City Government-As Annoying as the Rest

I believe that we, the people, should organize and make life better for all, I really do. And I believe that government should be that voice and power, really!

But, jeez, these people in no way represent me, or my fellow Americans. They seem to exist only to funnel money to construction companies and agents of repression.

Thus, my letter to the editor-

To the Editor,

Apparently our city government is incapable of determining cause and effect and foreseeing the consequences of their actions. But shouldn't the Carbondale Times make the obvious connections?

One week you report on the city's budget crisis, said to be caused by police and fire pensions. The mayor wanted to sell our public water system, supposedly to pay for the pensions.

The very next week, you report that the mayor gleefully hired five more policemen, because the Federal Government gave him money for five years! And after five years? While people who bought houses with five year adjustable mortgages are excoriated for their lack of fiscal responsibility, you report on the new hires without mention of salary and pension payments due in the future. So individual home owners must think of their fiscal future, but not the city government?

One week you report on the city cutting funds for at-risk children, quoting a volunteer plaintively asking "What is to become of these children?"

The next week you report that the city is building a giant new police station in the very center of town. Even more ironically, where a school used to be, now razed and moved out of town.

I guess that answers the question of the city's plans for at-risk children, doesn't it?

Is that really the welcome we want to give to the people arriving in Carbondale by train? A giant police station right by the train station?

People used to talk about our children being our future. I don't hear that anymore.

I guess no one wants to point out that our children's future involves paying off the debt we incurred building prisons and police stations. That is, when they're not actually inside, doing time.

Some future!

Dogs and People

It's summertime and my dogs have fleas. They seem pretty miserable. Who would want hundreds of creatures crawling around on them?

So, I give them baths. They hate baths. But I believe that, as much as they hate baths, they should realize that the flea-free bliss they enjoy after the bath should make them learn that baths are to be tolerated.

This doesn't happen. They never make the connection.

My route to work involves 2 traffic signals. My Green ideas, coupled with the habits derived from driving a car with no first gear, makes me save gas by timing my approach to the signals so that I cruise up to them as the light turns green.

This drives some people insane. Why am I going so slow? They get right on my tail, then speed up, and speed past me, only to get to the red light and stop.

Then I cruise past them on the green light, imagining that they are feeling pretty, pretty stupid, as they watch me pass.

Nope. Like my dogs, they never make the connection, flooring their gas pedals to zoom past me, so they can wait at the next red light.

If a Peasant Dies in a Forest, And TV Doesn't Cover It,Does It Make a Sound?

Yesterday I finished a book called "Xamon Song", by Adam Stone. It's about a teenaged American boy who joins the military and is sent off to "defend his country", and how he learns that he's really there to protect a logging company, and the paramilitaries they have hired to kill the indigenous people who live in the forest.

By coincidence, later on I watched Arundhati Roy speak about the indigenous tribal people of India, being wiped out for the profits of multi-national corporations. The interviewer scolded her for supporting the armed resistors, pointing out that India is the country of Ghandi.

She replied that Ghandian resistance requires an audience, but tribal people are being massacred without an audience.

That is an incredible insight.

While world-wide attention is being paid to the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, NO attention is being paid to the wiping out of the last hunter-gatherers on our planet, unless someone famous calls attention to it, as when James Cameron, the producer of Avatar, got involved with a Brazilian tribe trying to stop a dam from wiping out their homelands.

What about the people of the Congo? The people of Indonesia?

Avatar was a great movie, and at the time, I connected it to the American genocide of the Indians of our continent.

But the genocide continues to this day! Capitalism, having looted the riches of its own countries, is moving on to the last unspoiled forests and oceans of the rest of the world.

And tribes are being wiped out, without the rest of us even knowing that it is happening.