You’re not safe anywhere! The trillions of dollars dedicated to our bloated military budget (larger than the next 8 largest on earth) have not protected a soul against the Covid 19 virus, or a single victim of a mass shooting. While we continue to fret about what can be done, the Nation’s armament lobby (the NRA) masquerading as a family hunter organization, is doing its under-handed best to arm more and more of the population with military style weapons that out-gun most police departments. Armed men, fantasizing themselves as patriots invade the State house in Michigan attempting to intimidate legislators and stop debate. A wild and wooly mob composed of cops, ex-military guys, the disaffected, bewildered and lied-to voters seek to hang the Vice-President and stop the certification of our duly elected President, trashing the Capitol in the process. And this is the shit you can see!
Virtually invisible, are thousands upon thousands of nuclear missiles aimed between Russia and the United States in “launch-on-warning” mode—which is the equivalent to a hair trigger on a machine gun. We’re one computer glitch, one mis-read flock of geese away from Armageddon, which will solve all the smaller problems by annihilating human life on earth, and this is not even discussed!
Over the hand-wringing, the flowered memorials, the weeping grave-sites, and the oh-so-earnest-and-respectful media coverage of yet another obscene mass-murder of men, women and children, we keep looking to the legislators ( who are not leaders, but followers of polls) to do the obvious thing—to outlaw and buy back military style weapons from civilians. How many people can you kill with a bolt action rifle? The second amendment guarantees muskets to militia-men not AR-15’s to Posse Comitatus and Militia guys who believe that they will stop government tyranny by arming themselves for macho fantasies. Meanwhile the government sodomizes them invisibly with tax policies and legislative fixes which have bankrupted them and crazed them to believe that their little militia will solve these problems in the most violent country on earth, where one flyover by a jet will disintegrate a platoon of these beefy morons.
This is something the people themselves will have to fix! They will have to put the fear of god into the pompadoured, well-suited bag-men and women they send to Congress, who year, after year, decade after decade, privilege the rights of their donors’ capital over the needs of working people, unions, teachers, day-car providers, rural folks, non-college educated white folks and the environment itself. They’ve been doing this since they snuck Ronald Reagan into office posing as an old-timey cowboy who immediately changed into jodphurs and high-legged riding boots and declare dwar on government and unions beginning the sixty year assault of all the services and institutions that built wealth in the middle class.
It’s time to stop paying taxes. It’s time to threaten recall campaigns and primaries, to end the filibuster and pass legislation that will actually help people. If we don’t help them, Progressives will be voted out, and Mitch McConnell and his minions will have won the right to a scorched Earth and will deserve it. The Republicans cannot tell the truth to their voters because their voters do not want their policies, so they talk culture war, immigrants, while they pick their pockets and increase the tax burden on them while relieving from the one-tenth of the population which is living virtually for free. We can demand the truth, and tell it. Here’s a start:
CONGRESS IS PUT IN OFFICE BY THE ONE-TENTH OF ONE PERCENT. That’s why they don’t listen to their constituents. Failing the ability to institute Full Federal Funding of Elections and the prohibition of all gifts from Lobbyists, the people will have to threaten recall, and organize around candidates who pledge to put their interests first. Otherwise, we’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
It will brace you to remember YOU ARE NOT SAFE ANYWHERE when you don’t have the power to control your laws and culture. YOU ARE NOT SAFE.. So put down yr bloody video games, cell-phone, ‘handy’ apps, and set about organizing to bring these faux leaders to heal before it’s too late.
