Posts Tagged ‘slavery’

I am an alcoholic.

I got sober almost 20 years ago. Before that, I abused alcohol, drugs, sex and money in order to ignore the damage I had done to my life, deluding myself . I crawled through life in a cycle of being drunk or not yet drunk, making more mistakes that would need more drinking to erase. I am nobody special. Absolutely nobody. Everyone on this planet has problems and I have mine. I chose to deal with them by ‘feeling better’, one glass at a time. All day. Each and every day…week…month and year – until I turned to someone for help.

She helped me by asking me two questions.

 

(Image courtesy of thinkvegan.net)

Sexism is the ‘gateway ‘ism”, that makes all other ‘isms’ possible.  It precedes all other forms of discrimination, setting the example that there are some people that view others as inferior and they use brutality upon them.  What I mean by that is that because our family and society models are built around the model of inequality, injustice and brutality – we accept that behavior as normal.  So, too is racism, classism, speciesism and any other oppression by one group toward another.  The behaviors of sexism are the behaviors of bullying, injustice, intolerance and cruelty.

(Image courtesy of indiesocial.com)

I walked onto the train platform in downtown Chicago today.  A woman had just finished shopping at Macy’s and had several red shopping bags.  She was trying to put everything into one bag.  The wind picked up and blew some of the empty bags down the platform.  I took off running and stopped them from blowing out onto the street. 

Then, she yells to me that: "It’s OK!  They’re empty."  Then she sits down and waits for the train with her two bags full of stuff.  The 5 empty big red bags are just out there on the platform and she makes no effort to pick them up.  I told her that I didn’t want litter for a Christmas present, picked them all up and threw them in the trash (no recycling on CTA platforms…dammit!).

 

Image courtesy of cesr.org

This post begins a series to recognize people that speak about the world in terms of what they observe and what they can prove.  Their voices stand out in the crowd.  In their words, they speak not of fantasy, delusion and rationalization.  Instead, they utilize the gifts of human cognition, awareness to observe what is here in the world around us.  They are not dogmatic, but analytic and take in the world ‘warts & all’ for what it is and what it is not.  They do not separate humankind from nature in any form of grandeur.  In short, they look at things the way they really are and not what we would have them be.

“The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession,” and its days are numbered.” (H. G. Wells, as quoted in the Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers.)

The enemies of democracy are the enemies of the rule of law.

“enemies both foreign & domestic…”

Our Presidents and our armed forces swear to protect the Constitution from this threat – with good reason. The Constitution is the rule of law and it is the one thing that can prevent tyrants, thieves and murderers from the ruinous world of their unchecked greed and brutality.

Big Oil, Defense Contractors, Wall St. Speculators and Lobbyists.

They should be afraid because they will no longer have ‘one of their own’ in the White House. Barack Obama is not one of them. He is not the grandchild or child of one. He didn’t take their money to fund his campaign or his career in the US Senate. Although he may have met their children in Harvard, but he did not go to work for them.

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I almost pity poor John McCain. Almost. How did he end up with this ‘crap job’? It has fallen upon him to fight the last battle of slaveholders and plantation owners. I expect this bile from Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney and any of the rest that fall into the ‘angry white patriarch’ model that is interchangeable with KKK grand wizard or plantation owner.

The thinly veiled race baiting of the GOP that has been in force since Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’ is no longer thinly veiled at all. For a generation, the GOP was able to reliably manipulate themselves into power by scaring white voters about the danger to them from ‘the other’. They have expanded the cast of dangerous people to include gays, Latinos, (always) women and Muslims.