I've had nothing left to lose for a long time.  The country has gone to hell.  Congress totally sucks.  I hate this country.  I am going to leave it.  Obama is a socialist.  Bush is a fascist.  Cheney is well Cheney.  Al Gore is a polemical lightning rod, and global warming is the biggest hoax in global history.  I don't know how to make sense of it all.  Do you?  I feel desperate.  Lost.  Well, we have leaders like Glenn Beck on the Republican right and Keith Olberman on the Democratic left but most of us are standing someplace in the middle or a mix of the right and left and not so pure as the scripts from which Beck and Olberman read while gazing at their teleprompters.  Yes, most of us don't adhere to purity tests.  I don't even think the Palin followers are pure as the driven snow, either.  I think there are a lot of blurred lines.  I hear some people tell me they want to leave the country.  I hear people tell me they cannot make it anymore in America so they want to go to Panama.  I was just listening to John Lee Hooker Jr's latest Recession Blues, people going into Wal-Mart and coming out with a pair of free tennis shoes.  Catch me if you can.  There is desperation in the air.  Yet here on February 23, 2010 there must be optimism.   I laugh.  Because I think our best days are ahead.  But they are going to come only if we join in a movement called green patriotism. It's probably the most important thing going on in America today.  I'll tell you more about it with every word I write....

to be continued