My particular frustration (from so many fresh hells) lately is the black-out by the media as well as the Obama administration and Congress of the millions (thank you, three wickets... I had called us thousands in my media letter at first but we are millions) ... millions of single payer advocates. According to msm, opposition to Obamacare is entirely aimed from the right. Profound misinformation. Omission journalism I'll coin it.

I donned a black arm band last May. One day I was reading about the torture non-accountability (probably in Glenn Greenwald's column) and at that point I trusted that the Obama administration was just being terribly and inappropriately sluggish on following up on the torture crimes. As well as not reinstating habeas corpus. "So much on his plate," as Obama explained then to general criticism. (Jonathan Turley had called him at some point back then, "Hamlet on the Potomac.") But I needed to do something to protest my horror and impatience, and not let myself slip into desensitization, or normalization of it all (as I have read on the blogs), that this torture travesty had happened and wasn't being addressed.

I assumed that Obamaco would address it soon enough and then I could slip the black arm band off. I was a bit wary of people ... friends, strangers, coworkers demanding, or at least out of mild curiosity requiring, me to account for the band and setting myself up for political arguments. I can be terribly assertive in my writing. Face to face, I still lapse into amiable "people pleasing" too much of the time. So this was a commitment and a challenge for my temperament.

After all these months I still wear the arm band most of the time. Sometimes they (I have two I switch off with) get misplaced, usually I can dig one out of a laundry basket still on the sleeve of a shirt I'd taken off. Sometimes I race out the door to work having forgotten it. But I'd say 90% of the time I have that arm band on. I have to admit here, I often wear dark colors, so sometimes it can easily go unnoticed. But not all the time. It is part of my daily ritual now.

In all the time I have worn it ... more than 10 months now... only three people have asked about it. One, the first day I wore it. A very progressive coworker and she nodded and said "Good for you." And then at one point someone asked me who had died in my family. When I began to explain the real motivation, they looked rather stricken and walked away prematurely and uncomfortably not letting me get my point out.

And the third time was just the other day. An acquaintance who is much younger than myself and progressive, whose dad had been very much a political activist. By this time I pointed wearily but confidently at the arm band, grateful she was asking. I looked her in the eye and instead of being skittish and apologetically overtalking it as I had on the first day I had worn it, I simply said, "I have been wearing this since last May. It started out because of the torture. But I added on the wars and now health care."

She looked at me not with an understanding I expected, but what seemed a bit of reined in "get the net" disdain and quietly but deliberately moved away. End of conversation. I felt disappointment and confusion. My chronic confusion, actually, as to why the amorality of my government is not being seriously challenged by more people in my immediate life network.

Now, I am sure my black arm band is gossip fodder at the office. Or maybe that is narcissistic of me. Sadly, my clique of those truly politically outraged at her government, at the workplace, has one lone member, me. It is eerie to me that it seems like an "eccentricity" that is too troubling for people to address with me. Though I am sure it is sending out some quiet truth ripples.

One person at the office and I joined up to work for Obama at the tail end of the election campaigning, after Edwards had dropped out. Now, I seem to have lost more faith in Obama than the Dems I work with. Or they simply don't want to invite expression of my political exasperation. Yes, politics and religion in the workplace at the water cooler is not advised, I guess. I see myself as keeping my political rhetoric reined in there. But during my Edwards campaigning I was often teased good naturedly or invited to talk more. Not so, post-Obama election. Or maybe it is I who am not engaging them as much. I have become more "radicalized" the more awakened I am to the accessible details of massive government betrayals.

ARE WE AS A COUNTRY BEING SWEPT UP IN A HUGE TSUNAMI OF DENIAL? 80 million people, Obama trusters, had hope and that was short-circuited by the behavior of him and his administration soon after and many still seem stuck somewhere in those stages of grief. Is it the denial stage? The depression one? Maybe bargaining? Where is the anger one? Doesn't that come after depression and before bargaining? I must google. And then you've got the millions still in denial who trusted the unholier than thou Republicans.

To look at the horrors being perpetrated by our government when there are reasonable and humane fixes is traumatizing, granted. And the Democratic Party is not even Republican-Lite any more. It has crossed the moral divide to amorality and total corrupt ends justify corrupt means gamesmanship, a/k/a Reagan era Republicanism. Might makes right as in gangster families. G-O-P ... "Greed Over People" I read in an astute blog last night.

You know that story of the guy who stands on a soapbox spouting his moral warnings at passersby for years and years. Finally, one long-time observer of his does stop and asks him why he still does it when clearly no one is listening to him. The soapbox man admits that when he began he so very much wanted to change THEM (indicating the passing pedestrians) but now he does it so THEY won't change HIM!

We just passed the Ides of March. I always related to that soothsayer when I read about Caesar's plight. Even more so, today. God bless the messengers, even though it can be a thankless and lonely job at times. God bless all of us fighting the "normalization" of the morally and horrifyingly "abnormal".