I spent the day after the election sitting on a tractor in my 1800 square foot garden dragging a ripping plow deeply into the soil to break through the hard pan below. I'm told that this will allow for better drainage and healthier plants next year. On Saturday, I'll spread about 15 cubic yards of compost over the plot and till it into the soil. I'll spend the next month or so spreading the shredded leaves that have fallen from my trees on top of the soil to keep in the winter moisture. Over the coming dormant months, the compost will percolate through the soil adding nutrients and life and establish a permaculture that will allow the seeds I plant in the spring to thrive and become strong and healthy plants.

Four years ago my garden was an asphalt and gravel parking lot. Four years of labor later, it produced a modest bounty for my family and neighbors. Four years from now, my garden will be primed and ready to produce blue ribbon vegetables for my local grower's market and the state fair.

To me, this past election was much like a tractor dragging a ripping plow through the heart and soul of America, deeply dividing the soil and bedrock of our nation. As with my garden, now, in this winter of our discontent, it is time for all liberal progressive thinking Americans to rise up and spread our ideals and fundamental beliefs into these deep furrows and till them into the American political dialogue. Over the coming four years we must engage our fellow citizens in civilized conversation and percolate our true American values into our national political permaculture. We must demand that our voices be heard in the wilderness that our public airways have become. Just as the right wing has done, we need to hold our newspapers and media outlets accountable. To demand that they not simply parrot two sides of an issue, but strive to determine the truths of the debates.

We must absolutely quit merely preaching to each other and seek out those who have been proselytized and co-opted by the corporate-sponsored conservative right's hollow lies and cynical manipulation of hot-button issues. We need to convincingly demonstrate to them that their economic self-interest and well being are ill served by the failed conservative policies of the last twenty-five years. That tax cuts for the wealthy do not provide jobs for working people but rather deprive us all of much needed government services like roads and education. And this will not be easy. It will be very difficult to convince many of our fellow Americans that their short-sighted fixations on the unborn and gay marriages do not speak to their moral values nearly as loudly as their willful blindness to the countless innocents abroad that our government is murdering in their name, in a misguided war on terror. We must open their eyes to the fact that a handful of terrorists abroad are much less a threat to our personal security than heart disease or cancer or our lack of affordable health care. But do it we must, because these are real threats and they are threats that our government can actually do something about if it so chooses.

We must engage these former comrades-in-arms in our struggle for the common man wherever they are, and if this means that the Christians among us need to speak out to their fellow parishioners, so be it. We need to learn and understand why these natural constituents of our cause have abandoned we who have long been their champions in the fight for social justice and instead joined with those who exploit them for ignoble and greedy ends. It is time for us to finally rise up and throw the corporate money changers out of our temples of worship. And we can do this if we really want. However uncomfortable it may be, it is long past time to open a national discussion on the taboo subjects of politics and religion at our collective dinner tables. We must do this and do it now so that when the days finally begin to grow longer again, the seeds of our progressive ideals will sprout and flourish in the fertile fields of democratic discourse. With truth on our side, we shall overcome.

Claude Stephenson (cstephen@unm.edu) is the State Folklorist for the State of New Mexico and lives and gardens in the South Valley of Albuquerque.