Meanwhile, back in future America

Yikes... I mean, just - yikes. Hunter S. Thompson* said "America is raising a generation of dancers." To where are we dancing? Who's calling the tune?

And since the ad pictured above is part of a campaign conceived in Colorado, here's a quote from Extreme Behavior in Aspen:

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."

~ Hunter S. Thompson, February 2003

*It should be noted that Thompson was indeed a proponent of birth control.

Unfinished work

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863

That freedom highway

This land is your land, this land is my land, 

From California to the New York island;

From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, 

This land was made for you and me. 

As I was walking that ribbon of highway, 

I saw above me that endless skyway;

I saw below me that golden valley, 

This land was made for you and me. 

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps, 

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; 

And all around me a voice was sounding: 

This land was made for you and me. 

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, 

And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, 

As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: 

This land was made for you and me. 

As I went walking I saw a sign there, 

And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." 

But on the other side it didn't say nothing, 

That side was made for you and me. 

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, 

By the relief office I seen my people; 

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, 

Is this land made for you and me? 

Nobody living can ever stop me, 

As I go walking that freedom highway; 

Nobody living can ever make me turn back, 

This land was made for you and me.

"This Land Is Your Land"
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

Solar wealth

- - - - -

"It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system. Quite clearly we have vast amounts of income wealth as Sun radiation and Moon gravity to implement our forward success.

Wherefore living only on our energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth’s atoms is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming generations and their forward days.

Our children and their children are our future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmically bankrupt."

~ Bucky, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Obsolete

The power

BBC News Magazine:

In 1996, a black teenager protected a white man from an angry mob who thought he supported the Ku Klux Klan. It was an act of extraordinary courage and kindness.



Keshia Thomas was 18 when the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist organisation, held a rally in her home town in Michigan. Full story here.
...
For Mark Brunner, a student photographer who witnessed the episode, it was who she saved that made Thomas' actions so remarkable. "She put herself at physical risk to protect someone who, in my opinion, would not have done the same for her," he says. "Who does that in this world?"
...
"I knew what it was like to be hurt," she says. "The many times that that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me."
...

"That some in Ann Arbor have been heard grumbling that she should have left the man to his fate, only speaks of how far they have drifted from their own humanity. And of the crying need to get it back. Keshia's choice was to affirm what they have lost. Keshia's choice was human. Keshia's choice was hope." ~ Leonard Pitts, Jr. (The Miami Herald, June 29, 1996)

...and again:

"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness.
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are," Wendell Berry writes. "Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing."