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       Horror

                                                by Pat Foster

 

 

      What is true horror? Is it the monsters that the media often portrays to us in the movies, or is it something else that is far closer to our everyday existence?

 

        One day you get up and find that everything you felt was right with the world and your place within it just fell apart. Your world appeared to be going crazy, and nothing you did seemed to matter any more. You found major criminal behavior at the reins of government that you had trusted, and nobody in government did anything about changing it. Yet, the little people who stood up and tried to show the rest of us how this behavior was killing our world were arrested, tried, convicted, and put into jail for just trying to make a difference by letting us know exactly what was happening. When your normal world begins to fall apart before your eyes, that is true horror.

 

       I remember quite clearly in the last presidential election in 2004 that priests and ministers, the supposed guides to our moral lives told us that we would all be going to hell if we did not vote for George Bush and Dick Cheney. Now, close to four years later with the blood of possibly over a million dead Iraqi's on our hands, and the abandonment of the care of thousands of our own injured troops, we ask ourselves how our religious institutions could be so immoral. Did they just make the wrong choice? If so, how many other things are they wrong about?

 

       Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States shows that our government has had a long history of imperialism through starting wars. Mexico was the first foreign power we invaded to increase the amount of property we could control to develop and exploit the resources. We gained a good part of the western states from that war. Next came the Spanish American War, where we sent the battleship Maine into Havana harbor and it mysteriously exploded with a 167 sailors on board. Of course it was blamed on Spain, and we got Cuba and a good part of our Pacific holdings including the Philippines from that war.

 

       Howard Zinn says: "Even before the Spanish flag was down in Cuba, U.S. business interests set out to make their influence felt. Merchants, real estate agents, stock speculators, reckless adventurers, and promoters of all kinds of get-rich schemes flocked to Cuba by the thousands. Seven syndicates battled each other for control of the franchises for the Havana Street Railway, which were finally won by Percival Farquhar, representing the Wall Street interests of New York. Thus, simultaneously with the military occupation began...commercial occupation."

 

       The war with Japan was started over the economic blockade of Japan by the U.S. restricting their ability to get scrap iron to develop their island nation. After Japan attacked China and other countries in Asia, they presented a threat to American imperialism in the area, and needed to be stopped. It was no accident that Pearl Harbor was setup as a target with battleships at anchor that had been antiquated by air power, just as the battleship Maine was antiquated by the new Indiana style battleships.

 

       During my lifetime, I watched President John F. Kennedy assassinated in public view, and his supposed killer shot in front of the cameras. The Warren Commission gave the country a report that very few Americans really believed the official story about the whole incident. Finally, in this century, we get the towers coming down in New York and the Pentagon attacked by an airplane that had no wings, because it did not even break the windows on either side of the hole it made.  The documentary, Loose Change has certainly shed new light on the possibility of our own government carrying out this operation in order to have a reason to take over Iraq for its' oil resources. Wars had always followed these catastrophic events and our corporations stood up and prifited from it.

 

       The real horror of all these events can be summed up in our inability to do something about them. Do we lay back and let the monsters devour us, or do we stand up and say that we have had enough. NO MORE! The battle should start in your voting precincts by demanding that your vote be counted manually when the polls close. You should be there to observe that count. When we give credibility back to the vote, the voice of the people will be heard not just in Lansing and Washington, but all over the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Letter to the Bureau of Elections

 

 

PF Senate testimony

 

 

 

God Bless the USA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Loose Change