It's been a strange day -- seeing and hearing so much evidence of what a horrible candidate Mitt Romney is, and listening to him label the President's calls for fairness as "attacks on fellow Americans," and seeing the polls showing that despite all this, despite everything, the two candidates are neck and neck, and getting desperate campaign emails from Sherrod Brown, who is one of the most noble souls ever to take on the profession of politics (and yes, it actually is a profession the way he does it) -- desperate because he's being outspent so badly by his opponent. Just a lot of funky thoughts and feelings.
And then I came across this video. By accident, or serendipity, while looking for something else. It blew me away. As politics. As poetry. As an existential cry that is every bit as apropos today as it was when it was written, over a decade ago.
Funny how, in this shiny new millennium, when the future is supposed to be overtaking the past, still the more things change the more they stay the same. Bushes and wars and phony elections and democracy in doubt and the media perpetuating the lies -- and how hope, real hope, has to come from us, just as it always did, because we the people -- the real people, not the corporate ones but the human ones, the ones she says are 90% metaphor and are poems -- we the people are the change we've been waiting for.
For those who can't watch the video, I'm sorry, don't think I can provide a transcript without violating copyright law. It's Ani DiFranco's "Self-Evident."