This is a piece I posted on the GRASSROOTS website and Facebook today. I thought it worthwhile to post it here as well.

I want to begin as much of a discussion as I can around the subjects that I raise below. Again, I know I’ve been off this site for awhile (working very hard), but now I’m back and I treasure those of you who’ve participated on my strange (sometimes bumpy) journey over the past two years of “what’s the point?”

WHY READ THIS?

It’s a question worth asking. Why visit this website? Why go to our Facebook page? What’s the point? I want to answer that, but first everyone involved with Grassroots wants to announce that the movie will be coming to theatres in February, 2012. There will be sneak previews across the country starting next week in New England and continuing up thru Christmas. Oh, and yes…the film is finished – nearly. We’ll be screening it and listening carefully to the people who see it over the next two months, then we’ll make some final adjustments before the February release.

So why read this? Why follow this strange journey of making and releasing an independent film in the US from 2010 (when we started shooting) through 2012? What’s the point?

In the back of my mind I’ve had thoughts flickering even before we started shooting. First, I had a feeling there might be a narrative here as big as the movie, maybe bigger – a narrative that could unfold on YouTube, on our website, Facebook, on your mobile devices and computers across the country, actually across the globe (we have fans from everywhere now), even as some of you might have feared the film might never see the light of day.

But Grassroots is going to see the light of day, or rather the dark of many movie theaters. And, frankly, my suspicion now is that it’s going to see a lot more than that.

Why? Because the real story of Grassroots is about the messy process of getting something done. It almost doesn’t matter what. Of course, unlike most other projects, filmmaking and politics are fun and “sexy”, but they’re also a lot of hard work, and occasionally cause trouble, confusion, even panic…

Hopefully all the videos on our website make this clear as well as (hopefully) making clear the creative and fun parts too. And there will be new videos that will start appearing about music, post production, distribution. We’ll also re-arrange some of the older videos to help make this wacky and fragile story of filmmaking clearer.

But, again, why follow this story (over a milliard other stories)? Here’s the answer:

Phil Campbell, played by Jason Biggs and Grant Cogswell, played by Joel David Moore, are real people who got involved with something – ie: politics. They’d never done it before. They didn’t have a clue what they were stepping into and Grassroots is their story – funny, wacky, inspiring, lost, confused, found.

They did something – they ran for office. Then we did something. We made this movie about “democracy with smile” — a phrase we just coined this past week.

We could use some smiles around our political process right now, couldn’t we? And we’ll need a whole lot more smiles come next February when the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primaries hit, and then all the primaries and general election come at us.

And that’s when Grassroots will be out in the world full swing.

But the point is that Grant and Phil jumped into the process with just about nothing. Those of us who made Grassroots did pretty much the same – no money, no distribution and no cast for quite awhile (revisit the videos, revisit the journey). But isn’t that how many of the best things start? From nothing, with a good dose of fear and trembling, counterbalanced by unbridled passion.

Deep in our hearts we all know that we can do anything if we set our minds to it. Make a major motion picture or a small movie, build a chair, clean a house, wash a car or…

RUN FOR OFFICE

That’s what we’ve come to realize is Grassroots’ real story.

Run for office like Grant did; wonderful, crazy, unqualified Grant Cogswell.

RUN FOR OFFICE .

YOU.
NOT HIM.
NOT HER.
NOT SOME RICH DUDE WITH A TIE.

YOU
YOU

YOU, the “little” guy/gal whose been following our story. RUN FOR LOCAL OFFICE. WE’LL HELP YOU, even if you have no money right now and no hope. Watch our movie, then jump into the game. Maybe you’ll win, maybe you’ll lose. The point is — jump in.

RUN FOR POLITICAL OFFICE THIS 2012 ELECTION

One thing we can guarantee — it will change your life. It will change the lives of those around you. And it just might start to change the country. And then the point gets even clearer — the point of Grassroots the movie, Grassroots the website, Facebook etcetera. The point is to ignite that narrative of GETTING SOMETHING DONE (even if it’s sloppy, silly, seemingly stupid – which is how it often felt while making this movie, how it often felt for Grant and Phil.)

But as Woody Allen said, “Just show up.” And that’s what we’re asking you to do. SHOW UP. The real you. The best you.

Show up for the country by running in your district, and don’t forget to also show up to the movie. (If you want to see Grassroots on a big screen near you, then write us – our website is about to be revamped to make this easy. If you can pull enough people together, we’ll do a sneak preview in your neck of the woods.)

And we’ll do even more than that.

We’re teaming up with some of the top political groups in the country to help people find all the support they need to run, and hopefully get elected. Now I’m definitely a lefty, but one of our producers, Michael Huffington is a former Republican Congressman, so it’s not about a political agenda, but about getting involved right, left and center.

GETTING INVOLVED.

And that’s the reason to keep staying tuned to what it is we’re doing here – Grassroots – it’s not just a word; it’s not just a movie. In fact we will need you to define exactly what grassroots is at this moment in our history.

Now everyone would agree that things in this country aren’t looking great. We can blame it on the corporations. We can blame it on the rich, the poor, our leaders, the “illegal” immigrants. We can blame it on Global Warming or fate or… we can look in the mirror.

That’s what we’ve been trying to do as we’ve made this movie. And we’ve tried to share what we’ve seen with you.

So join us. Join yourselves. We can guarantee that we’ll all be in for one hell of a ride.

I’m having trouble with the concept of human nature today. There is a general sense that I keep getting that at its core human nature is really pretty screwed up. You could call it original sin or the death instinct (ala Freud). You can look at yourself and say, “Boy, I’m really self destructive.” (God knows I’ve done that.) You could look at the Health Care debate from across the Atlantic (where I happen to be right now – in Italy – a little distance never hurts) and say, “Boy, are those Americans really self destructive.”

And it would be easy to just say that a majority of Americans just don’t believe they have the right to decent medicine, to being healthy. You could say that a majority of Americans would rather suffer and die prematurely than to have at their disposal what all their representatives have the moment they get elected (what all the rich people have all the time). You could argue that at least the rich people and the people in government aren’t self destructive because they “got theirs,” but then you’d have to note that they still have to walk around in the streets (or at least take airplanes, et cetera) where disease could get them at the drop of a hat. Or (if they only use Lear jets, et cetera) where at least their children – who are taken care of by housekeepers, nannies et cetera – could have a nasty germ or two sent in their direction.

So what is it? Are we just genetically designed to be self- destructive? Have we been put together by the universe (or whatever) to run off cliffs like lemmings?

But then I look at (again – for a moment – from an Italian distance) the attack on the concept of real Health Care by the insurance, pharmaceutical and right wing industrial complex – the media, et cetera. The incredible manipulation of information and I compare it with the cathedrals I’ve been wandering through here in Italy – the endless crucifixions (the Christ died for our sins-thing so we better do a little dying too for the Church or whomever), the glittering Madonna and child images – over and over and over – and I can’t help but see some parallel…

I can’t help but connect up a dot or two around these beautiful cathedrals, the priests, the horrific child abuse sex scandals that are emerging like a pox here in Europe (not to mention the US), possibly even staining the Pope (it would be about time) – priests using children for their pleasure – and I make a strange link – a quantum strange jump perhaps – that a few people use the rest of us – hammer us with images and ideas – over and over and over again – so that we finally succumb, give up, let them have their way with us…

And then I wonder if maybe someday we will be able to wake up and realize that we are not self destructive at our core at all, but that so many of us are being (or have been) destroyed – from an early age on, like those poor children in the shadows of their altars — being damaged, being fooled, being buried alive in pain and confusion. That at the very core we are good, hopeful, healing – at the very, very core. And that from that core we can perhaps begin someday, if we can wake ourselves up and grow ourselves up, start really healing ourselves (which I suspect we have to do together, by the way) and then we can heal our leaders into really taking care of the situation they were elected to take care of, rather than raping us from the position we put them in. And then after that maybe we can begin healing this planet rather than raping it as well (which I would submit will also have to be done together)

This is a despicable Health Bill, a stain on the soul of anyone who has worked on it, who supports it, who believes they have done anything right in birthing it. If there is a hell I would want everyone involved with this bill to end up in it, nonetheless…

This Bill should be passed.

Then we need to work to throw everyone out of office that claims they did a good job here. I also think we need to remember that when our forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the various other State and Federal laws of their day they avoided the issue of slavery, barely thought of the rights of their mothers, wives, daughters, didn’t even blink about the rights of Native Americans.

Despicable.

We really do seem to be a despicable species — our current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Detroit, etc.; the joke of the Copenhagen miasma. And yet we’re all we got. And it’s not over yet so I say let’s keep going – but let’s be honest about it.

Let’s tell the truth as best we can because it helps.

For instance nobody talks much really about how this country was founded; how it lurched forward through a suicidal Civil War that befuddled everything until Martin Luther King et al came along; how we used Europe and Asia’s suicidal World Wars to climb atop the cat seat to where we now gobble up as much of the malnourished Third World labor we can get to keep our pig-out life style ablaze.

Despicable. And hard to change. Almost impossible.

But as this despicable Health Bill points out – not completely and utterly impossible, just as it was not completely and utterly impossible for the Declaration of Independence to be penned by a guy sticking it to his plantation slave girl back in Virginia.

Somehow (God knows how) we do (despicably) move forward bit by tiny, brutal bit. After all our poor, wavering President is black (and that matters, despite his failures); our Secretary of State is a woman (so was the last one, not to mention African American). Sure, both these woman (and our black President) carry out despicable policy 95% of the time (maybe 100%), but the fact that they are there (rather than us spoiled, arrogant white guys) means something. Not much, but something.

So let’s get on with this nasty business of being human on this generally inhuman journey. Let’s admit what it is that we’ve done in this democracy, so profoundly corrupted from its cruel and confused inception onwards. Let’s continue to cry out and fight for what it is we want, what it is we believe, what it is we hope someday will actually be and…

let’s vote this damn, sick Health Bill into existence and keep right on moving towards some real health in this nasty, real world.

I have been a little off center for a few days and so nothing has shown up here on my website, too bad this little cyber machine doesn’t generate entries on it’s own, but it doesn’t.

It’s been a hard week personally. No reason to go into details, really. We all have our hard times in our own particularly way and mine will hopefully find their way into some poems, which I have found myself starting to write again. Funny. I haven’t written much poetry in quite awhile, but as pain surfaces so too it seems for me does poetry, like some Greek Goddess’, Athena, maybe (I hope). I always liked the myth of Odysseus.

And my feelings around my personal struggles (family stuff, mostly) cannot be separated, I find, from the state of the world, our world, the USA. This country has had many dark times, has weathered them. I hope it weathers this one too. It’s a good country. There is much about we Americans that is good, but there is much that is troubling as well, as there is much troubling in me (after all I have sprung from this place, I’m not immune.)

It sometimes feels like we are living in a kind of Dark Ages, that perhaps in five hundred or a thousand years from now (I do believe as a species we are going to survive) that people (not all that different from us, but clearer) will look back and see this era as another Dark Age.

And for some reason this thought comforts me. It comforts me to suspect that (as a culture) we know very little. We know very little of how our minds work (so we drug them and run them into the ground, etc). We don’t know much about relationships, so we divorce, have wars, fight and do whatever we can to avoid really digging in. We know very little about the universe, so we make up stupid stories about it and we pollute as much of it around us as we can get away with.

In short we live in a Dark Age, even as we tell ourselves (as those in the last Dark Ages before us must have told themselves as they labored over their glorious cathedrals, for instance (as we labor over our skyscrapers, jets and nation building) that we have reached a kind of apex of what it is to be human.

It comforts me (at the moment) to understand that we have not reached any kind of apex at all, that at best we are like those “alchemists” (sometimes burned at this or that stake) who carry a bit of the old truths around with them (with us) – the truths that humans are miraculous, infinite, complex beyond the stars and molecules – that to kill one of us or even hurt us has ramifications beyond those stars and molecules, that someday this will be understand by a solid majority and acted on, someday.

I suppose it’s a bit strange that this comforts me right now but there you have it…

A few days ago a friend of mine agonized over her loved ones from the deep South raging that Obama was a murderer because his health care plan would sanction abortion. She felt an insurmountable gulf between herself and them, which seems to have gripped much of the nation as well, a gulf between those who consider themselves progressives, myself included, and those who rage against their government for wanting to protect them (for instance) from illness, pain and unnecessary death. These are people who see a national health care program as signaling the end of the Republic. Their behavior seems laughable, mentally ill, perhaps an argument for health care that requires mental care for every single one of them.

But I’m coming to see that this thinking may be wrong. These people may in fact have something deeply right; or at least more right than those of us who put Obama into office, those of us who believe in his brilliant intellectual capabilities, his articulateness, his clarity, his political acumen.

It has to do with soul.

Those of us who live lives using the principals that have evolved from Plato and Socrates, up through the Enlightenment, Industrialization, the Information Age – how many of us would give up much of anything in an attempt to save our souls? I mean this seriously – really – how much would we be willing to sacrifice? Do we really – I mean, really, really – even believe in what is called the soul, other than in the arena of music or as something abstract enough that it isn’t going to get in the way of our Blackberries, iPods, Kindles, twittering devices, jobs, marriages, New York Times, literary books and so on?

Would we sacrifice ourselves or our children in a war, for instance? Would we allow ourselves or our loved ones to be maimed for the soul or for anything spiritual at all?

Spiritual is a pretty easy word for us (certainly for me) – it’s amorphous – and convenient. I no longer believe in organized religion, frankly. I don’t belong to a church – so there’s no sacrifice there, no ten percent of my income goes to a bunch of priests. I’m not even saying I’m wrong about my cynicism towards all religions. But it does seem quite obvious to me that many of these right-wingers, born agains and so forth have been more than willing to sacrifice a hell of a lot for the soul. It’s why the elites of the Democratic Party have been so long perplexed by these folks over and over voting against “their interests.” But honestly, are their interests really of “this world?” An innocent baby’s soul matters (so you save it under any circumstances). A criminal’s soul matters too (so you hang him for his earthly crimes.)

Which is why I think government sanctioned abortion (with a medical plan that covers it) so horrifies them. Do I think their rage and apparent self destructiveness is correct? No. But I think what drives them may be more valuable than I have up till now understood. If this nation is to survive (and I sure hope it does) we (the supposed enlightened) will have to make a superhuman effort to understand the other side. I don’t believe the “other side” will ever try to understand us. Increasingly I think they see us as evil as “the devil” because they fear we have no souls. Much of the time I think they are being manipulated by the hopelessly soulless creatures who will do anything for power and profit, but this only makes our job more pressing. Who else is going to bridge this gap? Who else can reach across this gulf of confusion, suspicion and rage? And if this experiment that started with Plato and Socrates is in fact correct, then I believe we are up to the task. And if we are able in the end to succeed and bridge this gap enough to ease the worst of the tensions that beset us then, who knows, maybe in the final analysis it will turn out that it’s us (not them) that gains back the most, namely, our souls.

Common Sense – if it was good enough for Benjamin Franklin, it’s good enough for me. You Senators and Congressmen know damn well what the best health care plan is – you’ve got it for yourselves, and for the Supreme Court and for everyone that works at the White House. All three branches of government set up by our forefathers have single payer health care, sponsored by the government.

And while you Conservative representatives may call it Socialism or Communism or whatever you like – has any of you opted out of the plan? Or you Liberals and Centrists who are still on the fence or scratching your heads about how complicated the whole thing is, was it all that complicated when you signed on that bottom line for you and your families? Why haven’t you been discussing this solution with all of us – daily? Are you afraid we’re going to take it away from you if we understand the truth and don’t get it too?

It’s the only option that makes sense, which is why you all got it and why I want it. Single payer health care.

Or could it possibly be that you all in DC feel superior to us? Or feel that you have a right to something we don’t? Why? Because we elected you? How about some common sense here? Or maybe you’re just greedy.

If it’s any of the above, I suggest you go back to Ben Franklin, see what he’d have to say on the subject. I suspect the word “treason” might come up, given that this government was founded on the concept of the people, by the people and for the people.

Back in Franklin’s day the punishment for treason was hanging for which no amount of health care is helpful. And what was Franklin’s famous saying on that subject? “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Common Sense: let’s not hang anybody (out to dry or otherwise) – single payer health care for all!