We have met the enemy and he is us

There's still some places in the South, tucked away in little out of the way towns off the beaten path where it seems that not much has changed since the days of segregation. These are small towns that used to be on the major highways before the interstates of the great expansion cut swaths down from the North in their march to the sea. The little mom and pop stores are gone now, boarded up and overrun by kudzu vines that swallowed the rusty '57 Ford left behind decades ago.

There's a shop, still desperately clinging on, where an old man with a non-ironic trucker's cap still rolls his own cigarettes by hand. You can get pickled quail's eggs and a six-pack of PBR with the gas that is 20 cents more expensive than the Walmart down the road but if you ask him why his friends are no longer in business, chances are he won't blame Walmart. Instead it will be the government, "liberals", blacks, Mexicans or whomever else he was told was responsible for his predicament. Easy answers, like the easy moral choices faced in the tattered and yellowing John Wayne movie poster that still hangs by the old icebox in the back room.

There's a hunting and fishing store down by the lake with a gray-haired woman and an old hound dog that will always perk up his ears whenever you stop in to buy that last moment bag of ice before you head out to catch a cooler full of catfish. There's one pack of plastic worms and box of 12 gauge shells still on the shelf that were the hot items from 10 years ago, before the new Walmart super center paved over farmland 4 miles away. She will also probably blame the government, gun control, regulations and everyone else except who the real culprits are.

So it goes, through the country where we're fighting and blaming the wrong people. Last night, I was at a small town festival in a town that lost their Fruit of the Loom factory 20 years. There's no real economy left in that town and poverty is rampant. Some kids still fight the racial battles of their grandfathers as if it is still the most important issue of their time, all while both sides share the same poverty in addition to everything else, including the multiple variations of their skin colors.

They say "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing us he didn't exist" but I believe the greatest trick he ever pulled was convincing us that our neighbor was our enemy and the source of our problems. Why spend valuable time and resources fighting a war at home when you can just brainwash every ethnicity, social class and every subdivision of those groups into believing that their potential greatest ally and friend is really to blame for their troubles?

Now that, that is the real class warfare.

99% vs 53% vs 1%

In an effort to undermine or disqualify the Occupy Wall Street movement, a few people have signed on to a new astroturf "we are the 53%" group. This 53% is supposed to be the percentage of Americans who pay a net income tax at the end of the year. The irony of the slogan is that it states, by logical process, that 47% of Americans live below an income level to which they would have to pay incomes tax. Saying that 53% of Americans pay a net income tax isn't something to be proud of, it is a condemnation of the economic situation that we find ourselves in. I used to be in the 53% tax bracket. I used to end up getting back only a portion of what I paid in over the year and do you know what? I was fine with that and I would happily go back to that bracket in a heartbeat if only I could.

Yet, politicians and their backers want to play class warfare by painting those who don't make enough money to pay income taxes as lazy. I hate to break it to you but not everyone can become a CEO, an investment banker, a trial lawyer or win the lottery. Some people are going to have to flip burgers, bus tables, scrape roadkill, fix flat tires, bag groceries or work as a security guard to make our society continue to work as we know it. Guess what? Some of us are OK with the cards that life has dealt us. Some of us have accepted that the "American Dream" may not be realized for us but we're still trying to get it for our kids.

Occupy Wall Street isn't protesting to ask for a handout, it is protesting to ask for a handup instead of the current system that primarily rewards people who climb the ladder, only to kick out the rungs below it. The 99% represents the people who the system isn't working for anymore, not those who want a free government check every month.

It is too easy to be mentally lazy and let Fox News tell you that we are a bunch of "dirty, lazy hippies". The problems we face are far more complex than some pasteurized 30 second sound bite. It is intellectually convenient to just write off a social issue that has come to a head as the bitching of a few who want something they aren't entitled to. It isn't that simple. Think for yourself.

Abandoned vets

If you come back in a box, you're a hero. It is easy to make a hero out of someone who has died. There's no responsibility to that person, no moral imperative to take care of them. Putting a Chinese-made plastic flag on their grave once a year seems to be the accepted token of appreciation.

But what about the abandoned vets? The men and women who manage to survive the hell of war, only to find themselves in a new hell at home. Physical wounds heal but mental scars are forever.

I have not been a member of the military but many of my friends are/were. My first experience with a PTSD victim was when I was still a teenager. My father took in a Vietnam vet as a tenant in one of his apartments. A former Green Beret, he was fiercely loyal to us but was prone to panic attacks, violent drunken outbursts and flashbacks. This was probably 15 years ago, before PTSD was even an accepted disability. Back then, they called it "shell-shock" and dumped them out of the military on a medical discharge.

Fast forward to 2004/2005...My friend and coworker Dan comes home from Iraq after an Army tour. Formerly mild-mannered, he came back with all the same symptoms. He'd drink himself into blackout fits where he'd lash out at everyone, then sob his eyes out on the bar before passing out. I moved away that summer but often wondered if he would finally get the help he needed. I got a call that fall, Thanksgiving evening to be exact. Dan took his own life by hanging himself in his parent's closet that morning.

He was one of many. We have veterans homeless on the street, in jails and mental institutions and there is very little attention brought to this. The Angola State Prison has their own color guard, comprised of incarcerated veterans.

So why aren't we running TV campaigns and sleek Facebook pages to draw attention to this? My answer is, it isn't something that people can make money from or use as political campaign fodder. It is convenient to slap a Chinese-made yellow ribbon magnetic sticker on your SUV and say you support the troops. It is easy to glorify the dead because they can't speak. They aren't shivering by a dumpster by your favorite Starbucks or asking for change outside the local Taco Bell. The homeless and the mentally ill veterans aren't a sexy dress blues photo, forever remembered as such and forever out of the way. They're here now. For the dead, their suffering is over. For the living, it has not.

I am what I am

I take shit from all sides. I have the "conservatives" and the Ron Paul folks wanting me to endorse their idea of basic anarchy, a government that is a shell of what it is now. On the other hand, I have the "progressives" and liberals who want me fight for gun control and other issues they hold dear.

The thing is, I don't get paid by either side. This page and blog are for me, by me. I don't get paid anything to write the things that I do and I write this to talk about what I think is right, not some thinktank in DC that is funded by the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros or anyone else.

I express what I think is right. I fight for what I believe is the correct way in my opinion. I believe in some things that are a platform for the left, some things that are a platform for the right but when I started writing, I didn't sign a piece of paper saying I would be a mouthpiece for either side. I'm doing this for me. I am on the side of personal freedom and the little guy.

I hate hypocrisy and partisan politics but push me hard enough and I will swing left, or right, depending on the issue. I've been publishing this page for a little over a year now and I have taken shit from all directions. Guess that means I am doing something right.

Occupy Wall Street Commercial

Know your enemy

For years, we've had some mysterious and distant enemy to be afraid of. Someone out there who wanted to do harm to our way of life and only some flag-draped politician could save us. First it was Communist Russia, then it was Al-Qaeda, now it is our neighbors.

We've been divided, for the sake of politics, against each other. Republicans vs. Democrats. Fox News vs. MSNBC. Intellectuals vs. rednecks. Blacks vs. Whites. Gay vs. Straight. Christians vs. Atheists. Catholics vs. Protestants. Jews vs. Muslims. Hippies vs. skinheads. Crips vs. Bloods. East Coast vs. West Coast. Yankees vs. Southerners, etc. Every made up enemy is supposed to want to do harm and force us to live under their ideals.

The fact is, we're mostly all human beings who want to live our lives and raise our children right. The problem has been that over and over and over again, we've had it pounded into our heads on a nightly basis that there is so much to be afraid of. Stop being afraid. Yes, there are people out there who would wish harm upon us out of some mental psychosis but for the most part, we're all just trying to get through our lives the best we can.

Now that we are almost 2 months into "Occupy Wall Street", the people who have been setting us against each other for so long have been putting the spin machine into overdrive to try to stop something that could finally break us out of this mess. They've tried to paint supporters and protesters as "dirty hippies" and conveniently leave out the elderly who are front lines as well. They ignore or vilify the veterans who have come home and are now unemployed because a private contractor making triple their salary has taken their place in Iraq or Afghanistan. They love to preach patriotism, until it comes time to actually fund veteran's benefits, PTSD therapy and job placement.

We have politicians from both parties who have made very comfortable careers for themselves pretending to be representing us, all while taking contributions from the very people who are dividing us against each other. Even if we catch on to their game and vote them out, they are usually assured jobs working as a lobbyist to perpetuate the cycle with their replacement.

This has to end, someway, somehow. We can institute term limits, reform campaign finance laws, bar members of Congress from ever working as lobbyists and take money out of politics but that won't be enough. Only until we wake up, realize that our real enemy is the culture of fear and stop voting for the politicians who reinforce that, will we ever be truly free.

This is why we are Occupying Wall Street.

We are the 99%, here's why we Occupy Wall Street

We've already grasped the fact we aren't all going to be millionaires, movie actors or rock stars. Our generation has come to terms with the fact we are going to work until we're 70 or older, and as much as it sucks, we've accepted it grudgingly. We've realized that thanks to the Baby Boomers, Social Security may not be the safety net it was for our parents and grandparents and we're kind of OK with that, even as we pay out of our checks every two weeks to support your grandparents in Arizona or Florida or wherever else America goes to die.

We accepted the fact that "Hope and Change" rolled quietly into "Hope for some change down the road". We aren't OK with that, but hey, we'll live with it. Yet, when our homes get foreclosed on us because the banks who got a bailout won't return the favor to the same taxpayers who helped them, we're going to be pissed off. When the same financial institutions and trade schools who talked us into getting credit cards and student loans to get through college, only to now come and bully us to repay them when we are working minimum wage jobs despite our degrees, we'll probably finally have had enough.

We bought into the same "American Dream" that our parents and grandparents subscribed to. The one where if you work hard enough, save some money and go to school, you also can live the dream. The thing is, the "American Dream" set sail with Reagnomics and NAFTA. Now, if you work 10 years for a company, thanks "right to work" laws, they can dump you at any time, for any reason, and you're back at square one again while your job gets shipped off to an intern or someone who will work for half the price in Bangladesh or India.

In the old movies, the guy who found something crooked going in his company, or his politics, went and made a stand. Eventually, he turned out to be the hero and was usually rewarded for his efforts. In my case, I cut the losses of the company I worked diligently for by millions of dollars every month and I was rewarded with a boot out the door.

That isn't the "free market" and the capitalism our parents grew up with. This is a new system and one that rewards the cheaters, not the hard workers. We've finally realized that fact, and we're very, very pissed off.