When one decides to take action against fear and duplicity they open themselves up to intimidation and harrassment. Is this just? Our present corporate state will not allow citizens to exercise their rights without consequence, the lash back of a desperate regime teetering on despotism. Whether in Miami against a corrupt consolidation of banks and market forces to doom millions to a life of servitude and neverending poverty or a meager pulpit in a small town the task of rescuing the agenda outlined in the US Constitution towards life and liberty are everywhere under attack by the forces of fear, xenophobia, and ignorance.

So what is the political agenda of these anti-constitutional forces that have taken over the ruling politic of our nation? It is obvious to all of us in the anti-globalist anti-war movement. It is visible and undeniable in the SHUs in Angola Prison and the sound of snowmobilers in Yellowstone. It is clear and present in the policies that seek to turn the environs of Denali into a PCB laced Golgotha. It is written into the fiber of the endless new laws and proclamations from an embittered and inferior slew of legislators and police-state thugs. It is the end of the American dream, that frail wisp of sharp intelligence that is being smothered by the forces of the corporate death state and their attendant religions and unscientific technologists.

What is the idea of madness, a mad America hurtling like a locomotive?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
~~Sunflower Sutra by Allen Ginsberg

It rises from the past America that was built on slavery and extermination, the past America that was intolerant and fundamentalist, the past America that gave birth to the still potent legacy, the brutality of the Klan, of Nixon, of Hiroshima. The madness that we are separate from the other peoples of the planet and that our dominant position is divinely inspired and perpetuated by unseen forces that reside in the sepulchers of religious tyranny.

We face many problems in our culture, some of which I have mentioned above, and yet they all become irrelevant, like so many potatoes at a supermarket, something to glance at from time to time but not to address, when faced with the truest loss of values represented by the infectious death cult of Bush and his minions. The intimidation and use of the mechanisms of the military-industrial-entertainment complex to squash popular dissent, to belittle free speech, and convert the hope of countless generations placing their sons and daughters onto American soil into a mindfuck of hamster racing to pay bills so the rich can eat off of gold plates and the priest can read from his silk covered bible is the worst tragedy to befall this culture and nation.

And there are no easy answers. For the climate of fear insures that alternatives as such are not really alternatives at all, and that everyone is suspect in the burden of past implied transgressions, and that all future activity must be decided not by the public, the community of neighbors and family and friends but by the whims of heartless corporations and their owned owners who infect our nations leadership.

Real change will become manifest only when we turn our backs on intimidation and seek radically different and much more holistic forms of lifestyles. It is our responsibility and our power to do just that. The forces which seek to return our culture to the Dark Ages of feudalism, bigotry, and control of knowledge by a few squirreled away in faceless boardrooms, hiding behind desks and FBI sweeps, are aware of this. They will fight to the bitter end to hold onto their bitter coins and keep us out of the decision making that democracy requires of us as citizens. It will become worse as their despair at our power grows. We cannot allow intimidation to work its subtle death grip tighter. We cannot give up when we have accomplished so much. We are getting closer to restoring the Constitution, day by day, action by action, strike by strike…and they know that, and so their efforts will increase as our power grows. ML King knew this. He saw the horror of American madness and the potential for its twisted fulfillment and defended the liberties that we do not take for granted with his life.

We still have miles to go before we can rest. We must proceed not with fear but with the courage of our convictions. That might is not right. That war is the only true enemy. That the American dream may have not yet have ever existed but that its existence lies within us all and is seeking to come out and breathe air uncontaminated by the stench of corporate rot.