the gray season

It's a gray gray day here in Ohio. We each sit in our snug little boxes waiting for spring while the rest of the world rages around us. That's what it means to be an Ohioan. To be an edge hanger, part of the periphery, hanging out in the mist where no one will see us, acknowledge us. Part of the rust belt, the has-been state.

Just what makes us so? A people who grew used to having a piece of the good life and forgot to watch as freedoms slipped away from us piece by piece. Politicians who made choices based on the expedient, forgetting that they are supposed to represent the people back home. They don't even know the people back home. We don't exist in their world.

I met my congressman for the first time last October. We were redistricted at least 5 years ago, but this guy is rather elusive and tends to stay with his own kind in DC. You know, golf outings and occasional forays to the office to decide on a bill. I was used to my old representative, Sherrod Brown, who was at least good for an occasional debate (in public with the unwashed many no less). Of course now that Sherrod Brown has gotten into the Senate, all that has changed. Now he votes for funding an ill-thought-out war without batting an eyelash. The status quo flows on.

But Steven LaTourette is a different animal (or potbellied middle aged man). He doesn't really listen to the people that comprise most of his district--mainly because they stay silent. Silent and compliant. Steven knows best. At least he's changed his mind about the war--even though he hasn't changed his vote. But the pity is that he is for the most part unaware of the little guy out there, the one who has found the ground slipping beneath him. He is part of the majority of the Congress (doesn't matter which party) who listen to the wheeler dealers and the money men and have forgotten the ordinary people who look at their paycheck and hope it will stretch to pay $3 gasoline and $4 milk.

Congress needs to come back to the real world. The world of pinching pennies and doing without and always living with that pit of dread. Trillion dollar deficits to fund an empire are not part of reality. Lockstep with an overgrown frat boy who knows nothing about running a country for the people is also not part of reality. Just a few more months and the bubble will burst, things will change hopefully for the better. In the meantime we will sit huddled in our gray mist waiting.

I think I'm going to bake some bread. You know the kind where you knead and pound at the dough to make the finest texture possible. Every four years, my bread baking reaches new heights. Kneading and pounding. Kneading and pounding and raging. Kneading and pounding and plotting a future.