Conclusion
Other Things the Bush Administration Doesn't Want You to Know
IT’S LATE October 2003, and I'm on a week-long vacation, driving down a dark, lonely road late in the evening on a mountainous desert in Utah. I haven't seen a soul for miles, and the only light is a ghostly flicker among the nearby mountains.
Perhaps I should have checked in at a motel in Moab near Arches National Park back when it was still daylight. At least then I could have driven the 200 miles down this narrow, winding road to Salt Lake City when I could see the road that I was traveling down for the first time better. At least then my fellow adventurer and 4-year-old son could have sprawled out on a bed, instead of the back seat of my Honda CRV.
But it's not my nature to take the easier, safer road, even when I'm on a vacation. Something inside me makes me choose the more challenging alternative. I've been that way my whole life. Go figure.
After Bush stole the White House in 2000, I could have shrugged and gone back to writing about hospital closings and UFO sightings. I could have taken the easy road. No one asked me to spend practically every single day and night searching for something, anything, to hang the Bush administration out to dry. No one asked me to pursue the case of Margie Schoedinger, the woman who chose to file a rape lawsuit against Bush and wound up with a bullet in her head. I choose to open cans of worms. What the hell. It's my nature.
In late 2000, I was making a decent salary at a good-enough job and living with my young family in a three-bedroom suburban home on a Texas cul-de-sac. In early 2004, I am living in an apartment near Washington, D.C., in the process of a marriage separation. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, I've lost a steady job, a home, a marriage, and a slice of the traditional American Dream. Sure, I can blame Bush-Cheney, but unlike most Republicans who always blame Democrats for our problems, I'm honest enough to admit that ultimately I have no one to blame but myself. Don't cry for me; I found another steady job, another home, more friends, and a plan to take care of our kids in a better manner than having to grow up watching two parents who are miserable together slowly destroy themselves because they think they tied themselves to an unreasonable vow.
I'm resourceful and a survivor who can adapt to the cards I'm dealt. And I can't stop being an activist. I can't turn it off at 5 p.m. and watch Zaboomafoo and Teletubbies with the kids. I can't when there is so much at stake, when the Bush regime keeps turning the screws on us and the world keeps getting darker than this Utah night. I can't when there is so much to fight, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for a major U.S. daily newspaper, CNN producer, reporters from other U.S. newspapers, as well as those from France, Italy, England, and elsewhere call me, wanting some tidbits of information, interested in some column I happened to post on an Internet site.
I can’t when there is so much to expose, far beyond Margie Schoedinger’s sad case, which at least one of her family members doesn’t believe ended in suicide. Many of the cases I covered in these pages. But there are far more things Bush doesn’t want you to know. Things like how he really has forms of dyslexia and Attention Deficit Disorder, explaining many of the verbal miscues and apparent mental laziness. How he only acts like a born-again Christian to attract the Religious Right vote, but he really supports shotgun issues like abortion and gay rights that make social conservatives’ blood boil. How he still cusses in public and drinks – including during the infamous 2002 fall-caused-by-a-pretzel incident. How he was a spoiled rotten control freak as a kid who would cheat to win and still pretty much is. How he and Laura Bush let their daughters do whatever they wanted, helping turn them into spoiled rotten brats who abuse Secret Service agents, some of whom have said Chelsea Clinton was much more respectful and tolerable.
This is in my blood. Give this up, and I might as well live one of those suburban soccer-dad existences and go home. Not that that's not important. It's just that I can't shake the nagging feeling deep within that I should be doing more, that I should strive for greater things in this life, that I should try to have my cake and eat it, too. One thing I don't believe is getting tied down to traditions, especially traditional axioms. I believe when I can get heavy-hitting reporters to respond to something I write out of the blue just by being an Internet columnist, I should continue down this road as fervently and passionately as I can.
So I'm driving down that deserted, lonely road in Utah, searching for something - innocence lost, my youth, my dreams, my nightmares, redemption, salvation, love, peace, justice, freedom, purity. I look at my son in the rear-view mirror, sleeping peacefully in the back seat, and battles against the oil wells that Bush plans to place in national parks like Arches seem so far away. Like the central character in the movie 25 Hours, I wonder what my life would be like if I just keep driving, driving all the way to Canada, to Alaska, then hop on a boat to some island way out in the Pacific Ocean. We could take on new identities - my son and me - and start our lives anew in a land that not even Bush could touch. We could strive to do a better job at crafting a family and a society than those before us. We could live our lives the way we really think we should, not the way everyone around us tells us we should.
An 18-wheel tractor trailer is suddenly on my butt, and I gun the engine to get away from the glare. I gaze ahead at the darkness, knowing deep within that my alternative universe is as much a figment of an overactive imagination as any of the press releases that the White House cranks out these days. For one thing, I couldn’t leave my 2-year-old daughter behind. And I couldn’t leave this mad, invigorating, intriguing place called the United States of America completely behind, at least not for long.
Deep down, I know that I can do nothing but drive down the rest of this mountain and ultimately get back to work.
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© 2004 Jackson Thoreau