“He needs a victory”, sighed Dr. Paul Hochfeld at the very end of our 40 minute interview with him on our local talk radio show. After a feisty and informative discussion with us about health care reform, in the end, Paul, like us, kind of sighed. When Paul talked to the Doctors for Obama group that had flown in to support President Obama’s health care reform (whatever that was), they told him that “the president needs a victory”. Even though Paul is a single payer advocate and knows like many of us do that a national system is the only thing that will work, in the end does it boils down to giving the President something to sign? He was politely called delusional by his colleagues. Did he not see that the Congress was incapable of passing something meaningfully comprehensive? Did he not see that there were not 60 votes in the Senate?

Basically what our well meaning friends, colleagues, and the pundits are telling us is that we have to throw the game. For some illusion of victory, we must cheat. We must give up and give in and throw in the towel. We are told that victories are incremental. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a step along the way to labor reform. Women didn’t get the vote right away. African Americans didn’t really get their right to vote until the 1960s. Change comes slowly. Don’t be annoying and loud. Sit down and make sure you color within those lines, Sally Jean.

Looking backwards, change does seem slow for the cause of justice. But if Mother Jones or Eugene Debs or Sojourner Truth or Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King or Dr. Margaret Flowers had only looked backward and minded their “Ps” and “Qs” and waited for the promised land, women would still be wearing corsets and African Americans would still be at the back of the bus. Somebody should have told Jesus to sit down and shut up. “You know Rome wasn’t built in a day and it will eventually fall. So go eat some figs. You know we can’t get rid of these guys. We don’t have the 60 votes.”

No, without people who are impatient for change and who see justice as their sole guiding light who cannot sit down and shut up, there is no justice. These people cannot “circle the wagons” or “get in line” or all those other weasel phrases that are the bleats of a patriarchal sociopathic system that is in its death throes. Management speak, weasel words and cliches are like the bleats of the dumbass dinosaurs as they sink into the tar pits. Close your ears to them and fly high.

No, Dr. Paul, we must keep on truckin’. We must not throw in the towel or tow the line. And most certainly we must not throw the game. To keep up the illusion of a democracy with propaganda and photo ops is the real delusion. To go along with a political system that is as tainted as Chinese pet food and telling the world that “It tastes mighty fine”; now that is delusion. To have some sort of faith in the false priests of the false religion of greed is clinically delusional. And the sacrificing of millions of workers, throwing them into the volcano to appease that false god is not only deranged, it is criminal.

We want regulations back. We want vanilla consumer banks for ordinary lending transaction and Ponzi scheme gambling entities like Goldman Sachs separated. We want any kind of middlemen that deal with public issues such as health, energy, and food to take a modest profit, not shake us down for our last dime. We want short publicly funded elections with free advertising on TV and Radio for candidates. No more two Americas where wealth is rewarded and work is kicked to the curb.

We want a fair days pay for a fair days work. If we are forced to see life as a game we don’t want it rigged. Stop the purposeful confusion and manufactured illusion. Stop thinking you are smarter than we are because you see yourself as players. (And that includes the purring pundits of the Fat Cat news.) You are not smarter, you are cheaters. You are worse than delusional. To take off from Matt Taibbi, you politicians who collude with the banksters and insurance leeches are evil entrails-sucking vampire squids. And don’t bother to say “that was over the top”. It wasn’t. And I’m not crazy.