Surfin' USA

Can Presidential candidates perform extreme sport tricks? They're trying, and its the most extreme of extreme sports yet. They are convinced they can surf the monster wave, not just on one board mind you, but on two at once with each foot on separate and radically different boards.

One surf board is all too familiar. It is the expansive military, information, prison, war, capitalist, media, corporate, oil energy, debt soaked, genetically altered, and privatized mega-complex. The industrial aspect moved to China years ago.

It consists of defense contractors, and oil energy corporations that work in collusion with think tank 'intellectuals' and politicians to generate permanent war. It is media sources that keep the levels of information soft and incomplete, its the art of the empty sound bite haiku. It is Wall Street selected politicians primped out in public relations dialogue so they can pimp for the highest bidder and maintain power. Its much more and its huge and unwieldly. One edge of this board is rotten, the other edge insists its thriving.

There are figures that surf this board and only this board. A complicated network replete with hate based radio mouths and politicians that barely understand their own language especially when spoken from the hearts and minds of the ordinary citizen. The scariest figures are the inner core elites who want all wealth now, and can change laws, violate rights, stifle dissent, and remove any obstacle that prevents that achievement using any means available. Their present champion grabbed that board and took it to places that most Americans thought were off limits. People see the rot, and they are aghast.

The other board is more fragile and less defined. Its less moneyed and less coordinated. Its is the great quilted umbrella of movements and people aiming to increase democracy, clean up the deadly byproduct of materialistic fervor, some would say trying to protect humanity, trying to advance the civil part of civilization, trying to maintain and advance fundamental notions of equality, understanding, nobility, and survival.

There are champions of this surf board. Some get nobel peace prizes, some move and motivate us at the core of our being in the direction of the extraordinary possibilities, some leave us with lasting memories of the greatness of people, some change our understanding for the better and shake us from confusions, and most stay behind the scenes, invisible, but work tirelessly. They wake us up, inspire us, and lead us in the best way. One edge of that board is gilded and active and the other is in a great sorrow.

Is Barack Obama the dual surfer people think he is? He wants to usher in the age of green energy with its promise of no more resource wars with inhuman consequences. Yet he also wants to enlarge the military complex and maintain the rule of pre-emptive war and in so doing he appeals to the select neo-conservatives, a group well versed in war making and quick to promote the progression to war. How can he do that trick?

Is it Rudy Giuliani who at present isn't quite sure which side of which board he wants to start from. How about Hillary? McCain?

There's no way to wrap this up easily. We pick the problems apart piece by piece, try to understand all the details and implications, demand a voice, and push to aim our hopes for the best.