New Year's Revolutions

[Lightning Rod]

New Year's Revolutions

What are things you wish would happen during the coming year?

1. I hope that all the people who were displaced by the tsunami and Katrina find a comfortable home. The work that Clinton and Bush Sr. have done to raise money for relief is admirable. But I think the story of Clinton giving the bed on the airplane to Bush has been overused. My guess is that they were in bed together.

2. It would be nice to cure AIDS. We've spent 250 billion dollars to cure Iraq of Saddam Hussein, why can't we spend half that much to cure a disease that infects 40 million people?

3. Instead of tax cuts for a few I would love to see healthcare for everyone.

4. I wish that lobbyists would be outlawed and labeled for what they are--bribers.

5. I hope for a bumper crop of pot. Maybe the price will come down.

6. I would like to see Gdub choke to death on a pretzel but have second thoughts when I consider the possibility of Cheney becoming president. In that case even impeachment loses its charm. Can we impeach an entire administration?

7. I wish the news media would get their hearts right and start calling a spade a spade and a lie a lie.

[Arcadia]

can I make my wishes in february..?? (It´s my first hour of holidays and revolution can wait...)

[firsty]

1. lets not forget the victims of the earthquakes in kashmir - millions homeless, tens of thousands dead, and all the poor bastards in africa being randomly slaughtered. there arent many kettles of change set out in american malls for those victims.

2. i'd like religious leaders to harken back to the good ol days of Christ and Muhammed and all that. judge not lest ye be judged, etc.

3. we dont need an impeachment in this country, we need a coup. our leaders have performed sodomy on the legacy of our founding fathers. in 2001 the world wept for america. 4 yrs later they all hate us. that is the fault of our government. anyone who voted for bush in 2004 should be dismissed to australia to help with the race riots. ha ha. i'm just kidding. but we've got more closeted racists in this country than we need.

4. we need more good rock and roll.

5. news organizations should be barred from covering entertainment news.

6. hollywood should stop right now, take all money currently invested in all films, give it charities, and then restart next week. the world would be changed forever, and we'd have to go one week without the release of another crappy film.

7. we need more slush pile readers.

8. i read today that the FDA has approved a permanent automatic, surgically installed brain-zapper for use with depressed patients and that it's gaining more widespread use. so instead of prescribing happy opiates, more days off from work and free porn, the psychiatric community is going back to shock therapy via invasive surgery. we have a fucking problem.

9. houston, tx should be pronounced like it's spelled, as in "houston street, nyc". enough already.

10. socialism all around.

[bohonato]

My Revolutions!

1) That people stop worrying about the word ‘Fuck’ and start fighting the real obscenities: war, famine, poverty, disease, and hate.

2) That people stop worrying about marijuana and start fighting the drugs that do destroy: cocaine, heroin, etc.

3) That people start learning a little history, start learning about our government, and start realizing that America is far from what it could be, or what it was meant to be.

4) That people stop debating over ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ and start carrying for people with no homes, no money, and no food. What would Jesus do?

5) That we abolish the death penalty, legalize pot, allow gay marriage, cease nuclear proliferation, stop isolating our allies, start talks with nations before bombing the shit out of them, put money towards AIDS, cancers and diseases that kill rather than dog toe-nail fungus creams, and realize that the government is here to serve the individual, not the individual to serve the government.

[Glorious Amok]

1. i hope i get a summer job in theatre.

2. i hope i find a new apartment close to school that i can afford.

3. i hope to venture out on my first multi-day hikes.

4. i hope the whole world finds peace, happiness, safety, equality, medical care, and free expression within their own borders.

5. i hope to park my car and buy a secondhand bike.

[Artguy]

1. For a change i would like to see the leaders of the "free" world be all artists and poets instead of crooks and liars.

2. If we are going to have total global warming I wish it would come sooner....damn it's cold up here....

3. I wish we would open our eyes to the scale of how unbalanced the world is....and try to close the gap...Christmas is screaming reminder of this...

4. I wish everyone would put their guns away...a couple of days ago here in Toronto a full out OK Corral type shoot out took place between rival drug gangs and the only person that died just happened to be walking by...

5. I wish we could realize that we are on this earth as just another species to live with and not against all the others..

[hester_prynne]

Whoa! I sat here after reading this thread for about 10 minutes in a complete dream state, a trance! Felt great! Suspended in the beauty of hopes I suppose.
Sigh.

New year's revolutions. Hmmmmmmm........

I'd like my New Year's Eve gig to go well, for one thing. Not just for me, but for everyone there to have a good time....feel good, feel hopeful.....

I want to save up a big stash of money, continue having no credit debt and continue having little to do with banks or banking, despite the fact that some good money is going to be coming in.

I want to be able to help others in need.

I want the "war" and everything connected to it to end.

I want everyone to accept and respect each other's beliefs, and each other's right to their beliefs.

I want everyone to have food and shelter.

I wish for everyone to have love......


HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Auld lang syne Smoochies!
H

[lovingpenfull]

Like all of you guys I too want the world to mend the chasms and disparities separting complementry opposites, I want the Demons of Mars that seem to be running things to turn our bows and arrows into lutes and drum sticks.

But that really is only a new year resolution I can contribute to, I can't fully claim that as a personal resolution, that takes all of us and I am confident that we are getting there! I say this in way of not seeming selfish in listing the resolutions I am setting pursuant to my own life course:

1. Set to work in this up coming Dog year, my year, accumulating some capital by way of truck driving in the US that I will later put to work for me to create the Eden I envision.

2. Buy a laptop and hook it up with mobile connection so I can school online while trucking and amass the library of appropriate thought and that I can later draw from and contribute to the whole.

3. Have as much sex/intimacy as my loins can take.

4. Set at last back out on the road and inagurate a new world trip this time with laptop in tow so as to continue to school and forge aliances and make connections with others to strengthen the network of assosiation that I am currently constructing now.

5. Continue to work on my moving towards mental/spiritual autonomy and soverignty so as to fully divorce myself from undue influence from the Demons of Control and War that are making policy and their assorted High Priests and Minions.

These may seem self serving, but they are my own personal resolutions after all. But, foremost of all, to have fun.

[mtmynd]

See violence as boring, out of date and way too loud to accomplish anything good.

[Anonymous-one]

Add this to every voting ballots:

None of the above

See violence as boring, out of date and way too loud to accomplish anything good.

Violence : Hollywood's biggest star .
Sad but true...

C.R.A.Z.Y. de Jean-Marc Vallée : look for this movie at your local video club (distribution by
M.C. international) .

What people thought about it :

http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/film/movie.a ... =7690&v=vo

[Doreen Peri]

What the world needs is more


And more


And more


And more


These are my New Year Prescriptions for Revolution.

[mtmynd]

A-1 - thx for the link. Sounds like a damn fine movie. Think it'll make it down here on the border..? I'll keep an eye out for it.

Dor' - you got it! Less words and more action.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear All:

Happy New Year! ( honk! twitter!)


My New Year's wishes are best summed up in a fine essay by Howard Zinn I read yesterday:


( paste of Zinn essay below)



Published in the January, 2006 issue of The Progressive


After the War

by Howard Zinn

The war against Iraq, the assault on its people, the occupation of its cities, will come to an end, sooner or later. The process has already begun. The first signs of mutiny are appearing in Congress. The first editorials calling for withdrawal from Iraq are beginning to appear in the press. The anti-war movement has been growing, slowly but persistently, all over the country.

Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible. The troops will have to come home.

And while we work with increased determination to make this happen, should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war—not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing.

A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.

There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.

Furthermore, the government must persuade young people and their families that though the soldier may die, though he or she may lose arms or legs, or become blind, that it is all for a noble cause, for God, for country.

When you look at the endless series of wars of this century you do not find a public demanding war, but rather resisting it, until citizens are bombarded with exhortations that appeal, not to a killer instinct, but to a desire to do good, to spread democracy or liberty or overthrow a tyrant.

Woodrow Wilson found a citizenry so reluctant to enter the First World War that he had to pummel the nation with propaganda and imprison dissenters in order to get the country to join the butchery going on in Europe.

In the Second World War, there was indeed a strong moral imperative, which still resonates among most people in this country and which maintains the reputation of World War II as “the good war.” There was a need to defeat the monstrosity of fascism. It was that belief that drove me to enlist in the Air Force and fly bombing missions over Europe.

Only after the war did I begin to question the purity of the moral crusade. Dropping bombs from five miles high, I had seen no human beings, heard no screams, seen no children dismembered. But now I had to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the deaths of 600,000 civilians in Japan, and a similar number in Germany.

I came to a conclusion about the psychology of myself and other warriors: Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil, once we had made that simple and simplistic calculation, we did not have to think anymore. Then we could commit unspeakable crimes and it was all right.

I began to think about the motives of the Western powers and Stalinist Russia and wondered if they cared as much about fascism as about retaining their own empires, their own power, and if that was why they had military priorities higher than bombing the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. Six million Jews were killed in the death camps (allowed to be killed?). Only 60,000 were saved by the war—1 percent.

A gunner on another crew, a reader of history with whom I had become friends, said to me one day: “You know this is an imperialist war. The fascists are evil. But our side is not much better.” I could not accept his statement at the time, but it stuck with me.

War, I decided, creates, insidiously, a common morality for all sides. It poisons everyone who is engaged in it, however different they are in many ways, turns them into killers and torturers, as we are seeing now. It pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants, and may in fact do so, but the people it kills are the victims of the tyrants. It appears to cleanse the world of evil, but that does not last, because its very nature spawns more evil. Wars, like violence in general, I concluded, is a drug. It gives a quick high, the thrill of victory, but that wears off and then comes despair.

I acknowledge the possibility of humanitarian intervention to prevent atrocities, as in Rwanda. But war, defined as the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people, must be resisted.

Whatever can be said about World War II, understanding its complexity, the situations that followed—Korea, Vietnam—were so far from the kind of threat that Germany and Japan had posed to the world that those wars could be justified only by drawing on the glow of “the good war.” A hysteria about communism led to McCarthyism at home and military interventions in Asia and Latin America—overt and covert—justified by a “Soviet threat” that was exaggerated just enough to mobilize the people for war.

Vietnam, however, proved to be a sobering experience, in which the American public, over a period of several years, began to see through the lies that had been told to justify all that bloodshed. The United States was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, and the world didn’t come to an end. One half of one tiny country in Southeast Asia was now joined to its communist other half, and 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives had been expended to prevent that. A majority of Americans had come to oppose that war, which had provoked the largest anti-war movement in the nation’s history.

The war in Vietnam ended with a public fed up with war. I believe that the American people, once the fog of propaganda had dissipated, had come back to a more natural state. Public opinion polls showed that people in the United States were opposed to send troops anywhere in the world, for any reason.

The Establishment was alarmed. The government set out deliberately to overcome what it called “the Vietnam syndrome.” Opposition to military interventions abroad was a sickness, to be cured. And so they would wean the American public away from its unhealthy attitude, by tighter control of information, by avoiding a draft, and by engaging in short, swift wars over weak opponents (Grenada, Panama, Iraq), which didn’t give the public time to develop an anti-war movement.

I would argue that the end of the Vietnam War enabled the people of the United States to shake the “war syndrome,” a disease not natural to the human body. But they could be infected once again, and September 11 gave the government that opportunity. Terrorism became the justification for war, but war is itself terrorism, breeding rage and hate, as we are seeing now.

The war in Iraq has revealed the hypocrisy of the “war on terrorism.” And the government of the United States, indeed governments everywhere, are becoming exposed as untrustworthy: that is, not to be entrusted with the safety of human beings, or the safety of the planet, or the guarding of its air, its water, its natural wealth, or the curing of poverty and disease, or coping with the alarming growth of natural disasters that plague so many of the six billion people on Earth.

I don’t believe that our government will be able to do once more what it did after Vietnam—prepare the population for still another plunge into violence and dishonor. It seems to me that when the war in Iraq ends, and the war syndrome heals, that there will be a great opportunity to make that healing permanent.

My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race.

Governments will resist this message. But their power is dependent on the obedience of the citizenry. When that is withdrawn, governments are helpless. We have seen this again and again in history.

The abolition of war has become not only desirable but absolutely necessary if the planet is to be saved. It is an idea whose time has come.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

© Copyright 2006 The Progressive

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[mousey1]

Well, I'll keep my "new years revolutions" small. For starters I'm gonna work on my abs and torso, see if I can't turn this old body of mine into a well oiled machine that I can successfully bounce quarters off of!

Forgive me for thinking so small...but I must be in shape if I'm going to single-handedly bring about world peace and justice for all!

HAPPY NEW YEAR Everyone!

[judih]

how far must a quarter bounce before an ab is up to standard?

Can any coin do?
will an israeli shekel bounce be sufficient bounce?

i shall offer an israeli shekel when your trampoline body is ready to take coin throwers.

my coin shall be thrown for world peace and ab cooperation throughout the world.

hallelujah, and one bounce for humankind.

as for me, i never revolve, resolve or renege on new Year's.

i shall do those things when a quarter bounces off the streamlined promise of a spring day some time in a planetary light year.

(mousey, you're looking fabulous. bet with or without bouncing coins, you could still pull off a small coup)