For Once, Let’s Question Authority

Major Nadal Malik Hasan was born in the state of Virginia, but he was of Palestinian descent.  His parents were immigrants and he was a Muslim.

Before all the conspiracy folks get started and revenge plots get hatched, I wanted to discuss the fact that the United States Army may be at fault in this scenario.  Why?  Major Hasan was given a commission by the Congress of the United States as an officer.  Not only that, but he was also given the responsibility as a Doctor of Psychiatry to counsel PTSD “survivors” coming back from war in the Middle East.  If one adds all these ingredients together, then one can begin to see why the officials in charge should be questioned and perhaps the policy of the military should be changed to prevent such disasters in the future.

Not all governments do things the way the United States does.  The British, for example, did not send ethnic Jews in the military to fight in the Palestinian uprising in 1948 because they would be forced to kill their own kind.  This is called “respect for ethnic identity.”  Why would the U. S. send a man with roots in Muslim culture to a theater of war against his own people?

In addition, Major Hasan was a specialist in counseling PTSD soldiers who came home from that war.  He had to use drugs and hypnosis to allow these soldiers to “confess” the horrendous acts they committed, often against women and children, and this all must have worked on the Major’s subconscious.  It is reported that he argued regularly with fellow officers about how we should not be in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Shouldn’t this have been a “red flag” to his superiors that this doctor was not processing information correctly?  No, he received his orders, and he was all set for deployment to this “nightmare” of his mind.  This seems completely ironic to me.

Instead of looking for conspiracies and terrorist cells, maybe we should be investigating the policies of the Army.  Look at all the suicides coming out of these wars.  Dr. Hasan had to face these kids every day and listen to their stories of killings and mayhem.  There has been no investigation of why and how men in battle have committed acts of atrocity on Muslims.  Even though we know there were memos circulated in the Bush Administration to the effect of giving combat military all kinds of “torture and search and destroy discretion,” not one member of congress has begun a hearing on why this happened and if “free fire zones” are still permitted in Iraq and Afghanistan and if soldiers are being forced to kill civilians by their superiors.

If Dr. Hasan lives, I hope his confession will shed some light on this problem.  Perhaps leaders will finally see that ethnic identify goes much deeper than patriotic fervor and that we should not be forcing human beings to go against their own moral principles for the sake of blood, glory and oil..

More People Die from Prescription Drugs than from Car Accidents

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently reported that people are “accidentally” dying from drug overdoses more often than by car accidents.  If I can wrap my small mind around this properly, this means that even with the new technological distractions of cell phones and texting in the cars, drugs are still getting the upper hand on the human species.  Why?  Simply put, people are trying to turn their brains off (or, at least minimize the pain), so they “mix and match” a wide variety of totally legal drugs.

The most monstrous effect, of course, is that the person who dies from this overdose was simply trying to “ease the pain” of 2K life.  This is a life where 1% of the wealthiest Americans control over 95% of all the wealth (and the folks who foolishly make it for them).  Michael Moore’s latest documentary, and his best, Capitalism:  A Love Story shows just how depressing it has gotten in this sorry country of ours.  Can you imagine if 32,000 people died of some virus in a year?  There would be all hell breaking loose trying to provide some vaccine to stem the “world pandemic.”  However, just because people are “buying” their drugs legally and then killing themselves, everything’s just right as rain.  Could it be that the drug manufacturers are part of the one percent of the wealthiest?  That’s right!  With nearly seven million people in America who abuse prescription drugs (Michael Jackson included), you simply add the 20 million practicing alcoholics and you have a really sick society on your hands.

Watch TV today and you will see a multitude of pain medication ads.  Many doctors are literally on these drug companies’ payroll, and if/when you ask for this drug, they are more than happy to prescribe it for you!  In fact, they’ll get a kick-back that’s totally legal and hassle-free.  Pay attention to those long “disclaimers” in the ad.  They are there to protect the doctor and the drug company for when you overdose and don’t die but decide to sue them instead.

So, don’t believe that the evil “druggies” are your pot-smoking teens and gang-banging ghetto types.  No, they are your next-door neighbor, who’s a lawyer, a housewife, a teacher and a policeman.  Their numbers are increasing every day because it’s all legal, it’s all condoned by the capitalist system, and nobody’s doing anything to address the problem because, as Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Two Released from North Korea, but What about the 30,000 in the U.S.?

Despite the chance for humor on the Daily Show, as we see Bill Clinton escorting two young Asian reporters back to the United States from North Korea, there are serious issues that aren’t being addressed right here at home.  Isn’t North Korea supposed to be the bad guy?  Well, in case you didn’t know, our Homeland Security incarceration facilities house over 30,000 people who were trying to escape countries like North Korea to come to what they thought was the “land of the free.”

However, ever since the establishment of the Patriot Act and the implementation of Homeland Security, the rights of people have been disappearing each day.  Did you read the report by Amnesty International?  This report gives specific cases of keeping immigrants incarcerated without a trial and without bail for up to four years!  Illegal immigrants are no longer being deported, they are being thrown in jail–at taxpayers’ expense.

I think we should “clean our own house” before we make such a big deal about two journalists who were admittedly in a country illegally.  If Al Gore and Bill Clinton spent as much effort freeing immigrants to this country who just wanted “freedom,” then perhaps our country would be looked upon more favorably by the world community.  Right now, all we seem to be doing is invading countries, taking pot shots with killer drones and arresting anybody who tries to enter this country to seek refuge.  That doesn’t sound like the “land of the free” to me.

The Diagnosis: Dire

Okay, I’m going to give my “last gasp” lecture on why we should have a single payer health care system or face dire consequences in the near fture.  I am going to use logic in my argument, so I hope it does not offend my American audience.  We seem to have lost our ability to reason when it comes to emotional issues like health care for human beings, due to the naked truth that we, as a country, seem to philosophically stand on the idea that public health care should not be “public,” that is, government-run, and that health care is a privilege not a right.

I believe health care should be a right because, quite literally, bad health care affects us all.  For example, what if, God forbid, we were to experience an outbreak of mammoth proportions that was killing millions of people?  With our present health care system, the government control over how and when any kind of vaccine, cure, or large-scale ability to assist the public in such a disaster is almost nil.  That’s because “big government” has become an anathema in this country.  Nobody trusts “gubment,” as Ronnie Ray-gun used to call it.  Well, guess what?  Microbes, bacteria and viruses don’t care which health care system we have.  However, they are able to spread and kill much easier if we are separated and into our own money-making schemes.  I hate to tell all of you, but that’s just the way our so-called health care is today:  separate, money-making schemers who only care about where they get their money and not about if people are healthy and “cared for.”

With socialized medicine (there, I’ve said it!), any national epidemic could be much more easily coordinated and treated because we would all be working “on the same page,” so to speak.  Government control (hey, I was in the military, and my father, a Pearl Harbor survivor, worked for the Fed for 30 years) gives one the ability to keep a consistent supply system and focus on health care, not health profit.  For example, China (even with their human rights violations) was able to assist its earthquake victims much faster than, say, California (my home state) would be able to.  God forbid that we in California get the “Big One” any time soon!  I can see millions of people dead in our California cities because of the screwed-up priorities in Sacramento.

So, government control provides the much-needed focus and consistency that our present “profit-centered” system does not.  How can Obama and other congressmen want to slip a “little government plan” into the mix of other profit-making insurance company plans to choose from?  My liberal friends think people will “rush to join the public plan.”  Well, get a clue!  If we don’t all support a major public, socialized plan at the outset, no kind of teenie-tiny public plan will ever work!  Why?  Let me give you a little analogy.  Let’s say I’m a country doctor who runs a clinic in a small American town.  If a “big profit-making medical hospital” comes to my town, all they have to do is use their insurance company friends and pharmaceutical company buddies to lower their costs to patients long enough to run me out of business (kind of like what Wal-Mart has done in the merchandizing business).  Then, when I have either joined their “cause” or moved out of town, guess what?  The prices will creep back up to where they’re again making their outlandish profits at the public’s expense.

In America, right now, it’s the public hospitals and emrgency treatment centers, like Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital in Los Angeles, that are getting shut down because they can’t make enough money to serve the “poor” clientele.  The big profit hospitals, however, just keep getting bigger and richer, however, at the public’s expense!

The costs will keep rising, we’ll keep spending on war, and our health will keep getting worse, not better, unless we all get on the same page for once in our lives.  Oh.  I suppose we all go to the same grave, so what’s the difference?  Pay now or pay with your life!  That’s right.  I’d pay the taxes of Sweden if I thought we could get what they have.

Change as Future Shock

Prez Obama, when asked about investigating former President of Vice, Dick Cheney’s possible illegal and top secret campaign to “send out hit squads of CIA to execute Al Qaeda operatives” (he never even told Congress about it), recently said,”We should look forward and not backward.”  This statement reminded me of one of the best non-fiction books I ever read, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler (written in the 1970s).  Actually, his old book really explains what our politicians have learned to sell us all the time now, and Obama is also the ”high priest” (perhaps in more ways than intellectual) of this kind of Tofflerian “change”:

“‘The future as a way of life’, which argued that change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people. We coined the phrase ‘future shock’ as an analogy to the concept of culture shock. With future shock you stay in one place but your own culture changes so rapidly that it has the same disorienting effect as going to another culture”

In other words, as long as we stay “shocked” by always looking for futuristic “changes,” then politicians can have their way with us.  It’s when we do what Santayana proscribed and “learn from our past mistakes” that we begin to get in the politicians’ think tanks and begin to create a little real history of our own!

 

 

Letter from Jacko

Dear Michael,

Just call me Jacko.  Why?  You could have remembered me had you received this letter before you died.  Maybe if I had written this before that day you might not have died.  That’s what’s strange about our lives, isn’t it?  We can never know what would have happened had such and such gone differently.  We can only know what it’s like now, from moment to moment; endlessly affecting the present is all we can hope to ever do.

That first day I met you I knew you were an easy little chicken.  You came into the room at the Kingdom Hall assembly of our Lord God Jehovah on that night, and I knew I had to follow you.  You spoke to our minister in quiet, passionate tones.  Your eyes were wide, and you were clearly disturbed about something.  I later found out your father, Joe, had held you up-side-down again and beat you with his belt because you didn’t hit the right note.  I followed you back to your hotel room, and watched you, as you walked around the lobby.  You were ten years old then.  Chickens like you are ready at this age.  I knew it, and you knew it, but you first needed to be released from the bondage of your adult cage.  Adults had hurt you, and I was going to release you to fly with me off to Never Never Land.

I found out that first meeting that your mother was a Jehovah’s Witness.  That’s why you came to our assembly.  She had always taken you kids to Kingdom Hall when Joe was on another toot around town, chasing skirts, drinking and bragging about how famous he was going to be because of his kids.  I told you I was also a Witness, and I hated the war in Vietnam, and I was a completely religious pacifist and lover of animals.  Michael, now that you’re gone, I can tell you.  I was grooming you for your fate and your future as one of us.  We, who are most often misunderstood by the society that breeds us, are lovers of the man-child, the holy ones and old souls who have been given pain in this life so they can suffer it, learn to enjoy it, and, ultimately, we smile thorough it all.  Remember how I told you about how I was from Never Never Land?  I was one of Peter’s Lost Boys.  I was Jacko, the kid who could trip Captain Hook with his cape, wrestle the crocodile and steal time from him, and whisper to Wendy the stories that she would have never read to us had we been merely normal boys.  No, I told you that first night, we were never going to be plain, old normal lost boys.  We were special.

I told you I would take you to Never Land if you hired me to be your assistant.  We could do such wonderful things together while your brothers and father were whoring it up in the hotel rooms after concerts.  We would visit the local petting zoos and other animal attractions.  We would ride the carrousels, the Ferris Wheels, the go-carts, the wonderful, circularly exciting amusements of the flesh outside our insides.  Oh, but it was the inside of you that I was really after.  I think you knew it too, because you did get Joe to hire me, and I traveled with you on your world tours.  I watched you sing and dance, “like a trained monkey,” I told you later, and you would laugh.  You loved to be teased.  You were such a little chicken.

. . . to be continued