Rebellion, Chapter 35, The Brothers Karamazov

"Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I am a bug, and I recognise in all humility that I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that cause follows effect, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds its level -- but that's only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can't consent to live by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it? -- I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven't suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That's a question I can't answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I've only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.""That's rebellion," murmered Alyosha, looking down."Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that," said Ivan earnestly. "One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.""No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

Dostoevsky

The greater of evils

Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush’s Washington

by Thomas Frank

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.
I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president’s friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.
How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president’s former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president’s liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.
But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash “misplaced” in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska’s leading politicians are apparently on the take — our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay — or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Bad Apples All Around

So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the clichés roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors’ glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists’ mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.
Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a “culture of corruption,” a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology — an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.
Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!
Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. “The White House belongs to you,” its dust jacket told us. “So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C. For you are a citizen of the United States.” For you, young citizen, does the Post Office carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor Statistics add up long columns of numbers.
The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep in the American grain that we can’t bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the public interest.
We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose astonishing career as a corruptionist has been unreeling in newspaper and congressional investigations since I came to Washington. Abramoff started out as a great political success story, a protégé and then a confidant of the leaders of the conservative faction of the Republican Party. But his career disintegrated on news of the inventive ways he ripped off his clients and the luxury meals and lavish trips with which he bribed legislators.
Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the “bad apple” thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement from its onetime superstar. What Abramoff represented was “greed gone wild,” asserts the most authoritative account on the subject. He “went native,” say others. Above all, he was “sui generis,” a one-of-a-kind con man, “engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of.”
In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff’s in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and the undreamed-of antics have ceased.

Misgovernment by Ideology

But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in every hotel lobby in town, but we still don’t get the message.
It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.
The correct diagnosis is the “bad apple” thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our story’s worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the “values” that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities — priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.
Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.
Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people — Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years — have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.
Yes, today’s conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish “golf weekend”; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns — in short, when they treat government with contempt — they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.
And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort — a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the “virtue of selfishness” when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.

The Wrecking Crew in Full Swing

One of the instructive stories We Are the Government brought before generations of schoolkids was the tale of a smiling dime whose wanderings were meant to introduce us to the government and all that it does for us: the miner who digs the ore for the dime has his “health and safety” supervised by one branch of the government; the bank in which the dime is stored enjoys the protection of a different branch, which “sees that [banks] are safe places for people to keep their money”; the dime gets paid in tax on a gasoline sale; it then lands in the pocket of a Coast Guard lieutenant, who takes it overseas and spends it on a parrot, which is “quarantined for ninety days” when the lieutenant brings it home. All of which is related with the blithest innocence, as though taxes on gasoline and quarantines on parrots were so obviously beneficial that they required little further explanation.
Clearly, a more up-to-date version is required. So let us follow the dime as it wends its way through our present-day capital. Its story, we will find, is the reverse of what it was in 1945. That old dime was all about service, about the things government could do for us. But the new dime is about profit — about the superiority of private enterprise, about the huge sums that can be squeezed out of federal operations. Instead of symbolizing good government, the dime now shows us the wrecking crew in full swing.
Our modern dime first comes to Washington as part of some good citizen’s taxes, and it leaves the U.S. Treasury in a payment to a company that has been hired to do work on the nation’s ports. Back in 1945, the government would have done the work itself, but now it uses contractors for such things. This particular contractor knows how to win a bid, but it doesn’t know how to do the work, so it subcontracts the job to another outfit. The dime follows, and it eventually makes up a worker’s salary, who incorporates it into his monthly car payment. From there it travels into the coffers of an auto industry trade association, which happens to be very upset about a rule proposed by a federal agency that would require cars to notify drivers when their tire pressure is low.
So the trade association gives the dime to a Washington consultant who specializes in fighting federal agencies, and this man launches challenge after challenge to the studies that the agency is using in the tire-pressure matter. It takes many years for the agency to make its way through the flak thrown up by this clever fellow. Meanwhile, with his well-earned dime, he buys himself a big house with nice white columns in front.
But this is only the beginning of the story. As we make our rounds of conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our protection reengineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money.

Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is the founding editor of The Baffler, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and, most recently, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His WSJ columns can be read at his website. He lives, of course, in Washington D.C. and this essay has been adapted from his new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

Personal Jesus

EDITOR'S NOTE
Okay, ya got me. I haven't graced these screens for a time. Sometimes the dead have little to say. I allow them their silence. Besides, much has occurred since last I wrote. I ran a campaign to get elected to the Montana Legislature. I will admit defeat in the Primary but I admit NO SHAME! I am proud of our campaign and what fun we had doing it. I would do it again in a heartbeat if time machines were things of reality and not fiction. To any and all who read this, I recommend running for office once in your life. It opens your eyes to the process in both the good aspects...as well as the negative. I've been observing the national campaign from this perspective and a few things have tweaked me. Hence my note ends and my entry begins.

I've become one of those people. I used to watch news in the evening and feel up to date, but over the past few years that changed. Now I'm one of the people who gets deep information online and use the news as pure gloss of current happenings. I call it the Cliff's Notes approach to news: Summarize and I can pick what I want. I peruse many sites but I check out Slate.com a lot because they have waaaaaay too much time on their hands. They analyze things to nanobits. Some's good, some's not but an article popped out at me last week. It was in their Jurisprudence section which is about all things legal. The writer (and no, I don't remember the name) was writing about Obama's answer key to a test he'd administered as an Instructor in law school. The piece was okay but the whole angle of it annoyed me. The writer implied that many of the suggested answers didn't show Obama's legal positions on issues. They were too general and too supportive of varied viewpoints. Ummm, oookay. That's probably because this was an EXAM for EDUCATIONAL purposes, not some judicial examination for a Presidential candidate. What were they expecting for the love of god?

Media has its place, but the obsessive actions are becoming overwhelming. In the past (early to mid 20th Century) Presidents were viewed as important but they were allowed some distance from public eyes. FDR was in a wheelchair for years and the public was unaware, Kennedy had the rumors of close friendship with a Hollywood actress and god knows what Nixon kept hidden. Okay, the Nixon thing made Executive privacy a problem but I kinda think we overcompensated a bit. Now, we examine and re-examine and re-re-examine these people until we're exhausted and I don't see how this obsessive pursuit helps. People now have jobs that are nothing but watching and waiting for candidates to screw up. Isn't that kinda sick? Like waiting jackals, they fidget and fight behind garish grins to have the first chance to break some kind of garbage news, destroying campaigns and people and families. Why?

In essence, why the hell was someone at Slate combing through an Obama answer key from years and years ago? What would have satisfied that person? For that matter, what would satisfy us all? If we check and check and check into the candidate's opinions, personality and everything else, we may find things flawless and ordered. Yeaaaaaaa, we found a Saint...but have we found a President? Simply put, we've exploded these events into American Messiah. Maybe Simon Cowell should be involved and we could vote by touch tone phone.

The President's a person (imagine you with a better education and overexposed in the media) and yet we act like we CANNOT vote for someone unless they 100% agree with us, show Solomon-like wisdom and incidentally walk on water or heal by touch or banish the demons of inflation and Iran with a wave of his mighty suited arm. Delusion, anyone? Well, we've let the politicians and media convince us that, unless a candidate is on the level of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, Muhammad, the Buddha, Zoroaster or Confucius, we CANNOT possibly vote for them. These expectations are insane and we really need to take our head outta the high-def, latte sipping, multitasking, cell phone texting, fact-a-second oven we're in and recognize reality. The personage of the President is important, but Jesus ain't walking into the White House. So, QUIT looking for him and ACCEPT the VERY HUMAN candidates for who they are.

Red Sand: An Elegy

EDITOR'S NOTE: I really wanna thank many people for their messages of support after the passing of my Gram. Specifically, I want to thank the Boatmans, Jeri, Ruth, the ladies at Case Management, Carrie, the ladies of DPHHS, Barb and everybody else who really reached out. I really really appreciate the sentiments. It's taken a while to process this but it's time I laid to rest my erratic thoughts. So, I guess we'll see. :D

Okay, I don't know how many of you have scattered the ashes of cremation. When we laid my brother Michael to rest, I had an incidental chance to see the ashes his broken body became. I saw a sparkling shower of reddish sand floating downward through a shaft of afternoon sunlight that found its way through the pines. I swear it was red like martian soil or like a summer sunset. I could envision myself trying to hold the dust in my hands as it inevitably trickled through my fingers to be caught by the western wind. These ashes are never meant to be clutched onto no matter how much we wish it otherwise. I learned the meaning of impermanence that day. All beings should be valued as gifts of the earth. We should also remember that earth takes all things back...eventually.

Gram had been sick for a long time. Even though she appeared to bear illness with the same stoic resolve she displayed in everything she did, it wore on her. She so rarely complained that the toll on her wasn't ever truly expressed. I heard it in the undertones and subtleties that a lifetime of being her grandson provided. The things she enjoyed became more difficult. I guess any rational person in her place would reach a point where they would ask at what price was it worth remaining in this miraculously flawed gift of a world? At what price?

I can't look at Gram's passing as an unfair act by a being who would rip her from me. Michael on the other hand...well, that's my contention with the Other. I will speak only of Gram here. Her life was blessed and cursed in one, colored with joy and pain and triumph and retreat. It was a long and worthy life. She left behind all who called her mom, gram, teacher and angel. We are her legacy in this world and making her proud is the greatest achievement we can reach. I will always try for her. It's who she raised me to be.

Now, I can only envision her journey to that place built for her, perhaps with Michael awaiting her. Although I may somewhat lack in trust for the gatekeeper and his master, I know that Gram has earned her way. The pillar of faith has ascended and her rest is reward for her faith. She remains in my heart and pangs of yearning to talk to her do overtake me, but they are short. I know what is must be. The red sand and the lessons she taught me are what I have left. For now, it's got to be enough. I do love you always Gram. Always.

D

ANNOUNCEMENT OF IMPORT

On the heels of my last blog, I want to make a formal announcement. I am currently one of two Democrats running in HD 91 (East Missoula to Clearwater to beyond Clinton.) This is a chance to become a Representative in the Montana Legislature during the 2009 Legislative Session. It is a great opportunity to have a person with a disability sit on the Joint Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. It's a real chance to make major progress on DPHHS policy toward the disabled, elderly and children. Currently, I'm organizing my campaign. For those who are interested in supporting the campaign, two things are needed. A) We need word-of-mouth and publicity. For any who know someone who lives out here, please mention my name and any good things you can think to say about me. I'd appreciate it. B) We also need donations to raise funds. I will hold a formal fundraiser in the near future, but I really need financial support because I'm running in a Primary against another Democrat. The Primary is in June so I need a workable budget to compete this early. Any who want to contribute, the limit for an individual donation is $130 but anything would be greatly helpful. If you want to donate, message me by email and we can make proper arrangements. I need as much support as possible because my Primary opponent, Tim Furey from the Bonner area, is formidible. So, publicity and funding should make a good start. I will publish a campaign website within the week and post the link here. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. This is quite a challenge but I'm sure we can accomplish this goal together. Thank you my friends.

Dustin Hankinson

We Must Go Beyond

Like Kryptonite for Superman, this society saps me of strength and will. It always seems as if I've been exactly here before. Sometimes edges are a little too sharp and the walls are seemingly made of eggshell. It's like nobody ever dug far enough to find a solid footing for the collective house we find ourselves in. Yet we mostly act as though we don't feel unsettled. We've grown entirely too comfortable with the Nihilism at our doorsteps. Is this the way the world ends? Is this the way the world ends? Is this the way the world ends and what exactly is it that's slouching to Bethlehem? Yet still we exist, floating through while the sand creeps in to stifle us. What's more, most of us would probably WELCOME the chance to be buried in existence. After all, we are a people of scraps and leftovers who beg for crumbs and are happy, HAPPY to settle. I say NO MORE!

Yes we're disabled. Yes we're marginalized. Yes we're told over and over again that we're lucky for the gift of life and we should accept that and that alone. Ultimately, what truly blocks attainment of the world we want? It's us and our self pity and our settling and our apathy. A movement culminated in the 1960's that had it's roots take hold a century before. The African American Civil Rights movement, which continues to this day, stands as a model and a warning to those in the Disability Rights movement. The model is the tireless work millions of African Americans put in to improving their lot. All over the country, people pitched in to achieve the end of systemized segregation and to gain the ability to vote without harassment. They cared and pushed and didn't SETTLE. We need to LEARN AND EMULATE this kind of dedication.

The warning lies in what happens when a group gets a taste of what they want. When Segregation fell and people could safely vote, the marches ended and the boycotts were canceled. From where they started, the plight of African Americans seemed to have improved by light years by 1969. They had stopped the most glaring discrimination and for some that was enough. Of course, having a frightened and uncertain white Establishment kill their leader didn't help the Civil Rights movement any but I digress. Nothing excuses the "we accomplished everything we needed to and can now sit in Lazyboys and watch the Jeffersons" attitude of many people. The warning is this: SOME IS NEVER ENOUGH. We need to push until the World's EQUAL AND JUST for EVERYBODY or until the ground takes us back. It is the only worthwhile path.

Now, every few years, persons with disabilities are rounded up, taken to Helena and essentially BEG for their programs and services. I've seen this and even done this myself a few times. Well, I say WE ARE NOT BEGGARS OR CHARITY CASES OR THE "LAST AND THE LEAST." True empowerment is understanding that we have ALWAYS had the power to live and fight. Nobody gives it to us. It just IS. While playing the MLK role is tempting because of how much I personally believe in his wisdom, I can no longer bite my tongue or turn cheeks. Therefore, I choose to speak in the voice of Malcolm X. We got a raw deal and I ain't talking about being disabled. I have never thought of myself as lesser than any man. If "created equal" is remotely true, then we are as American as anybody, disability or not. If a place at the Table of Decision will not be given to us, we must TAKE IT! We are equal therefore we will BE equal. We must go beyond the begging and pleading. It is high time we took our places on the other side of the Legislative podium or City Council desk or Congressional Office door. It is time that representatives arose from the disability community to truly look after their interest and the interest of their disabled brothers and sisters. I will take up the sword of candidacy and challenge others to do the same. We must go beyond.