politics and cocktail weenies
yes, it's true, last night was interesting. sitting at a table eating snacks ("apertifs") with darby, catherine, and patrick and kim, pancho, and yolanda... the mayor of pamplona. the entire time i kept just staring at her thinking how strange it is that this is the person who makes decisions for the entire city. this is the person who knows about everything that is going on, and not just in this city but others, too. darby and i both confessed that we had both imagined her without make up at home with the husband (i pictured her with her hair in a ponytail and little whisps falling in her face, wearing cottony pajamas and reading a book -- darby pictured her in a nighty walking out of the bathroom pointing her finger at her husband about something). the only thing i could think to equate it with was having george bush in your living room, just chatting and telling funny stories and eating cheese and drinking green tea (darby equated it with tom potter...). not celebrity status, not "famous person", but just here is someone sitting in your home and you can talk to them about life, and tomorrow they're on the news or in the paper for some big event/decision/controversy/kudos. just a person. who happens to control the city. so, i hate to say it, but it makes me have more compassion for a man like george bush. makes me imagine him sitting at home being himself and waking up everyday making decisions for an entire nation which veritably controls the entire world. and while i know those decisions are completely entirely wrong and the motives behind them are awful, i guess i can bring it down a level and see it as just a person who is confused about what's important and doesn't know how to handle making wrong choices and confessing wrongness. i can just imagine george bush by himself sitting in some room in his big white home thinking. and i wonder what he's thinking. and i wonder what he cares about and what makes him laugh and what makes him so sad he wants to curl up into a ball and die. because he must have these feelings. and it makes me mad that of course in all of the media of this man, this human, we see the decisions and from those decisions we create an image of the man and we never really know what george bush FEELS. because politics and the media are not concerned with what people in charge feel. because they aren't people they are icons. and that is not right.
more and more i keep believing in the need for communities, the unbelievable necessity of communities, that communities will change the world because they will make it more unified and more connected (redundant i know) and more in touch with what we feel, that we are people, that we aren't ideas of people or symbols of people or representations of ideas and actions. we are feelings and breath and life. and george bush, and yolanda, both at the end of the day are beings that were born as babies and will die as an old man, an old woman, with the same thoughts about the experience of living as every single one of us has every day. babies, children, people with dreams and one day the realization of that dream and all the effects of it. people. individuals. you, me.
more and more i keep believing in the need for communities, the unbelievable necessity of communities, that communities will change the world because they will make it more unified and more connected (redundant i know) and more in touch with what we feel, that we are people, that we aren't ideas of people or symbols of people or representations of ideas and actions. we are feelings and breath and life. and george bush, and yolanda, both at the end of the day are beings that were born as babies and will die as an old man, an old woman, with the same thoughts about the experience of living as every single one of us has every day. babies, children, people with dreams and one day the realization of that dream and all the effects of it. people. individuals. you, me.