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July 4, 2008 at 09:18:04

A Letter to a Retired Activist

by Michael Bonanno     Page 1 of 2 page(s)

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My friend John spent most of 30 or 40 years as a full time activist.  A learned, wise and all around intelligent man, his subsistence came from doing “odd jobs” here and there.  His full time job was to deface the nation’s highways and byways by scrawling messages that Americans needed to read.  If one sees “9/11 was an inside job” painted on an overpass, there’s a good chance that John was the graffitist. 

He now tells me he’s grown tired of the anger that goes with all of that and has decided to make people happy on more of a personal level.  He plays the trombone with a plethora of talent for the elderly living in last stop hotels and gives them maybe one last reason to smile. 

He travels the country with his lovely wife, Kay, and he says he’s happier and more satisfied than he’s ever been. 

I admire John both for what he did for all those years and for what he’s doing now and wrote him the following letter telling him as much:    

John, 

Nothing changed, the rest of the world never got better, so you found a better world. 

You’re right. I’m still swimming against the tide.  While you were an activist for thirty or forty years, I was part of the problem, doing what I was told.  I was weaving in and out of marriages like they were short term loans.  I had no idea of what was going on “out there”.  I worked for a global Fortune 500 chemical corporation and had no idea what NAFTA was going to be and, when it happened, what it was and what it meant until they aimed it at me and pulled the trigger.  I worked for one of the powers that pushed it through and I was too busy making money for that company and becoming ever more in debt to the ABA to know what the news of the day was. 

I wasn’t paying attention to this world so I blew my chance to now join you in yours.  I owe this world what you gave it for so many years.  I not only ignored it, I knew nothing about it and helped bring it to this point in time. 

I suppose once I’ve done my twenty or thirty years of banging my head against that infamous wall, I’ll swim to shore and towel off. 

I’ll keep informing you of new stuff and trying to expose old stuff in a new light.  I hope that doesn’t cloud your new vantage point. 

Remember when the military media’s theaters almost banned Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911”?  Now there are two mainstream films that question our political system and the stealth manner in which our so called leaders govern.  They’re not documentaries.  One stars Kevin Spacey and it’s about the 2000 Florida theft.  The film is called “Recount”.  

I’m not sure who’s in the other movie but it’s called “Stop Gap”. 

Yeah, I know, I know, we had ‘em when we found out about Downing Street and we had ‘em when we found they were breaking the law with their spying and how can one not see the connection between 9/11 and The Regime?   

Maybe I’ll catch you a criminal or two.  After all, somebody’s got to catch ‘em.  They’ve been getting away with this ongoing farce for far too long.  It’s my turn.  After all, it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?  Do we have time to finish out our stay before it all goes wrong or will it all go wrong first and will the mist turn into that tidal wave so many of us have been fearing for so long? 

Most of your activism was before 9/11.  After 9/11, you used your wisdom, passion and energy hoping to bring a number of murderers to justice.  You knew, however, that people would resist, so you handed out videos, hoping that one out of every so many people who received that free disc would watch it and become enlightened. 

At the very least, the so called political process by which we occasionally change leadership started to become transparent in 2000.  Suspicions rose.  In 2004, the game was played again and, thanks to the person they call John Kerry, we saw maybe the worse performance ever.  Despite the fact that it was obvious that he didn't want to play the role, he played it anyway.  But when the play ended, he exited the stage as if it had spontaneously combusted.   

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Song sample for October, 2008 Everybody Knows from the cd Flameland.

Michael Bonanno is a published poet, essayist and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay AreaSome of his poetry can be found at The Poetry Corner at OpEdNews.He is an associate editor for OpEdNews. 

Bonanno is a political progressive, not a Democratic Party apologist. He believes it's government's job to help the needy and that leaving the people's well being to the so called "private sector" is social suicide.His CDs may be purchased at CD Baby.

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