This just in: President Obama and other world leaders have decided to postpone a legally binding international climate change agreement at next month’s Copenhagen summit. According to the New York Times, “Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen was Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges.”

Given the reality that “later” may very well be “too late” when it comes to enacting necessary measures to protect life on earth as we know it, this delay approaches criminal negligence on the part of our government.

For this increasingly disillusioned American, it’s one more sign that “Change we can believe in” comes with fine print reading, “…someday, later, eventually…maybe.”

Tea-party fanatics on the Right are beating their chests and screeching that Democrats are trying to turn this otherwise perfect nation on its head. Over here on the left, I wonder when they’re going to get started… doing, well, just about anything. With control of both houses and the executive branch, what could they possibly be waiting for? Off the top of my head, I can provide them a nice to-do list:

What of federally guaranteed civil rights for non-heterosexuals, including marriage, health care, adoption and inheritance? Of legislation protecting our food supply from E. Coli and other potentially lethal contaminants? Or reform addressing the un-sustainability of our industrial agriculture and its dependence on petroleum? Or that seriously tackles hazardous chemicals in everyday products (as the R.E.A.C.H. legislation did in the EU)? Where is the political will to develop a national rail grid? Or to truly jump-start the green economy? We are still waiting for a sound drug policy, for a redress in the regressive tax code (especially in corporate welfare) and for better consumer protections from lead and other contaminants, particularly in products arriving from China. Speaking of products arriving from China, where is the political leadership to revamp our manufacturing sector and the quality jobs it once afforded? And speaking of getting laid off…universal health care seems to be limping along towards some kind of resolution, but this has seemed to be despite- rather than thanks to- the party leadership.

Why aren’t we seeing any discussion of the impossibility of raising a child in today’s society due to the high cost of child care, combined with long commutes and working hours? Why is maternal mortality during childbirth higher in the US than in Poland, Ireland, Bulgaria and Korea? Why are American students having to take out unimaginable sums in student loans in order to pay for college (or, just as bad, being forced to work forty + hours per week while maintaining a full course load, as my husband did a few years ago)? Why do we continue to beat the dead horse of home ownership as the only manifestation of the American dream instead of promoting much-needed quality affordable housing? Why am I getting letters from my food bank informing me that demand has skyrocketed 54% since last year, when high-risk investment banks are being given incomprehensible bail-outs with taxpayer money? (And when I’m also reading that the Eurozone has left the recession?)

Out here in Arizona, we continue to wait for meaningful immigration reform, both to secure our borders more effectively and to provide a reasonable path to citizenship for those who are already here. Under most citizens’ radar, but even more upsetting, is the fact that the Obama administration has not only not overturned many Bush-era policies on wire-tapping, infringement on privacy rights, shadowy military tribunals, and top-secret “national security evidence”, but he is careening quickly into a never-ending folly in Afghanistan. Perhaps towards North Korea and Iran as well: at first seeming to extend the olive branch to those states, he’s reverted to the old pontifications about what we will and will not “allow.”

The list goes on. The rest of the world may have cause to celebrate that the ridiculousness and base criminality of the Bush administration has ended, but stateside, the changes are starting to appear largely aesthetic.

Increasingly, I wonder whether this “Change” doesn’t need to become, in accordance with the archetypical American spirit, more self-directed. Maybe we need to stop voting, stop waiting, and simply move abroad. As Rufus Wainwright says in his song “Going to Town”: “I’m so tired of America…I’ve got a life to live, America…”

I’m ever-more doubtful that we can make that life here. And with in-demand skills, I’m not even sure that we should. In light of the climate change debacle, I don’t know that we can take the guilt.