'Civil Disobedience'

On our morning walk, my fellow citizens and I no longer seem like a good fit.

Almost everyone out on the streets looks like a victim of something--they walk with their heads down, for the most part, or amuse themselves with electronic devices. The news in the morning paper never crosses their minds.

This President, I thought as I walked, was elected by people still in high school or by high school dropouts. For it was clear to me from looking at this President's mouth while he talked that he had no new ideas, that everything he proposed was old, and that these proposals appealed to people who were dying of nostalgia.

Wouldn't it be refreshing, I thought, if the people who elected this President finally saw him as the bore that he most certainly is and rejected him on the basis of the boredom he so arrogantly proposes. That's the very least a responsible citizen could do, to register his or her boredom with the arrogant thoughtlessness of the President, and stop walking with him. 

(But meantime, what to do about the lies? Keep watching the President's mouth, it's a mouth meant to tell lies; eventually the mouth will lead to the money, and then everything will come tumbling out and down as it might have in the first place).

On my walk this morning I could also see how addicted I'd become to the idea of good and just government, and how this addiction caused me to see my fellow citizens in less than ideal democratic light; and that this way of looking at things was a kind of poison.

I'd been reading HDT's Civil Disobedience, hoping to apply some of its information to the current political crisis, but the more I walked and the more people I saw, the more I saw whatever I might do as a citizen is useless at the present time; though I also saw a time coming when the people who'd put out the poison would have no other choice but to begin eating the poison themselves.