Meanwhile: A Long, Provocative Read (🧐🍷)

Full day without WiFi l/access to work or a talk I was actually looking forward to. Out since about 4 AM except for about 20 minutes this morning. At least three blocks in the area were out. (Interestingly, only those with the newest, routerless tech)
But ya know what? I still had every other amenity and driveable roads, unlike millions of US citizens in Puerto Rico, where people have never recovered from Hurricane Maria, that killed 3,000. (That’s more than perished at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and almost all preventable if the US exploited even a bit less and invested in infrastructure for the local citizens as it does for an economic system that rewards only a select few.) Americans are again being forced to live without electricity or safe water following the recent hurricane Fiona.

So why weren’t all patriots up in arms about the mistreatment and lack of support for other US citizens? Why must we send aid to Kansas, Mississippi or California for their natural (also measurably preventable) recurring disasters? And why are “disaster/vulture” capitalists and neoliberal governments openly allowing these, and other areas of the USA to be destroyed while locals are impoverished, removed and replaced with wealthier gentrifiers/neocolonialists?

This is happening across the US as prices for necessities soar, wages stagnate, and greedy corporations enjoy increasingly higher profits.
Yet the death and related “news” about a colonizing monarch of a country the US fought to get away from was the only news that media and many others cared about or reported. That’s some serious cognitive dissonance and denial of your actual relationship to Power, folks. And some serious manipulations by corporate media, mimicking the fall of the Roman Empire. (Look it up/read a book without pictures. Here’s a simple intro:

“The best known is “panem et circenses” which translates to “bread and circus games”. The brutal and often very bloody fights in the arenas were basically free and so was the daily bread allotment. Since the Coliseum in Rome (known also as “Amphitheatrum Novum” or “Amphitheatrum Flavium”) had a limited number of seats the admission tickets were drawn by lot. A citizen of Rome could hope, at least once a year to win a ticket.

Another example is the Circus Maximus where chariot-races were held. These events were also free of charge to the citizens since all costs were carried by the state.” Quara

Meanwhile, our distractions aren’t even free! You pay for your own distractions and ignore the downward spiral, thinking that buying more products to arm yourselves and fortress your mortgaged houses against your neighbors is the answer. 🤦🏽‍♀️ 🤷🏽‍♀️🤦🏽‍♀️
Anyhow…thus endith the lesson. Don’t mind me…

Below are a coupla organizations that are helping. Do what it’s government hasn’t and help your neighbors out of a jam. Thanks.

Disaster Relief

https://www.prvoad.org/

https://www.diasporaxpuertorico.org/en/index.php

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/09/19/bad-bunny-el-apagon-music-video-puerto-rico-hurricane-gentrification/10426694002/

Birthday Blues

Friends, you know that I usually make a fuss over my birthday, but this has been a personally challenging time and yesterday topped it off. We’re in a nightmare where a bunch of greedy, heartless two-leggeds want to force women to have children but won’t regulate the formula companies or spend the money to feed the children women are forced to bear. They know that the majority of these under nourished, possibly unloved kids will be poor and more likely to be incarcerated, often for the same crimes that their jailer’s own children and grandchildren commit but for which they will never be punished. And the rotten cherry on top of this putrid cake is that these immoral and cruel meat suits also adjudicated that death row prisoners could no longer use exculpatory evidence to free themselves when wrongly imprisoned.
So it boils down to the willful and fully conscious control, virtual enslavement, and persecution of women, people of the global majority, and the poor.

My birthday wish is that you actively fight against this in every way that you can. Give money, take to the streets (masked, of course), write letters and put your various amazing talents to good use. Organize, Agitate, and Change the World because a better one is waiting to be born. And it must be born, “by any means necessary.” We cannot wait!

It Is Always The Day After

We need to be organized, put differences on hold, or at least not let relatively petty quarrels divide us. The scary people may hate each other, but they still vote as a block. They show up, if only to beat us. There’s no sitting this out, no “I’m not political” or “They’re all the same, why bother.” We not only have a common enemy, we have common interests, desires, and visions. They’re not identical-that’s ok. They’re enough for us to organize behind and win. Then we can hash out our differences. This is an intersectional cause: leave your ego at the door and work it out.

Dine/Apache burden basket

Is this the system of my choice? Hell no! But I’m here; X marks the spot, and I spent many years preparing for “The Revolution” while watching the disintegration of an increasingly hypocritical and corrupt system. I saw early on that most people don’t want revolution/change: they just want to be on top or better off within the familiar. They want to survive; they want to hold onto the illusion of the myth of The American Dream.

Disappointment can’t make you turn away, it requires us to use every tool available to us until “revolution” evolves.

We have to do better. These are the times that try our souls: united we stand, divided we fall hard, lose our remaining rights and become virtual, if not actual slaves to people you might mock, despise for their vulgarity and biases, but who will continue to kick your/our collective asses.

Work, work, work…

Barbuda Is Us

Please listen and then WRITE to António Guterres, UN Sec. General.

The podcast below (link at the page bottom) explains exactly how the people of Barbuda are being cheated of their land and birthrights. This is part a new colonialist assault that employs the same rule (terranullius) that was invoked to seize Indigenous Peoples’ lands and dehumanize them. (It is a pattern that is frighteningly similar to what’s being done to Puerto Rico right now.)

If unchecked, this de facto coup, on a tiny, otherwise unknown island, helps to solidify an international pattern threatening the idea of independence around the world.

Barbuda is one of the few remaining places in the world where citizens hold the land in common. Certainly the local government has been short sighted in some decisions and it is not a perfect democracy, yet the people of this island, most of whom are the descendants of enslaved Africans, have enacted enviable democratic principals that should be respected and protected.

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Category Archives: Democracy