Last week, I watched Ed Rendell cite on television New Orleans' 2005 flood as an infrastructure failure and couldn't help but smile at how far we've come. He made no mention of a "natural disaster" or Hurricane Katrina, and rightly, finally so.
I've been honored and blessed to be a part of a group of people who've worked passionately for the past six years to bring about just such a change in lexicon, bloggers who adamantly referred to the event as The Flood, or even the Federal Flood, insisting that what it's called accurately represents the actual truth of the event. It seems to be working. We can change the words if there are enough of us and we stick with it long enough.
This is the amazing gift that new, or social, media has brought to us: the opportunity to join voices and be heard as We, The People. The patriotic choice is to use it.
I should also like to stop calling them the Tea Party. It inaccurately infers patriotism when it's closer to insurrection, and it suggests, erroneously, that it's an independent party. I intend to always refer to them as Tea Party Republicans, since Secessionist Anti-Democracy Republicans doesn't roll off the tongue as well. I accept that, delusionally embracing ignorance and without regard for history or truth, they've fully appropriated "Tea Party" so that it no longer means honorable patriots but now describes people who wish to tear down our government and to transfer significant portions of our nation's wealth from the people to the very richest among us and the corporations that made them so.
The saddest aspect of this is that so many, falling victim to ignorance, have been persuaded to vote and march and passionately clamor for all these things that are not in their best interest. This movement preys upon some of the most vulnerable among us, the gullible, fear-motivated uneducated, who're unable to think for themselves, and have done so with the collaboration of what we used to call the Mainstream Media, but should, from now on, refer to as the Corporately Owned Media, because that's what they are. They, the Corporately Owned or Corporately Funded Media, have the power to affect public thinking, especially that of the most susceptible and those in the throes of latent or blatant racism, and mold it into a movement that will do the bidding of the most powerful against the people.
So, let's review:
- It was a Catastrophic Infrastructure Failure.
- They're the Tea Party Republicans.
- It's the Corporately Owned Media.
We, The People, if we choose to raise our voices together for long enough, can change it.
