Spider Robinson's essay: "Carry On, Singing."

We have a golden opportunity, right now, and we shouldn’t waste it. Take your attention away from the disaster reports on TV and radio and internet for just a moment…and take a surreptitious look at the people around you.

The racists and classists are just having too much damn fun to keep their masks on straight.

Take notes. It’s like a litmus test for scumbags. A Gagger-Counter. If you see anyone in America who is looking at that sea of universally dark-skinned faces in the Superdome, is listening to accounts of people whose loved ones died waiting for help that never came—and does not look sick and ashamed and shaken—then you know that person is a piece of shit. If you hear anybody making jokes about the refugees—and don’t give me any static about that word: they are refugees from a country they thought they were citizens of, that left them to die—you’ll never again mistake him or her for human. If you hear some jackass yammering about the blame for this tragedy belonging to a governor or a mayor, to a state or a city, you’ll know you’re almost certainly listening to a fink, who stools for Dubya and the rest of the Scudderites.

And conversely, those around you who have kindness in their true hearts will be just as unable to conceal or restrain their compassion and love. Take even better notes. Or do you already know too many kind people?

OA ­ And what about you? Your work seems very light-hearted and full of fun. What¹s your social-political options and how does it influence your work?

SR
I'm afraid I don't know how to answer, with anything shorter than a novel.

I am not aware of ANY political party or school of thought that comes close to representing me. The best I can do is choose, year by year, the one I find the least offensive at the moment--which fluctuates so randomly that it's pointless to keep records. Heinlein's character Manuel Bernardo de la Paz in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS defined the position he called "rational anarchism." In those terms, I guess I'd say I am an irrational anarchist.

I will say this: I think that regardless of what political philosophy he claims to represent, George W. Bush has overseen the destruction of most of the things that made America great, the corruption of its most fundamental principles, and the greatest disgrace it has earned in three centuries--with the eager cooperation of an appalling HALF of the population. Half of America does not even know what it was supposed to be--or care. The America that Robert Heinlein loved and fought for no longer exists: in its place is a country of smug thugs that detains people indefinitely without charge, counsel, visitation or due process; tortures prisoners as policy; attacks nations that have offered it no offense, on grounds known to be lies; pisses on the very concept of an international community; and has the unlimited power to suspend its own Constitution and Bill of Rights internally, any time it feels like it. A country too cheap and mean to feed its hungry, to house its homeless, to heal and medicate its ill.

I did not move to Canada for political reasons. But if I were living in America now, I would move to Canada for political reasons. I believe in my heart that America will recover its soul one day, not too far in the future, and become again what it used to be. But as Paul McCartney said, in his great song "Tug of War," "It won't come soon enough, soon enough for me."

It needs great leaders. Right now, just about every one of its leaders and potential leaders is exactly what Sting called them in one of his better songs: game show hosts.

http://tinyurl.com/8gh8l

But that’s not what I want this entry to be about. That stuff is personal. There is some genuinely gruesome and tragic shit going down on this continent just now. America is starting to realize that the karma driving slowly but relentlessly up its ass with outsize tires is a big old gas-guzzling brute of an SUV, driven by a smirking jackass it elected twice. The chickenshit has come home to roost. Thousands are dying because the MREs that were intended to feed them, and the National Guard that signed up to deliver those MREs, and the infrastructure they would have used to do it, are presently around the other side of the planet, being used to kill strangers for no rational reason anyone has yet managed to articulate. Babies are floating in dirty water in New Orleans, and we can all see what colour the stranded faces in the Superdome are. I honestly believe white America would have shown desperate black Americans more compassion back in the 1950s. The couple of dozen or so real terrorists that actually live on this planet (nowhere near Iraq) must be laughing their asses off as we do their work for them: the monsters are due on Maple Street. This is not a time to brag about stars I’ve met.

But it is time for all of us to heed those stars, and the message they still embody after forty years.

Teach your children well. Their fathers’ hell will slowly go by. Feed them on your dreams. Please.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/carryon.htm