In response to my earlier post, from my dear friend Byron Fry:
You know, I've watched the chipping-away of civil rights by Nixon, by Reagan and by Bush the first, and the patient, dedicated rebuilding of the damage by the conscientious miserables in America's temple yard since my childhood; it's a tired, tiring routine that We The People must never grow tired of. The big powers throw a storm down, and a rag-tag parade of not-so-helpless little boys put their fingers in the dike. Don't ever underestimate the power of grass-roots moxy. It's easy to celebrate the losses, especially in times like these, when We The People have allowed ourselves to get caught with our pants down. Easy to whine about being victimized, as if it's the wolf's fault for eating a helpless child left unprotected out of inattentiveness. Yes it's our fault, it will always BE the fault of We The People when WE allow criminals to feed us a line of shit and take over. SHAME ON US, already. This land and its Constitution are helpless without our vigil. There will always be drooling, murderous corporate wolves in this America; remember, it's their right to exist...if not to destroy our country. We The People are either vigilant or we're not. If we're not, we deserve what we get. VIGILANCE!!! If we tune out, and allow our kids to play video games, or watch too much coporate TV, or obey all the prompts from MSN, the magazine ads and the billboards, and allow ourselves to become an ocean of obedient, brain-washed consumer-lemmings, guess what? Game's over. (sigh)...and that is how the constitution ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper...
Yet, for all that, the line inches steadily uphill. Not as fast as it would in a sane world, to be sure, but nonetheless the progress is forward.
I remember marching with Martin Luther King Jr. up Telegraph Ave from Oakland to Berkeley in '67 (age nine); the concept of a Barack Obama---and all the change in the collective paradigm necessary for such an event to even occur---would have seemed too absurd to mention in even that august company, had anyone thought to dream of the possibility. We've come a long way in my short life, and I'm fucking PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. But to get back to our civil rights and our Constitution, gasping for life against the ropes in the ninth round, a circumstance with which they're all too familiar: This tide has washed back and forth in our bathwater here in America since the late 1700's, and you know what?
WE'RE WINNING.
You know, I've watched the chipping-away of civil rights by Nixon, by Reagan and by Bush the first, and the patient, dedicated rebuilding of the damage by the conscientious miserables in America's temple yard since my childhood; it's a tired, tiring routine that We The People must never grow tired of. The big powers throw a storm down, and a rag-tag parade of not-so-helpless little boys put their fingers in the dike. Don't ever underestimate the power of grass-roots moxy. It's easy to celebrate the losses, especially in times like these, when We The People have allowed ourselves to get caught with our pants down. Easy to whine about being victimized, as if it's the wolf's fault for eating a helpless child left unprotected out of inattentiveness. Yes it's our fault, it will always BE the fault of We The People when WE allow criminals to feed us a line of shit and take over. SHAME ON US, already. This land and its Constitution are helpless without our vigil. There will always be drooling, murderous corporate wolves in this America; remember, it's their right to exist...if not to destroy our country. We The People are either vigilant or we're not. If we're not, we deserve what we get. VIGILANCE!!! If we tune out, and allow our kids to play video games, or watch too much coporate TV, or obey all the prompts from MSN, the magazine ads and the billboards, and allow ourselves to become an ocean of obedient, brain-washed consumer-lemmings, guess what? Game's over. (sigh)...and that is how the constitution ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper...
Yet, for all that, the line inches steadily uphill. Not as fast as it would in a sane world, to be sure, but nonetheless the progress is forward.
I remember marching with Martin Luther King Jr. up Telegraph Ave from Oakland to Berkeley in '67 (age nine); the concept of a Barack Obama---and all the change in the collective paradigm necessary for such an event to even occur---would have seemed too absurd to mention in even that august company, had anyone thought to dream of the possibility. We've come a long way in my short life, and I'm fucking PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. But to get back to our civil rights and our Constitution, gasping for life against the ropes in the ninth round, a circumstance with which they're all too familiar: This tide has washed back and forth in our bathwater here in America since the late 1700's, and you know what?
WE'RE WINNING.
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