Mark Morford has an interesting piece in SFGate: Your vegan, holistic president. He indulges in some heartfelt imagining about a country in which universally-dismissed-as-unelectable Dennis Kucinich sits in the Oval Office.

I remember watching on television as Jesse Jackson delivered his address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention. At the end of it I felt inspired. I felt the stirrings of a hope that eight years of the Reagan presidency had beaten down into a small, stunted thing inside me. And then, moments after the speech ended, the network commentators came on and basically said, well, Jackson has certainly scuttled whatever chances he had in American politics with that speech.

I’m tired of having my hopes and dreams filtered through someone else’s idea of what’s “possible.” I’ve paid little attention to Kucinich up to now, largely because he’s been dismissed by the media as an also-ran. Likewise with Dean; I’ve shied away due to people arguing that a Dean nomination would be a “disaster” for the Democratic party.

Well, screw that. It may well be that someone more mainstream, like Kerry or Gephardt, ends up getting the nomination. If so, I’ll doubtless vote for him. I want Bush gone in the worst way. But in the meantime I want to be a whole person, one not ground down by the certainty that things will never change. I want to decide myself whose vision I believe in, whose ideas I’m inspired by. It’s my birthright as an American.

It’s important to be practical. But it’s also important to dream. Thanks to Morford for reminding me of that.

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, June 13th, 2003 at 8:28 am and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.