A View From The Street©

THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT OF 2006

       HoHum...Yawn, yawn.  Does anyone realize what the hell happened to us this month, (October 2006) or are we all too busy watching Entertainment tonight?  Is it what we don't know, what happened or we don't understand  Both I suspect.

     I have been telling you for months that this President is stealing our rights, that the constitution is dead, that the Patriot Act is really an act of treason.     I told you how they declared the Rainbow gathering this year in Colorado a National Incident and practiced their terrorism protocol by arresting people for just being there, trying to get there, and their attorneys were not allowed to see them or represent them.  I told you secret trials were held in a fire house.

     A lot of people see what the supposedly elected reps have done to us, but too many do not.  I mean that I didn't elect anyone to congress that would suspend the constitution.  Did You?  Did you want our country to become the country our forefathers came here to get away from?
Don't you know that George Washington, the hemp grower, Ben Franklin, the hemp grower and Abe Lincoln, the freer of slaves, have not only turned over in their graves but are still spinning.  They must be thinking we have all lost our minds.  Didn't we learn anything from them?  What is the old cliche?  If you don't learn your lessons from history then you are bound to repeat them?

     Well fuck me if I want to go back to the ways of Nazi Germany!!!

     So what can we expect next from these guys.  Bush now has the power to arrest us all or any of us for any reason they think up.  Could.d he declare Martial Law?  Could he suspend the next election and just take over?  Yes he could.  What kind of incident/disaster would it take to tighten up the power grab?   Certainly, another national incident real or made up, like they blew up the world Trade Center.   Is the West coast in for something big?  Will they blow up the Golden Gate bridge?
Bush needs a threat on both coasts of Americka to frighten us into submission.

     Could Martial law work in Amerika?  NO!!

     The country is too big geographically  Home land security was not able to manage even a regional disaster like Katrina.  Not that they really cared about helping people, but still it was beyond their ability to manage.  Martial law was easier to manage in Nazi Germany.Germany is a small country.  I lived there for two years and you can drive from one end of the country to the other on the autobahn in about 3 hours. The Feds do NOT have the manpower to control us.  Not as easy as locking up the Japanese during WW2.  And what happened to their constitutional rights?  Didn't the government finally apologize to them?  Who is going to apologize to me?

     I am already hearing talk from real patriots about not letting this bastard take the country away from us.  Just try and declare Martial law on independent Oregonians, independent folks in Montana, Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming.  We still have a frontier mentality.

     And finally, the national guard, already sick of the war in Iraq, would have to control us to make it work.  Are your neighbors in the guard going to enforce Martial law against you?  The short answer is no!

     I have given you some of the possibilities of what might happen next.  Figuring the administration's next move head long at us won't be easy, but you know it will not be good.

     While we were sleeping, eating, watching tv and having  sex, they took our country
What are we going to do about it?.

DO THE RIGHT THING

     I sometimes use my position on televison as a bully pulpit to help folks see what needs to be done in the community.  And this editorial is about doing the right thing.

     When someone you know needs help, what goes through your mind?  A dozen reasons why it would not be convenient for you!  Like helping the person might put you out, might cost you money.  If the person is temporarily homeless and needs a place to stay, would you offer shelter?  Or would it be an interruption to your routine?  When you see a shabby appearing person asking for money in front of the super market, do you look the other way, avoid eye contact or step aside?  How about the homeless person laying in the door way you pas every day.  Have you ever stopped to see if you could help?

     Why is our first reaction to a request for help, even if the request is a SILENT look, a negative reaction?

      NOT ME!  DON'T LOOK AT ME! DON'T ASK ME!

     Could it be because we see ourselves in that person?  You already know your life and circumstance can change in a heartbeat.  Ten minutes of the evening news show you that.  So...that person asking for help could be you or one of your family and if it WAS you or YOURS, would you want the prosperous person passing by to say  NOT ME!  DON'T LOOK AT ME!  DON'T ASK ME!  GET A JOB!

     ......No...you would want them to help you and not think you were a bum, an addict or a slackard, or disgusting.       

     As I grow inevitably older, I hope I grow wiser too.  There is so much human need in a world of evil.  I have always been drawn to helping people.  As a young policeman I honestly thought if I put enough bad guys in jail I could make the world a better place.  I realized only later that the bad guys were the cops.  I left when I would no longer get around, under or over the corruption and murders.

      As a cop I saw a lot of homeless people and the homeless have my heart and my voice more than any other.  I spent 6 years managing a homeless shelter and I made a difference in a lot of lives.

     I ran for Sheriff of Multnomah County because I knew I could have made a huge difference and helped a lot more folks.

     There should not be any politicians.  Just public servants doing the right thing for the people.  When you are asked for help, say "Yes."  Say yes to yourself because in a very real sense that person IS you.  It is not about being a Christian or a Buddhist or a Mormon, it's about doing the right thing.

     Remember, a gun shot, a car crash a missed heart beat and I could be standing in front of my maker.  And when I'm there I'd like to be able to say, "I helped as many people as I could as long as I could until you called me here, and Sir, of Madam, I hope you can help me now!"

PAIN-IN-THE-ASS PAIN MANAGEMENT

     Thank goodness chronic pain is covered by the Oregon medical marijuana law.  So many of us suffer chronic pain, pain management has become an industry, a specialty unto itself & highly lucrative to Big-Pharma.
But a rebellion has begun by pain patients with too many years experience with Vicodin, Phentenal patches, Oxycodone-Oxycontin, morphine pumps and the most insidious, in my opinion, possibly the most addicting pain management pill, Methadone. Methadone is the favored (cheapest at about 5 cents a pill, vice Oxycodone $4 bucks a pill) addictor-pain manager available.

     I talk to patients every day that say these drugs, are ruining their lives with the lousy side effects, causing problems in their family relationships, ruining their bodies, having to process the chemicals.  Then they tell me the drugs are not working, or no longer working.  They tell me they don't want to put chemicals in their bodies anymore or ever again.  They tell me that their doctors won't seem to listen when they say, "No more vicodin.  It makes me sick."  "No more morphine or methadone, I don't want to be addicted any more."

     Then they tell me they already know marijuana works for their pain, they tried it on their own, or a friend gave them some...but AAHHH bring up marijuana to their doctor and the shit hits the fan.  Doctors reactions I'm told are everything from "You can't be serious," or "You're just trying to get high," to threatening to cut off the patients they know are addicted to the narcotic they are about to write another "scrip" for...that the patient don't want. In effect the doctor is saying "Now that I have you hooked, you are part of my income.  I won't let you go."  Isn't the heroin dealer on the corner doing the same thing? Patients tell me that their doctors are no longer doing anything for them, but are not doing things to them, including threatening them.  "My way or the hiway now that I have you hooked." 

     I am not making this up.  I hear this from patients every day about their doctors. What's wrong here?

     What's wrong is most doctors are too ingrained with Pharma and have NO REAL KNOWLEDGE or natural medicine, and are afraid to "break ranks" if you will, are afraid of loosing patients, ie income, and lack the genuine compassion necessary to first LISTEN to the patient and follow the Hippocratic oath. (First do no harm!)

     Pain management doctors are "system" doctors faced with an increasing patient dissatisfaction with "the system."  More and more pain patients, running from big Pharma, are looking desperately for natural medicine in general and natural PAIN medicine in particular.

     Our THCF medical clinics are pain management clinics offering legal access to the oldest pain medicine in the world...AND something apparently new in medicine, doctors that will listen and  have compassion.

     THCF is as anti-system as it gets and we invite you to join us if you qualify under state  law.

SSD-THE GOVERNMENT CRAP HEAP

     I see these folks in the medical clinic where I work every day, men that spent 20 years carrying sheet rock, 20 years on their knees kicking in carpet or setting tile or floating in concrete, 20 years swing a framing hammer, 20 years painting bridges and inhaling paint fumes.  These are the men and women that drive the corporate profits, the ones that make the stock holders happy and in the mean time try and make a living wage to support the family.  But now in your 40's or 50's your knees are shot, you can't raise a hammer above your head, years of paint fumes cloud your thinking...and you can't work any more!!  The company probably went broke, down sized or out sourced or moved to Bangladesh, probably with your pension...and you folks that made $600 a week swing a hammer are now trying to figure out how to live on $603 a month SS disability.

     Are any of you out there trying to figure out how this happened?  How you went from  wage earner to poverty heap?  We are a throw away society, we throw away every  thing from beer cans to human beings.  No longer useful?  No longer a tax payer?  Off to the disability scrap heap.  $603 a month and have a good day.  We might throw in a few food stamps and perhaps put you on a list for substandard housing too.

    So it takes a while to realize you have been consigned to poverty by who? Well who writes the checks?  Uncle Sam the poverty man!! It is the government's fault that you are in poverty.  The government that spends your tax money on every thing...except you!!  Bombs and bullets and all the other expensive war things that DESTROY OUR HUMANITY AND ALLOW US TO THINK IT IS ALRIGHT TO MAINTAIN A POVERTY CLASS.

     President Bush is trying to legalize torture, has tortured and still tortures.  This man will always maintain a poverty class until he figures out a way to get rid of those that no longer are producers.  To them there are only two classes of people, the producers, the elite, and the scrap heap.   

     So if you are just now figuring out you don't matter any more, you have just figured out you're on the government crap heap.  But the crap heap is a data base.  We're all in the computer, the SS suckers, the homeless suckers, the methadone patients, all of us that are addicted to something big Pharma sells.  The undesirables are already on a computer disk!!

      Seems to me it's the same thing the Nazi's did.  But Bushcheney have better computers!
We've lost our privacy, we've lost our constitution, we've lost our freedom and somewhere I just know they are building the gulags.

     Too far fetched for ya...well that's the way I see it.