My rant below was originally on Yahoo 360 but they are closing down. I thought it best to bring everything over here so if anyone should read my entries it would be complete. This was done in the middle of the Bush Crime Family administration.

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Why I Hate Bush, Neocons and Enabling Democrats
They say everyone has a story…
If I do, it is the rant of a 55 year old, in plain Texas speak, who is fed up with the horseshit lies that our government leaders have told us for a hundred years. I am telling this from the viewpoint of a fairly average American who grew up believing in country, apple pie and Chevrolet. I did what I was told, went to school, made good grades, got along with my classmates, did the normal things American kids did, and believed what we were told in school.
As I got older and started taking advantage of the education that my parents and country afforded me I started realizing that things were not as they seemed, and certainly not what we were told in school.
All my life the problems of our country were blamed on outside forces. When American workers tried to organize for better wages and working conditions, they were called Communists. When the blacks in the Deep South tried to get equal rights they were set upon by the Klan and local government powers in an attempt to keep them in their place, and all the trouble was blamed on outside “ajitatuhs”. Luckily, at that time the news media felt it had a duty to report the news (unlike today’s sycophantic suckups) and the horrifying pictures of black children being attacked by white cops with dogs forced a foot dragging Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Let me start at the beginning…
My first bit of political awareness was the campaign of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Like most people of my generation we were taken by his youth and energy. He was the first young politician we knew... All the others looked like Everett Dirksen, whom I did admire, but he did not give me inspiration.
I was hooked with the "ask not what your country can do for you" speech. As a kid, though, I did not yet know what I could do for my country.
The first time I remember the news media shouting the word “crisis” was when I was 12 and it was about Cuba. I remembered a few years before when I was nine, watching news film on the Today Show with Dave Garroway, when the rebels of Fidel Castro took over the island government. Of course most of the film clips showed firing squads executing government soldiers or officials. I guess the film clips were supposed to make us think the rebels were the bad guys, but I figured that if the rebels were mad enough to shoot the government officials, they must have had their reasons. Anyway, that was pretty heavy thinking for a nine year old.
Back to the “crisis”. It seemed that the US government was pissed off because they found out that the Russians had put some pretty high powered missiles in Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida. Castro asked the Russians to do this because the US government had backed a bunch of CIA operatives and Cuban mercenaries who invaded Cuba at some place called the Bay of Pigs and Castro did not want us to do it again. Well, I can see that we would be upset because we would not want those missiles blowing up any of our cities. (Again, my nine year old mind, though, was trying to figure out why we weren’t leaving the Cubans alone because they didn’t seem to be bothering us. Anyway, I figured our government was smarter than I was, so who was I to question the government. But, we know how that came out. Kennedy stared down Khrushchev, the Russians pulled the missiles out, we promised not to invade Cuba again (which really pissed off the Miami Cubans and lost them to the Republican Party forever, and we may or may not have pulled missiles out of Turkey.)
By this time Southeast Asia was heating up again. (The French had gotten their asses kicked at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.) Uncle Sam didn’t want another Communist government getting a toe hold, you know, the old domino theory, so we sent in “Advisors” to the anti-communist (meaning corrupt-buy-me-off) government of what was to become South Vietnam.
By the time this hot potato was handed to Kennedy the Pentagon, CIA and just about everybody else was in it ass-deep and our American macho-ness was not about to let us walk away even though many published reports state that Kennedy felt that we should have negotiated a withdrawal and brought all our troops home.
John and Bobby Kennedy had taken on organized crime and had moderate success in cleaning up some of the crime families. This success was in spite of the cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover’s denial that there was an organized crime problem in the country.
So this brings us to November of 1963, a moment that still brings tears to my eyes. Who was mad at JFK? The Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the Miami Cubans, the Mafia, and who knows how many unknown politicians that his father stepped on? Anyway, that bright light for the future of our country was murdered in plain sight as a warning not to go against the power structure of this country.
(Oh, yes, I almost forgot. There was the Warren Commission that issued a report that said that a poor schmuck named Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Yeah, and there was a guy named Wilbur that had a talking horse named Mr. Ed.)
(Now that we have the internet and access to more information than ever, I would urge the interested reader to check out http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4315024059102108031 to see period news videos that we who lived in that time were not allowed to see.)
The country buried JFK, and the image of young John, Jr. saluting his fathers casket, is burned into our minds like a laser burning a hole through two inches of steel. It is something that those of us who lived through that time will never forget.
“They” say that time heals all wounds. I don’t know about that, but time did pass on and I found myself a teenager. We had survived the LBJ years even though the Pentagon convinced that good ole boy Texan to crank up the Viet Nam fiasco. LBJ grew up knowing poverty, so in spite of the horrible ratcheting up of Viet Nam, I still cut him some slack for the things he did to try to alleviate poverty and the inequality in this country. At least he had the “cojones” to force the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act through a reluctant Congress, something only a Southern Democrat could do. Also, another act making sure the redneck south would vote solidly Republican in the future.
During my summers I worked on one of the many party boats that used to ply the waters of Corpus Christi Bay. During the summer of 1967, I was again working on the boat and pondering what the future held for me because I was entering my senior year in high school. Every two hours a giant C-147 would fly overhead with a terrifying shrieking noise which would elicit complaints from our fishermen customers about “the damn planes gonna scare off all the fish I am paying to catch.” The fact that the fish might disappear from the plane’s noise did not bother me so much as what the planes were carrying.
At the time, the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station was home of one of the Navy’s largest medical facilities, as well as ARADMAC, the Army’s helicopter repair facility. I was told that the planes were alternately carrying shot up military personnel, and shot up helicopters. The planes would turn around and take back to Viet Nam the patched up Huey’s and the patched up 19 year olds. I could not understand why our government was telling us we were winning the war in Viet Nam, yet the planes never quit flying. Day and night the planes were ferrying wounded people and damaged Huey’s.
Growing up in South Texas one would never question the rightfulness of our government becoming involved with a war against the Commies. I mean the Commies rape and kill nuns, don’t they? When passengers on the fishing boat mentioned Viet Nam, and asked me, a prospective draftee, what I thought about the war, I would say that if called, I would do what Uncle Sam said. But the planes kept coming.
As 1967 ended, and January 1968 exploded with something called the Tet Offensive, the planes were even more numerous. Then some of my classmates started getting letters from Uncle Sam to see their draft boards, because they were about to win an all expense paid trip to the “Orient”. Of course, the fellows who were getting the letters were the ones who didn’t want to stay in school anyway, they were the “trouble makers” that all us “good kids” could do without. No big deal.
Then the spring of 1968 came around. Martin Luther King was murdered. Corpus Christi had a black population of less than 15 percent at the time (and still does) and we (from the viewpoint of a white teenager) did not have a “race problem”. Therefore, his death, at that time did not have much meaning to me.
The anti-war movement began heating up across the country. Poor
Vice President Hubert Humphrey was saddled with Lyndon’s war and there was nothing he could do to shake it. We did not know it at the time but LBJ was secretly trying to negotiate an end to the war so that Humphrey would be able to announce a cease fire right before the election, but that back stabbing cock-sucker Henry Kissinger was playing both ends against the middle and tipped off the Nixon camp. Nixon started his own secret negotiations, which scuttled Lyndon’s, so the war dragged on.
During all this, Bobby Kennedy picked up the anti-war gauntlet from Eugene McCarthy and announced for President. Again, the flame was kindled and the young people of the country saw a bright light of hope in the darkness of the political landscape. Too soon, however, that bright light was snuffed by an assassin’s bullet for a still unknown reason. The moment Bobby was struck down I felt his loss, and that of Martin Luther King at the same time. I realized just what it felt like to lose hope in the future. I never have forgiven myself for not feeling the loss of Reverend King immediately upon his death. I chalk that up to being young and stupid. When we lost Bobby I immediately saw that we are all one and I would never be as blind in the future.
Summer ended and I readied myself to enter Sul Ross State College in Alpine, Texas. Boy, what a thrill, really getting away from home. When I got to Alpine, I had to drive through Alpine twice before I realized that all there was in Alpine was the college, one main street, several residential streets, and the football field that was “across the tracks”. That phrase would come to mean much more to me in the future.
Alpine was to become the cause of my radicalization. You see, that was the first time I had ever been anywhere in my life where there was “a right side and a wrong side” of the tracks. One of the older students at the college told me that two years before I got there in September of 1968 that the college had done away with a curfew time for being “across the tracks” after 10 pm on any night except football nights.
What was on the other side of the tracks? The Mexican-American community. That is what. I was soon to find that although Hispanics made up 40 percent of the college population, Alpine rally did not have much use for “Meskins”. The students at Sul Ross were basically divided between three groups, the “Shit-kickers”, the “Cat-daddies”, and “the Minorities”. If one was to study the subgroups one would find the following genus and species:
I. Shit-kickers
a. Goat ropers
b. Rexall rangers
II. Cat-daddies
a. Hippies
b. Those without long hair
III. Minorities
a. Mexican-Americans
b. Blacks
c. Foreign Students
Of course, there was some mixing among main headings on the above groups , but not much. Needless to say, coming form Corpus Christi, where we did not mix with the few blacks and the many Mexican Americans who lived in the city, I was undergoing some major mental twists. As my freshman year progressed I noticed more and more how the black students were systematically excluded from all campus activities, except sports. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the status quo at Alpine and Sul Ross State College, and I was also becoming more politically involved on campus.
If I remember correctly it was the spring of 1969 that the government introduced the infamous “lottery” to help sort out who was to win the wonderful free trips to the “Orient”. My lucky number was 104, and they were projecting reaching the mid-100’s when they implemented the program. About the same time, I stumbled on a recruiter for the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class program in the student union building. I listened to the spiel about all the wonderful benefits of joining the Marines and going to summer PLC camps in Quantico, Virginia. I decided that since I might be drafted anyway, I might as well sign up for the program and take what was offered. I was about to take the step that was to change my life forever.
During the summer of 1969, I spent six weeks in Virginia, courtesy of the USMC. In our platoon, there was one fair skinned black man and one Hispanic. The rest were white. The other four or five platoons in the company had about the same breakdown. I found it really hard to believe that the military was not actively recruiting an officer corps of minority men, to represent the disproportionate number of minorities who were fighting and dying in Southeast Asia.
When I arrived at Quantico I honestly believed that we were fighting invite Nam to “preserve democracy”. After a few weeks in the camp, listening to our training officers, I suddenly realized that democracy really did not have anything to do with it. We were over there to “kill some gooks” and show the little bastards that they cannot push Uncle Sam around. I suddenly remembered those planes flying over Corpus Christi Bay, and thought “those are really shitty reasons for men to be killed for”.
At the end of the six week period I decided that I would personally see that no one else from Sul Ross would fall into the trap being set by the Marines. By the end of the summer, my full radicalization was setting in. My hair began growing, and my clothes were turning strangely paisley and tie-dyed. It was a wonderful metamorphosis. From that time on whenever the Marines arrived on campus, I sat near them in the student union building and countered whatever outlandish lies they threw out . I realized then that it made no difference at what level you were dealing with government representatives, chances were, they were lying to you.
I also realized that it was time for the students at Sul Ross to take charge of their lives and get into the decision making of the university. My sophomore and junior year was spent laying the ground work for the takeover of the Student Government during my senior year. We managed to organize the Mexican-Americans, the Blacks, and the foreign students into and active voting block and won the Student Government presidency in a landslide. We succeeded in getting many changes made on campus, including a very active Black Students Association, and at the same time were able to make changes in the community at large.
The state of Texas in 1971, in a weak moment, passed a law making it much easier to register people to vote. The university student government created a voter registration drive, both on and off campus, that focused on people who were never “encouraged” to vote in Brewster County and Alpine. (Remember those folks that were “across the tracks”?) I am happy to state that in the next general election in 1972 there was a shift of power and there was finally minority representation on the board and commissions in the community.
As I neared graduation in 1972 I realized that I did not want to stay in the country the way things were going. I kept thinking of John Kennedy’s statement “ask not what your country can do for you…”, and one day a different type of government recruiter came to the campus. Realizing that they might be lying also I took a chance and sat down with them. This time they were ex-Volunteers from the United States Peace Corps. They explained the Peace Corps programs that were available and I decided to take a chance and filled out an application. After a few months I heard back from the Peace Corps – I had been accepted for the program in Jamaica in the Caribbean. I was really shocked because all I knew about Jamaica was it was a tourist paradise and that they made rum there. I thought it would be a pretty cool destination.
After graduation I had a few weeks before reporting to Washington, D.C. for the beginning of training so I went to the local library in Corpus Christi to get as much information as I could about Jamaica. Surprisingly there was very little. All I could find was that Jamaica was a major exporter of bananas and bauxite and had been a colony of Great Britain. Yes, our public libraries tend to not be much of a storehouse of up-to-date knowledge. (I am sure glad the internet came along.)
I flew to D.C. on July 1 of 1972 and took the Peace Corps oath. We underwent three days of brief indoctrination of the philosophy of the Peace Corps and then flew in country. Our group (Jamaica 13) was one of the first groups to be trained in country in Jamaica. When we landed in Jamaica we were immediately put on vans (known in Jamaica as mini-buses) and taken out into the countryside for a three day live-in with Jamaican families. After the three days we had to find our way into Kingston to the training site, after which we had six weeks of training and were then assigned to our jobs for which we had agreed to sign up for a two year tour of duty.
Michael Manley had just been elected Prime Minister of Jamaica shortly before our group had arrived in-country. His Peoples National Party proposals to bring better times to the poor people of Jamaica were raising eyebrows in the Nixon Administration. The PNP government tended to lean leftward while the Jamaica Labor Party was quite right wing and had controlled Jamaican politics for some time.
I imagine Nixon was quite apoplectic when Manley sent a delegation to Cuba to discuss joint agricultural projects with the Cuban government, since Jamaica had always toed the line with the USA policy of thumbing our nose at Cuba. Then when Manley announced that he was adopting some Socialist policies things really started popping.
Suddenly the Jamaica Labor Party had plenty of money to do things to stir up trouble; guns were popping up everywhere and gun violence was worse than ever. (Philip Agee confirmed in his writing later that the CIA was instructed to do whatever necessary to destabilize the Manley government.)
After my two years in the Peace Corps I married and stayed on there managing a small hotel for a year and a half. Things got so bad economically and politically that we left in late 1975. We got out and many of the wealthy Jamaicans left, but those who stayed went through 20 years of the worst violence that Jamaica had ever seen. I often wonder what would happen to other countries if we would mind our own damn business.
Ok, so that explains where I am coming from. I figure it is important to know my background so you can realize how deep seated my rant is felt.
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