"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!!

Although it is nearly a statistical certainty that the 2004 presidential election was stolen and a crime was committed, no one within the Democratic leadership is doing anything about it. I do not understand their reticence to stand up for their constituents, protest this outrage and demand an investigation. There is something very wrong with this picture, and I believe we should all let them know that, as fictional news anchor Howard Beale said in the 1976 motion picture Network, we are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.

When the movie came out, I was too young to connect with what this character Beale was saying. However, now I am much older, and what appeared wildly insane to me at the time now seems pellucidly clear. What follows is only a slight paraphrasing of the movie version to update it for the new millenium:

Program Director: "Take 2, Cue Howard."

Beale: "I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared their job is going to be outsourced. The dollar buys a penny's worth; small businesses are going bust; we even outsource our elections to Republican-owned corporations; the Supreme Court decided the presidential election before last and ballotless, unverifiable electronic voting machines owned by hard-line Republicans decided the last one; the President claims that he no longer binges on cocaine, beer and hard liquor; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; "crips" and "bloods" and a thousand other youth gangs still run wild in the streets; in some of our cities, driveby shootings continue to occur on a daily basis; terrorists fly plains into skyscrapers; mass assassins shoot at motorists from overpasses; small children are being kidnapped and murdered. There's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

"We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some network newscaster tells us that today 6 American soldiers and 40 civilians died in a suicide bombing in Iraq, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

""We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy. We know that Bush and the Republicans have stolen the last three elections; that they have gotten us into a police action in Iraq that is likely to go on for a decade, resulting in thousands more American deaths and tens of thousands of maimed and crippled young Americans and causing Muslims around the world to hate us more than ever; that they have sought to use terrorist attacks against our country as an excuse for severely curtailing personal liberties, while failing to secure our borders and ports; that they have reduced or eliminated funding for Clinton's initiative to put more police and EMTs on the streets; that they have pocketed the budget surplus the Clinton Administration left us and have replaced it in just a few short years with the biggest deficit the country has ever seen; by eliminated the financial "fresh start" for people who suffer medical emergencies and other financial catastrophes and making bankruptcy protection nearly impossible for most to obtain, they have enabled the credit card companies and banks to keep doling out credit more recklessly than ever to the middle class and poor and have saddled countless families with crippling medical debt; that they have adopted legislation protecting large corporations from class action lawsuits that provide the only form of meaningful consumer protection in this era of unbridled business deregulation; that they are working to protect negligent physicians who wreak unspeakable harm on patients from the legal consequences of their carelessness; that they are in the process of severely curtailing Medicaid for poor and sick children, seniors and disabled adults; that they want to allow young Americans to gamble part of their Social Security premiums in the stock market and reduce benefits for older and middle class Americans; that they want to turn Medicare into a welfare program to replace Medicaid so that they can claim that it is too expensive and begin to phase it out; that they want to delay converting to a Hydrogen economy as long as possible so that they can keep pumping domestic petroleum out of the ground until it is all gone and reap enormous profits from selling us all of the domestic and foreign oil they can get their hands on; that they want to allow the large power companies to endanger our health by burning enormous amounts of dirty coal to produce electricity and creating more nuclear power plants that produce greater and greater amounts of plutonium and other nuclear byproducts that are so radioactive and toxic that they must be guarded from terrorists for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years; that they want to institute their so-called "Clear Skies" initiative in order to allow electrical utilities to trade pollution credits, permiting greater amounts of mercury and other contaminants to be pumped into so-called "environmental ghettos" that will experience elevated rates of neurological damage and birth defects; that they have implemented a "No Child Left Behind" education program that torments children with "high stakes testing" and results in some children being passed over for promotion year after year, ultimately dropping out of school and ironically being permanently "left behind"....

I could go on and on, but I don't have to tell you. All of you know what is happening but have become too numb or frightened to protest anymore. No one is doing anything about it.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our own dens. Let me have the Internet and my TiVo and my high def TV and my my SUV, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

"Well I'm not going to leave you alone.

"I want you to get mad!

"I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write and most of them are Republicans or co-opted Democrats and wouldn't do anything anyway. I don't know what to do about the stolen elections and the outsourcing and the illegal aliens and the Iraqis and the crime in the street.

"All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

"You've gotta say, 'I'm a human being! My vote has value, and I won't let you steal it!'

"So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!'"

O.K., so it's a little over the top. Well, maybe a lot. Go ahead, ask me if I give a damn, and I'll say, "Nell ho! I'm mad as Hades, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Go on. Try it yourself. I guarantee you will feel better instantly.

Oh yea...and very eloquent rant, i agree with you on many of the points you hit

Have enjoyed what you've been saying today. Need to light some fires under all Dems. All of us need to help each other use our vocal cords and its up to us to stand by each other in order to make it easier for people to speak out. We can thank Governor Dean for his courage and commitment to show he's been mad as hell. Courage is contagious.

I'm mad as hell too, just watched Network again the other day, and I'm not taking it anymore either Filius.

We cannot continue to isolate and sit in front of the computer screen as much as we have. Time to build our relationships with other Americans.

"THEY" who wish to destroy all that is good depend on us to isolate, remain distant and disconnected from each other, and they bank on it.

Time to open the window and start yelling.

NO MORE LIES AND NO MORE FAKE ELECTIONS WITH FAKE OUTCOMES.

Thanks for the good words, Shance.

real problem.

Went to a duplex theater -- one screen was showing Rocky, and the other was showing Network. She couldn't understand my preferring Network.

Great rant, Filius.

Thanks. After a while I started feeling like TJ writing the Declaration of Independence. You know, "He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has quarted armed troops among us. He has...."

:shrug:

which was true and they upped their ratings but making a mad man out of him. That is the same tactic which is being used in the media today if anyone speaks out and tells the truth. We all saw it in the last election. Freepers can act as crazy as the like and the media doesn't give it a serious thought but let someone tell what is really going on in this country and they make them into a nut.

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If Bill had gotten him another 3 million votes, they would have just dialed up the machines to a slightly higher RPM and cruised in to victory anyway.

Be sure to read as many threads by TruthIsAll as you can. Or better yet, do a search for his username a few months back. You'll change your mind about "election fraud."

That your vote counted? After I selected "Vote Democratic Slate" only to discover the voting machine failed to register a vote for Kerry, and after it took two more attempts at correcting my vote before the machine showed a vote for Kerry, I just can't be sure my vote was counted accurately or that it counted at all (you see, I'm an IT professional and carry some understanding of the vulnerabilities and inherrant weaknesses of digital voting).

So, how can you be so sure? Or do you just not want to come to grips with the loss of our democracy as the legacy you pass on to your children some day?

...know your answer. (--or is this just a hit and run?).

Please tell me what voting system you voted upon, and describe the "chain of custody" of your vote from you through the local machines and precinct personnel to the tabulation system to the final count (including how an absentee or other paper ballot might have been handled in the electronic tabulation process). Did you have a paper receipt or ballot that was handled in a secure manner? Was there a precinct level audit of the paper receipt or ballot vs. the reported tally, sufficient to insure an accurate count?

Also, as you track the "chain of custody" of your vote, please identify what private companies and private company personnel might have had access to your vote along the way, and if private companies were involved (generally the case with any electronic components), do you, or do any authorized election officials in your jurisdiction, have the right to review the computer codes that these private companies used to program electronic voting machines and electronic tabulators? And were those codes reviewed--by you, or by someone else on your behalf who was authorized to do so?

Possibly you can convince me that your vote WAS counted. I doubt it--knowing what I now know about our election system. But it's possible. And if you can be sure of that, can you be sure that others' votes were in fact counted and tabulated correctly--in your precinct, in your state, and in the nation?

Because that is the problem, you know. They can't prove that Bush won--and there is much evidence that he did not. And when you look at WHY they can't prove Bush won--that the Bushites in Congress and the major Bush donors who own the electronic voting machine companies set it up that way, deliberately (it would have been easy enough to have a verifiable, transparent election--they didn't want one), you really have to wonder why we are not all shouting at the top of our lungs, out the window, every day: "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANY MORE!"

Things to look forward to:
* Reconstituting the draft - June 15 2005 - to gain fodder for
* War with Iran soon thereafter.
* "Liberation" of Lebanon - Rapture reasons and for military resupply capability from the Mediterranean
* Required national ID scanning to gain access to public events, public transportation
* Patriot II retroactively outlawing activism and public assemblies for redress of grievances (prepare for incarceration!)
* Drilling in ANWAR and beginning of new trans Alaska pipeline
* Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich as Supreme Court Justice (after the nuclear option has been exercised and Dems have lost the ability to filibuster judges)

So, if you don't like it now, just wait!

...community and even some of the corporate establishment is going to turn against them. I do think you have identified real threats, and your warning is certainly apt. I agree that all of this could come to pass, quicker than we could guess. However, there are OTHER ways that it could go--some of them less frightening but still with huge problems in our democracy for us to solve.

Looking at precedents--say 1929 and the Great Depression--they are showing every sign of pushing the theft and profit-taking and looting of federal and state budgets, and the thievery of the rich against the poor, so far, that the economy will collapse, and a strong tide of revolution will result, which the financial and corporate powers might be able to ride out, keeping their powers pretty much in tact, by means of liberal solutions (a la the New Deal). We will still be left with the potential for another fascist coup down the line, if we don't severely rein in--or even dismantle--the financial and corporate system that is operating from our shores, but is not "of us" any more. They have no loyalty to the U.S. of A. or its people.

Such a financial collapse would likely halt expansionist plans, such as the invasion of Iran (and thus also the Draft, for instance). Come to think of it, they're probably trying to loot the Social Security fund in anticipation of a financial collapse--to pad the very richest pockets now, before it's too late. They've certainly got it set up to bankrupt a whole lot of people (something you didn't mention), but, as in the Depression, it doesn't do the banks much good to seize property that they can't re-sell (no one with the money to purchase it). Drilling in ANWAR may also just not be feasible if no one has the means to gas up their cars to the extent that we are doing so now, or to go on manufacturing petroleum-based products. Dick Cheney being Supreme Court Justice may be the least of our problems if they crash the economy.

It won't be pretty for the poor, I can tell you that. But I think it will require at the very least breadlines, government job creation, some control over banking, and other such measures to prevent bloody revolt.

However, the global financial picture is much more complex and hard to predict than it was in 1929--for instance, the U.S. now being in hock to China! What a beautiful irony it would be if Americans end up having a communist revolution against the mandarins of the old communist regime in China soon to be the capitalists of the world! (We have to keep our sense of humor, don't we?)

Then there is Germany 1933-34, the western country that took the worst economic battering during that period (mostly by design of the WWI victors). There is nothing even remotely funny about this haunting parallel. But there are some big things that do not favor it--America's size and diversity chief among them. We are not an easy country to control. Many, many subcultures; great diversity of people; great diversity of landscape--and a very strong tradition and history of democracy, as well as abhorrence of Nazism and all its permutations (which we have systematically evaluated and rejected over the years). There is no question that the Bush Cartel is acting like Hitler in many ways, but I think they may be in for a surprise if they try to carry militarization and ethnic cleansing that far.

If and when they finally crash the economy, a la 1929, would likely be our most vulnerable point, as to a Hitler-Mussolini-Stalinist type dictator taking over. But I doubt that Americans would easily fall for the cult of personality that is necessarily involved. We are not even close to being as homogeneous as those cultures, such that a stereotype of a stern father of his people would work here--we are too diverse and too irreverent and have too many among us with family memories of those tyrannies. Of course--who knows what a desperate and starving people might do? But I see something DIFFERENT happening here. I'm not sure what. Maybe something good--a genuine populist arising who could re-organize the economy along sustainable lines, and help RESTORE democracy. Or--as for bad possibilities--fakery, trickery, a dictator by another name (which we are close to having now).

A curious disconnection with both 1929 AND with Hitler and his ilk is that we did not have a 1929 here, in 2000 or 2004--no Great Depression. A lot of suffering, yes, but nothing like those days. Nor any great war, like WWI, that blasted Germany's economy. We were quite well off when Bush took over. He has wasted and depleted it all--and is most certainly out to loot the rest--but there has been no crisis, other than 9/11, to trigger the fascist policies that we are seeing. (A hidden trigger may be the oil cartel's awareness of the short life that oil has left as an engine of our economy.) What has 9/11 to do with looting Social Security or curtailing women's rights? It doesn't really add up--except when you look at it as an artificial, planned trigger--an excuse for repression and fascist looting.

Actually, the parallel that bothers me the most is the fall of the Roman Empire, because, with that fall, came a thousand years of darkness as to human progress and learning, a thousand years of ignorance and serfdom for most people (most westerners and northerners, anyway), and a long, slow and painful climb out of it to the period of the Enlightenment (which spawned Thomas Jefferson & friends). A thousand years. And I don't care what revisionist historians say about the monasteries in the Middle Ages and their preservation of learning, or the skills of the tradesmen who built the cathedrals, it was DARKNESS for most people--a near complete loss of medical knowledge, a near complete loss of literacy (widespread in the Roman Empire, utterly forgotten in the Middle Ages), a near complete loss of astronomical and scientific knowledge, and NO progress, or almost indiscernible progress, on all fronts--unchecked disease, plagues, tribal warfare, and oppression, and a trapped, slave-like existence for most.

We don't want to see that repeated. And some of the details of how and why Rome fell are riveting--and truly haunting. With the decline of the Republic in Rome and its original idealism, and the ascendance of the Caesars, the Empire over-extended itself in every way, with endless distant warfare to expand its frontiers and obtain new raw materials, and insufficient soldiers and income to maintain it. The Romans weren't such bad rulers, and it all worked for a while, creating a great and influential culture which non-Romans could join. Literacy, culture, trade, and high learning all prospered for a while, and the benefits were widely dispersed both in Rome and in its conquered lands. The culture jewel of the Empire, the Library of Alexandria, contained a monumental cache of all the learned texts in the known world, where scholars of any religion or belief system could study with perfect tolerance.

But the Empire was not sustainable. For instance, North Africa--the "breadbasket of the Roman Empire"--was becoming a desert, due to over-use of the land. The rich ruling families in Rome became merely acquisitive and luxury-loving, and not the noble civil servants of the Republic they had once aspired to be. Rome was losing its inspiration--its ability to hold people together. A number of mystical religions were on the rise during the later years of the Empire, among them Christianity, which were fulfilling a human need to be dedicated to something other than acquisition and exploitation. Notably, the Christians were anti-slavery, and provided solace to those who were left out of the general prosperity. The Christians, however, were quickly becoming an institution with ambitions to earthly rule, and when they came to power with the Holy Roman Emperors, began persecuting all others.

There was a brief resurgence of Roman idealism under the Pagan Emperor Julian who stopped the religious warfare with his "Edict of Toleration." (He was hated by the Christian patriarchs--and there was a tone of ridicule of the Pagans by the Christian writers of that period that is hauntingly similar to rightwing ridicule of "liberals" now.) By the end of the 4th Century, Rome was sacked by the Visigoths. In the 5th, the Alexandria Library was burned by fanatical Christian monks, and, at the order of a bishop who was rivaling the Romans for power, the renowned head of the Library, a famous and beloved philosopher, a woman named Hypatia, was seized and skinned alive by the same Christian monks, on the streets of Alexandria--with no retaliation by Rome (she was a Roman citizen). That was 415 AD, and the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the great darkness. And, like our era, the end was marked by a hatred of learning and culture, and of women.

Whatever might be said about the beginnings of Christianity, by the 5th century it was an earthly power run by men with great ambition. Their ambition and the institutions they created to some extent filled the governmental void left by the late Roman Empire. They were committed to their own power and material acquisitions, and found it convenient to preach poverty and obedience and mystical doctrines to all others, and, critically, omitted teaching the populace how to read, so that the true teachings of Jesus--his complete pacifism, his abhorrence of accumulated wealth, his egalitarianism, his love of his enemies--were not accessible to most. Result: kings and nobles and bishops accumulating vast wealth at the expense of others, serfdom for most, endless warfare and conscription, pogroms against the Jews, forced baptism, the Crusades, the imposition of power rather than the nurturing of belief, and the witch-trials and so on--a venomous suspicion of learning and of women.

This is not to say that Jesus's inspiration was not at work, at times, or that it is not a beautiful thing--the essence of Christianity. It is just to say that the loss of an essentially sectarian government--that of the pagan Romans--was a catastrophe for the human race, or rather, for western civilization, that it took a thousand years to recover from.

Given the impact of our civilization on the world's natural resources, we may not have the luxury of a thousand years to recover. We may well go extinct as a species--done in by our own cleverness and ingenuity.

The repressiveness and militarism of the Bush administration--and its immediate, nefarious plans as listed Kip Humphrey above--may be just symptoms of a dying civilization, rather than some weird new phenomenon (a la Hitlerism) that can be stopped and reversed. I am haunted by this. But I also know that history in truth does not repeat itself, and that we are the inheritors of an accumulated history that LED TO the concept of continual human progress, a better and better life for everyone, and a governmental system that can correct itself when it goes awry. Correct itself by voting.

That is why we must recover our right to vote. It is the most precious legacy of that accumulated historical record. It is the most important gift of our Founders to us. And our very existence as a species is hanging in the balance, largely due to U.S.-based global corporations and their impact on the planet. We are not the only offenders, but we do have the power to lead the way to sustainable living--if only we can get back control of our government.

...should be NON-sectarian in the following paragraph:

"This is not to say that Jesus's inspiration was not at work, at times, or that it is not a beautiful thing--the essence of Christianity. It is just to say that the loss of an essentially NON-sectarian government--that of the pagan Romans--was a catastrophe for the human race, or rather, for western civilization, that it took a thousand years to recover from."

-----

Also, I believe one of the burnings of the Alexandria Library by the Christians occurred in the late 4th Century, when Hypatia was a little girl. She would have witnessed it with her father, who was head of the Library before her. Her horrible death at their hands occurred in 415 A.D. Then the Library was repeatedly burned and sacked, and eventually deteriorated, as the bishop who had her killed came to power, ruled Alexandria, and ended its long history of tolerance of all faiths and beliefs. He drove the Jews out of Alexandria, was the first to use the word "patriarch" to mean "bishop," and the first to ban women speaking in church. Very bad dude, name of Cyril (still a "saint" in the Catholic Church). (There were some good bishops, one called Bishop Sinesius, who was a student of Hypatia's and deeply revered her as his teacher and friend.)

Hey I love in Travis county Texas...city of Austin... large margins for Kerry... my Congressman (Doggett) was reelected despite DeLay's gerrymandering.... my vote WAS counted.... but because of the stupid electoral college MY VOTE didn't really count towards the Presidency cause there are a bunch of drunken cowboys and morons and patriotic Texans who outvoted me....

I KNOW the elction was stolen in Florida, in Ohio.. I know the Lucas County Democratic PArty HQ was burglarized by republicans...I know that thousands of voters encountered voting machnie shortages which in NO WAY should have happened cause we have voter registration... that tells you how many machines to put in each precinct. PERIOD. Kenneth Blackwell has committed so many crimes against the office to in which he serves.... he belongs in Gitmo!

I say boycott all Dibold customers... means I'll ahve to quit my bank.... abide by buying blue... these pukeheads ONLY respond to money..... the ONLY way we can make em hurt is to take it away... problem is.... Democrats aren't organized or on the same page to really make it hurt. Think BLUE!

this should be part of the VR campaign. have you chimed in at the VR forum about your idea?

Hi melissinha. I'm not sure what you mean when you say you are sure your vote was counted. Did you vote on a DRE?

Maybe your vote for Congressman was but your vote for President wasn't.

Just because there were large margins for Kerry in Travis County does not mean they didn't steal Kerry votes there. After all, it's the margin at the state level that matters for the electoral college. Also, for the "popular vote mandate" any vote in the country is just as good to steal as any other.

The evidence says that in Travis County there were lots of Kerry votes that switched to Bush as well as other dirty tricks.

Here are reports of problems in Texas. Look about halfway down the page or do a search for "travis":
http://www.flcv.com/texas.html

trying to sound calm reasonable etc. but. I've gotten no response except from the NPR ombudman, who clearly finds me annoying.

I am stunned by the obliviousness to this issue.

I've suspended my NPR membership and am thinking about withholding support, even my vote, for the Dems. I just don't know what else to do -- if anyone has ideas, pls let me know.

(Bearing in mind I live in an 11 million metroplis where the no. of folks willing to turn out for a protest are at most in the dozens, and the media won't cover them anyway.)

...energies and related events occur at the same time, creating an opportunity for major progress in the human enterprise, and probably concurrent with mentally or spiritually generated evolutionary change and growth. As Teilhard de Chardin believed, the spirit evolves with the body. There is spiritual evolution as well as physical evolution (and who knows how they are related? --it is a very obscure to us at the moment). Anyway, I most certainly see and feel synergy developing on election reform, and on understanding of, and resistance to, the Bush regime's very retrograde policies.

As with every other synergistic phenomenon in history, the beginning of it is fitful and consists of a number of intelligent, creative and courageous individuals, often working in isolation, or with a few others, and often in opposition to the given paradigm, and given power structures. That is exactly what is happening now, with election reform. The ideas start getting around. They can almost be described as being "in the air." Individuals and groups then start coming together, interacting, building upon each other's ideas, and furthering the moment of growth.

Dozens of people arriving for a protest is very good sign. Kudos to them for being among the first to perceive the needed change! You should never disparage a protest because it is small. Even one person protesting--one human being standing out there with a sign and a passionate heart--sends powerful ripples through human society.

News monopoly attention is irrelevant. It's nice to have. It feels good. But the current monopolistic media is so completely stultified--in the grip of the given paradigm and power structure--that its attentions can actually be very negative and even deadly. The people involved in these phony news organizations, from top to bottom, simply do not have the ability to understand new ideas nor how they arrive and succeed in human society.

Is our goal to get media attention? Or is our goal to save our democracy? Attention from the current news monopolies is only a tool--and a very paltry one, indeed--for informing and motivating people. Really, we have to STOP people from SEEKING VALIDATION from these very bad, war profiteering news monopolies, NOT encourage and feed into their delusional world (BushWorld).

I know it's a dilemma. I'm not saying don't try to influence that delusional world. We all accept it as a our national "reality" to some extent (even if we shouldn't). I'm just saying we need to look at this differently--from the angle of how revolutions really get born and succeed. They are NEVER acceptable to the powers that be. They are ALWAYS suppressed. They ALWAYS start small--sometimes with just one person thinking the new thought, more generally with the new thought "popping up" simultaneously in several isolated places.

The new thought that is being born here has several aspects: that we MUST recover our right to vote, that only a state/local peoples' movement can succeed in doing that, and that American democracy is in big trouble and in desperate need of awakening and reform.

How to create synergy? To some degree, synergy for a new moment of understanding and growth cannot be artificially created--or, rather, it cannot be planned entirely with our rational, waking minds. Our rational, waking minds are sometimes as stultified as the "news." Packaged. Pre-written. We have to reach into our feelings, our dreams, our unconscious energies and powers--and DISCOVER the synergy that is unfolding, or is waiting to unfold, and bring our more rational and intentional activities into sync with it.

You can't force it, in other words. You can organize and plan, and do, do, do--but the timing and success of what you do is connected to deep events in yourselves and others that cannot be predicted or marshaled They just happen--sometimes as the result of a lot of organizing, and sometimes not; sometimes just because the seeds have been planted and suddenly large numbers of people seem to magically agree, and are ready to act.

I think the Nashville conference was an early synergy. People were ready for it. And the organizers did a great job, both of recognizing synergy that was happening, and being well prepared to ride that deep lively energy. So, too, the conferences in Oakland and Santa Monica, and other events and activities over the past months--synergy is definitely happening.

How to...go along with synergy? How to discover it?

Well, there's another opportunity coming up in Houston, Texas, in the week of June 30. Check it out. It has a lot of creative (and synergistic!) potential...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x364243

Find your best venue--where your personal skills and power are best manifested. Is it talking to individuals? To groups? Talking on the radio? Writing? Lobbying legislative aides? Internet work? Research? Art and design? Alternative media? Working alone? Joining an organization? Street theater? Fundraising? Organizing meetings? Putting on presentations? What do you LIKE to do? Where do you shine? Or what new thing do you want to try--an adventure?

Working for democracy should be FULFILLING. That's what democracy is all about-- empowering individuals as citizens, bringing each of us forth, each one contributing to the collective effort.

And just try to ignore all the ways that the current power structure tries to marginalize, frustrate and stop you. Know that it is inevitable that they will try their damnedest to make you and your oddball viewpoint go away. And every time you don't go away--but just keep being there, with this new information and new thoughts--you send out thousands of seeds, like a wildflower, that will eventually reach those 11 million people in your metropolis. That's synergy. It will happen. It IS happening.