Now What?

And now what? Where do we go from here? How do we generate the spark that we so desperately need to rekindle the housing market? What do we do to keep the millions who have been pushed to the ranks of the unemployed from fading into oblivion? We have taken away the capacity of the government to create and have it left it only with the ability to destroy, to make less than we already have. Where do we turn?

What do we do to prevent the procedural fiasco that we call government from continuing on its path to nowhere? How do we rectify a process that permitted the health care debate to turn into an endless filibuster debacle? When the will of the majority in the Senate has been sublimated and 50 has become 60, what next? And when what should have been the briefest of exercises in agreeing that our country is obligated to pay the debts it has already incurred instead becomes a vehicle to threaten our own mutilation, what then? When the Republican party leads from behind, and the Democrats, who were elected to take this country out of the Bush era and into the sunlight, have no opportunity to bring us anywhere close to their land of promise, what does our future hold?

Until we focus our efforts on assuring that those who are elected to lead can do so, we are powerless. And if we are powerless then the opportunity exists for those who should have no voice, to shout and threaten and carry on and take us to the brink. If we don't pay attention to everything that has gone wrong and if we think that somehow it will all just go away, we are more than sadly mistaken. When the next crisis arises, and it is just around the corner in whatever form it may take, and substance is subsumed while process controls, don't say we weren't warned. And don't act surprised. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for the last 30 months, shame on me.

Now, before we get so small we fade away to nothing, is the time to start moving in the right direction. Destroy the right of the filibuster to do more than was intended, take away the power of the vote on raising the debt ceiling to reshape our democracy. Plug up the holes, that have become giant sieves in our government. Regain the power that was intended before the Republicans made a mockery of our system. Now is the time to pay attention to the details of governing. NOW.
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