sardine balloon

The revolution is over, and the politicians missed it. They were occupied, gazing at a sardine balloon.

A sardine balloon is an encoded term (encoded by my daughter and me) meaning "a hallucination."

And now I'm a recovering Democrat, a revolutionary who believes the revolution has already happened. We and our politicians need to run to catch up with it. The two major parties are not addressing the country's real problems because they're acutely nearsighted and sidelined by their inability to cope with reality.

Democrats are stuck in the 20th century, back there with "The Way We Were." The Republicans are -- I'm not sure -- stuck somewhere between the outer reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy and the early 19th century with John C. Calhoun, living in the good old days that never existed -- the way we weren't.

Either way, you miss the boat. And where is that boat? One of the few people (but the numbers are rapidly growing) who knows what's happening and how to describe it, James Howard Kunstler, wrote a piece this morning everybody who cares about this stuff ought to read. Just go to Kunstler dot com and click on the "Jobs" essay's title. The money paragraph from that essay is:

Among the surprises I've suggested over the years is the idea that people used to spending long hours in cubicles staring at video screens may, at some point ahead, begin to spend their days in the fresh air, cultivating food crops. I'm sure this sounds outlandish. But we begin to see the new dynamic of this world resolving in the nexus between a crisis of capital, climate change, and peak oil.

It's a new world, with lots fewer jobs and cars, and lots more home-grown vegetables, bikes, and buses. Our leaders may not be able to see it, but like the rest of us they have to live in it.