Text This: WE WANT TO WIN

I have read that Obama’s VP will be announced by text message, on Friday this week. New, unusual, different. I think it’s a brilliant grassroots effort and an excellent start to the head to head campaign season. It’s a least something interesting to liven up the otherwise dull campaign of late.

I know. I shouldn’t complain.

I’ve heard that some folks, like Michael Moore, are calling for Caroline Kennedy to be the Vice President.

Hey, why not Oprah? I tell you why not, BECAUSE WE WANT TO WIN THIS RACE.

I’m a little edgy, can you tell? Might be the three boys I am raising, one of which will be draft age soon. Or all the boys I know that already are draft age. The one thing that strikes me about all of them?

They are only boys.

I do have a plan. I have a friend with a second home in Canada. Yes, I really would go there rather than have my kids fight in a war that is about oil and greed and conflicts older than the sand they are fighting on.

I am awake late at night wondering if any of the conspiracy theories could possibly be right- could Bush cancel the election? Could there be a catastrophic event that would lead the American people to hand over their final, few civil rights?

Could we all be so blind to the flip-flopping angry, crazy man McCain is? I’m not talking simply about calling his wife a cunt; I’m talking about all the documented cases of him losing it on the Senate floor. Can we afford to have this nutcase control the big red button?

Time and time again, I come back to the war. Sure, I want marriage equality, and I want a decent, balanced supreme court. I want social progress and taxes that make sense for everyone. I want universal healthcare, even though I want Clinton’s plan, I’ll take Obama’s as a start.

Mostly, though? I want the war to end. Now.

I talked with a friend today who is from Dansville, New York. It’s is a rural community in central New York State and very poor. 75% of the kids in the public school qualify for free or reduced meals. Deeply rooted poverty that grabs people by the throat and holds them barely above water. There is no hope it will ever get better.

Unless, she said, you join the service.

And now, imagine the opportunity it is to serve next to convicted felons because enrollment is so low. Proud families with little choices now have even fewer.

The war also sucks up all the money for the programs they need to claw halfway out of the water.

When we become a nation without hope, without opportunity, with giant divides between the haves and have-nots, will we even recognize ourselves in the mirror?

I’m glad the Obama campaign has come up with an exciting, new way to get the news out. I look forward to the technological moment far more than I do the announcement- Bayh will be a tremendous disappointment for me.

Mostly, though, I will sit on the edge till November’s election. I fear our country’s very soul is to be chosen.

And whether or not I’ll be able to stay here.