RADISH SANDWICHS #24

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my mother used to slice radishes thin and then scatter them aboard a slice of buttered wonder bread. what a strange lady. There was rarely a moment when residual smoke wasn’t curling out of her well defined nostrils. As a kid I thought, “Dragon”. Very cool. 

but really more like a witch, a frightened and pissed off witch. she had good reason to be frightened; her father molested her sister and tried to do her too. Held him off with a steak knife, so she said. 

there was always a cigarette burning in one or more rooms at the same time. Viceroys. Charcoal filter. Add a little carcinogenic to the lung cancer eh?  

slwoly but surely televisions, small ones appeared in every room and they were on, always on. 

at 4 o’clock she would stop cleaning and recleaning the house and have her first of two martinis, dry-no vermouth. 

Dinner was an uncertain time. She might attack my father. Really about the only time he was home and available to be attacked. She was so very angry. She was so very needy. She needed to be needed and he hid away at his office, poker games with the guys, fucking his secretary. I like how the word “secret” is in secretary. But nothing stays secret forever. Secret scald and burn and change people when they reveal themselves. Secrets change the course of lives, someitmes in good ways, sometimes not. 

Radish sandwiches on buttered Wonder bread; builds strong bodies...how many ways? Who knew there were so many memories waiting to be told in a radish sandwich?

At Wit's End

We “donate” money, lots of it to foreign countries in exchange for control of their governments and resources. We sell them on the idea of infrastructure designs, sewage, electricity which will grow their economies: the World Bank loans them money (Ecuador, Iran, Kuwait, etc.) and we send our own construction businesses and workers like Haliburton over seas to do the job and earn back 75% of money loaned them. The remaining money fills the coffers of select ruling families. If/when they default on the loan we really have them dependent upon us and over a barrel. If we need to we put in our own puppet leader and if all else fails, we make up some lame excuse to invade and conquer them. Bottom line, we take control of the country. 

We...humans...countries have been doing this for thousands of years. It’s no surprise that imperialism still reigns, one world power at a time controlling vast empires of wealth and needed resources. When the pilgrims arrived in the New World they were met with generosity and good will from the indigenous natives here. These simple people we grateful to the earth for the abundance of materials available to them. They believed in a natural world that would always provide what they needed as long as they revered and took care of it.  

We Europeans, on the other hand came out of a culture where kingdoms reigned, royalty prospered and the plebeians (middle class, barely-just like us now), did the work and paid the taxes. George Carlin said it succinctly, “The rich don’t work or pay taxes. The middle class does all the work and pays all the taxes. The poor are put there just to scare the middle class.”  Funny, ha! And not funny really. Think about it..

Since most humans come from a belief in “scarcity”-that position of acting as if there simply isn’t enough of everything necessary to go around, we are compelled to manipulate, coerce, or forcefully take what we want from those who are not our families, our religion, our race, or fellow country men. 

Meanwhile. The politicians who are owned and controlled by the insanely rich and powerful few continue to pass legislation that is aimed to keep things just as they are; the rich richer, the middle poorer, and the poor unconsidered entirely. The rich also own and control the mainstream media and unfortunately it appears that most Americans believe whatever they are told. For that reason and the fact that most media is designed to put us in conflict with our neighbors. They do a great job of polarizing the left from the right and focusing us on our differences so that we waste energy fighting one another instead of uniting our energies against the common enemy: greed, selfishness, dishonesty,  the ethic of “profit” at any cost. 

Besides the fact that we are powerless before the machinery in place that drives our economy and politics, we are also drowning in corruption and injustices too numerous to go into in this essay. 

I’ve said this before-if you think back to the reason we Americans had a revolution in the eighteenth century it was because we got fed up with “taxation without representation”. 

The question on my mind today is this, “Just how badly do things have to become for the vast majority of us to finally stand up and say, “Enough!”  We can affect change only if we stand together. The partisanship is designed to keep us at each others throats instead of the throat of a system that doesn’t work and has no intention of changing. It’s broken. Those in office won’t fix it, can’t even if they want to because it is a for-profit designed puppet government whose strings are pulled by the money maker/world shakers. You can’t even run for office unless you have tremendous financial backing from special interests who you become beholding to immediately. We need campaign reform, tax reform, and corporate oversight just to name a few things. 

I can’t even listen to the news much anymore. The lust for profit has altered the ecosystems of the planet and the storms, floods, droughts, earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis are more intense and more frequent. Think this is coincidental? Our decision making and our decision makers need to be changed. Am I espousing doom and gloom? I don’t think so. I am espousing a call to “alarm”. 

Our heyday is over as a world leader. Don’t be surprised. What ever happened to Spain, Italy, England, Greece and the Dutch? How about the Mongols and the Japanese, the Aztecs and so many others. Check your history. No country has ever ruled an empire for ever and it sure isn’t going to start now with us. For quite a while there we had the wealth, power and world trust to lead the globe to a sustainable and comfortable future improving conditions for impoverished peoples in many lands. I believe us average Americans are good people, compassionate and generous and devoted to their families and communities. So why doesn’t our government reflect who we are? What do we need to do to make that change?