I spent, perhaps, two minutes of face to face contact with Cindy, managed to get a snapshot of me kissing her on her cheek, and I was tailed out of Crawford by a group of males in a light green Ford Expedition.
Not that overexposure to right-wingnut "thought" processes make a person paranoid, or anything.
I did manage to get one shot of Cindy under the August 9th rainbow, which actually became a double rainbow shortly thereafter, but I was under alot of time pressure to get back to my home 3.5 hours away.
Sometimes that's all you can give -- a hug, a moment of warmth, and some office supplies from BigLots. But I left Crawford that day on top of the world for not only had Cindy remembered our long online letters to one another, she referred to me as her, "guru."
It took me a few days to recover from that comment. Whoa. Wait a minute, lady. I was just offering support and encouragement for ways to navigate the grief process based on my own experiences...guru?
Yup. Gee, U are U.
I played a role in all this enfoldment at Crawford and the rolling out of the anti-war movement? Hmmm. What about Ann Wright? She's running the whole show, apparently, and she's got one helluva lot more on her resume than this former IT Manager turned Advertising Man turned Cable Guy turned Master's candidate in Communications. No matter how I slice it, though, I come up broker than broke in every incarnation. No movement starting here unless I can scrape up enough cash to buy a bran muffin.
But I don't think I'd trade my experiences over the past three years, some of which Cindy knows (may even recall) and that I won't share here, for the person I am today.
To come from a wholely arrogant and angry upbringing, I came to Texas for a job in educational testing. Anyone who knows that business knows that the people who work in it bust their asses for peanuts, yet still have to put up with the kind of academic culture that infuriates a working class persona. Not that I have one of those, mind you. Okay, I admit it. I can string words together fairly well, but I grew up slinging petroleum in a gasoline station-slash-repair shop. I thought being an IT worker in educational testing was a step up from where I was coming from, oh great son of greasy fingernails and busted knuckles basted in kerosine and cleaning solvent.
In the past three years since I was laid off from my position as a manager of seven IT senior Programmer/Analysts, I have been on food stamps. I have been on public health assistance. I have been on, and exhausted, my unemployment benefits. I have seen my dead grandchild. I have held my wife wailing over the loss of one of her twin sons in a Fort Worth car accident. I have watched my wife go crazy and leave our home, file for divorce, humiliate me in public, only to return home two months later. I have gone from being known as an excellent employee to being an average producer. I have had terrible bosses who were clearly trying to get me to quit so that they could siphon in someone younger and more likely to buy their freeze-dried sales pitches that no one wanted to waste water on after the first month. I have been living paycheck to paycheck for three straight years.
I have a genius IQ (on a good day), a 3.76 GPA and have a college degree from the University of San Francisco (go Dons!). The past three years of my life were not on my plan for the greater salvation of the western world. My plan involved alot of fishing, water skiiing, snow skiing and maybe some shaving cream commercials in between trysts with women young enough to be my daughter.
God has His own plans for me and let's me know what He thinks of mine, on occasion, as young women pass me by in the grocery store without so much as a glance, or I cut the hell out of my face with a safety razor designed for use by Stevie Wonder.
The day after I was laid off my wife called over a doctor friend of our's to secretly remove my Glock 20 from the house. And the 200 rounds of ammo I had purchased after 9/11/2001. She'd never seen me in crying jags before. The depth of my depression and sense of hopelessness scared her mightily. I was too numb to care.
I'd always been a, "you, first," kinda guy. By that I mean, "sure, I'm humiliated enough to want to die, but, you, first." The intense feelings of inadequacy, uncertainty and paranoia overwhelmed me as never before. I realized I had no one else to blame but myself. I saw the handwriting on the wall. I could have responded, but I just couldn't do the job anymore. What they were doing was insane and there was no hope that it would ever get any better staying on the path they were choosing for the company I was working for. I've seen this movie before, any number of times: organizational renewal, fifth symphony, opus five, tenth movement. But I was only hearing madrigal music and seeing the usual clowns in funny suits. The only thing I knew how to do in that situation was just hold on and not budge an inch.
Well, obviously, that didn't exactly work out as I had planned. It's one thing to play a key role in eliminating a five million dollar late software penalty expense in less than twelve months. It's another to remove the excuses a Senior VP had for why this productivity hadn't occurred during the two years since I had left and he had been given the department. The same senior VP who had just taken out our COO on a trip back from England.
I was dead before his plane hit the tarmack and didn't know it. Or, perhaps I did, and just let it happen. I dunno. I just know that being a manager AND trying to bring up the software for my own major statewide educational testing project was too much for a first time manager to bite off. The neck pain wasn't from unchecked stress so much as it was from me squeezing my shoulders, arms outstretched, and saying, "hunh?"
Or, perhaps, it was my fixation with the internet that had them all a twitter. I'd been watching the present band of scumbags since I caught a CNN broadcast where George Senior was telling juniors assembled staff, "well, he's not the most qualified candidate out there, but...." And then the story just evaporated off of the wires. Gone. Poof! I'd never seen anything like that before.
All during the run-up to the 2004 election Cindy and I shared letters back and forth about matters of life and death, war and peace. After several rounds of letters, I felt comfortable sharing my links with her and offered her my support regardless of what she would come to believe. I let her know that some of the stuff wasn't exactly supportable in a court of law, but the pattern and direction of the evidence was unmistakeable. The government of the US had been usurped by a neoconservative junta and her son -- her whole family -- had been victimized by a policy that should have been DOA on Election Night 2000.
Then I started bitching to Cindy -- and whoever else would listen because, by now, I was becoming a broken record -- that it made no sense to protest the present administration inside of a bonafide blue state because it was a waste of resources. The Californians needed to start boarding busses and getting their tails here to Texas where red-state resources could be expended, unquestionable courage could be displayed and where Texas hospitality (from both sides of the aisle) could be demonstrated.
It has never been the case that Texans are as unsalvageably partisan and corrupt as the carpetbagging Bush Administration; Texans formed a line over a mile long to donate their blood on the day of 9/11/2001. Texans sent their firefighters to NYC to help out without a thought to their own safety or health. Generosity, bravery, team-orientation and compassion for one's neighbors is what defines the heart of a true Texan. The crap on display in Crawford and Washington DC is all about the deliberate manufacture of misery for fun and profit.
That's it. That's my crime. I am the vast left wing conspiracy behind Cindy Sheehan. Several hundred pings and attacks from Brown-Shirt Techno-jerks later, and I am still writing my heart out to anyone who cares to hear.
I am glad that Cindy was listening, but I am sorry for the reason why. Everyone is. If the 58,000 brave men and women who perished in Viet Nam teach us nothing, it should teach us just how expensive the gift of wisdom can be.
As much as I would like to blame George Bush, the Bush Family and the entire neoconservative cabal for the mess we are presently in, there is more than enough blame to go around. For every bear with a sore arse there was a bear who first assumed the position.
In the soil where the Neocons hope to extract even more of the blood of their dead relatives, they may yet rise to suck the hope of a united humanity out of the air. They might yet convince all of us of the reality of their interpretation of a book written hundreds of years ago by a political prisoner driven mad while locked in a jail cell -- provided they can make a buck on it.
Whether they like it or not, everyone bleeds the same stardust. What this simple fact means is obvious to a child, but escapes the conscious awareness of the average adult.
The nice thing about Truth is It doesn't require our understanding for It to be what It is.
The unfortunate thing about Truth is that It doesn't require the cooperation of the human species in order for It to continue in Being.
There are some perfectly acceptable cockroaches who will readily improvise, adapt and overcome any number of obstacles left by the husk of a humanity wasted by madness.
Perhaps this was what has always been meant by the phrase, "the meek shall inherit the Earth." Cockroaches seem to be better at meekness than some televangelists of late.
