There is a lot of Negative in the World — This surprisingly made me feel great

There is a lot of negative in the world.

Particularly now, when seemingly the proponents of hate and intolerance have wormed their way into places of trust and power. From the police force, to the president.

We have somehow, transitioned from a nation that fought Nazis, that gave the lives of Fathers, Brothers, Sons, Uncles, Wives, Daughters, toward this pursuit of Liberty, and the dream of America; to now where the grandchildren and great grand children of the greatest generation, have put on the yolks of ignorance, and stupidity, and bigotry and hatred — have become the Nazis that, at great spill of blood, we pushed into the sea.

That’s fine. Nazis fell before, they will fall again.

What is not fine– is that you can not resolve a problem; if you can not grasp, or define, the scope and depth of the problem.

So a racist media, selling only fear and outrage, but never really concerned with resolving the issues they bring up (to garner ratings); they are concerned with profiting from the criminal and the caustic and the egregious, but never punishment or closure.

A racist media, which in many ways is a membership campaign for more racism; makes the problem amorphous, and too big for us, makes it an unchangeable reality, rather than what it is, a problem— to be understood, and worked, and fought, and solved,

Organizations that start putting into perspective the problem, specific locations, specific organizations, specific patterns, that tangibility of the problem, that definition of it, makes it something you can work. Something you can fight.

Particularly when we begin highlighting the ties between movements of  stupidity and corporations. When we start tracing the money and the history, we can then start attacking the finances of these movements of hate, and that is when you start having results. There are a lot of companies no person of color should be giving money to, just for their historic, and in some cases present ties to movements of intolerance.

If you are a person of color, or just a person of conscience, patronizing companies like SHELL and KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN, you may want to do your homework and add them to your “sanctions/do not do business with” list. Otherwise the bullet that ends you, or the rope that lynches you– you may have paid for. Yes, I have no tact. 🙂

Now helping to clarify the problem, that is not an ending, it is not even a solution, but by helping to define the problem, that is the only way to begin to work a solution.

I went to SPLC’s website, and signed up to be a member immediately. I already donate to NAACP, and EFF, and Catholic Charities, but I really, after an incredibly stressful day at work, looking at the SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER’s webpage, looking at the work they put in, looking at their hate map, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I felt— empowered, I felt better.

I don’t love the name, HATE MAP, it is to the point, but I think it gives these organizations the ‘bad boy’, fear inducing glamour they are looking for, call it ANTI-AMERICAN MAP call it TERRORIST MAP, and now you are painting these enemies of liberty with the brush, they would paint others with. Now you truly are defining them.

I felt in an age of fake, racist news, and public servants murdering the public, that  finally these — repeated failings of our nation, someone is taking the time to map them, to define — however rudimentary—the scope of the problem.

And God Almighty, give me a foe I can see, and a problem that I can understand, and that understanding is both lever and weapon, give me a big enough lever and I will move the world, to borrow a quote; that is how it felt finding the SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER and becoming a member. 

I’m going to be reaching out to them, because I think a Think Tank approach, devoted to resolving the issues of intolerance and hate and malfeasance in our law enforcement and elected officials ( I would love to see a JUSTICE or LIBERTY map, showing off organizations doing good, as a counterpoint to their hate map), is a great idea and can use contributors.

Do your own homework before donating, but heck you can donate for as little as $25, and just the good feeling I received from their website existing, is worth that $25. Do your own homework, donate, get involved.

And for people who do not like using credit cards or paypal online (especially with one time or new purchases), I can not blame you, I do not either. Do what I did, print out their donation form, fill it out, get a money order from the post office, and mail it in.

View the site here!

And if you choose Donate Here!

WEDNESDAY’S WORDS was postponed to bring you this post. I think it is a worthy substitution.

Thanks and enjoy!

And when you sign up, tell them HT sent you!!!

 

And if you found this post useful, if it made you breathe a little easier, or stand a little straighter, or feel not alone in the night. then do me a favor. Like, subscribe, comment, and share this with others.

You do that and in little ways and in big ones, we win. We win the moment, if not the day. And win enough moments, well who can say.

I’m going to keep shouting out people and organizations that I think our winning the moment, Come shout with me.

The silence of good men and women, is all evil needs to triumph.

So reach out, and make a joyous noise. Join me here, as we speak in these— Heroic Times. 🙂

 

Thanks and enjoy!

 

The NSA, Programs of Terror and Crime and the rights of the Governed

I find it interesting how the attention is focused on the young man who to my mind, did his duty and put the interest of the American people’s right to know, above the interest of a few shadowy spooks right to play god.

The Government is the servant of the people, and when it forgets that, it forfeits its right… to blithely be obeyed.

It forfeits its right to unquestioningly… govern.

There are such things as illegal orders and illegal acts, and any soldier’s or representative’s ultimate duty is not to his government but his country, and the moral imperative to know and act when those two things diverge.

The defense of the NSA in their criminal enterprise boils down to “our actions have stopped potential crimes”.

To that I would answer… you can not preserve freedom by eradicating freedoms, and you can not preserve the law by breaking the law.

Full stop.

That road lies in dark places that we have been before.

The NSA attempts to justify it like all overreaching totalitarian regimes justify anything, that their ends justify their means. And that has never been remotely true, and is not in this case. The NSA’s claim to have stopped acts of terror, misses the truth, which is… they have traded their greater acts of terrorism for others’ smaller, potential acts of terrorism.

It’s like Nazi’s Germany’s answer to any petty and supposed crime of the individual was the magnitude greater crime of the state, such as concentration camps. That we are walking down that road with the American government today is obvious and clear, from Darpa designing ever more sophisticated machines to kill men (in the event enough of our military wakes up to the idiocy of murder and assassination as government policy, well of course we need unquestioning machines there to do it instead) to the barbaric state of our prisons… we use the threat of terror to support an increasingly terrorist American Government.

It is a hypocrisy that must be recognized… clearly recognized… and opposed… vigorously opposed.

The person’s name we should be broadcasting is not the young man, that the culpable press (in the payroll of the very interests getting rich treating the common citizen as criminal before crime) calls demeaningly “whistle-blower”, it’s the ones who run the NSA. The shadowy directors and heads of the NSA and CIA and FBI and all those acronyms that hide their big crimes under the lie of persecuting small ones.

They are like the lynchmob hanging and castrating boys for whistling at women, they use the lie of petty crimes, as a smokescreen to commit great ones.

We’ve cut so many social and humanitarian programs for supposed lack of funds, yet so much of your tax dollars go into a black hole, where abhorrent individuals do abhorrent things under the lie of doing it in the name of “National Security” or “for the people” when the truth is, they do it for the reasons it has historically been done, they are diseased animals in positions of power and no one has told them no.

No one has put them down.

“No.”

And “Get down.”

It’s a start.

Maybe instead of cutting programs to feed and clothe and inspire and employ our citizens, maybe we start closing down the acronyms. This country ran before them, I reckon we’ll run after them.

And maybe run a damn sight better.

On Muammar Khadafi, Grapes of Wrath, American Liberty and Rome

Henry Fonda/Tom Joad:

Maybe it’s like Casey says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then –

Jane Darwell/Ma:

Then what, Tom?

Henry Fonda/Tom Joad:

I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be there in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be there in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they built – I’ll be there, too

— Grapes of Wrath

Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Haiti, now Libya… but a few names on that list of Dark Countries that America has been toppling like dominoes. Invasion, bombing, mass murder, terrorism of the rich… on an unprecedented scale, since just prior to the start of the 21st century.

“We need breeding room” Adolf said then, and the talking puppets of Bush and Obama have said now.

The last time a country had killed this many nations this fast, we called it Rome or Nazi Germany. But today they own the press, so we call it nothing at all.

What does it mean when the most terrorist nation on the planet calls other nations terrorist?

It means they resist a bully. They harbor in their hearts difference, a different religion, a different style of government, a different people, a different value structure, and most damning of all a non-business friendly structure, ie they don’t want their natural resources exploited by outside forces.

Enter trumped up reasons to invade.

Enter the crusades 21st century style. Rawanda, Kosova, the Congo region. Uprisings of surprisingly well backed, and brutal (mostly Christian) factions in heretofore relatively homogeneous non-Christian nations.

The use of child soldiers to declare war on their own. The destruction of social order. The plunging into chaos of an entire region.

And you follow the money of all these bloody uprisings, and it leads unsurprisingly back to people not of the countries pushed into endless civil war. And the countries we can’t get to destroy themselves, quick or fast enough, we move in and do the job, with patriotic flags a flying, and to the swell of horns and drums… while the blood and monuments of people older than American liberty, stains the sand and veldt.

Tripoli has fallen.

The greatest libraries and seat of learning in the world. Delicate architecture and cultural artifacts, fragile beauties irreplaceable in the history of the world, blown to hell by planes without the decency to even have pilots, and offshore barrages from monstrous warships at sea.

We are killing indiscriminately people we don’t even have the courage to see. People we might actually like, and smile with and laugh with and love upon the seeing.

Whole blood lines, and families, and castes of people, as fragile and irreplaceable as their architecture, and language and culture… blown to hell by the Barbarians at their gate.

It’s empire building 101.

They say they’ve killed Muammar Khadafi.

The new Rome says he was a bad man.

An evil man.

And Rome would not lie to you.

But if I may, This is what I know about Muammar Khadafi…

I know that when the new Rome was sicking dogs and fire hoses on people of color it was Khadafi who spoke out an offered not just words but financial and cultural support to Rome’s criminals of the time such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

But this same Rome, that still holds slavery and their apartheid regime of the early 20th century as not a mistake, but a lost but not relinquished battle, this new Rome, sire to Israel, this new Rome says Muammar Khadafi was a bad man.

And the new Rome would not lie to you.

But with all this blood on their hands, perhaps their definition of good… is in question.

By the fruit will you know the tree, and by god what a bloody, crippled harvest has been the fruit of the new Rome.

Perhaps their definition of good and evil… should be questioned. Before any more irreplaceable men and nations lose their lives… for breathing room.

And perhaps… before we lose our souls.