söndag 29 Jul 2012, 20:16

I am sending this out to all groups to which I belong. It is not about music, but it is about the world we all live in. It's aimed particularly at my American friends and co-members, but because of America's unique position in the world, it affects everyone and the kind of world we'll all be living in for a long time.

Group leaders, it's up to you whether you treat this as spam, or post it. I try my best never to spam, but I feel so strongly about this that I'm willing to take the chance.

I hope that as artists and appreciators of music and other arts, and as people who think and feel for themselves, the majority of us here can appreciate the historic importance of Barack Obama's election to the American Presidency, and the efforts he continues to make (against a very entrenched opposition who represent the interests of the rich and powerful) to make life more livable for the ordinary citizens of the United States and for the rest of the world as well.

Perhaps some of us who cheered his election four years ago are disappointed that he has not been able to completely transform the world in the ways we had imagined, but as someone who has been involved in social causes for half a century, I can tell you that nothing comes quickly or easily. What is important is the fight and the day-to-day effort.

I expect that a number of you see the world in exactly the opposite terms, and that an even larger number are not involved in politics and perhaps haen't given a lot of thought to the upsoming election. (I'm speaking primarily to the Americans among you here. Every country has its own issues and its own struggles, and there are brave and hard-working citizens in many countries fighting oppression that we Americans can scarcely imagine!) But what is at stake here is nothing less than the kind of country we will live in for many years to come.

The message of the right is that if we take care of the rich and privileged, that the crumbs that fall from their table will eventually feed the rest of us. If that doesn't seem right to you, it may be because that particular social experiment was given an extensive trial thru the Reagan administration and thru Bush father and son. The result was disaster.

What happened was exactly what you might expect when all the safeguards that were built into the system over the years to protect the rest of us from the abuses of money and power, and from greed and corruption, were systematically dismantled. The top tax rate is a small fraction of what it was fifty years ago, and we are being asked to lower it even further, at the price of cutting the services that most first-world countries take for granted: the social safety net, affordable health care, funds for education, care for the environment… the list goes on and on.

The President has manged to get a good start at pulling this country back from the cliff it was about to fall over… but we are being asked to roll back all that progress and go back to the same things that got us in this mess in the first place. It is as if arsonists have set your house on fire, and then when the firemen are attempting to fight the flames with water, suggesting that we pour on gasoline instead!

To those of my felliow Americans who feel as I do and want to help, I have set up a grassroots fundraising site with the ambitious goal of $5,000 for the Obama campaign. Any amount helps! My site is here:

https://donate.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/2012/timdoylemusic

Thanks you,

Tim Doyle