03.13.07
Greetings from the Belly of the Beast
I’ve spent 62 years on this planet working toward what seems so obvious, yet remains so elusive: a world based upon the values I was taught as child. I was told these values were embodied by my government, that they were the values of my country, the United States of America, which I was also told was the greatest country on earth, the land of equality and opportunity, the land of the free, and the home of the brave, with liberty and justice for all.
By the time I was twenty, I had internalized these values and seen the men who’d come to stand for many of them, at least for me, killed, one after the other. Martin, Malcolm, John, and Bobby, all gunned down. Then the war amped up and the Beatles crossed the pond with “I want to hold your hand” and the whole world changed, for both better and worse. At that point I had been drafted for the sake of a war whose duplicities were known to me. I chose not to go. I chose not to make an issue of it with the US government. In spite of my idealism, I could never grant them that legitimacy. Even then I knew the difference between system and society. Read the rest of this entry »