Tulip 2.0
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the partly cloudy, cool island of Nantucket! Great to be with you and yours on this Saturday morning, the twenty-fourth day of March, 2012, a bit more seasonable this a.m. on Cape, Cotuit to be precise, ‘where the ocean meets the wood’, waking up to birds a singin’ and flowers a bloomin’, as evidenced by this yellow tulip sticking it’s head out of the earth screaming, ‘hey, wake up! it’s a beautiful day! why not spread the LOVE?’… According to Thompson-Reuters, the New York City Police Department has other ideas. It seems our country, after 2003, has become a nation of voyeurs, especially when it comes to spying on our fellow citizens. Since that aforementioned date, the NYPD has expanded it’s covert spying operations well outside the jurisdiction of the city that never sleeps, with the NYPD taking that colloquialism quite literally, as the little King, Mayor Bloomberg and his right hand man, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, are now pouncing on OCCUPY protesters before they even get going, brutally taking them down one by one, as they foolishly attempt to quash FREE SPEECH in a country that was founded upon said PRINCIPAL. One hundred years from now, this reporter will not be here, and neither will the leaders of the NYPD or the City of New York. But ‘time’ does march on, and our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on, looking back upon this tumultuous ‘time’ in America, WILL scratch their collective heads, asking the same simple question… ‘what was that all about?’. Rampant paranoia always goes hand in hand with power, just look back at our history as a nation. In the 1960’s, after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, former FBI strongman for over forty-five years, the nation saw it’s first public glimpse into this phenomenon with President Nixon’s failed break in at the Watergate Hotel, bringing this paranoia and an insatiable hunger for ‘more power’ on behalf of powerful politicians to light, begging the question in 2012 America today, just how far are we going to let the NSA and Homeland Security, and the dozens of agencies under that rather large umbrella, just how far are WE, as a collective nation of individuals living under the auspices of a true democracy, yes, just how far are we going to let this out of control domestic spying go? A FAIR question I think, especially when we see what is going on in Sanford, Florida at this hour. This classic microcosm–the tragic shooting death of Trayvon Martin, gunned down in cold blood on February 26th, 2012, by a neighborhood watch DOG (self appointed captain) who couldn’t cut the mustard on the force, claiming ’self defense’ under the now notorious 2005 ’stand your ground law’, a law on the books in over twenty states in the U.S. presently, as a seventeen year old CHILD passed on to a better world…–of the macrocosm, a much bigger problem plaguing our splintered, paranoid, ARMED, and fearful nation, drives the nail home, hitting a real nerve not only in this country, but around the world, for, as President Obama said so profoundly yesterday, a universal statement of TRUTH if I have ever heard one, “if I had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon…”. This ‘man’ was well known and protected from the get go by a corrupt police force, the Sanford, Florida police department, who saw one of their own police officer’s sons, recently, beat a HOMELESS black man to death, caught on video tape, and, as such, is a metaphor for a much bigger problem that exists BIG TIME today–namely, “a really, really, really BIG GOVERNMENT” (something I thought the republican establishment was against on PRINCIPAL, right Grover Norquist, you knucklehead!), a point that was articulated so well by our friend Rachel Maddow, of the great “Rachel Maddow Show”, only on MSNBC, weeknights at 9 p.m., eastern… Many, many moons ago, right after the attacks of 911, our President, way back then, George W. Bush told a shell shocked nation, “…just go about your business and don’t be afraid, for if you are afraid, the terrorists win.” Hmmmm, it seems to me sir, you and your administration, especially Dick, kept this country in a state of fear, panic and paranoia for close to a decade, so much so it took US to the point where ‘it’ allowed you and your ‘team’ to wage a war that was based on a LIE you told to ‘the American People’, killing over 4400 American soldiers, with countless wounded, many with PTSD, undiagnosed because they are afraid of the ’system’, and thus do not want to be put in a box with the ’stigma’ of a mental disorder that can be easily treated, therefore, suffering needlessly, not to mention 100,000 plus real life Iraqi civilians, mothers, fathers, children, wiped from the face of the earth as, I assume, ‘collateral damage’. The majority of those lives spared being worse off (such as the electricity problem in say Baghdad), than when the Americans went in to ‘liberate’ that sovereign nation, posing NO threat at all to the U.S., from a brutal, ‘dangerous’ dictator who was supposedly holding all sorts of caches of ‘weapons of mass destruction’. We showed them huh George! The blank check that was given to the Bush administration, promoting this new ‘war on terror’, established the new gigantic Homeland Security ‘top secret America’, a spider web of dark ops in new super secret, ‘no trespassing’ office parks, mostly unknown to the public, that spy on said public 24/7/365, with no warrants needed, bringing George Orwell’s chilling book and movie, “1984″ full circle once again and hurdling it back into the timeless light it most certainly deserves. For if our country, that was founded on the RIGHT to peaceably assemble, speak it’s mind, and evoke change by the WILL of the PEOPLE (now under the said spying authority of say, the NYPD, whose reach can extend all the way to Cape Cod), then who is to say you are safe, or a Keith Olbermann is safe, or someone who looks just like Trayvon Martin is safe? When a few people get their hands on ALL of the power, given to them by a rather lackadaisical and blissfully ignorant public, due in part to the constant noise pollution offered up by a FOX NEWS for example, horrible brainwashing propaganda that serves the overall consensus (the .001 percent) of a plutocratic ‘mission statement’ (credit Tom Cruise and the classic film, circa 1996, “Jerry Maguire”) PROFIT OVER PEOPLE, especially when history has shown US ALL that absolute power corrupts ABSOLUTELY, then I think WE all can agree, assuming YOU still want a democracy, ‘Houston, we have a problem…”. God’s speed to all the folks who will rally in Sanford, Florida for the arrest of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin, especially his parents. This case, as Reverend Al Sharpton said on Friday night’s, “Politics Nation” (again, only on MSNBC, weeknights, six sharp), “I will not stop until JUSTICE is served to Zimmerman in a courtroom.” Have a nice day. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
