I went for a comfortable jog around the neighborhood around Garmin today.  I was literally lost in suburbia, unable to tell where I was or where I was going, if anywhere.  These are my reflections from my three miles spent on the great outdoor treadmill of cul-de-sacs and intentionally tangled roads:

• It’s in the low 50s, wet but only threatening to rain again.  I’m alone on the sidwalk in the gloom.
• I’m passed by some teenagers in their 90s red BMW.  They park on the street two houses down from another 90s red BMW.  They sit in the car, seeming to wait for someone else.  I eventually jog past them.
• I pass driveway after driveway of minivans waiting for me to pass at my pedestrian pace before they can back out onto the street and drive by as far on the other side of the road as possible.
• I shuffle through a four-way stop where a maroon minivan has stopped well in advance of my arrival.  She could have come and gone before I reached the intersection.  I think she’s checking me out. But I can’t tell; the windows are tinted.
• I jog down a slight hill and around a pine-tree lined corner where houses are made of stone.  They stand out against the wood siding of a brick-layer-union-busting neighborhood.  I grew up in a pine forest.  These houses’ facades  remind me of my childhood home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains like a green tree car freshener hanging from a mirror in a sticky-hot car reminds one of an evergreen forest, which is to say: close, but no cigar odor was masked.
• I follow the road side into several dead end cul-de-sacs, which is Catalan for “Bottom of the Bag”.  In the bottoms of these bags, with identical houses all facing each other at slightly different angles, I wonder if anyone looks out and wonders why the neighbors would choose such an ugly shade of taupe.  Dogs bark in warning that this is not a through street and non-residents are not welcome.  If we had wanted people jogging by, we’d have bought the house on Sleepy Hollow Drive.  This is Sleepy Hollow Circle.  You must be lost.
• I look down when I run.  This neighborhood is over 10 years old, which is to say it’s falling apart and the streets have several minor potholes.  I notice some plastic pellets that are evocative of the ammunition from a toy gun I once wanted so badly as a child.  I finally got it one day.  It was my most prized possession.  Until I saw a commercial for something else and wanted it more.  The toy was discarded and the rubber ammo is likely littering a driveway somewhere like plastic land-mines for my brother’s GI-Joes.
• Another minivan passes.  This one’s windows are not tinted.  She gives a sideways, suspicious glance.  This isn’t a through street.
• Does this street go though?  I really am lost.  How could I know where I’m going?  The roads are intentionally obfuscated by real estate planners who want to conceal the fact that an actual meadow was destroyed before East Meadow Lane was built.  Transplanted trees keep me from being able to see the next street over.  The landmarks are houses that all look the same.  Wait–that one is powder blue and this one is baby blue and this one is rotated 30-degrees off from the one up the block.
• More litter:  Soda bottle caps.  Mountain Dew is for snowboarders.  Pepsi is for cool kids with leather jackets.  Coke is for people who want the whole world to get along.  But this cap is useless and the trash can is so far away–except on Tuesday morning, when every trash can is lined up at the end of every drive next to the house numbers and an American flag icon painted on the curb.
• The cool air has made my nose run into my open mouth.  It’s salty–it’s real and honest.  It’s playing outside in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It’s climbing a pine tree.  It’s the safety of a road in the woods.  It’s living in a stone house and getting warm by a fireplace that isn’t for show.  It’s desire that isn’t sated by high fructose corn syrup or plastic BBs or a red BMW.  It’s personal, but it isn’t alone like these streets are alone.  I haven’t seen a single person who wasn’t safely hidden behind a curtain of steel and crouching airbags.

If you’ve read this far, you either have a biological imperative to love me (Hi Mom!) or you’re really convinced that Suburbia is an environment built to be discarded.  In the latter case, you will also enjoy watching James Howard Kunstler talk about Suburbia at TED.

Liz Cheney wants us to question the values of lawyers who would represent terrorist suspects at trial.  She wants us to question the Department of Justice that employs them and its credibility in the area of Justice if it is in the practice of hiring people who defend the guilty.

This is, aside from being idiotic, thoroughly unAmerican.

What does it mean to be American?  An American is not someone born here.  An American is not someone with a particular religion or one of a specific set of last names.  We are Americans because we subscribe to a particular form of government: A government of laws, not men; based on Freedom, Justice, and Equality; and deriving its just power from the consent of the governed.  This is not possible if anyone is presumed guilty until proven innocent or denied due process.  To assert that some are not entitled to due process is objectively to be unAmerican.

This is backwards. The definition of marriage depends on society. Marriage is not a natural phenomenon nor a free-standing institution. Marriage is a social contract defined by society. It is completely mutable and has no inherent nature beyond what society defines for it. If not, then what gives inherent meaning to marriage as between one man and one woman? Is it a gene… the monogamous heterosexual marriage gene??

If there is some biological inherency in one-man-one-woman marriage, then it must be in its current form via evolution. Looking back through the historical record (even the one provided by the Bible), we see that marriage has been one-man-many-women, it has been about finance and property, it has been about alliances and power. It has changed, evolved.

So, either marriage as defined by DOMA (one-man-one-woman) is a consequence of some biological configuration that is subject to change via evolution and has arrived at it’s natural present state through natural selection, or marriage as we know it is socially constructed and has changed because society has changed it.

(I suppose there’s the third option of the Intelligent Designer having created marriage in it’s current state and then a pernicious devil-like character has gone back through history and the Bible and planted false evidence of a different notion of marriage in order to trick us.  But some things are just too absurd to believe)

I doubt anyone takes the biological evolution of the nature of marriage seriously. So we as a society are permitted to change the definition of marriage. Your definition is not sacred and neither is mine. It never has been.  It is now and always has been what we define it to be.

A storm is coming. That storm is the dying fit of those who wish to suppress the democratic process by which states are changing the legal definition of marriage to match the social contract already written by our changing culture. The storm is coming, but you do not need to be afraid. A rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color is what comprises society. And that society is increasingly choosing freedom over fear.

I think it is a very provocative juxtaposition to have this couple, much maligned by the GOP, speak for a message of bottom-up change and fearlessness.

First, Bernadine discusses the biggest change to come from the result of the election:

And it does represent two important things, at least. One of them, it seems to me, is a pretty decisive rejection of the politics of fear, whether it’s fear that there’s some secret cell of domestic terrorists from the ’60s hanging around or fear that our major primary approach to the world and to raising our children should be one of fear. Obviously, life is—includes tragedy and pain and suffering, and that will come along, but approaching the world as five percent of the world’s people now seems possible, adjusting how the United States thinks of itself in the world. That’s, to me, an enormous thing.

The other striking part of the interview, for me, comes just a moment before when Bill Ayers says:

The question is, as Bernadine is saying, how do we build the movement on the ground that demands peace, that demands justice? This is always the question. It’s happening—the question is being raised in a new context. So how do—you know, I often think, thinking historically, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t the civil rights movement, but he was an effective politician who passed civil rights legislation. FDR wasn’t a labor leader. Lincoln didn’t belong to an abolitionist party. They all responded to something going on on the ground. And in a lot of ways, we have to get beyond—progressive people have to get beyond the idea that we’re waiting for a savior. We’re not waiting for a savior. We need to transform ourselves, transform our movements, reach out to one another and build an irresistible social force for change.

We are the change we have been waiting for.  The campaign slogan was not, “Yes I can,” but rather, “Yes, WE can!”

Read, Watch, or Listen to the interview at Democracy Now!