I’m listening to old 70s Soul Cinema trailer clips, and they are cracking me up. The best? This little tag line from Fred Williamson’s BLACK CAESAR… “This Caesar comes to bury you!”— How Frigging cool is that!I have to pick up that movie on DVD and watch it now.

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

God rest ye merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember Christ our savior
was born on Christmas day.
To save us all from Satan’s power
when we were gone astray.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

The odd thing I find about Christmas, and this supposedly benevolent time of year, one of them, is it is typically the time America ramps up her military strikes against non-christian countries.

“Celebrating Ramadan with your families are you? Well let me drop off my present from Uncle Sam….
this megaton bomb bitches!! Merry Christmas MFers!!!”

I sadistically jest, but the truth is that sadistic without any jesting involved.

From God, our heavenly father,
A blessed angel came.
And unto certain shepherds,
Brought tidings of the same.
How that in Bethlehem was born,
The son of God by name.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

I want to highly recommend a book I had mentioned picking up previously, DIGGING:THE AFRO-AMERICAN SOUL OF AMERICAN CLASSICAL MUSIC by Amiri Baraka.

A compilation of essays covering several decades of this uniquely American art form of Jazz/Blues as only an insider can, it is not only a seminal dissection of the times and the players in the music scene, it is as brilliant a dissection of America the American id and American fallacies as I’ve ever read.

It is an essential book, and is easily my recommended read of 2009.

It is a book on the masters of the medium, Trane, Coleman, Miles, the list goes on, told by someone who knew and played and laughed with them.

It is a book told with an authority, validity by one of not just the world’s preeminent poets but one of the world’s preeminent music lovers, and you’re NEVER going to get that again, EVER. By anyone.

Because those pioneers are all shuffled off this mortal coil, and what is left is the vultures to retrofit their memories and their music. The vultures who would paint Black Gods white.

We are now deep in the age of Sony and Time Warner and American Idol and corporate bs as the end all and be all of music.

Deep in the age of the tail wagging the people.

So the discussion DIGGING engages in, of the music as the gestalt, and the natural by product of the fears, the hopes, the politics, the loves, the controversies, and most of all as a chronicler from an abused mass of Americans not allowed to be Americans, this understanding of music as a call and a component in change, you are NEVER going to see presented from this capitalist controlled society again.

Music to them. the suits, is either a way to sell you something or to divert you from something, but never a way to engage you in something constructive or progressive or enlightening.

So DIGGING, written by this eight decade old LIVER and SURVIVOR and SHAPER of the most turbulent of American Years, I see as absolutely a historic document from day one, and an essential component to understanding what music was, and what it can be again.

You’re looking for a gift to give that music lover in your life? This is the book you give them. His list of recommended CDs alone is worth the price of the book!! I’ve tried some of his recommendations and they are dead on. Highest Recommendation.

“Jazz is the music of Americans who were not allowed to be American.”

To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy, joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

I’ve followed the recent rash of removals of Black Mayors, from offices throughout the country, for the most trumped up nonsense with some interest. It is very Jim Crow like, and in the age of Black Newspapers and Black Radio Stations and even Black owned theaters… we would have called this convenient confluence of events what is it… a witch hunt, and a power grab, and a turning back the clock.

We would have called it clearly… injustice, and undemocratic, this usurping of the duly elected representatives of the people, by legal maneuverings of a very few people.

But we no longer live in an age of Black owned anything. Brown vs. Board of Education led the way to that.

Brown vs. BOE while a good case in the micro-level, on the macro-level can clearly be seen for what it is, a defeat cloaked as a victory. Zora Neale Hurston said this decades ago, and she was derided for it by everyone, Blacks as well as Whites.

She ended up dying a broken woman. But she was right, and no one has ever been more right.

“Our victories give them weapons they did not have before”

Separate but Equal, there is nothing wrong with that concept. The problem was the practice. America was never Separate AND Equal. It was alway seperate AND UNEQUAL. Inferior service, inferior representation, inferior choices.

And BROWN vs BOARD rather than treat the root cause of the problem, unequal and unjust allocation of dollars and resources, instead became a model for even more unequal allocation/distribution of resources.

That leads to our present atmosphere of disenfranchised people, devoid of real recourse or representation. With representatives picked off one by one, with not even a real Black owned paper or radio station left .

And you may be saying, I’m not Black why should I care?

You should care because

“what you do to the least, you do to to me”

or

“They came first for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew so I said nothing”

or

Because ultimately the crimes they, the robber barons of this… trifling age, get away with in Haiti or Iraq or Palestine or Philadelphia today, they are ultimately perfecting to try on you tomorrow.

Because while I’m fond of terms like Black and White, the truth is that this is a class struggle, between those who want to be, once again, their fathers’ sons and be the masters of men. And they will not let color deter them from your fall. They want the mass of men as slaves or serfs, and each peoples’ fall, from Liberia to Haiti to Iraq to Palestine brings them a step closer… to preparing your fall.

They are greasing America to fail, the agents of Oligarchy, they hope to put to bed, at last, even the lie of liberty.

So that the people, frustrated with services closing, taxes rising, food and water unsafe, quality health unaffordable, cost of living escalating, fear and crime their only constant food, and hunger and pestilence and perversion and death in the air, and America made into Gomorrah… so the people, frustrated, will be ready at last for their nation’s march to terror and totalitarianism.

Will be ready, at last, for America’s fall.

Mistakenly blaming their liberty for their pains, when it was not liberty that failed them, but they that failed their liberty by not killing the leaders that led them to such mire and such madness.

So remember this… rambling of mine from the edge… the next time you hear of a suspicious removal of an elected representative, or of an odd arrest, or a case tried in the press/tv, as many increasingly are.

Because with every broadcast, you are being manipulated closer to that day of your own dark Reich.

Ohhhh,
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

Thanksgiving is a very Western holiday. And I am increasingly… not western. I’ll take the day off. Sure. But I’ll take it in my way. The United American Indians of New England since 1970 have called Thanksgiving by perhaps a more apt name, ‘A Day of Mourning’ and have observed it as such. And being myself a son of colonial horror, I see clearly their stance. My aboriginal blood, always pulling toward aboriginal people. Be they Zulu or Wampanoags. I find myself, somewhere between those two disparate camps of celebration and mourning. I find for me, the day is one of rumination. A day of reflection. ************ More on Holidays. I refuse to be dictated to, regarding what I should celebrate. I refuse to bury truths, beneath money making lies. The general purpose of holidays. Be it Thanksgiving or Christmas, a pagan Roman Holiday to debauchery that became retrofitted to celebrating the Roman’s killing of, what they considered, a so-called Christ, and retrofitted again in the 20th century as a marketing tool, a tool for big business to get bigger. Selling toys, and cards, and trees and crosses. And a word on the cross. The cross long before Christianity was a Greek, then Roman, symbol of torture and terror, the very word has its roots as a device of torture. And was perfected by the great Roman empire, going up and down, and to and fro the entire world, the sign of you crossing yourself, it is also how the devil is described. The cross was a symbol of terror before the coming of Christ, and remains so. Only it has become slightly more horrible, as they have added a crucified man to that symbol. The cross is not celebrating Christ’s life, it is celebrating Rome’s victory. Who but the lyncher makes the lynching and the lynch rope their symbol? Who but the crucifier makes the crucifixtion their symbol? Think. The tiny cult of Christianity a long time ago was usurped, like everything else, by those who loved it not. They want to sell you the idea of a meek martyr and salvation paid by submission to the state. But the man we wrongly call Jesus Christ (that is a Romanized name, surely not a name this dark man, with hair like lambs wool, ever heard in his life, more accurate would be Rome altering this African martyr’s name to their purpose, and labeling him with a play on their JC, Julius Caesar), he came not to bring peace but a sword. And if the idea of a Black Christ changes your relation to that Christ, or your comfort or belief in that Christ, then I say to you… your religion is a fucking sham. And you should call yourself what you truly are… a son of the new Rome and proud eater of Christ. “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” –Mathew 10:34-36 It’s the standing up of a man you want to make a symbol, not the falling down. Think. And you may realize, everything America does stinks of lies. “And if you heard I was celebrating, it’s a world wide lie” – Public Enemy

I have very little to say about the Fort Hood, Texas massacre. Not because I have become numbed to massacres by dint of long sojourn in America, that bastion of massacres, though surely some of that is in my reaction and the reaction at large. I feel for the loss of life and loved ones in this atrocity, as I do every atrocity. Those we endure ourselves and those atrocities we impose on others. I feel them all. No I have very little to say, because it was largely said by better men than me, before me. “I don’t know who I’m going to shoot, you put a rifle in my hand” and “This is chickens coming home to roost” America for a while now, has worn herself thin declaring war on every darker, non-christian country from Haiti to Liberia. Waging what amounts to the bloodiest religious crusades in the history of the world, while being tactful enough to keep the idea of crusades and ethnic cleansings out of the television reasoning for such expenditure of lives and dollars. At a time when America would be best served by shoring up her own crumbling economic, moral, educational and cultural landscape we instead invest our time in destroying these things for other countries. And the oddest thing is, we get other disenfranchised people to go out and disenfranchise other people. It’s a cycle we’ve been engaged in since the Revolutionary war. Making of victims, our victimizers. The Irish became the American police force, because Ireland had become a fucking killing ground. And disenfranchised soldiers flocked here to find something… better. The Buffalo Soldiers, escapees of enslavement, won renown by being efficient cleaners of the plains, killers of Native Americans. Latin Americans escaping in some cases decades of bloody totalitarian regimes, often supported by US Dollars, augment today’s dwindling American armed forces. And the cycle continues. Our victims today, America will turn around and make (when they have no other jobs to accept) her victimizers tomorrow. That type of duplicity and juggling act is no easy feat to keep going. In fact it’s damn difficult and dangerous. And the concept of diminishing returns being a reality, it is costing America. America has by hook or by crook, pushed, grabbed, cajoled, threatened anyone it can…. to garner the manpower to continue its endless war. In many cases that has meant the armed forces being more than happy to augment its forces with the less than stable. From well documented cases of soldiers with Autism, to convicts, to out and out psychopaths. America doesn’t care who they put on the front lines, as long as you will kill for them. It doesn’t care what you have to lose to go someplace and kill people you have no beef with, as long as you do it. As long as you will be their gun. The problem with that is, every so often, people get shot with their own guns. Particularly irresponsible people. And America is an irresponsible nation. It is an irrational nation, that breeds this in their subjects, demands it even. Demands that you accept the most irrational reasoning, the most irrational justifications… for that which can not be justified. You ask of people to kill for your lies, to weigh the life of the other… cheap. For no other reason than you say so. To surrender personal moralities, religions, codes, ethics, humanities… to the ever shifting dictates of the state. And at some point teaching people to weigh other lives cheap means the ability to weigh all lives cheap. Do you understand? You can not spit horror into the wind, and not ultimately end up swallowing it yourself. I do not know this Officer Hasan, beyond the sound-bites that his life has been reduced to. But as a psychiatrist, he was obviously an intelligent man, more intelligent arguably than those who now debate him, and as a psychiatrist understanding of the strange landscape of the human condition. So to try and right this off as a dirty muslim, killing good Americans would be inept. No do not put that lie upon your soul. Officer Hasan perhaps was never more American, than in his massacre of other Americans. It is after all, the American past time. Ask any number of Post offices, or Shopping Malls, or Schools, or McDonalds. No my dear beloved child, you lay that butchery at Fort Hood, where it belongs… with you. And with me. Hasan was the bomb, but we as America… were the lit and burning fuse. Officer Hasan was by occupation aware of Abraham Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs, and Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality so he understood better than most the foilbles and fallacies of the human condition, its pitfalls, and yet he himself fell into them. Looked too long into the abyss, and found it sweet. What hope have the rest of us? If a man whose occupation it is, to deal with pressure, himself crumbled under the pressure of America, how much more these 18 and 19 and 20 year olds that we send into the killing fields? How shall they come back to us? Us… we who gleefully do send them out to kill, in unjust wars to unjust ends, if not changed and ready to show us… what lessons they have learned at liberty’s great lap. Oh yes, what they have sown abroad, we will surely in the fullness of time, reap the harvest of at home. You and me and all of us. Unless we stop this train wreck direction America is on, this rule by sociopaths… then our Fort Hoods are waiting for us. All of us. This is what is to be learned from all that pain and anguish and calamity of Fort Hood. That it is America… unplugged. Chickens coming home to roost.

I tell ya, if it wasn’t for pesky things like bills, and a perennial lack of funds, I could spend more time consistently updating this blog. Rather than these “drive-by” postings, that demands on my time have reduced me to. I really need to write for a living, but the writing markets aren’t what they were. Writers of the 30s and 40s were averaging anywhere between $200 and $1000 for a short story. A $1000 is still a lot of money now. But in the 1930s that translates into probably $10000 in today’s money. Especially considering the average family income coming out of the depression, was around $1500 a year. So heck yeah, a $1000 check for a short story in the 1930s was a good chunk of change. Even the pulp writers, especially the prolific pulp writers were raking in the dough. Here it is 70+ years later and the market for short fiction has not just dwindled, but the average pay rate has dwindled to a fraction of 1930s pay rates. Most people are very lucky to get a $100 for a short story, much less the $1000 of the 1930s. While the internet is great for turning everyone into writers and radio announcers, it’s done so at the expense of creating a viable monetization model for it, and thus eroding the existing model. The “Why should people pay for your review in the New York times or listen to this radio show, when you can read a 100 free blogs or a 100 free podcasts” mentality. And don’t get me wrong, I love bloggers and podcasters, but don’t use us as a reason not to pay the professional a decent wage. The same goes for writers. The glut of online magazines has seemingly through their mere existence altered how print publications compensate their writers… and not in a good way. Nowadays places are paying you less, and want far more. Not just first rights, but world rights, reprint rights, electronic distribution rights, you name it they want it, and generally, for short stories, don’t want to pay you over a $100. In 1937 Dashiel Hammet sold the rights to his popular THIN MAN series to Hollywood for $40000. A princely sum for 1937, and nothing to sneeze at in 2009. Let’s compare it to the $100,000 a “hot” author/screenwriter can command today. In 1937, that $40000 was income tax free, the price of a house averaged $4000. So you just made enough to buy in cash ten houses. Compare that to today, a superstar writer gets a quarter million dollars for the rights to his novel. After taxes we’re talking if he’s lucky $198,000. Now the price of your average home is still around $250000. With homes in California still going for half a million dollars. So the superstar writer of today makes enough to put down a large downpayment on one house, as compared to the superstar writer of yesterday that makes enough to buy ten houses. Not to mention the fact that studios today have locked writers out of making residuals for new mediums derived from their work. And yes, I get it that print publications aren’t what they were. That the multitude of media and mediums currently available has cut into the bottom line of print publications, so you have magazine circulations in the 10s of thousands rather than the 100s of thousands. And exorbitant ticket prices covering up the fact that less and less people are going to the movies. For every DARK KNIGHT that does well, their are a few score of REDBELTs that don’t. But the thing is the increased cover and ticket prices, and ad and tie-in prices offsets this… so that the various mediums, are still ending up in the black. So there is no reason the writers whose work is the source for the cartoon, and the film, and video game, and the internet download, shouldn’t receive residuals in these mediums as well. But It is just like in every other big business these days, the suits want maximum profit while sharing as little as possible of that with the workers who make the profits possible. There was a time when if the company did well, that was passed down to the workers, in raises, bonuses, profitsharing, pensions… not any longer. If you’re not a suit at the corporate headquarters, or in the board meetings, if you’re just the poor sap who actually does the work… you get none of those things. You get a job with a payscale that is gradually going backwards, and the always pleasant possibility of having your job outsourced from under you, to a country where the suits can pay the workers even less and get away with it. When economic gurus talk about the weakening of the dollar this is what they mean. And the only ones getting rich in such a system are the banks and the conglomerates. The setters of prices. The manipulators of money. So that you have a top down system, where the base, the majority of the population, is canabalized crushed to support the excesses, expenditures, waste, and greed of a vocal minority at the top. When Barack Obama put the nation further in debt to the tune of 1.4trillion dollars, to bail out the very people who were and are responsible for our nations economic crisis, the banks and the conglomerates, that is a top down system in effect. It’s the many people being canabilized to support the few, an inherently flawed and unsupportable system, that grows more unsupportable the more the dollar is devauled by spending money that we do not have. In essense not just locking the taxpayer into bondage to pay for the excesses of greedy, rich men, but locking the taxpayers’s children for generations to come. It’s slavery. 21st century style. And it’s the reason no one can make a living wage anymore. Not writers, not technicians, not engineers, not anyone. The wealth would have and will have to be distributed more evenly throughout the pyramid for the pyramid, for the people and the nation to survive. The people are the foundation for the nation, and economically, emotionally, educationally, culturally; the American people, and the American foundation… under a storm of unchecked, venal capitalistic tyranny.. is crumbling. Capitalism is this seasons shiny new Fascism. And will goosestep us all to death, if not stopped.

What if we’re wrong?

What if we are wrong about all the things we wanted to be right about?

What if we’re wrong about apple pie, and liberty, and democracy?

What if we are a police state, not for the good of the many, but for the greed of the few?

What if the FDA doesn’t care about protecting you? What if they don’t care about you staying well? What if a nation filled with the sick, is of more value to them, and their pharmaceutical backers, then a nation committed to being well?

What if a President rode to victory on the promises and the hopes of generations past and generations present, and in a few short months has completely betrayed every oath and every promise?

What if he answers to the same ends, and administers the same means, by which our world has been brought to this endless war? To this odd age, where all America has left to sell… is death.

What if it’s a game? The Republican and the Democrats, rigged puppets pulled by the highest bidder. And your life the ball they play with. What if we are a nation, that is ruled by gangsters and goons and greed?

What if the only true service your nation wants from you, is capitulation, and apathy, and fear?

What if our government taps our phones, reads our emails. monitors our correspondences, fragments our unity, intimidates our associates, and decimates our liberties?

If it does all those things to even one, one person, one group, one area… without checks, without balances, without oversight, is it still our government?

Or is it a state of monstrous governors and the mutely governed? Of butchers and their sheep?

And if so, what are you prepared to give up, to live by their rules, and what are you prepared to give up… to live by your own.

Odd questions for a Friday. Perhaps made all the more odd, by the certainty of the answers.

I’m always interested in the catch phrases the media adopts, across the board.

Words like Insurgents for people who if we were in their shoes we would call… Freedom Fighters.

Refugees for people who if we were in their shoes we would call… American citizens.

Pirates for people who if we were in their shoes we would call… Defending their shores.

Everybody is talking Somali pirates… or Somalian… take your pick.

Okay let’s talk about this… “pirating”.

That boat they hijacked was delivering arms being shipped from the US, from the Ukraine, from all over the fucking world, so that bloody, genocidal, and suicidal civil wars can continue on the African continent. At last count there were 52 Wars going on in the African continent.

Can you imagine that? 52 Armed and bloody conflicts.

Pants … this is for you… 52! (Inside joke).

And where are these arms coming from that one bunch of goons is supplied with (typically to overthrow a government that’s not inline with US interests)? Where are these arms coming from that a continent is using to massacre itself? I mean they are not being built in theses countries, so where are these weapons of insane death coming from? Hmm? Any hands?

These are colonial wars. Is anyone stupid enough not to know that? These are wars for silver, and gold, and land… oh my. You keep Eastern nations in disarray, and western corporations in the midst of this… loot the nation of all its wealth. And then give them “relief” for the holocaust it has made of their nation.

Pirates.

God forbid America speaks of Pirates.

Anyhow, yeah… so it amazes me how these buzzwords get adopted… across the board.

Across the board.

How is it that every network, every newspaper, every announcer begins almost immediately using the same buzzwords?

Because they all get down on their knees to the same global interests, and read from the same script. Whenever the US or Israel media call you something bad, more than likely you’re interfering with them killing someone, someplace.

So yeah… whenever I hear these buzzwords, I automatically hear bullshit. Calling these fuckers pirates, which probably means there is a complex issue here, and probably some validity to their seizing that ship. And more than likely the US is selling death where it shouldn’t be again.

Pirates my ass. Yeah there are pirates, but more often then not… they fly under the US flag.

LIVES ARE ON THE LINE: GRASSROOTS NON-VIOLENT DEFENDERS Dear Reader, While 15 of the members, children and wives, of the Grand Ravine Human Rights Council (CHRC-GR), are hidden away in safe housing because of death threats, other supporters of the CHRC-GR who want its mission to continue have come out to help. (Photos: temporary replacements for the leaders-in-hiding attend a special meeting Tuesday, 2.17.09.) Those in hiding as well as these others who have stepped up to do the work need our help. Financial always. Back-up work like helping to raise money, write grants, to do the tasks that keep Hurah, Inc. viable (serving on the board, doing database management, website maintenance) more than ever. E-mail me to volunteer: president@hurah-inc.org AUMOHD is a champion defender of the poor anonymous champions on the grassroots who want to promote a peaceful way of striving for their rights, all their community’s rights. They need help. They have worked without pay and with a small ($200 per week) grant from Hurah, Inc. to help out with communication, transportation, court expenses, etc. NOW IT IS RENT TIME! THE RENT IS DUE ON MARCH 15 OTHERWISE AUMOHD LOSES A PRECIOUS RESOURCE, THE OFFICE. The office has served as a neutral place away from the battlegrounds of the inner city neighborhoods for victims to meet. It has a large meeting room, a reception area, a courtyard for large gatherings. The rent has been raised to $3000USD annual. Any gift you can give will be appreciated. Go to our website and click on DONATE (2008 has been a horrible disaster with multiple storms, famine. All Haitians have been majorly strapped on top of being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Later in the month in our regular bulletin we’ll publish a startling, ground-breaking report of negotiations, face-to-face meetings between AUMOHD/CHRC-GR and armed men who have given the death threats to the CHRC-GR. Because of Atty. Fanfan’s reputation for really working for the poor, these men have asked to meet with him instead of threatening him also. A brief dialog was entertained where each side laid their position on the table. The nature of things in GR as in the past is that politically motivated turf battles are waged with guns, even massacres, to control voters. Sometimes the police are involved. Right now the police seem to be incapable of dealing with the murder of two policemen in the area.We are working on an inter national campaign to put the spotlight on the lawlessness in Grand Ravin and to get the State involved in constructive ways to re-establish order–instead of the violent campaigns waged in previous years. The CHRC-GR was instituted by AUMOHD to pioneer a path to another approach, non-violent advocacy for justice. The armed men are objecting to Franzco and the CHRC-GR working with the police to control criminal behavior because they have been accused of crimes. They think that AUMOHD is tied to foreigners with lots of money. They think that Franzco and the CHRC-GR promoting non-violence is a disservice to the community. A very, very complicated and delicate state of affairs. Please consider helping us support these non-violent champions of human rights! Thank you, Tom Tom Luce, President Hurah, Inc. – Human Rights Accompaniment In Haiti In Partnership with AUMOHD, a Haitian Human Rights Advocacy Group 800 US Advocates – a Vermont 501(c)(3) 1515 Fairview St. Apt. 3 Berkeley, California 94703-2317 E-mail: president@hurah-inc.org Web: http://www.hurah-inc.org To donate (tax exempt org 501(c)(3)) Joan Rae, Treasurer P.O. Box 418 Fayston, Vt. 05673

I want to forward this urgent update I just received from HURAH. I’ve spoken of them and the Haitian situation before. If you can give, please do.

It’s a complicated situation in Haiti.

I’m always inclined to side with the man willing to take up arms to protect his own. His hearth and his home.

Because I can understand the need for Militancy. Militancy in the face of oppression is what freed Haiti in the past. Demanding on their feet, not asking on their knees.

But there is a difference between Militancy, and anarchy.

And at the same time, if a non-violent approach can win the day, can save lives AND liberty, it should be, with all effort… pursued.

So, I choose my charities… with care.

You look at a lot of charities and 90% of what you give goes into “administrative fees” which is a fancy way of saying in the pocket of the people who don’t need it. I look for a charity that answers your questions, and actually uses the bulk of your donation for the people you’re trying to help. Also one that is communicative about how the funds are being used.

I like charities like that.

I like this one.

Check out the website, and when you’ve satisfied yourself you can say the same… give.

Give.

I know the battles are many, and the resources few.

But the winning is not won in our high days, but in our low. When you have nothing left to give, and nothing left to fight with, is when the fighting and the giving matters most.

Victory only promised, to those who will not, ever, ever, content themselves with defeat. Not their own. And not their brother’s.

To those who will never surrender.

Not even to themselves.

From LA to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Haiti.

To Haiti.

A country, one of the first to crack the shackles of the slave trade, that is owed a debt of gratitude by an entire hemisphere; and that debt has only been repaid with bloody horror by our governments.

But increasingly that’s all governments have to give. To give to others and their own.

Horror.

I ask more of myself.

And I ask more of you.

Now is the time to fight.

Now is the time to give.

Today you can give just money to help another’s problems, and perhaps avert a quickly descending tomorrow… where you must pay in blood to resolve your own.

The request is as follows: