AUSTIN ADVOCATE

City/Homeless on Collision Course
By Kirk Becker

Think of your upbringing as a kid – well, “somebody else has a neat toy”, “somebody else gets to stay out after dark”, “why can't I do the same”? The parental response is always the same -- “I'm not somebody else's parent, I'm your parent, too bad for you.”

Call it jealousy or call it envy, but the tendency to desire more than basic subsistence needs based on the accomplishments or wealth of others is at least as basic as imagination. The continual exclusion and ostracism of people who don't have any money generally, and people who are homeless in particular, can induce the various personality and psychological disorders that sometimes develop among the homeless.

Among these disorders is assholitis: a tendency to go around messing with people just for the sake of making them uncomfortable or unhappy; an inclination to rain on other people’s parades for no other reason than there’s no room in the parade for me/you/them.

People have a right to their parades, they have a right to their own parades. Other people don’t have any rights whatsoever to join in parades into which they’re not invited, but they have every right to stand along the roadway and watch the parade. They have a right to cheer or to boo, they can hold up signs in support or condemnation, and they can even ask to join in the parade, which request can be either granted or denied at the option or the parade sponsors.

When there’s no parade, the cheers and the boos, the demonstrations, are necessarily muted to be short of disturbances of the peace, but they’re still allowable and frequently proper.

Over the years, the City Council has grappled with similar issues in its regulation of public order. It’s tried to pass laws against “camping,” and the portion of that law was thrown out as it pertains to sleeping. The City Council has passed laws against obstructing the sidewalks, and against “aggressive” solicitation. It passed a law against any solicitation downtown as part of the effort to move the day labor corner from downtown out to 51st and I-35 and, five+ years later with the mission accomplished, the law against solicitation downtown was recently thrown out by the courts as well.

They passed a law against bicycle riding on the sidewalk along the U.T. drag as well in response to a few people on bicycles and skateboards barreling through crowds of pedestrians walking too and from school. One morning I was walking along the drag, school was out, so there were very few people out that morning. A girl was riding her bicycle about half as fast as a person would normally walk, window shopping along her way, when a cop stopped her and gave her a ticket for “riding her bicycle on the sidewalk”. The law is reasonable and makes sense, but it didn’t make any sense for the copy to give out a ticket in that circumstance. What was he trying to do, give the young lady a lesson? What was the lesson, that the cop was an idiot who didn’t have any common sense?

It is easier to catch somebody peddling 3 mph in no crowd than to try to chase down somebody going 9 mph through crowds of people, and a ticket is a ticket, so the cop’s boss probably thought he was doing a good job.

The City Council also passed a law against drinking on the drag or on the streets downtown. Poor Chris. He was a mellow guy, had some kind of a check and a place he could sleep out in Bee Caves somewhere, he didn’t cause any trouble or even panhandle for his beer money. He just liked to go down to the drag, socialize with his friends, and people watch and drink beer along the side.

Chris didn’t think that the Council should be able to ban drinking in his favorite spot, and so he began to conduct his own demonstration against the Ordinance. Somehow he got himself put on a list. The cops all knew him, and every time he opened his beer, they picked him up and took him to jail. He didn’t even have a chance to get drunk before the cops jumped him. Chris wasn’t really a troublemaker, he was just pursuing his own peaceful demonstration, but he sure was in trouble.

The rest of the public order ordinances aren’t any more complicated, or unreasonable, than the ordinances prohibiting bicycling or drinking along the drag in a typically crowded pedestrian area. It’s just so much easier to enforce those ordinances against people who are only nominally guilty than it is to enforce the ordinances against the people who’s actions led to the ordinances in the first place.

About 10 years ago, the Salvation Army on 8th Street had an open courtyard where anybody could come in and sleep. (They would only wash the Courtyard about once every four months, but that’s a different article.) I’d come in around 2:00 a.m., and 5 out of 7 nights, there’d be cars with broken windows along the parking garage on 8th Street between San Jacinto and Trinity. The place was a perfect thief trap, the cops could have hidden in the parking garage until they heard the glass breaking, and they could have watched the street from the Federal Building across the street, but all anybody did was complain about the homeless and sweep up the glass. (Lately, with increased budget and more pay for more cops, they’ve started equipping decoy cars with cameras and watching them, even publicizing the effort as a “deterrent”.)

The City Council is currently considering changes to it’s public order ordinances, banning lying down or sitting anywhere on any sidewalk, and banning any kind of solicitation in the City except at the one designated work corner at 51st and I-35.

The ban against roadside solicitation (such as vendors selling The Advocate) involves a finding that “the distraction … impedes the safe and orderly flow of traffic”. I remember driving a taxicab during the Reagan administration. “Make my day, get out of the way!” I really wasn’t supposed to be driving like that (and I wasn’t), but I’ll admit that the idea of just taping the horn button down with a roll of duct tape occurred to me more than once.

The Ordinance goes on to find that “[d]istracted drivers pose a significant risk of physical injury to motorists and pedestrians”. Well duh, such distractions especially pose a risk to the bicyclists that the Council is so often pandering to as well. However, the Council isn’t banning a list of such distractions in the Ordinance to protect the safety of people selling the Advocate along the roadsides. They’re just asserting a bunch of B.S. as an excuse to ban panhandlers standing beside the roads that would incidentally affect Advocate vendors selling papers too.

A public hearing was conducted on October 29, 2005. People who weren’t homeless complained about actions of many homeless people, but most of those actions are already banned under the current City Ordinances already in effect. The homeless complained about an unfair society and called for increased wages. Social service providers thanked the Council for existing social services that help people and called on the City Council to expand the programs that actually do help many people. The Salvation Army called on the Council to force people to take advantage of the services offered, but the Salvation Army charges $240/month in it’s Worker’s Dorm for either an upper or lower bunk in a room full of people, at least one of whom snores loudly. With an early evening curfew and an even earlier morning wake-up call. There were also a couple of people with bugs up their butts toward the homeless, which can be really irritating for those who don’t have health insurance to get help with their problems when some people are bums who don’t even have jobs!

The Mayor concluded the Public Hearing by noting that there were also 125 people who signed up in support of the Ordinance without wishing to speak on it’s behalf.

top

Violence, Women & Prejudice
By Penney Hunt

Every year about one million women seek help for some kind of injury as a result of domestic violence and other violent crimes. Crimes against women in the United States are significantly higher than in other countries. In fact, from birth until death, women must actively fight off a variety of violations against them both by the society that they live in and by individuals in their lives.

These violations range anywhere from verbal to physical, from mildest to the harshest, and are committed by strangers and people they love and family as well. They also include criminal physical harm and more difficult to prove or define, unethical emotional violations condoned by our society and institutions.

Women are and always have been seen as the property of men, and this lets men believe they are superior to women and that they are entitled to exercise power over them. This also makes the man think he can possess the women, like she is some kind of object and not a human being.

The attitude towards women by men and our society contribute to these actions and why men get away with what they do to women. Most of the time women are portrayed as sexual objects instead of a living, breathing person that has feelings. This is very wrong and helps feed into the male possessive attitude that we have today and that has been allowed to continue for quite some time now. We are not "less than" and are equal to man. Even God says this in His word that woman was not put here to be above man or below him, but to be beside man, to help him.

This attitude towards women by men and society also plays a part in the emotional problems that women have from this kind of treatment as well. Whether it is verbal and emotional abuse or it is physical it is unhealthy for women and it is unhealthy for anyone. This kind of abuse also brings about mental illness and prejudice views against and towards women.

Is it any real surprise that so many women today are being treated either through therapy or drugs for mild or clinical depression and other illnesses today? Yet many women have to deal with this and the painful effects of such abuse throughout their whole life.

This kind of abuse and prejudice can affect women from all types of races, classes, ages and even professions regardless of who they are or where they come from.

Someone needs to do something to stop this kind of abuse and prejudice against women. If not, this problem is going to continue to get worse. This problem effects more than the women who have to live through this, it also has its effects on our society.

Why is our law enforcement and our society being allowed to let men keep on threatening and abusing the women they are pursuing? What about the victim’s emotional and physical health? Because in our society men are valued more highly than women. We are not men’s property.

top

Confront Poverty

After Katrina, we listened dazed but still hopeful as President Bush gave his, "We Will Re-build It" (New Orleans) speech. Never before has this nation been exposed so blatantly to our own poverty. In response, the President declared that "We have a duty to confront poverty." These are courageous words. He spoke of creating enterprise zones which will give tax incentives to business to rebuild these devastated areas. This is good. But now the President has suspended the Davis-Bacon Act which requires federal contractors to pay workers the average or "prevailing" regional wages for public construction projects. In New Orleans, that wage is just over $9 an hour. The act's suspension allows contractors to pay as little as $5.15 an hour, the current federal minimum wage.

But just providing incentives for business to return and re-build New Orleans and paying minimum wages does not "confront poverty." The jobs must be put in the hands of local workers. But to just create jobs and put to them in the hands of local workers without ensuring that they are living wage jobs, clearly does not "confront poverty."

It has been reported that over 1,000,000 people were made homeless from Katrina. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, this year 3.5 million other people will experience homelessness throughout the United States. According to the last several US Conference of Mayors Reports, no minimum wage worker can get into and keep basic rental housing in this country. At the same time, the US government has stated that 42% of people experiencing homelessness are working at some point during the week. So clearly, the work ethic is there-but the wage is not.

How do we confront poverty if we rebuild an entire city and put back into place a permanent underclass of impoverished minimum wage workers? We don't.

In 1938, in response to the Great Depression, both halves of Congress created the federal minimum wage. The idea was to ensure that a full time worker could afford the basics- food, clothing, and shelter. At $5.15 per hour or about $10,000 per year, this is no longer possible. However, by taking a page out of our military pay practices, and indexing the wage to the local cost of housing throughout the US, we can encourage people to work. By basing the wage on the morale premise that anyone working a 40 hour week, which affords basic rental housing, we do encourage people to work and we do confront poverty. Additionally, we draw these folks away from needing to be on the "dole" and their endless reliance on tax payers.

By re-establishing people's ability to achieve self-sufficiency through work, we re-instill people with a sense of core American values evidenced in the platitudes. "A fair wage for a fair days work," which creates the ability for any worker to "chase the American Dream" by "pulling oneself up by one's own boot straps."

Red and Blue states alike, we are ready to defend these ideas. We are ready to rebuild New Orleans and all of America. Yes, let's do confront poverty. Let's encourage people to work at jobs that they know will afford them basic life necessities. Let's give them a sense of pride and belief in America, knowing that if they work a 40 hour week then their wage will put a roof over their heads other than a bridge.

Richard R. Troxell
National Chairman
Universal Living Wage
www.UniversalLivingWage.org

top

No Child Left Behind
Sound Principle, Flawed Premises
By Kirk Becker

The No Child Left Behind program endeavors to ensure, actually it mandates, that each and every child growing up in the USA gets a good education. While a fully educated populace is a sound principle, the No Child Left Behind Program itself is based upon some flawed premises.

The matter is generally framed as a “social justice” issue. The argument begins with the observation that economic prosperity is generally founded upon a solid education, and therefore, since everybody has a right to pursue economic success as an adult, then everybody is entitled to a sound education as a child.

With the outsourcing of most jobs that don’t require higher education, the matter has taken on increased importance. Where previously, a sound education was necessary in order to get a good job, and where now the only jobs that aren’t being outsourced are the good jobs, a sound education is a matter of economic survival.

Flawed Premise #1: “Everybody wants a good job.”

We can use a football analogy here. Big, strong people make good linepersons, fast, quick people make good receivers and defensive backs. (Big, strong, fast, quick people make the pros, but I’ll get to that point next.) People with intermediate abilities frequently end up as linebackers or running backs. A couple of oddballs become kickers, and everybody at least dreams of being the quarterback. Sometimes the only jobs available are the suicide positions on the kick and kick return teams, where people run half way down the field and crash into each other with a running start.

The linepeople jobs don’t pay very well, and the kicking team jobs are downright dangerous. If we compare our mythical football team to the economy, it’s like we’re outsourcing all the low paying lineperson jobs and hiring immigrants to do all the dangerous kicking team jobs.

Under the NCLB program, that’s ok because, with good training and hard work, the people who are big and strong should be able to learn how to be fast, quick receivers, or at least linebackers or runners. Although they won’t enjoy their jobs as much as the players whose natural talents coincide with the skills needed by their positions, and they won’t be as good at it, they should at least be able to make the team and play football for the coach and fans.

The No Child Left Behind focus on intellectual achievement contributes to the growing problem of obesity. Since the good jobs require college educations, and the colleges require high school degrees for admittance, it seems cruel to flunk a kid out of school and ruin the rest of their life just because they couldn’t pass gym class. Besides, if excellence in gym class (and art and music) were requirements of educational promotion from grade to grade, we’d have to make allowances for physical handicaps and disabilities. So why don’t we make allowances for mental and intellectual handicaps, instead of dosing the kids up on Ritalin™ and denying that those kinds of handicaps even exist?

No Child Left Behind compromises well-rounded educations for job training, and we seem to be abandoning our quest for happiness in the drive toward prosperity.

False Premise #2. Everybody will be able to create their own job.
Or
False Premise #2. Good education will enable people to get good jobs.

Well-educated people with basic math skills find it almost unfathomable that there are people who can’t even balance their checkbooks. Instead of simplifying the tax code, No Child Left Behind strives to educate people to the point where they can prepare their own tax returns.

At the same time, some people ring up ½ dozen purchases a day on their debit cards, and it’s equally unfathomable that many those people actually balance their checking accounts at the end of the month. Already, we’re starting to trust the machines. All of us. What’s the point in learning to balance a checkbook if nobody actually balances their checkbooks? For that matter, what’s a checkbook? The World is Changing.

The Return of the Renaissance People

As we teach science to the school kids, we should remember that there was a time only several hundred years ago when most of the science that we’re currently teaching the school kids wasn’t even known to civilization. A person could come to know all that was known, if they had the leisure time to do so.

Those times ended shortly before Columbus discovered America, but we’re in a new age now, where computers can play chess better than most people. A person with a sound education and one or two talents developed into a marketable skill should be able to make a living as an entrepreneur, with assistance from computerized programs available to complete any other tasks necessary for success.

Already, many entrepreneurs who get by with the aid of computer technology even though they can't possibly afford the extensive professional expertise that is available in major corporations. This technology currently enables small businesses to undertake projects that would have required the resources of large corporations several decades ago.

The Rise of the Clueless

Already, the computer program I’m using can spell check and even grammar check our documents. I can share my work on the Internet just by saving my document as a web page instead of printing it – with common web page standards and fast internet connections, there’s no longer any need to “tweak” the code in my web pages to work with various browsers or download faster over slow connections. And people with no “technical” skills can do as good a job of it as I can (or so they think).

Already, five cars have managed to drive themselves across 130 miles of desert with no human driver. When cars can drive themselves in traffic, we won’t need driver’s licenses, and people’s kids will be able to ride-not-drive the family SUV to the convenience store to buy themselves an ice cream cone. It’ll be a different world.

The Enron Experience

So which is it going to be, the Return of the Renaissance or the Rise of the Clueless. The Enron Experience may be a good guide.

Enron employed more graduates of U.T.'s graduate business college, one of the top MBA programs in the country, than any other company in America. The highly trained workers at Enron thought that they were actually earning as much money as the company reported as profits, at least to the point that few of them took their retirement accounts out of the company. When the company went bankrupt, even these knowledgeable employees were caught by surprise!

But then again, the people who caused the bankruptcy of Enron weren't clueless – they knew what they were doing. When computers first became common tools in businesses, employers wouldn’t hire people who new how to operate the computers to do simple data entry typing because those people were viewed as security risks. In the future, as computer programs enforce sound engineering principles and business practices, employers may refuse to hire anybody with sufficient knowledge to trick or defeat the computer wizards because they’ll be deemed security risks. At some point, a good education may become a barrier, rather than a prerequisite, to a good job.
Right now, it looks like Cluelessness is winning, but perhaps the Renaissance entrepreneurs will figure out a way to change the rules in a way that does more than merely stave off the inevitable for one more generation.

One more premise:

The Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate actually comes from a consensus that if the kids grow up to be as dumb, ignorant, and immoral as their parents, the whole country is going to fall apart and collapse. I try to be optimistic, but I’m not ready to label this a false premise.

It’s probably best to make the No Child Left Behind program work.

top

War Stories
By Why Change Cain

This Veterans day seems more on the minds of most Americans since there are so many of our brave soldiers in combat situations protecting our freedom from those twisted minds that seem bent on taking it away.

If you talk with most veterans today you will usually find them willing to share a few anecdotes of their adventures in the military, me being no exception. I’ve already shared two anecdotes in previous copies of The Austin Advocate. One being the Friendly Fire story and the other Top Guns.

Going back to 1972, I was stationed at Bergstrom AFB and waiting to be shipped off to Korea to do my overseas tour. I was trained to repair radios but slotted to do the job of a ROMAD. That’s Radio Operator Maintenance and Driver for the 702nd TASS.

A Romad’s duty was to drive and maintain a 4 wheel drive radio jeep equipped with 6 radios and pulling a trailer carrying a power generator. Two of the radios were portable.

Since I was trained to repair radios only, I had to also undergo the training necessary to prepare me to advance to the front lines of the battle and live in the field with the Army and Marine Ground-Pounders or grunts as we called them.

Training exercises usually took place at Camp Swift in Bastrop. I was scheduled to spend the weekend there for training in driving the larger vehicles such as the 2 and ½ ton truck through the ravine, escape and evasion, and assisting in calling our first air strike.

We set out from Bergstrom that Friday afternoon in a convoy with all our 7 fully equipped romad jeeps, a larger truck for training, and three deuce and a halfs with supplies. We had a lead jeep and a follow jeep and kept the convoy in between listening in on the communications between the two.

Of course we liked to liven up the boring military life any way we could so we did a little listening in on the radio as we careened down highway 71 towards Bastrop.

We had packed our generator trailers as we always did with the necessary essentials of personal camping equipment such as cots, sleeping bags, bacon, eggs, and a cooler with a tall one for the evenings.

The trailer of the jeep in front of me had a loose tarp that was flopping up and down in the wind. I radioed the lead jeep and told them. About that time the tarp was blown up high and a Styrofoam lid came off a cooler.

I radioed and told the driver of the lead jeep and he instructed the driver of the jeep in front of me to pull over and wait. Then the driver of the follow jeep radioed that he would have catch up later. He said he needed to turn around to go back and get a lid.
At that point, being the time of an era when the word lid had more than one meaning, all the drivers began to chime in with the same request, “Bring me one two.”

After setting up camp at Camp Swift, we endured our driver’s training of the two larger vehicles in the notorious ravine where you had to let your hands off the wheel at the right moments to avoid getting your hand broken.

The evening time at Camp Swift was quiet, and I enjoyed watching the stars and sitting around the camp sharing stories with the other Airmen and Officers before turning in.

Early the next morning we were each assigned a FAC Officer and told to take him out to call an air strike, computerized ordinance of course, which meant there would be no real bombs, just make believe but the jet bombers would be real.

My FAC was, as most Forward Air Controllers were, a jet fighter pilot himself. Most of the time jet fighter pilots seemed to be the a little crazy but real fun to be with. I always assumed they were a little crazy acting to keep them from going insane from the stress of their job.

We got in the jeep and he was given the coordinates of the location we were to bomb. He studied the map a few moments and he turned to me and said, “Well, it looks like we’re lucky. We only have to drive over that hill and to the top of the next one to call our strike. We should be back at the camp in time for chow.”
I drove where he was pointing and in no time we were on top of a hill overlooking a small valley on one side and a muddy creek bed on the other. He studied the coordinates again to double check himself then he called in the strike.

He ordered two F4 Fighter-Bomber jets with computerized ordinance. After receiving confirmation, he said, “Well, the bombers are on the way. We will be dropping four napalms on that small valley over there. All we can do now is wait. They should be here in a little while.”

About that time another Radio Jeep with ROMAD and FAC Officer were driving up the muddy creek bed below. Apparently the ROMAD thought with a 4-wheel drive jeep they could go just about anywhere. Their jeep got bogged down and stuck so they radioed for a truck to pull them out. Then the truck that came got stuck trying to pull them out and they had to radio for another one. That truck driver attached the rear bumper to a nearby tree and was going to use his wench to pull the other vehicles out of the mud.

My FAC and I were quite amused by this predicament and about the same time we were observing all this commotion going on down at the muddy creek bed below, our jet bombers arrived. There below us was one M-151A1 4-wheel drive jeep and one 2-½ ton truck; both stuck in the mud and another 2 ½ -ton truck over at a nearby tree. All the Airmen and the Officer involved were standing out around the vehicles talking and a couple of them were hooking up the cables to pull the vehicles out.

Just then my FAC said, “Give me that radio handset. I’ve got an idea.” He radioed the fighter jets overhead and said, as he studied the map, “Pilots, I have new coordinates for the target.” He gave them the new coordinates and then said, “I also have a request. Come in as low as you can over the target and kick on your afterburners immediately over the target just as you begin your ascent.”

He then handed me the radio handset and said, “I knew I would find a way to make this boring task a little more entertaining.” Just then two very menacing looking and large F-4 Fighter-Bomber Jets came swooping down right over the trucks and men down in the muddy creek bed.

Just as they were directly overhead they kicked on their afterburners, making a very loud sound much like an explosion. The sudden jets overhead and sudden loud noise was so overwhelming and surprising to the men down below that a few of them, including the other Officer fell face down into the mud.
We were rolling in laughter at the show below as my FAC said, “That’s a definite kill I would say,” and the Officer in the creek bed picked himself up from the mud yelling and shook his fist up at my Officer.

If it wasn’t for improvising in situations like that I suppose a lot of the military might have been rather routine and mundane.
I hope that our fighting boys overseas are all blessed with at least some experiences that are as interesting and entertaining as mine were. While war stories are boring to most, some people, especially those that have been there usually enjoy them. I hope someone enjoys mine.

top

Book Review: Destination Nowhere
John Siscoe

Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry
Written by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch
Overlook Press: a Jetlag Travel Guide
Paperback, 176 pages, $13.95

The destination of choice is Molvania, a little-known and overlooked country in Eastern Europe. It is, among other things, the world’s number-one producer of beetroot and the birthplace of the whooping cough. The population staggers about, half-nauseated by industrial fumes while in the bleak countryside a band of famished goats (and criminals) rove at will. The food is inedible, the folk dancing interminable, the local customs unspeakable, and civic discipline invisible. Here is a country with no past worth remembering, a present to be avoided and a future — perhaps it’s best not to speculate about the future. In any case, a visit to Molvania will make your present woes seem paltry indeed.

I was all set to pack my bags until I realized that Molvania does not exist. However the authoritative (and only) guidebook to Molvania does. Comprehensive, up to date, illustrated with alarming photographs and detailed maps, Movania, A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry contains all that you could ever stand to know about this preposterous yet oddly plausible country.

Created by three Australians, Molvania (a Jetlag Travel Guide) is a pitch-perfect parody of the excellent but relentlessly perky Lonely Planet Guides (or anything by Rick Steves): “Tourists tend to be a little wary of Western Molvania, perceiving it as little more than an arc of polluted factory towns full of high-rise tenement housing and even higher crime rates. They are of course, right.”

Every traveler’s heart must warm to a country where the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier burns only from Tuesday to Saturday, where the famous revolving restaurant (Gastrodizzi) can take up to six months to complete a rotation, and where municipal buses “run frequently and can be hailed by simply waving your hand or, during peak periods, a small handgun.” Then there’s the dining experience at the renowned Tzoyczec Restaurant, where “you can sit in the garden and order roast suckling pig or lamb. Of course you’re unlikely to get it, as the place only does buttered rolls.”

No, it’s too tempting to go on quoting from this superb parody. Better that you check it out yourself. For me, I haven’t laughed so hard since I lost my traveler’s checks in Ljubjana and had to walk all the way back to Trieste. In the rain. This is a wonderful book.

John Siscoe is the owner of Globe Books in Seattle. He can be reached at johnsiscoe [at] zipcon [dot] net.

Reprinted from Real Change News
© Street News Service: www.street-papers.org

top

Earth is not the devil's
By Tumen Soliz

It took Katrina
to intrude our comfort zone,
in Dulce Vida.

We live and love,
sometimes the toys steal our souls,
we're humans not gods.

Who lives in glass house
shouldn't throw rocks at neighbors,
cost of living kills.

Shoot to kill order,
won't go down without a fight,
we Neanderthals.

Children sacrificed,
satisfies our fear of God,
quick get back in cave.

Priests scalding hand test,
all guilty in love and war,
time to phase out war.

Uganda's killers,
B.T.K. hiding in church,
rampaging for God.

They killed John Lennon.
World trade centers hit by jets.
Who are these people.

Look inside yourself
to understand these people,
caveman culture rules.

Free to make millions,
apocolypse culture rules,
kill for one's freedom.

Play self-righteous card
ignoring humans mortal.
I am God on Earth.

This urge for vengence,
from fear of losing one's wealth,
stops tomarrows flow.

Trial by ordeal.
Marines trained to vaporize,
not Mirandize them.

Who are we to blame,
when goals tied to money and
church just play along.

Who are we to blame
anyone else but ourselves
for selfish desires.

top