The CEOs/CFOs who pirated their companies without a guilty conscience and no one is making them return their ill-gotten gains to the companies and their employees and laid-off workers;
The actions of President Bush and his henchwomen and men who are doing everything in their regulatory power to backflip the United States into pre-1960s environmentalism —namely, the lack thereof;
Monsanto —for making the planet and all its inhabitants their guinea pigs to test the effects of genetically-modified foods and for winning an absolutely unjust verdict in a lawsuit brought by a Canadian farmer, because his crops showed up with Monsanto's genetic modification even though he never purchased Monsanto seed, and he sued it for contaminating his crops. So the wind blows.
One in 32 Americans in prison: now is that a statistic to be proud of? The much-vaunted drug war and the incredibly stupid laws that treat illegal drug users as criminals instead of as people in need of health care (physical and mental) and spirit care have created an equally incredible prison industry in the United States, which now very understaffed. We non-imprisoned taxpayers support every inch of them and every body within.
The drug war which we take to other countries by spraying health-impairing defoliant on indigenous people and the ground they live on, all because we haven't the will to let go of arcane illegalities and make of these drugs as we have of alcohol and prescription drugs.
Just heard that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has chosen to audit restaurant waitstaff for mis-representing their tip income; now, there's a high-tax potential! God forbid that the agents actually go after people who make millions and hide it.
Here we are at the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What to say? We have knee-jerk patriots galore who threaten death to anyone who doesn't fall into goose-step with them. We have peace marches with family members who lost loved ones in the attacks.
We have Attorney General Ashcroft unleashed! God help us if we Americans hope to retain any civil liberties under his regime. Now that is a regime change that I would support. And I am damned sorry that the U.S. Senate confirmed his nomination a year and a half ago.
We have the generals saying whoa on attacking Iraq, and we have the VP and Prez who have never been in battle pushing for sending tens of thousands of troops into outright war. I think Bush and Cheney would like to be dictators of the world, and I keep praying that their leadership lasts for only 28 months more and hope that we as a country and a world survive their leadership.
Well, my granddaughter and I adore each other and my new grandson has a great big smile when we play.
But with people talking about actually using nuclear weapons, and arms dealers around the world, and especially in the United States, buying and selling armaments at record pace — what will be the world to come?
I pray that we come through without a nuclear holocaust. No country has the right to do that to any other.
I read that it was due to pressure from the corporations, which have made India their tech-support centers for the world, which caused India to retreat from its heavy nuclear threat against Pakistan.
Maybe globalization will have one benefit: it will make no sense to nuke the buyers of the goods you make nor will it make sense to nuke the makers of the goods you buy.
There really is no "safe" place, unless we make the whole world a safe place. And I don't believe that overt bombing of other countries to effect regime changes (nor the more-usual American covert way) makes it so, particularly since such changes are generally geared to benefit American-based industries.
This morning the pastor of the church I attend spoke again and again of loving your neighbor as yourself, of putting on Christ (this is a Christian church, after all, but it works for other faiths with leaders who also highly esteemed compassion).
But how do you get people to stop hating the other? How do you get people to accept the inherent rights of the other as equal to all the inherent rights that the first enjoy?
We have seen that when young people of different faiths or backgrounds are brought together and shown that their differences are not really that different, they develop friendships.
In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "South Pacific" there is the song which answers that, and the lyric is "you've got to be carefully taught." We teach love and we teach hate…all over this world…in varying degrees.
What will you do to teach love today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day…?