I seem to be drifting a bit...

This is a wall. This is me banging my head against it. Any questions?

I am less driven to blog these days.

I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps with the election over I no longer feel the need to be political. Maybe I feel that, with Obama safely re-elected, I can relax.

Fat chance of that. If I ever doubted the need to keep fighting what I see as the good fight, I don't doubt it now. I feel that need acutely.

Look at Washington, where the Right continues to play its obstructionist games despite the ever-more-apparent fact that the population doesn't want that to happen. Where the Right continues to try to take the voter out of the equation, making it harder and harder for people who don't look (and vote) like them to exercise their right to participate in their nation. Where backward fools with outdated opinions still hold much, perhaps even most, of the power.

For that matter, look closer to home, to the state capitol (Michigan's state capitol, that is) in Lansing. You cannot have failed to notice that there is an actual crisis of democracy going on there, where the Republicans have pushed through, at lightening speed, a series of anti-union measures and are poised to do the same with anti-abortion and anti-gay measures; a legislative bulldozing of civil liberties that they're undertaking now because they can now. In a couple of weeks, when the new more Democratic legislature sits, they won't have the votes for unpopular causes near and dear to the Conservative heart.  It's now or never. I would have preferred never, but...

So it can't be that I'm not feeling political; after all, I just typed that last paragraph without interruption off the top of my head. Apparently, I still feel something.

Maybe I put my finger on it when I typed "Lansing." Maybe the debate over the Republican legislative lame-duck juggernaut has depressed me to the point that I just can't bring myself to blog about it. Maybe I'm feeling powerless to resist this fresh right-wing onslaught. Maybe I don't feel that there's much point in resisting such forces, when they are so adept at forcing their political will on the people of Michigan, who (by a clear majority) don't agree with them.

Well, let's talk about that for a bit. The voters of Michigan had their say in the election, and the Democratic Party did better than the Right expected. With a raft of new Democrats coming into the Michigan legislature, they certainly wouldn't have the votes to push through their more extreme pet laws. So they're doing it in the lame-duck session, during those last few weeks when they'll be able to get such measures through to the Governor's desk. Where, despite the positions he has stated for the last few years, he has been all too quick to sign them.

Worse, and cleverly, they have included budget considerations that, according to Michigan's Constitution, cannot be challenged by referendum. In other words, the people of Michigan don't have a say. The people, instead of having a legislature that enforces the people's will, are instead saddled with a legislature that forces its will on the people. The legislature does not have any kind of consensus to act this way...but they're doing it, for no better reason than that they can.

Perhaps that's what's getting me down; the apparent futility of expressing political opinions in a system where my opinions don't matter. Perhaps I am tired of banging my head against that wall. Perhaps I am finally seeing the futility of trying to be heard while shouting into the wind.

Well, no, I never cared much about that. I persist in writing this blog even though not many people read it. I continue to express my opinions even if they're ignored. I like my opinions, and don't much care if anyone else does. As it happens, I started doing this blog to prove to myself that I could still write after several strokes. Even though the jury's still out on that, I keep writing to make myself feel better.

Obviously, it works; I feel much better now than I did when I sat down at my keyboard.

I think that is the point I'm trying to reach, the answer I'm looking for tonight, the thing I need to do now...to keep writing as long as it still works. Even if democracy doesn't.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.