Yesterday I was so bummed out about Obama failing to veto the Tar Sands Bill and allowing the gutting of the Clean Air standards, that I just wanted to give up on politics. So I called my friend Beverly, whose political judgement I trust and she said “Have you seen what’s happening in Israel?” She’d sent me a link a few days back, of people dancing in the streets in Tel Aviv, and then she sent me another one as we were talking. I went to the computer, clicked the link and found Daphni Leef’s speech. I started to cry. Democracy may be strangled, almost dead, buried under the weight of corporations and the super-wealthy, in the United States, but it’s alive and well on Planet Earth!
Dancing in the Streets has long been my image for Peace, whenever I visualize it. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book called “Dancing in the Streets” in which she shows that the disorder once known as “melancholia” (now known as “depression”) has been rising in proportion to the loss of public celebrations. She describes the book in an Op-Ed piece from the NewYork Times, Published: June 3, 2007