"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.
http://burldunn.com

"the Southern Baptist Convention is America's Taliban"

Anyone out there who might be looking for a new blog from me - I apoligize - I WILL jump back on it soon. In the mean time I'll share a quote with you that I will incorporate into a future blog.

Here is a quote from an article by Peter H. Stone on Huffington Post: I'll bold face the words that, I say, prove that the Southern Baptists are trying to lead us into a theocracy and that most Christians don't even TRY to follow the teachings of Jesus.

Richard Land, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, an arm of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, told The Huffington Post that he believes evangelical concerns about Obama administration policies will allow conservative religious voters to "overlook any lingering reservations about [Mitt] Romney's Mormonism." The Commission itself is spending a few hundred thousand dollars to promote a nonpartisan voter registration and education drive that will compare the platforms of the two parties on numerous key issues.

Land also predicted that Romney’s recent trip to Israel would give him a boost with evangelicals and agreed with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee's controversial comments that “cultural” factors were important in explaining the economic success of Israel compared with the Palestinians. The statement, he said, showed that Romney "was sympathetic to the social conservative world view.”

On the domestic front, Land predicted that many evangelicals and social conservatives would "want to bury Obamacare in a lead coffin with a stake through its heart and cover its grave with garlic," calling the law, "a codification and personification of pro-abortion policies."

To defeat Obama in the state, Let Freedom Ring also is counting on a big hand from Sam Rohrer, an 18-year veteran of the state legislature and a former head of the Pennsylvania chapter of Americans for Prosperity. Rohrer told Huffington Post that since joining the group last month he’s been “building the network and encouraging pastors to be more bold."

"As a nation we’re in trouble and until we reach out to God rather than government we’ll be in trouble," he said.

There, now it is a blog. A message from the American Taliban. We will lose separation of church and state if we don't speak out OURSELVES and elect the right people. Obama must win! He's our only chance of gaining time to organize and take back America from gun nuts and God nuts.

"about jobs, sunlight, and reelecting Obama"

I grew up in an America that had a place, a job for everyone, regardless of intelligence. I traveled from town to town and often began my first day in a new city by showing up at Manpower, or something like it, where you lined up and got sent for a day or a week to some warehouse or plant that needed a little extra help. The first time I showed up at Manpower and was told one must have an address, a phone, and a car in order just to apply was a shock to me. The first time I went to downtown Seattle for a cheap hotel and found the city "gentrified" beyond my pocketbook was a surprise.

So, as Congress took our tax dollars and used some to finance the stimulus packages, we only hear of "abuses" of the Obama administration. But the job flight from America began as far back as the eighties and much of it was financed by us, the job losers. We pay our share of taxes, the super-rich people and corporations don't. Period.

We've been lied to and our money has been stolen. So, some nuts join militias, some join nutty churches, many of the young just don't want to hear about politics - all these people are in denial. Denial of the fact that our government, as George Carlin so famously said, "... is a club, and you ain't in it." Federal education plans create jobs for top level advisors, administrators, and "administrative fees" that states and schools skim off before a single dime gets to the teacher or student. We admire ALL veterans (many from afar), yet do not protest the misuse of their lives and limbs in needless wars.

I believe the only answer to all these problems is sunlight. I want to know where every f...... dollar goes. If, all of a sudden, every government expenditure was exposed, it would overwhelm us, but in small groups and individually, we could figure it out. My old school district voted on "voucher number 111, for general student services" - things with no real meaning, and this is just a local school district. Secrecy is our enemy. Audit the Fed! Expose exactly how much money is spent on the CIA + the NSA + "Homeland Security" + all the secret-holding bodies in our government and military! Expose it and make them explain how all those trillions of dollars did not stop 9/11!

Make every millionaire professional team owner PAY for their own damn stadiums! Stop the use of eminent domain for private gain! No more "pay to play" politics! No more private jails! No more locking up of non-violent offenders who committed no crime against people or property! Let's wake up! So we thought Obama would do all this for us in one term and now we're disappointed. Waaaah. Let's grow up and take back America! For starters one must decide which party has done the most harm and which party has the ONLY members in Congress with any sense of fairness and justice at all! Sure, now, it's the Republicans who dreamed up this mess and it's yellow-dog Democrats who went along, but there's only one way out. We must reelect Obama. We must deny the Republicans. Then, we can work on the future - a future that includes well-paid professional teachers in public schools, degrees that mean something beside massive debt incurred, jobs in America - such an overflow of jobs that a person can walk into a city and at least be cleaning floors or unloading trucks the next day!

Unfortunately, POLITICS is the only way we have to cause change. And politics is not fun, it's not partying, damn it, it's a party. And Democrats from Obama down are the only hope for now. We've still got a lot of work to do after Obama. I'd like to look back some day and say, "He was a great centerist president who ran two Republican wars, and, thank God, our last centerist president."