Posted June 21st, 2003 by Michelle

I don’t think I even need to mention that today was the longest day of the year, but that the sun never actually appeared, and it was dark all damn day. Summer Solstice my a… I can’t help wondering when we as New Yorkers are going to get all of the good karma that simply must be headed our way. It’s been a really rough two years, starting in September of 2001, through the wars, through the economy, and then we’ve been cursed with the worst winter EVER. The worst spring EVER. And now it’s the first day of summer and damn it, we New Yorkers deserve some sun. And I’m not talking the 90 degree mugginess that it is supposed to be by Thursday- I’m talking about a week- just one week- of sweet, breezy, mid-70’s weather that is warm in the sun but you are glad you grabbed a wee sweater when night falls. We deserve this. We deserve nothing less.

There was a front page article in the New York Times that New Yorkers are actually more depressed. There are numbers to prove it. More people are going to see analysts and psychiatrists. Me? I’m just going nuts.

And yet… and yet… the only thing that gives me pause about joining the Peace Corps, the only thing save my worrying about my family, is that I will miss my city. I became an EMT because I wanted to be an EMT in New York. Even though I don’t work on an ambulance, I work every chance I get on the people who live and visit here and who need me. I became an EMT to care for my city and once again I am leaving, and this time not just for the summer. That gives me pause… for about ten seconds. I still feel like I’m sticking my head in the sand by leaving. I have this irrational, desperate hope that when I return, the goons will have left the office and people remotely resembling humans will have signed up. But, as my brother Ian points out, the goons in this country elected the goon in office. But I would like to make a few points perfectly clear:

1)Bush is anti-choice. Bush would take away every right to choose that ever existed from every woman alive. He is going to sign into law the first national abortion restriction since Roe Vs. Wade. Even if you are wishy-washy on this issue, please realize that it is one of many basic rights that he is dissolving.

2)Bush cares exactly nothing for the natural world. Of ten examples I will cite one: this past winter he allowed the use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park. Now, yes, I am a tree-hugging granola eater, but even if you hate the likes of me, please realize how lucky we are as Americans to have places like Yellowstone. If you’ve never visited, you cannot know the beauty of it. But I hope you will trust me, as someone who lived there this summer, that places like that make everything else better. Allowing snowmobiles 1) disrupts the mating habits and migrations of countless species of animals and 2) destroys wild areas. It creates unnatural trails. It scares animals. It sucks. Bush allowed this simply because he could. He felt like it. “Just cuz”.

2c) The simple use of the term “ANWR” rather than the full name- Artic National Wildlife Refuge- speaks to all the unthinking Americans who don’t care if he drills for oil in some far off place called ANWR. Perhaps if a few of those folks looked up what those letters stand for, a mind or two might be changed. But the Americans who elected him aren’t paying any attention.

3) He lies. That’s really the jist of it. He is a liar. He lied about the WMD, he lied about why he went to war, he lied and said that Saddam was behind 9/11, he lied that he gave a flying shit about anything ever. Sorry. I’m trying to be cool-headed here. But I simply don’t understand why the whatever huge percent of America that supports him doesn’t see that.

Wow. You know what I just realized? It’s not our administration that has made me lose hope. It’s the people who support it. The majority of Americans. My fellow Americans, you make me lose hope.