As US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University in the middle of third week of February 2011 condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking though.
They don’t need to take this off the internet and they don’t need to address it through press releases. Nobody knows and nobody cares. This is America.
I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it. Things are worse than ever. The poor are dying and debt is strangling them. The old can’t retire, the young can’t get an education, and the educated can’t get a job. Meanwhile we fight imperial wars overseas and let the rich plunder our legacy. It’s too painful. I can’t work in America – I can barely even stand to look at the situation. A friend of mine works for a senator in the states and she vented for nearly an hour about how frustrating it all is, how deep the corruption goes, and how hard off people really are. Meanwhile we’re thrown into a cyclone of material distraction, drugs, waste, television. Real wages haven’t risen in over 30 years. What’s the point of cheering on protests overseas when you can’t even see how badly you need a revolution at home? Will oil pipelines inject us with discontent? Will rising prices force us onto the streets? Will we wake up to see empty swaths of burnt-out Detroit and New Orleans and decide to demand our legacy? Will we see our parents dying in their poorly-heated homes and finally ask for something more? I’m sick of it. I’m sick of watching people play games with our future. We’ve made so many mistakes in the past and we can’t stand to keep passing the buck to the next generation. Where is the youth in America? We are all asleep at our laptops or stoned and playing video games. We live off nothing and as long as we have our microwave dinners and occasional lay from the bar we can’t find much of a reason to complain.
Where is that sacrifice your forefathers made in bringing you to this point in time? Whether a slave, a servant, a soldier, a teacher, a farmer a miner, an assembly line worker… whatever it was, they worked hard to give you more than you have now. You feel entitled to the wrong things. You feel entitled to your wants but assume the needs will always be there somehow. You are entitled to a free education, to free healthcare, to decent housing, and well-paying jobs. You are entitled to justice and you are entitled to dignity.
Where are the marches, where are the protests, where are the movements towards liberation from our situation? What are we waiting for – rock bottom?
m a n y f e s t ø 
We have arrived at Huxley’s Brave New World. People ridicule the 60s but at least we took to the streets–at least someone paid attention.
Have you ever wondered if there are marchers out there–we’re just not hearing about it because our news media no longer covers them?
Did you know that news media in America is distinguished by the fact that it is almost entirely privately owned? I wonder what else is happening that we never hear about.