I have been a great supporter of Barack Obama. But I watched the Democrats blink after Massachusetts and walk away from health care with their nerve shattered, and the White House was nowhere to be seen or heard. Exactly when a rallying cry could have shored up the crumbling spine of an entire political party and carried the field of battle, Obama held his silence.
It was then I realized his strategy wasn’t good enough for these times, and would fail to create for us what we must actually create ourselves.
Take a look at my bookmarks archive to see reactions in those fateful days. Here’s how three people in a row felt in the comments thread of Ezra Klein’s blog as we watched health care reform vanish. The third one is me.
I walked away on that day from a year’s worth of fascination with our broken, decayed and ghostlike democratic process, and turned back to the task at hand, which is to help create sustainable world.
Reversing climate damage and restoring the biosphere will not happen from the greatness of governments, but from the persistence of people.
I think this excerpt from Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2007 film The 11th Hour says more eloquently than I could ever write what’s wrong with our nation’s great institutions, and the direction we must point our efforts in now.
The 11th Hour: The forces blocking change
And since I hate it when people provide links and don’t say what’s in them, let me throw a bit of transcript your way.
Around 1:50 Michel Gelobter explains that despite appearances, in reality we have very responsive political leaders, it’s just that they’re responsive to wealth, and to money, and to corporate power.
And the reason our politicians aren’t responding to global warming is that their response is to a higher power. It’s to the fossil fuel industry.
Starting at 3:15 listen to David Orr describe how our political system has failed us with climate change. The general public wants a green world of renewables and clean air, but this fails to materialize. In a beautiful piece of imagery, Orr cites “the chasm between public opinion and public policy,” and the bridge across that chasm which we call “government.”
The bridge is broken, he explains.