We are discouraged.  

We are discouraged not because we lost the last election, but because we DIDN’T lose; not because people don’t agree with us, but because most Americans agree with us; not because there is no hope, but because hope is evident all around us, but is being ignored.
We are discouraged because hope is being crushed by the disenfranchisers of the American dream.  The American dream of being good.

Who are the disenfranchisers?  Certainly the Republican party.  But that’s nothing new.  For at least seventy-five years, they have been the party of the Machine.  They have scorned the will of the people.  They have used lies, intimidation, racial and religious discrimination, and violence to distract from their true goal of serving the Machine.  The new development is that the Democratic Party has been co-opted.  The Democratic Party has fused with the enemy.  

We are discouraged because the party of Roosevelt, the party of Kennedy, the party of Martin Luther King has lost its soul.

We are discouraged because the Democratic Party freely admits (to a federal judge who is hearing a suit filed by Democrats against the Democratic Party) that the DNC is NOT a democratic institution.  They brag that it was never intended to be.  They tell us to our face, to the face of the sitting federal-court judge that the words in the DNC charter are meaningless; that a small number of DNC power brokers have a right to choose candidates literally in back rooms filled with cigar smoke without consulting party members.  In other words the Democratic Party is not democratic.  

We are discouraged because the Democratic Party has the same position as the Republicans on defense spending (which should be called offense spending) – using cuts to social and health services to transfer money to the arms manufacturers.

We are discouraged because the Democratic Party is war party.  It insanely backs the placement of “tactical’ nuclear weapons on the borders of Russia.  This despite the fact that poll after poll show that the American people do not desire endless wars, including cold wars that would involve placing “tactical” nuclear weapons on the border of another nuclear power.  We are discouraged because the Democratic Party has pledged itself to a strategy of regime change despite the fact that this strategy has never worked.

We are discouraged because the Democratic Party pays lip service to alternative sources of energy then authorizes fracking, seismic bombing in the Artic, and oil pipelines in our national parks while climate change promises that the worst is yet to come.

We are discouraged because the Democratic Party, with few exceptions, supports universal surveillance, the militarization of our police, and the ridiculous idea that Russia (not the 1%) is a threat to the American way of life.

Mostly, we are discouraged because so many of our friends on the left believe that Donald Trump is all that’s wrong with America.  That if we could impeach him all would be well again.  Huhh?  

The will of the American people means as little to the Democratic Party as it does to the Republican Party.

A friend recently told me, “I have to believe that no matter what, our leaders mean to do good.”  It doesn’t seem to matter to him that former President Obama, in the very first 100 days as ex-President immediately cashed in on his Presidency by taking eight hundred thousand dollars as payment for two short ‘speeches’ to mega corporations.  It doesn’t seem to matter to him that this appalling misuse of his position makes the ex-President now American Lobbyist In Chief.  On whose behalf? ...  Guess!

It is time for big change.  It’s time to take both parties down.
There is a need to make America good again.