Month: July 2013
Let’s Stand Our Ground
Gandhi, King, Mandela and Congressman John Lewis stood tall, non-violently, for equality and freedom, even when beaten and imprisoned. This is standing your ground. Stalking unarmed teenagers, whether self-proclaimed gang leader or self-appointed neighborhood watch, is not.
‘Stand Your Ground’ like Helen Thomas did, when a foxy President cornered by the wise old feisty hen, tried tap dancing to the tune: I didn’t really want to preemptively strike and go to war with a country which had nothing to do with the 2,977 deaths on 9/11. I just wanted to ‘shock and awe’ until 3,527 Americans stood their last ground for the American Dreams of Bankers and BP/Halliburton corporate types.
Detroit, though only one example of neglecting urban issues to death, deserves fellow American citizens standing their ground to prevent more murders and more Governors hiring more city managers for more city obits.
Whether financial burden on those trying to get the highest and best education, or deterioration of employer provided healthcare, or home ownership, or funeral charged to a credit card, BANKs are the Alpha of American BANKruptcy and Foreclosure, their Omega for Right and Left Americans.
So “Stand Your Ground” as much against those who start wars for profit with no financial motivation for ending them, as we stand our national security ground against those who choose to expose the felicity of power’s foreign and domestic spying and killing machines.
Nonetheless, those standing their ground for bathtub drowned government, without realizing how very passé is the time without taxes allowing Robber Barons to “build America” on the backs of their assembly lined unrepresented worker bees, need their “Father, Knows Best” reality checked.
When we profess standing your ground for our U. S. Constitution, is the highest expression of American patriotism, then as “We the People” we are obliged to “Stand Your Ground’ in defense of a tasteless and insensitive magazine cover, and ‘Stand Your Ground’ by neither buying the publication nor buying into a myopic press, or gerrymandered government.
As patriotic Americans standing our ground for The First Amendment, we are standing up for a Mosque in lower Manhattan, and the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” However, unless living in our largest IOU holder, one citizen’s freedom is not allowed to infringe on another’s.
Speaking of China, it’s really not all that American to ‘Stand Your Ground’ herded by ABC’s “Made in America” ratings solicitation. Our past trials in isolationism aided and abetted world wars, holocaust, genocide, ethnic cleansing, starving children, women as chattel, export import imbalance and the inhumanity of the powerful on the “least of these.”
Better to ‘Stand Your Ground’ as a super power for humanity and example of ‘Truth, Justice and a new and improved American Way,’ but be conservative when standing your ground on hunting trips, with a friend so much a legend in his own wonder lust and filled with unknown hydration sources, that you, like oil sources get in his sights.
As earth Stewarts, we need to be good listening neighbors, who remember to send the elevator back down for the next generation, so truly, ‘No Child is Left Behind.” That’s the wise alternative to self-destruction by corporate media driven polarization.
Standing your ground against potential contribution of women and citizens of every color, has already cost America a colossal reservoir of immense talent, and we need to do better.
Having lived on ‘both sides of the track’ President Barack Obama is probably a good choice to guide us into the 21st century reality that Franklin was correct, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Let’s stand our ground with our children, who are better.
World Peace
“WORLD PEACE!” Believing we need to spend more time thinking beyond the bookends of ‘The Right is radically wrong and The Left throws money at the poor,’ I celebrate heroic education: “One Child, One Teacher, One Book and One Pen” Malala, that changes our world into a place where the death of a seventeen year old is not justification for a “Halleluiah” tweet nor talk radio victory lap.
For a renewed focus on TheReasonableVoice.com and The Reasonable Voices BlogTalkRadio, I chose “World Peace,” knowing what an unfortunate punch line this goal has become.
We’ve been lubricated into believing “The Home of the Brave” is “The Land of the Free” by an endless marketing loop from corporate overseers who dangle technological advances of Capitalism before our eyes, glazing over reality.
Discounting Ancient World wisdom, we mentally download history into Sunday reruns, content to superficially surf. Distracted by a myriad of devices and medical breakthroughs, we self-blindside, eating ourselves to death, while devouring Earth, Air, Water and Firefighters.
In college I walked in on an argument my roommate, a Hopkins PhD candidate, was having with his guests from India, and was asked, “as an American,” to settle their differing world views.
I suggested, ‘The United Nations is not a group of foreign guests America allows to gather on Manhattan’s East Side. It is the world capsulated into the individuals speaking for every world leader and nation of people who comprise its membership. Even as host country, we either are co-earthly inhabitants or proclaimed superior ideological isolationists.’
Either way, like Charity, “World Peace” begins at home – with every American family whose ancestors sought freedoms here, only to enslave Native Americans, or brought with them, their own black slaves — in short, in the homes of American immigrant descendants. Either we are global citizens or we drain human and financial power in perpetual Wall Street war against the world.
Diminishing the education of our students under the weight of corporate loans, we deny Constitutional equality for all Americans, while shooting a mother’s child every three and a half hours.
I fail to understand why ‘Stewards of the Earth’ care who consenting adults marry, or where a man puts his penis, as long as it is not in you, your wife or a child. Although personally against abortion, anyone claiming absolute power to dictate to a woman what her choices are, while denying her equal protection under the law and equal pay for her professional contribution to society, murders “Free Will.”
Yes, these are global issues, but “Justice for All” is an American pledge, and unlike the Middle East, generally we replace our elected Presidents by electing another. So instead of cheering a Nixon, Simpson or Zimmerman verdict, demanding personal preferences over a jury’s “reasonable doubt,” consider why our Founding Fathers created a Republic, resulting in an Electoral College, rather than a mob ruled Democracy.
All over our world, there are life threatening realities facing women and children, especially girls, yes even from those shouting for their Democracy and Freedom. Yet our national priorities remain military power, corporate healthcare profits and oil & coal revenues, rather than endorsing The Council for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.
CEDAW is the call for global decency, equality and humanity for all. Yet America has not signed it, because CEDAW requires each signatory to guarantee, in their Constitution, equal rights for its female citizens. Supreme Court Justices Ginsberg and Scalia insist the Constitution of the United States of America, does not. Equality and Justice for All are global challenges America has yet to achieve.
Still think we’re God’s gift to the world, the Gauntlet is at your feet.
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