Wall-E.

I agree – Democrats, like country music, have disappointed me too many times in the past for me to keep on listening. But here’s the thing – frogs are mutating due to the planet trying to kill itself. Salmon have forgot how to screw. Otters in post-Valdez Alaska are clawing their own petro-chemical-burned eyes out in pain.

The patient is earth, and it’s not getting better. You want to yell at which insurance company fucked up, or change a bedpan, so to speak? During times of crisis (which this is), the ones who will create positive change are those who accept the hand they are dealt and act. The ones who are educated and informed and attached to delegating moral judgements will be perfectly equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. Just ask the Palestinians who left after the first war to cry over the past. Or ask my Paiute grandfather. *Or even Friend Salmon, who still haunts my dreams and tells me not to let us blow each other’s asses off the earth until we clean up the mess we have made.

*That was for Lumpy. Nobody gets laughed at alone in my presence.

Lumpy, I’m not a Democrat and I don’t much approve of the Democratic Party. Just so we’re clear on that. I don’t think you present a fully-informed argument on the causes of urban decay, but I don’t disagree with you.

I’m not particularly interested in whose fault this mess is; rather, I choose to focus on how we’re going to clean it up. That’s where the green movement comes in, and when I say “green” I’m talking plants not politics.

If you’ve got some fancy new technology at Boeing that can do more for people’s health and happiness (and for less cost) than a victory garden can do, please let me know.

When you said you were naive, you weren’t kidding.

I’ve never been there, but ever since that mad, possessed American History Professor I had, I’ve been haunted by Detroit. No, even before that – The Dollmaker has often been called ‘America’s least pretentious masterpiece’. (Joyce Carol Oates in the NYTBR)

When folks like Gertie Nevels, and Levon Helm and John Hiatt and my favorite, John Henry, left the mountains to go wrestle with the Industrial leviathan in Detroit, they were in it to the death. Detroit won’t be the death of the courage of those early Detroit pioneers; it looks like Nature will prevail after all. Everybody wins.

I love what you are doing.