A moment of clarity, at the Janus Hour, and now contemplating it in the full light of day, well-rested, yielded this notion.
There is a great national protest march planned for Washington on Sept. 24th, to demand an end to the war again.
Some of us cannot afford to go - perhaps most of us, who are against it, but who have not been heard because we do not exist in the eyes of Middle America, the people who live paycheck to paycheck often without cars.
And in any case, that is too long to wait.
There are educational and organizational events planned for
this weekend around the area, symposia on peace and justice, which are good things, and the choice of the date is symbolic.
But that, to my mind, is too tame, too predictable, too orderly, not enough effective. Meetings, meetings, endless talk and talk and talk - while our enemies act, and make the Song that shapes the world's understanding.
I am going to Concord to morrow, to the capitol, as early in the morning as I can manage, to stand before the State House on the fourth anniversary of the opening gambit of this regime, and whosoever wishes to defend their First Amendment rights, by exercising them, is welcome to join me.
Everyone in NH, who can make it to Concord, I invite you to come and peaceably assemble on the square, in the sight of all, on September 11, 2005, beginning at sunrise. And there we shall stand witness, and demand that our leaders, so called, make our swords into plowshares instead of the other way 'round.
--Yes, it will be symbolic, because the legislature will have the day off. But this is a small town, the whole south of the state, and if there are enough of us they will not be able to ignore it - as they ignore us with our vigils and meetings - and letter writings and phone calls - anyway.
--Yes, this is local, and we a small backwater province, and what good or effect will this have on the national government to protest at the local level? Why not wait until Tuesday and go to the greater protest in Boston, which has more effect on the world, and let everyone who can afford to get to Boston at 6:30 on a Tuesday night, add to the critical mass there which will have the potential of being seen by more individuals and more cameras.
For two reasons: I don't buy that what we do here in NH makes no difference. John Sununu is such a loyal ally and longtime liege of the House of Bush and/or the Dark Alliance of the Plutocracy which is currently manifest in the House of Bush that they were willing to risk, as it turns out now, a trial by jury to thwart the chance that Jeanne Shaheen, the well-respected and competent several-times-elected Democratic governor with no Beltway experience (and thus no leash as yet affixed) would take his place in Washington by paying a Virginia minion to suppress voter turnout in this state in 2002.
They broke the law to fix the elections, in insignificant New Hampshire, for one Senator, Sununu.
That says a great deal to me, and has for a long time.
"You sure had the right idea about me, Saunders. You told me to go back home, keep fillin' those kids full of hooey. Yeah. Just a simple guy you said was still wet behind the ears. A lot of junk about American ideals. Yeah, that's certainly a lot of junk, all right...I don't know. This is a whole new world to me. What are you gonna believe in? And a man like Paine, Senator Joseph Paine gets up and swears that I've been robbin' kids of nickels and dimes - a man I've admired and worshipped all my life. I don't know. There are a lot of fancy words around this town. Some of them are carved in stone. Some of 'em, I guess the Taylors and Paines have put 'em up there so suckers like me can read 'em. Then when you find out what men actually do - Well, I'm gettin' out of this town so fast and away from all the words and the monuments and the whole rotten show."
Mr Smith Goes To Washington, 1939
Congresman Charlie Bass I have told you I have been watching since before the last election: he is not a zealot, but a pro-environment moderate who deplores the theocrats in his own party and tries to assure us that he is independent and puts our own good before all else, and even opposes his own leaders and the rest of the party when necessary, and his voice has grown more and more quavery in the last two years, from the bluff, cheery chap he used to be when he appeared to stump, and was elected because, well, he was a nice guy and nobody ever managed to get their act together to run against him. This past election, Bass got 54% against unknowns and write-ins.
Gregg and Bradley are colorless, inoffensive, gladhanding and well-funded-of-advertising clones of Sununu. In the elections this year, with Bradley's opponents being two unknowns, he only got 67% of the vote, and with the sole opponent running against Gregg an unknown for a 90-year old grandmother, he got only 66% with nearly half the whole population - not the voting age population, the whole population of the state turning out to cast ballots--
--and only after, for motivations unknown, a man named Jesse Burchfield joined the campaign of the aristocratic liberal opponent of Judd Gregg, Burt Cohen of exceedingly wealthy Newcastle - whose campaign managers had less savvy than the owners of the local fruit and vegetable stand from what I saw - and stole his entire campaign fund donations - too late in the cycle for anyone else of the Democratic political establishment to step in and file to take Cohen's place, realistically. (And even then, 220,000 of us voted for Granny D against Gregg.) And then vanished into oblivion, with nothing more than a censure, and no serious subsequent legal investigation into his background, or none that was ever made public. "Let Bygones be bygones, we're all civilized here in Concord" - and meanwhile both our Senators are Company men, loyal and unquestioning flacks of the Majority Party, the opposition quietly put down just as surely as the great sums of money and voter suppression that has been used to turn and Texas and Louisiana and other states red, or growing magenta, and keep down the vote of the poor.
Their One-Partei Nation-State's hold on NH is thus proven by their fears and resistance to be not strong, beyond the narrow loss of it in the presidental election, and they know it, and are afraid - afraid enough to cheat and also to steal, afraid enough to beg for our pity. We are not Florida, we are not Ohio, we are few in number and thus have little power - but that makes it more difficult to control us, and our senators are equal in number to any other state of the Union.
They are both Owned Men, and so there is no earthly hope of shaking their consciences. But they can be made afraid, of losing what they hold dear.
It may be too late already, I do know that, to save the Republic.
We cannot count on our Democratic leadership [sic] here - they are weak, appeasing, head-in-sanders, save for Lynch who is an outsider; they did not pursue Jesse Burchfield with the wrath of an avenging angel, and root out his associates and find out why he picked upon Burt Cohen, and what his former political alignments and manchi are. After the first time that the regional GOP stole a NH election, and was caught (but got away with it anyway), the head of the party apologized for accusing the GOP of doing again what they were under criminal investigation for doing the last time.
There is no hope for us in them. And none, I think, in the majority of the Sen. Joseph Harrison Paines in the Beltway, whatever part of the country they come from. We, the people, must reform this union of ours into something much less imperfect, or else we shall all hang singly at the doing of our Tories, our Junkers, our landed aristocracy and their pawns and lackeys, and in short order.
Al Gore saved 270 lives, with his own will and main strength - and wealth. We have one political leader who is proven to be, now, in this day and hour, as physically and morally brave and resourceful as three college boys from Texas, who did not let the laughter of their classmates or their own fear for their lives, deter them from helping to save 7 lives directly and who knows how many by the supplies they brought and the witness they bore, only heaven can tell. --But who will save the Senate and People of Rome? It must be us, the hoi polloi - for only our agitation, our keeping the story alive in the face of our puppet president's prancing and the supine, Owned media feeding this engorged lie, is what made the national news finally report what local southern newspapers were reporting, that act of true, genuine, unsynthetic heroism, one small rescue in the storm.
If we are sufficiently strong in voice, then Concord must hear us and they cannot help but voice their concerns at this rising chorus to those higher in their organization and the webs of power. It doesn't always have to roll downhill.
I have talked with pride and humility about the passion and commitment to real democracy that I have seen in NH, how the lines at the polls when the door opened last November were so long at my less-prosperous ward in this city, filled with people in oily coveralls and hospital workers' smocks waiting in line to vote, and to register to vote, before going to work, and how this was repeated all over the state, with poll workers working overtime to register voters of all skin colors and accents as efficiently as possible, making up photocopied ballots when they ran out of the original ones, staying until everyone who wished to had the chance to participate. About how the only thing that can permanently lose you your vote - these days - in this state, is to try to take away someone else's right to vote.
Of how we here in the hinterlands of New England don't believe in messing too much with each other's lives, but do believe in the rights of all people, enough to defend them, when we can be shaken out of our obliviousness and own troubles. Of how we are more independent than aligned with any party, and on a local level throw out with a vengeance politicians regardless of whose "side" they are supposedly one when they betray us before our eyes, like the unlamented Governor Benson, where the servile Majority Party daily newspaper cannot cover it up as they do the sins of commission and ommission committed in far away Washington.
Of how there are only a little over a million of us, of all ages, and how while that makes it a little harder to decieve us in re the character of individuals living here, it has also made it easier for greedy carpetbagging strangers to change the composition of counties and the way that they vote, and how nevertheless we do not have and do not go for gerrymandering, and do what we can to make sure that anyone who wants to and meets the qualifications of age and residence can do so - except when the Majority Party interferes by intimidating students and disrupting the firefighter volunteers' phone banks to give rides to the carless.
And I will say this: a rising tide yes lifts all boats, whether they wish it or not, in the Primary World - and sometimes flings them into the houses of plutocrats or strands them upside down right on the manicured lawns in Barbados and Bahama as well as the humble towns of fishermen. What good did our predecessors in Britain no less than in North America who for so many decades resisted the Riot Act originally expect to accomplish, by showing their displeasure and attempting to explain why to leaders who didn't want their dinners disturbed by restless underlings, who thought that they could make the problems they were refusing to fix go away by ignoring them, or by telling the protestors to go away and shut up or else they'd shoot them, here and on the other side of the Atlantic?
What good did they accomplish, since it came to the American War anyway, with leaders on both sides unwilling to compromise, and those who held the lion's share of power, eager to punish, invade, and destroy against the pleadings of a few?
--Well, it woke up people in Britain who otherwise would have shrugged it off as a few treasonous Jacobites and French-loving England-haters, that yes, your leaders do not care about you at all, they will crush you and throw you away too, no matter how calm and reasonable and how legitimate your issues our - it won sympathy that pushed all along for an end to the War, and protests, in England - it started something that yes, "pushed" the government to shoot universal suffragists demanding an end to government policies that ate up the poor to feed the rich, at Peterloo, and ultimately helped break the back of plutocracy in Britain, though not to kill it altogether, and set examples for people in Ireland and Germany and elsewhere in the Continent to work for, and in the rest of the Americas, whom we have betrayed so many times.
But I don't want it to come to a shooting war with our government again, small scale or large.
I would rather make a fool of myself by standing up for what I believe in, with the only weapon I have, which is words, and endeavor to persuade enough of us to Say No to compel our elected representatives to either represent or get out of the way, and let us fix that which they have broken through greed or failure to oppose the greedy and the evil ideallists.
We are refighting the battles of the 18th century, with computers and laser printers and the internet instead of portable lead-type presses, and audio and video, against the larger government-sponsored media just as then, and they have tasers and machine guns instead of just truncheons and muskets now, and there is electricity and running water and central heat in the fortresses and dungeons they control.
Nothing else has changed.
This is not a time for fearing Rules-following and most of all, the embarrassment of being thought Chaotic, i.e. Hippies, filled with embarrassing and uncool unhip emotionality. Lawful Good has stood by aghast and helpless and unwilling to act, and allowed untold deaths, and will allow half-a-million people who are not of the Church of Tashlan to be displaced and their homeland given over to the loyal subjects of the Hegemony, with feeble protests tied up in Comittee, again, as always and victory going to the Hegemony, the way things are going. This is precedent: there is no reason to expect, for any reasonable person, that it will not happen this way again. Only an irrational fool would expect that miraculously the same circumstances, the same influences, the same persons and places, to yield a different result - without a new force inserted into the dynamic to change the trajectory.
Tomorrow, in Washington, a State-Sponsored Party Rally of Militarism and synthetic, mass-produced "patriotic" pseudo-Folk music will take place, mostly forbidden to the media, despite weeks of protests from New Yorkers regarding its inappropriateness - despite the destruction of an entire ancient city on our soil less than a fortnight ago and the misery of the survivors - to celebrate the victory that was handed them by their own actions and our inaction as a people, on this day in September four years ago.
And here, in one of the Original Thirteen, at the quiet sleepy heart of state government, I will be holding my own vigil, rain or shine, defending the First Amendment, or Waking it, whichever it will be to be proven - and if they take me away, then they take me away, and we know what they will go on to do. The torch is nonetheless thrown, catch it who may.
--See you, if you're there.
The rest of you - around the country, around the world - there is no reason why you cannot demostrate before your place of government, or the representatives of ours. Stand peaceably before your capitol building, your city hall, your local US embassy or consulate. Pass out nothing more inflammatory than a handbill showing the First Amendment on one side, and the Declaration of Independence on the other: We hold these truths to be self-evident...
First they came for the rights of the atheists and the Pagans and the Muslims and the heretics and the agnostics, and I did not speak up because I was not an atheist or a Pagan or a Muslim, and I didn't know that I knew any either, and they were not actively persecuting heretics and agnostics just then, nor requiring that all attend church and pray for the ruling family in express words;
Then they came for the freedom of speech and abridged it, and I did not speak up because I didn't miss it anyway, never having used it, because I didn't care much for demonstrations myself;
Then they came for the freedom of the press, and I didn't even notice, being too absorbed in my own problems and recreations to notice the discrepancies or disprove the lies;
Then they came with the Patriot Act for the freedom to read and write privately what one wished without fear of spies and informers, and I did not speak up because I did not wish to be thought a traitor or a coward or a fool;
And then they came again for the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and took it away with laws and rules and Free Speech Zones, this time;
And when I finally realized that this was intolerable and wanted at last to petition for a redress of grievances, it was too late, and there was no way left for me to speak up--
--credit to Pastor Martin Niemoeller and flister Crazy Soph