Dancing On

from Salvaged Poems of Theodore Roethke as cited at woods lot.
And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.

And then there was Elvis Presley. How do I get from Roethke to Presley? Ah, such is the magic of the blog linking, which takes me from Tom Shugart to woods lot.
What came before Presley? Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, I guess.
For me, nothing comes before Roethke.
Shugart’s older piece on tying in the rock and rollin’ explosion of 1955 with the four Kent State shots heard round the world fifteen years later is worth re-reading.
I was there too (at the movies), 15 and frustrated with my family’s small life and ready to Rock around the Clock. At the moment of Kent State, I was hanging around the edges of a conference in the Rockies on changing the face of higher education. Yes, both happenings were life-changing for me too, Tom.
And we dance on.
Or at least we try, despite what Betsy Devine reports: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 486,000 jobs have disappeared since January, 44,000 of those disappeared during July.
We’ve just got to give Dumbya that real and final “pink slip.” (image from Code Pink)
Burningbird thinks we need to get angry:
If you’ve read Burningbird for any length of time, you’ll remember that I’ve talked about learned helplessness before, but it wasn’t until I read this at Maria’s that I indentified what I’ve been seeing among the people of this country. With learned helplessness, even if truth marches up and spits in your face, you’ve lost the ability to ‘see’ it.
How do you fight learned helplessness? I’ve talked about this here also; you fight learned helplessness with anger. Not everyone will agree with me, but if you can anger the American voters enough, I have a feeling they’ll start seeing the reality, the truth behind today’s patriotism. I hope. I wish.

I agree. Anger is what has danced me out of every bad situation in which I ever found myself. You take the energy of anger and, instead of turning it in on yourself and feeling helpless and depressed, you propel it outward into constructive action. We need to get mad at the diseased MadCowboy.
Let’s do the democracy dance.
Dance on.

3 thoughts on “Dancing On

  1. I’m dusting off my tap shoes. They haven’t seen the light of day in years. But now that I’ve rested, it’s time to start dancing. I see Bush has taken a month off for vacation back at his ranch in Texas. Since when did a president ever take a month off for a vacation? Who’s running the country in his absence?
    No. He’s not really “vacationing.” He’s campaigning and fund-raising for his campaign ON OUR DIME, ON OUR TIME.
    That reeeeeeeeeally pisses me off….hmmmm….
    I wonder if he knows “shuffle-ball-STOMP”?

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