It's a weekend of political change!

The dawn's clouds had the rolls and ripples of a body-builder's biceps. A pink was from an emergent sun suggested anger more than frilliness What kind of day did they portend? A day of discovery of an alternative to our current two party system the same weekend as the two parties have their conventions!

We have been increasingly disenchanted, to be polite about it, by Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party but, for the most part, found them to be the lesser of two evils. Minnesota's Green Party has been looking like a possible alternative, except for a few planks in their platform that we found troubling. On the other hand, the Green Party platform is more in line with our preferences than the DFL party platform, at least as it's been interpreted and applied by Minnesota's Democrats for the past several years. We've never considered voting Republican, so that's left us (pun intended) ready to declare ourselves an Independent. The existing parties have become too entrenched in maintaining the status quo, or regressing back to the stone age, while supporting global corporatism at the expense of environmental and social justice.

Today we (re)discovered the Movement for a People's Party and their platform. A first read it seems to be missing the planks in the Green Party platform that bothered us. It also looks to include most of what we think should be political priorities for a sustainable future for what used to be our democracy. We intend to do a little more poking around and checking out what their up to, but so far we're more heartened and encouraged than we've felt for a long time. We've been more and more thinking that someone should do what the MPP folks seem to be doing. Turns out, someones are doing it but we'd lost track or missed it somehow.

Dreamwood

By Adrienne Rich

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand

there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see

or the child’s older self, a poet,

a woman dreaming when she should be typing

the last report of the day. If this were a map,

she thinks, a map laid down to memorize

because she might be walking it, it shows

ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert

here and there a sign of aquifers

and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map

it would be the map of the last age of her life,

not a map of choices but a map of variations

on the one great choice. It would be the map by which

she could see the end of touristic choices,

of distances blued and purpled by romance,

by which she would recognize that poetry

isn’t revolution but a way of knowing

why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced

wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,

mass-produced yet durable, being here now,

is what it is yet a dream-map

so obdurate, so plain,

she thinks, the material and the dream can join

and that is the poem and that is the late report.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.