Pardon Me, But ....!

I know, I know, I know!

It used to be the case that, at least in Colorado, mention of politics and religion in polite society was considered almost a "social-class offense," but not any more. Everywhere I go, people are talking the election and the race, and, surprisingly, most of the party talk is for Obama. I feel the 60 million strong group of Americans known as the "Cultural Creatives" have found a partisan home for the first time since the Sixties. I am a "Cultural Creative" ( Paul Ray, The Cultural Creatives) Certainly my life as an Independent for thirty years has come to an end this summer when I changed my registration to Democrat, after 30 years of being "Unaffiliated," because, basically, back, then, I tuned out politics to focus on my students in an apolitical way.

I feel as if I've come home, somehow. In the 70's, I carried a sign down and up Grand Avenue in Glenwood Springs, on Vote Day, 1976, urging people to remember to vote: this looked at the time in this very Western town (then) as a somewhat anarchist personal statement that no one could deny, but it was practically terroristic to be carrying a sign.

Now, I'm looking at Michael Moore's emails and wondering how 400 families at the top of the rich spectrum own more than the next 100 million citizens down the ladder--even though most all of them own property in this Valley--and I have to wonder. That figure sounds suspiciously like the percentage of "billionaire" aristocrats in the British national makeup in the eighteenth century, and I thought we had revolted against the concentration of wealth in a few back in 1776. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see many parallels between the plight of the disappearing Middle Class in America and the Colonists who founded our Republic.

But I am writing about the Cultural Creatives: if Sarah Palin can just ignore the questions of the moderator in a national televised debate, I guess I can return to focus in my blog, to strike some sort of universal balance.

Cultural Creatives are, 60 million American adults strong, almost all for Global Citizenship, second only on their ladder of values to Oneness with the Universe. When one places that "global-ness" so highly, everything else has to change, down below: partisanship is so many words; "national" means the place I live for, not die for; the national economy looks most like the tool that drives a third of the world's population to live in abject poverty and seasonal starvation.

Cultural Creatives work to live in the Now, and anyone looking for "our" vote better give up running on the "What I voted for" line: too many great Senators have voted against a great bill because some yahoo Senator has amended a pork barrel add-on to it, to use those numbers. Cultural Creatives look into the eyes of the candidate, and then know for sure.

They come from every angle of the American spectrum, from Colorado MamasforObama to a Listserv for Colorado accountants, but the defining character point is love of the planet and our place in it. How many readers out there realize that a third of the American adults in America place the sanctity of the world higher than the health of the American economy? Yikes!

No one even remembers Nicaragua, a chic topic in 1980, but completely forgotten now. It is as if the mouths of starving peasants, crushed by American might, mean nothing. I beg to differ: the result of our foreign policy has impoverished that sovereign state, and, even though the country is bending over backwards, it's still considered a "terrorist" state by the State Department, which, God Bless them, lives in the 1950's. One of the primary reasons why so many Independents have shifted to the Obama and Democratic columns, cultural creatives, mostly, is due to the fact that the Federal line simply doesn't wash with the cultural creatives' experiential take on real conditions in the countries who serve our needs for sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee and bananas. So many Americans have actually been there that the "line don't wash," anymore.

Is anyone listening to global citizens? I'd suggest that the background of Barack Obama as a multicultural citizen of the world is arms above any of his opponents. Peasants are citizens of the world, too. Vote Obama, 2008.

Gracias, CenterDoug