Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 945 Editor's Choice: 126
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The Prisoner has Everything She Could Possibly Want, Except...
[Read the article: I'm young, rich and beautiful but so very unhappy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...freedom? No, I realize all that affluence is supposed to be able to purchase freedom, but it doesn't. It only helps the prisoner to furnish her cell with a better grade of stuff.
It's hardly surprising that people born in a prison - social, religious, political, physical, check all that apply, would feel desperately unhappy. One is raised to "know" that if one is sufficiently affluent there is nothing further standing between the subject and her ultimate happiness. We have labor unions and corporate robber barons telling us the same thing - from different perspectives, but still the same thing.
"Take a pill." There's some excellent advice for someone who has lost track of her very soul. Play with your seratonin levels - inside the damned prison. But before you choose to do that or to not do it, dear LW, you must first realize the affluence and physical, material good fortune you are heiress to is neither the prison nor the means of escape. It is nothing, really, as you have painfully become aware. That, in itself, must be terribly disturbing. A pill won't change it. Brain chemistry has very little to do with being imprisoned. Oh, it can make us willing to tolerate our imprisonment, but it won't get us out.
Cary actually did make some good suggestions to you. It's all outside you, outside your gilded cage, where the free birds are flying. Start by watching them - without judgement - and simply be aware of their joy, which lasts until the moment they drop - or are perhaps shot - out of the air. What may lie beyond that moment doesn't matter either, because we don't know, can't know, unless we first find truth, begin to know ourselves, stripped of our awareness of the cage - until we are able to walk directly through the walls of the prison this unfortunate society has placed over us like a cage.
Your suffering is encouraging: it means you aren't shallow enough to be satisfied with the simple (and simple-minded) gratifications that convey with life in the most plush wing of the prison. You want something more. This is the beginning of passion. Go with it.
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If Ever A Case Has Been Made...
[Read the article: How bad is he?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...for removal of a sitting President, Blumenthal has crafted it.
We have the Constitutional mandate. We have the Constitutional mechanism. All we need now is the will.
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No, We Can Not Wait - Not Any Longer
[Read the article: Bush's Get Out of Jail card]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Carol Duffy is absolutely correct, and as a Republican who has always cared more about his country than his party, I have been calling for the people of this nation to stand up now, not in another two years (when it may well be over the hill and gone) to exercise our mandate and responsibility to remove George W. Bush from office. Not now, not in two years, but YESTERDAY! As I have written here again and again (until I am certain many readers think they see it even when I haven't said it - a good thing, far as I'm concerned), the crew in the White House must go and they must go NOW!
Just how many blows to the head is this nation willing to accept as part of the "price" of freedom? How long are we willing to accept the humiliation, degradation and wholly un-American practices of this evil and insane administration? To quote the late, lamented genius Richard Pryor, "How long? How long? How long must this bullshit go on?"
From another unlikely source comes the timeworn-but-true-now-more-than-ever "If you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem", from Eldridge Cleaver. Yes, it's those days all over again, only worse, much worse, if that is imaginable to those aging hippies among us, daydreaming about their glory days while patting their fat stomachs and crooning over their pension checks. This really may BE The Last Call.
Cleaver said some other things, too, which resonate with these times even more than when they were said. Here are a few which come to mind:
"I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare."
"In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all." (Word to the Gitmo interrogators).
And so long as I am using (as I so often do) guidance from seemingly unlikely sources, Albert Pike also spoke to this generation when he said:
"A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable."
But enough of that. There is only one thing that needs to be said: ENOUGH!
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The Real Lone Star Still Shines
[Read the article: The Texan who actually governed]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am, for once, at a loss for words. Good night, Miz Ann.