ojai news at The Ojai Post :: blog, newspaper, events in Ojai, California

Apparently, not a horrific war. Not illegal, warrantless wiretaps and physical searches. Not an avoidable disaster that destroyed a proud American city, killed a couple thousand people and displaced tens of thousands more. Not the environmental rollbacks from an administration that sweeps global warming under the rug. Not the soaring deficits and national debt under a president and Congress from the same party.

What it is going to take is a series of events that completely changes The American Way. How we get around, what we eat, where we work. Kid Oakland has more. An excerpt:

I keep thinking about how there's this gap between realities that are obvious to those of us on the left, and the way most of our society completely ignores these challenges, in particular, how U.S. voters seem to vote to ignore them. (To name a few of the challenges I'm thinking about: global warming, the increasing level to which the American diet is poisoning us and our kids, the disaster that is the American health care system, and the way in which this nation seems to have absorbed the dual failures of the war in Iraq and our abadonment of the citizens of New Orleans without much of second thought.)

Why is this? Why does it seem that it's almost a "liberal" thing to talk about the environment, corporate food, our health care system, and the multifarious failures in Iraq and on the Gulf Coast?

I think some of it comes out of a reality that we are just beginning to get our heads around as a nation and a planet: the logical next step here in the U.S. and abroad is not a "moderating" of the dominant corporate conservatism but instead a full out embrace of progressive ideas and policies: a reinvention of our society and economy to meet the needs of humanity in the 21st Century, a reinvention that starts from ideas that progressives, liberals and socialists have been talking about for decades.