Politics, not triathlon.

I want to interrupt this irregularly scheduled tri-blog for some thoughts (cribbed from another site) about Tuesday's election. And please, regardless of your own political beliefs, regardless of whether you agree with the piece or not, don't forget to exercise your right to vote next week.

Holes: A Society Teetering on the Precipice

By Dennis Rahkonen
Created Nov 1 2006 - 9:10am

An inadequately-armored Humvee speeds down an unfamiliar roadway, bearing callow soldiers who sweat more from well-warranted fear than from the oppressive Baghdad heat.

Suddenly a hidden explosive device is detonated by remote control.

Its shaped charge easily tears through the vulnerable vehicle's bottom, then sprays steel ball bearings at tremendous force into young American flesh.

No one survives.

The bodies of the dead are riddled with small holes.

A large hole smolders between the four wheels of the overturned truck.

An even greater hole is to be found in the arguments of those who contend our nation has some legitimate and worthy purpose for being in Iraq, and that it would be "folly" to remove American parents' precious sons and daughters from the murderous, sitting-duck situation they unceasingly face.

The dead soldiers will be returned to their respective hometowns, where not that long ago some of them laughingly swayed on tire ropes above summer swimming holes, unaware that distant politicians were plotting the demise of their teenaged happiness, and their very lives.

To the mournful strains of Taps, they'll be placed in holes dug through local cemetery sod, leaving holes that will never heal in surviving family members' perpetually pained hearts.

---

An elderly woman with multiple health problems is about to be shocked by a malicious, deliberate flaw in what she thought would be a welcome, money-saving prescription drug plan, Medicare Part D.

Having exceeded an arbitrary limit with the purchase of earlier medicine, she now enters the infamous "donut hole."

Suddenly, she incurs the full cost of drug purchases out-of-pocket, while still having to pay premiums. All the crucial requirements of sustaining daily life on a fixed income are abruptly called into frightening question.

"How will I afford my utilities?"

"Can I even buy groceries?"

She wonders empty-eyed through the halls of her modest home.

No answers are provided. No help is given.

Meanwhile, in the boardrooms of pharmaceutical and insurance companies that sought Congressional assistance to gimmick Medicare Part D for their own, corporate gain, profit arrows point so sharply upward that they could almost poke holes in the ceiling.

---

In urban ghettos and on desolate Indian reservations, where chronic joblessness is epidemic and poverty abounds, and where the human spirit all too often becomes hideously deformed, entire generations are sacrificed.

Children without futures succumb to the impossibility of their circumstances.

They punch holes into scarred arms, shooting addictive dope that offers the briefest relief.

Relief followed by even greater despair.

The anger they ought to manifest as rebellion against imposed injustice is, instead, directed at their own kind, differentiated only by the colors and symbols of gang affiliation.

Fratricide supplants remedial options.

Armed youth in passing cars fire holes into mean-street apartments.

The intended targets sometimes escape, but maybe not their baby sisters, sleeping innocently in their cribs.

---

A slender man in a tattered coat moves amid shadows beneath a freeway overpass.

Snow whips in circles, driven by a howling November wind.

He slides into a cardboard refrigerator box, his home without a television or even a street address.

He wriggles under dirty blankets and tries to attain some measure of comfort, finally shutting the box flaps above his head.

But a hole remains, allowing white flakes and an icy blast to steal inside.

He tries to patch the problem with a crumpled newspaper, whose want-ads he'd futilely searched for jobs. All the factories have closed, becoming shameless runaways to low-wage countries in the Third World.

Will his fix do the trick?

Or will he be found, frozen solid, a few days or weeks later?

---

There are mysterious black holes in space that swallow starlight.

There have been societies on Earth that became so compromised from within that they vanished, into the devouring vortex of history, to emerge later as ruined reminders of their former selves.

We know their names. Babylon, Egypt, Rome, the European colonial empires, and the Third Reich.

George Bush and his profits-before-people Republicans have taken America to the precipice of that sucking hole, and we fight the malevolent force that would take us down.

Have we unthinkingly gotten too close to the edge?

Has past apathy sapped the strength needed to step back now?

Or can we still lean leftward and leap into a future bright with hope?

Election day will provide the answers.
_______



About author Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the Sixties.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/2498