What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
-Langston Hughes
A sickly shroud of death was cast over a nation November 2, 2004. A shroud underneath which the last murmurings of a belief in our country ever embodying a moral vision that we can embrace were strangled and cynically discarded. What awaits us is a broken world absurd beyond comprehension, with no entry points into which its moral reference points can be reconciled or integrated with our own.
We are living a nightmare. The world we inherit from the Bush regime is a perfect amalgam of a ruthless Orwellian eradication of truth standards and reversal of moral reference points for defining right and wrong abetted by a Brave New World-ian anesthetizing cultural environment that lulls its subjects into a comforting and socially rewarding moral coma so as to never question their subjugation.
Underneath this shroud, we have an unprovoked war of aggression based on willed deceit and an unprecedented foreign policy premise for war (pre-emption), imposing its violent bloodthirsty will in the name of a grossly perverted hollow label of “democracy.” Underneath this shroud we have American troops, already hapless stooges of an oil plutocracy, sent into battle without proper equipment, deceived into staying longer, driven to suicide. Underneath this shroud we have foundational precepts of American democracy disemboweled, our Constitution’s fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth amendments of the Constitution blithely violated by the Patriot Act. Underneath this shroud we have gay men and women whose humanity is cruelly degraded and tossed around as bait with which to galvanize the basest of prejudicial fear and primal hatred. Underneath this shroud we have the Neanderthal regression of the questionability of a woman’s right to choose seriously coloring mainstream policy debate. Underneath this shroud we have the sole outpost of America’s social safety net for the most disadvantaged and abused, Social Security, in peril of having its fundamental DNA hijacked by the Bush finance junta.
We mourn at the end of the next four years of Bush’s Kafka-esque nightmare trajectory a pummeling of America’s soul into irreversible moral oblivion, the ramifications upon which for future generations will one day become our ultimate sorrow.
The National Day of Mourning Project in conjunction with THAW, Theaters Against War, will be enacting THE FUNERAL MARCH on the Inauguration Procession in Washington DC on January 20th 2005. Representatives of a multitude of groups—gay groups, women’s rights groups, environmental groups, and other entities whose raison d’etre will be irrevocably blighted under the reinstallation of a Bush regime, will march in a symbolic funeral procession to express the sorrow and utter eclipse of human hope linked to a reinstallation of a Bush administration. Against a martial law-protected manicured and pre-orchestrated show of cheer and narcissistic self-congratulation for the President, we will coat the streets of DC in funereal hues with an elegiacal protest elegy that mourns how far we have regressed as a society, AND HOW MUCH FARTHER WE STILL HAVE TO REGRESS, under the Bush regime.
We need your help. We are calling upon all enlightened organizations, institutions, thinkers, intellectuals, and leaders across the country, those who believe in core American values as outlined in the Constitution—to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, promote the general Welfare," and who are in concert with the belief that a reinstallation of Bush is antithetical to those core American values—to show your patriotism. Show that you believe what this country stands for: civil liberties, equal protection under law, democratic process. We are asking that you not going to work or school on January 20, 2005, as a symbolic act of mourning of the re-installation of the Bush regime.
We do not expect that people defy their superiors to not go into work, but aim for the heads of organizations and groups to endorse this symbolic act as an organization, to make it possible for employees to do this. To not go to work one day in an act of mourning is an infinitesimal sacrifice counterposed to the scope and breadth of social retardation and moral bankruptcy inflicted upon our country by the Bush regime, the reverberations upon which for future generations we shudder to even attempt to extrapolate.
We cannot do this without your valued and esteemed support. The Inauguration is less than 20 days away. Show your support for the National Mourning Day Project. Simply send back the following e-mail with the National Mourning Day Project statement signing the name of your organization, institution, or yourself to nationalmourning@hotmail.com.
Thank you.
National Mourning Day Project
NYC Counter-Inauguration Collective
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