A Different Politics

Posted on July 25, 2005 in Campaign 2004 Mania

I haven’t been all that fun, active, or productive unless I have it written on a calendar to have done. Then I will do it. A friend of mine has been hospitalized with my disease. In her eyes, I see my own wildness. In her voice, I hear the same slowed shock. I have no idea what triggered it. Memories of my own manias flow through me as I try to ignore the world and that shake runs through my arms, portending a possible jump and a fall.

Today I slept for 14 hours after I had only 6 hours sleep the night before. This is what disease reduces your life to, especially if you choose hermitic protections against overstimulation. Tonight, I watched a movie set in Las Vegas. All those lights stirred up my terror of the Strip and the strange life of the nightclubs and the bars. It called to mind the incidents surrounding the election when I had a break while on the road, the power struggles and the doubletalk that will bend me and snap me like a dry reed.

I should not have gone to Vegas. The absence of one bipolar would not have saved the election. I doubt that I did any harm. I don’t believe in new visions or new ways. What I saw up there was the door to door work of the Sixties. The young people who ran the booths had no idea that their methods were the same. They wanted to be the cutting edge and they didn’t want a crazy oldtimer like me — starting to frazzle from all the bright lights — telling them that he had been there.

I was told to be strong, to stay, but I got in my car and drove home. I took off like a jet and breezed across the deserts and down the canyons. I sang. And when I got home, I began unwrapping what was left of my sanity and laying it out for the vultures to clean. Except they wouldn’t touch it.

Those memories are what are bustling through my mind tonight. I sat down here at the keyboard for one reason: confession. By speaking of them, I deny them their power. I will never work on a political campaign again because they are all alike: a handful of youthful organizers order around a mass of older volunteers. I shall devote myself to what I have feared, practice a different politics based on reaching out to people, making a difference in their personal lives. A politics which is not politics but compassion. Those who wear fashionable leather coats and talk of the coolest bands can have the campaigns. They’ll ruin future ones like they ruined the last few until they learn how to work with others.