Tag Archives: Statistics

Cynthia McKinney and Cindy Sheehan together in Mexico City!

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Below, we reprint 2 speeches made in Mexico City Friday, just yesterday, April 4, 2008. The speech Greed … by Cindy Sheehan, and another speech by Cynthia McKinney that is without title.

Cynthia McKinney
Segundo Encuentro Continental de los Trabajadores
Mexico City, Mexico, April 4, 2008

Brothers and Sisters in the Movement

I am happy to be here in Mexico City where the people all over Latin
America are on the move:

On the move for justice, self-determination, and peace.

I love that you have created a Power to the People movement with your
votes that is stronger than the mightiest military force on the
planet!

With the power of your vote you have taken your countries back.

Now, all we have to do is to count all the votes in the United States
and Mexico!

In the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, an estimated six million
people went to the polls and voted, but their votes weren’t counted.

In 2000, and again in 2004, Democrats helped to install Republicans
into power rather than fight for the victory that the voters had
given them.

As a result of this kind of collusion, the Democratic majority in our
Congress has failed to impeach Bush. They have failed to institute a
livable wage, stop the multiple wars the U.S. is fighting right now,
and they have failed to protect human rights anywhere in the world,
including even at home.

That’s why I left the Democratic Party.

I refused to become complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity,
crimes against the peace, spying on the American people, and ripping
our Bill of Rights to shreds.

And so I declared my independence from the U.S. leadership that gave
us tax cuts for the wealthy and a country 53 trillion dollars in debt
and Hurricane Katrina.

To my brothers and sisters at this Conference and in the United
States, I say:

Hands off Haiti!

Hands off Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Argentina now making a claim for
the Falklands!

Hands off Venezuela and Ecuador!

No to Plan Mexico; No to Plan Colombia! Hands off Pemex!

And finally, it was on this date, 40 years ago, that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was murdered.

We now know that Dr. King was murdered as part of a conspiracy that
included his own government. Hatched in the bowels of the Pentagon,
where so many other regime change operations have been hatched, the
government of the United States launched regime change at home on
Black America. We blacks in the United States have long known the
pain and the consequences of having authentic leadership snatched
from us; of having someone else pick our leaders before we pick them
ourselves.

I am proud to join this international movement for
self-determination; for justice and for peace. Despite today’s
difficulties, we must never let our dream be deferred. We in the U.S.
gain inspiration from your successes here so we can carry the
struggle to every nook and cranny of the United States.

Que vivan los pueblos de america!

Cindy Sheehan -Key Note Speech “GREED”
Segundo Encuentro Continental de los Trabajadores
Mexico City, Mexico, April 4, 2008

First of all I would like to thank the International Labor Council and the Electrician’s Union for such a warm welcome and I would like to assure you all, my brothers and sisters that I represent millions of North Americans who are in solidarity with you, because we are also plagued with an illegitimate President!

Once, a couple of years ago, I was getting a pedicure in the deep south in the USA, of all places, and my pedicurist was a Latina from Mexico. She lived two hours from where she and her husband owned the shop and she left her young son home with her mother-in-law for six days a week, while she and her husband toiled at the shop. She was very sweet and sympathetic to my situation as a mother whose son was killed in Iraq, but she looked up from my feet at one point and asked me: “Why do you Americans have to have everything. If you all weren’t so greedy, I could still live in my country with my family.” Greedy? Hmm? Her earnest and passionate comment gave me much to think about.

Dictionary.com defines greed as the rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions

Greed is also one of the seven deadly sins and I know more than most Americans that the same twisted drive for, not just a fair share of prosperity, but ALL the prosperity is what caused my son’s death and, similarly, my nail persons’ need to have to leave the beloved country of her birth.

Greed is not what drives Latin Americans to try and cross the border to go north, existential necessity is; but corporate-capitalist greed is what makes the dangerous journey necessary. Building walls on the border is not the way to solve the immigration “problem” just as invading two countries and killing innocent civilians was not the way to solve the terrorism problem. Healing the systems of oppression that cause immigration is the way to solve the “problem.” People in Latin America want the right to not have to emigrate. Like my pedicurist, they want to be able to make a good living in their own countries.

In a study done by the Economic Policy Institute in 2004, it was found that 5% of the US population owns 58% of the wealth and only 1.2% of the wealth is owned by 40% of our citizenry. I am sure if a similar study were done, this disparity would be much wider in these days of irresponsible corporate bailouts while Americans are losing their homes at the rate of 250,000 a month and the war economy has made the fat cats astronomical profits while robbing our communities of essential services and needed infrastructure improvements. The Milton Friedman model of disaster capitalism, which Naomi Klein exposes so well in her book, Shock Doctrine, is responsible for economic disaster from New Orleans to Baghdad and the basic underlying root sickness of this is greed.

Statistics can be easily manipulated as we know the statistics reporting the “success” of free trade agreements such as NAFTA are. Facts, numbers and experiential data cannot be so easily manipulated, though. In the years since the Clinton administration (with the support of my Congressional opponent, Nancy Pelosi) foisted NAFTA on our continent, both Mexico and the US have lost farmland and good paying jobs. Many of our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas to Indonesia or China and the Wal Martization of our cultures creeps up on us unchecked and corporations such as Wal Mart have been the main beneficiaries of NAFTA to the detriment of working class people in both countries.

What can we do to improve the situation and reclaim our prosperity from the control of the 21st Century Robber Barons and slave-traders?

First of all, “free” trade treaties should be replaced with fair trade agreements. Small business owners and workers should be protected from being crushed under the heels of multi-national corporations. Any agreement should have protection for workers. A worker who makes shoes, computers, cars, or grows crops should make the same livable wage in Mexico or China, as they would in America. There would be no incentive for off-shoring jobs or relocating manufacturing plants if workers in China made the same wages as workers in America.

All workers should be guaranteed the basic human right of being able to belong to a union. Unions elevate the conditions of workers and families and should remain a strong political force for good and not allow them selves to be beaten into submission or weakness by governmental or corporate pressure. (But aren’t the corporations and governments so intimately linked these days in their fascistic oppression of us average citizens?)

The fragile ecology of our planet must be protected in these agreements and the same standard of sustainability and environmental protections should be uniformly recognized and practiced globally.

Small farmers should be protected from the encroachment of “agri-giants” and their lands protected from the eminent domain of greed.

I know there are many more solutions and a comprehensive platform of “No human left behind” would guarantee the rights of all humans to safe and plentiful food and drinking water; shelter; good and free education; sustainable employment; security and safety from US corporate-militarism; and the basic rights that were guaranteed of: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

For far too long, the United States of America has greedily gobbled up too much of global wealth and resources and our chickens of greed and violence are coming home to roost. As alarming as these trends are, we North Americans are only slightly beginning to feel the ravages of what we have been manufacturing and exporting for years: death and destruction. A new paradigm of global sharing and caring must be implemented and today is the beginning.

Today, as we commemorate and mourn the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr who was assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis, Tn; and as I mourn the murder by the war machine of my son Casey, who was killed in Sadr City, Baghdad 4 years ago today—we must renew our commitment to peace and justice to honor their sacrifices and the sacrifices of others who have also gone before us. We just celebrated the birthday of Cesar Chavez who dedicated his life to the most marginalized and exploited of workers and I am constantly inspired by the devotion of people like Dr. King, Casey and Cesar Chavez andI hope that we all take inspiration to rededicate our lives to peace and justice.

We must build upon the coalition that we have gathered here in this beautiful and historic place to include every group that we are a part of. We can no longer say that we have to focus on “one” issue, because all the issues are the same. My country is waging deadly and lost-cause occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and so many groups in my country say that we have to focus on bringing our troops home and not become “distracted” by other issues. Profound economic inequality and unchecked greed is the root cause of these occupations as it is the root cause of the occupation of Palestine by Israel and all the violence in the world’s hot-spots today.

In our coalition, we must educate our brothers and sisters that equalizing prosperity and neutralizing greed are the solutions to these acute problems.

I also stand here in solidarity with my brothers and sisters who are working in the Legitimate Government of Mexico to prevent the illegitimate government from privatizing PEMEX. The oil of Mexico belongs to the people of Mexico, and if I can’t be here with you all to block the crimes with my body then I will definitely be with you in spirit.

Thank you for allowing me to speak. It has been an honor to be here.

Bush does math…2nd verse…

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There’s a problem with the accounting of War Dead. We’re constantly told that we must be wrong about the number of “enemy” or civilian dead, but there’s more…

The 4000 combat deaths to date,… weeelllll … Mr Bush ordered a change in accounting, allowable statistics and other standards have been ‘tweaked” to reflect the notion that All Is Well and we’re somehow winning HIS war.

The incidental death count for coalition soldiers was over 10,000… until people who didn’t immediately die on the battlefield, committed suicide because of combat-induced PTSD, committed Homicide due to combat-induced PTSD… accidents, diseases they wouldn’t have caught on the streets of, say, Colorado Springs… “friendly” fire… died from their wounds while in the hospitals or being transferred to a hospital…
well, their deaths were suddenly NOT COUNTED.

This is nothing new, they used the same accounting standards during the Korean conflict and of course VietNam.

When this was brought into the open they changed the standard…

And, at a time when the casualty count was really really inconvenient for them… changed it right back.

Happy Romantic War, Mr Bush. You’re going to be unemployed in just over 10 months, maybe you’ll actually get to live your fantasy of going and fighting for your money.

More statistics to sleep on

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I hear that less than 25% of the American public knows approximately how many US soldiers have died in Iraq. The total as of today is 3,986. Two other US statistics of note: of men in prison and teenage girls:

The 4,000 death was predicted to fall a month from now, until a casual suicide bomber ambled up to a group of our soldiers. The death toll was five, though I find it beyond curious that Iraqi observers were insistent it had been six.

ONE PERCENT of all Americans is behind bars. The number represents 7% of all Black Americans, 11% of young black males, and 3% of Hispanic males. The work gulag capitalist enterprise system in China boasts the next highest incarceration rate, where the percentage of the Chinese population imprisoned is 0.1%.

One in four teenage American girls have an STD. That’s three million girls aged 14-19. 48% of all black girls, 20% of white girls. In 18% of the cases the STD is genital warts.

Gold Hill blows arsenic and lead our way

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Winds have been blowing up dust from Gold Hill, in part due to a two month discontinuance of keeping damp the exposed 210-acre toxic mound. Neighbors are complaining, but have no fear, developer Bob Willard told the Westside Pioneer “I take responsibility for that.” That’s great. If years later health statistics point to an abnormal concentration of debilitating illness due to arsenic or lead, we’ll know where to knock.

Justice delayed is justice denied. Profit now at all cost later.

The State of Colorado authorized the Gold Hill development on a “brownfiled” site, the mound of tailings from the old gold-mill. Their proviso was that particular care be taken to, among other measures, keep the freshly disturbed tailings from being inhaled by the city’s residents.

For some reason, perhaps owing to the housing market financing problems, Willard decided to forgo the water trucks until someone complained. Oh, is that how enforcement of state instructions work? Open the can of worms, whether you have the means to stick around or not, don’t bother about the lid.

It looks as if the state will bear some fault for this too. But meanwhile the developer tells us he will bear full responsibility for his lack of diligence to safeguard community health. Is he planning to abscond to Paraguay with his takings before we all start falling sick?

Electing the lesser of real evil

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While it might appear to make no difference if a candidate is Republican or Democrat, I’d say a freshly galvanized non-voter would be hard pressed to suggest that any of the Y2K presidential hopefuls could have performed with more mischievous malevolence than George W. Bush. Disengaged citizens used to be ambivalent about their lack of options. Now we have precedent for thinking very hard about the lesser of evils. Billy Mumy in ITS A GOOD LIFE We don’t want just the better of the worst, we have to be sure to pick the lesser EVIL.
 
Will 2008 be a veritable toss-up between shills? We need to know for Decision 2008 if there lurks another Alfred E. Neuman Nero in the bunch.

Remember this little boy? His occult powers and prepubescent morality made him the demonic despot of a little American farming town in an early Twilight Zone episode. He could read people’s minds and had the power to punish them at will. Though he might easily have been deposed by a collective effort, no one dared lay a finger. Frustrated individual insurgents were summarily disappeared to the corn fields.

With FISA surveillance and the Patriot Act, could this be George W.?

But even if we could discern the truly evil, the amorality which comes with profound lack of profundity, do we really have the power to make our choice heard?

We’re told the primaries determine the presidential winner. I heard an NPR reporter covering the circus interject with “here’s a fact:” and proceed to declare that no one below the second place in such and such caucus has ever gone on to win the nomination etc, etc. As if a statistical likelihood could yield an absolute. Then there’s the Iowa Caucus Curse or some such, to throw witchcraft into the pot for those blasphemers who think statistics can lie. I hear what they media pundits are really saying, when they “predict” with the caucus results, and it is true. The media have always determined who is going to win. Whether it’s in the primaries or in the final election. Whoever they choose wins. The distance between is a horse race.

The bizarre UNICEF report about children’s health

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The corporate propaganda machine has been working full blast to convince the public that worldwide children are doing better than ever before! Oh how much progress we are making so goes their chime. As usual, the UN is the fountain of this sort of idiotic ‘positive thinking’ passing itself off as real fact.

This of course goes entirely counter to what Americans know, but a lie, especially a statistical lie, repeated over and over sounds so convincing. Only 10,000,000 kids per year are dying before they reach 5 y/o? Oh how cheering, right? Instead of around 13,000,000 kids dying as in 1990, now they say only 10,000,000 per year die. We’re saving lives, oh yes!

Isn’t this sort of nonsense obscene? 1990 was the time of the dismantling of the social security network of the former Soviet Union. Living standards plummeted for several hundred million. What a base level to now start claiming that great strides in world public health are supposedly now being made. Sure they are….

This report is utter nonsense as it claims great strides are being made yet admits that half the developing world lives without any basic sanitation. And 1,000,000,000 of the world’s population lives on less than $1 per day. Does that seem like a world where solely 10,000,000 kids before age five are losing their lives unnecessarily? Common sense would dictate that that is a totally false and misleading measurement of the numbers.

Liars have so much money to spread their lies with. And those who try to counter the piles of propaganda have so little. Don’t buy such obvious bullshit saying that the world is getting better, when it obviously is not. Even if they repeat this sort of crap over and over and over….

Not only is it not getting better for children these days, we might not even have a world left for them in a generation or two. If we do, it might have hardly any wild animals left alive, and it is likely to be a planet where pollution causes disease everywhere for everybody.

Thank you United Nations for trying to pretend otherwise for the benefit of the super rich who want all to think the present world is just peachy keen. I would expect nothing less from such a US government controlled institution. That is the job of the UN… to massage, message, and manipulate. Save the children because certainly the UN is not going to be doing that by their constant cleanup operations in support of the Pentagon, and with their fudging and fiddling with statistics.

The ecology of America’s rotting food

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A lot has been written about the ecology of America’s rotten food. The book and movie, Food Nation, for example centers in on this American phenomena of bad factory food, leading to bad American taste, leading to bad American health. Fat city. If we keep gaining weight at the present rate our country’s population is doing, one perhaps can figure that the per capita weight per American will be about 10,000 tons apiece in the year 10,000. Holy hippopotamus! But what about the ecology of America’s rotting food? Just how much food does get thrown out? Here is what the food industry itself has to say. Half of US food never gets eaten.

If one looks closely at these statistics, we can see that the majority of the food waste does not come at the family table. According to this study, only 14% of what is bought gets wasted here. A family of 4 spends over $4,000 a year, and could save almost $600 in food costs, if only none of it went to waste. But since the supermarket actually passes much of its waste to the family home, really 14% is not that bad to throw out. Don’t blame the consumer then.

So how does the supermarket force waste on the consumer? Answer; by its constant promotions. For example, why buy 3 lbs of potatos at $0.59/ lb, if the grocer is pushing for you to buy 10 lbs for $1.29? What often happens, is that the consumer buys 10 lbs, then overeats to keep from throwing the food out. So he eats 5 lbs, and then tosses the other half of the then rotting remainder of potatos into the trash. Do we call all this efficiency of the capitalist system, liberty ,and democracy? Or do we call it a big rotten, rotting shame?

So where is all the other waste happening? When I lived in Oregon, I was amazed at how much rotten fruit was hanging in so many trees. At one time, the small family farm had produced orchads all over the state. But all those farmers got driven bankrupt, so their trees still produced fruit, but nobody was around still to pick it. Even the highways had both sides filled with ripe blackberries when in season. The bears were all bankrupt, too, so these delicious berries everywhere just rotted in the sun. All throughout the countryside, food is left to rot.

And look at our public schools. The kids get served about 3 times they could possibly consume, so that food gets thrown out in bushels. All under the guise of making sure nobody goes hungry. Yeah, but then again, all the kids grow fat. And they grow wasteful and slovenly, too.

Have you ever looked at the grocers themselves. High prices everywhere, but is it because what you consume is expensive? It’s more like what they throw away is what costs. You pay for the grocers’ inability to manage the transport of decent food at a decent price. Ever gone into Whole Foods on Academy Blvd.? Look at how many shopping carts are mostly empty. Why? Simply because the prices are too damn high. What do you think happens to all that unsold, high priced ‘organic’ food then? It just gets tossed into the garbage can. You pay for that with their higher prices. It’s all organic, though.

What a disaster all this is ecologically. The liberal sites were all carrying an article last week about the problems that high tech waste was causing ecologically. Computers, cell phones, compact discs, sex toys, tvs, etc. True enough. But to not eat half of the food produced in America is quite an ecological tragedy, too. The soils get worn down, blown away, and the rivers fill up with pig poop. And as grandma used to say,

“Eat all the food on your plate. There is a kid in India that is starving.”

I care, but I don’t think your average American business man gives a damn. He’s proud thinking about how efficient ‘free enterprise’ is in America, for making all of us grow so fat and growing mountains of food in double quantities we don’t really need.

Trolls and Dolls

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TrollWe’ve all seen it. The beautiful girl on the arm of a troll. A troglodyte. At best, a man who is physically average. We never see the opposite, do we? A gorgeous man paired up with a fat ugly girl. Sometimes there is still a first wife in the picture, pretty average by today’s media standards…the high school sweetheart, the smart one, probably athletic, the one with the good DNA. The child-bearing thing can complicate the beauty pursuit significantly. Every man knows that he wants brilliant and competent children. Even his daughters. But once that goal is met, all bets are off. Enter the trophy wife. Arm candy for the insecure man.

Why is this? Let me enlighten you (and I claim expert status here for a variety of reasons). My favorite book (and all-time bestseller) says that man is the glory of God, meaning that man is God’s highest achievement, a source of honor and great praise. Well guess what? The Bible also says that woman is the glory of man. Woman, more than anything else, can bring happiness and respectability to a man. That is why the experts say that the happiest people on the planet are married men.

Hooters girls, models, women who are defined by beauty and little else, and whose personalities reflect that, don’t make great mates for intelligent evolved men. Besides, outward beauty will undoubtedly fade. Real beauty will not.

I think most men figure this out because statistics show that 80% of second marriages to Marla Maples ultimately fail.

Child

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RooI was holding my little boy (at almost 9, not so little anymore) on my lap the other day and I was looking at his hand. His long fingers, still slightly pudgy, tapering to perfect little fingernails. I took off his sock and looked at his little foot, again with clear beautiful skin and perfect tiny toenails. He, of course, thought I was weird for doing this but my thoughts were, “What if I never got to see this again? What if I could never hold this warm little hand, or look into these lovely clear green eyes? Or touch these sweet adorable freckles?” I’m not sure how I’d get my head off the pillow each day.

I once knew a woman who lost a young child to an accident. She held the toddler in her arms for hours after his death and when the nurses finally insisted that she give up the body she asked if she could undress him so she could look at him one last time. She said she wanted to memorize every inch of him so she’d never forget. Especially his little fingers and toes.

The mothers and fathers in war-torn countries encounter this nightmare every day. They’re forced to live with the horror and the guilt of not having protected their babies from harm. Their children become statistics that are reported to us daily, but, believe me, as a parent I can tell you that a child is not a statistic. Even a grown up child.

Oppose war…any day, any place, any time….It’s not worth it.

Mara Liasson, Washington gossip

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NPR correspondent Mara Liasson spoke at Colorado College last night. What we thought would be an insider’s glimpse of the primaries turned out to be just that. Ms. Liasson spoke only of Kerry, Edwards and Dean. When asked about the other prospects, she countered that she expected we only wanted to hear about the candidates who would prove to matter.

How is a candidate like Kucinich, who is trying to bring issues such as health care, fair labor, environment, an end to war, and a return to human rights, to the fore, how is such a candidate to get covered by reporters who only want to report dispassionately about a candidate’s odds of winning? I mean, you tell us that “a candidate who wins in W state, but fails to win X and Y has never won Z,” that’s reporting? That’s more like Sports Talk.

Why not have reported about who won the debates? Edwards and Kerry, your favorite subjects, came off very stiff in the debates. Kucinich and friends ran circles around them, wouldn’t that have been worthy of reporting?

Isn’t the only thing standing between Kucinich and a viable candidacy, a media that’s refusing to consider him viable? Can you separate Kucinich’s chances from the tough chance he has with networks bent on keeping his issues invisible? What about your own sense of responsibility to report on every candidate, especially if you know their platform will resonate with the American public, if only given some visibility?

You dismiss the Bush AWOL charges as having been reported in 2000. For the record they were ignored in 2000, and you’re doing it again by suggesting they’re old news. They’re 30 years old news! Members of the National Guard today who have gone AWOL from Iraq are sitting in the brig, they’re not out snorting cocaine, even dealing cocaine, and then serving community service for having been caught. But Bush’s records have not only gone missing, they’ve been erased or sealed in the name of National Security. Wouldn’t that merit reporting? But that’s not your beat? Crime? Issues? The environment?

My question? Shouldn’t NPR consider covering the presidential election with correspondents who want to report more than just political gossip and primary statistics like it’s a horse race?

No, my real question: How much does FOX and MSNBC’s framing of the news, like the New York Time’s “all the news that’s fit to print,” determine what NPR can report? Is NPR too anxious about looking into the margins for fear it will marginalize itself? I guess that’s rhetorical. More constructively: How can the mainstream framing, that focus, be increased to include the interests of the American middle class, progressives, and peace-loving peoples around the world?

Bigger jails or bigger hearts

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Nearly half a million people are now behind bars in the United States for nonviolent drug law violations, which is more than all of Western Europe — with a larger population — incarcerates for everything!

Our country also has the most religious denominations and has one of the highest rates for church attendance outside of the Muslim world.

What is wrong with this picture?

In the late 1980s the University of Colorado sponsored a survey seeking public opinion regarding building more prisons as a safety measure. The majority of respondents did not think more prisons would make them feel safer.

Many who reported they would feel safer with more prisons were employees or families of the police, sheriff and corrections departments. A conclusion could be that those working in criminal justice fields may have the most reasons to be fearful.

Are they afraid of traffic violators or DUI offenders, many of whom fill our jails, or is the fear predominately about nonviolent inmates who, upon release, may become violent?

Another conclusion could be one expressed by a local deputy sheriff who, several years ago, made this quip at a County Task Force meeting on Alternatives to Incarceration: “We are the only ones with job security around here!”

My El Paso County Criminal Justice education began at those meetings, where I learned:

· Various groups were protecting their turf and were adverse to using alternatives if someone else was providing them.

· No one in the task force seemed to know if there were any local use of electronic monitoring.

· Illegal drug use and mandatory minimum sentences were the main reasons prison expansion was accelerating.

This year my experience as a representative on the Justice Advisory Council has reinforced earlier observations.

I have also learned there is an overcrowding situation because of increased numbers of women behind bars (many for drug-related offenses), unfortunately indicating more children become social service statistics and likely future juvenile detainees.

There is general agreement, at least in one subcommittee, that jail alternatives such as PR bond release and electronic monitoring, along with behavioral and addiction counseling, could be utilized to a much greater degree for nonviolent offenders. Such modalities have proven successful and very cost effective in other jurisdictions.

And judges need to be better informed about available sentencing alternatives.

Common sense dictates that other solutions be tried if the $40 billion we have been spending annually in the United States to solve the drug problem remains unsuccessful. We need to stop protecting and enhancing a system that has failed over and over again.

It is time to bring about change. To do so, we must all become informed about city and county budgets and the percentage of our tax dollars being spent on criminal justice issues compared to quality of life matters that provide the following:

Health and wellness assistance for those unable to afford health insurance; free recreational opportunities in public parks and trails for residents and visitors; public transit to help our youth, elderly and disabled get to these important destinations and to help ex-inmates get to their jobs; and places to park and connect with a bus, lessening roadway congestion.

We must request the media provide complete and unbiased local government information in a timely fashion.

We must contact county commissioners as well as City Council members, giving them our perspectives on issues and ideas for solutions while demanding accountability.

We also need to contact our federal and state General Assembly members and seek changes to legislation that has contributed to our problems instead of improving the health, safety and welfare of all.

Finally, we must examine our own motivations toward and involvement with the less fortunate in our community and resolve to assist small groups and agencies that are helping people help themselves.

(Printed in YOUR TURN, THE INDEPENDENT, December 19, 2002)