MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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The Leftist Agendaby Rod Amis
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HARLEM - This was meant to be a column where I talked about what this magazine is all about.
I dread going to my e-mail box. It is filled with horrendous stories from the former Yugoslavia. Many people, even Albanians, regret that the NATO bombing even started.
People report missing friends and dreading the knock on their doors at night.
Most of the people writing me from Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia and the former-Yugoslavia refuse to allow me attribution because of fear of reprisals.
So I hear about tragedies and I weep alone in this little apartment in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, the bombs continue to fall.
People die every day.
I would have thought that most people would have figured some of this out by reading previous DAY ONES:
The problem, as I now see it, is keeping up with the stories.
And America remains a Great Power. (Thank you, Henry Kissinger.)
"Collateral Damage," just a few civilians, means nothing after all in the calculus of world domination.
One woman writes that a "friend" she saw during the day, a Serb, turned out to be a paramilitary assassin at night.
The horror, it was written, the horror.
It has reached the point that I dread opening my e-mail. I don't have a high threshold for pain, and my threshold has been overwhelmed. I WOULD RATHER NOT KNOW.
I am sorry because that admits that I am weak, but I don't want to know anymore. IT HURTS ME. It keeps me awake at night.
I never wanted to believe that there was this much evil and suffering in the world.
I guess that means that I need to work harder against The Darknesss. Lord give me strength.
The problem is getting it right.
Who are we as Leftists?
What do we stand for?
Are we ready to say that Dollar Bill's policies are all about Corporate Hegemony and have nothing to do with Genuine Democracy?
Are we ready to say that Working People are being given the long shaft and that everyone needs to speak up about it?
Are we ready to say that BOTH political parties in the USA have abandoned the American people?
Are we ready to re-engage on issues of foreign policy and demand that there be some moral position to what the only superpower does to our world?
It is time, every story I work on tells me, every e-mail I read with dread tells me, that we use this global Internet to take common cause with people all over the world. It is time that we demand that the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights be more than a piece of paper. It is time that we support the Zapatistas, the East Timoreans, and all other people who suffer from neglect and oppression. Not just with rhetoric, but with action. But some politicians' feet to the fire.
IF NOT, JOIN THE CLUELESS.
Jesse Ventura is a breath of fresh air that most Americans I know have been waiting for. 'Sure as hell can understand why he doesn't want to go to Washington (That Cesspool.) But I also wish someone could come up with a scheme to clean that cesspool up and give us our country back!
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