same with the military - very right wing automatically. Anything that requires toughness and danger is always in risk of landing itself into the right wing extremist nest.

as far as not having networks is the way to analyze it because the history, money and media access are all hugely different between those two groups. I don't think New Democrats in office are the artists, etc. For that matter, neither am I.

I say our only option is to destroy the BORG (Republicans lol) that has been in control of this country since 1981

this country - the entire country stupidly and grotesquely went right wing in the 80s, with Reagan the evil clown. No matter who said what about what, the population just went right along with rightwingerizing everything as if it were funny and amusing, and confirmed it in the polls each and every time by electing right wing a-hs. We are now still living in the resulting cesspool.

I don't think the U.S. has the same options as Europe. Europe has multiple political parties, for example. Perhaps it's because Europe has been to hell and back, and has been in really rough situations, with very right wing governments having put in place multiple right wing rules, that they are extra cautious about right wingers taking control, and they allow other parties, from the Communist, to the Green, to whatever.

The U.S., on the other hand, is geographically isolated from everything, has suffered little (it considers, for example, 9/11 to be horrific because it didn't live through any world wars in its own skin), and thinks of itself as the undisputed king and controller of the world precisely because that isolation has helped it avoid confrontation and it hasn't had to ponder much.

It is true that the people here can't protest easily for the reasons I mentioned (it's a country of sprawl and on wheels which creates horrible distances, and it has work laws that threaten workers with losing jobs if they miss work or protest something at work, etc.). However, those that can protest if they want to, either don't, or won't, preferring instead to sit in front of a reality show or have a few beers and wait for some magic wands to be waved around and fix everything. They leave the effort to protest to a few hundred that do show up, if that many. Let those few hundred knock themselves out while I sit here and have my ice cold beer!!, seems to be the attitude.

A case in point is the Democrats. As we sit on our keisters and expect politicians to force through legislation without any support from us except lots of whining, we see absolutely nothing wrong with that. Fact is, politicians need support. Republican politicians have always received support, emotional, grassroots, and all kinds, from their constituents. Democratic politicians just end up with only a handful of supporters and a few whiners who want their bidding to be done without having to lift a damned finger. Politicians aren't magicians. All of them need need a strong constituency's support, and I'm not talking about donations of money, either. And because it's hard to protest and defend and back our politicians, Democrats just don't, except for a few. Instead, most Democrats just get online and whine and whine and whine.

Just the way I see it.

the views from outside the bubble are such and important part of du.

but i gotta say this about the video-

is it just me, was this a peaceful protest until guys in black started smashing windows and egging people on?
throw the rocks then hides their hand?

that always sets off my bells.

I've enjoyed your posts.

-- Mal

Now I am very sad that I did not pay attention better.

If you are still here long enough to read this: Thank you for this video. It provides VERY RELEVENT food for thought for all citizens of this planet. I may be naïve for saying it but I believe that it is doubly important for the citizens of my country to see videos such as this.

I truly believe that the Democratic Underground is strengthened by members who are non-American. Not only can they hold up a mirror that is arguably crucial for us Americans to look into they can also give us important glimpses into their own slices of the world. After reading/watching your post and the posts of those who responded to it, I am especially saddened by the DU's loss today. Good luck to you and yours BelgianMadCow.
chris

...but I understand.

It would be great if you would come back to visit.

party, as well, as I'm sure you've learned here.

Having said that, please take best wishes and agreement with you regarding it's about WE,

whether it is admitted to or not, we all learn from each other, for good or bad...you will be remembered here as part of the good.

One day we will look back at these days and understand it was the beginning of post-capitalism (at least the predatory sort, as one of Thom Hartmann's recent vid posts here re: Portugal's struggle with it and similar changes)...it reminds me that someone here once said:
The best democracy is socialism and socialism is democracy at its best.

Here's hoping the future holds more promise than we know, and these growing pains will be worthwhile.

All the best to you, keep shining. and remember the good, let's hope it goes global.

Until we meet again...

Your perspective was always welcomed by me and sorely needed. You will be missed.

I have left a board after I thought it had devolved; and have had boards I like disappear from the net. So, I know that no one who has finally made up his or her mind to say a final goodbye likes to see the door reopened.

However, you have a perspective that many of us lack.

It's very sad to see someone leave after 9+ years.

Meanwhile, thank you for the video.

a place that I once saw as a place that reflected opposition to all that is wrong with our country. Sadly DU has no longer provides that place for those of us here who, like you, cannot stomach the 'exceptionalism' that we once so strongly opposed. Many others have moved on from here, where they too, like you, see the need to use their energies where they can make a difference in a world that sometimes seems to have gone mad.

I loved your posts, I will miss them and you. Please don't think that all Americans support what is going on here. We don't.

I don't blame you for leaving, not much is being accomplished on internet forums which have, for the most part, been infiltrated and taken over by Corporate interests.

Thanks for your insightful posts.. Many of us will most likely be joining you in moving away from these forums which COULD have been a force for change, but sadly are no longer worth the time we have wasted.

with every single word you have written here.

Well, of course, it's not up to me to allow or disallow, but I certainly hope that you will stay.

Real world activism must be, I think, among people who see most things in the same general way. But I am not sure that posting only with people who see most things as you do has potential to make as much of a difference as posting on a board where push back is badly needed.

It's different for Mad Belgian Cow as he or she does not live here and is not a US citizen. Although, even then, the US impacts his or her world and maybe his or her voice is needed here, too.

Depends on why you post, I guess. If it's to pass enjoyable time, this is not the place for someone who is not marching to the same drummer. If you post to try to make a difference, maybe some time spent here is worth it? For one example, I googled something the other day and one of my own posts here came up.

Besides, I would miss your voice and woo's and others like you!

I always loved your posts. DU will be poorer without you.

I hope you will reconsider as voices that do not try to push one point of view are most needed here.

I hope that you just need a break and will return.

I thought that I had posted that to you upthread, but now can find only my replies to others, but please see my Reply 76 to Sabrina as well.

Whether you go for a while or for good, go with my best wishes. I hope that you do good and do well.