a guest voice, out of the great blue: don vanvalkenburgh

I'm going to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I don't have a choice. Global warming, global individual and collective violence, global overpopulation, and the global financial crisis has very clearly bopped me over the head with the message that I'm leaving a ghastly situation for my 5 year old granddaughter, Lili, and for all of the kids on the planet.

John McCain deserves respect and admiration for his years as a prisoner of war, and as a U.S. Senator, but he doesn't have the intelligence, the steadiness, and the creativity that Lili needs for her flowering life. Obama does. Joe Biden is almost invisible under the flash and aroma of Sarah Palin but she needs 8 more years as the Alaska Governor to be ready for the world that we live in. Biden would be a reasonable president should the situation arise.

The Republicans prefer arrogant profiteering and consumer madness, the bloody foolishness of war and facelessness in our neighborhoods, schools and workplaces. We've been given plastic hearts that are scanned by swipes in checkout machines. The Democrats aren't much better at the State and Federal level but at least they recognized the quarterback-like skill and charisma of Barack Obama in their midst.

The current financial crisis may unintentionally be bringing us back to our senses as we struggle to recover from the second major financial failure of the past hundred years. The ghosts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and of the women and men working in New Deal jobs, seem to be lifting Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the rest of us towards reasonableness, sanity and compassion.

As the last century began America was abandoning its farms and family-centered communities in favor of the smoke, grime and loneliness of steel manufacturing cities. The violent ugliness of World War I was followed by the Great Depression, and by a severe drought in the central U.S.. The country was brought to its knees. There was little work in the cities and food production was inadequate. Families were hungry. My Dad bought 26 cases of Spam, one for each free volume of an encyclopedia for his infant son, and my Mother became the resourceful Spam Queen of the neighborhood.

In response to the Great Depression at least one beautiful thing happened: Americans began to take better care of one another. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president he became a national symbol of compassion, reason and patience, not unlike Barack Obama today. Jobs were created with federal money to strengthen the U.S. infrastructure. Food was measured and rationed and distributed free so that the poorest families could eat. And Americans learned to live with less. Then World War II ended all of that. The factories had work and Americans had jobs, some carrying guns and some manufacturing the weapons of war.

My grampa John, my dad, and my Uncle Ralph worked in a factory that assembled the clumsy tracked monsters of the so-called cavalry: tanks and half-tracks. My uncle and his family lived across the street from the factory. My cousin, Del, and I would sit on their porch steps across the street from the factory. An adjacent old farm had been bulldozed into a hilly, muddy, creek-laced dirt test track for the vehicles. Day after day, night after night we'd listen to the roar of vehicles as they climbed and swiveled and churned across the landscape. America was back at work. Families, at least those who were home, had food to eat.

When the war ended the surviving soldiers returned home from Europe and the Pacific and a new suburban America was created with new track houses, new assembly line jobs and new children. Slowly but surely the family farms began to disappear under shopping malls and housing subdivisions. Steel was replaced by plastic. Television and computers gradually became the new schools and entertainment centers of our communities, and we learned to consume mountains of things that we didn't need because there was nothing else to buy. As Bill Clinton said later, "It's the money, stupid." Money and corporate box stores became our churches.

Stockholders replaced customers as the prime reason for manufacturing and selling plastic and polyester stuff. To satisfy the appetite of the insatiable stockholders the price of homes and cars soared beyond meaning for the nature of our economy. When I bought my first new car, a 1964 Volkswagen bug, it cost a dollar a pound. It would be $10.00 per pound today. The same was obviously true for homes and real estate. The bubble prices weren't created for the consumers, or for the workers. Then, a month ago the bubble burst and the entire world is sliding into what may become the Greatest Depression.

What should we do, you and I? We should come back home again. We should rediscover the amazing beauty of ourselves, of one another and of the earth. There is a cathedral inside each one of us for us to wander around in. We have been using our minds as rakes, as clever tools. We've forgotten how to use our minds to create beauty: songs, poems, dance.

We should help one another. I enjoy you, and i need you, and i miss you.

Government and corporations have become bubbles, too. It's time for them to burst, like the economy, and come back home with us. They should create a poetry of need, and of deep beauty. The choices for the future begin with each of us, with each new breath. We shouldn't farm out our lives to people we don't know and who don't really care about us.

I have struggled with my choice for president until recently. I always return to my granddaughter, Lili. I will vote for the flowering of her life. When I think of Lili and I see Barack Obama with his family I know that he understands what i'm talking about. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain are perfect, just like me. But I have decided that Obama seems to have the intelligence, the reasonableness, the problem-solving abilities that we so need now in this lovely place, our earth. He reminds me of F.D.R. and John Kennedy in some important ways. They actually were leaders. In that way Barack Obama seems like one of them. I will vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.