These issues must supersede pop music and television blunders and celebrity apologies, how do we do that? How do we wake up the sleeping youth?

We need to explore every facet of “viral” marketing to get our message out. We need to be strong.  We need to be eye-catching and expressive. That sort of creativity and inspiration, it feeds into other things, it helps keep that fire burning. Explore it, when you feel the most hopeless, explore it. It can be sanity-saving and therapeutic.

This can’t remain as some stupid partisan-political debate. We’ve got to show people that it matters. Politics aren’t a hobby, they’re a duty. You have to be involved or forever hold your peace about anything important, ’cause you let it pass you by.

This is more than politics and we need to treat it that way. This is our way of life, this is our freedom. All the little issues are adding up and we see now how they’re all intertwined and connected.

They think destroying America is the right thing to do because we are so amoral and terrible and Capitalism is slavery and the only way to live is in a community where you take from the middle class and give to the freeloading leeches. Yo, I’m pissed.

They have an agenda. How naive we were to trust them in the first place, when so clearly they stated their intentions. This was never about “saving” America.

It was about building a new country.

I am overcome by a fleeting feeling of helplessness, and then, just… betrayal. Total betrayal. I guess I was ever the optimist, ’till the end. No, I didn’t think they would pass it. I didn’t think they had the cajones to ignore the majority of the country that employed them, the greatest nation on the face of the earth.

How much longer can we uphold that myth? How much longer can we claim to live up to our legend? You’re slipping, America.

This isn’t the end of the road. This isn’t the end of the fight. You know what this is? This is a call to war[of course, I mean of the non-violent kind, but don't think there won't be political casualties].This is proof of what we’ve known all along; that the political arrogance of these folks knows no bounds. Do they think we’re that stupid? Mommy and Daddy state needs to step in and hold our hands, tell us what to eat, what cars to buy, pad our pockets with stolen cash. I don’t need Mommy and Dad to hold my hand when I go to the doctors office, I don’t need Mommy and Daddy to tell other people how to spend their money.

I don’t want to live on an allowance the rest of my life, balancing an endless tab. Does the enormity of the numbers make you sick? And besides, I’m just dying to find out what’s in this bill. It’ll be a surprise. Like a Christmas present, right? What a joke.

They aren’t listening. Haha! Tell me something I don’t know. I wish I could camp out at the White House for as long as it takes for the Prez to look out and the window and notice me yelling and waving a sign. Could you imagine that? Hundreds and hundreds of people.  Oh, we’re here, the thousands of us. And just ’cause we’re not on your front lawn for months at a time doesn’t mean we’re not here, doesn’t mean we don’t exist. It doesn’t mean you can get away with anything, we’re gonna make sure you know that.

This is not just a healthcare “reform” bill – Which, by the way, was never ABOUT healthcare. If you still believe that, you’re a bigger fool than the Prez takes ME for.

This is a sign, a power grab.

There is no helplessness, no hopelessness now. Just determination. And deeply-rooted, passionate anger. Justified anger. Productive anger. The kind of anger that drives you to something, makes a far off goal attainable.

Are you kidding, Mister President? 215+ backstabbers, treasonous sewer rats! Spineless, yellow-bellied cowards, who didn’t have the guts to say, “We’re voting with The American People, not with the President.”

215+ men who were either naive, stupid, or decietful. Deception doesn’t look good on politicians, so why has it become uniform? Have some balls! There’s a reason we dressed you up nice in a suit and put you in that little club we call the U.S. Congress. You’re nothing but what we’ve made of you – and you’ll be nothing by the time we have our say. You’ve abused your power, and you will be gone.

Scum filth! You’ve revealed all. If you didn’t stand with us, if you twisted that knife in our back, we see you. Oh, how clearly we see you. So keep talking out of your ass, keep thinking that you’re safe, jokes in suits and ties.

We have not yet begun to fight.

39] Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people,
40] Who shall take what ye would not give.
41] Did ye think to conquer the people,
42] Or that Law is stronger than life and than men’s desire to be free?
43] We will try it out with you, ye that have harried and held,
44] Ye that have bullied and bribed, tyrants, hypocrites, liars!

- Padriac Pearse, “The Rebel”

WE, who are no longer scared away by threats of character attacks and ridicule; WE who band together now more than ever; WE who are prophets among sheep, just for opening our eyes. It is our duty to ring the warning bells, WE, the aware, like the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

We are not all intellectuals or writers or poets or philosophers, those ‘above the grade’ elite. Not all of us have that gift of reinterpreting what we see. We don’t sit in at cultural cocktail parties and talk about foreign trade, we don’t band together and act snooty about what cars we drive. We are not the plutocratic socialites, the elite we see mirrored on the other side of the political fence. We do not want to be them. We are the concerned citizens of a crippled nation who understand more about love and understanding and open-mindedness than many of the folks we disagree with, because we are not over-pretentious, and we disagree because we know we stand for something that is right; there is no defensive cruelty or over-the-top character attacks, only quiet utterance of fact, before we fade back from the conflict.

The truth, it’s said, can stand on it’s own. It is as it is, in it’s finality, and, if we lived in a word of sane, level-headed people, the truth would be the end of every argument.

The progressives play on the emotions of the irrational, which always start with youth. We are am emotional and flighty beast, teenagers. We tend to believe the best in people and take their word for sacred truth. Teachers, who we should be able to trust, are still people with bias. Textbooks are written and never questioned. Music is like political scripture, making more sense to us, being more pure, when interpreted by Green Day and Pink than by Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs. Not so much us, but teenagers as a cohesive whole; There are those of us, like myself, who look at these kids and have the urge to bang our heads against a brick wall so we can be on the same level as those still sleeping.

The “re-education”, the lies, the propaganda. Teachers who may mean well pass on the poison; It is regurgitated and spreads and cripples half the population with hate that cannot be tied to anything. It is the venomous way they say, “Dick Cheney,” when they wouldn’t recognize him on the street – This man they hate so completely. It’s in the cheerful way they hugged me after the election, saying how proud they are, not to be American, but of Barack Obama. For “fighting the good fight”. He was the messiah who could heal a broken country, ravaged by a war waged by evil republicans, a country that was rooted in slavery and needed to be regulated by the shackles of affirmative action and white guilt, as if it would save all those people who died in the fields and the boats so many years behind us.

Their worldview never jived with common sense.

They didn’t even understand a word he said, and he said it all so plainly.

I didn’t get how bad it would be, either. All I knew was that this man had socialist ideas and this disturbed me; I never knew how deep the red ran in his blood, marxist corpuscles, thinly veiled veins and plains that we turned away from because we didn’t want to think the worse. We didn’t want to be like those radical, anti-Bush kids, who made no sense but spewed incoherent nonsense and knew only rage. Cynicism. Bitterness. Hopelessness. Kids who had no plan but hated; the girl sitting next to me who called Sarah Palin a cunt. I told her she had some balls talking about experience when Barack Obama was a fuckin’ community organizer, and you know what she did? She turned tail.

The vanished ghost of liberal hypocrisy.

It’s starts with, “I”, the salvation of the soul, the discovery of identity and value and wholeness. Through the loss of religion, or the gaining of a faith, through the rejection of ideas or embracing of literature, when the tinted window in finally smashed and everything comes in clear. The butterflies in your stomach all vanish because you’re standing on solid ground; You are a person, now, who can face yourself with honesty because you know who meets you iin the mirror every morning.

Then, through social networking, the formation of a voice, the fearlessness that comes from security of the soul, it becomes, “We.”

You are not alone.

Being young, it seems like everybody around me is glazed over and braindead, not just because we don’t agree on politics, but because I can feel it; they have no sense of who they are or what they believe in. They are not standing on solid ground. They are inconsistent people who have not taken the time to be alone in their own heads, to listen to those little voices that bring you down to earth and shape you. And once they do that, they’ll be alright. But what they lack makes it impossible to have a real conversation, because they don’t have anything to tie it to, no concrete values or morals, no real solid belief system.And I wonder, “How can you stand not knowing who you are?”

When they come around, they’ll come around. Either that, or they’ll float aimless like the adults I see at protests, the kind who still believe there’s no corruption in government and what the hell are those crazy tea-baggers even talking about? They’re paranoid!

This is where you and I and we all come together. Be the exceptional teenager. Set a new standard for what’s normal in your generation. Provoke people to think and ask questions. Start discussions at the lunch table. Force your generation to face itself before it’s too late.

We can handle this, if we come together.

The truth is addictive and infectious; once you get a taste, it’s never enough.

As Christmas looms, make it a mission; get four classmates or kids in your community on your side about healthcare. Convince them to call or email their senator.

Four people. That’s a manageable number. Start creating that “we” at home.

It always starts with the youth.

I remember being a middle schooler and laughing at illegal immigration – saying, “Well, if they’re illegal by definition, why don’t they take care of it like that?”

I didn’t understand it. Sometimes I still don’t.

I forget that it’s not about logic or common sense or The Constitution, as I once did; What a naive child I was! Now, I know the truth; It is not a show I watch but a circus I am attending, my ticket my birth right, my civil duty, my calling and my passion. They’ll trip you up in their world of “theories”; Do not let them. Do not give an inch when it comes to philosophies.

If your eyes are open, you’re a soldier on the field. This is not “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” This is not a game or a show for your entertainment. “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes said that. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to overlook the advice of one of the greatest fictional detectives ever crafted. What I mean by this is the following: Know what you are fighting for. This is the first step.

The second is to know what you are fighting against. I used to float through biased history classes with my mouth shut because all I knew about what I believed was this deep, gut feeling that they were right. And I knew these were not logical arguments. A good cop will tell you how important your gut is in determining something important. I remember sitting through a discussion on abortion, freshman year, and being brought to tears. I put my head down and let it roll over me. I couldn’t explain it, but I had that gut feeling, man, These people are wrong. I did my research. I spent many a lonely night at the computer with Google, the blog-o-sphere, and The Washington Post. I spent hours upon hours with my grandfather, asking for his opinion on everything, asking my mom. Contrasting them. Asking for books and watching CNN and Fox News and absorbing it all, taking in the differences.

All the while, I got this awful feeling about the media, this nagging sense that something was not right here.

I guess it wasn’t until last year that I started being horrendously obnoxious about politics. I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Everything changed. Everything. It got into my head and changed everything around. I’d never felt so shaken to my core. From that day on, I was a blank slate, finding and fitting ideas into this new, morally sound being, seeing what fit and what didn’t.

No square pegs in round holes. Contradictions, Rand taught me, did not exist; in this way, by testing the waters of everything, reading, writing, debating, listening, I discovered who I was. My brother had given me the book for Easter; My brother, the fucking messiah of information. Maybe this is childhood idolization talking. His whole room is a library. He knows everything about everything and then some. He gives me books for every occasion, every birthday, every Easter, every Christmas, I get a book.

We read The Fountainhead at the same time. I grew up with parents who didn’t read one word they didn’t have too; A dad who read non-fiction work books day in and out for his job and my mother who liked to buy biographical Beatles books and look at the pretty pictures. I don’t know how they ended up with children who loved the fictional magic of the written word and aspired to it, but here they are, four kids later, all of them breezing through novels – Yes, even the seven-year old, whose nose is in The Jungle Book as we speak. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was what did it for me. It was so fresh and beautifully crafted, the meaning so clearly projected, that it was hard for me to put it down. I lived the book, man, from beginning to end, I lived it. When I opened it to a page for a reading session, it was like holding my breath and going underwater, becoming surrounded by something entirely new. This was how I was introduced, formally, to Collectivism and the Individual. This was when I fell in love with cities and skyscrapers and architecture because Ayn Rand taught me what they really meant. This was when I made a beeline for my library to pick up Atlas Shrugged.

I suddenly became very afraid because I finally understood it. Everything. Their theories, their phony philosophies, everything. And here I was thinking like a fool that socialists really meant it, and it was just people who were inherently bad and ruined it. No, fuck that, no. Collectivism can hide itself under many names, S.E.I.U, Socialism, civil justice. It may hide under the more friendly sounding ones, like Health Care Reform. The devil takes many names. Whether you believe in him in flesh and bone or simply simile and metaphor, there is the existence of real evil in this world, and let me be frank with you; Collectivism is evil. Socialism is evil. Anything less than the full freedom we deserve under laissez-faire capitalism is evil. We can’t keep saying those who disagree with the obvious are “misguided”. They are not. Ignorance is not innocence, and they will not be saved. When all their plans crumble to the ground and their theories fall apart and it’s too late, the cop outs of ‘misguidance’ and ‘ignorance’ will not save them from the same fate as those of us that rang the warning bells ’till we grew weary. The difference between the radical liberals(asses or elephants) and normal, rational, conservative human beings – is the question of suicide. We are all afflicted with a terminal case of living.

Conservatives, capitalists specifically, want to make the best out of this. We are an ambitious breed. We have big dreams and are willing to sweat to get there. We may harbor deep fears about our futures, but this won’t deter us from taking chances; we want to see what’s next. We want to make this life as fulfilling as possible and leave a future that is sustainable for our children. The radical Marxists, the liberals, the fucks who sit in the white house twiddling their thumbs and voting on bills they didn’t write, let alone read – Ah, now, where are they driving us towards? Suicide. Impossible futures, I see them full of clouds of smoke and tyranny.

They cannot look us in the eye and they won’t. It only takes a second – a metaphorical second of us not looking for them to finish putting in place what they need to, so that in the case of a manufactured emergency, they can seize it all. The sooner you open your eyes to it and see where they’re stretching their tentacles the better off you are. Those who are not wary, this question to you I pose: Is it not a good idea to keep an eye on the organization that controls virtually everything about your life? Is it not reasonable to find it disconcerting when your employees start treating you like a pet instead of a force to be reckoned with? Have they forgotten who pays their salaries and keeps food on their table? When is ‘too much control’ going to be too much for you, those who are still sleeping? If life has taught you anything, it is that nothing is outside of the realm of human possibility; it is that politics are a circus of corruption and a cycle of lies and pretty words. It’s that a president shouldn’t need a teleprompter to look at the American people, right into the eye of the camera, and tell us everything is going to be fine. If life has taught you anything, it should be the fact that politics in this sense is a giant seesaw in which government grows; individualism shrinks. Once large entity to overtax you and swallow you up. It’s about power. I don’t know why, but it’s about power. Once upon a time, there were men who had the courage of their convictions, who believed in things so strongly that they’d stake their lives. Where the hell are you now?

These were men who understood what it meant to believe in something purely for the sake of the truth. We saw it spark in some journalists; few politicians, but the memorable ones; we saw it in historical peaceful protests through Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, among others. And me, I first saw it in a book, who’s binding has long since cracked. I first saw it through a philosopher, immigrant, and wordsmith named Ayn Rand. She gave me step one. I know what I’m fighting for; it’s the proven truth that we are not as free as we think we are. That everything that’s happening now has happened before. That their dirty games will collapse and drag us all under. Will we wait for that day? Strip down the arguments to their bare bones; Morals, philosophy, and theory.

What does it mean when they tax the rich? That they demonize profit. That they demonize capitalism. This is a prime example. Once we kill Robin Hood, we can move along to greener pastures. And once you get it – And I mean, get it – become a recruiter for the cause. Wave your freak flag high, man. I wear my socialist Obama t-shirt and buttons all the time .

If you want to pick a fight with me about it, let’s talk; I’m happy I’ve provoked you to share and even attempt to have an opinion. A lot of people are apathetic until they ask me about my strange pins, and then the floodgates open up; they reveal how little they actually know, but at the same time, you can see this look in their eyes; Why am I saying that? What does it mean? Am I right or wrong? And I’m one of those people who constantly thinks I’m right. I know what I stand for. I might be bitter at times, cynical, maybe I sound a bit paranoid. I don’t care. Your Che shirts piss me off. I will call you on them. I’m not a conservative conservative; my tongue is biting.

Call Sarah Palin a cunt again at my lunch table and I’ll be less kind than I was the first time; and don’t you dare call me racist because I disagree with my President. That’s right; He doesn’t just belong to you. If you’re not loud – if you don’t defend your principles – you might as well have none at all. Be brave. Be loud. Be respectful, and be willing to listen.

That might be the hardest part. After you get things figure out, don’t be thrown off by the arrogance of people who might be on the opposite side of the aisle. They might open your eyes to something you didn’t see before. Rand wrote, “Before once can say ‘I love you’, one must first know how to say the ‘I’.” What does the ‘I’ entail? Who are you?

One is defined by one’s values. What values do you hold dear? Why are they worth defending?

Figure yourself out, youth. This is the only period of your life when you will have unlimited time for books and music and information in order to do just that.

But I keep on writing and I keep on watchin’ what they say, I keep listening. That I’ve never stopped. And no matter how many Yoga poses you do or green tea or mocha chai lattes you drink, no matter how many trendy artists nobody’s ever heard of you can boast on your iPhone,  the only thing that’ll really leave you free is the truth. I reject your bohemian, materialistic trend-setting doctrine as a prescription not for social freedom and individuality, but as a joke, and whatever scene I end up in, I hope I ain’t confronted with the likes of you. I’ve grown too short-tempered, too impatient for it.

But I keep on writing.

Joe Public lit a cigarette, stood stoic and estute.

His voice, it grew real quiet, and the words he spoke were few

It was a breathy repetition of a mantra overdue,

“Corrupted Congressman, there ain’t no place for

you.”

Healthcare & Honor in CT’s 1^st Congressional District

It went like this: My grandfather and I loaded up in his van, headed down to Larson’s town hall, and arrived about a half hour early. When we arrived, we found the steps of our Congressman’s office were overrun with proponents of the bill – Nothing wrong with that. They have a right to be there, too. When my grandfather and I stepped over to get to the doors, they turned to each other and yelled, “Form the line!” attempting to force us to back down. Uh… excuse me?

This was our house. We were not backing down. And no thugs were going to silence our right to free speech and participation in democracy.

I know I’m not supposed to take a side, not ‘till the last paragraph, but as an active member of my community I was already well aware of the issue at hand and went not be informed but to be heard. Do pardon my bias, but I am but a lowly opinionated citizen, not a fancy-schmancy N.Y. Times Journalist(you know, the ones that are always objective).

Dozens of dirty hippies, union thugs, and bussed in folks from Massachusetts stormed the steps of Congressman John Larson’s town hall in support of President Obama’s socialized health deform. The opponents were loud, rude, and, oft times, not even residents of Larson’s district. Their signs were glossy and well-laid out – Ours were scribbled on cardboard. They were decked out with stickers and pins, the dress reflecting some kind of…uniform, dare I say? I do dare! They looked like soldiers in uniform!

This is an issue that’s been covered to death by the mainstream media, and as I flip back and forth between CNN and Fox News, I begin to get a full picture of why. This is Obama’s Waterloo. Him and his associates denounce us protesters and opponents of his healthcare plan, but he’s out there campaigning for it – Which shows us as the threat…and common sense tells most people that the government couldn’t even run a hot dog stand efficiently, let alone a complex national health scheme.

The two sides of the issues are clear and obvious; the hippies carried signs demanding we take care of our brothers and sisters. They said nobody should go without healthcare and the government growing even larger and more intrusive is justified. They advocated the passing of a bill that is so difficult to read  lawyers have trouble deciphering what it says. Who even wrote the bill? Something has been committed to paper in some way, because I’ve gleaned bits of it on the news… like the infamous page 16 that points out private insurance will be made illegal. Who wrote it? Apparently there are several in the works, and without the details being exposed and hammered out we already have politicians like John Larson(D-CT – oh, hey, that’s our guy!) pledging their support for the so-called “Public Option” plan(it’s not an option if page 16 renders private competition illegal).

H.R. 3200 seems to be the bill we’re pulling through the ringer, though, so let’s start there.

“H.R.3200 – Title: To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.

Let’s take a look at this posting from Sean Hannity’s forums, containing not only a link to HR 3200, but also an immense amount of intelligent discussion on this bill:

“America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009″
Introduced 7/14/2009
Status: Committee Consideration and Mark-up Session Held.”

This isn’t the only proposal being worked with, but it seems to be the most prominent one, based on its status and on it being the top-listed item on THOMAS.

As rumored, the bill does indeed contain an (illegal) order to get health insurance or be punished with a tax; see Title III (“Shared Responsibility”) Subtitle A Sec. 301, which leads you to the tax described starting in Sec. 401. Because the tax is described in a thicket of IRS Code modification, I’ve not looked into the exact amount this would be. But a guide to the amount is seen in the text: “The tax imposed under subsection (a) with respect to any taxpayer for any taxable year shall not exceed the applicable national average premium for such taxable year.” So, it’s designed to be comparable to the cost of a health insurance policy. I.e., the purpose of this tax is to punish the disobedient.

Note also that employers are ordered to provide insurance to their employees or pay a penalty/contribution for their disobedience. We’re to be locked into the employer-provided-insurance model that only exists in the first place because of WWII wage controls. “

His claims check out. I followed up on the links personally, instead of acting like a “professional” journalist and misquoting, misattributing, rewording and not following up if I put down false second hand information as fact. Maybe it’s just my thing, I don’t know. The link to this forum is included at the bottom of this text.

This addresses only some of our concerns about the bill. Our side carried signs advocated insurance reform, most definitely, and also encouraging personal responsibility. We advocated Capitalism and denounced Cuba – The culmination of this argument came about when a woman asked, “What’s so wrong with socialism, anyway?” And later on when some kid gave me a Socialist Action newsletter. Now, I know I hate it when folks generalize on our side, so I won’t do it to these guys. I’m sure there were a handful of them that really believed in this because they think it’s the right thing to do, folks who advocate love and peace and denounce socialism. Maybe they don’t realize how much we’re slipping away from The Constitution. Maybe they think what Europe’s got ain’t such a bad system after all.

America was founded on the very principle that we would not be like every other nation on earth, and definitely not like Europe. We fled from there, remember? We were a nation founded on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; on individual freedoms; on dreams. The Founding Fathers tried to warn us about tyrannical governments – “Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace” – thank you Mr. Madison – and thus engineered sets of checks and balances to be installed within our own government to prevent it from growing out of control. They wanted us as close to anarchy as possible – with the government as small as we could get away with – doing little except enforcing laws and building roads. Look around. Don’t you think they’ve overstepped the set boundries? Gosh, I see it, and it makes me angry. Thomas Jefferson is spinning in his grave.

Larson had a panel of experts behind him. The proponents of the bill had waited since 3:30 outside of the doors so they could flood it and hopefully keep us out. Still, dissenters managed to fight their way in, few though their numbers were. Aren’t we the ones he wants to try and convince, after all? A woman behind him even had the guts to say that this plan was constitutional. She quoted the Constitution:

“WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

She emphasized that bit in bold. Promote the general Welfare does not equal Provide the general Healthcare. It really bothered me that she’s twisting the words of the Founding Fathers to fit her agenda. They didn’t believe in big government. They didn’t believe in the government being involved in their lives at all, some more than others. The general consensus amongst those 56 great men was that government sucks and they wanted little to do with it, and it’s power should be limited so it can’t intrude on your life. That was it. Bada-bing, bada-boom, done. Finished. It’s simple enough when you actually read what they wrote. Wonder how many in Congress read and comprehended The Federalist Papers – if for nothing more than a better understanding of government in general.

There was no other side in that room. The few dissenters were abused and made to feel like their opinion was not welcome at this discussion. Last I heard, everybody has the right to participate in local government – It’s our duty, damn it! And to think you have the right to silence opinions you do not agree with is despicable, anti-American, and snobbish.

Larson was quoted as saying that if necessary, they’ll tax the nations wealthiest 1%. Where is the sense in that? I’m tired of watching these politicians demonize money, sick and tired of it. I am not entitled to what somebody else has earned. Money does not equal greed; business does not equal evil; and being proud of profits does not make you despicable. Ayn Rand addresses this issue best in her novel, Atlas Shrugged:

So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? …. Money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.

Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter….Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.”

Still, the other side hammered in that Medicare is awesome(bankrupt) and the government has a history of running successful social entitlement programs(haha what).Overall I think their emotions governed them too much – One whiny chick at the front lines was sobbing the whole time. “Healtchare noooow! Healthcare noooow!” Which doesn’t help her case. When you go into an argument you have to Mr. Spock it, so to speak. Bring facts and remain objective and emotionally distant. Be open to the truth if you are proven wrong. Take in everything with an open mind, even if you think you are right – because we owe more to the truth and our country than we do to political parties, and our personal bias.  Want to talk solutions? How about Tort Reform? They walk right out of the room when you bring up that one. How about devising a way for your healthcare to follow you – not your job? Don’t know how that would work, but I think it sounds about right. How about we look into insurance reform and punish the folks who through people under the bus and wrongfully take advantage of people? Why don’t we clean up Medicare and Medicaid? The concept of these make no sense to me, because I think they’re immoral by nature, but if we’re going to deal with this little entitlement program, let’s do it without bankrupting the country. A last comment – We’re often told “Well, the Republican party doesn’t have any ideas.” Republicans shouldn’t have to meet up in a secret clubhouse and come up with a party-based plan to be taken seriously. If one man – Democrat or Republican – has a good idea, it should be met with support on both sides of the aisle without embarrassment. To blame the Republicans for not having a plan supported by the whole party angers me because it only reinforces this Democrat v. Republican partisan issue. I hate that. Parties do not matter. It doesn’t matter to me, it doesn’t matter to most Americans – Why can’t they see that? Why reinforce this black and white stupid tug of war garbage they’ve been playing at for years? America is more awake and aware of what’s going on than I’ve ever seen in my short little lifespan, and it’s amazing to me that they think they can get away with this.

The claim that this plan is revenue neutral is laughable, but that’s cool, Prez. Just keep printing money and touring the world apologizing for America. Keep running up the deficit. Guess we can cut you a little slack – Clinton and Bush left you quite a screwed up economy. I understand that. But how much longer can you blame the last administration before you man up, buck up, and do the right thing? Spending money does not save money, just as surely as “abandoning the principles of the free market system” does not save the free market… and proposing this government expanding socialistic healthcare takeover at this time is the wrong thing to do for the budget, no matter how often you preach otherwise. Proposing it at any time would warrant a very lengthy and serious discussion, actually – so don’t get up on your pedestal in front of Congress acting annoyed at us. You haven’t been clear – and when you have, we got the meaning crystal. When it comes down to it, no matter all the problems in this bill, I think all you have to do is glance at the Constitution and the rejected 2^nd Bill of Rights to come to your conclusion on this heated issue, because that’s what’s important. This healthcare bill is about so much more than healthcare – It’s socialism, it’s big government, it’s entitelement, it’s an embarrassing defecit – This healthcare bill and our current President represent years and years of building frustrations among your average Americans who simply cannot keep silent anymore. What makes these politicians so arrogant that they think they can trample on our Constitutional law – That they’re smarter than Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, I could go down the whole list. It’s arrogance in it’s purest form – This Healthcare bill is just one way that it twists and manifests itself.

And on 9/12, as I watch T.V. and see the crowd at Washington D.C. – The crowd I should’ve been apart of – I pay attention to their signs. They address Healthcare because it’s so prominent right now, but Obama’s agenda is all interconnected – They’re all the same issues, the same concerns. I see Anti-Czar signs and a guy that looks like he could be my neighbor in an old baseball cap quoting the Constitution off the top of his head. My mind wanders to all these town halls and the people coming out and asking questions everywhere. And I think of a great man in the distance of our past, penning this to paper:

“A little matter will move a party, but it must be something great that moves a nation.”

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792

The quote I used from the Sean Hannity forum discussion is located at http://forums.hannity.com/showthread.php?t=1562881

The full text of HR 3200 is available at http://docs.house.gov/edlabor/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf

Free from the shackles of formal government run education, I have been spending my summer trying to get into trouble, or at least out of the house. I have failed profoundly at both of those thus far, although I have been having quite a social life outside of my room. In between binging on Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart movies, I have been out in the world, playing cards, doing music, and just having a general fantastic time with my pals.

I feel that politically my views have grown sharper, and I’m more pinpointed; My convictions are stronger than they have ever been before. Of course I’m open minded. Of course I welcome discussion. But on the other side of the coin, I know what I believe in, and I know what I value. From a two-hour debate with a college-attending socialist, whom I like to think I dessimated, speaking at my local tea party protest on the fourth of July, looking at colleges and asserting my independence here at home, I’m growing in body, mind, and soul.

I’m ready to face the school year completely unafraid of debate, discussion, and “coming out of the closet” as a staunch conservative. I’ve never been ashamed of it, but I’ve been ganged up on countless times – and sometimes, you just think, Jesus, why bother with these kids? They’re not only ignorant, but they don’t want to discuss, they just want to look down their noses at you and proclaim that they’re right – No proof and no facts. It’s useless to look for logic where there is none, or to use it in an argument where it’s relevance is nonexistent.

I’m doing typography, which I’ll post here, of full-page quotes that inspire me. I have a binder that allows you to easily slip a picture into the front under this spill-resistant clear-plastic page thing, and every day I plan on bringing a new quote to school. This is an experiment in provoking thought and discussion amongst others.

As a second generation Puerto Rican, I’d like to make it clear that Sonya Sotomayor does not speak for me. Please and thank you.

And I will not take race relations without kicking and screaming. I will not sit there and be told that white people are the cause of everybody’s misery. I will not sit there and be told, instead of the stories of civil triumph and human rights and the incredible endurance of the human spirit, story upon story upon story about the african slaves and how evil we still are to their descendents.

They will not tell me I am a racist and I will not stand for it. Silent no more.

-Breezy

My social studies exam was depressing.

It wasn’t that it was difficult or biased, but that the students I had sat next to and tolerated for almost a year seemed to know absolutely nothing about history. And not just history, but modern events, too – One girl, a senior who would be graduating this following Thursday, asked with glazed eyes what country the 9.11 terrorists were from.

LOL WHAT?

Now, look, maybe she was just… not too bright, right? But it wasn’t just her asking questions like that.

Let me make one thing abundantly clear: there is no excuse for not knowing about this stuff.

This was the same girl – These are the same students – That openly agreed and talked about how the war was about oil and egged our teacher on when he ranted.

In fact, let’s catalogue all the glorious truths I have learned in my Junior year in High School under the banner of American History. Here is a shortlist:

• John Walker-Lindh, “The American Taliban”, was not fighting against Americans. He was fighting some other rebel faction and we just happened to find him amongst the bodies. Because we’re embarrassed we couldn’t catch him under any crimes against his country, we’ve cut him a deal. Boy, are we red in the face!

• America has not always stood for it’s principles of Freedom, Equality, and Civil Rights.

• Bush is a jackass. You know what, he wasn’t a stupid man, stupid men don’t get as far as he did, I don’t care who you are. And I don’t agree with everything he did and we weren’t happy watching that money funnel down the toilet but he was(at the time) still our President and you have to have some respect. There is a line.

• The War was about oil.

• Republicans are desperate to get Barack Obama out of Office so they’ll do anything, including examining his birth certificate, to get him out. He often lumps run of the mill Conservatives up with the Right-Wing Crazies.

• He briefly touched upon the Homeland Security report, reaffirming the ideas of the “Right Wing Terrorists”.

• It’s his job, not to report the facts, but to – and I quote – “interpret the news” so that we can understand it… Are we too stupid to use our critical thinking and come to our own conclusion?

He’s a nice guy, a good person at heart, but I’ve left his classroom before. It’s wrong for him to stand up there on a pedestal and say those things, no two ways about it, and – listen – that’s the short list! There’s more!

You want to bitch about education? You tell me college is going to be bad? I’m getting fucked over already.

And I’m told I’ve got to grit my teeth because it’s not about right and wrong – It’s about tolerance.

What a load.

]]> http://obnoxiouscommentary.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/617-more-bullshit/feed/ 2 breezyshrugged http://obnoxiouscommentary.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/611-general-mayhem/ http://obnoxiouscommentary.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/611-general-mayhem/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:10:13 +0000 breezyshrugged http://obnoxiouscommentary.wordpress.com/?p=30 ]]> General Mayhem would be a really good band name, but I can’t think of bands right now, I got that same old song playin’ in my head. A broken record.

And I’m sitting here, and I know everybody else can hear it, but nobody else is reacting to it. It’s driving me up a wall. I’m so tired. All these politics wear me out.

Fallacies, policies, Socrates, shut the fuck up – Let me breathe.

…

Ahhh.

General motors was too big to fail; Now it’s bankrupt anyway.

Is this the burden I was born to carry? I don’t want to go into the future with this debt on my shoulders, this shame in my stomach, this failure. I want to be part of the generation that said “Fuck You!” to the government for all the right reasons; I want to be part of the nation that sees socialism creeping up and says, “Excuse me, what the fuck are you doing?”

This is an active, living, breathing revolution. It’s all about the mind. Come into consciousness. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

This is a mental rejuvenation, a return to principles. More than anything, this general mayhem isn’t long lost partisan Pig-Latin gibberish – It’s a call to action.

And believe you me, Uncle Sam’s been calling you a long time.

“At times you have to fight. No way around it. At some point, every one of us is confronted with danger or injustice. How we choose to combat that challenge is often life-defining. You can face difficulties head-on, or run from them, or ignore them until they consume you. But no one escapes conflict. No one. “

The above is an excerpt from Culture Warrior by Bill O’Reilly. The introduction was really awesome, I think – There’s something about it that’s stayed with me since I read the book back in 2007 – I often find myself thinking about it, the power of that first sentence, the truth in it — Sometimes you have to fight. No way around it.

I’ve been devouring Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin. I’ve gotten about halfway through. You know, I never really understood what Obama’s policies and the ideas of all these crazy politicians and activist judges would do(and have done). I didn’t realize it had gotten as out of hand as it has. The very soul of our nation is threatened and lay in the balance.

The kinds of radical changes we’ve been embarking on as a nation, the manipulation of the Constitution… It’s distressing. To quote a punk rocker, somehow it really bothered me.

I read Atlas Shrugged and it showed all these little ideas being put in motion. Rand didn’t just say, “Spreading the wealth is evil”, she showed me what happens when people try to pool their resources – Each according to their need. It made so much more sense to watch it unfold.

Then I see Rush Limbaugh doing that speech at CPAC, and I was like, “Holy shit. Parallels. I see them.”

So then I’m reading Crazies to the Left me, Wimps to the Right. From there, it snowballs. I get my hands on Liberty and Tyranny and practically drool.

And everything that Mark Levin is saying, it all makes sense. He’s just laying it out like it is. I think it’s helping to flesh out all that bullshit that happened in Atlas Shrugged for me, by defining it more, by giving it names and pointing out it’s many faces in our government.

Give this a listen before you teabag Obama today, lol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2H8xHFXC8U&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fbighollywood%2Ebreitbart%2Ecom%2Fasking%2F2009%2F04%2F14%2Famerican%2Dtea%2Dparty%2Danthem%2Dsinger%2Dlloyd%2Dmarcus%2Dthis%2Dwhole%2Dthing%2Dis%2Drush%2Dlim&feature=player_embedded

Raw link! It’s not letting me embed! Bahaha!

Anyway, I’m a bit incoherent and inconsistent right now because this blog is spur of the moment.

I certainly hope you attend a protest today. Silent majority no more! And you’d be surprised the kind of difference a protest can make, because it provokes people, it makes them think, it encourages research and the formation of an opinion. I have friends who try to keep their nose out of politics, but politics tie directly into one’s philosophy, morals, basic beliefs and way they want to live their life.

And for those of us who will not be joining us, we’re onto you. All of your reasons are cheap and see-through. Your arguments are laughable. Good luck.

My point being, you can’t run from it for too long. This is our nation. Seize the bull by the horns. Fuck this shit. Let’s go!

[an inspirational blog written at the beginning of a computer applications class; unfortunately, school filters killed this when I tried to post it. I found the draft; Do enjoy.]