Squawk & re-Squawk

  
    We must squawk. Now.

    I realize the dread and pity a doctor must feel when she looks at the x-ray on the light-box and the grainy gray shadows are undeniable, big, and in the wrong places.

    Our beloved <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />America is sick, friends. Very sick. If we unsqueamishly look at the x-ray of the American heart, of the American soul, we can see the shriveling heart, we can see the broken soul, the swollen pride, the emergency about-to-burst self-righteousness whose seeping toxic pus is fatally poisoning our unsweet, uncivil, unwise interactions with the rest of our planet family.

    We need radical, emergency action, citizens, beloved fellow journeyers. The radiant planet we could, we should share with glee and with mutuality of art and with ablazing heart is in peril. And we are each a voice in its healing. Denial is the sickness. That those who can still see, shrug, is the sickness. That in your secret heart, that in your dawn conversation with yourself, you are saying, “What can my one squawk matter? I would feel vulnerable, exposed, absurd. What can my one squawk matter anyway?” and you pour the comforting sugar-coated Frosted Flakes into your breakfast bowl and shrug.

    What happens when it is your own country (a false & fading label) which is the addict in tragic denial? It is time. It is time for an intervention, a cool-headed, warm-hearted intervention. No more shrugging – squawking now. Small, persistent squawks. Today, your first deliberate act of squawk. At the water cooler, at the café, the bar; at lunch; hanging out at a colleague’s cube; finally e-scribbling the 176-word letter to the editor which has been drifting through your mind.

    It is not the size of your first squawk, citizen friend, it is that it is deliberate. Move one small step outside your familiar zone, your comfort zone. Squawk to someone different. Squawk differently to someone familiar. It is the intent not the content which will change, will challenge the zeitgeist, the world pattern, the planetary psychic mosaic. Light up your little tile. It will add up. It will add up to illumination soon.

    Squawk mildly if that’s your style. Squawk raucously if you prefer. What is eloquent is your intent. If you are saying, “By golly, I’m squawking!” to yourself, you got it.

    Back when, an astronaut was asked, “Tell us about looking back at the planet Earth from space!” The astronaut  paused and spoke, a calm and radical squawk (astronauts are calm), the most radical observation of the 20^th century, the most radical observation in the history of the planet, “When I looked back at our home, when I looked back at planet Earth – what struck me when I looked back at Earth is that there aren’t any lines on it.”

      No sentence turned my inner kaleidoscope, no sentence changed my own life more. “There aren’t any lines on it.” Of course! First there had been the stunning, heartbreaking photograph of the whole wondrous fragile planet suspended in immense space, the shocking heart-stopping gasp of the moment when many of us broke out of the cocoon and became planetary. It was the most important single photograph ever taken.

   But ‘there aren’t any lines on it’ is vertiginously radical. Families, tribes, nations, creeds – we have so internalized the arbitrary lines, the imaginary borders outside of which or inside of which you can arbitrarily be placed — that we have actually instead of, say, taking care of each other, (e.g. planetary health care), taken our common treasure, our brow-sweat common wealth and built teeming and crescendoing weapon systems to mutilate each other. Instead of training soldiers of healing armed with syringes of polio vaccine, mosquito nets, and M-32 shovels to dig wells for clean water, instead we spend millions upon millions (one billion equals a thousand million) training energetic and idealistic young men to be soldiers of death-and-mutilation dealing. And those who would squawk out allow themselves to be cowed by those afflicted by virulent patriotism, a disease of curable blindness, of curable deafness.

   The strident and belligerent theo-fascism of church, state, and corporations is in its last ugly throes. The chest-thumping patriarchal, hierarchical, to-win-there-must-be-a-loser, exploitative, model’s days are numbered. Most of our planet-sharing fellows have already got it, grokked it, or are on the cusp of that eureka. ‘Where is America?’ they look back concernedly and ask. America who dared the first ablazing step to be born into the pearlescent dawn of the first democracy, that giddy glimpse of  justice and equality. Where is America now as we dare the step into the dawn of the 2^nd democracy that includes all citizens of the planet?

    Earth is the mother of each of us, Earth is the mother of our mothers – we are all one family. The invisible lines we so trumpeted, for which we despised, for which we killed – oh ye gods, there is blood on our hands, there is blood on all our hands, pilgrim – the invisible lines drawn on parchment, on paper, in blood do not appear running through the forests, over the deserts in photographs. The one planet, the same planet, the great ship, Home, bears us all, snug, in the vast galactic sea. Home, the planet is home to us all.

   Do squawk and re-squawk. For the sake of  your, of our darling Home. A squawk a day. America can be healed, and can contribute humbly and mightily to the care of Home. After the first gawky squawk, it gets easier.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

xxxxxx

07.08.05

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send our link to your friends

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

8:30:53 am  11 Serpent  tzol 245 tues o5.17.o5

pogblog@yahoo.com

for jamie fuller

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />=====

June 20, 2005

Dear Mr. Matthews,

  Every time I  tuned in to what I am now compelled to call HardBias after Mr.Bush's tepid (quaaludy, I thought) speech about the “Vietnamization” of Iraq, I went from distressed to appalled to see these photogenic young blonde women waxing adorable about how happy and proud their brave husbands were to be helping the Iraqi people.

   This is journalism? Had this episode of SoftBall been scripted by Karlsputin Rove and paid for by what used to be called CREEP in the old days, I would not have been surprised. That it was hosted by the edgy writer of the real and original book HardBall, that it was presented as journalism — talk about shilling, 'product placement' and selling out — I am still agog.

     John Kennedy was shot on my 19th birthday — there is no amount of money or access they could pay me to make me take a dive like that 'town meeting.'

    I have a Gold-Star-parent friend who knows what side the bullet hit her only son's head before it exploded into a bloody confetti of brains because they sent her his twisted glasses back — she could and would have told you a less cottoncandy story.

    You must remember the exact same words for the hideously failed 'Vietnamization' quagmire policy? “Stand up Iraqis and we can stand down Americans.” Deja entendu — I already heard this turkey — if it gobbles like a turkey, it's probably a turkey. Iraqisization. Hello. Remember? I heard not one single commentator utter the term “Vietnamization — Huge Stupid Failure.” 

     I know you're under intense corporate pressure, but I never dreamed you would capitulate this profoundly. I remember you when you were spunky, were cool, were a vertebrate.

In sorrow,

pogblog

pogblog@yahoo.com

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

ps. I'd share my full name etc under a Blog Throat arrangement, but the stuff I'm writing on pogblog is less polite and formal than this — flaying comes to mind — and I want to live another day to scorch the 12ftTall Lizards Disguised as Human Beings who purport to Lead us.

=========

email your own letter to hardball@msnbc.com <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

    Simple Iraq Exit Strategy

   There is a very Simple Exit Strategy for Raq. Each of the 535 members of Congress will designate one son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter or nephew or niece to be deployed asap to the theater of war in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Iraq.

     Also Mr. Bush’s Choice — either Jen or Barbara. Also a child from Mr. Rove; Mr. Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Ms. Rice, et al in the hierarchy of True Believers who shed no sweat, least of all blood.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

I predict that an Exit Strategy will be whipped up in a month.

     I remember when Michael Fay, my first husband, died. Not in war. But at 29 years old. I can still hear my scream when I got the phone call. A scream that should have shattered Heaven but which he could never hear.

Is it really worth all these kids, George? Send yours then.

I predict that an Exit Strategy would be whipped up in a month.   

====== 

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

06.29.05  01:17:47a.pdt.us 2 Rabbit . Lamat  tzol 28  tueswed

ff 1294

We want your Comments on pogblog.

 Don't know how to Comment? Other questions?

Enter pogblog CONTESTS:

Contact pogblog@yahoo.com

guest post on pogblog:   

   The previously self-evident American precious-idea that All citizens are created Equal took a distressing hit in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Palo Alto CA on Saturday night, June 25, 2005. As a person who has protested for peace and for economic justice for 40 years – since John Kennedy was assassinated on my 19^th birthday I suppose — I was desolate at the sudden slide towards totalityranny that I experienced in those Palo Alto streets where once liberty shone.

    As a chubby ex-English teacher carrying a Teach Peace sign, I think I am not an inherently threatening figure. Around the edges of a full-time job, I have carried that now very-dog-eared sign around the Peninsula daily for nearly 1000 days since October 2002.  There have been several adventures in free speech and the right to the public-square-equivalent protected in 1980’s Pruneyard (our own backyard in Campbell) Supreme Court decision.

    But the police presence in downtown Palo Alto had to be experienced to be believed. I know and deplore that there was some minor mayhem in a May rally, but the law enforcement community who have always difficult and often dangerous jobs have changed materially from my experience over all these years. I was not treated as an equal citizen whose reasonable exercise of first amendment rights should be actively protected by law enforcement in America – even hated speech must be honored actively in fact.

     It was clear that the officers were intensely edgy and fearful with no provocation. I was shouted at repeatedly not as a fellow citizen, but with derision, “Go home and smoke some more dope” (by a senior officer). I whose tag line to my students for a lifetime has been “My drug of choice is air.” There was no respect or presumption that I was a profoundly patriotic American citizen endowed with inalienable rights. I was treated as if I were possibly criminal and certainly stupid. That instead of being proud to be serving the public with benign strength in a country where the light in the torch of the Statue of Liberty itself is the light of free speech, many of the police were clearly contemptuous of the assembled citizens. I was personally battered by scorn.

    If free speech, that endangered species, were not at stake, it might have been all-but-comically sursurreal (sic) to see hundreds of police persons in a riot gear that paled the overwrought imaginations of Vader’s Storm Troopers themselves to keep a few hundreds of folk in order. But the full black head-to-toe exoskeleton riot gear with three-foot long truncheons, huge black guns, and no names only numbers was chilling. The infamous black helicopter circled ominously and endlessly overhead saying, “By the order of [a long list of Law Agencies], this had been declared an unlawful assembly. Disperse or you will be subject to arrest.”

    I heard one well-appointed man shout to a middle-aged protester, “Get a life,” as if free speech were for bums, not the highest expression of responsible, heart-wrenchingly concerned citizenship. This prosperous citizen went from froth to slaver, spewing invective with spit, at which point a perspicacious bystander, one of the putative ne’er-do-wells, said mildly, “Sir, sir, please take your meds.” Later, one well-groomed older women said haughtily, “Why are these [unwashed] people wasting our time? This is a terrible waste of police resources.” A gentle protester said back, “Protecting free speech seems a bargain, ma’am. One might better complain that we’re spending $14,000 a minute 24/7/365 on a fantasy Missile Defense system which I could sell to the same people who want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.”

    The whole event on behalf of the police felt like an overdose of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, but treating your fellow citizens, whom I presume the police are sworn to guard, as if they are enemies and low-life agitators is a sad business in America. It was not just the lack of respect for the event and its participants who were slightly rowdy at worst, but the hostile presumption of some kind of inchoate guilt that misses the point of the first amendment which must not be abridged by scorn or intimidation. 

=====

guest post .. Teach Throat

copyright assumed by http://pogblog.myblogsite.com 2005

all rights reserved

06-26-05 

===

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/pogblog” rel=”tag”>http://pogblog.myblogsite.com</a>