Jay Toups

I’m not going to run for President in 2008. Go ahead, laugh. Now that you’ve got that out of your system, listen up. I don’t want to receive an assassin’s bullet after insisting that we Americans take stock in our situation and stop consuming a huge chunk of the world’s resources and waging war to ensure the Wal Mart shelves are stocked with Twinkies and Chinese-made chotzkys we “industrialized” people can’t seem to live without.

I can’t make anyone in this country or anywhere else meditate, be a vegetarian, drive less, recycle, ride a bike or plant a garden. Or do without something entirely, like driving your precious automobile. You like violence and white bread, especially the kind that comes with a dead cow, chicken, turkey or peanut butter in the middle. You like things just the way they are enough to kill to keep what you’ve got. You like cheap gas, NASCAR, you like football, you like hot dogs. You like people who resemble you. You can’t stand people who take a dissenting position. You can’t stand the truth, you just want the convenience of not having to pay attention to what the truth really means. Even if it means killing the entire planet. Similar to enjoying the steak when you don’t have to slaughter the cow.

Nope, I’ll step aside and let another in a long line of well-heeled Ivy League professional politicians, backed by big corporations and pomp and circumstance, tell you what you obviously want to hear: You’re great because you’re an American who consumes too much of almost everything. So don’t change a thing. But make sure to kill or otherwise disable anyone who suggests otherwise.

One of us proud xenophobes would kill Christ again simply for telling the truth or wearing the “wrong” type of clothing. It might even be you, especially if you fear “doing without” anything enough to kill what you don’t care enough to understand. I would surely take a bullet for my messianic streak that insists that truth have a capital T.

Change to a “less is more” personal ethic is largely feared and ignored/avoided because it is not well understood. It is antithetical in fact to the American vision, so clearly in the vise-like grip of corporatism and nationalist righteousness. This country sets the pace of consumption and denial. As a result, change in this country is usually traumatic because it is pent up until it can no longer be contained. Incremental change is being scrupulously avoided—even as greater changes loom—because our leaders and you and me steadfastly refuse to recognize the truth of our times, much less embrace managing the truth as a political imperative. We would rather live in a bubble of gluttony and fabrication even though it may well kill us all one day.

Now why would anyone who tells the unvarnished truth want to run for President of the United States of America?