Forward- The Day of the Raids

Angry.

Meth is rampant in Washington State.

Drunk driving is rampant in Washington State.

Political corruption is rampant in Washington State.

Police corruption is rampant in Washington State.

The taxpayers spoke and do you know what the cops of Washington and of Washington, DC said to us?:Fuck you. We do what we want.

The last I heard, cops were supposed to be public servants.

The taxpayers spoke and do you know what the doctors said to us about obtaining our meds: Fuck you. Do it MY way or suffer. 

The taxpayers spoke and the politicians said to us: Fuck you. We will do whatever we want to you whenever we want-with YOUR tax money.

How did the citizens of Washington State get this way? Complacent with being abused? Complacent with being told how to live?

Complacent with having their own tax dollars used against them?

WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

How many people think that the politicians are going to create the jobs needed to get Washington State back on track by January 1, 2014?

The politicians can’t create any jobs while the taxes from our disability and unemployment checks go to pay their salaries. They’ve shipped our jobs away and refuse to replace them.

So when we try to survive by being healthier with MMJ they STILL try to shut us down.

They are wrong and they have to go.

Then we have the corrupt dispensary owners who turn on their neighboring dispensaries because of greed. They don’t give a shit about their patients.

[TimesOfMalta.com]

At the top of all of this are the fake patient advocates who have been pretending to be friends with the patients in order to collect data that is used to deprive them of their medicines — to make them suffer.

When people cannot have their chronic pain medications or end-of-life medications they become angry, depressed, and bedridden.

When people cannot have their meds, they cannot work, properly raise their kids, help their elders, help their churches, or fight for social justice; this is exactly what the politicians want in order to stay in power.

How dare these people try to take away our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Washington citizens are retreating into booze, prescription pain meds, and methamphetamine at astonishing rates.

How do these people sleep at night knowing that their perverse need to control other peoples’ lives is ruining entire cities?

[The Feronia Project]

It’s time for these people to go. It’s time to call the special election necessary to relieve these people of their jobs.

In the meantime, this is what you do:

Start having neighborhood meetings. Learn to grow your own. Rely only on word-of-mouth referrals and trusted sources.

Find every journalist and alternative media outlet you can and scream off the rooftops what has been done to you. Drop any doctor that has supported this nonsense in favor of pro-mmj doctors.

File Referendum Measure petitions. The last day is July 27, 2013.

http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/initiatives.aspx

The citizens of Washington State did everything that was asked of them and were knifed in the back.

Now go underground, increase your numbers, make a plan of attack, and come back out swinging. 

Put them ALL out of work in 2014. They must have forgotten that the citizens outnumber the cops and politicians.

It is now time to remind them.

~ Anna Dawn Garland

• • • • • • • • •

Editor’s note: This post was taken from Steve Elliott's Weedblog at tokesignals.com  Dispensaries across the Puget Sound area were raided by federal DEA agents on July 24.

The State of the Union: SSDD

Anyone else watch Backflip Obama's State of the Union speech? 

Can anyone name a single REAL issue Obama is going to confront in the next four years? 

With 18 states passing laws to legalize cultivation, distribution, and use of hemp and medical cannabis, and TEN more with pending legislation to do the same (that's twenty-eight, potentially), as well as two (Washington and Colorado) that have passed laws to tax and regulate recreational cannabis use just like tobacco and alcohol, our cutting-edge, will-of-the-people-minded lame duck president and game-playing Congress moved quickly to do... NOTHING about addressing the question of cannabis, or patient and states' rights.

No new ideas, no new information, and absolutely NO acknowledgement of the fact that there is only one bi-partisan, bi-gender, multiracial, multi-generational idea that is sweeping America: the end of racist-based Prohibition; a war on its own citizens that is ruining American lives and communities. 

How could hemp/cannabis legalization affect the issues the President did talk about?

We need better schools- which can be paid for, in part, with taxes from sales and certifications, application and permit fees from equipment sales, growers, dispensaries, teachers, doctors, training centers and clinics.

We need to reduce the strain on Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare.  I actually believe the answer to this is to start by cutting off everyone with an annual income or net worth over $250,000 who currently receives payments or benefits from these programs, as well as making sure we are only sending checks to real, living people and actual U.S. citizens.

But to return to the benefits and potentials of hemp and cannabis: it has been demonstrated, repeatedly, that the disabled and seniors benefit from interaction with growing things.  A healthy garden crop of cannabis will reduce the need for narcotics and experimental meds with their numerous side effects, allowing patients to produce their own medicines in a positive feedback loop as well as earning a tidy nest egg for both the grower and the state when sold to local dispensaries or at festivals, concerts, and seasonal tasting events.  And a co-op or senior center that produces an acre or ten of hemp will quickly find every bit of its product, root, leaf, and stem, in demand from a fiber-hungry public.

We need equal opportunity for women- Plants grow for anyone, regardless of gender, and most of the bud tenders and dispensary staffers I've met in the West were females who were quite well paid for providing informed choices and supporting the local economy. Cannabis and hemp technologies are cutting edge, with no limits on who can participate or how high they can rise, save for those draconian measures instituted by the federal government to limit profits on the herb to those lobbyists and corporations footing the bill for re-elections.

We need to help our school children compete on a global scale, preparing them for jobs before they leave high school by grounding them in advanced knowledge... but we fill their heads with outright lies regarding the properties of cannabis and actually obstruct investigation into the potentials of one of the most ancient of medical herbs, or the potential uses of its COMPLETELY NON-PSYCHOTROPIC cousin, hemp, a plant that once formed the backbone of agriculture and the textile industry and led ALL U.S. exports.

We need to ensure that our returning veterans will have not only jobs but adequate medical and psychological resources to deal with their traumas. Only cannabis can treat PTSD with NO CHANCE of addiction or overdose, two things that have claimed so many of our returning veterans. Dealing with growing things has been demonstrated to be invaluable in PTSD therapy, as well, so let's put some of our returning heroes into grow operations, tending the plants they also use, and patrolling the National Forests for illicit grow-ops.

Veterans uniquely solve the security issues of dispensaries and delivery services... who is going to attempt a hold-up with a pair of armed veterans behind the counter or the wheel? No one with a high chance of surviving the first ten seconds of that encounter... thus reducing the mostly-wasted cost of processing, jailing, then rehabilitating the perpetrators.

Let us return to those illicit grow-ops. 

How is it that our government leases vast tracts of public land to ranchers whose cattle create massive erosion, devour scarce native vegetation, and foul the waterways, to private corporate recreation interests who hunt the baited game inside their boundaries with 4WDs and dogs, spotlights and sniper rifles, to timber companies that buy hundred-year-old trees for a dollar apiece and to mines that level our mountains and erase historic landmarks as they export our mineral wealth right out of the country, and yet that same government does NOT allow its poorer citizens to use land managed by the Department of Agriculture to grow useful and marketable crops?  If hemp and cannabis were legalized and regulated, thousands of acres of fallow land could be planted and made useful, small farmers would once again have a guaranteed cash crop (if we are smart enough to stop subsidizing farming operations whose clear profit is over $100,000/yr or who are corporate or foreign owned).

We need to rejuvenate our cities. To do this, the Federal Government needs only do what it is so good at: NOTHING. 

As in NOT raiding self-supporting education centers where caregivers and patients are taught how to grow and utilize hemp for fiber and cannabis to produce their own medicines, small business owners are educated in the process of setting up dispensaries, smoke shops, and hemp clothing stores, and MILLIONS of dollars pour into the surrounding communities as a result.

As in not arresting and destroying the business efforts of a man whose only crime was that he was more successful than Lilly-Squibb because he was selling natural remedies instead of narcotics, or breaking down the doors of seniors and families and veterans to kill their pets and ransack their homes for a false tip or a half-ounce of a plant that has never killed anyone... unlike the police. 

Our President has threatened to use Executive Order to enact gun controls, against the will of the majority, which would cost this country jobs and tax revenues, closing businesses and driving away industry, all while dividing the electorate.  Obama has already used this power to invade another country and kill a dangerous terrorist without due process.  He signed the Indefinite Detention Act into law in a secret move at midnight of New Years, something America did NOT need.

But Obama"cannot" use this same power to stop imprisoning and killing American citizens for having cancer, MS, or PTSD.

Cannot... or will not?

When will this black-and-liberal-as-he-needs-to-be tool of multinationals corporations finally admit he is just a puppet?  Will he ever acknowledge the fact that more people want an end to Cannabis Prohibition than the number who favor gun control, immigration reform, or the re-election of Barack Obama?

One good thing did come out of last night's speech and the previous weeks. Joe Biden is in charge of the effort to implement gun control. Does anyone else remember that "Happy Hour" Joe was also put in charge of the original War on America... sorry... War on Drugs, back in the Reagan/Bush heyday?

Let's look at the progress that particular effort has made:

We have spent several billion dollars, incarcerated any number of non-violent patients, veterans, music lovers and teens, destroyed families and communities, shut down tax-paying, local law abiding businesses small and large, created a corporate rehabilitation industry, log-jammed our courts and filled our prisons.

We have oxy- and hydrocodone clinics in Florida that dispense narcotics like breath mints, killing 17 people every day and filling the jails and hospitals of the surrounding states with addicts. We have meth labs that no longer require even a single room... the cartels can cook up a batch in a 2 liter soda bottle in a half hour that will ruin the lives of hundreds of people, with commonly-available materials.

We have a host of "potpourris" and "bath salts" (artificial cannabis and cocaine substitutes), both of which can lead to psychosis and death, available in convenience stores across the country to anyone, regardless of age, because as fast as the DEA makes up special laws to interdict them, the formula is changed enough to make them legal again and a whole new round of emergency room visits and psychotic reactions begin, with the government chasing its tail like a rabid dog.

Ecstasy and blue moly are as easy to get as a cold, and college students are consuming both, along with a sea of booze (oh, but that's Joe's drug of choice, so no problem), as well as carrying on a thriving trade in pharmaceutical speed, street-quality meth, and good old heroin.

Given this level of success for Joe's past efforts, I predict that his participation in gun control will mean that, in the next decade, MS13 and the cartels will have streetcorner sales points for automatic weapons (likely purchased from Fast and Furious Eric Holder), and 95% of North America, Mexico, Central and South America will have either a fully-automatic weapon, body armor, an armored vehicle, or their own weapon-bearing drone, if not ALL OF THE ABOVE.  

Which will be the only thing protecting us from whichever tyrants replace the one currently languishing in the Oval Office.

Inconsistency

Over the past four years, Mexicans have been locked up and deported in record numbers, while young black men and Negro veterans have been imprisoned and/or killed for doing exactly what the black man currently in the Oval Office laughed about having done as a youth, while cancer, PTSD, and MS patients and seniors have been forced back into the black market, had their homes raided and their children held at gunpoint while their pets were killed, despite that black man in the Oval Office's implied promise, during his last campaign, NOT to target medical cannabis users and suppliers.

Nonetheless, in the wake of a huge Latino turnout in November and the tragedy at Sandy Hook, gun control and immigration reform have become the primary focus of the second term, despite the fact that the Oval Office itself lost guns that later killed Federal agents, that dozens of Sandy Hooks have happened all over this country in the last decade without a meaningful peep from the press or the Prez, and despite the fact that immigration, legal and otherwise, is at 10% of the levels we had in 2000.

Ignore the fact that armed thugs in body armor are smashing in front doors and holding children of the exact same ages at gunpoint, so long as THOSE criminals have a badge.

Pay no mind to the fact that a far higher percentage of people than EVER voted for Obama think that cannabis and its cousin hemp should be taken off of the Federal Drug Schedule and regulated like alcohol and tobacco, a truly bipartisan moment that every facet of the press on the left and right is doing its very best to ignore; 

How do you talk meaningfully about "growing the economy" when, due to your actions and those of your Attorney General, the once prosperous city of "Oaksterdam" and the state of California have both lost millions in tax revenues due to Federal disruption of state-certified businesses and trade, while other states with cannabis legislation waste months in which they could be generating tax revenue, jobs, and new businesses, awaiting a Federal interpretation of intent regarding respect of their laws?

How do you justify Federal silence and inaction when almost half the states in the Union currently allow medical use of cannabis or have decriminalized personal possession? 

How can you talk about immigration reform and border violence and still not act to reduce the profitability of cannabis smuggling for the cartels, thus reducing their ability to buy guns, bribe politicians and cops or maintain a strong enough presence to dominate a region?

Latinos are voting in record numbers BECAUSE THEY ARE BEING DEPORTED and the crime cartels are losing all their money laundering and courier connections, all their operation fronts.  Want to reform immigration?  The Federal Investigation into Joe Arpaio's criminal activities might have been a good start, followed by Eric Holder's indictment and Barack Obama's impeachment for the Fast and Furious debacle.

Isn't it great that the Progressive Obama Government decided that, while promising our veterans jobs on their return and spending trillions to restart our economy, playing games with the fiscal cliff and the budget crisis, there were 50,000 children of illegal immigrants (you know, criminals?) could have jobs and/or get a college education?  I can't tell you how glad I am that a college education and a decent job aren't burdens I'll have to shoulder in the near future.

Illegal immigration is fixing itself... Latinos are going south in record numbers, here in the southwest. This is a smoke-and-mirrors issue.... Ignore the absence of the little brown man behind the curtain, we are Oz, the Great and Terrible...

Why are we fighting to free the Middle East, when the nations south of the Rio Grande are controlled by one of the largest criminal organizations in history?  How can we claim to combat terrorism and border violence and the growth of the cartels when MS13 has a cell in every city in America, while they make billions on the illegal import of low-grade cannabis?

See the bigger picture... look for the connections.

Gun Control, the other topic sure to unite America, means hitting your target as many times as you pull the trigger. Guns made our nation free, guns, not talk, stopped global tyranny, and the responsible use and ownership of guns will keep our nation and our world free, from outside influences as well as the forces, corporate, private, conservative and liberal, attempting to subvert our government from the inside. Retention of background check data in a LEO eyes-only database, with required state and federal input of felony and mental data to the NICS, and uniform enforcement of the current laws, with no loopholes, no special cases, and no privileged class would remove the need for any new legislation regarding guns. 

No gun has ever simply pointed itself at someone and killed them. 

And NO ONE, EVER, IN ALL OF RECORDED HUMAN HISTORY, DIED FROM THE USE OF CANNABIS. 

We have enough laws about humans and guns... we need clarity and reason, we need enforcement, and we need consistency between our scientific knowledge, our laws, and our actions. Cognitive independence is a term that is getting thrown around a lot.  In an age of increasing government invasion, shrinking freedoms, genetic research and scientific advances in artificial intelligence, it may be long past time to start considering jujst where a competent, thinking individual draws the line between external and internal authority and autonomy.

When the government holds medical patents on a plant that same government defines as a drug with no medicinal value, when the courts refuse to hear evidence to the contrary, the same old answers and issues will not continue to distract or dissuade a public too well informed and personally experienced to accept  those tired clumsy shenanigans.  

When SWAT and RUSH task forces are raiding family homes, killing pets, holding children and seniors at gunpoint, destroying any notion of freedom and justice, when entire cities are reduced to slums and empty storefronts by Federal contempt for states' and citizens' rights, how can we continue the meaningless charade of talking about high-capacity magazines or border fences as a solution or source of our problems?

Don't Let Go, and You Won't Fall Off of The Fiscal Cliff, either.

Posting this again, because given Washington State and Colorado's recent VOTER initiatives to legalize cannabis and regulate it in the same fashion as alcohol and tobacco, I think it is a crime that NONE of the major news outlets on the right or left has shown much interest in a historical moment in American politics. Focusing on immigration due to Latino turnout? Millions of white, black, brow

n and red voters turned out , and in November, and a significant number of them spoke far more loudly to the issue of a trillion-dollar war on our own people than the rapidly-diminishing illegal immigrant problem, which is down to 10% of 2000 levels.

How about you focus on the issues, Congress and Mister Obama, and stop trying to win the next state elections before you deal with the current problems?

AVOID THE FISCAL CLIFF.

One simple step: Executive Order (like the one for Bin Ladin's execution) decriminalizing hemp and cannabis, releasing all non-violent offenders, dismissing all pending cases for simple possession with or without intent, legalizing personal production and growing co-ops.

Results: compassion and dignity for patients and caregivers, reduced stress for the same, lower Medicaid and Medicare doctor and prescription costs, lower infrastructure costs (hospitals and clinics), lower enforcement and incarceration budgets, no new prison costs, increased jobs and tax revenues across the country (Washington estimates 2 billion in the next 5 years just from new taxes, stores, patients, clinics, and dispensaries. I've estimated a savings of almost 2 million PER YEAR for Medicaid and Medicare; http://roninsroad.blogspot.com/2012/06/no-value.html).

Decriminalization also means exponential reduction of the profit margin of the cartels and black markets, reduction of inner city crime levels, revitalization of urban and farm communities, and an increasingly competitive America.

So how 'bout instead of partisan politics and special interest accomodation as usual, we all join in on a solution that offers immediate relief and forward momentum?  Or is that too much to ask from a group of lifelong bureaucrats?

Foundations

So, here are the hard, cold facts.

95% of your world was created by people using cannabis.

Right now, if you are sitting at a computer, or holding an iPhone or a Kindle or in some other way interfacing with the Internet and the World Wide Web of data sharing, you are enjoying the fruits of the intellectual and physical labors of a group of cannabis-using scientists.

If you are enjoying some music with your surfing, starting your morning, during your commute or throughout your day, anything from classical to light jazz to country to, yes, even a few gospel tunes, you are listening to the work of folks who routinely used hemp, cannabis, and hemp flower extracts to deal with stress and pain.

(Quite of few of them also used laudanum, opium, morphine, absinth and cocaine, which were then accepted as natural remedies, just as citizens of voting age were considered mature enough to determine those remedies’ use in their lives.  There was, oddly enough, no drug problem, no multi-billion dollar prison and drug enforcement system.  My, how the times have changed…)

If you enjoy the paintings, sculptures, poetry, literature, or craftworks of 95% of the last three centuries, you are, in fact, enjoying the effects of cannabis and other mind-altering substances on the real world.

Have any number of these artists died of addiction or the diseases that come with it?  Yes, many if not most of the greats that we know did indeed succumb to their appetites and the dark inner flame that lit their world in the first place.

Not one of them died from cannabis.

In fact, in seven thousand years of recorded history, including the incredibly detailed records of the dynasties of Asia, not one person has ever died from the effects of cannabis; smoked, brewed into tea, eaten, or rubbed into the skin.  It is humanly impossible to consume the amount of cannabis it would take to deliver enough THC to disrupt bodily function.  Imagine trying to smoke a bail of marijuana in an hour.  That’s how much it would take.

But I digress.

If you live or have lived in a house, or a condo, or an apartment that you did not construct from ground to doorbell with your own two hands, there is a good chance that someone using marijuana created the materials, was involved in their shipping and/or delivery, and installed or assembled them into the structure that kept the rain and snow from your head. 

The streets you drive on, the shops you patronize, the restaurants you eat in, all built and staffed and possibly owned by cannabis users or their relatives or friends.  The town you live in, the state in which it is located, and the country in which that state exists, all discovered and founded by cannabis and hemp growers and users. 

For hundreds of years, cannabis users have been laying the foundation stones of your world.

Cannabis and hemp; twined branches of the same tree.  Useful for paper, cloth, a wide assortment of building applications, fuel, protein, and a thousand potential applications to replace and preserve our depleting fossil fuels, forests, drinking water and arable land.  Jobs for literally millions; farming, harvesting, processing, breeding strains for food, fuel, medical and textile applications, packaging, manufacturing, warehousing, transport, security, logistics, marketing, education, outreach, clinics, research… the list grows as rapidly as the reasons to rethink our long-held, misguided views on this beneficial plant.

Why, out of so many useful plants, is this one demonized?  I’m not talking about opium poppies or cocoa leaves or psychedelic mushrooms, although medical science has found uses for all three- morphine and cocaine have been accepted as legitimate painkillers for hundreds of years, and new research into the use of psilocybin for post-traumatic stress and hospice care as well as a host of other mental disorders, is yielding amazing results.

No, I’m talking about a plant that our government has not once but twice encouraged all citizens who could do so to produce in bulk quantity.  During colonial times, it was a mandate that “every household plant at least one teaspoon of good Indian hemp seed”, and hemp formed one of the principle exports of the colonies. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp. Ben Franklin owned a mill that made hemp paper. Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper , and most of our early money was printed on fine hemp paper.

Somehow, a century and a half later, this foundation stone of American life and agriculture suddenly became the demon weed.  There are any number of reasons why one can see this happening; a racist reaction to white teens mixing with other races to listen to jazz, a response to the continuing influx of laborers from countries with long cannabis associations, and of course the well-documented government manipulation by corporate interests to ensure proper development of their investments.  

Yet our government and the corporations that increasingly control it are adept, if nothing else, at reversing themselves without batting an eye.  During the Second World War, when our supply of hemp from the Philippines was cut off, American farmers were exhorted by the US government to grow “Hemp for Victory!” 

But when soldiers in Korea seemed disinclined to rush out and kill the enemy after discovering cannabis, and with the burgeoning music scene in London and Germany on the rise, American authorities once again labeled cannabis the “gateway drug” and filled schools and theaters with propaganda, little if any of it based in fact.

Such as the fact that NOT ONE Presidential research committee into cannabis/marijuana has ever uncovered ANY permanent, negative side effects from its use.

Right now it is costing American taxpayers 5 billion dollars every year just to fund the DEA.  Well over 80% of that money is for cannabis interdiction.  95% of the victims of that interdiction are NOT criminals.  They are parents and young people, seniors and veterans, patients and mechanics, carpenters and plumbers and roofers and electricians, teachers and writers, painters and musicians and mentors, foster parents and cab drivers, shopkeepers and janitors.  They are the thousands of people who hold this society upright and together.

We have so many battles ahead.  Worthy battles; to restart our economy, to clothe and feed and house and employ our people, to bring hope to the downtrodden and redemption to the broken and lost right here in our own homeland.   

Together, we have come so far, and accomplished so much.

Isn’t it time to end the war on our own people?

The fight goes on...

And I am tired.

Tired of causes, of interests, of hobbies.  Tired of the endless Internet chatter of affirmations and discoveries, secret plots and sunny family photos of nothing.  I am tired of writing hundreds of diatribes to idiots and slackers and stoners who all want to legalize cannabis but have not one single clue of how to get off their asses and get something done in a unified fashion.

I am deathly tired of lazy liberals who want to post about the revolution and call for Change but still cling to the same fake badges that wanted to cut them up for bait.  People who aren't ready to sacrifice and expect an easy path to revolution and victory.

The only thing guaranteed in a revolution is casualties.

Where does it start, and where does it end?  Do we rise up, and revolt, join the idiots at Occupy and immediately launch a coup to seize that movement before it is giving away useless college loans to univesities without the government support to offer decent classes or teachers? 

Do we re-invent the wheel and begin our own movement, or do we rely on the folks at NORML to finally end their comfortable rearguard action of polls and meetings and endless verbal jousting with the Federal government and actually call for a general strike?

Do we face armed Guardsmen and police with non-violence as we are teargassed and beaten and forced off of our own public parks and public lands? 

I have loved and defended this land, right and wrong, for most of my life, inside its borders and beyond.  I have accepted that the corrupt men in high places who sell poison to our children and old people have a right to make laws controlling my use of an herb. Instead of speaking out, or acting, I simply participated in the black market and reveled, to some degree, at my participation in the game that keeps such men in power.  I danced on my strings, grazed with the herd, and wished someone else would do something about legalizing cannabis.

Then I fell in love with an MS patient, and saw firsthand what prescription drugs were doing to her, and saw as well the heroic spirit fighting inside the pain and disability for just a little space to breath.  I saw the immediate relief when she tried cannabis, and I watched the fear she went through at the prospect of blood tests; tests that would reveal the damage the 'scripts had done to her organs; tests with the potential for positive THC results that would disqualify her for housing and grocery assistance, Medicaid, Medicare, and her SSDI monthly income.  It didn't matter that for $400 each month she could replace $2,500-3000 in prescriptions and the inevitable cost of damaged liver, spleen and kidneys. 

Or perhaps it did matter, to the very corporations that fund the Drug War while applying for (and getting) patents for cannabis-derived medicines.  Perhaps it is for this reason, and not any "gateway drug" propaganda, that the same Federal government which arrests MS, cancer, and PTSD patients for possession and production of cannabis has reserved for itself a patent on cannabis-derived medical pain and nerve applications.

I find myself at the point where Malcolm X once stood; I would seriously advise the leaders of this nation to heed those who would only see change come non-violently.   You have made non-violent change increasingly impossible, and you would seem to wish violent change to become inevitable, to justify the killings and beatings, the arrests and lives destroyed, the riot police, the teargas, the dogs and barricades, the FEAR and LIES used to destroy the textile industries and farmers of the south and the freedoms of a nation.

How can you expect men and women of honor to stand unresisting after such a long history of abuses and injustice from their fellow countrymen and the government which was formed to serve all citizens, without respect to economic or social standing?  After a decades-long war of  physical and spritiual assaults against our homes, families and selves, seizure of our properties and destruction of our state-licensed and approved businesses and thus our very means of earning a living; of public slander and distortion, of suppression of scientific facts and denial of succor to those in pain, how can you expect us to simply hold hands and sing as you wade into our midst, jackboots and nightsticks swinging in a fog of mace?

For too long have we remained silent.  For too long have we danced to the tune of a malicious piper.

Do not place your faith in the Vote.  All those vying for the Throne would wear the crown, not thrust it back into the hands of the People. 

Men will talk of States' rights when States are all that they can control.  But when a man stands in the highest office in the land and rules the destiny of ALL states, that appreciation for autonomy fades rapidly before the headiest drug of all: POWER.

The Vote is simply the Carrot, with which the forces of corruption and Tyranny will lead you on toward the unattainable goal of Change From Within the System.  It is a tragic comedy in which the masks change but the true players remain the same.  There can be no change in the system when there is no opportunity for outsiders to enter the system.  Those who have been bred and groomed to survive in the Political and Corporate jungle have closed the gates against outside interference or change.  The police, public opinion, your church, your place in the community, arrest, discomfort, imprisonment, public infamy and slander, these are all the Stick, used without compassion against those who would point out the fallacies, the Illusion of the Will of the People, and stand up rather than meekly bow before the show of force.

We stand at a crux, at a time of important decisions and great actions.  In flight navigation, in climbing mountains, in piloting uncertain seas, and at certain points in history, there comes a time of final choices, a Point of No Return.

The question is simple.

Is peace so dear and life so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?

ALMIGHTY GOD FORBID IT!!!

I know not what others may do, but as for me, GIVE ME LIBERTY, OR GIVE ME DEATH!