At the official level, the first thing you need to know about Maryscott O'Connor is that she's not a centrist. The second is that she is the founder and editor in chief of MYLEFTWING.COM, a welcome arrival in the blogosphere fully emblematic of the best in the current "citizens communications revolution" that has finally shaken the System's monopoly over opinion-moulding.
Highly original, bewildering in its offerings, breezy, and a little dislocated at times due to its tremendous desire to be of service, O'Connor's site is utterly democratic, with viewpoints exchanged at all levels of argumentation and decibels...but when all is said and done, it will receive warmly anyone battling in an honest way the forces of cruelty, entrenched privilege, ignorance, and injustice. Maryscott's favorite turfs are media, politics, history and culture. And she's not afraid of controversy. Her manifesto diary may be inspected here. It's a damn good catalog of what we urgently need to do in this nation to make it a healthy civilization.
I imagine Colombians wouldn't give a shit about an American president's party affiliation because they, unlike most Americans, more fully understand how very little difference there is between the two parties when it comes to things that affect them (Colombians). We sure as hell haven't seen much of a difference between the two parties in the past several years as concerns foreign policy in the Middle East; why should we expect the Democrats to suddenly decide to take up rhetorical arms against the Republicans and fight the neocon imperialist agenda the rest of us have seen coming a light year away?
DEMOCRATS: END THIS WAR NOW! The tragedy of this essay, for me, is that I so desperately wish I could have written it about another nation. Or about extreme world poverty.
The list is longer than my arm, of crises on which we ought to be demanding immediate action from those who sit in power, those who hold in their grasp the power to change these wretched realities. To be forced to choose, it's such a horror.
