Democracy for Vancouver

I always feel hungover on New Year’s, despite the fact that I drink about 10 ounces of alcohol a year. (No one who knew me in college would ever believe I’ve become such a lightweight.)

No, my annual hangovers are a result of having my birthday, Christmas and New Year’s all fall in the same week, combined with our regional winter vitamin D deficiency and the through-the-looking glass naval gazing that we white, middle-class folks seem to get sucked into each year when the calendar arbitrarily resets.

So this year’s mental lint is a combination of the new job I desperately need, and how getting a new job or staying in this one will affect our financial situation; how we’re going to peacefully integrate our new kitty Blanca into the household when Christmas break is over, and the menagerie is unsupervised once again; how and whether I can help my friend A. extract herself from her marriage with her kids and financial future intact; whether I should have saved the $200 I spent on Geek Squad over the weekend to try to get our home PC disinfected and put that money into a new PC without infection and with a better processor…

You get the picture. We each are wrapped up in these little dramas that pull us so far down the rabbithole that we have a hard time breaking the surface to wonder how others - whether in our family, our community, or across the world - are managing to survive.

My blog is one of the ways I try to stay engaged. Not just by reading and writing, but by forcing myself to to acknowledge the problems represented by the links I put in my blog’s right-hand column to aid New Orleans and recognize the human loses in Iraq, which are sadly an infinitesimally small percentage of all of the crimes and usurpations, political negligence and malfeasance at work every day in the world. On any given day, I may have a migraine, but Iraqis are wondering whether their disappeared family members are dead or alive. I may have to live another 6 months with a stained and rusting shower, but in New Orleans there are people in their third year of a FEMA-trailer existence, with a return home always at least one boneheaded bureaucratic decision away. My boss may deride me in front of my coworkers, but I have a job and health benefits.

2008 is a critically important year, but it will also be a year in which the same old shit keeps happening to the same unfortunate people, while the same 1% coast above it in their private jets, feeling no pain. So while we all need to dig in to make the most out of this election year, we all need to keep our perspective, as well, and put some focus on the real needs of those around us even as we hope and plan for a more progressive, inclusive, and generous future.