What if you lived in a country where, after the Administration negligently failed to prevent a major terrorist attack, they deliberately exploited everyone's fears and utilized shock doctrine to do INSANELY stupid and dangerous things: things like launching costly pre-emptive wars, subverting law, and destroying the checks and balances of the Constitution and common standards of decency by re-instituting torture? What if the actions were so wrong-headed that the Administration's own right-wing appointees (men like Paul O'Neill and John Ashcroft) found themselves having to take stands against the subversion? What if it got so bad that even some neo-cons themselves were finally seeing the light and calling the Bush Administration's latest plans to launch their third war in six years "raging lunacy" because, on a purely pragmatic level, it's another unwinnable proposition and makes absolutely no sense?
But no one was doing anything?
Well, we DO live in that country. So wake up, everyone! It's true that waking up to this kind of real nightmare is scary. It's easier to dream of the past and what it was like to live in the "green" color code before 9-11 or maybe dream of happier, safer future times rolling in after the next election. Paradoxically, however, the only way to really end this nightmare, is for the people of this country to wake up, get a grip by telling themselves we have nothing to fear but fear itself and get off their collective couch.
With Bush-Cheney's track record and their avowed neo-con disdain for the truth, complacency about their latest "World War III" threats regarding Iran is horribly misplaced. Impeachment must be put back on the table as soon as possible and the only way that will happen is if enough people force their congressional representatives to do the job they were elected to do.
The last time we took up the question of whether spinelessness is as bad as evil, most of the discussion was to the effect that it's impossible to separate the two as spinelessness enables the evil. Some astute commenters even remembered that evil flourishes when good men do nothing. So we have hatched a plan here in Minnesota to do something, something which has already been tested and proven to be a safe, legal and effective way of quickly reaching lots of people. The best part is it's doable by ordinary folks like us. At the very least, we intend to reach several hundred thousand MSM (Main Stream Motorists) in a couple hours.
Our mission, for those who choose to accept it, will be as follows. First we'll synchronize our watches for 4:17:52 p.m. (for Mission Impossible types, that's 16:17:52) plus or minus a second on Monday, October 29th. Here in Minnesota, we happen to have these great, very safe, fully enclosed pedestrian overpasses already strategically scattered all over the major highways of the Twin Cities. We also happen to have great legal precedent! In July our Minnesota Supreme Court (Minnesota vs Otterstad and Rudnick) reversed lower courts and held that it was perfectly legal to display a message on such bridge overpasses that did not endanger public safety. Three of Minnesota's Supreme Court Judges went further and held it was activity protected by the First Amendment. But just in the event any non law-schooled police are not up on their latest Minnesota Supreme Court precedents and make the mistake of threatening or arresting any of us for simply exercising our First Amendment rights--evidencing discrimination about the content of our scary message "Don't Bomb Iran"--we have one of Minnesota's top First Amendment attorneys on call to launch a class action civil rights lawsuit and/or to request the appropriate court injunction(s). (Police interference would, no doubt, be inconvenient, but think of the lemons that could be turned into lemonade because any news coverage of such issues would no doubt help get our actual message out.)
We believe the cause of trying to wake up our little area of the Midwest to the raging lunacy of the Bush Administration's plans to launch war on Iran is worth our work, our paint, and our possible inconvenience. So all this pre-Halloween weekend, we will be at work to stencil as many of these fluorescent orange banners as possible. Then, on Monday, it'll be time to synchronize our watches and hit the Twin Cities pedestrian overpasses. Maybe it's not Mission Impossible after all--it's scary stuff alright but not that hard to do something, to hold a banner and communicate with our fellow citizens AND our elected leaders.