Byron DeLear

A Time for Dreamers

Has the US truly gone mad? And can we still nurse it back to health? Yes and yes, says Byron DeLear, Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives. As co-founder of the non-governmental non-profit organization Global Peace Solution, DeLear said he had “calling in his heart” to calm some of the madness befalling the globe in a post-9/11 world. In 2004, Global Peace Solution sponsored a peace delegation to Israel and Palestine in an effort to affect a two-state solution to the ongoing conflict. Today, he’s giving one of Bush’s most loyal supporters a run for his money in the great state of Missouri. Here, he explains why the time for dreamers is upon us.

I first threw my hat into the ring running for the US House of Representatives for the Green Party in 2006. At the time, there was a popular dissatisfaction with the Iraq War and yet there was complacency on the part of the Bush administration to deal with the people wanting to pull us out. The politics-as-usual, two-party system in the United States was languishing and we no longer had the ability to evolve with the emerging national and global challenges of the 21st century.

I joined the Progressive Democrats in 2007 and returned to the home I was raised in: St. Louis, Missouri. I am now opposing one of the most radical, extreme Bush Republicans in the United States House of Representatives: Todd Aiken.

Missouri is the quintessential bellwether state. In the last 100 years, Missouri has only been wrong once in picking the presidential candidate who eventually won the White House. On Super Tuesday, Missouri went in favor of Barack Obama.

Obama presents an amazing restorative tool for engaging folks who have been apathetic and disenfranchised. He represents a rational, global perspective that is so desperately needed today in our country. And of course, the gross dissatisfaction with George Bush has created an amazing political vacuum that the Democratic Party has the capacity to fill.

After 9/11, George Bush and the American people had the sympathy and empathy of the global community. He could have taken that political capital and expended it to build an international coalition dedicated to protecting against international acts of terrorism. Instead, Bush decides to order a traditional mass military deployment into Iraq as an answer to a decentralized, asymmetrical act of international criminal terrorism. That was the major misstep.

We have heard many great global leaders talk about being on guard for what Eisenhower frames as the military industrial complex. Many of the founders of America warned against “standing armies” because in that mindset, you start to look at the world through the lens of military solutions.

When we have new emerging threats that threaten the security of our nations, we have to have new solutions to those new threats. The idea that deploying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the necessary logistical support to this enterprise in Iraq will protect against asymmetrical decentralized acts of terrorism in the future is like rowing a boat with a tennis racket.

I’m reminded of the presidential seal of the eagle with two talons. One talon is full of arrows and the other talon has an olive branch of peace. The eagle’s head faces towards the olive branch of peace, which suggests that we should pursue diplomatic solutions.

George Bush and his over-hyped militant mindset have crowded the arrows of war into both of the eagle’s talons – and its beak. We have so much of this one-sided approach that it’s toppling our survival and squandering trillions of dollars worth of international stature, integrity and reputation. If you want to put a dollar figure on the worst effects of the Iraq War and occupation, it most certainly has to be in terms of how the United States has forgone its ability to stand tall amongst the world’s nations anymore.

A recent poll indicated that upwards of 61 per cent of American historians believe George Bush is the worst president in the history of the United States. Another 30 per cent on top of that said he was likely the second worst president – that makes 91 per cent of historians polled calling Bush the worst or second-worst president of the US.

The American people are starting to wake up – they’re not paralyzed and being distracted by Gods, guns, gays and abortion anymore. They’re looking at long term economic interests because in the short term, they see the price of gas, health care and education skyrocketing.

The dollar is falling in its value because a bunch of fiscal opportunists and lobbyists are running roughshod over the American people’s interests by perpetuating an ongoing occupation in Iraq, by denying upwards of 50 million Americans health care, and by rewarding corporations that shut down jobs in America to open factories with questionable labor and environmental practices. Those products then roll into America, further addicting us to the consumer mindset.

These kinds are trends are not sustainable, nor are they stable. There is truly a moral and spiritual component to negotiating these issues so we are not feeding at the trough of our demise. That’s occurring right now in our consumer culture, as we put profits over people and put power over life.

When rainforests are being razed so cattle can be grown to feed our growing appetite for meat, when the air supply is being polluted and water is compromised, when coral reefs are diminishing – when every single component of our global ecosystem is under threat, the writing’s on the wall.

Every living system on the planet is in decline, and in order to reverse that, we’re going to need a sustainable socio-economic system; a new economy, a green economy. We’re going to have to remove ourselves off of our fossil fuel addiction that continues to pollute the atmosphere that’s heating the world through global climate change.

Certainly, economic interests deserve a seat at the table – I’m not anti-corporation, let me be clear. But it’s social corporate responsibility and the triple bottom line of enlightened capitalism – people, planet, profit – that is going to save our planet from destroying itself.

We need to erect an ethical wall between our private and public institutions to free the hands of our legislators to serve, rather than sell. It’s about showing up and protecting the idea that people should have a voice in our democracy, and not be drowned out and shut up and overwhelmed by the 67,000 lobbyists that currently infect Washington DC, orbiting every single legislator like a pack of wolves. There are 175 lobbyists per legislator in the House of Representatives and the US Senate, controlling, mangling, manipulating, compromising and polluting our political system to serve their elitist profit agendas.

This is a long term ideological argument that’s about restoring some of the fundamental principles of our Democracy as envisioned by our founders and framers. Right now, civilization is headed into a brick wall at 100 miles an hour, and to stop it, we’re going to need some folks in congress who are willing to be laughed at a little bit. We need folks who are willing to be called dreamers.

The time for thinkers has come.