Month: October 2014
Acts of Terror: Domestic Violence – Stranger Danger – Governor Redirection
In a northwest high school cafeteria on the morning of Friday October 24th, five Marysville-Pilchuck students were shot by a fourteen year old. All involved were friends, two even cousins of the assailant. Because one had a gun, one girl lay dead, before the homecoming prince shot himself.
However, I’m not writing to repeat the obvious regarding an NRA Congress, or the Open Carry distortion of the Second Amendment, nor to dwell on the convenient excuse for gun violence: mental health. I’m writing because, none of that seems to matter anymore.
Truth is, if the early 2012 Christmas present from handgun lovers like Wayne LaPierre — 26 people (23 of them elementary school children) gunned down in Sandy Hook Elementary — didn’t recalibrate public handgun discipleship, then two dead girls in Marysville-Pilchuck High School, won’t raise a rational eyebrow in a Tombstone oriented Congress, nor enlighten change resistant political conservatives, or remove the bulls-eye mentality in the marriage between violence and political corruption – unless of course, November voters fire with ballots as accurately as we’re fired upon with bullets.
For weeks, as radio news producer/anchor, I have been reporting on the tenacity of Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo and Federal, State, County and City police agencies and volunteers, searching for a missing second year University of Virginia student.
Friday, while editing upcoming human rights BTR interview, my iPod confirmed: human remains found in Albemarle County Virginia Saturday October 18th, were those of Hannah Graham.
In a September 2005 attempted murder, a twenty-six year old Fairfax County woman was raped; In 2009 Morgan Harrington was twenty; at seventeen, it was Alexis Murphy in 2013; Twenty-four year old Yeardley Love was murdered in 2010, by boyfriend. Hannah Graham was 18.
Could it be, like our enemies and frenemies, we hold female life less dear?
All violence: ISIS Syrian be-headings, Guantanamo water-boarding, shootings in schools and inner-city streets hands held high, elevator/home beatings; being killed in the line-of-duty by sharpshooting survivalist or radicalized Americans — women, minorities, children and elderly are its primary targets.
It’s shameful enough when
- NRA’s President James W. Potter II leads Congress by the nose at the cost of American life
- a politicized Supreme Court inundates our electoral system with Corporatism’s financial underbelly while gutting minority voters
- On election days, we repeatedly ignore devaluation of the more than 50% of American citizens without a penis and refuse to raise minimum salaries to a livable wage
- TAKATA’s response to mothers driving their children in cars with shrapnel shooting airbags is to disconnect passenger side airbag and relegate family to the back seat
- Creators of The Great Recession of 2008 have not been prosecuted
But when in 2014, not one Republican member of Congress has agreed to vote for bills currently before them to make American females constitutionally equal to American males, then how can any patriotic American consider putting Mitch McConnell in charge of the U. S. Senate?
When New York & New Jersey governor scandals are camouflaged with inciting further Ebola panic through intimidation of volunteer medical professionals, and we fall for it, we belly-up as welcome mat on which the old white men of Wall Street and Capitol Hill wipe their feet.
American women, minorities and immigrants matter and contribute to America’s success, prosperity, brain trust and recovery, and yet they’re relegated to second class citizen status.
Could it be, the Liberty Bell ringing game changer America seeks, is the legacy of 1923 and 1972? Shall we elect those who truly value the lives of all Americans enough to preserve, protect and defend them against all forms of violence?
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Voter ID — MIA Surgeon General – Ebola Panic
Ebola is not worthy of our national panic button, however NRA dominated Congressional Conservatives blocking the nomination of Dr. Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General is grounds for alarm over low voter turnout in 2014.
In America, Ebola has killed one man and wounded two nurses, but if we must panic: Alzheimer’s, brain robbing millions, is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
Police shoot and kill more minorities than Ebola, as do drunk drivers, texting teens, domestic violence and airline crashes.
But IF panic is our new American pastime, on November 4, vote for leaders who deactivate hyperlink between high school dropouts and privatized prisons; vote knowing it was the board of a for profit private hospital that voted No Admittance for Thomas Duncan in Rick Perry’s Texas. See Ebola Facts Cancel Panic.
If we must panic, choose more rational targets, like the Oxidation of our brains by the greed of Pharmaceutical pill-pushing companies, that bombard reason with so much overstated and questionable advertising, we are Ebola distracted from what is really killing us:
- Sugar & diabetes
- A K Street ALEC judiciously handicapping the elderly, university students, minorities and our electoral system with Voter ID laws
- Obesity & malnutrition
- Failing to honor the physically and mentally wounded veteran with affordable healthcare, as much as we memorialize war dead with monuments
- Filibuster, Congressional Gridlock, Government shutdown, and a 5-4 politicized Supreme Court
- Sequestration gauging NIH budget to find cures for disease
- Ignorance of the facts and being too lazy to research for the truth
- All forms of discrimination, prejudice bias against those who look, think, preach, act or marry differently than we
- Food corporations with advertising so bottom line oriented, we are addicted to the very things that kill everything, but our panic
Arguably, the above is Corporatism’s defining moment, and we define ourselves by how we allow Corporate America to transform our eating, drinking and election habits.
Thus, we get the government we
- Fail to vote for, by leaving the choices to those who do
- Are too issue misinformed about to cast justice for all ballots
- Settle for because metaphoric flag waving and repeating, Americans this slogans and Family Values that clichés, are easier than committing daily acts of random Constitutional Spirit toward one another
Voting, like driving, loving, hating and panicking are choices and privileges, not rights. Rights are what’s guaranteed us in our U. S. Constitution.
Unless We the People allow through inaction, ignorance of history’s revisionists, dangers of redistricting, or just blissfully succumbing to the redirection of misinformation, settle for being subjugated by the repetitious reelection of supremacist oriented Conservatives (addicted to corporate money & political power), then on November 4, 2014, we will honor those hungry, underpaid and often shoeless originals who fought against tyranny and for justice for all Americans, even before there was an America – by both voting and helping others, especially the elderly and college aged, to vote.
Then, truly we will be The Home of the Brave and not the panicked.
Let’s strike a ballot blow for rational thought against media hype, and defeat both political and Wall Street/Madison Ave corporate commercials that both brainwash and brain damage, before we’re brain dead.
With each vote, we can denounce the revolting revolving door from Congress to Corporatism’s rewards. Let’s not diminish ourselves with the irrelevance of Right Direction poll questions.
Instead let’s renounce panic, let go of hype and vote ourselves, forward into fixing fixed voting machines, attending to our neglected infrastructure, sharing both affordable healthcare and voting privileges with truth and justice for all.
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