Dear World,
I would like to bring to your attention the plight of my country in hopes that you might find it in your hearts and budgets to come to our assistance.
For over seven years we have suffered under the despotic rule of a government that hijacked our normally fair and free elections process. Since that date our liberties have been drastically eroded and our Constitution has been grossly disfigured. Our private information is subject to search by the government at any time so that we may be accused of “terrorist activities” and jailed indefinitely without access to lawyers or fair trial. Our poor and middle class are being taxed to extinction so that the few, wealthy, friends of government may live an even easier life. We are increasingly forced to “uphold family values”. This means the erosion of women’s rights and the imposition nineteenth century values as we are given no support to raise this family that we are supposed to value. Our old people are left with very little to live off from the system they paid into throughout their lives. We are routinely denied health care by a greedy system that punishes us for being honest about our aches and pains and denies coverage to those who most need it. Far too many of our people go without health care at all because doctor visits are too damned expensive.
We are a country that was founded on freedoms Рfreedom of speech, press, and religion. But increasingly these power centers in our country are controlled by a select few. An active debate in the public sphere has is increasingly over-run with insipid media content. We may speak but our public voice is drowned out by the clich̩ messages decided upon by a chosen coterie of propagandists. Our politics suffer the influence of religious groups determined that every one should live according to their values. Indeed, in the name of fighting terrorism, certain religions are even vilified. It seems that the only real freedom we have left is the right to choose what we would like to buy in the many big box stores and shopping malls that have over run our communities.
We have become a shameful laughing stock in the world community, associated with ignorant leadership and extremely poor environmental stewardship. We are known for favoring big business and big box retail rather than valuing our land and the welfare of communities. This is simply not true. Many of us cringe and worry at what is becoming of that fragile fabric of our social and ecological networks. We would like to do better by the environment. We would like to support each other. But at every turn we are rebuffed. We are told “not to hurt business” or “not to impede material progress” or simply “shut up, it’s an election year”.
Our president is despotically dishonest, using lies, manipulation and fear mongering to start wars all over the globe. Thousands of our young people have died (either physically or emotionally) in the name of wars with no justification and no honest provocation.
But we feel the American government has shown that it is viable for one nation to invade another and overthrow a legitimate government entirely without justification or provocation. We believe our government deserves to meet the same fate to save her citizens from inept and selfish rule. Please do not let our young people’s sacrifice in Iraq be in vain. Show that unprovoked war can, indeed, install true democracy.
For all of the above reasons and many more too numerable to outline here, we the citizens of the United States respectfully ask to be invaded by Canada. Please impose your democracy, health care and common sense upon us. Before it’s too late and our sick ones die for lack of health care or our old ones go hungry for lack of social security; before our environment collapses under the weight of ‘progress’ or we, as a nation, perish from our own brainless palaver, please invade us and topple our government.
If you see no value in undertaking this operation let me assure you that, if nothing else, we Americans will make great pets.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The new slavery
Last November I decided to gamble my imagination and participate in the “National Write a Novel in a Month” contest. I started this with no plot in mind. I had just one character, and I decided let her go where the winds would take her. To my shock, she slipped through a hole in time landed on a southern cotton plantation during the 1840’s.
I had to do some homework to catch up with her. So, I began digging through published diaries left by those living in that time and place of American history. This also led me to uncomfortable subject of African American slavery. Histories of the suffering slavery caused are not difficult to find. But, for the sake of my character, and even though it really felt horrible, I had to lend an ear to the contemporary justifications for not ending slavery.
I got another shock. The words of nineteenth century politicians echoed of the same words I hear today to justify inaction toward protecting our environment or the use (and abuse) of overseas labor to manufacture cheap goods.
“It will hurt business.”
Over and over again I read words plainly reflecting how antebellum landowners’ logic mirrors that of modern corporations. The rationalizations for failing to make tough choices and truly live up to our Constitution have not evolved in over 150 years. In every era treating with dignity one’s land or worker’s, the sources of earthly wealth, has posed costly risks to the bottom line that no one is willing to take.
If the logic that prevented our country from abolishing an institution as morally unsound as slavery can work the same magic and excuse our failure to protect the planet, then something is seriously flawed with our reasoning. It’s not reasoning at all. It is just plain fear. Fear busily resurrects nebulous boogeymen from the dark past while lending no imagination toward creating a better future. It invites apathy and inaction and every day it keeps us making choices to do nothing about elements of our society that we say we don’t like.
But, I don’t believe in fear. And I don’t believe that our social ills would disappear if every person had a pile of money. I believe in creativity and I believe it is our innate creativity that can see us past fears toward more just and honest ways of treating our fellows, seeing our world and creating our lives.
Surveys say that most Americans believe in God or a Higher Being. Do we really think that this divine creator put us on this planet just to pay bills, to maintain the status quo, or cope? Do we think our creator is so lacking in creativity that our purpose for living is our bottom line? No, we trade in our innate creativity for the delusion of short-term security and acceptability.
But I believe it is time, never too late, after all, to dust off our innate creativity and imagine a world that serves all of us justly and will be worth handing over to our children and grand children. If we dare to let ourselves imagine a world without money as and excuse for bad behavior, then we can surely create it.
I had to do some homework to catch up with her. So, I began digging through published diaries left by those living in that time and place of American history. This also led me to uncomfortable subject of African American slavery. Histories of the suffering slavery caused are not difficult to find. But, for the sake of my character, and even though it really felt horrible, I had to lend an ear to the contemporary justifications for not ending slavery.
I got another shock. The words of nineteenth century politicians echoed of the same words I hear today to justify inaction toward protecting our environment or the use (and abuse) of overseas labor to manufacture cheap goods.
“It will hurt business.”
Over and over again I read words plainly reflecting how antebellum landowners’ logic mirrors that of modern corporations. The rationalizations for failing to make tough choices and truly live up to our Constitution have not evolved in over 150 years. In every era treating with dignity one’s land or worker’s, the sources of earthly wealth, has posed costly risks to the bottom line that no one is willing to take.
If the logic that prevented our country from abolishing an institution as morally unsound as slavery can work the same magic and excuse our failure to protect the planet, then something is seriously flawed with our reasoning. It’s not reasoning at all. It is just plain fear. Fear busily resurrects nebulous boogeymen from the dark past while lending no imagination toward creating a better future. It invites apathy and inaction and every day it keeps us making choices to do nothing about elements of our society that we say we don’t like.
But, I don’t believe in fear. And I don’t believe that our social ills would disappear if every person had a pile of money. I believe in creativity and I believe it is our innate creativity that can see us past fears toward more just and honest ways of treating our fellows, seeing our world and creating our lives.
Surveys say that most Americans believe in God or a Higher Being. Do we really think that this divine creator put us on this planet just to pay bills, to maintain the status quo, or cope? Do we think our creator is so lacking in creativity that our purpose for living is our bottom line? No, we trade in our innate creativity for the delusion of short-term security and acceptability.
But I believe it is time, never too late, after all, to dust off our innate creativity and imagine a world that serves all of us justly and will be worth handing over to our children and grand children. If we dare to let ourselves imagine a world without money as and excuse for bad behavior, then we can surely create it.
A Vagina changes nothing
In case you haven't guessed by now, I have a vagina. While I do sometimes think about (or WITH) this particular aspect of my anatomy, overall I’d have to contradict the historical platitudes, which mistakenly assumed that having a vagina makes me so very different (or inferior to) my male counterparts. No, I've found that it doesn't make a big difference.
I don’t stand in the produce section of the grocery store and consider its health and well being while I select vegetables. It doesn't effect how I take in or retain facts. It doesn't manipulate how I see colors. It doesn't change how I react to other people. In fact, I’m sure no matter what my anatomy everyone else on the road would still drive just as badly. I see this same lack of difference in other beings that I know to also possess vaginas. My upstairs neighbor, for instance, stamps her feet like a bricklayer (especially after 11pm) despite her petite feminine physique.
So here we are in another fun-filled election year and at the top of the Democratic Party sits Hillary Clinton. As a first presidential runner with a realistic shot at winning to be a “she”, Hillary storms across the country touting herself as the standard bearer of “change”. Suddenly, having a vagina is supposed to make a difference.
It doesn’t.
Sorry to disappoint, but no matter what the gender of the chef, the sausage will still come out of the Senate kitchen with the same stink.
Any one looking to Hillary Clinton's electability and thinking that in her lies a new vista of equality for American woman had better scratch the surface a little more. We might be fooled to think that we are getting someone who cares about our Health care concerns and desires to end a senseless war and bring our sons and daughters home. But no. She is a candidate who’s funding sources put her so in bed with the exact corporate interests that we say we don’t want having any more say in our lives that there stands little hope of America, under her leadership, really seizing hold of that promised magic: change.
Of all the presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton has received the most funding from defense contractors who have wasted billions of our dollars in Iraq. These are companies who have taken bales of Ben Franklins into the desert to “pay off locals” as needed and lost over 8 million dollars. These are companies who have sent truckloads of “sail boat fuel” (read: air) across Iraq, risking the lives of civilian contractors, just so they could bill our government for the expense. Who picks up that tab? You and me baby. I don’t know of any American who, upon hearing that story, doesn’t grow more than a little mad and want these companies held accountable. They have stolen. This is money that has not been spent at home on our social welfare. This is money that has not been used for our soldiers and their safety. The current administration is not going to lift a finger to take such action because the biggest culprits: KBR / Haliburton form Bush’s funding base. By funneling money into Clinton’s campaign these corporations are merely insuring four (or eight) more years of kid-glove treatment for all their wrongs.
Lest anyone get too optimistic, the candidate who has received the second most amount of funding from these clowns is Barak Obama.
And yet the word on every candidate’s lips is “change”. But change doesn’t necessarily amount to an improvement.
The issues written on the hearts of Americans may be too broad and personal to fit into choice A, B or C of a focus group form. But focus we must so that candidates can spend the next 10 months tossing around words we might not understand about issues we might not care about in ways that we already know and avoid adding any real truth to the public discussion. But really, do we want “change” or do we just want the war, the obvious lies and political nonsense to stop? Don’t we really just want our jobs back? Don’t we really just want to push the pre-chewed punditry off our plates forever and see some real democracy? Don’t we all really just want to put our head to the pillow and know that our government isn’t trying to screw us?
Someone has suggested handing the candidates a thesaurus to get them out of that one word rut. Cooler minds might go so far as to hand them a dictionary so they can see what that word really means. Last time I checked it didn’t amount to having our once democratic elections auctioned off to the highest bidding corporations, just like four years ago, just like eight years ago, just like everyone in the past generation as done as they pretzel themselves to emulate Reagan’s dynamism and landslide victories.
Hillary Clinton has had immense success in raising funds for her presidential bid. Where the money goes the cameras follow and what gets the TV coverage gets a better chance at being elected because if its on TV it must be true. I have only a little doubt that she will end up in the white house. She may go down in history as the first woman elected president of the United States and her strength and gall to pursue such a goal will be no doubt extolled ad nausea. But is she so very different that what has come before her?
A vagina changes nothing: but money sure does.
I don’t stand in the produce section of the grocery store and consider its health and well being while I select vegetables. It doesn't effect how I take in or retain facts. It doesn't manipulate how I see colors. It doesn't change how I react to other people. In fact, I’m sure no matter what my anatomy everyone else on the road would still drive just as badly. I see this same lack of difference in other beings that I know to also possess vaginas. My upstairs neighbor, for instance, stamps her feet like a bricklayer (especially after 11pm) despite her petite feminine physique.
So here we are in another fun-filled election year and at the top of the Democratic Party sits Hillary Clinton. As a first presidential runner with a realistic shot at winning to be a “she”, Hillary storms across the country touting herself as the standard bearer of “change”. Suddenly, having a vagina is supposed to make a difference.
It doesn’t.
Sorry to disappoint, but no matter what the gender of the chef, the sausage will still come out of the Senate kitchen with the same stink.
Any one looking to Hillary Clinton's electability and thinking that in her lies a new vista of equality for American woman had better scratch the surface a little more. We might be fooled to think that we are getting someone who cares about our Health care concerns and desires to end a senseless war and bring our sons and daughters home. But no. She is a candidate who’s funding sources put her so in bed with the exact corporate interests that we say we don’t want having any more say in our lives that there stands little hope of America, under her leadership, really seizing hold of that promised magic: change.
Of all the presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton has received the most funding from defense contractors who have wasted billions of our dollars in Iraq. These are companies who have taken bales of Ben Franklins into the desert to “pay off locals” as needed and lost over 8 million dollars. These are companies who have sent truckloads of “sail boat fuel” (read: air) across Iraq, risking the lives of civilian contractors, just so they could bill our government for the expense. Who picks up that tab? You and me baby. I don’t know of any American who, upon hearing that story, doesn’t grow more than a little mad and want these companies held accountable. They have stolen. This is money that has not been spent at home on our social welfare. This is money that has not been used for our soldiers and their safety. The current administration is not going to lift a finger to take such action because the biggest culprits: KBR / Haliburton form Bush’s funding base. By funneling money into Clinton’s campaign these corporations are merely insuring four (or eight) more years of kid-glove treatment for all their wrongs.
Lest anyone get too optimistic, the candidate who has received the second most amount of funding from these clowns is Barak Obama.
And yet the word on every candidate’s lips is “change”. But change doesn’t necessarily amount to an improvement.
The issues written on the hearts of Americans may be too broad and personal to fit into choice A, B or C of a focus group form. But focus we must so that candidates can spend the next 10 months tossing around words we might not understand about issues we might not care about in ways that we already know and avoid adding any real truth to the public discussion. But really, do we want “change” or do we just want the war, the obvious lies and political nonsense to stop? Don’t we really just want our jobs back? Don’t we really just want to push the pre-chewed punditry off our plates forever and see some real democracy? Don’t we all really just want to put our head to the pillow and know that our government isn’t trying to screw us?
Someone has suggested handing the candidates a thesaurus to get them out of that one word rut. Cooler minds might go so far as to hand them a dictionary so they can see what that word really means. Last time I checked it didn’t amount to having our once democratic elections auctioned off to the highest bidding corporations, just like four years ago, just like eight years ago, just like everyone in the past generation as done as they pretzel themselves to emulate Reagan’s dynamism and landslide victories.
Hillary Clinton has had immense success in raising funds for her presidential bid. Where the money goes the cameras follow and what gets the TV coverage gets a better chance at being elected because if its on TV it must be true. I have only a little doubt that she will end up in the white house. She may go down in history as the first woman elected president of the United States and her strength and gall to pursue such a goal will be no doubt extolled ad nausea. But is she so very different that what has come before her?
A vagina changes nothing: but money sure does.
The second amendment has nothing to do with guns
Archaic phrases are just wonderful for justifying stupid behavior. Some people like to pick out obscure lines from Leviticus to bring damnation upon homosexuals. And yet they sure love a good pig roast. Our selective myopia goes in search of some vague “truth”. But, the truth that is found in the justifying text seldom strays much from the pre-held judgments of the truth-re-teller. If it sounds like something I agree with, it must, then, be true.
Here’s another dusty sentence that’s got people lining up to point fingers and play judge:
A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
And so steps the Bill of Rights into misty, murky territory of historic misunderstanding. As fast as I heard news about people being shot on Valentine’s day the spin about “not infringing upon second amendment rights” began to whirl on the airwaves. EXCUSE ME? What about the right of those 6 students who were murdered to live out the rest of their lives? What about the students at Virginia Tech who most certainly had the right to a full life? What about the lives of people living in our cities and gang infested communities to live in safety? Do people who demand their “second amendment rights” simply find it a sad inconvenience that bodies have a way of dying when you point a gun and pull the trigger?
The second amendment really, in spirit, has nothing to do with guns. It has to do with a citizen’s ability to have a voice.
Our country’s Constitution has its roots in English law. We certainly didn’t like what George III was doing and the way English politics exploited the natural resources North America whilst pissing on the colonists. But, they had a Parliament. They had the Magna Carta. They had a House of Commons. They had in place those things our system would react to and improve upon. Our founding emulators indeed did a good job considering the extent of what they could envision at that time.
English freemen (property owners) were obliged to supply their own arms (which, over a period of history that would have been the recent past to our founding fathers, meant ARMOR). Such arms were to be used when freemen were impressed into Military service. However in the late 17th century the crown began raising the quota of land ownership needed to qualify for owning arms. So only the very wealthy (those who would be least interested in harming the king) could own “arms”. Under King James II being a protestant was added to the list of prohibitions for arms ownership.
America in 1783 was a very different place filled with very different types of people than one might suspect considering what it’s like today. Many had come here as indentured servants, a sort of temporary slavery. Many came on the run from religious persecution. Whole areas were penal colonies. So, with the exception of the few wealthy landowners, the people of the North American colonies were Europe’s poor, heretical, criminal rejects. Even today we do not give incarcerated people the right to vote. They pretty much thought of the colonists in that same light. So think of the American Revolution as more of a prison uprising that worked. And it was indeed the prisoners that rose up because most wealthy Tory landowners continued to support the crown through the Revolution.
We see ourselves as one nation today. Back then, not so much. The new government was extremely weak and unable to mount a defense against uprisings. It was also a government that intended to serve only those male citizens who owned land. This was not an everyman’s place. The social stratifications of Europe would retain a deep foot hold in the American mindset until well into the 20th century.
Adding the provision of arms-ownership was an equalizing factor for the freeman citizens of the new country. It meant that you didn’t have to be rich to have some power. It was a provision to insure that states would be able to contain a power sufficient to the power of the Federal Government (which wanted to maintain a standing army after the Shay’s rebellion in Massachusetts) in order to prevent tyranny. It was also a way for the federal government to insure that there would be an armed body of the willing should the need for a national defense arise.
It was never meant to be a provision in the name of self-defense. That protection is afforded elsewhere in the law. If the founding fathers had gotten even a wee glimpse into a future where semi-automatic weapons are regularly used to hold students or poor people as terrorized hostages I’d bet my last dollar that they would have ripped #2 right off the fuckin’ page before the ink was dry.
What #2 guarantees us is not “arms” as much as an equalizing factor that allows individual citizens the right to a voice in a way that our contemporaries understand and respect. It is a weapon not against another person but against tyranny. I have such a weapon. You’re reading it.
In the past 7 years we have seen our constitution shredded and disfigured not by guns but by words. If you want to fight for your right to own a gun, go ahead. But, please do get your head out of your ass for long enough to realize that you may have no other rights left. Was it worth it?
I truly believe that the collage artists who appropriated English law, the Magna Carta, and the Enlightenment philosophies of Voltaire to craft our Constitution knew on a deep level that more would be revealed. They knew they could only create the framework upon which we would grow. We have added branches; some good, some bad. In 1793 the Supreme Court realized that a nation filled with people who escaped religious persecution to be here should not have an official religion. And we became the only country of that time to not have any state sanctioned creed (so there, we were NOT founded as a Christian nation). We realized that it no longer served us to hold another person as a slave and deny them the right to dignity. We realized that a vagina was no reason to not possess equal voting rights. Maybe soon we will realize that what we must aim is our reason and our words. Maybe we will put down the toys and pick up the tools to fight back a tyranny of ignorance.
Here’s another dusty sentence that’s got people lining up to point fingers and play judge:
A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
And so steps the Bill of Rights into misty, murky territory of historic misunderstanding. As fast as I heard news about people being shot on Valentine’s day the spin about “not infringing upon second amendment rights” began to whirl on the airwaves. EXCUSE ME? What about the right of those 6 students who were murdered to live out the rest of their lives? What about the students at Virginia Tech who most certainly had the right to a full life? What about the lives of people living in our cities and gang infested communities to live in safety? Do people who demand their “second amendment rights” simply find it a sad inconvenience that bodies have a way of dying when you point a gun and pull the trigger?
The second amendment really, in spirit, has nothing to do with guns. It has to do with a citizen’s ability to have a voice.
Our country’s Constitution has its roots in English law. We certainly didn’t like what George III was doing and the way English politics exploited the natural resources North America whilst pissing on the colonists. But, they had a Parliament. They had the Magna Carta. They had a House of Commons. They had in place those things our system would react to and improve upon. Our founding emulators indeed did a good job considering the extent of what they could envision at that time.
English freemen (property owners) were obliged to supply their own arms (which, over a period of history that would have been the recent past to our founding fathers, meant ARMOR). Such arms were to be used when freemen were impressed into Military service. However in the late 17th century the crown began raising the quota of land ownership needed to qualify for owning arms. So only the very wealthy (those who would be least interested in harming the king) could own “arms”. Under King James II being a protestant was added to the list of prohibitions for arms ownership.
America in 1783 was a very different place filled with very different types of people than one might suspect considering what it’s like today. Many had come here as indentured servants, a sort of temporary slavery. Many came on the run from religious persecution. Whole areas were penal colonies. So, with the exception of the few wealthy landowners, the people of the North American colonies were Europe’s poor, heretical, criminal rejects. Even today we do not give incarcerated people the right to vote. They pretty much thought of the colonists in that same light. So think of the American Revolution as more of a prison uprising that worked. And it was indeed the prisoners that rose up because most wealthy Tory landowners continued to support the crown through the Revolution.
We see ourselves as one nation today. Back then, not so much. The new government was extremely weak and unable to mount a defense against uprisings. It was also a government that intended to serve only those male citizens who owned land. This was not an everyman’s place. The social stratifications of Europe would retain a deep foot hold in the American mindset until well into the 20th century.
Adding the provision of arms-ownership was an equalizing factor for the freeman citizens of the new country. It meant that you didn’t have to be rich to have some power. It was a provision to insure that states would be able to contain a power sufficient to the power of the Federal Government (which wanted to maintain a standing army after the Shay’s rebellion in Massachusetts) in order to prevent tyranny. It was also a way for the federal government to insure that there would be an armed body of the willing should the need for a national defense arise.
It was never meant to be a provision in the name of self-defense. That protection is afforded elsewhere in the law. If the founding fathers had gotten even a wee glimpse into a future where semi-automatic weapons are regularly used to hold students or poor people as terrorized hostages I’d bet my last dollar that they would have ripped #2 right off the fuckin’ page before the ink was dry.
What #2 guarantees us is not “arms” as much as an equalizing factor that allows individual citizens the right to a voice in a way that our contemporaries understand and respect. It is a weapon not against another person but against tyranny. I have such a weapon. You’re reading it.
In the past 7 years we have seen our constitution shredded and disfigured not by guns but by words. If you want to fight for your right to own a gun, go ahead. But, please do get your head out of your ass for long enough to realize that you may have no other rights left. Was it worth it?
I truly believe that the collage artists who appropriated English law, the Magna Carta, and the Enlightenment philosophies of Voltaire to craft our Constitution knew on a deep level that more would be revealed. They knew they could only create the framework upon which we would grow. We have added branches; some good, some bad. In 1793 the Supreme Court realized that a nation filled with people who escaped religious persecution to be here should not have an official religion. And we became the only country of that time to not have any state sanctioned creed (so there, we were NOT founded as a Christian nation). We realized that it no longer served us to hold another person as a slave and deny them the right to dignity. We realized that a vagina was no reason to not possess equal voting rights. Maybe soon we will realize that what we must aim is our reason and our words. Maybe we will put down the toys and pick up the tools to fight back a tyranny of ignorance.
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