Saturday, December 25, 2010

Dear Mr. President,

Christmas day. You in Hawaii with your family, I perched here on a hill in San Francisco. You with enormous power, life and death power, I merely free to come and go as I please, walk outside, feel on my face the rain that’s falling, breathe in the fresh air, visit friends and family. What brings all this to mind, Mr. President, is the plight of millions of Americans who are not so fortunate, who have little if anything, including Hope. People like the retirees in Prichard, Alabama who lost their pensions and have no safety net; or those like Ms. Mimi Ash in California, Mr. Alan Schrott in Texas, Ms. Debra Fischer in Florida, and Ms. Celeste Butler in Washington, all of whose homes were illegally broken into by bank contractors and stripped, ransacked, emptied, just four of the thousands of erroneous seizures of property for default of mortgages that were not actually in default, everything taken and, in Ms. Ash’s case, her husband’s ashes - her husband’s ashes! - taken and tossed in the garbage. And I think also of Pfc. Bradley Manning who has spent seven months in solitary confinement in a Marine brig, brutalized without even being indicted for a crime - cruel and unusual punishment, torture, Mr. President, which I distinctly remember you pledging to abolish, a stain on America you called it during your election campaign. But somehow all that changed after the election and here we are, still with all this injustice and misery. Injustice to the Prichard retirees and Ms. Ash, Mr. Schrott, Ms. Fischer, Ms. Butler, and Pfc. Manning; a trampling of human rights and human dignity for average Americans while the fat cats you bailed out celebrate with expensive toasts and look forward to another obscene year end bonus this year. I read where it costs a million dollars a year to deploy one soldier to Afghanistan. A million dollars! For each soldier in Afghanistan, that’s a million bucks less for social programs here at home, for aid to states which desperately need it, for help in restoring our schools, our roads, our bridges, our future. Ten billion a month for war while we cut services and pensions and persecute people who try to expose corruption and injustice. That’s just not right, Mr. President. What happens to people when they get power, anyway? Do their souls get twisted? Or were they really that way all along? Have a merry Christmas out there in Hawaii-land. Mr. President.