We Must Pursue the Best of and In US

From the speech JFK was to give, had he not been assassinated:

"There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternative, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility.

Those voices are inevitable. But today other voices are heard in the land. - voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality...most especially from the right and Republican. Voices of quantitative, not qualitative considerations, with little or no regard to that of quality, or compassion.

Impassioned with numbers, not Humans.

We can no longer expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will, "talk sense to the American people."

But we can hope that fewer people will "listen to nonsense."

Breaking that down as we can clearly see today, Kennedy's entire first paragraph refers to and defines today's Republican party.

JFK's second paragraph refers to the extremes the GOP follows like ravenous puppies in they striving for never-ending power and wealth. While people die, while the earth dies around us.

JFK's final words define those of us who take the time to find what is real against the unrealities so very perpetrated ad nauseam by the right, by the greedy and by our few but singular and elite enemies within Russia and elsewhere.

One sets precedents to build upon, not to revisit out of vainglory and bigotries, our foolish and removed beliefs of inculcated ignorance we now see fanned into flame merely for the purpose of power and corruption.

Women have rights, minorities have rights, Reality has rights, over the many and varied disingenuous right-wing evangelicalizations.

Those are our Rights, our Human rights, our American rights.

And yet the rightwing conservative thinking, especially the religious-sects wish to tear down our advances from ignorance and self-indulgence.

Yes, we should be forcing decency upon this country, no matter your orientation or party. Not religious decency. But human decency. Yes, we should be supplying healthcare for everyone, and any argument that it cannot be done, be damned. We can do anything we put our minds and hearts to!

Though we might have to stop giving entitlements to the rich, to corporations who don't need it, to the military, to the petroleum agenda, to war hawks who keep us in never-ending vastly expensive wars merely so they can claim we cannot support our citizens, our infrastructures, rather just those citizens who have been impoverished and deluded into traveling the world murdering for us.

Yes, of course, we need a strong military. A wisely smart military. Not the one imagined by unwise politicians.

Rather than us doing the hard work and using politics and economic forces to aide the world, so we do not HAVE to have neverending wars that enrich the wealthy and powerful in a neverending cycle of draining our resources while enriching the wealthy.

We do not need to support the worst citizens of this world in such as Donald John Trump, or Mitch McConnell, or Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, or Pres. Xi in China or the ridiculously conservative and rich, right wingnuts to the point that they are racist in actions, if not outright white supremacists in the likes of Marie La Penn in France, Putin in Russia, or Trump in America.

We should be building UPON these things, not trying to tear them down. Otherwise, it is like graduating grade school, then fighting tooth and nail to get back in that elementary school door again.

Brown v. Board of Education, established that racial segregation is unconstitutional.

Roe vs Wade, ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restrictions such as the GOP are pursuing today all across America. And under the guise of religious reasonings. Which should have no place in an American government that is based on a secular model exactly so that free citizens could worship in their own ways, or not at all.

That latter part is far too frequently pounded upon and ignored by those who are entitled, or in power. Religious have for far too long been used to abuse, to wrest power from the ignorant and the kind. Or kind minded.

The trial, of John Thomas Scopes, commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.

These have been laid to rest. They are settled. Let us move on, and forward, not downward and backward!

For Trump supporters, IF you do not see Trump doing anything you do not like, outside of his personality or demeanor, in the areas of policy or actions, that is your FIRST sign that you are deep in not the conservative or Republican mindset, but the Trump echo chamber where you have lost your way.

Even during Obama, I liked just about all he was doing. And one did have to give him mass respect for putting up with all the Republican uselessness, abuse and racism he was up against.

You typically can't listen to the vocal extremists and haters but you can listen to those even-tempered and rational opponents. In hearing some of their comments, I took a look at some of Obama's actions and I did find them lacking, seriously so in some cases.

Still, MOST of the manufactured Republican noise against Obama was utter bullshit.

As it was with Hillary.

But some issues under Obama I did find concerning. Such as how whistleblowers were handed, how national security issues were being handled, how Putin was (NOT) handled. These were serious issues. Issues I know had much to do with Obama getting poor advice and of his own ignorance. but also of his trying to be functional at all under an onslaught of Republican abuse and obstruction.

What is so interesting there is most of the noise from the right against Obama was indeed utter nonsense.

But even as much as I respect Obama, he wasn't perfect. No one is. But sadly, that offers no excuse whatsoever to Donald John Trump.

if you think Trump is perfect, then you are outright defective in facts and reality and quite lost in the Trump "echo chamber" of utter and sincere bullshit.

Trump himself, is bullshit.

That hasn't been a secret at all, all through his years in New York. Everyone at his level knew it. And many far below him.

The Trump GOP is now bullshit. The establishment Democratic party is now far too much bullshit.

We do indeed need a change. Bernie Sanders appears to BE that change. Like it or not, that may be where we are headed. And if that's the case, ew somehow have to make it work.

As for Bernie as POTUS? I'd far prefer someone with decency and a concern for others, rather then just some dumb schmuck like Trump with little or no management experience other than to have his ego sucked whenever he wishes it.

Tar too many are all too ready to fall in his wake to perform. And to have free range to act the bully and never be called out for it or feel the actual responsibility of things like managing people, dealing appropriately with women, or actually making money.

Let's Change! But let's try something new. A change for the better!

Let's make it work!

Let's do the hard work. There are no easy answers and Republicans love those. Push-button fixes that fix nothing but kick money upstairs. Shallow explanations that fail with time. Shallow people who fail with time and then are promoted upward or outward. Or escape after damages with a |Golden Parachute.

Let's purge America of the despicable, the underhanded, the criminal in our government who have through the Trump Republican Party overtaken and begun to dissolve and destroy our government administration, overtake our judicial system and implode our Executive branch as well as our Legislative. 

We need to put this country back on course, back on a better path, back on a path to the future and not the past, not our worst selves, but our better selves.

Back on Our Path. Back on the Path the Founding Fathers hoped for and worked hard to produce.

Really all we have to do it keep people from destroying it and it should run like a well-oiled machine. If only we could stop people from trying to subvert it for their own selfish interests and desires.

We can do this. We just need to do the hard work.

I Am Not Anti ANY Americans, However....

I say this every so often and now in the face of apparently partisan and ill mental health bombings and mass shootings, it really seems a good time to repeat it.

Conservative or Republican, I am not against any Americans (or those of other nations and where I am it's usually their government, not citizens).

I have only recently voted Democrat because of #Republican illiberal abuse of our elections and government... bordering on if not at times surpassing being criminal. Their actions have damaged America, unbalanced us and today you see the results.

Usually, I've been as independent as I can be, not wishing either to align with independents for various reasons. My family whom I grew up with was Democrat and Union.

What I am against is conservatism as currently practiced in America. It's not historical conservatism at all. It's a bastardized form, frequently disgusting to well-educated people who haven't been educated in a modern American conservative bubble.

Regardless of how you perceive conservatism, especially if you consider yourself one, it IS what is practiced and how it is applied in Congress and SCOTUS. What we see, it supports old style, anachronistic beliefs.

Today the 45th President Donald Trump came out to say we need to use the death penalty on people like the Pittsburgh Synogague shooter. We do not need the State murdering citizens. Issues on abortion, prisons, the economy and trickle down economics as defective agendas...are failed, incorrect and downright wrong. Conservatives continue to take the wrong direction time and again.

I AM against people who are abusive to others. Speak, don't hit. Vote, don't kill. Get involved in politics if you're that passionate. We need you. On both sides, because that's where balance is.

Love the sinner not the sin, essentially in my post-Catholic upbringing, pro-Buddha Dharma mentality. No, I don't even follow common Buddhism, but an originalist form as I have discovered it.

Conservatism is a retrograde form of political thought.

You always have to move forward in a changing world. To maintain a (frequently defective or broken) status quo is counterproductive. Conservatism is not a form to be adhered to as a primary principle. As a governing factor of a political principle (conservative Republican, Conservative Democrat), sure. But to claim to be "conservative" is to cut oneself off at the knees to be able to see clearly what is really needed. Add partisanship and here we are.

Same in a way for a progressive or liberal. But not as much a serious concern as the conservative form by a long shot, as it can lead to thinking as we see now. Isolationism. Or abuse of others we have no right to abuse. Or kill. it is too akin to the religion it spawned from it. both being severely problematic in government and diverse social concerns. The Christian evangelical movement has also been culpable in all this. Evangelicalism itself has been acquired by politicians to subvert and pollute our government.

Prime example is the defectiveness inherent within it...it leads to a Domad #Trump (I should say, Donald $Trump, but that doesn't carry as far, albeit it's far more accurate).

So... we are all Americans who are American. We NEED to disagree, then to moderate, to compromise. Republicans want only their point of view because apparently, God is on their side. That is backed up by their actions in Gerrymandering, in abusing our electoral system, in voter suppression, in too many underhanded undemocratic actions.

One can (easily) see just how ridiculous that all is. If we just look.

We Are What Makes America Great

We need to get along in order to be the Great America we are known to be.

We need to be intelligent, as best we can be; educated, as best we can be; humane as best we can be.

We need to be Human beings FIRST and foremost.
We need to be Americans SECOND and proudly with reason to be proud.
We need to be political or partisan THIRD and as Americans.

And finally and some might say most importantly, we need to be atheists, theists, or ideologues... FOURTH.

Because it needs to be fourth.

It needs to be fourth because we live in an amazing country that is multicultural, not only white. Because we do take in the "tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free." And that is what makes us great, not isolationism, not fear, not revenge, not anger.

That does not mean you cannot put your God first.

It does mean however that if you will find yourself in conflict between your God and OUR America, then you cannot take a public office that will put you into that conflict if it will affect others in their not being able to have their God first. It is what protects us all from abuse in such a country as ours.

You should praise that, because it protects your rights to your beliefs, and everyone elses and just how amazing is that?

We are multi theistic and atheistic, not only Christian.
We are equally male and female and all other genders involved, not only as defined by theism.

If you want your religion then practice it as you see fit. But allow others to practice their own beliefs too as they see fit, and give them the room for themselves so that you too may have the room you need.

Because THAT, is what America is founded upon and THAT is what makes us Great.

What is it (should it be) to be an American?

Thanks to The History Place web site for this.

I've heard some people asking this week, just who are we as Americans now? Who do we think we are? Right wing extremism, extreme fundemental, evangelical Christianity and Republicans confused in the implosion of their party as well as our having now to deal with a different kind of enemy in religious if not Islamic terrorism and the rise of groups as an enemy over that of nation states, has diluted what it is to be an American. 

In this speech just replace Britain for France. Or simply wait, as I'm sure there will be attacks forthcoming again on the UK, sadly. Transpose the elements of WWII for today's struggles and today's events and players. But the core should sound familiar. And if it doesn't, you need to question your orientation today.

From Harold Ickes - May 18, 1941

This remarkable speech was delivered during an I am an American Day gathering in New York's Central Park by Harold Ickes, President Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior. It came at a perilous moment in history, May of 1941, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seemed headed toward possible world domination.

By this time, countries that had fallen to the Nazis included Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and areas in North Africa. Airfields and cities in England were now under ferocious air attack from the German Luftwaffe while wolf-packs of Nazi U-boats attempted to blockade the British Isles.

Many Americans, however, still questioned the wisdom and necessity of direct U.S. involvement in the European war. Pacifist sentiment was steadily growing, while at the same time Fascism was sometimes referred to as the "wave of the future" by respected Americans, buoyed in part by the ceaseless barrage of highly effective anti-democratic propaganda emanating from the Fascist countries of Europe including Germany.

In this speech, Harold Ickes counters that propaganda, defines what it means to be a free American, and offers a blunt assessment of the perilous future the United States would face standing alone against a victorious Hitler.

Here it is:

I want to ask a few simple questions. And then I shall answer them.

What has happened to our vaunted idealism? Why have some of us been behaving like scared chickens? Where is the million-throated, democratic voice of America?

For years it has been dinned into us that we are a weak nation; that we are an inefficient people; that we are simple-minded. For years we have been told that we are beaten, decayed, and that no part of the world belongs to us any longer.

Some amongst us have fallen for this carefully pickled tripe. Some amongst us have fallen for this calculated poison. Some amongst us have begun to preach that the "wave of the future" has passed over us and left us a wet, dead fish.

They shout--from public platforms in printed pages, through the microphones--that it is futile to oppose the "wave of the future." They cry that we Americans, we free Americans nourished on Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, hold moth-eaten ideas. They exclaim that there is no room for free men in the world any more and that only the slaves will inherit the earth. America--the America of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and Walt Whitman--they say, is waiting for the undertaker and all the hopes and aspirations that have gone into the making of America are dead too.

However, my fellow citizens, this is not the real point of the story. The real point--the shameful point--is that many of us are listening to them and some of us almost believe them.

I say that it is time for the great American people to raise its voice and cry out in mighty triumph what it is to be an American. And why it is that only Americans, with the aid of our brave allies--yes, let's call them "allies"--the British, can and will build the only future worth having. I mean a future, not of concentration camps, not of physical torture and mental straitjackets, not of sawdust bread or of sawdust Caesars--I mean a future when free men will live free lives in dignity and in security.

This tide of the future, the democratic future, is ours. It is ours if we show ourselves worthy of our culture and of our heritage.

But make no mistake about it; the tide of the democratic future is not like the ocean tide--regular, relentless, and inevitable. Nothing in human affairs is mechanical or inevitable. Nor are Americans mechanical. They are very human indeed.

What constitutes an American? Not color nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbor. An American is one who will sacrifice property, ease and security in order that he and his children may retain the rights of free men. An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

Americans have always known how to fight for their rights and their way of life. Americans are not afraid to fight. They fight joyously in a just cause.

We Americans know that freedom, like peace, is indivisible. We cannot retain our liberty if three-fourths of the world is enslaved. Brutality, injustice and slavery, if practiced as dictators would have them, universally and systematically, in the long run would destroy us as surely as a fire raging in our nearby neighbor's house would burn ours if we didn't help to put out his.

If we are to retain our own freedom, we must do everything within our power to aid Britain. 

We must also do everything to restore to the conquered peoples their freedom. This means the Germans too.

Such a program, if you stop to think, is selfishness on our part. It is the sort of enlightened selfishness that makes the wheels of history go around. It is the sort of enlightened selfishness that wins victories.

Do you know why? Because we cannot live in the world alone, without friends and without allies. If Britain should be defeated, then the totalitarian undertaker will prepare to hang crepe on the door of our own independence.

Perhaps you wonder how this could come about? Perhaps you have heard "them"--the wavers of the future--cry, with calculated malice, that even if Britain were defeated we could live alone and defend ourselves single handed, even against the whole world.

I tell you that this is a cold blooded lie.

We would be alone in the world, facing an unscrupulous military-economic bloc that would dominate all of Europe, all of Africa, most of Asia, and perhaps even Russia and South America. Even to do that, we would have to spend most of our national income on tanks and guns and planes and ships. Nor would this be all. We would have to live perpetually as an armed camp, maintaining a huge standing army, a gigantic air force, two vast navies. And we could not do this without endangering our freedom, our democracy, our way of life.

Perhaps such is the America "they"--the wavers of the future--foresee. Perhaps such is the America that a certain aviator, with his contempt for democracy, would prefer. Perhaps such is the America that a certain Senator desires. Perhaps such is the America that a certain mail order executive longs for.

But a perpetually militarized, isolated and impoverished America is not the America that our fathers came here to build.

It is not the America that has been the dream and the hope of countless generations in all parts of the world.

It is not the America that one hundred and thirty million of us would care to live in.

The continued security of our country demands that we aid the enslaved millions of Europe--yes, even of Germany--to win back their liberty and independence. I am convinced that if we do not embark upon such a program we will lose our own freedom.

We should be clear on this point. What is convulsing the world today is not merely another old-fashioned war. It is a counter revolution against our ideas and ideals, against our sense of justice and our human values.

Three systems today compete for world domination. Communism, fascism, and democracy are struggling for social-economic-political world control. As the conflict sharpens, it becomes clear that the other two, fascism and communism, are merging into one. They have one common enemy, democracy. They have one common goal, the destruction of democracy.

This is why this war is not an ordinary war. It is not a conflict for markets or territories. It is a desperate struggle for the possession of the souls of men.

This is why the British are not fighting for themselves alone. They are fighting to preserve freedom for mankind. For the moment, the battleground is the British Isles. But they are fighting our war; they are the first soldiers in trenches that are also our front-line trenches.

In this world war of ideas and of loyalties we believers in democracy must do two things. We must unite our forces to form one great democratic international. We must offer a clear program to freedom-loving peoples throughout the world.

Freedom-loving men and women in every land must organize and tighten their ranks. The masses everywhere must be helped to fight their oppressors and conquerors.

We, free, democratic Americans are in a position to help. We know that the spirit of freedom never dies. We know that men have fought and bled for freedom since time immemorial. We realize that the liberty-loving German people are only temporarily enslaved. We do not doubt that the Italian people are looking forward to the appearance of another Garibaldi. We know how the Poles have for centuries maintained a heroic resistance against tyranny. We remember the brave struggle of the Hungarians under Kossuth and other leaders. We recall the heroic figure of Masaryk and the gallant fight for freedom of the Czech people. The story of the Yugoslavs', especially the Serbs' blows for liberty and independence is a saga of extraordinary heroism. The Greeks will stand again at Thermopylae, as they have in the past. The annals of our American sister-republics, too, are glorious with freedom-inspiring exploits. The noble figure of Simon Bolivar, the great South American liberator, has naturally been compared with that of George Washington.

No, liberty never dies. The Genghis Khans come and go. The Attilas come and go. The Hitlers flash and sputter out. But freedom endures.

Destroy a whole generation of those who have known how to walk with heads erect in God's free air, and the next generation will rise against the oppressors and restore freedom. Today in Europe, the Nazi Attila may gloat that he has destroyed democracy. He is wrong. In small farmhouses all over Central Europe, in the shops of Germany and Italy, on the docks of Holland and Belgium, freedom still lives in the hearts of men. It will endure like a hardy tree gone into the wintertime, awaiting the spring.

And, like spring, spreading from the South into Scandinavia, the democratic revolution will come. And men with democratic hearts will experience comradeship across artificial boundaries.

These men and women, hundreds of millions of them, now in bondage or threatened with slavery, are our comrades and our allies. They are only waiting for our leadership and our encouragement, for the spark that we can supply.

These hundreds of millions, of liberty-loving people, now oppressed, constitute the greatest sixth column in history. They have the will to destroy the Nazi gangsters.

We have always helped in struggles for human freedom. And we will help again. But our hundreds of millions of liberty-loving allies would despair if we did not provide aid and encouragement. The quicker we help them the sooner this dreadful revolution will be over. We cannot, we must not, we dare not delay much longer.

The fight for Britain is in its crucial stages. We must give the British everything we have. And by everything, I mean everything needed to beat the life out of our common enemy.

The second step must be to aid and encourage our friends and allies everywhere. And by everywhere I mean Europe and Asia and Africa and America.

And finally, the most important of all, we Americans must gird spiritually for the battle. We must dispel the fog of uncertainty and vacillation. We must greet with raucous laughter the corroding arguments of our appeasers and fascists. They doubt democracy. We affirm it triumphantly so that all the world may hear:

Here in America we have something so worth living for that it is worth dying for! The so-called "wave of the future" is but the slimy backwash of the past. We have not heaved from our necks the tyrant's crushing heel, only to stretch our necks out again for its weight. Not only will we fight for democracy, we will make it more worth fighting for. Under our free institutions, we will work for the good of mankind, including Hitler's victims in Germany, so that all may have plenty and security.

We American democrats know that when good will prevails among men there will be a world of plenty and a world of security.

In the words of Winston Churchill, "Are we downhearted," No, we arc not! But someone is downhearted! Witness the terrified flight of Hess, Hitler's Number Three Man. And listen to this--listen carefully:

"The British nation can be counted upon to carry through to victory any struggle that it once enters upon no matter how long such a struggle may last or however great the sacrifices that may be necessary or whatever the means that have to be employed; and all this even though the actual military equipment at hand may be utterly inadequate when compared with that of other nations."

Do you know who wrote that? Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. And do you know who took down that dictation? Rudolf Hess.

We will help to make Hitler's prophecy come true. We will help brave England drive back the hordes from Hell who besiege her and then we will join for the destruction of savage and blood-thirsty dictators everywhere. But we must be firm and decisive. We must know our will and make it felt. And we must hurry.

Harold Ickes - May 18, 1941

'Merka (that's America) and Its Followers

My love of America was questioned the other day because of my attitude and comments in general. So this is a comment to all those who see (or would see) me that way.

This is a comment to the political nut cases out there and all their supporters like Fox News and the Republican party for the most part. Also, the ones who aren't nuts but rich, who abuse us all and their positions in America, or for the purposes of this argument, 'Merka, using the back hills slang version that has so come to symbolize all of those types.

Look, I'm pro America. Pro, "real" America, not the modern, saccharine version pushed on us by questionable types of late.

I spent my time in the military, did my Service with its generous awards, ending in a Good Conduct Medal. I got my official Government Certificate for serving during the Cold War. I got a degree in Psychology from a University. I've had cross-cultural college classes, had those classes with people from the Middle East, Qatar, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere.

I've met interesting people from around the world and, I did not kill them, going against the American way of late.

Yet, I hesitate to say I'm a patriot anymore because that has come to have an odd meaning, one that leaves a strange taste in one's mouth. If, you're a traditional patriot, that is. Of late, Patriot has come to mean racism, hate, idiocy, dunderheadedness, right wing nutcase-aphilia, fat beer belly hick with a gun theisms... and things like that.

I'm not any of those things so where does that leave me. In the Chinese Communist Revolution, I would have been dragged from my home and shot as an intellectual. I'm proud of that, actually. Because I have a brain and I use well, the mind contained therein. I use logic. Real logic, not the political kind of crap that is so rampant now a days and not just in America. Because we have infected the world. We infected the world with a good infection and now along with that, we have infected it with a kind of moronic sensibility, emboldened with our making friends with low characters, supporting the wrong people for economic gains and for corporate greediness.

I love the concept behind America, what we are supposed to be, supposed to stand for, not what some are pushing now a days as, 'Merka, which has come to mean I really don't know what, other than selfishness, greed, isolationism, uncharitability, uncompassionate, right winginess, conservativism (to the point of banal idiocy), superficiality, hyper confused Christianity, and so on and on.

I've always said that I'd fight and die for your right to free speech, even for you to say stupid crap like how you hate people; to say stupid shite like we hear online ad nauseam in the news, on a more than daily basis and instantly, in many cases.

Sure, in this country, it's your right to speak your mind. But why? Why have such a tiny mind from which to pull such banalities? Having a right doesn't mean you have to use it to say such nonsense.

That being said, from a psychological POV we do to vent, to get it all out, to allow those with disparate point of views to point out to us, who they are, what their beliefs are, and basically, as we've seen over and over, just who the crazies are.

It's healthy, it's the human condition.

Maybe if we just vent enough we will blow out our frustrations and fears because that's what all this is.: Fear and Frustration. The realization that you are not and never will be one of the Nouveau riche. That ideal has failed, the American dream of becoming rich like the rich, has died; mostly because the not rich have voted to give power to those who abuse their position; the legislators who have been bought by the corporations who take from us and then convince the have nots, to call themselves, "the Takers", rather than the backbone of this nation who are mostly, the middleclass; a class of people the rich have abused for far too long for their own selfish benefits. And the worm may be turning on their cadaverous bodies.

The more you talk, the more we know you are there, know who you are, what you think and how you work. You are insidious, the new American cancer that we can't cut out and have to instead take a long time to rehabilitate. You'll only be happy when you are rich. Right? But guess what, that ain't gonna happen. Interesting conundrum, right? You, are our bruised loop of insanity.

See, it would help everyone if you would just stop, read a damn book (one that makes some sense), and join us in being Americans. The traditional American, the one the original dream was all about, the one people around the world appreciate and wish to achieve. See the dream only was ever that you can better your position, not to become rich. That was an idea that was sold to us but those who were rich and wanted to blind us from cutting their taxes, giving more of ourselves, receiving less money so they could have more and more, and more.

But then one day? All your venting of your bitching and abuse, your hate and misdirected anger, will actually do us more good than you; once it's properly directed at the right people, and that ain't us, those who you are misguidedly directing it at now.

So think about it. We know you. You are limited in your spotlight now because as we've been notified long ago (and do you even know by whom? Do you? You don''t, do you? By Marshall McLuhan.), that one day everyone will get their fifteen minutes of fame. Now is your time. Soon it will be ours again and that will last much longer than the embarrassing, short term insanity that you have been exhibiting. Catharsis isn't that useful when it is used to a childish degree.

It's useful when it's used to be productive and directed consciously to things that are right and true. To shine a light on what has been hidden for so long, but really isn't a secret anymore. But those deceivers hidden in the shadows for so long have now turned the light back upon those who shined the light on them, blinding the wronged people now from seeing the right people and their insidious actions.

You have marked yourselves, in public, on camera, online, and in permanency. The more you vent, the more powerful you become, but only in the short term; because in the long term, the more powerless you will become. The pendulum will swing back to us again, to sanity, and then you will evaporate and turn into good people out of necessity, except for those few who will scurry into the dark like the cockroaches you are.

And so again and in closing, thanks. Thanks so much for pointing out you and yours to us. Because it won't be long now that I will no longer be embarrassed to call myself a Patriot once again. After you shut up. After you join us in reclamation of our new, "Old" Patriotic American ideals.

Oh and, thank you for your service....

Lady Liberty is peeking out at you. Dare you take up her challenge and look back?

In looking around America, related to the election yesterday, I feel like Lady Liberty has breathed a heavy and grateful sigh of relief. I think through the years of Bush, she was in tears a lot of the time.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Remember her? She's back. At very least, she has her chance to return, to cast off the dark cloak of isolation and cowardice; to enter into the sunlight once again as the extremists scurry back to their dark corners of this nation.

America has a chance again to be great. The dark cloud of the Bush administration and those fear-mongered years and those who still survive them, the conservative shadow of the extreme right is reasonably and hopefully in its death throws.

But they are still there. Do not give up. Keep fighting for freedom and liberty, to advance into the future and not retreat into the past and the fears of our ancient, McCarthy era mentality (and now we know) minority. Yes, hard times are still about. But who we are, is all about how we deal with these times in being open minded, kind, compassionate, intelligent, bold, brave and in keeping our eyes wide opened.