Home The Diaries (34)

The Diaries

Eight months & 17 days out -- the fierce urgency of now

Previous | Next

To everyone:

Good late Sunday morning, January 27 -- the sky clearing from a four day cold, gray funk here on the farm. The earth taking a warm breath, before more rain and blanketing gray sky comes this way again. When working outdoors feels good, warming you up without fear of getting too hot. That's something we seldom experience here in middle Tennessee, and it is a blessing.

I haven't written all y'all in a while, and this note will be shorter than most, because the sun really is filling the suddenly blue sky and there are "things" I want to do in the garden, in the woodlot, around the outside of the house, maybe even up in the berries -- today. This late Sunday morning. Unique into and of itself. No longer counting down within a set of days (the days inside, the days outside, the days I have been once again free). No, it's time to stop counting, and just start living. One day at a time.

I have enjoyed the idea of this life since December 4th, though I have not traveled much or changed my daily routine to account for the newly re-found freedoms of movement and from the monitoring and muffling that the last five years have been. It has been nicer than I want to take time to describe now, but it has also been bittersweet. I am easing back into life, after a five year sabbatical. It has been nice to do that easing back on my farm, to have the time and the space to satisfy the "fierce urgency of now" that is always winter in the holler. The need to cut wood (and to keep cutting wood) defines this time.

Until the wood-pile is tall and thick with split and seasoned red and white oak, poplar and black walnut, cherry -- even some green hickory and dogwood -- nothing else matters. It is nice to know how (to have the skills and the stamina) to get this chore done. To connect to almost four decades of fulfilling this need in these hills and valleys -- in this dark and quiet hollow. One day this past week, a good late morning up into the afternoon of cutting, hauling, splitting and toting seasoned white oak to the house meant that my fires are fine for at least a while. What had to be done is done again, and I feel safer for it.

Safer, and freer also to begin to rebuild the garden beds, to plow and shovel and tote and mix more goodness into beds that will grow a complete season feeding me and many others for the first time in three years. That is not something to take for granted. It is something to experience and to celebrate. Like so many parts of the lives we live, and share again here with each other. And this Sunday morning, the most urgent thing I can ask of each of you , the fiercest thing I can ask from each of you, is to speak up -- again, but now with more volume and depth -- to let our votes count in '08.

After three years of hard work here in Tennessee, we are on the threshold of accomplishing the kind of election reform we must have in order to avoid another insecure election in our state. We are literally within a handful of days from getting the legislative action we must have in order to vote this November on voting systems that start and end with a voter-verified paper ballot (vvpb). It's that simple now and we are now that close. Your voices (and/or your emails) may make the difference NOW in Tennessee, regardless of which horizon you can scan in the moments you read this note. And I know that besides the many of you who live in this Orange State, these are some of you who can see the Wind River mountains of Wyoming or the Sangre de Christos of New Mexico right now; who can step out among the Smoky mountains of east Tennessee or the high deserts of the Navajo Nation; who can hear, smell and maybe even see the beaches and the bays of Seattle, of Hawaii and California, the meadows of England, the unknown places of China and Australia -- the "same ole, same ole" of Mississippi.

All y'all -- you can indeed help me (us) now in Tennessee.

On Tuesday, our House State and Local Government committee will hear the TN Voter Confidence Act which, as now written, mandates vvpb for the November '08 election. The forces of evil (or at least of inertia) are bemoaning that they cannot possibly scrap paperless touch-screen voting machines in favor of optical scan machines (which use vvpb) in time for that election, that they must have two more years -- until 2010 -- to make the changes:

Our response: we cannot afford another insecure election in Tennessee, or anywhere in the USA in 2008. It's just that simple.

So I can hear all y'all now: "Bernie, OK, enough already, you've convinced me. Shut up and tell me what you want me to do if a) I am a Tennessean or b) I live somewhere else." For all of you, I would ask that you spend 30 minutes (or less) writing emails and speaking out for vvpb in Tennessee between now and Tuesday (yes, that's right -- in the next less than three days).Nothing else you can do will be as important as the time you spend speaking up for the idea (and the reality) of democracy.

After you finish reading this email, please go to the www.votesafetn.org web-site and join us in this effort.

If you vote in Tennessee, we have a new four-part action plan posted there which will make it easy for you to send your thoughts on the importance of secure and verifiable elections, and the need to support the TN Voter Confidence Act, to four separate audiences: the members of the House and Senate committees that will hear the bill, your own state House and Senate representatives, the Governor and speakers of both house of our legislature and, finally, to the two legislators (Moore and Haynes) who have carried this bill for us with persistence and focus for almost two years. If you live in Tennessee and want your votes to count in '08, you owe it to yourself (and to this country) to donate a half hour of your time today or tomorrow to speak your truth -- to say how important a trustworthy voting system is to our state's leaders.

If you don't live in Tennessee, how can you help? If you can devote at least fifteen minutes, go to the www.votesafetn.org web-site and just do parts 3 and 4 of our action plan. That will allow you to write our Governor and the speakers of the state House and Senate to tell them how important having a secure and trustworthy (and verifiable) election in every state is for every American, for every other inhabitant of this planet. If you live in Seattle or Santa Fe, in Menasha or Mississippi, in California or in China, please tell those three Tennessee leaders how important it is to you also to let our votes count in Tennessee in '08. We really want to impress on these three leaders just how important our state's needed election reforms are for everyone one else in this country. Who better than all y'all to help lead that effort NOW. Please write those leaders and tell them just what you think. From your own perspective, wherever you live and however you will vote in 2008.

And if you have just a few more minutes, please write Representative Gary Moore (D-Nashville) and Senator Joe Haynes (D-Nashville), the House and Senate sponsors of the TN Voter Confidence Act. Please thank them for sponsoring this historic legislation. Please ask them to hold strong for a 2008 implementation (they are being pressured to slide the implementation to 2010). Tell them we cannot afford another insecure and unverifiable election anywhere in the US. Not in 2008, when we certainly know better and when the vast majority of other states have either already corrected these same mistakes that we seek to remedy here in Tennessee or are correcting them right now.

There now. I have that off my chest -- my latest small request to all y'all, to you who are some of the brightest and most engaged people in the world, to demonstrate your power once again. We live in the "fierce urgency of now", as Martin Luther King once said, when the price of freedom is once again eternal vigilance. At times like these, as King also said, "we must move past indecision to action."

Please give your time and vocal support for the continuance of "the consent of the governed" as the principal power principle in this country. You can do that in less time than you think. As for me, now that I've called for reinforcements, I can now be about moving around in the cool, slanted light of late January. In the garden to be, in the berries that once were and will be again, in the continuing need for more good wood outside the kitchen door.

(You can never have too much cowbell or too much good firewood, in this cool, quiet, losing the winter light hollow.)

All y'all come soon now, y'hear. Bernie

Previous | Next