Whistling in the Dark

I find myself wanting to publish more and more of my philosophical and political musings onto my little myspace page, and so I've decided to create a "Cindy's Universe" of the questions and answers that I come up with in the course of my ongoing investigation of the universe at large.

Who are we as a country? Who am I as a citizen? How do our own perceptions of "the truth" affect our collective conciousness? What is control, who has it, and why do we let "them" abuse it? I always say that we should practice conscious consumerism, but what about conscious citizenship? Does a Democracy really function if the information with which we vote is muddied or biased? Is there even a way to prevent this in our current Capitalist regime?

I do not intend this to be the retelling of the fairy tale that pitts the evil conservatives against the virtuos liberals, or vice versa. Instead, I wonder why we as humans are so obsessed with duality. Why just red and blue states? Make mine Green, please. Maybe with purple polka dots.

Not to suggest that I am not obviously immersed in my own strong viewpoints, or that one can ever observe the quantum electron without the observer, I am as culturally relative as everyone else, relatively. I am not going to attempt a "fair and balanced" diatribe in the great tradition of Big Brother Media, I mean, Fox News. I just want to talk about our country, and our global community, and what I feel like my responsiblities are as a citizen, as a human. How much is enough? When do we protest, when do we throw in the towel? Is my Starbucks latte the end of civilization as we know it?


I was at a party a while ago, where several members of an underground activist radio station were present. I was talking to a young girl, and she began describing how very much she enjoyed "protesting". She loved the shouting, the signs, the people banding together in demonstration. But, I wondered, along with my friend Kristin, demonstration against what? What are we yelling about? Why are we here? Who's listening? If it is in vogue to identify one as a member of a subculture that prides itself in it's watchdog status against the dominant power structure, then shouldn't we have an agenda? Because if the object is simply to not "be one of them", you know, those nasty Rebublican Conservative Fatcats smoking thousand dollar bills, then aren't we simply a part of the whole that defines them? For you Matrix fans out there, wouldn't that just make us a neccecary part of the programming, that aspect that needs to exist and rebel, but the "against what" doesn't matter?



I would like it to matter. I'm not anti-America, I live here, right? I'm a legal citizen, gosh darn it, and so therefore am safe from marauding minutemen and the INS, and I qualify for a decent wage. I was raised in suburbia, and I eat veggie dogs and watch fireworks on the 4th every year. But I am so disgusted by so many of the actions taken by government, by big business, that it's tempting to simply say, "Golly, what can the average citizen really do, anyway?" Or, "How hard is it to deport to Canada?" That power of one crap is really often just that, crap. Statistically, my vote really doesn't count. But if we check out, if we say, "I''m not even going to participate", then that's an even bigger load of crap. We participate every day in the functioning of our society, like it or not. We vote with our purchases, our conversations, our conscious or unconscious digestion of the media. What are we saying? Are we listening to ourselves?

And so that is what I intend this blog to be- a way for me to listen to myself, to my choices, to my role in society. I'm not going to change the world, change your mind, or even my own. I'm just whistling in the dark. Got a light?