This mama needs to take action!

Too long have I avoided politics, despite living in the DC area for 14 years. I have always lived on the left of center following the lead of my hippie turned yuppie parents. But now that I have a family of my own, I find myself turning more to the hippie roots. I had my children naturally. I choose not to vaccinate them until they are old enough to understand why and deal with the pain. I joined La Leche League for breastfeeding support and a natural parenting group in my area. And I got a subscription to Mothering magazine which not only writes about natural parenting but publishes articles about how to be informed, how to act. It's this point that I have always lacked in life. Maybe this is due to both of my parents struggle with depression as well as my own. It's hard to take on the responsibility of helping others when you can barely help yourself. It's hard to make time to do anything else when you're just trying to keep your head above water and take care of yourself and your family. I struggle with this every day. But I also am faced with choices every day that present issues that always come back to politics and decisions our country has made and directions that we have taken that I sooo don't agree with.
So I've been watching a lot of documentaries on Link TV - a channel funded by public support based in San Francisco that prides itself on presenting documentaries and movies that enlighten our view of American and the world beyond our borders. It's getting to be an addiction and it's starting to inspire me to act on some of these issues. But how do you decide what to do? There are so many issues. There are so many things you can do. I want my children to be aware of the world out there and have empathy and want to help other people and not just keep their heads in the sand and sit back and grumble and moan that things are going the way we want them to be.
In the last week I've watched several documentaries, the first of which was "Blood and Oil". This details our government's foreign policy in the Middle East and how it started with FDR and the king of Saudi Arabia and how every president since has had a doctrine that has provided guidelines for protection of our interest in Middle Eastern oil. FDR realized that our country very quickly would not be able to sustain itself on our own oil reserves. In the 50's 20% of our oil was from foreign lands, now it's 67%. Our entire foreign policy and environmental policy is driven by the oil companies and lobbies and our addiction to petroleum products. Our country uses more oil than any other country in the world, not just for heating, cooling and transportation but all of the plastics that are in and around everything that we buy and use. It's frightening. I'm trying my hardest to buy products with less packaging, recycling everything that I can, using recycled reusable bags and driving less. It's frightening that in one day running errands and taking kids to school, I can rack up to 100 miles with out leaving my town. And of course I had to have an SUV - at least it gets more than 20 mpg. And of course the possibility of me owning a hybrid or electric or smart car is all based on affording it - difficult!
The second movie that I watched was "Murder Spies and Voting Lies" by Brad Friedman http://bradblog.com which was all about the whistleblower who came out to say that he wrote the source code that rigged the Florida elections in 2000. They also had the author of "Recount America" and the attorney who sued for a recount in Ohio in 2004. After watching this, I started looking into the Maryland voting system. On http://www.mdelections.org one can check to see if your voter registration info is in their system, you can get a sample ballot, sign up to vote absentee, volunteer to be an election judge etc. They also had links to reports that review the electronic voter system in MD. By the way, the system we have here is the same system made by Diebold (not Premier Election Systems) that was tampered with in the last elections.
So now I'm gonna finish reading the reports, which I'm sure will not quench my fears, and then write a letter to the department of elections and ask what steps they are taking to make sure that our elections are secure. (I'm sure I'll get some BS answer).
Anyway, I hope some of you can see some of these documentaries or are at least aware of some of these issues - which by the way never really make it to the main stream media.