[GJM] Fw: Notes From the Trail... Stop This Man!

[marguerite hampton]

 Thank you Steve for your courage and leadership at this critical time. 

  I urge list members to distribute this far and wide. The creation of war,
death and destruction is
not an answer.  Only love -- the manifestation of the Christ Consciousness
that lies within. -- can prevail.  

eco 

-------Original Message-------
 
From: Steve Bhaerman
Date: 01/31/07 16:57:22
To: ecopilgrim at aabol.com
Subject: Notes From the Trail... Stop This Man!
 
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Stop This Man Before He Kills Again! 


By Steve Bhaerman 
As President Bush and his shadowy puppeteer unblinkingly prepare for another
stare-down with reality, those who remember are comparing our current
situation with the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon a third of
a century ago. Agnew went quietly over some corruption scandal which
nowadays might be classified as “business as usual.” With Gerald Ford in
place to replace him, Nixon received the delegation of Republican leaders
from the Senate (Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater), and House Minority Leader
John Rhodes who told him his Congressional support was gone. After a final
confirmation from the two most powerful men in his administration, Alexander
Haig and Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon resigned himself to the inevitable
resignation. 
As we should well understand by now, our current misleadership makes Mister
Nixon look like Mister Rogers. A better comparison for Bush and Cheney would
be Enron execs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who acted legit until the
moment the handcuffs were slapped on. So we would expect that whoever gets
the assignment this time around will have to do more of a classic
“intervention” than a political persuasion. It won’t be pretty. 
And it won’t happen without the awakening and participation of the American
people. 

Our Choice -- Freedom or Empire? 
What we face over the next six to nine months is the most challenging choice
point for America since the Declaration of Independence itself. In 1776 and
the years that followed, the American colonies had to choose between freedom
and empire. The empire at the time was the British empire, and the colonists
saw and felt firsthand how their economic and political well-being was being
compromised. Hand-in-glove with the British empire was the largest and most
powerful multinational corporation of the day, the British East India
Company. Together, these two institutions imposed topdown political and
economic control over the colonies. 
As Americans are now waking up to discover, there has been a
“re-colonization” of America as multinational corporations and our own
government have reestablished the rule of a would-be King George. The
American “middle class” is becoming as archaic as the family farm, as a
modern “taxation without representation” bleeds the many to feed the few.
The outrageously ridiculous financial price we pay to support our
unsupportable empire is not only bankrupting America, but doesn’t even
benefit the vast majority of us. A pertinent analysis can be found in this
recent article by Chalmers Johnson, an author and former CIA consultant who
also appears in Why We Fight. 
So we must do what the media will not. We must understand that the America
we imagined we were living in has become a dangerous monster, all the more
dangerous because of the still-pervasive belief that our intentions are
benign. We must understand -- as Paul Levy most eloquently puts it in his
book The Madness of George W. Bush -- that George Bush is simply the
outpicturing of this unacknowledged shadow, the most glaring and blatant
symptom of our potentially-fatal malaise. 
So as we move the “up-wising” forward to rightfully remove a
wrongfully-elected chief executive, we must understand that George Bush is
the symptom and not the cause. “Impeachment,” which I prefer to call a
massive, nationwide, transpartisan vote of no confidence, becomes necessary
as we the people take the first step to restoring “government of the people,
by the people, and for the people where the government does our bidding, not
the bidding of the highest bidder.” The good news is, we don’t need a
revolution in this country. We’ve already had one, and the documents born of
that “up-wising” are good enough for us, thank you. What is now required is
an American Evolution where ordinary citizens wake up, speak up and stand up
to apply these founding principles to these extraordinary times. 

A State of Emerge ‘n See 
Like the American Revolution, the current American Evolution is a grassroots
process, where “we the people” emerge from a long slumber as passive
bystanders and become active participants in choosing the world we live into
 As with any grassroots activity -- and very much like the internet which
now provides this movement’s “nervous system” -- this movement is not
hierarchical. Instead, it gains its power from a solid foundation of
understanding, agreement and action from the ground up. This may sound too
simple, but America’s political recovery program involves just three steps
(and that puts us nine steps ahead of those 12-step folks!): 
Set an intention. 
Share this intention, so it is held by as many other people as possible. 
Show up, and act when appropriate. 
I would suggest then, that we hold the intention that America make the
choice of freedom over empire, and that we reframe the issues we currently
face in that context. That is a broad and complex conversation and too much
for this short email. However, we have only to look at how much we’re
spending in lives and fortune in Iraq and how diminishing the returns are
for the average American, to make a persuasive argument that what we are
doing isn’t working. When we look a little further at issues like climate
change, environmental destruction, species loss, outsourcing of jobs, and an
alarming “Greenspan Index” (far too many Americans don’t seem to have enough
“green” to span the average month), we can see that the track we’re on is
headed for a train wreck. 
So ... what do we do now? There seem to be two immediate urgencies, and by
addressing each we may be able to “feed two birds with one scone”: express
and build the power of “we the people,” and at the same time possibly change
the course of history. The most urgent urgency is to stop that man from
killing again, specifically from bombing Iran (or provoking an incident
which can lead to the bombing). While Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
is a definite wild card -- he’s been called Iran’s George Bush because his
warlike policies don’t reflect the feelings and aspirations of his people
but he rules nonetheless -- an attack on that country would lead to
unnecessary death, untold destruction, and would send the world closer to
that apocalypse George Bush’s rapture friends seem to be praying for. 
One immediate way we can fortify our Senators’ spinal tissue to help them
stand up to this insanity is to partake in MoveOn.org’s Virtual March
tomorrow, February 1st. This campaign to get millions of people to contact
their Senators to stand up and oppose escalation of the war in Iraq (and by
inference, help pre-empt a preemptive attack on Iran), and it’s something
simple anyone can do. Keep in mind that the lobbying of organizations like
MoveOn and Code Pink right after the election helped Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid find the courage to oppose escalation of the war. Please feel
free to send this email and link to friends so that even Republicans will
see that it’s time to abandon a ship that increasingly seems under the
command of a Captain Queeg who has lost his marbles. 
Paradoxically, in order to really take this country back -- and take it
forward -- we must see that the impeachment or removal of George Bush, while
necessary as a first step to restoring America’s moral authority, is only a
step. Rather than focus on the crimes of one man and one administration, we
must face our roles as silent enablers for a system that has outlived its
uselessness. As the wall of lies crumbles -- and it will -- we must take
responsibility for something that might even be more challenging than facing
the awful truth. We must now embrace the awesome opportunity to help create
a world that has not been seen before. 
Let the good times roll. 

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