THE RIGHTIES ARE COMING! THE RIGHTIES ARE COMING!
By Helen L. Burleson, Doctor of Public Administration

In a right wing e-mail being circulated to paralyze you with fear, they are circulating one with the heading,
“BOY, THINGS ARE GOING TO GET UGLY”
“YOU’D BETTER WAKE UP AMERICA!!!!"
“So you think you live in a free country.Boy have you got a surprise coming.A License will be required for your house…no longer just for cars and mobile homes…Thinking about selling your house? Take a look at H. R……..”

Let me tell you what I know as a Real Estate Broker/Owner and a homeowner.
1. Many local municipalities and the government already have rules and codes on their books that mandate some of the things discussed here.
a. FHA requires homeowners to upgrade their electric: no fuse boxesmust have at least 100 amp service, many require 220.
b. FHA requires homeowners in homes built before 1978 to scrape and paint interior and exterior where there is peeling paint to protect children from lead poisoning (yet they import toys from China loaded with lead) b.f. Obama (before Obama).
c. FHA requires hand rails on stair cases.
d. FHA requires that no railings be wide enough for a child's head to get wedged in.
e. FHA requires that all windows be operational and in good repair.
f. FHA requires that concrete not have cracks that will cause one to trip. In other words FHA inspects for health and safety factors; and, home buyers must be given a booklet advising them of lead-based paint hazards, now radon, asbestos and mold are included.

2. Some villages require that the extra lock in interior/exterior doors have flip locks for ease of egress in case of emergency.

3. Some upscale villages have point-of-sale or occupancy requirement s and sellers must comply with those standards before a certificate of occupancy can be granted.

4. Some municipalities forbid the parking of work vehicles overnight in the homeowner’s driveway.

5. Some municipalities forbid parking on the street after certain early morning hours, l. e. no parking after 3:00 a.m.

6. Some municipalities require that garbage cans not be out earlier than the night before pick up and removed that day after being emptied.

7. Some municipalities forbid the cutting down of trees without a permit.

8. Some municipalities require that grass be cut and maintained.

9. Some municipalities have building codes that restrict ones' own creativity in building and determine the height, building lines and numbers of unrelated people who can occupy a home.

10. Some municipalities require fees for licenses for dogs and burglar alarms, as well as fees for municipal stickers.

11. Some municipalities require homeowners to pay for correcting past sewage problems caused by the village.

12. Some municipalities require a license and building permit before additions can be added to a home.

To address this alarmist e-mail being circulated to further discredit President Obama, it is nothing but fearmongering. This is just another example of the right wing determination to cause Obama to meet his Waterloo. What passes for information, when it is disseminated by the tea baggers, right wingers, and lunatic fringe, is nothing but sheer paralyzing propaganda designed to reach the illiterate, those who do not do due diligence on their own, and those who like sheep are easily blindly led to their own self destruction. It appears to be the goal of the right wing to so inflame, arouse and infuriate the gullible so that they will resort to violence.

Before anyone takes the message of this e-mail at face value, I suggest you go to snopes.com and enter Cap and Trade Energy Bill. Snopes identifies this as FALSE. As usual, conforming to their attention to fact finding and research, they have even reprinted this e-mail to authenticate that the e-mail circulating is based on lies and a deliberate misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the facts.

Every word that comes out of the mouths of people like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Shawn Hannity and most of those FOX entertainers is carefully crafted to elicit the most banal, animalistic, mob think mentality. Words like reload, Nazi, socialism, and you’d better get your guns, are provocative. When the inadequate and those with inferior intellect, out of jealousy, envy and inferiority, they prey upon the unfortunate people who do not research, read or think for themselves. Those “spokespeople” have their own ulterior motives. Notice how each one of these “spokespeople” (for the average American, the little people, the real Americans) have millions of dollars. They write mediocre books, give asinine speeches and charge a fortune. What are you “so called little people, average Americans getting out of it, other than a psychological outlet for your rage? While you rant and rave, these spokespeople are constantly going to the bank depositing their bounty earned from your discontent. Compare their fees and their lifestyles to the school teachers, the college professors and other educators who truly transmit American culture. Most of them can barely make their mortgage payments, while these parasites and piranha are getting rich off of your stupidity.

Follow the money! Open your eyes! Go to more than one source for information. Look at your check book. Do you have millions in the bank? They do. The educators, who are sincerely concerned about knowledge, do not have millions in the bank. The next time you visit your child’s teacher, ask how much he or she earns for a whole year, all the while being held accountable for making certain that your child knows the history, the geography of their country, math, science, reading, spelling, penmanship – the basics - that prepare them for success in life. These educators are with your children 6 and sometimes 8 hours a day for five days a week, for a nine month school year. At the end of that year, your child has progressed, especially if you as parents, have done your part.

Now, here flies in a mouth who pokes fun at education, determination, vision, accomplishments, goals and success, this flashy mouth speaks for an hour or two and walks away with thousands of dollars, more than a school teacher, who is one of the most valuable people in society, walks away with at the end of a year.

Yes, wake up America, you are being duped and you are being used as a tool for someone who’s not adequately prepared. Their only purpose is to further their greed at your expense. Should you act out your frustrations as they are urging you to do, you will be the one to pay the ultimate price. Now you will have been double billed. You’ve been billed to listen to their bombastic drivel; and you’ll be billed to pay a fine for civil disobedience. Is the price worth it? Think on that!

THIS DAY

What we are doing here
We realize that this day is like no other that life here is no different than before

what we have is the best we can offer

There will be many more passing along this way
each of us must come to a time, stop, think what we want,
what is our purpose here?

Why were we born, what is the point of being?

consuming and to occupying space, breathing air, holding a place, wracking as much as possible, resolving to use as little as possible, until too feeble to know the difference, thus expiring or,

rushing on like a mad hatter through the din and thus to shatter

shattering and dissipating in the air of what is left having no idea

They’re gone forgotten and left for gone, left for good along with the rotted vegetables in a heap, a morsel for a bug to eat, dissolving in the fungus that makes everything.

It’s time and we step aside

This activity goes on and on everyday repeating itself infinitely for as long as we remember and before the tree stood in the glen.

Remembering before stood here this redwood forest heaving in the moon landscape

Planted by the wind that rushed on filling the dense forest with rustling, snapping branches, and brachia ferns.

Before the time when we stood when there were puddles of life on the verge of extinction and separation from the primordial soup of existence.

This miracle occurred, most mundane and routine of natural processes.

We’re here as much by accident, we’ve gone beyond now moving on and on this fine spring day …….

Commentary: By Randle Loeb
New Information on the Murder of Archbishop Romero and How People Have Fared.
We see that Judas who sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver hung himself. There is no fitting end to murder because those who engage in acts of violence can never, like Lady Macbeth, absolve the shame of their conscience. What is the reason? Simply we are not meant to destroy life. When we do we are diminished and when a whole world is entombed in sorrow the results are more starkly foreboding. We are here for peace as Archbishop Romero was practicing. Where were you the eventful day that Oscar Romero was killed? It was a time when I worked as a chaplain and teaching assistant with the research team on cognitive moral faith development at Iliff School of Theology. Leila, my youngest child was barely a half year old. This heinous act would change the circumstances of everyone whether touched by the horror or not because Archbishop Romero was a person of peace. My belief is that this humble person would have been anointed with the Holy See for he surely was one of the most beloved persons in Latin America. His death catapulted us into a sea of vengeance and suffering for which there has not been any evidence of ending. Why do we consecrate violence and retribution when we see that only outcome from this is desolation of all?

“Participant in the 1980 Assassination of Romero Offers New Details”
From the Washington Post: April 6, 2010

By Anne-Marie O'Connor
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was raising a chalice during Mass in a peaceful chapel in San Salvador 30 years ago when a shot rang out. The clergyman fell to the floor -- and his country ignited into civil war.
Now Salvadorans are finally hearing details of the incendiary assassination from a self-confessed participant, former military captain Alvaro Saravia, on an online news site, http://www.elfaro.net.
From a mountain hideout, Saravia named Roberto D'Aubuisson, the deceased founder of the conservative Arena political party, as the person who gave the order to kill Romero.
"I didn't kill him" is one of the first things Saravia is quoted as telling El Faro. "Of course I participated. That's why we're here talking."
The revelations have reopened this still-painful wound at a time of renewed calls for prosecutions of those accused of political violence, which were shelved by a 1993 amnesty law passed in El Salvador after the end of the war between the repressive U.S.-backed Salvadoran army and leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).
The FMLN is now the ruling party, and its first president, Mauricio Funes, apologized for the Romero assassination on its March 24 anniversary, "in the name of the state," saying the right-wing death squads "unfortunately acted with the protection, collaboration or participation of state agents."
D'Aubuisson, who died of cancer in 1992, was a notorious suspect, and El Faro has provided unique firsthand confirmation.
"This is an excellent story that leaves no doubts," said Marissa D'Aubuisson, a founder of the Romero Foundation. She is a sister of the late right-wing activist, but she ardently opposed his views.
"Many people have read this, and what they want is justice," she said. "This case has been sealed for years, and now it must be reopened, to strip away the impunity. There are others who were involved who are still alive."
Carlos Dada, the reporter of the story, said that while it confirms the long-held D'Aubuisson involvement, "I believe I have opened even more questions. For example, who was the intellectual author of this assassination?" he said. "I believe there were people above D'Aubuisson."
Saravia emerged after years on the run. El Faro said he delivered pizzas and laundered drug money for a Colombian trafficker. He was running a used-car dealership in Modesto, Calif., when lawyers for the Center for Justice and Accountability filed a civil action against him for involvement in the Romero assassination. In 2004, Saravia was ordered to pay $10 million to the plaintiff, a relative of Romero, and fled.
Saravia said in the El Faro interview that he was speaking out "for my children," whom he hasn't been in touch with in 10 years. "Even they see me like Hitler," El Faro quoted him as saying.

"Of course this is punishment," he said, gesturing to his "small mud house" in a village with rail-thin, sickly children, in an undisclosed country.
"Poverty! How would a man not become a guerrilla when he's watching his children die of hunger?" Saravia added. "I wouldn't hesitate three seconds."
On the day before Romero died, Saravia said his confederates were angered by the archbishop's Sunday homily. They thought only a communist would insult security forces with a Mass that said: "I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!"
The next day, Saravia told El Faro, retired major D'Aubuisson was on the phone. "Take care of it," D'Aubuisson said, and Saravia answered, "Okay, that's fine, Major. We'll do it."
He said he and his cohorts drove the assassin to the chapel. "You better shoot in the head because maybe he has a bulletproof vest," Amado Antonio Garay, the driver, later testified he heard Saravia say.
Romero was saying Mass: "so that we may give our body and blood to suffering and to pain, like Christ, to teach justice and peace to our people."
Saravia said he heard a single shot.
A few days later D'Aubuisson borrowed 1,000 Salvadoran colons, and Saravia gave the money to the assassin, who is "still out there somewhere," he told El Faro. He did not name the killer.
Worshipers at Romero's funeral were attacked with machine-gun fire and a bomb, which killed as many as 40 people and wounded 200.
"The crime became a milestone," said a U.N. Truth Commission report, "presaging the all-out war."
More than 75,000 people died in the 12-year civil war.
The Arena Party held the presidency for 20 years, until Funes won the 2009 elections on the FMLN ticket. Today, the country has one of the world's highest homicide rates.
"Saravia is not worried that one of his old buddies will kill him. The thing that worries [Saravia] most these days is that his neighbor will murder him to steal two cents," said Dada, the journalist. "And that is very possible. We were left with a culture of impunity that has consequences even today."

A minority Report: Somehow, somewhere there needs to be delivered to Ms Ritter and the whole earth a response to being homelessness that does not start with deficits but from a place of strength and substance.

They’re having an all day summit on SOAR and the advantages of stream lining and augmenting the process of claiming benefits. Many times I have applied for these benefits and was rejected because I was too fit and able and I am grateful for the disposition.

I told the federal judge, “Thank you,” because your honor and first lady and nationally, there are many of us who have nothing wrong or who feel that even though we have many things going on that are questionable we want to work, earn our way, and our fair share. We do not feel disabled and disadvantaged and that we need anything more than a chance to earn a living wage and contribute as citizens. We do not want unlimited benefits and to have checks arrive all the time that mark our time, or which regard us as a ward of the state, or a person of less ability than any of you who are reading these words.

Many of these people do not want housing stock that is at below market value and we do not want to have a subsidized living with rules and regulations like section 8. We want to live well, live healthfully, eat well, work out and be fit. We want to strive to be contributing members of the social milieu and not a burden to the world.

Ms Ritter, there are many of us who prefer to be recognized for what we are capable of doing and refuse to yield to being “sick,” labeled, “mentally ill,” incubated and tested for new pharmaceuticals, take medicines that make us feel numb or relinquish whether we feel the mania and euphoria of the emotions of our lives. For those of us who live for the best that life has to offer and for what we are, standing here as citizens, we do not choose to walk with somber and down trodden specters or fix our gaze downward, but that we are of value, though we have limitations, and though we have faltered and stumbled, that we’re seen as equals to everyone else who earns a living in America.

We’re not asking for a speedier process but economic and social justice because we belong here just as much as you do, and we are just as capable of running businesses, and being in charge of our lives, our welfare and the abilities of our communities to thrive.

Most of us do not have disabilities, we are interdependent and belong as readily as anyone and we believe in community models of recovery, where there is a place for everyone to do his or her fair share to work and to live in society.

In my time there are many who have strived for dignity and grace through being employed and being able bodied. We have lived with the idea of running and playing, of raising our families, of being lovers and spouses. We don’t want housing based on disabilities or to relate to others in segregated communities of others with disabilities, but as residents integrated economically and socially in the community as leaders, as citizens, as members of the congregation, of schools, of teams, of social organizations, as speakers, and civic representatives without regarding us as special in any way other than by what we have to offer.

It is time that we receive full and open value for our contributions as people of worth and grace. Though I have a mental illness I will not look down on my efforts to be self-sufficient and self-reliant and be judged not for my limitations but for my strength of will and determination as a citizen.

Let’s rise and press on with the agenda of recognizing the need for fair housing for our families and opportunities for all of our brothers and sisters. Let’s regard each according to his or her worth as equals sufficient, capable and at last, as people of stature and significance and not for deficits and a need for being patronized and belittled. Let us persevere in preserving housing for all people that promises a place of sanctity, dignity and grace.

If in all of the soup kitchens and across the land the pantries, the shelters, the residential programs, the street papers, the social service programs, the legislature fighting for the rights of those in poverty, were listening to the people and included them as leaders with knowledge and sense to make decisions and run their affairs, then there would be no need for any of these institutions and we would be living side by side in all neighborhoods, rich and poor.

We would be successful according to a new paradigm. Everyone has a role to play and a place and a measure of success in the commonweal of this republic. We want to live everywhere and no one will ever again be segregated in terms of being excluded for whatever preceded their inequities and losses.

Be you then being charged to listen to this and enter in the record for all of us to amply hear, this plea. “When you regard your visage in the mirror what do you see, you see me, and when you look back you see your reflection.” We’re right here side by side lifting one another up. We are the same. To quote John Donne, “Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. If a clod be washed away from the main, we’re all the less.”

Randle Loeb
The People’s Leadership Council

Many of us overcome fear and humiliation to rise and accomplish greatness. Many of us are born leaders and many of us seek leadership. There are those who are destined to change history regardless of their circumstances and who create the portal that we walk through to rise and be counted. Let us remember and honor them. Randle

Dr. B. T. Washington, Negro Leader, Dead

BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

TUSKEGEE, Ala., Nov. 14.--Booker T. Washington, foremost teacher and leader of the negro race, died early today at his home here, near the Tuskegee Institute, which he founded and of which he was President. Hardening of the arteries, following a nervous breakdown, caused his death four hours after Dr. Washington arrived from New York.

Although he had been in failing health for several months, the negro leader's condition became serious only last week while he was in the East. He then realized the end was near, but was determined to make the last long trip South. He said often: "I was born in the South, have lived all my life in the South, and expect to die and be buried in the South."

Accompanied by his wife, his secretary, and a physician, Dr. Washington left New York for Tuskegee at 4 o'clock on Friday afternoon. He reached home last midnight, and died at 4:40 o'clock this morning. His last public appearance was at the national conference of Congregational churches in New York, where he delivered a lecture on Oct. 25. The funeral will be held at Tuskegee Institute on Wednesday morning at 10 o'clock.

Dr. Washington's Career

No one knows the day, nor even with certainty the year, of the birth of Booker T. Washington; but the day of his death was announced by telegraph and cable to many parts of the world.

He began life as "just another little nigger" on a plantation of a family named Burrows in Hale's Ford, Va. The month and year of his birth were probably April, 1858, although Dr. Washington himself was not sure of this. In the biographical paragraph under his name in "Who's Who in America," it is said that he was born "about 1859." The only certain fact is that he was born into slavery when negro mothers made no record of nor long remembered the date of a child's birth.

Soon after the close of the civil war the little negro boy went with his stepmother to Malden, West Va., where he worked in salt furnaces for nine moths in the year and attended school for three months. After several years of such life the boy obtained work in the kitchen of Mrs. Viola Ruffner, a New England woman who had married a Southerner. Mrs. Ruffner soon recognized the boy's eagerness and ability to advance himself, so she taught him the elementary subjects. Booker Washington felt grateful to her to the end of his life, because she really gave him his start.

He heard of the Hampton Institute, for negroes, in 1871, when he was about thirteen years old, and he decided at once to attend it. So, with the little money he had been able to save from his wages of $6 a week, he set out for Richmond, Va., hoping to earn enough there to enable him to go on to Hampton, which is near Norfolk. This was in 1871. Dr. Washington founded the Tuskeegee Institute just ten years later. He was admitted to the institute and was graduated at the head of his class in 1875, after working his way through the school.

After graduation Dr. Washington returned to Malden and taught school until he had earned enough to enable him to go to the Wayland Seminary in Washington, D. C., where he studied until 1879, when he was called to Hampton as a teacher in the institute. After he had taught for two years, in 1881 the State of Alabama voted to found an industrial institute for negroes similar to that at Hampton, and, after searching for a negro qualified to head the proposed institution, Dr. Washington was selected. This was his entrance into the "black belt" of the South, a chance which he had long desired, and when he assumed charge of the institute at Tuskegee, Ala., his real life's work began.

The Start of Tuskegee

The State had appropriated $2,000 a year, and it was the task of the negro to organize the school. How well he did this is shown by a comparison of statistics. The institute opened on July 4, 1881, with one teacher and thirty pupils. At that time it had neither land nor buildings, nothing but the $2,000 a year granted by the Alabama Legislature.

When the institute celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary it owned 2,000 acres of land and eighty-three large and small buildings, which, with its equipment of live stock, stock in trade, and other personal property, were valued at $831,895. This did not include 22,000 acres of public land remaining unsold from the 25,000 acres granted by Congress, valued at $135,000, nor the endowment fund, which was $1,275,644. During the year there were more than 1,500 students enrolled in the school, more than 1,000 young men, and more than 500 young women. The students were trained in thirty-seven industries.

It was on the opening day of the Atlanta Exposition in 1895 that Dr. Washington became a national character. On that day he delivered an address that was heard by thousands and read by other thousands in far-away places with wonder that a man so wise and clear- seeing should arise from among his people to lead them upward. For it was because Dr. Washington stood out as a negro striving in a sensible and sincere way to help negroes that he commanded attention on that day in Atlanta.

His subject was "The New Negro," and white men saw in what he said a sane hope for the negro race and a real solution of the vexing "negro problem."

The character and difficulties of Dr. Washington's work are told in a magazine article written by him. When elected to organize the Tuskegee Institute, he traveled through the "black belt" in order to become acquainted with the people whom he was to teach.

"In the plantation districts," he wrote later, "I found large families, including visitors when any appeared, living and sleeping in a single room. I found them living on fat pork and corn bread, and yet not infrequently I discovered in these cabins sewing machines which no one knew how to use, which had cost as much as $60, or showy clocks which had cost as much as $10 or $12, but which never told the time. I remember a cabin where there was but one fork on the table for the use of five members of the family and myself, while in the opposite corner was an organ for which the family was paying $60 in monthly installments. The truth that forced itself upon me was that these people needed not only book learning, but knowledge of how to live; they needed to know how to cultivate the soil, to husband their resources, and make the most of their opportunities."

Men of Affairs Come to His Aid

Word of his aims, advertised to the world in the Atlanta speech, spread all over the country, and soon men and women of means began to want to assist Dr. Washington. Chief among these was Andrew Carnegie, who began by giving a $20,000 library to the institute, which he followed with a regular contribution of $10,000 a year. The climax of Mr. Carnegie's generosity toward the institute was reached in 1903, when he gave $600,000 to the endowment fund.

Among those who indorsed and supported Dr. Washington by act and speech were Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson; the officials of many States, and the heads of many institutions of learning. Though he never seemed to seek them, honors of all kinds were bestowed upon the negro. The degree of M. A. was conferred upon him by Harvard in 1896, and LL. D. by Dartmouth in 1901. In 1910, when Dr. Washington was in Europe, he was received by the King of Denmark, addressed the National Liberal Club in London, and visited Mr. Carnegie in Skibo Castle.

Among those who gave the most effectual assistance to Dr. Washington in his work was Robert Curtis Ogden, who died in Maine on Aug. 6, 1913. Mr. Ogden became interested in negro educational work through his association with General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of the Hampton Institute, and as the President of the Southern Educational Board he did much to overcome southern prejudice against the education of negroes and spread the knowledge of Hampton and Tuskegee among both the white and black people.

An incident of Dr. Washington's life that stirred up a controversy throughout the country was the occasion of his dining at the White House with President Roosevelt on Oct. 16, 1901. Dr. Washington went to the White House at the invitation of the President, and, when the news was spread abroad, thousands, both North and South, who were moved by race prejudice or by a belief that social equality between blacks and whites had been encouraged, became angry. Most of the criticism fell upon Colonel Roosevelt, but the incident served also to injure Dr. Washington's work in some parts of the South.

In addition to his work at Tuskegee and upon the lecture platform, Dr. Washington wrote a number of books and pamphlets upon the negro question. Chief among his works were: "Sowing and Reaping," 1900; "Up from Slavery," 1901; "Future of the America Negro," 1899; "Character Building," 1902; "The Story of My Life and Work," 1903; "Working with Hands," 1904; "Tuskegee and Its People," 1905; "Putting the Most Into Life," 1906; "Life of Frederick Douglass," 1907; "The Negro in Business," 1907; "The Story of the Negro," 1909; "My Larger Education," 1911, and "The Man Farthest Down," 1912.

Dr. Washington was married three times, and is survived by his third wife, two sons and a daughter

The Allen Chapel AME Church Will Never be the Same in the District of Columbia.

Allen Chapel AME Church in Southeast Washington, D.C. was the center of attention for two hours yesterday as the Obama motorcade, bearing the president's family attended Easter services for two hours. In the hub bub of the service the minister had said, "That there are great things in store for the president because the hand of God is all over him." Let's hope that this is true.
Unemployment in the community is the highest in the country, nearly a third of every citizen is unemployed. Violence has continued to raise its head as gangs and drugs prevail. The president has visited the community before going to a charter school and a fast food restaurant. The president did what every normal person does on Easter and received communion, sang, chanted, read the verses,and listened to the gospel.

No one goes to the neighborhood who holds power except for the people. In a microcosm the community is the same as any in America, full of promise and poise, and troubles and doubts. What we need in America now is peace and jobs. We need to tighten and pull together as a community and this neighborhood needs to have a purpose. Schools like the one that the president visited and the one that is on Welton Street near the office of the Denver Urban Spectrum are significant steps on the way to changing America to a land of promise for everyone. We need to stop waging battle and stop the restless urge to destroy others here and abroad. Back home the Obamas have no room for waiting for the hand of God to be all over them.

The world cannot wait for peace and property because everywhere this Easter the hand of God is rumbling and stirring the fires of the depth of the lake of natural disaster. The tides are rising and we cannot bear the impact of the fall out from the ash that has begun to blot out the sun.

On Self-Knowledge
Kahlil Gibran

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself like a lotus of countless petals.

"We Still Don't Hear Them," (original language is "Him") In fact, there were many dissidents from usual and customary policies abroad who echoed the same refrain then and now. IS anyone listening?

By BOB HERBERT Op-ed Columnist for the New York Times
Published: April 2, 2010
"The great man was moving with what seemed like great reluctance. He knew as he climbed from the car in Upper Manhattan that he was stepping into the maelstrom, that there were powerful people who would not react kindly to what he had to say.

“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,” said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “because my conscience leaves me no other choice.”

This was on the evening of April 4, 1967, almost exactly 43 years ago. Dr. King told the more than 3,000 people who had crowded into Riverside Church that silence in the face of the horror that was taking place in Vietnam amounted to a “betrayal.”

He spoke of both the carnage in the war zone and the toll the war was taking here in the United States. The speech comes to mind now for two reasons: A Tavis Smiley documentary currently airing on PBS revisits the controversy set off by Dr. King’s indictment of “the madness of Vietnam.” And recent news reports show ever-increasing evidence that we have ensnared ourselves in a mad and tragic venture in Afghanistan.

Dr. King spoke of how, in Vietnam, the United States increased its commitment of troops “in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.”

It’s strange, indeed, to read those words more than four decades later as we are increasing our commitment of troops in Afghanistan to fight in support of Hamid Karzai, who remains in power after an election that the world knows was riddled with fraud and whose government is one of the most corrupt and inept on the planet.

If Mr. Karzai is at all grateful for this support, he has a very peculiar way of showing it. He has ignored pleas from President Obama and others to take meaningful steps to rein in the rampant corruption. His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the kingpin in southern Afghanistan, is believed by top American officials to be engaged in all manner of nefarious activities, including money-laundering and involvement in the flourishing opium trade.

Hamid Karzai himself pulled off a calculated insult to the U.S. by inviting Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidential palace in Kabul, where Ahmadinejad promptly delivered a fiery anti-American speech. As Dexter Filkins and Mark Landler reported in The Times this week: “Even as Mr. Obama pours tens of thousands of additional American troops into the country to help defend Mr. Karzai’s government, Mr. Karzai now often voices the view that his interests and the United States’ no longer coincide.”

Is this what American service members are dying for in Afghanistan? Can you imagine giving up your life, or your child’s life, for that crowd?

In his speech, Dr. King spoke about the damage the Vietnam War was doing to America’s war on poverty, and the way it was undermining other important domestic initiatives. What he wanted from the U.S. was not warfare overseas but a renewed commitment to economic and social justice at home. As he put it: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

The speech set loose a hurricane of criticism. Even the N.A.A.C.P. complained that Dr. King should stick to what it perceived as his area of expertise, civil rights. The New York Times headlined its editorial on the speech, “Dr. King’s Error.”

Mr. Smiley, in his documentary, noted that “the already strained relationship between President Johnson and Dr. King became fractured beyond repair.” And donations to Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference “began to dry up.”

So it took great courage for Dr. King to speak out as he did.

His bold stand seems all the more striking in today’s atmosphere, in which moral courage among the very prominent — the kind of courage that carries real risk — seems mostly to have disappeared.

More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and more than 1,000 in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has chosen to escalate rather than to begin a careful withdrawal. Those two wars, as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have told us, will ultimately cost us more than $3 trillion.

And yet the voices in search of peace, in search of an end to the “madness,” in search of the nation-building so desperately needed here in the United States, are feeble indeed.

Dr. King would be assassinated exactly one year (almost to the hour) after his great speech at Riverside Church. It’s the same terrible fate that awaits some of the American forces, most of them very young, that we continue to send into the quagmire in Afghanistan.""

The amazing truth of war is that it is a totally destructive endeavor for the earth and all of the people that dwell here. War especially rips the fabric of life of children apart and destroys the resilience and hope of generations of people. War sheds one reward and that is desolation. What we have been doing throughout my life time and for generations is evil. Dr King did not even write these words that Bob Herbert refers to. It was Dr. Vincent Harding Jr, a speech writer and civil rights leader who created the path for Dr. King to enunciate what it obvious, that the poor are the victims of tremendous hostility and violence and that their lives are forfeited fro the sake of the aspirations of the entrenched military industrial complex. The truth was enunciated by general and president Dwight David Eisenhower nobly and without fiction. He captured the essence of what Dr. King and Harding established as a hymn of the republic for peace and new ways to obtain an end to hostility toward all of earth's citizens.