It seems to be a peculiar disease among mortal humankind that from time to time, we seem to feel the need to kill each other in large numbers. Perhaps it’s the need to thin the herd. Perhaps there is some bizarre demonic influence. Perhaps it’s a virus of some kind. The European powers had been itching for a fight. There have been many books about the causes of what was once called “The Great War”. It seems to me that Europe would have been plunged into war had someone farted at the wrong time. I imagine the Krupp family’s munitions factories just weren’t making enough money. Anyway, after the assassination of the archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Europeans were slaughtering each other wholesale. By 1917, they had gotten themselves into a nightmarish stalemate in the trenches. Churchill back in England knew that there was no chance of the war ending any time soon unless the United States entered into the fray. President Woodrow Wilson had done his best to keep us out of the war, in spite of the many voices here that were shouting for us to join the carnage.

Two events brought us into the war. One was the Zimmerman telegram, a supposed telegram from Germany to México offering large amounts of land returned to our neighbor to the south if they joined in the war and fought against the United States. This telegram was “intercepted” by U.S. intelligence and caused an uproar when news of it came to light. This telegram was later proven to be a fraud, much like the presence of uranium in Iraq. The other event was the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania by a German U-boat. The sinking of this vessel was considered further proof of the barbarity of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic. There were many American citizens on that ship. The public outrage over the sinking caused us to enter the war in April of 1917.

It has come to light after many, many years, two major controversies regarding that ship. The ship sank after only one torpedo strike, according to the official story. Survivors claim there were two explosions. It seems the ship was carrying large amounts of munitions for the allied forces. This alone would have made the ship a justifiable military target. The Germans claimed that the British themselves sank the ship in order to bring America into the war. There is some circumstantial evidence to support this claim. There were British agents on board and the ship was sailing in known dangerous shipping lanes in the Atlantic when there were other safer routes which might have been taken. The chances are that we were suckered into the war, but whatever the reasons, after our entrance, the war soon ended.

After the war ended, November 11^th was declared a holiday, Armistice Day, to celebrate the end of the fighting that was the worst the world had ever seen. New technological advances, such as the tank, and the airplane, had made the horror of war unthinkable. Now it was time to celebrate the peace. This had been the war to end all wars. There would never be another. It seemed a good thing to celebrate. After World War Two, however, and the beginning of the cold war, it seemed clear that war was here to stay. So in 1954, after the “police action” in Korea (not officially a war), President Eisenhower changed the name of the holiday to Veteran’s Day in order to honor all living veterans.

I think it’s a good idea to honor our veterans. These courageous men and women (and dogs) put their lives in danger so that we can enjoy the freedom that our president has been trying to take from us for the past five years. And our government thanks them by cutting their benefits and sending them into peril without the equipment they need. And I won’t say our troops do it without complaint, it is a soldier’s duty to complain, but they go anyway. They deserve our respect. They don’t make the policy. They just go where we send them and do what we tell them. And some of them don’t come back. Here are the numbers of the casualties suffered in all our wars: (these numbers include killed and wounded)

The Revolution: 10,623

The War of 1812: 6,765

The Méxican War: 17,435

The Civil War: 970,227

The Spanish American War: 1,662

World War One: 320,710

World War Two: 1,078,162

Korean War: 136,935

Vietnam: 211,431

Gulf War: 760+ (this does not include those harmed by Agent

Iraq and Afghanistan:  about 919,967 (including all casualties from all nations), probably much more.

???:   Who knows, a few billion maybe?

Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote the best definition of veterans that I have ever read. He was a medically retired US Navy officer himself when he wrote his classic novel, Starship Troopers. In it he said that there is only one distinction between veterans and non-veterans. It isn’t intelligence or education or class. It is only the fact that veterans are those who have put their own mortal bodies between their loved ones’ homes and the war’s desolation, a fact that the full verses of the Star Spangled Banner first recognized. Veterans are those who love others enough to risk laying down their lives for them, especially people they do not even know. With that definition, we should certainly consider the fire fighters and police officers that helped to rescue the victims of 9/11 as veterans as well.

At any rate, on this holiday, whether you have it off or not, it would do well to take two minutes, just two minutes, it’s not a long time, to pause and think about those who have paid dearly for the freedom we enjoy. These are people like my dad, Paul’s dad, and probably a lot of your dads and moms, too. Two minutes isn’t very much. But they deserve that much. And the thing we can do to honor them most, is to bring our troops home out of peril and make sure that we find a way to solve this old world’s problems without killing each other. Perhaps then, they will not have sacrificed in vain. And then we can celebrate this holiday for what it was meant to be, the end of war for all time. We can only hope and pray.

When we look at the television industry, we might be tempted to consider ourselves, the viewers, to be the consumers. But this is not so! We are not the consumers. We are the workers. How do you figure that, Big Daddy, you ask, as well you might? Well, the television isn’t getting any money from us, for one thing. Their money doesn’t come from the people watching. Their money comes from the advertisers. You see, television isn’t selling programs (and that’s good, because I wouldn’t buy any of them). Television is selling viewership. Television guarantees to the advertisers that a certain number of people will be watching a given program. The advertisers then purchase the program.

So the advertisers are the consumers. What television is selling is our viewership; therefore we are the workers. The other way to tell that we are the workers is that watching television is no fun. At least watching the ads isn’t fun. That’s why we try to get out of watching the ads by doing other stuff while the ads are on, such as using the bathroom or making a snack. And this is why television is so bad.

You see, they don’t really care if we like the programs or not. They are not trying to interest us in the programs. They are trying to interest the advertisers. For us, all they care about is that they get our attention, which they do every time they put something lurid are bizarre on the screen. We watch television the same way we watch an automobile accident, with that same kind of fascination. Once they have our attention, then the advertisers can sell us shit.

The television’s job is to produce programs as cheaply as possible so that they can make a big profit, like any other factory. If they could outsource our viewing to another country, I’m sure they would, but they can’t. Advertisements, on the other hand, have big budgets. Nearly as much work goes into producing most ads as goes into a big budget Hollywood movie. That’s because they need to make the commercial entertaining so we will watch it, and watch it the ten or twenty times we need to watch it in order to be suitably brainwashed. A lot of money goes into those commercials, including research that allows them to make a commercial that will still sink in even if you see it in fast forward mode while you’re speeding on to the next bit of the program you Tivo’d.

Another way to know that we are the workers in the television industry is to note how much we work. The way that capitalism dealt with the labor unions’ insistence on an eight hour work day was to find ways that the same amount of work could be done in fewer hours. That’s how we got the assembly line. As most of us have noted, the number of commercials per hour in television has steadily increased. Late night, I’m sure you have noticed there are often seven minutes of commercials for every four minutes of program. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

Moreover, the duration of each commercial is getting shorter and shorter. At one time, the average commercial was one minute in length. Now it’s much shorter, often even less than 15 seconds. That way they can get more and more commercials in a shorter period of time. Commercials are what the networks are selling. So for each hour of television we are getting less and less program and more and more commercial. In other words, they are making us work harder, longer hours. And we don’t even get paid!

So if you wonder why the news media makes such a big deal about stupid little things that politicians say and why they spend so much time trying to scare us, it’s because they want us to watch their news so we see the ads. And we do. They just need us to do our job. The news industry took a big hit back in the Reagan years when the FCC ruled that reporting the news fell under the same category as any other programming, thus relieving the networks from the responsibility of having to keep the public informed. In other words, new programs now have to make the same profit as any other program. When I was a kid, the two big political conventions were all that was on television those nights. Now, the conventions are banished to cable networks, which still show ads during the coverage.

Even the film industry isn’t immune from this. Increasingly product placement has become a bigger and bigger part of film making, along with all merchandise associated with the film. Now I’m not trying to paint television as the great evil or anything. But this is why the programming is so bad. Still, it’s amazing how much you discover when you stop watching television. For example, there are these strange things called books with which we were familiar while children, but with which, as adults, we spend less and less time. And as a reminder to those of you  who spend more time reading than watching the tube, get back to work!

From the very beginning, it would seem, we hated government, not just big government, but any government. The colonists left England because they either didn’t want to be told what church they could attend, or they wanted opportunities that were only available to the wealthiest class of people back home. Of course, once they got here, they immediately started to dictate which church you could attend, and began to limit the opportunities of others. That shouldn’t really seem so odd. After all, the children of child abusers usually become child abusers themselves. It’s the only model they have.

We even fought our own government in the early days of our federal government. Americans were forced to fire on Americans in Shay’s Rebellion. Americans have always resented government. It seems to be in our blood. The rest of the world doesn’t really have any problem with government. For most of them, government has been pretty good, overall (with the exception of some nasty people who ran Germany for a short while). Europeans look at our dislike for government and think we’re nuts. In Europe, the idea is that government is supposed to take care of the people. Here, we seem to feel that government should stay out of our way.

One big difference for this is the nature of our country compared with the nations of Europe at the time our country began. We had a sparse population. There were fewer than 300,000 people living in American when we became a country. Europe was crowded, at least in the urban centers. Where there are large numbers of people, you need to have lots of regulations. This is because people bother other people. Your neighbors are close by and you can’t do shit that bothers them. People in Europe saw new religions as a threat to the established order. We didn’t really have an established order. Our country was founded with disdain for an established order. We could do that. We didn’t have that many people. You could stay out of other people’s way. Nobody cares what you do when you’re miles away from anybody else.

Our country grew rapidly because there were no regulations. And while we did become a wealthy nation in general (not everybody did so well—ask the Indians and the slaves, along with scads of poor whites), it was done so with a total disregard for the rights and well being of others. Just ask the Chinese workers who came here to help build the railroad. A lot of people became rich by fucking over other people who didn’t have the resources to stand up for themselves and their rights.

But poor people have a way of multiplying. Eventually, the poor people grew strong enough to demand their rights. And in guaranteeing those rights, the government, which was created to “promote the general welfare”, regulations had to be put into place. The wealthy business owners objected to this, of course. And so the Pinkertons, and other, official, law enforcement agencies were brought in to try to put an end to the labor movement, and women’s suffrage, and any other movement that, you guessed it, threatened the established order. We had become Europe. But of course we became Europe. We now had all the trappings of Europe. We had our own aristocracy, and aristocracy of money, instead of nobility.

Although we had all the trappings of our European fathers (and mothers), we still had the American disdain for government. And yet the only protection the little guy has is from government. There are many in our country who would try to do away with all the protections put in place by FDR in the 30s. Some say we should do away with social security and let people invest their money the way they want, without government interference. Well, my wife and I have already lost about twenty grand from our retirement accounts in just the past two weeks. Imagine if everybody’s retirement plans were based solely on investments. It’s true that many government retirement plans are invested in the market and have lost money, but the average social security recipient is going to receive his or her monthly pension regardless of what happened in the market. Of that much, they can be sure, for now at least.

Businesses cry out (especially small businesses, and I understand why) at all the regulations that protect workers on the job. Those protections cost money and make it hard to make a profit at all. But without those protections, workers are in danger of significant threats to life and limb. As long as there is money to be made, businesses are willing to put people’s health and well being at risk.

Now I know that there are many small business owners who would never consider putting their employees at risk. But there are plenty more that would, and that’s why we need regulations. I guess my point is that we are no longer the small country we once were. We no longer have limitless resources. And, with the kind of population we now have, what we do to the environment really matters. We are a lot more like Europe than we used to be. We have huge urban centers now. Almost 81% of the population of the United States live in an urban center. In 1790, 95% of the population lived in the countryside. Only 5% lived in cities. We are not the same nation we once were. That’s why we need regulations.

So in the end, we have to overcome our intense hatred of government. When you have lots of people, you need government, and we have lots of people now. When you have lots of people that live in cities, you need government. I hear McCain and Palin say over and over again that they are opposed to government. They want to get government out of our lives. And a part of me likes that idea, in the same way that children want mom and dad out of their lives. But children need mom and dad in their lives to make sure they don’t do stupid shit. Nobody likes being told what to do or what not to do. But sometimes it’s necessary.

FDR got us out of the depression because he used government to step in and put people to work. Yes, it was the war that eventually got the U.S. out of the great depression, but thanks to the New Deal, FDR did finally bring the GNP of the U.S. back up to where it was before the market crash of 1929 by 1936. FDR was not willing to create the kind of deficits necessary to totally get us out of the depression until the war made in unavoidable. Either way, it was government that saved our parents’ and grandparents’ asses back in the great depression. And it will be government that saves us now, as long as government makes the right decisions.

Two things, I think, have become clear. One, we have to quit thinking of the kind of country we once were. We are not that country anymore. We can’t move forward as long as we keep looking back. And two, we have to quit thinking of the government as the bad guy. The government is only the bad guy when we put the wrong people in power. And to my mind, the wrong people are the ones who keep putting the interests of the minority, the 1% who own 30% of the wealth of the nation ahead of the other 99% of the people that live here. And I’m not sure there is anybody speaking for those 99% at all. As Ralph Nader so correctly claims, both the democrats and the republicans represent that 1%. The rest of the free world has government in their lives. And they don’t mind.

I suspect that out of this current economic crisis we will see the eventual coming of a totally new system. I suspect that what we are seeing is the collapse of capitalism, just as we saw the collapse of communism. Neither system works anymore. And what we will end up with is some kind of mixture of limited capitalism and socialism. It is up to us to make sure that the rights of individual continue to be respected. And it could well be that those people who want to have the opportunity to make their riches, those opportunities that were once available in this country, this shining city on the hill, will have to go someplace else that is, like America was, sparsely populated. You go where there is nothing and build something. Perhaps they will colonize Mars. Who knows?

But we will become like the rest of the democratic world. We will become like Germany, like Ireland, like France, like the rest of the European Union. Government will become more involved in business and in our private lives. There will be more regulations and higher taxes. It may come soon, or after a terrible new depression, but it will happen. The only question that remains is how many of our rights will we still have? Will we be like England, or will we be like China? Personally, I vote for England, where government is considered your friend. I may have to pay higher taxes, but at least I won’t have to worry about starving or not having a roof over my head.

42.2 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward Military expenses. Current Military and war spending used 28.7 cents, interest on Military debt was 10 cents, and Veterans’ benefits were 3.5 cents out of every federal income tax dollar.

22.1 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward Health programs. Health ($458 billion) is the federal funds portion of all health spending by the federal government, including the federal funds spending on Medicare.

10.2 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward interest on non-Military debt. The military share of the interest payment is based on the average historical share of national defense spending. Since interest payments are on the debt which has been accumulated over time, the allocation of shares between military and non-military spending takes this into account.

8.7 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward anti-poverty program costs. Anti-Poverty Programs ($179.4 billion) includes federal funds outlays on the sub-function areas food and nutrition assistance and other income security.

4.4 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward education, training, and social services costs. Education, Training and Social Services ($90.6 billion) includes all federal funds outlays on the function area of the same name.

3.9 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward government and law enforcement costs

3.3 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward housing and community development costs. Housing and Community Development ($69.2 billion) includes all federal funds outlays defined by the federal government as housing assistance ($39.7 billion), and the function area of community and regional development ($29.5 billion).

2.6 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward environment, energy, and science costs. Environment, Energy and Science ($54.6 billion) includes all spending on the government-defined function areas of natural resources and the environment ($29.9 billion), energy (-$860 million), and general science, space and technology ($25.6 billion).

1.5 cents out of every federal income tax dollar went toward transportation, commerce and agriculture costs. Agriculture, Commerce and Transportation ($31.7 billion) includes federal funds outlays on three function areas: agriculture ($16.7 billion ), commerce and housing credit ($590 million) and transportation ($21.6 billion).

One cent out of every federal income tax dollar went toward international affairs costs. International Affairs ($21.5 billion) includes the function area of international affairs except for international security assistance, Andean counterdrug programs and international narcotics control.

Now, consider that even the most conservative anti-immigrant groups around assert that illegal immigration costs us, the taxpayers, as much as 22 billion dollars at the most (which is highly doubtful), and you will see that the cost of illegal immigration is about one penny out of your tax dollar a year. And in exchange for that penny, you get cheap labor in any number of industries. And you get someone to clean your house as well. So, if you earn $30,000 per year, that illegal alien costs you all of $11.46 a year. That’s 22 cents a week. You give more than that away to guy with the homeless sign sitting in front of the Seven-Eleven. And you want to spend all that money to put up a 700 mile fence to save that? Excuse me, but that seems penny wise and pound foolish, if you ask me.

Isn’t it interesting that if we could cut the military budget by two percent, we could increase the education and social services budget by 22 percent. Imagine what the schools could do with 22 percent more money. We could increase the federal money for law enforcement by 25.6 percent. Spain, France, and England have all had more terrorist attacks than we have and they don’t begin to spend the kind of money on the military that we do.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we, the citizens, could dictate what percent of our tax money went to specific parts of the budget? I wonder how much the military would get then? How would you divide YOUR tax dollar?

Without taxes we wouldn’t be able to pay for traffic cops and teachers and librarians and firefighters and public hospitals and any number of useful things we all use and enjoy such as parks and streets and sewers and the list goes on and on. So our government has to have taxes. The only countries without taxes are those with huge deposits of oil. But then, obviously, those countries have an alternate method of acquiring the revenue necessary to run a country.

Every country has to raise taxes. We had a temporary income tax during the civil war, which was made permanent in 1913. Of course, we also have sales taxes, property taxes, gasoline taxes, and any other number of taxes to bring in the cash the government needs. The Méxican president, Santa Ana, back in the 1860s, actually raised money by taxing the number of doors and windows of Méxican houses thereby being the first government official to effectively tax the air people breathe. Nobody likes to pay taxes. That’s why the government sometimes calls the money they collect something else.

You see, one way or the other, when a government needs money, like we do now, both in our nation, and in my home state of California, which is having a budget shortfall crisis, it has to raise taxes. That’s the only way a government can get money. So when a government is feeling the pinch, it has to raise somebody’s taxes. Now they can either raise everybody’s taxes, or they can raise the taxes of a specific group of people. For example, your car registration is a form of taxation, because any monies raised by the government can be defined as a form of taxation. So when the state raises your car registration fees, they are raising the taxes of people who drive. Of course, that’s just about everybody.

So, rather than raise income taxes of everybody, or even just the wealthy, most states have raised the amount of money students must pay in fees to state universities. So, in effect, what the government has done is to raise the students’ taxes. They’re not taxing everybody, just the students. When a government refuses to give a raise to government employees to adjust for the cost of living, they have raised the taxes of government employees. When the government raises the amount of money that medi-care recipients must pay for medical treatment, it has raised taxes on old sick people.

Increasingly in our country, we have, in the last eight years, cut the taxes of the wealthiest 2% of the population, while raising the fees for any number of services to others to compensate for the loss of revenue due to those tax cuts. So we have chosen, as a nation, to raise the taxes of those with the least ability to pay those taxes, rather than to raise the taxes of those most able to shoulder the tax burden. Thus, we have chosen to tax the poor rather than to tax the rich. And there are reasons the government does this.

For one thing, the poor generally have few lobbyists in Washington D.C. to speak for them. The poor also have fewer resources to fight those fee increases. In addition, the rich, having the money to pay for well-informed accountants and lawyers, have the resources to shelter their income from taxation. That’s why many large corporations pay no taxes at all and even often receive large tax refunds. So when you vote for a candidate who promises to cut your taxes, the odds are that you will still pay those taxes in the form of increased fees. For example, California’s governor will not condone a tax increase for those earning more than a million dollars a year, but he has said he will approve legislation to raise the sales tax, thereby insuring that everybody will have to pay more taxes, not just the rich. And those rich folks who put him in office will end up paying more taxes in the form of sales tax as well thus offsetting any money they saved by not paying more income tax.

Ireland is considering instituting a property tax. In the past, Ireland charged a tax in the form of a stamp duty that was paid once when the house was purchased. Now, in order to fund the much needed infrastructure such as roads, schools, etc., the government of Ireland has decided that an on-going property tax would be better as it would provide a continuous source of income. Naturally, homeowners in Ireland are not happy with this turn of events. But the money has to come from somewhere.

Of course the government, and by government, I mean ANY government, wastes a lot of money. But then, governments have always wasted a lot of money. I’m not sure that there is any way to stop that. Elected officials will always try to get more for the people who vote them into office. So there will always be “pork”, as long as we elect our leaders. Before the last election in México, PRI, the previous ruling party, went out and bought new ovens and other goodies for the people in the ranchos hoping to win their votes. It bothers us when the government wastes money. But then, speaking only for myself, I know I waste a lot of money too. And so do you. Keep track of how much money you spend in a little notebook for a week and you’ll be surprised by how much you spend for crap you don’t really want or need.

One way or the other, if we want to have those government services we cherish, like a military and medical research and space exploration and such, we’re going to have to accept taxes. The government needs money to run and they get that money from us. The only choices we have are who will be taxed. When any candidate says they will need to raise taxes, s/he is only being honest. And when a candidate says that s/he will lower taxes, s/he is lying through his/her teeth. You can’t lower taxes and keep the government running. You just change the people being taxed. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Consider this scenario. California used to offer a free college education through the California State University System, which now costs about three grand a year. I know three grand doesn’t sound like a lot for college, but three thousand bucks may as well be three million bucks for a hell of a lot of poor people. I know I couldn’t afford it right now. Anyway, if we returned to offering a free college education, then more people who wouldn’t have been able to go to college would now be able to receive a degree and would, therefore, be able to get a better, higher-paying job, that would then bring in more revenue to the state in the form of income tax. If that person ends up in a low-paying dead end job, then the state receives no income tax at all from that person because he or she wouldn’t be earning enough to pay income tax.

Providing more government money for libraries and schools means more librarians and teachers, which means more revenue in the form of income taxes. In other words, put the money in the hands of the poorest people, and the government ends up getting that money back in the form of taxes. Put more money in the hands of the rich, and that money ends up in savings accounts or invested in companies that are, no doubt, sheltering most of their income so the government never sees any of it.

The logic that has been proposed thus far is to tax the people who use the services. Thus, people who drive pay higher fees thereby raising money for roads, etc. People who actually go to the university, pay for that university through higher fees. Tax the user. But then, on the other hand, we give tax exemptions to people with children, thus reducing their taxes. And yet, these children require us to have schools, for which we ALL have to pay taxes. Maybe only parents should have to pay taxes for schools. Obviously, that is absurd. We ALL benefit from an educated populace. If only we had one. I know, maybe we should only tax the people who actually BENEFIT from a war for the cost of that war. Our grandchildren will be paying for the war in Iraq and as far as I can see, we could just as easily be sending our money to Haliburton for all the good the war is doing.

Death and taxes are inevitable. The only choice we really have is whom to tax. Don’t you think it’s time that everybody shouldered the burden of paying for our government, instead of putting the burden on the poor and middle class? We’re already providing our children for the war. I somehow doubt that many of the children of the wealthy have made the choice to go into the military and go off to fight.

Martin Luther King was far more complex than the man who stood in Washington D.C. and revealed his dream to the thousands upon thousands standing in hope there. His dream went far beyond racial equality, equal rights and equal opportunity. It must be remembered that when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, he was a very disliked man. The F.B. I. had been watching him and tapping his phone. What was then called “the silent majority” despised him for the civil unrest he encouraged. We must remember that Martin disrupted the business as usual mentality.

I find it interesting that the same people who say they look up to Martin Luther King and believe him to be a great hero are often the same people who complained about the demonstrations at the WTO meetings in Washington a few years ago. Trust me, if Martin had been alive, he would have been at those demonstrations, would have been a part of those demonstrations.

When George W. Bush was president, he said of Martin, “Throughout Dr. King’s life, he continued to trust in the power of those words [ life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—from the Declaration of Independence, BD], even when the practice of America did not live up to their promise. When Martin Luther King came to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1963, he came to hold this nation to its own standards, and to call its citizens to live up to the principles of our founding. He stood not far from here, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. With thousands gathered around him, Dr. King looked out over the American capital and declared his famous words, “I have a dream.”—At the groundbreaking for the MLK memorial, Nov. 2006

Well GW could afford to praise Martin because he’s dead. Trust me, if Martin were alive now, Bush would hate his guts. Martin would be protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and pointing out that it is people of color and poor whites who make up the largest part of our volunteer army. He would point out how the vast military expenditures are crippling our economy and making life worse for those least able endure the recession, the poor and middle class. Martin would be speaking out about the loss of civil liberties and the criminal, yes, and criminal actions of our leaders. And if Martin were alive, you could bet that he’d be raking President Obama over the coals just as he would any president that failed to improve the lives of the poor and disenfranchised.  If Martin were alive today, they’d kill him again.

Here is what Martin had to say about labor, “A Society that performs miracles with machinery has the capacity to make some miracles for men if it values men as highly as it values machines.

This is really the crux of the problem. Are we as concerned for human values and human resources as we are for material and mechanical values? The automobile industry is not alone a production complex of assembly lines and steel-forming equipment. It is an industry of people who must live in decency with the security for children, for old age, for health and cultural life. Automation cannot be permitted to become a blind monster which grinds out more cars and simultaneously snuffs out the hopes and lives of the people by whom the industry was built.” –Speech at the UAW 25th Anniversary Dinner, 1961

Remember, Martin was killed while working for striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. Here are some more of his words on labor: “”The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.”
—Speech to the state convention of the Illinois AFL-CIO, Oct. 7, 1965

Here is what he had to say about war: Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.”

You can be certain that if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today and making speeches, people like John Mc Cain, Romney, Bush, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Anne Coulture all would be attacking him. You can bet that it wouldn’t be long before someone silenced his voice again because unlike so many people talking today, people listened to Martin. He had the knack of getting people to do something. That was why he had to be killed back in 1968. He was a threat to the power structure and the status quo.

It must always be remembered that to follow Dr. King is to go down an unpopular road. People will hate you. People will abuse you. People will call you a traitor. It should also be remembered that as we look across the nation, the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. has yet to be fulfilled. Although race relations are better than they were, people of color still make less money than white people. People are arguing today, forty years after the death of MLK about whether a black man can be elected president of the United States. People are still making “lynch” jokes. No, I would say we still have a ways to go before that dream comes true.

The best way to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. is to live out his words. Be peaceful, but fight against injustice. Stand up to protect those rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Help fight to take back our government from the multinational corporations. And then maybe, just maybe, we’ll be free at last, free at last, great God almighty, free at last. Have a good holiday everybody.

I distinctly remember that this car had big holes in the floor caused by rust. I used to enjoy watching the street pass under us as my dad drove up and down the mountain to Victorville whenever we had to go down the mountain for groceries because we had too high a tab to show our faces in the little market in town. Once, on the way back up the mountain, the car quit going moving, always a bad sign, but we were able to pull into a service station. Back then, service stations were really service stations. They even had mechanics on duty who were there to actually fix cars if necessary. However, these guys were off duty, being just slightly after closing for the service bay. My dad figured out that the accelerator pedal coupling had broken off, so he asked for some bailing wire, crawled under the car, and fixed it…at least well enough for us to get back home. My dad could fix anything. I wish I had inherited those genes. I always found it curious that my dad quit the job he had up in the mountains because the trucks he had to drive weren’t safe (the windshield wipers weren’t working), when he had no problem putting our lives in jeopardy every time we got into that pile of crap Ford, not to mention that he and my mom were both usually inebriated when he was driving.

Anyway, that is neither here nor there. The point is that my junior high had a dance and they had some kids from the school for the band. I never got a chance to hear them, but people said they weren’t bad, for a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. Still, the students were upset because the band had been asked to change the lyrics of one of the songs they were doing, “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, by the Rolling Stones. They were told to sing, “Let’s spend the DAY together.” Well, I guess it WAS a junior high school, after all. And Ed Sullivan had done the same thing with the real Rolling Stones, so what should we expect? Ed Sullivan had even tried to censor Jim Morrison and the Doors, but it didn’t work. So the Doors were never on Ed Sullivan again. I don’t think it hurt them much. Censorship is what knocked the Smothers Brothers off the air. They just said too much, and the network couldn’t allow it. Censorship is what killed Lenny Bruce. They couldn’t let somebody say the kind of things that he was saying. It’s nothing new.

Censorship has a long and glorious history. It was taken for granted in the Greek communities of antiquity, as well as in Rome, that citizens would be formed in accordance with the character and needs of the regime. This did not stop the emergence of strong-minded men and women, as may be seen in the stories of Homer, of Plutarch, of Tacitus, and of the Greek playwrights. Greece was notorious for its open-minded approach to literature and lifestyle in general. It was the Greeks who made the orgy a household word.

While Greece was liberal, Athens, its capital city, was even more free minded. There may be seen in the plays of an Aristophanes the kind of uninhibited discussions of politics that the Athenians were evidently accustomed to, discussions that could (in the license accorded to comedy) be couched in licentious terms not permitted in everyday discourse. And yet, even the progressive Greeks had their limits. In the trial, conviction, and execution of Socrates in 399 BCE, we see the evidence of censorship.

Socrates was executed on charges that he corrupted the youth and that he did not acknowledge the gods that the city worshipped, but other new divinities of his own. This is a clear example of the damage banning books can cause. Socrates’ works were banned from the public’s eye and Philosophy was set back about one hundred years. But this was not done behind closed doors. In Plato’s Republic, there is a clear account of a system of censorship, particularly of the arts. Not only was the worship of different Gods forbidden, but certain political issues were NOT to be discussed under any circumstances. These Greeks, they meant business.

In England, once upon a time, when a more liberal regime came to power, many things were proposed and rejected. Thomas Becket had brought much of the civilization from Europe to England. One of the most controversial and important was the English translation of the Bible by John Wycliffe. This was banned by Kind Edward II in the late 14^th century and would not return until the reign of Henry VIII when the country turned to Protestantism so Henry could remarry. During those days, anything having to do with the Vatican or the pope was declared illegal. In fact, one of the charges against his second wife, Anne Boleyn, was that she was in possession of a book Henry had banned.

In the long and colorful history of censorship, many of what we today call classics have been the subjects of burnings or bannings. The Nazis were notorious for their book burnings, provoking Heinrich Heine to pronouce famously, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” And he was right. How a man could predict the terrifying ovens of Auchwitz in 1933 is unknown, but this quote shows one thing: censorship is not so much about the books as it is about control. The Nazis may have thought that they were only burning books, but it went further than that: they were burning freedom of thought.

Even today, in our enlightened times and in our free society, we see censorship at work. The right wing organization ironically named Free Republic has done everything in their power to destroy The Dixie Chicks. For three years now, ever since Natalie Maines’ comment in England about the war and George W. Bush, the band has been banned from country music stations, their traditional fan base. It gave me a great deal of satisfaction to see they won five Grammies the other night, especially the one for Best Country Album.

The religious right in our country has tried hard to get the Harry Potter books banned from public and school libraries around the country claiming that it promotes Satan by glorifying magic and witchcraft. But censorship is not just the darling of the right wing. The left wing can be just as bad. Numerous parent groups have attempted to ban Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because it contains the word, “nigger”. In fact, liberals everywhere are doing their best to have that word officially banned in cities all over the United States since Michael Richard’s comments at the Laugh Factory. And as the Nazis knew, it’s not about banning books, it’s about banning ideas, but you can’t stop an idea any more than you can unsay something.

Various groups have tried to ban a book, a Newbery Award winner, “The Higher Power of Lucky”, by Susan Patron, because of one word. That word is “scrotum”. On the first page of the book, the protagonist, an orphan by the name of Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum. “Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.” What is sad is that they are succeeding. How can we allow students to watch programs like, South Park, but NOT allow them to read a book because it contains the word, “scrotum”. I mean, it doesn’t even say what a scrotum IS!!! We will allow children to see the incredible violence in 24, but they can’t read a book that contains a word, a clinical, scientific word for a part of the human anatomy.

I don’t believe in censorship for anyone, even children, especially children. There is no idea, no word, so dangerous that we cannot be allowed to even see it or hear it. We need to see these things and hear these things, and then we need to talk about them. We make our society worse by hiding good ideas; we make our society worse by giving evil ideas more power by forbidding them. We need to have faith in the ability of humankind to separate the wheat from the chaff. The more we talk about things in an open society, the more we arrive at truth, the more evil is seen for what it is, evil. The important word here is “talk”. We have to talk to our kids about what they see. Yes, that’s right. We can’t just leave our kids in front of the TV and forget about them. We need to watch what they watch, and then talk about it. We have to read what they read, and then talk about it. Yes, I know it’s hard. It’s called being a parent. That’s what parents do, if they want their kids to grow up to be responsible intelligent adults.

I guarantee that if the media were showing pictures of the coffins arriving from Iraq and Afghanistan there would be an even greater noise from the population demanding an end to this illegal war. I know why school librarians are scared of the book. They are afraid of the backlash from religious right parents who want to hide any thought of science from their children. How long are we going to allow these people who live somewhere in the 19^th century to dictate what we see and hear? The first amendment of the constitution gives me the right to buy triple X rated pornography. It should also guarantee that children have the right to know what a scrotum is. It’s up to us as parents to make certain that little piece of knowledge doesn’t warp their little minds. So I suggest we all go out and buy a copy or two of “The Higher Power of Lucky”. Keep freedom alive.

And below, please note the titles of some books which have been banned in the past:

Lady Chatterly’s Lover

To Kill A Mockingbird

The Satanic Verses

Of Mice and Men

Anne Frank’s Diary

Huck Finn

The Grapes of Wrath

The Harry Potter series

An Ideal Husband

The Canterbury Tales

Catcher in the Rye

The Bell Jar …

and all of Shakespeare’s, Marlowe’s, Wilde’s and even Blake’s verse.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *EDIT* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I have just finished reading “The Higher Power of Lucky” this weekend and I can tell you that it is an excellant book, and I highly recommend it for any child between the ages of 9 and 12 (the ages for whom it was intended).  It is, in fact, enjoyable for any adult who wants to read it.  It’s only 134 pages and makes a very easy couple of hours of reading.  The story is interesting and the characters are quite interesting.

It is the story of a girl, Lucky, 10 1/2, whose mother has died two years earlier.  Her father doesn’t like kids, so he asks his first wife, a French woman, to take care of the child for him.  She comes to live with the child in the tiny town of Hard Pan, California (Pop. 43).  Lucky becomes convinced that her guardian is going to abandon her and return to France.  That is the basic premise of the story.  I’ll let you find out how it all ends.

The inclusion of the word “scrotum” is really inoffensive in all possible ways, and I think necessary for character development.  In fact, there is a paragraph about how Lucky needs to pee in the desert which is much more questionable if you ask me, but even that is not so bad.   There is no good reason to ban this book from libraries.  I’d pick it up and read it if I were you.  It’s pretty good.