American Angry

Americans are angry. Black Americans, American Latinos, Native Americans and of course, White Americans. The poor are angry, as are the rich and middle class, right along with second amendment and gun control advocates, pro-lifers, pro-abortionists, Southerners, Northerners, Christians, non-Christians, the Police, the old, the young, the general public, and just about everyone else in America.

We should be!

I am an old, not quite withered man of 58, and I am angry. I am also tired.

In my lifetime, I cannot remember a time when this Nation was not on a war footing. Wars; big, small and even inconsequential have been the thread of our existence.

What does a legacy of war say about this exceptional Nation?

An exceptional nation that honors our solders as great heroes, greater patriots in our media, in our entertainment media. Heroes that have given their lives to protect our freedom, yet our Veterans, with no better phrase to state it, are treated like crap by the Government they protect and by the very public which hails them as heroes. I’m angry about that, angry that the Veteran suicide rate is so fantastically high, almost one every hour, and angrier that few claim to even be aware of that fact. I’m angry that we have a civilian population of young and ageing vets that are damaged.

I’m angry at what we have become as a people, as a nation. I’m angry at what our priorities have become. I’m angry at those, without knowing who they are, who have driven a huge wedge between myself and my friends, and even family members. I’m angry at myself for allowing that wedge to exist, and I’m angrier at those who refuse to comprise, much less listen, and relish driving that wedge deeper into the soul of all Americans for their personal welfare, their personal agenda, and their personal view of what this Nation should look like.

As a white man that once woke uncomfortably up, the only white man in a cell, I get that racism exists. That’s on the individual, that feeling of being uncomfortable wasn’t the result of humans that were born a darker shade than I, it was because of my feelings, my fear, my sense of being uncomfortable.

We no longer ask why we are uncomfortable, we just blame it on minorities, the poor, the mentally ill, anyone who we can claim as a scapegoat. I’m angry that is who we are.

For a Nation of Christians, we fail miserably at being good stewards of our earth, good keepers of our brothers, in being compassionate of our judgement of others. Indeed, religion as a whole has become a divisive wedge, not bringing people together in brotherhood, but instead driving people apart, in horrible, terrible ways. I’m angry at what Christianity has become, fractured, divisive, political, fearful, and even, hateful. What was once a deeply personal experience has become fodder for those who wish to propagate their beliefs, interpreting the aged words of God as their own, personal belief system.

Indeed, we do not celebrate age, wisdom and experience in this Nation, we shutter our elders away in retirement communities, assisted living and nursing homes, and most visit their mother or father on a holiday or birthday. Gone is the generational connection of having your elder living in your basement, or nearby. Gone is the honor of passing in your own home, your own bed. Gone is the tradition of inheritance, because the state, the government takes everything to pay for your parents lives lived in retirement. They will takes yours as well.

Just as we fear diversity, just as we do not celebrate our elderly, we fear and we ignore the mentally handicapped. They are shunned, outcasts and forced to live with a stigma that you not only don’t understand, but don’t want to understand.

Neither Christian, American, much less humanistic.

I was taught we take care of our own, clearly we do not.

Not only do we take care of our own, we’re not good stewards of our home, a living, breathing ecosystem in the cold darkness of space. While we’ve raised awareness, raising that awareness doesn’t do much if major corporations can continue to spill billions of oil into our oceans without serious consequence, if game and fishing industries can continue to hunt and fish our companion species into extinction, if shipping can continue to create a huge garbage dump of our oceans, all without serious consequence. Without even tagging the fact of global warming, we’re destroying our planet. Add in the dire warnings of climate change, our future looks dismal.

All of us have reasons to be angry. We live our lives in the midst of violence. Be it from our police, a mass shooting, a riot, a single murder or on the screen of our television, we almost relish it for the entertainment it brings us, until it is our son, our daughter, whose corpse we are invited to identify. We don’t even have the intelligence, the compassion, the honor or gall to even address the issue much less talk about it unless we’re blaming our neighbor for the violence. It’s always someone else’s fault.

I’m also angry that I bought into a lie my father preached to me as a young son. Work hard, be honest and you’ll find success. I don’t measure success by living paycheck to paycheck at 58. Yes, I made some bad decisions, and I take ownership, but I’ve held down a job since I was eleven. My wife, since finishing nursing school. We’ve both worked hard, decent jobs. I had almost 20 years with my last employer, and Theresa has 25 with hers. Never been poor, but this is the thing, when we get a paycheck, it’s gone, mostly to bills, groceries and benefits. We’re not poor, but we’re certainly aren’t going to have the golden years we once thought we would. Yea, I’m angry about that. Angry that I’m part of that vanishing, working class American.

There is a lot to be angry about. We are not the exceptional Nation that you believe we are. Yes, we might be full of piss and vinegar, we might beat our chests in triumph, we might bleed red, white, and blue but none of that makes us exceptional to anyone else, except those doing the shouting how great we are.

Greatness is born of respect, and we lost that when we made the collective, National decision that to be feared is exceptional, that to be respected is to be minimal.

There’s a lot to be angry about.

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A Most Misfortunate Soul

(that you will ever meet)


There is no matter, rope or forged chain that held the old piano, swaying high in air, to and fro. Of concern only, is the singular concern that whatever suspect held the weight aloft, did not hold for long.

That a great weight landed upon Mr. Lockwoods head, ending his life, as the rest of his life, is a lie. It was not the weight that ended his most misfortunate life. Rather, as the old wood piece of junk succumbed to gravity, it splintered. Upon smashing into a a hundred large splinters, one small shiver of a large splinter went splaying, cutting through the hot, warm and humid summer air to find a home somewhere in the back of Mr. Lockwood's rather large, cumbersome brain.

Doing so in such a fashion, that Mr. Lockwood believed a small insect of the flying kind had drawn his blood. Before he could raise his palm to swat the aforementioned flying small irritation away, Mr Lockwood was  dead, splayed himself across the walk, the shattered remains of life and piano evident to all.

It was not what was evident in this tragic scene that bears the slightest importance, not at all. Not one witness would guess, could guess, given hints as well, that the man who lay, dead and cold across the walk this fine hot summer night, was the most misfortunate soul one would ever, could ever, or in this tale, hope to meet.

Ninety Seven long, tedious yeas ago plus some small, small change, Mr. Lockwood was born to a fair and wealthy maiden who in turn had found a fair and wealthy prince. Unknown to both, a drunkard by nature, an orderly by secured profession switched without care or caution a bassinet, and Mr. Lockwood went from a life of princely principal to an existence of professional poverty in the space allocated for less than a thousand and three breaths.

Truly, a most misfortunate thing. As a young lad, living under the decrepit concrete and stone bridge, Mr Lockwood often on a clear, cool unclouded night would gaze off to the distant, and wonder who the fine and pretty people were that lived in that grand, magnificent house far away, on the only hill on any distant horizon.

Mr. Lockwood would never know.bridge1

Life under that old bridge was cold and harsh in the coldest months, and hot and miserable in the sun drenched days of summer. The old cardboard house had to be rebuilt after every rainfall, and when the river encroached, Mr. Lockwood and his poor mother sought safety in the hill of the high ground, just above the bluffs, thickened and threatened by forest and large, dark unknown animals, all hidden and protected by the oak, poplar and pines.

All Mr. Lockwood possessed in his youth was a tattered blanket, a singular eternally filthy blanket full of holes which from time to time, Mr. Lockwood attempted to rinse in the rapids under the bridge. Mr. Lockwood never understood the origins of the blanket, nor the meaning of the name sewn on a now frayed corner edge, barely readable. One day, while rinsing, a current caught what was left of the filthy material and it disappeared from sight in a single, exasperated and sorrowful sigh of misfortunate loss.

Things being as what they were in Mr. Lockwoods youth, he was not an unintelligent young man. After all, his genes were of the most superb available, and after considering the irony that the jeans he wore, were so less significant than those he possessed, one can only wonder to the matters and consequences of the universe. That matter and consequence came to be important when at the age of thirteen he was hired, not for his intelligence, and in spite of his unkept and unthreaded appearance, to work deep in the dark coal mines as a digger, apprenticed to one old, curmudgeon Mr. Paxton, who non the less, taught the boy how to dig rock with the utmost sincerity and respect due all rock and coal.

Years passed in the darkness of rock and tunnels and one day, Mr Lockwood was told that Mr. Paxton's heart had given out at the end of a especially long and misbegotten day and that from that day forward, Mr. Lockwood would be expected to labour long and hard without companionship.

Unknown to Mr. Lockwood, is that Mr. Paxton after a life of hardship had managed to save a small pittance of astounding proportions. Barely known to Mr. Lockwood was that Mr. Paxton had a wife, three sons and a daughter. Mrs. Paxton, along with her sons, in an action unknown by her fair and honest daughter, cheated Mr. Lockwood out of the small amount of gold that his long standing co-worker had bequeathed him. Of course, it was a most misfortunate thing.

One day, pick ax slung over broad shoulders, Mr. Lockwood was refreshing in the cool waters under the bridge, naked and nude as most men tend to be in their youthful days, when a young, delightful fish of a woman swam his way, naked as most fish are, and inquired as to his name and nature.

cardboardhousesThe young woman had been married some years past, and in an unfortunate, unforeseeable accident, her husband had been trampled to death by a horse carrying a funeral carriage. A funeral carriage carrying the tender remains of a young man that had once lived in a great and magnificent house, far away on a distant hill. It is a most unfortunate thing that Mr. Lockwood never learned that the woman who came to him in the river was none other than Mr. Paxton's true, honest and beautiful Laura, for he once thought to ask, to which she replied, there was no need to know, for she cared not for her past, her mother or her evil brothers.

Time flies as a crow flies, herethere and everywhere but never in form or desire of ones heart. Mr. Lockwoods marriage to his true and tender produced a heritage that most men would be proud, and most women in constant and glorious agony, but it is a most misfortunate thing that a poor man, a man of rock, can not feed, can not cloth, much less tend, to an enormous flock. In the unseemly tick of times eyes, children were born, children were raised with scraps from the table, tatters for clothes, all in cardboard houses along the wandering river under a bridge, with a hill far in the distant. One a baker, two a ditch digger, three sweeps streets, four works late till the sun comes round, five pours coffee, six acts upon a worlds stage and seven, still a child, lives at home.

Love is as time is, a tender thing, tragic this day, joyous the next. For each of us, it is either or, never seen the two tween the sun and moon the same day. One can not say the same for Mr. Lockwood and it is a most misfortuante thing for when eight arrived, his true and only, departed. Departed in a way, only love can, with child in arm, husbands hand in hers, a smile, then her whisper, a belief so strong echoed in  gentle words.

Surely, a most misunfortunate thing, especially so for an old and bothered Mr. Lockwood who raised his young number eight to be, not a musician, but a musician, a muse of word and rhythm, fashioning string from dinner sinew, horns from large, undiscovered, old and ancient bones, ivories from forgotten circus elephants and forming small and distinct wooden instruments. One day, as the young girl sat upon the rocks of the gentle flowing river that gracefully swept under the bridge, a carriage came to a quick and fortunate stop above, high above, over head, and an old, a very old young lady helped herself out of the horse drawn carriage.

For no other purpose than to listen to the child sing and play far down below, upon the rocks.

'It is a most misfortunate thing' the woman claimed, with finger pointing to Mr. Lockwoods nose 'that such a gifted little child be born to one such as you' and therefore asked, and asked again, and therefore so many more times that Mr. Lockwood finally packed all her simple and cherished belongings and walked with her to the far and distant house on the hill where she lived a splendid life of love and goodwill.

Bones become brittle, bend in shape, muscles ache, some even wither and tither away while thoughts turn to memories, or those that remain. Age of old, and older still, is a most misfortunate thing is what Mr. Lockwood was thinking as he paid for his daughters birthday gift, an old, but beautiful girl with soft pelt hammers and tongue tied ivories waiting to be set free. Mr. Lockwood stayed just long enough, to watch it hoisted out the third floor door, to be dropped to the cart below, before he turned, to walk away, his heart happy.

It was a most misfortunate thing, for an unfortunate soul.

As the sun rose, in cardboard houses under bridges all across the land that the days sun would wash, people prepared a bridgejourney. Fathers, sons, daughters, their children and their children's children prepared. Some in rich and fine clothes, some in rags and ragitty tatters. Some men good, some perhaps not, women with their men, some alone. Bakers, ditch diggers, street sweepers, night workers, actors, writers and musicians all prepared, all came. And their friends, and their friends friends came.

From high on the hill, from far and away, Mrs Lockwood held her husbands hand, and smiled at the most fortunate thing.

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Reincarnation, Really? 4 17 14

Our belief in a vision of who we are is vastly different than an unarticulated vision of who frac4we should be, need to be. We no longer even trust our collective good will to bargain as a whole for our financial and personal welfare. As lambs, we wear the false skin of a wolf because we submit to being led blindly down a destructive path while believing it is an exceptional journey to great rewards and eternal riches. We lay our heads upon our pillows, dreaming, even sincerely believing that tomorrow will bring a glorious chorus of welcomes into the 1% club when in truth, the one percent take, and take. Our esteemed news media no longer is involved in the art of news, they now are in the business of entertainment, entertainment and propaganda. The selling of that false vision to insure your remain a lamb steeped in the beliefs of a wolf.

We are both poor students of history and even poorer judges of the environment in which we live. No single political entity survives when a society is fractured and goes untended. No Government survives when Government ceases to benefit those they are tasked to Govern. No Democracy thrives when it's citizens no longer care to participate, and pass fract2decisions to those who are unfit to piss in a pasture populated by cows.

As a Nation, as a people, and as a society we have been lulled into a false belief that we are impervious to ruination and civil strife to such a  degree that we believe our Government can never fall. There is common ground in the thought that no matter how great our differences, our Nation will survive, our Government, our Constitution, will endure.

Fifty long and tedious years after our Civil Rights movement, racism has reared it's ugly influence to an appalling extent. Those valued men and women who risk their lives to protect us in the sands of far flung apocalyptic countries are disrespected under an illusion of patriotic puffed chests and guileless verbiage. Our police, those tasked to serve and protect here on the home front, have become our enemies, their motives questioned at every tick of the second hand. Our politicians are corrupt and their loyalty is a fealty not to our constitution or history, but to their political party,  to their political ideology, second only to their bank accounts. Our Gods, once bastions of good will, comfort, and common sense, have become gods of division, contempt and prejudice.

And yet we continue to trust those who have proven they are not worthy of our trust. Perhaps because we have no other options available. Perhaps because we have become lost, ourselves.


We call that democracy, we call that equality, and we are fine with it. Those who are not, are socialists, communists and the dredge of society. Those who speak out are questioned as unpatriotic, as undemocratic, as socialists. There is afractured1 pretense on our part that we know the difference between the three when a larger, supported truth supports the knowledge that most Americans do not know the difference between a Republic and a Democracy, much less Socialism.

One man is not to blame. One President is not to blame. In fact, those who are to blame hide in plain site, comprised of a insidious agenda to destroy our great Nation through deceit, conflict and manipulation. Their belief is in an America whose strength lies in its Military, it's influence in it's financial power, and that the path to reach those goals is through war, conquest and domination, establishing a global American Financial empire, even at the cost of our Constitution.

They are winning! We are a divided nation, without direction, without vision. That fracture is growing, not by decades, not by years or even weeks. The abyss grows darker by the day, ridiculously so. We refuse to see it, to accept it, to seek solution.

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The Intelligence of the Ruling Class

I do not care if you are a politician, a Doctor, a Lawyer or some rich and golden CEO, because I want you to remember one friggin little tidbit, when your toilet backs up, you need me. People like to talk about the entitlements given to the poor, to the dregs and the downtrodden of our society but they never seem to talk about the entitlements of the rich, the wealthy, the educated. You know, all those uppity ups that we ditch diggers, we sewer divers, serve.

The first entitlement given to any educated person, is the belief that they are always right, that they know better than the plumber whose ass is hanging out the back of his pants. The second entitlement is that because they spent 4 years in college, they believe they have the right to make more money than the Janitor pushing a broom, sweeping up the shit the educated person just tossed on the floor. The last, and worst entitlement, is that many of the ruling class just feel they are better people, better human beings than all those in the lower end of the financial spectrum.

What I’m really getting at, is the total lack of respect for those people in this Nation, whose lives took a direction that just didn’t give them the opportunity to live the great American dream and are instead working menial but meaningful minimum wage jobs. I always knew the lack of respect existed, this class distinction, but I never believed it widespread until now. Most won’t acknowledge the ugly truth, even to their own selves, their egos would never allow that, but it is there, in all it’s glory.

I do not agree with the Tea party, but I do understand their motivations, what drove some of these people to get up off rotund asses and start following the Limbaughs, Hannitys and the Becks of the world. They’re tired of being treated like second class citizens, tired of being treated like shit.

And they are, and we are!

And the next time someone who makes a couple hundred grand a year tells me that they know what my life is like, I’m going to kick the shit out of ya..., friend or not! I work just as hard as you do, just as long as you do. I don’t have the same access to health care as you do, to the legal system as you do, I don’t get paid to attend conventions or management seminars (Golf outings) and I don’t get to take annual trips to the Caribbean.

I’m too busy unplugging your damn toilet.

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