Where do we begin as every day people living in extraordinary times?
For those of us who found hope and solace in the election of President
Obama and a senate majority, we are suddenly standing on our own,
recalling history and Martin Luther King Jr. Yes, we were naïve to
think that change would come easily, if at all; though I prefer to
call us idealistic, optimistic and hopeful.

Some of us have been out in the streets for eight years now, some of
us much longer than that. I, for one, cannot remember a time in my
lifetime when there was not the need to protest and protect the values
of peace and freedom, racial equality, human rights and dignity, let
alone justice.

I thought we might get a brief reprieve. No such luck.

Look up! The sky is falling. The economy is falling. The environment
is falling. Healthcare has barely anyplace left to fall. Basic values
of trust, truth and honesty have fallen. The flag flies high but what
does it represent today? For me it represents a memory of what I
expect from my country.

It is time to let the old fall and rebuild a new. It is time to let
the banks crumble, fraudulent corporations to collapse, and criminal
leaders to leave their pensions behind and be cast out of the “system”
that protected and paid them well, to bring us to our knees.

It is time church and state to separate once and for all. If you pay
charitable dollars to sell your religious-political wares, it is time
to surrender your tax deductions. If you believe your personal values
are more important than the freedom of other individuals, fine, but
that does not give you the power or the freedom to cast limits on
others choices. This is after all, still America.

It is time for Monsanto to get out of the food business, for cloned
beasties to go back into the lab and out of the food chain, for
farmland to be restored to the family farmer who gives a damn about
the quality of products raised and distributed. It is time for packing
plants, whether they pack beef, chicken, nuts or spinach to be shut
down until they are cleaned up. It is time for industrial pollutants
to be stopped in their tracks before one more child or adults gets MS
or autism or Alzheimers or Parkinson’s or any of the other
pollution-suspect diseases that are weakening human life.

It is time for us to stop the chase for cures and find the sources of
human misery, while demanding the resources to find affordable
treatments.

Cesar Chavez led us to boycott grapes to bring safety to the fields.
Now it is time for us to boycott every industry that is killing slowly
and not so slowly – be it banks, markets, or corporations. It is
simply time to stop trying to outrun suffering and embrace it. It is
time to go without now, so that we might have something of value to go
to in the future. It is time to take our thumbs out of the dike and
let the greedy drown in their own contempt.

We cannot negotiate the outcome. It is what it will be if we idly
stand by and wait for whatever crumbs might trickle down to us. We
cannot save ourselves from terrorism while we are the terrorists. We
cannot raise Afghanistan to a place of peace and freedom, when our
very presence encourages rape, murder, and revenge against their most
vulnerable populations in retaliation for our self righteousness and
military presence. How can we fight for human rights when we are
disregarding them?

We cannot provide Israel with arms when they not only threaten but act
upon their threat to destroy that which they do not agree with,
including now, the threat of a pre-emptive strike on Iran.

We have been destroying the infra-structures that have survived
thousands of years because we have allowed arrogant and stupid leaders
to put their own interests above ours.

It is time for us to take to the streets bearing only our hearts and
our will to overcome those that have for years warped every industry
into some kind of tyrannical empire of self destruction.

It is time to say no more and put our bodies where our mouths have
been, in the open, refusing to watch the media that deceives us, to
buy the products that are killing us. It is time to support the small
local businesses that will be our heart and soul if we are to survive
this economy. It time for poor kids to stop enlisting in the military
and for those who have enlisted to stop fighting, to sit down, to face
the consequences of doing the right thing.

It is time for us to have the conversations about what WE can do and
must not do, to tell our leaders that they long ago stopped supporting
us and we no longer support them.

It is simply time to find the personal courage to begin doing the right thing.
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Kerry Bassett (kjb.mysticwolf@gmail.com) is a graduate student in
Conflict Resolution