Friday, October 29, 2010

VOTE.


Lower turn out always benefits the elites, always bolsters the Establishment and reassures the top 1% of the nation’s Wealthy across the board. Nothing makes lobbyists happier than poor, working-class, middle-class, upper-class non-voters who cite “lack of enthusiasm” as their reason to stay home.

“The powers that be” don’t care if you’re Rich, Poor, Black, White, Brown, Man, Woman, Tranny, or a World of War Craft aficionado, -as long as you stay home on Election Day.

The dollars corporate interests and big business spent in the last presidential election and the last Senate and Congressional races go farther if we just act like nothing matters. This is why the Establishment always fights voter registration efforts, anywhere, from the Mission district in San Francisco, to Beverly Hills, to Compton, to Detroit, to Chicago’s Southside, to Park Avenue, to Harlem and all places in between, the non voter is the Establishment’s favorite kind of American: The defeated kind; The kind they don’t have to spend money distracting with ads or lying to in the newsmedia.

When you don’t vote, you have no say. When you have “no say,” you are no different than a royal subject in days of old… save that you did it to yourself.

GO VOTE.

Vote and vote hard.
Really think about it.
…And, if you do give it some thought, you’ll find there are plenty of reasons to vote for this candidate versus that candidate, or this proposition as opposed that bill… but there is no reason, not a single solitary one not to vote. EVER.

Many people died to set in motion this system, a still evolving one, which was more of an open-ended hope for a future that the founders were humble enough to know they could not imagine for us on parchment in perpetuity. Thomas Jefferson and others understood what they could not bring themselves to pronounce openly; namely that inalienable truth that says “us” means “all” or it just means “some,” and whatsoever was jotted down in the first drafts of our Constitution, -we were never intended to be a nation of “some.”

We’re still working it out. SO VOTE.

We owe them one.
The founders, despite their own criminal flaws, mendacity and self-centered motivations, didn't elect a new king, they laid down the ground work for a system by the people for the people, in an attempt at a “more perfect union.” –Those words were a dare of sorts to be answered by every succeeding generation, and some of our forbears have paid for it in flesh. Too many profited from its loopholes, its abusive legislation, its murderous and exclusionary protections… only to find those abuses and crimes the very reason for changing the Constitution, for the better, for the future.

If you’re going to stay home during this election I ask that you look at a portrait of Frederick Douglass while you stay home, wasting a precious chance to be counted, to be heard, to simply exist in the nation you live in. The shame might just kill you, be you Black, White, Hispanic, Fundamentalist or sane.

I won’t tell you who to vote for or why.

I have faith that if every registered voter came out and fulfilled their civic responsibility to the country, government would improve vastly. More would get done, -and more needs to get done because we’ve only started.

SO VOTE ALREADY.

Ignore all the noise, and cast your ballot and think of all the native nations that discovered this country millennia ago, the settlers, the slaves, the exploited, the immigrants and all who gave everything in return for nothing.

Vote because it’s your right, it’s your power and it’s the only way in which this nation can move forward into the light of its proper future.

VOTE.
-SJ
Enhanced by Zemanta

Friday, October 15, 2010

Nobody Says We Were Attacked By Agnostics, White Men, New Yorkers, Republicans or Veterans on 4/19

If the glibness of this post’s title makes you angry, then read on. There’s actually a very important point to my sarcastic and jingoist-baiting statement above.

On April 19, 1995 the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was bombed by Timothy McVeigh, a Caucasian, sometime Catholic later Agnostic, decorated Persian Gulf War veteran, American militia movement sympathizing, registered Republican voter who was born in the state of New York.

McVeigh committed what was the single most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. It claimed
168 lives, not counting an unmatched adult human leg that may belong to a possible, unidentified 169th victim who remains anonymous to this day.

The 168 death toll includes 19 children under the age of six.

Tim McVeigh claimed he initially wanted to destroy the Murrah building itself, but that he later came to the conclusion that his “message” would be heard only if there were many deaths. Most of the fatalities were directly caused by the violent collapse of the building’s structure, and not the bomb’s sudden instantaneous blast.

After April 19, nobody focused on any of the groups of which McVeigh was an identified member after his cowardly bombing with the ferocity, venom and prejudiced hate that Muslims have endured in America. Why? Because it would be manifestly stupid to suspect all persons born in the state of New York of terrorism. It would be an act of absolute idiocy to suspect all Persian Gulf War veterans of sedition and treason (And yet I would not blame them for those sentiments after the scandal of Walter Reade hospital during the Bush administration.) It would be irrational to assume that Caucasians want to bring down the government because of Tim McVeigh, and his accomplice Terry Nichol’s racial identity.

Yet this is the reasoning too many of us apply to Muslims in America.

You wouldn’t know that “guilt by association” is actually illegal in America from watching pundits on the Right, or by listening to the screams of protesters opposing the building of a Islamic learning center, (or mosque it doesn’t really matter which it is) in downtown Manhattan.

That’s all prejudice is at its core: the judgment of individuals based upon a belief applied to a group. The individual disappears, and all manner of injustice and violence is allowed. To paraphrase comedian Chris Rock, there’s always a lot of “accepted racism” when people start getting angry or scared or both.

We are angry and we are still scared in America, -and with good reason. Some spoiled fundamentalist asshole billionaire named Osama Bin Laden keeps releasing new tapes faster than the late Tupac Shakur; threatening violence and death against “the west” from all corners, sides and borders. Regardless of what motivations are ascribed to this homicidal thug and his fellow sociopaths, Bin Laden’s reasoning has more to do with perceived affronts to his reputation as a freedom fighter and protector of his culture and religion than the actual religion of Islam itself. When the House of Saud refused his help in pushing Saddam Hussein back across Kuwait, he openly threatened the Royal family. When the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia ran to their old friends the Bush family for support, he openly threatened the United States, leveraging the coming installation of an American military base within miles of Mecca as a rallying insult for Al Qaeda to galvanize around during and after the Persian Gulf War. Underneath all of this, the United States’ motivations had nothing to do with freedom or religion, -just the securing the uninterrupted procurement and distribution of oil at any cost. Nobody remembers that Bin Laden’s former target was the Egyptian government after the Soviet Afghanistan war, a fact conveniently lost in the post 9/11 us-versus-them propaganda deluge that ironically served the purposes of maniacs like Bin Laden himself: Every Muslim made to feel they do not belong gives his self-indulgent war of religion and culture legitimacy; Just ask John Miller, the only western reporter ever to interview Bin Laden face to face in 1998.

Even Bill Maher, another comedian like Chris Rock whose powers of reason and ethical humanist clarity I respect greatly, -actually defended racial profiling to my shock a few short years ago. If you’re looking for someone who looks and sounds like Osama Bin Laden, it still allows everyone who doesn’t look that way free reign to harm. I don’t feel safe around anyone when I’m at the airport, because I know that persons looking a particular way, being of a particular race, creed or color doesn’t make them any particular thing for better of for worse, for good or ill. Maybe old people get a pass, but that might be it.

And this is my point, and the motivation behind the title of this post:

Fox “News” Channel’s Bill O’Reilly said that “Muslims killed us on 9/11” on the TV talk show, The View this week. While that statement in isolation remains a fact, its selectiveness as a statement lends authority to a lie because all Muslims did not attack the United States on September 11, 2001. His statement is as ridiculous and dishonest as positing that “Veterans, Republicans and White men attacked us on April 19, 1995.” No one would uphold that statement or use it as justification for let’s say, denying a permit to an RNC convention in downtown Oklahoma because the GOP’s presence would be “an insult to families of the 4/19 victims.”

I am an American and I am tired of pointing out what is still racism and what still amounts to bigotry and prejudice over the shouting of people like Bill O’Reilly. I am exhausted from pointing out just how hypocritically selective hate is in America. I’m tired of pointing out the obvious to people who would rather act before they think just because they say their anger gives them the right.

Sadly, I am scared too.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon and the failed run at the White House by high jacked flight 93, the United States is one terrorist attack away from a federal lock down that would make the Patriot Act look like a Civil Rights initiative (no matter who is in office.) The cultural and social repression that would emanate at street level is too monstrous to contemplate if we are hit again in sizeable measure. I know we’d lose everything valuable about this Republic because we’re not the nation we used to be. We don’t listen to smart people anymore, we call people who try to think things through “pussies,” and we call people who defend the powerless even worse names.

Just try and remember this:
The casualties on 9/11 included nationals from over 70 countries. That’s one isolated fact that Fox “News” Channel and Osama Bin Laden are glad we have forgotten.

-SJ