why

Because we don’t want to see our mothers
for who they really are
or how far they have stretched
knowing they could never go back
Because we carry the weight
of their secrets they were forced to
wrap around hips, shoulders and backs
wrapped tightly hugged against breasts
babies for whom no one would claim
responsibility for or likeness to
Because we left a legacy of
girl too fast becoming womanchild
while underneath her skirt
still burns the fire of innocent intoxication
Because our fathers had the luxury
of sleeping on their stomachs
being ambiguous or unknown
while we waited, tenderfooted and swollen
to be unnamed

don't believe the hype

as per usual...Mr. Howard Zinn articulates what so many sane people are feeling right about now...

Election Madness

By Howard Zinn
(The Progressive, March 2008) -- There's a man in Florida who has
been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I've
never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held: security
guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and
day, to barely keep his family going.

His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our
capitalist system for its failure to assure "life, liberty, the
pursuit of happiness" for working people.

Just today, a letter came. To my relief, it was not handwritten
because he is now using e-mail:

"Well, I'm writing to you today because there is a wretched
situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say
something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis.
That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual
debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so
steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can't tell you. ... I did
a security guard job today that involved watching over a house
that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held
an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during
this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing
in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now."

On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page
story in the Boston Globe, with the headline "Thousands in Mass.
Foreclosed on in ‘07." The subhead[ing] was "7,563 homes were
seized, nearly 3 times the ‘06 rate."

A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000
people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social
Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are
not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.

Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are
gone in a flash. What's not gone -- what occupies the press day
after day, impossible to ignore -- is the election frenzy.

This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already
been chosen for us.

It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-
respecting teacher would give it to students.

And sad to say, the presidential contest has mesmerized
liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable. Is it possible to
get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the
presidential elections?

The very people who should know better, having criticized the
hold that the media have on the national mind, find themselves
transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the
candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with
a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.

Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is
an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the
major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor
candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic
political system won't allow them in.

No, I'm not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity.
Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat
better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the '30s,
for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between
the two parties may be a matter of life and death.

I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the
election madness. Would I support one candidate against another?
Yes, for two minutes -- the amount of time it takes to pull the lever
down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time and energy
should be spent in educating, agitating, and organizing our fellow
citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, and in the schools.

Our objective should be to build -- painstakingly, patiently but
energetically -- a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical
mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress,
into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let's remember that even when there is a "better" candidate
(yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George
Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of
the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White
House will find it dangerous to ignore.

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal -- Social Security,
unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized
housing -- were not simply the result of FDR's progressivism.

The Roosevelt administration, coming into office, faced a
nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover administration had
experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army -- thousands of
veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to
demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry.

There were similar disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit,
Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt presidency, strikes broke out
all over the country, including general strike in Minneapolis and
San Francisco, and hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile
mills of the South.

Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate
people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put
back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help
organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis -- economic destitution and rebellion --
it is not likely the Roosevelt administration would have instituted
the bold reforms that it did.

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it
faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading
presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will
not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system
of free healthcare for all. They offer no radical change from the
status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people
cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs
one, a minimum income for every household, and housing relief to
everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or
the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions,
even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has
broken with its historic conservatism -- its pandering to the rich,
its
predilection for war -- only when it has encountered rebellion from
below, as in the '30s and the '60s.

We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in
November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin
fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

So we need to free ourselves from the election madness
engulfing the entire society, including the left. So, yes, spend two
minutes focusing on the election. Before that, and after that, we
should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.

For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving
millions from their homes -- they should remind us of a similar
situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many
of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could
not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of
the land, their homes.

They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and
refused to allow the auctions to take place.

The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents
should remind us of what people did in the '30s when they
organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in
their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.

Historically, government -- whether in the hands of
Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals -- has failed
its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and
Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and
boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of
soldiers in order to stop a war.

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute
for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

------------------

Howard Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United
States," (with Anthony Arnove) of "Voices of a People's History",
and most recently, "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress."

love notes

Yes, it's Valentine's Day yet again. Red and Pink, Balloons and Teddy Bears, Candy Hearts and SpongeBob sentiments. In my desk at work, I have a collection of love notes that I have found in the hallways of our school. Sometimes they are actually written for a crush, sometimes about a crush, or just about love or like or lust or the infuriating and life-altering combination of all three that grips you in middle school and suddenly turns each and every day at school into the nucleus of human existence on planet Earth and the very possible end or beginning of life as you know it. Someday, when my collection grows large enough, I want to make a book out of them because I'm a sucker for nostalgia and besides, what adult wouldn't want to remember what love sounded like before you knew it wasn't enough? I think it's only when you start to forget what it felt like to be a child, that you begin to die.

The nucleus of my world in 6th grade was Tony P. He was my best friend and I was a tomboy so I wasn't supposed to give a shit about my guy friends besides what time they could hang out till after school, what Nintendo games they had, what thier mom's stocked their fridges with and what kinda bike or skateboard they rode. Unfortunately, when 6th grade hit, so did the crush. They call it a crush for a reason you know. I was thoroughly, entirely crushed that all of a sudden I wanted to be the girl he liked, instead of making fun of the girls he liked. It fucked up my whole game. I dreamt about him at night and then became certain he could tell in the daytime. My face would burn when he tried to talk to me about playing basketball after school or going to the corner store, for no reason other than I was harboring this awful hateful secret: I loved him. I loved him so much I wanted everything in the universe to cave in on us and let me have the chance to be with him - without the unbearable weight of what that would mean to our friendship, and what people would say about me, how much they'd make fun of me, and how he would most likely be forced to reject me, even if he did like me, to protect himself from what people would think if he went out with me...ME, the one all the boys kicked it with but would never KICK IT with and who was probably a dyke anyways and seriously pretty weird even if she wasn't.

For an entire year, I thought of nothing but being his girlfriend. I wrote about it and sang about it and cried about it and lost sleep over it, but through all my pain and suffering, I never told a soul. I watched him fall for other girls, often being forced to act as a liaison to tell the girl he liked her and ask if she wanted to go with him. I let him be on the playground, watched from the corner at dances and the skating rink while he put his hands on hips and shoulders and necks of girls I had nothing in common with and didn't want to be friends with, but envied with my entire being nonetheless. We still hung out almost every day; I knew him like a brother - actually I knew him better than my brother. I'd hang out at his house, shooting hoops in his driveway, playing with his two little shit tzu puppies, talking to his mom, watching cable that I didn't have, till I couldn't risk being any later getting home without getting grounded and therefore being kept from spending more time with him. I remember trick-or-treating with him and going into the only haunted house I've ever been in (I still can't go, they freak me out) even though I was terrified, because I didn't want him to see me acting like a baby. It felt like nearly everything I did that year was for him or about him, until one day he came to school and told me his dad got a new job and he had to move to Indiana. I was crushed.

Before Tony left for Indiana, I somehow summoned the courage to tell him how I felt. I guess I figured if he wasn't around anymore, no one would find out and ridicule me for making my grand declaration of love, and if he rejected me, well at least I wouldn't have to see him every day in school. He would be in an entirely different state and gossip couldn't possibly travel that far, right? So I waited until the day he was leaving. I told him in his empty basement. I can't remember what I said or how I even managed to say it, but he told me that he had liked me the entire time too, but now that he was leaving there really wasn't much to do about it. He would go to Indiana, I would stay in Michigan, we would go on with our lives and stay friends. He would visit, keep in touch, whatever, but that was that. I remember being completely stunned. I don't know if he said that because he wanted to make me feel good and he knew he could and it wouldn't have any consequence because he was leaving, or if it was actually true. Either way, he left me feeling loved and hopeful - hopeful that love could happen in impossible situations and that all I needed was the courage to love out loud. I also felt kinda ripped off and pissed that he never said nuthin or made a move, but I moved on after a few months and loved someone else even harder and faster, because that's what you do in middle school when love is enough to make u get up in the morning and go to school and enough to make u never want to get up again.