Thursday, October 09, 2008

Democratic Congress in Full Power?



The NYTimes always does a good job of having interactive maps for the various elections during the Fall. Here you will find a map of the House race, and here you will find a map of the Senate race. 

Things are looking good for the Democrats, and really, I think, for a reduction in the average age of the congresspeople. The incumbents are dropping, maybe not like flies, but they are losing their iron clad grip on the congress. That, in conjunction with the fact that many of these old foogies are retiring, will hopefully result in some kind of a POST-WWII-military-industrial-complex. I think that the Nixonites are finally getting out of politics. We've seen that with the retirement of the whole Bush cabinet Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, and I think that we're starting to see the shift with Congress as well. I don't know about anyone else out there, but I really don't want to spend the rest of my life paying for our parents and grand-parents fuck ups, even though that is exactly what we are going to do. Maybe that unfair, and it really is just the grand-parents (the Greatest Generation) who fucked it up the worst and now the 40-50 year old politicians (our parents age) are getting a chance to fuck it all up now. We can only hope that some closet hippies get some power now!

I guess I HOPE (and I hate having hope- it's usually false hope), I HOPE that just maybe our culture will shift after this election, into something more sustainable. That is really the nut of all of our problems if you stop to think about it- we need a sustainable economy (this military-industrial economy is a boom-bust-boom-bust cycle)- we need a sustainable agricultural system (industrial-General Mills-Monsanto-Cargill-agriculture is killing us one obese child at a time)- we need sustainable energy (so we don't end up choking on what amounts to our own energy excrement)- we need a sustainable healthcare system (instead of one that has an exponential rise in cost)- and finally, we need a sustainable housing system (instead of this bonkers suburbian housing development thing with asphault being laid all over perfectly good farmable land). 

1 comment:

Liz Dembski said...

I completely agree with you on the sustainability issue. Not just environmentally sustainable but socially and economically. A radical shift in thinking needs to happen. I hope the next administration is up to this challenge, or at least takes some steps in the right direction.