One of the reasons that I started my blog was so I would have a place to let loose some of the frustration that would threaten to put me in the back seat of a squad car for battering some brain dead lamppost I considered a friend, or a family member, who pushed my political buttons. Knowing my tendency to go apoplectic, these lunatics would casually drop such items, informing me for instance that they heard from a reliable source that Obama really was a biased Muslim, or that he was prejudiced against white people and was about to take their guns away (which would happen if I had my way), or that he was this or that, or somewhere in the radical middle. They were always so far off track that I would go ballistic. ‘Where did you get that? Who have you been listening to now? Jaba duh Hut? Faux News? For god sakes do your own research!" I would hear my voice rising and would need to choke it back down my throat before it reached the shriek stage. And at my age that could be dangerous. So I started listing the buttons.
First there was Bush and 9/11 and when were they really going to tell us the truth. And there was the Bush family legacy, the uncle who was Hitler’s financier for instance, which certainly puts a new spin on who was or who wasn’t a fascist. And there is the endless enduring war--the crippled state of the union--the McCarthy era that sits beneath the surface of this country’s politics like asparagus between seasons creeps below the soil and pops up the following summer like a new crop--and the Texas group, but maybe I shouldn’t even mention that. There is also Leonard Peltier and the abuses of Wounded Knee and Pine Ridge. And now there is a whole slew of new stuff. The schools blocking children from hearing the uplifting encouraging words of our caring articulate president, for one. And even worse, the gun toting toads at the town meetings. There is something about gun toting toads that scares me as much as seedy old clowns with their dirty wigs and big floppy hands and feet. Egad! And there are the equally seedy old white men who sit in our government drenched in their fury that a man of color could be smarter and more honorable and definitely more honest than they ever even knew how to be, men who I can easily visualize in their white robes and dunce caps.
I am so appalled at the stupidity of the people who buy into their lying propaganda. Who do they think will pay their medical bills when they get shut off by their present plans because they have already spent their share of money on their uncured prostate cancer? And no other plan will take them because it was not a brand new doomsday diagnosis. Do they think they will just cut into the long lines that will be at the hospital emergency rooms? If that ever, god forbid, happens maybe they should be forced to wear shirts that say it was their lies that got us there--and then find out just how happy that makes the rest of us who have been fighting so hard to keep this country from sliding back into the last great depression the same greedy people or their greedy granddaddies caused. See, now even my writing is starting to shriek. God help America!
Hi Charlie. Thanks for letting me into this little room with big windows. Thanks for your passion. Thanks for all those days when you stood out there on the sidewalks with your signs, trying to tell everyone how insane war is. Thanks for your courage, and your persistence. I'm honored to be a follower.
ReplyDeleteThis is wonderful. I hope you send it to any newspaper that still prints letters to the editor. Start with the New York times.
ReplyDeleteLarkin
the world needs more shrieks like yours. we should all be so brave!
ReplyDeletei agree, this would make an outstanding letter to the editor. well, several, really.
write on!!!
with great admiration,
m