CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT:

We'll go walking out
While others shout of war's disaster.
Oh, we won't give in,
Let's go living in the past.

One of the replies when I sent my posting of "How To Beat Bush (Again)" to my local email list was this note:

I'm glad you sent this e-mail and wish that we could get it out to Kerry's team that's making decisions. I, too, have been saying this months, but I fear that many of our fellow Dems and Kerry's team are just too focused on the past. We must have a positive message and one of hope...the future is what matters. Why can't we Dems get focused in that direction? Your thoughts?

The reason for the obsession with the political crimes and alleged lies of former years was well expressed by a writer whose 107th birthday is next Saturday. One of William Faulkner's characters said in Requiem for a Nun:

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

This is true to many active Democrats, and one can harly blame them. Even a puppy which loves you may turn and bite you if you accidentally step on its tail. The pain blocks the brain from thinking of anything else. There's been a lot of pain willfully imposed by this misadministration, beginning with stealing the 2000 election. Turning the attack of 9-11 into the U.S. Reichstag Fire, using it to demonize any disagreement and rachet down a society ruled by paranoia, has been much like stepping on that puppy's tail. There is a righteous outcry demanding punishment of this spreading evil and its perpetrators.

Faulkner said another thing which applies very well to today, in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in 1950:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?

That the current fright being manipulated by the politicians is of being blown up by religious fanatics instead of atheistic communists is only an irrelevant surface detail. The power grab works the same way. To move on to a better world, we have to steel ourselves to ignore the pain and be positive. No one has appointed us the avenging angel whose task it is to punish evil on earth. Can we, as a party and a nation, rise to the strength needed to overcome the only thing FDR said we have to fear? Faulkner finally thought so, and I agree:

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.