On Being a Zealot...

I sometimes don't know what I am. Don't know my own capabilities....But sometimes I do. Obama has won the election, the first step in what is sure to be a long process of recovery for our nation. How do we wipe away the backward thinking, the anti-progress of the last 40 years? We have had moments, bright spots in a sea of despair, a war of attrition against the American dream itself, the dream of equality, opportunity for all. And as I say these words, I reflect on myself; my instincts, my inclinations and impulses. I have been asking anyone who will respond if I am a zealot. A Fanatic. An Extremist. So what am I? What am I capable of?

I seek vengeance. I taste blood in the water and I want more. I want to punish those who have punished us for the last eight years. Punished us for hoping. For being creative, dreamers, believers in a fundamental human goodness. Where is the modern Nuremberg? Where will these crimes against humanity trials take place? "Would trials even be enough?" I ask myself knowing full well what an unlikelihood a trial or series of trials would be. Will there be any justice worthy of these crimes? Any punishment? I seek vengeance for those killed, and for us, our hands bloodied, our humanity maimed. These are my instincts, my impulses. I do have a pragmatic side. I understand the need for reconciliation. I even understand the desire for it in some. But my instinct keeps popping up. Slapping me in the face. I am aware of the cross I bear, my own hatred. It rains down on me in dreams. I descend to earth and as I do, my blackened, battered leathery wings open up and slow my fall. I am an angel of death, leaving heaven early, to pass judgment and sentence upon whom I see fit, ignoring the will of God. My sights fix in, not on personal enemies, the people who have injured me, but on the true evil doers. The killers of hopes and dreams. The wasters of life and limb. The ones who have engineered hell on earth and the ones who follow them out of fear or stupidity. These recurring dreams are visceral, nearly sensual. There is no fear. Only the near erotic satisfaction of vengeance. And as the smoke clears and the ashes of the dead float away on the gentle wind, I realize I cannot share in the earth's new found peace and freedom because I have transformed. That I have disfigured my soul beyond recognition. That I am a danger, a bringer of death. These are my sleeping dreams. This is what I sense, in my soul, I'm capable of.......perhaps.

In "The Candidate", after winning the election, Robert Redford's character asks his campaign manager, "What do we do now?" What do we do now? The pragmatist in me thinks that a modicum of reconciliation could go a long way in repairing this country. But I am also deeply concerned about this reconciliation process. So we reach across the aisle? We get input? We try to get the Right Wing on board, moderate our agenda for the sake of bipartisanship? Part of me understands that this is what a man like Barack Obama would do. Try to heal the nation. And yet I can't help but think that now is the time to fix America's policies, our problems, not to soothe the hurt feelings of these small minded, sleazy lunatics, at the risk of putting these course corrections in place at a glacial pace. How do you make a place for people so wrong about so many things? Let us set aside the question of what we do now for a moment. Instead, let us think of what has led us here, these policies, these issues.

Health care. Does anyone believe that there should not be universal health care? Seriously? Who in good conscience could be against everyone having health care? Can we not look at health care as a fundamental human right? I am going to be blunt. If Jesus himself came today to judge the living and the dead, would those who invented and support the for profit health care system not be among the first on the list to spend an eternity in hell? How could you explain to your Jesus, that a dying child should die because she hasn't got the money for a transplant or a surgery? And for what? So that a stock holder in an insurance company can have a larger dividend? A CEO can have a bigger bonus? That is what we are talking about, right? Profit margins made on the very lives of human beings. There would be a special place in hell set aside for these people, if I believed in such a place. If I believed in hell, I imagine their place would be to relive the pain and anguish of the mother of that child turned away, and of that child's death, over and over again for an eternity.

Iraq. A war started by lies. The stated reasoning for this deadly folly was that the United States was in danger, that Iraq was an imminent threat. Think about that for a second. Iraq was an imminent threat. What madman dreamed up such an unbelievable lie? The idea brings laughter. Iraq, flanked on each border by an enemy, monitored by US forces and UN forces and no fly zones. The claim was that they had weapons of mass destruction. There were UN inspectors on the ground, led by Hans Blix, who knew, and told us that this was not the case. And what about the intelligence info? The two mouthed George Tenet who said it was a slam dunk out of one side of his mouth and prayed to his God that what he made up would come true out of the other. And the second source of info? The second opinion? A newly created wing of the Office of the Vice President, specifically an intelligence gathering wing. This is the office that tried, again laughably, to float the idea that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Namely, that lead 9/11 perpetrator Mohammad Atta had met with Iraqi Intelligence officers in Prague, and that they had trained in Iraq, intelligence gotten from prisoners that they knew full well had no access to this type of information. And on the weapons of mass destruction fabrication: the evidence of yellow cake uranium purchases in Niger, proven to be fabricated, aluminum tubes, the wrong size and type for the Bush administration's claimed uses....The list goes on and on. The only evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was fifteen years old. The weapons that proved what a bad man Saddam really was. The ones used on the Kurds. So sad really, especially when you consider that Iraq at the time was our ally. Think about the pictures of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam from that period. Think about the fact that the chemical weapons used on the Kurds were most likely bought and paid for by US dollars. The only WMD that we knew Iraq had were the ones we basically gave them to use on their own people.

We are nearing the 6th year anniversary of when this war began. And no one can explain why we were there in the first place. The so called "Left Wing Media" seemed to be in collusion with the Bush administration, overlooking these blatant fabrications and errors. Few voices mentioned the 1996 policy paper entitled “A CLEAN BREAK: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, in which Richard Perle, and other NeoCons outlined a strategy of sabotaging Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, eliminating Yassar Arafat, crushing the Palestinian independence movement, as well as an ambitious plan to invade Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein, and replace him with a US friendly puppet government. No one mentioned a meeting in 1998 when these NeoCons flew to Texas to "educate" one George Walker Bush. No one said a God damned thing before the invasion. Nothing. Not a peep. Not a peep was heard about Saddam Hussein's ties to the Reagan Administration, or the CIA, heavily involved in the Bathe party's rise to power as well as its longevity. Few said anything after the disgraceful "Mission Accomplished" speech, and those that did were ridiculed and called Anti-American. Those that dissented were swiftly marginalized. And no one said a word about the most horrific thing of all. We were allied with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, while secretly selling weapons to Iran. Imagine selling weapons to the Nazis and the British during WWII at the same time. Is there anything else more insidious to do during a war then sell weapons to your ally's enemy? To profit by selling weapons to the two opposing sides of a war? As with the health care profiteers, what does the hell I don't believe in have in store for these people?

With war comes incredible tragedy, heroism, and loss. We have brave soldiers fighting in Iraq for a lie. Every day when we wake up and look at ourselves in the mirror, we know this. I am not talking about what we do now. I am talking about what has been done in our name. As I am writing this, the US military death toll is over 4200. Not wounded. Dead. This is an American tragedy that will never be healed, lives that will never be recouped and for what purpose? The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3000 Americans. We are approaching one and a half 9/11s worth of US military deaths in this horrible, unlawful, immoral war, and this is only half of the coin. The US government does not officially keep statistics on Iraqi deaths, a sickening thought in itself. The lowest number I could find on Iraqi deaths was 86,663 and those were violent, non-combatant civilian deaths. The highest number was 1,446,063, and was a toll of all of the deaths due to or related to the war including civilians and military combatants, caused by coalition military directly and infrastructure failure caused by the war. Even if you turn a blind eye to the large number (I suggest sitting somewhere in the center of the bell, most estimates are around 600,000), how many 9/11s is that? Divide 3000 into 86,000 or 600,000 or 1.4 million. How many people have to die before we call it a genocide? What number? And why are these people dead? Because of a misguided theory about spreading democracy through the world. Unlikely. Because Iraq was an imminent threat to us? Laughable. Because these people had something to do with 9/11? Fabricated. What are we left with? Who benefits from a perpetual war in an oil rich nation? Oil men like Bush? Military contractors? And guess who was the head of Halliburton, a military contractor, before the disputed 2000 election. That's right, the very same Vice President whose office fabricated intelligence to get us into Iraq. What does the hell I don't believe in have in store for the war profiteers responsible for more than half a million deaths?

Jeremiah Wright accused the US of being shocked that "Our chickens had come home to roost." And oh...The uproar. How could he say that? How could Obama have listened to things like that in his Church? How could anyone think that way? Oh, wait. The Mujahideen funded by the US under Reagan gave rise to the Taliban. Close family friends of the Bushes? The Bin Laden family. Pictures, Pre-9/11 of President Bush shaking hands with Taliban representatives. A long history of covert and not so covert actions in the region. The Bush family, an oil family, with deep ties to Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from, funded by petrodollars made amply available by decidedly anti-green policies. To say that 9/11 was a conspiracy from within the US may be plausible, but is still a huge stretch. To say that any nation deserves to have a 9/11 happen to them is certainly an odious, disgusting, and unfathomable suggestion. To say, however, that our chickens have come home to roost, to take stock of the history, of which the United States is heavily involved, that led up to the attacks is perfectly sensible. It would be irresponsible not to look at what led up to the attacks. Yet where is the study on the US foreign policies that led to 9/11? Are we that sensitive that we can't take into account our own hand in it? Even if it is a repugnant idea. Are we to squelch any and all dissent? Are these Pre-9/11 truths so painful that anyone who brings them up is demonized? And after the passage of laws allowing people to be spied upon, allowing others to be tortured, how was anyone shocked at a backlash against American policies? Are Post-9/11 policies so frailly conceived that they cannot stand up to the wind created by a million or a thousand or a hundred or one eyebrow raised? In this post 9/11 world we have tossed Habeas Corpus out the window. We have allowed our government to spy on us. We have allowed our government to set up secret prisons, with secret juries and secret sentences where torture is not only tolerated, it is applauded. What place is there for those who would use fear as a tool to wipe away any opposition, any dissent, any questioning at all, in the hell I don't believe in?

Economic Equity. Who doesn't want lower taxes? I defy you to find someone who wants to pay more. However, as anyone can tell you, a government needs money to run. In this election cycle, Obama faced criticism for wanting to raise taxes on the highest bracket. His proposal, to raise the highest rate from 36% to 39.6%, was tacitly called Socialism. Mind you that the top tax rate under Nixon was 70%. This type of idiotic, hypocritical accusation actually took off. It was somewhat effective in garnering votes for the ethically challenged McCain/Palin duo. Though slight, the use of the Socialism label did give McCain/Palin a bump. Mind you again, that Sarah Palin as governor of Alaska created a wealth sharing program where each person in the state got over $3200 culled from taxes on oil companies. Yet the official McCain tax proposal had more tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans and corporations. This comes down to an economic theory the was put into place by Reagan. Supply side economics, also known as "trickle down" economics. During the 1980 primary run, George Herbert Walker Bush, an opponent of Reagan, referred to supply side economics as "Voodoo Economics." Though arguments on the validity of supply side versus demand side rage on, there has never been an official study on the efficacies of what is still a theory in practice in a very early stage. At the same time that the wealthy get tax breaks directly from the government, the other Republican mantra of privatization lies in ruin. Privatized health care allows 18,000 people to slip through the cracks in the for profit health care system to their deaths. The 1st Amendment is blurred as federal dollars are funneled to faith based organizations with no accountability. The Republicans preach that we need school vouchers without explaining that this money will be pulled from an already underfunded public school system, and sent to private for profit schools as well as religious schools. Both, again, with no accountability, and in the case of religious schools, again, sending federal dollars to religious organizations. In the end we must ask ourselves, what is more important? The weakest among us or the strongest? Do we give tax cuts to the rich, the poor, the middle class or everyone? How can any well off, economically comfortable person in good conscience accept a tax cut while children still go hungry, people still die because they have no health insurance, education fails our children, families have no homes, and the list of the impoverished becomes longer and longer?

Issues of "morality" and personal freedom. Pro-choice? Pro-life? Those on the Pro-life side of this equation have two main problems with their arguments. They all too often side with the Pro-death arguments in Extra-Abortion issues, IE: Pro-death penalty, Pro-war, Anti-universal health coverage, and the list goes on. For people so interested in protecting unborn life, they sure seem to be indifferent to life once it is born. Secondly, if we are to grant these people the freedom to practice their religion (most Pro-lifers are religious fanatics after all), and it is from their religion, not science, that their conception of when life begins arises, shouldn't people who don't practice their religion have the right to choose that definition based on science? In other words, it is the very freedom of religion that allows us the option to not have to practice one person's religion or another's. No one is Pro-Abortion. We all feel that human life is sacred. We disagree on when human life begins. We all agree that the problem is unwanted pregnancy, and we all understand that the fewer unwanted pregnancies, the fewer abortions. Yet, by and large the Pro-Life community is Anti-sex education and Anti-contraception distribution, both proven to reduce unwanted pregnancy. So what we have is a community that wants to illegalize abortion and birth control at the same time. They want more unwanted pregnancies and they want them carried to full term. The minute these unwanted children are born, of course, they wash their hands of them.

On the most joyous election night of a lifetime, there was one major blemish. The passage of Proposition 8 in California. This despicable law....an amendment taking rights away from fellow human beings is an unprecedented and immoral exercise in hate. And for what? In the name of sanctity of marriage? Whose marriage does it sanctify to take marriage away from some people? What reasoning goes behind this? Is this the work of sensible "Christians," people who believe in love? People who believe in the Golden Rule? What does it matter to them if gays marry? How could it? No one has asked Prop 8 supporters to be gay. No one has asked them to change anything they do. It only matters to those who would want to insure that gays remain second class citizens; that gays do not have access to the same rights as straights. That's what we are talking about here. Bigotry. Hate. These are the same arbitrary prejudices that are used by people who believe that blacks should be second class citizens, or Muslims, , or Catholics, or Jews, or that interracial marriage should be illegal (it was illegal in 16 states as recently as 1967). These are the ideas that breed slavery and genocide. These are the ideas that dehumanize one "stock" of humans, that lead to theories of racial or sexual superiority. To turn a group of people into outcasts, untouchables, is to strip humans of their very humanity. What place in the hell I don't believe in is set aside for these people? What punishment is deserving for the Mormon church that dumped $20 million dollars into the Yes on Proposition 8 Campaign? Are there chains on a slave ship in hell long enough to enslave these people for the eternal torment they deserve?

The United States of America. A nation with high hopes. Those hopes were best expressed in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, most poignantly in the first two lines and the last:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

This hope, this dream of a nation has endured. A government of the people, by the people, for the people has not yet perished. Yet it cannot endure if the people lose their ability to think, to question, to see fact from fiction. We as a nation, over the last half century have promoted a culture of stupidity, of anti-intellectualism where no one questions anything and consumerism runs rampant. This trend culminated in, among other things, the election of a man with no intellectual inquisitiveness as President of the United States. Those who adored him wanted to have a beer with him. These are the same people who love their country, but refuse to educate themselves about what their country does. Like people in Kansas who are poor and who align themselves with the Republican party for no conceivable reason. Are they for supply side economics? For the for profit health care system? For the occupation of Iraq? Why? Why do they allow themselves to be mislead? Is it all the American flags? Do they really believe in these ideologies or have they shut their brains off? A government of the people, by the people, for the people cannot exist if the people do not participate. The knee jerk flag waivers, the "never forget 9/11" crowd that refuse to ask uncomfortable questions about why 9/11 happened, or how it has been used by the Republican party since, have chosen to no longer participate. They have refused to use the modicum of intellectual rigor it takes to ask simple questions, to read a newspaper or a magazine. They have instead fallen in dogmatically with whatever the Republican party says. Ask them why they believe that 18,000 people should die, by being denied health care, for the sake of corporate profits. Ask them why they believe that gays should be treated as second class citizens. Ask them why Iraq needed to be invaded when they presented no threat. Ask them why the rich should pay less taxes while children still starve. You will not get an answer. You will be called a socialist or a communist or a Nazi. You will get hazy Republican talking points. You will be called anti-American or unpatriotic. You will be told that they believe what they believe. There will be no reason, no rational thought behind it.

So what do we have? A list of sins. The constant hunt for personal profit over the needs of the people. Over our very lives. Corporate profits over the lives of those who so desperately need health insurance to live. Personal profits for military contractors, oil executives, middle managers at companies that build bombs and make tanks over the lives of the troops, put in harms way for these profits. Outright hate like Proposition 8, framed with no subtlety at all. These sins cannot be wiped away. These are the sins of the Republican party. And they are the sins of any that would pick up the mantle of that label. What does it mean to take this name? To take up this belief system? If you are a Republican, you believe that gays shouldn't have the right to get married. You believe in supply side economics, and that tax cuts should be given to the wealthy. You believe in an end to public education, an end to the separation of church and state. You believe in the death penalty. You believe that the war in Iraq is justified. You believe that women should not be allowed to have an abortion. You believe in a for profit health care system. You believe that dissent is not to be tolerated. You believe in the unforgivable. There is no pardon, no special dispensation, no indulgences granted by the local bishop. If you choose to align yourself with evil, with sinners, you cast your lot with theirs. These men are sinners of the worst kind. The soulless calculations that have allowed them to do the things they have done prove that they are incapable of the guilt associated with these crimes against humanity that they should feel in their hearts. Their ascendancy, their power and affluence makes the likelihood that they will receive some sort of earthly justice, infinitesimal. We know there will be no Nuremberg trials for them. No Gitmo lockup, no water boarding, no electrocution. They will never know the audacity or evil of their crimes. Oh how I wish there were a hell, for these creators of hell on earth.

And I am falling....The air passing over me. Chilling my skin as I descend. There is no fear. I arch my back and my wings unfurl. Beaten, black, leathery. They reinforce what I am, an angel of death, and my mission, the reason for my presence. I am the destroyer. The destroyer of worlds, of life itself, a tool of the God I once believed in. He left us long ago, to fend for ourselves and we angels have been asleep. The soulless wolves have been given the power over life and death itself. And they've chosen death. They have proven over and over again their unfitness as leaders, their unfitness as humans. They have lost the right to eat at the table of humanity, to drink at the water hole. And this doesn't stop with the architects of these sins. The enablers, fools too involved in themselves to open their eyes, the supporters even in name only have cast their fates as well. To all that have stepped in the way of decency and humanity for personal greed or worse, my cup of wrath has overflowed. I spill my seed of annihilation. I am now the arbiter, judger of those who escape justice, with guile or stupidity. I rain down upon them. I breathe in and the putrid smoke of burning bodies fills my lungs. And it stings less than it should. The exhilaration of the kill in all of its bloody exultation. The destruction of the tyranny of the wealthy, the sycophants and lackeys, the meek thoughtless obedient sheep who follow hate as blindly as they would follow their favorite television show. The victory of freedom and life over fear and death. The ecstasy of killing for a just cause, of laying to waste those ruiners of life, those wasters of what we hold so dear. The orgasm is overwhelming and terrifying. And then it is over. I look over what I have done and I no longer know if it is good. The emptiness surrounds me. I stand on the blood soaked battlefield. It is accomplished. I have saved all but myself from their reign. I have stripped away whatever remnants of my humanity were left. I have become the danger, the tyranny I've fought so hard against. I have wiped away the tears from their eyes. The tyrants that have held them down are gone. But, I cannot wipe away my own tears. I cannot celebrate with my compatriots in humanity, for I have lost mine.....And I know what I must do. And as I remove my armaments, I reach down with all of my being to try to hear that child who believed in hope. I cannot. And I take my leave of this world....And then I awake....

These last few months have been strange. These last eight years have been stranger. We have been beaten and abused for so long, weighed down by the intricacies of this chapter of American history, as well as our universal history....the history of man. We have been subjected to realities, too grim, too dire, to know how to react anymore. We spy on each other and call it a "Patriot Act." We invade a nation for no reason, killing hundreds of thousands and call it part of a "War on Terror." We bail out the richest among us while people go without food or shelter and we say it's a necessity. We turn our backs on our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. We fail them all. The weak. The poor. The young and the old. The helpless and the hopeless. Until we are helpless and hopeless, prisoners of this regrettable human history. And we had let ourselves become hopeless until this election. And I am a zealot. And I am not a good man. And I have this hatred welled up within me, ready to explode upon the first person who does not believe in human rights, human dignity, justice. And this is all too real, and I wonder to myself if hope is enough. Because I have seen things. Incredible things. This election. This man. This voice telling me to believe in hope. To forgive. And that has inspired hope. But I have also seen horrible things, inhumane injustices, indignities of the spirit, the body, and the soul. And I wonder how I can reconcile them, how to let go of my pain, our pain. And I have cried tears of joy and tears of anguish. And I don't know how much of that eight year old that believes in hope is still there. And I worry..........

And I fall..........

And as I do my wings unfurl..........

But I want to hope...........