Transcribed from the Summer of Peace and Love 1967.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...

To Burien, Washington, July 4, 2008.

Sponsored by South End Neighbors For Peace and Justice.

Meteor Blades' magnificent front-page diary establishes the fact that the highest officials in our government deliberately directed that human beings be made to suffer torture.

I came to his piece from Harry Maurer's Strange Ground. With Carol Brightman, a woman who in the winter of 1972 sojourned to North Vietnam, to gather evidence establishing that the aerial bombing of that nation constituted a war crime.

After nine days of ghost-walking through the air-wracked ruins, Brightman was presented with victims of torture.

These were stories of a level of barbarity that made the air war seem like something that wasn't so serious. I'm writing this down very faithfully, "arrested, tortured," and then suddenly I wrote: "This is a farce. Probably all happened, but it doesn't matter. Bestiality is not a war crime." I think the circuits jammed at that point. It was overkill. There was too much. I didn't have any way to package it. I couldn't begin to comprehend the degree of barbarity that was involved in this, much less pass it on to others. Who would want to know? On an honest level, nobody wants to know these things. Because it's just too grotesque. This was beyond what I ever imagined, and it was if I couldn't hear any more.

As a child I would play/pretend/role play with my friends.  We would build igloos at the North Pole while talking about another Ice Age coming.  In 3rd Grade we hadn't yet heard about 'global warming'.   There wasn't alot of free time/play time.  There was school, homework, Brownies and Girl Scouts, piano lessons, swimming lessons, ice skating lessons, horseback riding lessons, voice lessons.  There were even lessons on bike riding.  Lessons, lessons, everywhere.

Dolls?  A few.  But they usually sat on my shelf.  A porcelain-face ballerina with a gold lame maillot and a gold tuille tutu.  Barbie was safely away in her case and I didn't like changing her outfits.  My beloved stuffed rabbit, a Stieff, snuggled with me at at night. Ontop of my upright piano, next to the tick-tick-ticking of the metronome was a statue of my beloved horse listening to me practice my scales and watching my fingering.

In my neighborhood in Chicago, Albany Park, very few boys went into the military.  It was primarily a Jewish neighborhood, with a large Swedish contingent, and a smattering of other minorities.  There were lots of cultural resources due to 2 institutions of higher learning in the area, Northeastern Teacher's College and North Park College.

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

The one true and lasting gift that the hippies tried to give the world is precisely that which has been offered by every wise or holy man or woman to ever walk the earth – the gift of love.  Love as a conscious choice, love as an ethic, love as a way of life, love as the antidote to fear, hatred and violence – love as a way to walk lightly on the earth.

Republicans and Conservatives (especially the talking Bobblehead kind on Fox News) talk a lovely game when it comes to protection of private property, particularly copyrights for intellectual properties. The Republican Congress back in 2001 passed the odious DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and has generally allowed the RIAA and the MPAA to become the intrusive, suing beasts that they are today.

Apparently, like laws against torture and ease-dropping, Conservatives also can choose to just ignore copyright law whenever the want.

Exhibit A: "Expelled" and the film's use of John Lennon's "Imagine". Typically responsible filmmakers try to get permission to use an Artist's music in their film or documentary regardless of how much or how the music is used. If a filmmaker doesn't they get sued into oblivion, or (more likely) their film never sees the light of day because no Film Distributor wants to get sued themselves.

I find it very ironic and quite amusing in a way how have all played mind games in tandem with corresponding semantical arguments here on Kos and in our daily lives; all particularly regarding the merits of our own candidate for President.  When bad news breaks about the candidate we support, we spin it our way, and if bad news breaks about the candidate we support, we spin it our way as well.  The same goes for when good news breaks for our candidate versus good news for the candidate we oppose.  

John Lennon and Yoko Ono used the publicity of their honeymoon to protest for peace by staging two week-long "bed ins" in 1969.

Now we can do the same March 19 in a nationwide call in sick day, to get the attention of our elected representatives who seem to forget they represent us when it comes to the war, constitution, and just about anything else that conflicts with a corporate donor.

ANIMATION

Urgent: Please pass this on to Barack Obama and the other presidential candidates, local law enforcement, government officials, and everyone else you know.

John Lennon was assassinated 27 years ago, one month before Ronald Reagan assumed office. That was a long time ago, but it should be a reminder to all people who work for change and promote peace that there are people out there who are willing to do anything to extinguish the flame of hope and turn this country in the direction of division and violence.

Before Lennon, there was Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and John Kennedy. Over my lifetime, the entire leadership of the left has been systematically eliminated in a violent wave that resembles places like Pakistan and El Salvador more than it does the United States I thought I knew.

Listening to John Lennon in the car this morning.  Stuff is still powerful ... still has the capacity to make you think about how crazy the world is around you.  After last night's debate, all I could think of was that when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington, the song the band played was "The world turned upside down".  

The harder they fought to outlaw drugs, the worse the problem became. The more money they spent on the drug war, the worse the problem became. The reason why I refer to the failed War on Drugs in the past tense is because it's beyond lost it's hopeless. How much more evidence do they need before they realize that America has lost the unsuccessful War on Drugs?  It would be hard for a Blind Cave Fish not to see the obvious , that our drug laws have failed miserably. How long has the war on drugs been a  failure well the Society for the Prevention of Crime declared it unsuccessful 91 years ago !

I never hear this John Lennon song without tears.  It captures all that is good in the human spirit, in simple poetry.

Hearing CNN play "Imagine" just before New Years in Times Square, got me to dwelling on the momentous things that lay ahead.

We often become buried in the minutia of policy, the sausage of government, and the glow of candidate personalities, and I wonder if we fail to Imagine.

The number is only ephemeral, it will be gone tomorrow, replaced by a new one. The lives are already gone, along with a million others. As the year ends, the actual number is 4209 non-Iraqi, uniformed "coalition" soldiers who either died in Iraq or shortly and directly attributably afterwards, 3902 (the sign in the picture below says 3909) of them Americans. Another 748 dead in Afghanistan, and another thousand "contractors" in Iraq.

Here's some Christmas cheer for you all...

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.

This is my ‘the day the music died’ story.

I’m writing this after glancing at the clock and realizing 11:39 p.m. Eastern was about the time I flipped on the TV 27 years ago and there was Geraldo Rivera with tears in his eyes saying, "I can’t believe it!  I can’t believe John Lennon is dead!"  

What a bad Karma moment that capped a night that had, in a strange way, eerily foretold what was going to happen to John Lennon.  

(YouTube seems to be down, but those big white spaces are supposed to be textually relevant videos. Maybe they'll come back up soon.)

The title says it all.

"Is it not written in your law you are gods?"  John 10:34

John Lennon was gunned down and killed 27 years ago today in New York City. This event goes largely unnoticed in the press today, but in 1969, at the peak of the war in Vietnam, John Lennon was the most important man in the world.