Anger or Ennui?

At a time when there are so many people and reasons to grieve: for New Orleans, for Iraq, for London of 7/7/05, for New York of 9/11/01 ... I am in a singularly fortunate circumstance: I'm dry, warm, well-fed and healthy, with people who love me.

But there's a strange kind of ennui that comes over me.

As if: there is so much going wrong, what can one person do to make it right? You get kind of sorrowfully numb.

But I'd rather be angry than depressed. I'd rather have hope for change, than feel so impotent.

I'd also gone through the stages of grief at the outcome of the last election (after witnessing some of the nastiest campaign spin I've ever seen, and subsequent nastiness as American public opinion was adroitly manipulated ) ...

I went through:

• the forehead slapping about how half of my countrymen could vote for the most cunning but inept president in decades
• the "how could you be so stupid" snarling at TV talking heads explaining from administration-supplied cue cards why we live in the best of all possible times
• the eye-rolling during Iraq war happytalk from the President, the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense as 2000 American kids died
• the open-mouthed amazement as I see the lower middle class, those whose kids are the ones disproportionately dying in Iraq, those who are most likely to suffer from his economic policies, earnestly join the tongue-in-cheek power elite in declaring that this is a President of the people, one of them, a regular guy, a true leader.

But now some of my countrymen are in a world of hurt -- and the rest of the world hurts for them.

Absolutely the only good that could come out of this is an awakening to the real priorities of that guy barely voted into office. A realization that those priorities didn't have anything to do with the American people as he looked out the window of Air Force One, looked down on all the little people, the little people who were sick, starving, drowning, dying. While he decided how little and how late he could do anything for them and still make it look good.

Once again, he didn't make the right decisions.

Isn't it time to replace the ennui with anger, acknowledge that this isn't the America we were raised to respect, and commit to doing whatever we can to change the administration to one that gives a damn about its people?