"We are running out of chances..."

Here I am at the age of 22 in 1972. The location is Auke Bay, outside of Juneau, Alaska. I was not drafted and had I been I don't know what I would have done, probably gone to Canada. While still in high school I began reading about Viet Nam and by the time I was 18 I could hold my own in a debate about the uselessness of that war. I still believed that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy.
Looking back, I remember, around the age of 12 and 13, seeing the news footage of Martin Luther King, the marches, the dogs snapping at little black children, the fire hoses ...
I was confused about how to express myself politically, except to vote. I was put off by the cussing and hatred of much of the antiwar movement. I still thought a lot about Christ and believed that, if I were a true Christian, I would have to go to jail rather than Viet Nam, because, then, as now, I believe the red letters of the New Testament are literally true. Jesus said turn the other cheek; I believed he was a complete pacifist and, if one followed Him truly, one would never fight, period.
The "Praise Jesus" thing, so common today, was alien to me. Back in the 50s and 60s, at Trinity Baptist Church in Amarillo, Texas we didn't jump, shout, or even raise our hands over our heads, but we sure did sing! People like Pat Robertson and all the others who make such a show out of faith strike me as phony.
Maybe this is a silly little blog, but I'm introducing myself to the few people who read it.
I believed that James Earl Ray killed Martin and Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby. But I was quite troubled by all the killing. I was troubled by the 1968 Chicago Convention. I graduated high school in '68 and went out into a troubled country, playing my guitar for hours each day, finding day labor in every town I passed through.
I don't trust people who jump too quickly to conspiracy theories, who don't read and think a lot about issues before coming to a conclusion. I don't like Alex Jones any more than I do Rush Limbaugh.
But one thing that came to my mind on 9/11 was all the news stories I had seen in the 60s about Palestinian hijackers taking planes to Cuba. And, I think, there is NO EXCUSE for what happened on 9/11. None. Common sense would have dictated the locking of airplane cabin doors decades before - I don't want to hear any of the excuses.
Now, I believe our government was actively involved in the murder of the Kennedy brothers and Martin. There was a coup in November, 1963. We, as a nation have gone too long with our heads in the sand, allowing psychopaths to bluff us into believing that we needed to build and build our military no matter what the costs to Americans and American soldiers. Even at the end of WWII, when no one could have defeated us, we ignored the warnings of President Eisenhower about the Military/Industrial Complex. The press and the people do not even mention cutting back on needless wars and needless spending as one answer to the debt crisis!
That's why I admire Ron Paul so much, for calmly and rationally discussing that, if we left other countries alone, maybe they'd leave us alone. Well, Congressman Paul can't win in November. The next president will be either a Republican or Obama and there is only one sane choice between those two - Obama. If we elect him and give him a democratic majority in both houses there is hope that we can wake up from this deadly dream of constant war.
So don't give up. Register and vote. Don't bother trying to change the brainwashed minds of half of America. Just outvote them!
Here is a song I wrote back in my hippie days. I think now it expresses a kind of Jeffersonian dream. It's called Concrete and Stone.
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