My Peace City | nonviolence & social change

By Natasha

Wikipedia tells us, “a ‘hot potato’ has come to mean something unwanted, which nobody wants responsibility for, and passes on to others as quickly as possible (as if to avoid getting burned).”

Oh, America, our little hot potato. Our big globally warmed, debt-ridden, obese, diabetic, polluted, global bully -hot-frickin-couch potato.

And it dawned on me that a black man would win the presidency.

Huh?

Yep. A black man will inherit the mess. Look at this romper room.

Who am I to call it? Well, I have lived into my third decade and it is in this decade I have found my personal and political mantra–“life sides with irony.”

Irony holds that it is now looking like Barack could take the highest seat in this country. But he takes it, as we raid it for any ornate value to put a tourniquet on the bleeding Iraq war, to throw peanuts at the starving elephant of public education.

Irony whispers, the celebration of not only a “black” man, but an amazing black man, will be welcomed by rusty trumpets whose care is no longer budgeted because art had to get a day job.

“Hot Potato.” Tag you’re it.

Life siding with irony dictates the proverbial street sweepers; housekeepers of the country get out their brooms and start cleaning up – like the immigrant housecleaners of the wealthy.

Barack thank you for stepping in. But you’ve been framed. Black man left holding the hot potato. Go for it. Be careful where they take your picture – it is a set-up, the will say you did it.

America knows that she needs a representative from a “fringe” to save her.

Here’s the key to the title on the melting icecaps.

America is a ghetto on fire. Our sacrificed endangered species haunt us like ghosts and the salmon are performing disappearing acts and the environmental contaminants are showing up behind fun house doors.

Yep – we are happy to hand this puppy off to a black man. We are the inner city on fire, we are all the slaves to the multinational sharecroppers, we don’t vote anymore. We are all pre-civil war America’s African slaves.We work for Exxon. We are broke. We are American Indians taken from our beautiful land and being handed discontent on un-inhabitable reservations that house the waste of our insatiability to which we are all complicit.

Is Barack my candidate? Yes. He can pronounce foreign leader’s names correctly. When we listen to him speak, he is visionary. He is the pep talk we need after our homes were broken into and everything stolen – he is the message that we can get it back.

But it is not without a heaping helping of mashed potato irony that this is the country, the circumstances, the times that we turn a country historically run by white men to a black man. What convoluted reparation, but Barack may be the just the rare political chef that can take our delinquent American potato and stretch the starch into a beautiful melting pot that nourishes, sustains and inspires.

We shall overcome is all I can hope, all I can say.

Tags: America, Environmentalism, Exxon, Politics, sustainability, Voting, War