--><font color=#0000FF>... auch wenn´s hart ist.
-----------------------------------------------------------</font>


<font size="3">
<div>
<p align="center"><font size="7">The Road Not Taken</font><font size="2">

<strong>Thoughts While Passing The Point Of No Return</strong></font>



<font color="#000000">skylax@comcast.net</font>



July 30, 2003</font></font>




<font size="3">

Sometimes when we're traveling, we get so engrossed in our own conversations
we fail to see significant things. We speed by these emotional landmarks
without noticing them. It may be the very thing we've been looking for all our
lives, but we miss it for a distracting remark that happens to turn our heads
in the wrong direction at that very moment.



Think of what constitutes the point of no return. The days that follow
ignorant and unwise decisions are always filled with grief and remorse.
Sometimes, in the distance between the moment where we passed it and the spot
where we realize we've passed it, the epiphany dawns on us" there is no
turning back, despite all our fondest wishing and hoping, despite all our
teary promises to do better next time. Real life has no reset button. Then
comes that hollow time, with its aluminized applause of silence, when
understanding crashes in on us. Some mistakes, like the death of your mother
or your son, simply cannot be corrected. Sometimes, in this life, there is
simply no going back.



So it is with the American dream, lying crushed in the bleeding dust of
official lies presented as eternal truths by neatly dressed young people
trying in vain to speak English correctly in front of mobile television
cameras, saying things like"the American people support what has been
done in Iraq" and trying to show their spontaneous sincerity as the
scripted words slither from their painted lips.



America has been twisted from an example of hope for the world into an armed
robber intent on fleecing everyone it meets. Just recently, America has
changed the world from a place of hope to a place of fear.



We pass by these significant events as the newsreel of our memories unfolds
before us. We show appropriate horror at the mangled bodies of people we never
knew, then go on about our business" to the mall for those birthday
presents meant for people we hardly know, to work on time to meet the daily
shift quota, or to our homes to retreat from the daily assault of debilitating
images that assail us by using whatever substance pleases us at the moment. So
many events we try to pass by and forget. Some can't, but most do.



In the days following these events, we try to rationalize that some mistakes
can be corrected: we can go to court and demand a recount for an election that
has been so obviously stolen; we can catch the perpetrators of a stunningly
horrific crime and try them in a court of law in accordance with the finest
traditions of democratic justice; we can appeal to the better natures of
elected officials who pass laws without even reading what's on the paper; we
can take to the streets to protest decisions to drop nuclear weapons on
peasants far away; or we can point out to anyone who'll listen that our
leaders are lying about everything they say.



But in the days after that, we learn to our shocked dismay that the courts are
closed to people without flashy pedigrees, that elected officials seem not to
want to catch the villains who perpetrated a shocking mass murder, that
legislators only really listen to representatives of large companies who can
fund their vacation homes, that large protests are really great social events
that accomplish nothing, and that precious few people really care whether our
leaders are lying or not, as long as we have our homes, our paychecks, and our
cold beer and warm beds.



Most fail to perceive that if you fail to adequately protect what you have now,
chances are good that you won't have it for very long. I'm talking about the
future here, although you probably didn't realize it.



Listen, can you remember that sound you heard when you passed the point of no
return. No, of course not. You were busy. Talking about something else.



Since the turning of the millennium, we have passed by four events that have
changed the consciousness of our nation and the world forever and irrevocably.</font>




<font size="3"><font color="#000000">[img]" alt="[image]" style="margin: 5px 0px 5px 0px" /> </font>1.
The stolen election of the year 2000, in which the surreptitious denial of
voting rights to tens of thousands of people of color and manipulation of
computerized voting systems turned the vote count in favor of fascism, turned
America into a police state. Few then were prescient enough to have predicted
democracy would soon die, but it has.</font>




<font size="3">Now there's no going back. The deed is done. The
Constitution is nullified. Habeas corpus is gone for the first time in 800
years. The police can come into your home at any time for any reason. People
can be executed without legitimate trials. All as a result of a fixed vote. We
should have seen it coming. But we were talking, and the moment passed by. Now,
no amount of second-guessing can turn back the clock. Just look at the
political opposition, acting as if nothing really serious has happened, that
they can fix the difficulties with a few pieces of legislation. And still
America slumbers.



But there is no going back. Democracy died when a bill was passed by those who
didn't even read it. The new American way. Goosestepping in silence. And all
across the political spectrum, the phony functionaries who grovel for our
votes (and who will ignore us when they have them) act as if this shameful
occurrence was normal. Perhaps it IS normal in a society of treasonous pigs
with no scruples, which is apparently what America has become. Just a gaggle
of dishonest accountants who don't really care where the numbers come from.



<font color="#000000"><font color="#000000">[img]" alt="[image]" style="margin: 5px 0px 5px 0px" /> </font>3.
America dropped radioactive bunker buster bombs on defenseless peasants in
Afghanistan, leaving them to twitch in the dust as their children developed
horrific red tumors on their heads. This was billed a direct response to
capture the alleged perpetrator of the 9/11 horror. Yet when the alleged
perpetrator was offered up for trial in a neutral country, the U.S. ignored
him and continued bombing. And it turns out the war in Afghanistan was planned
long before 9/11. How can you launch a war that was planned before the crime
was committed, and then insist the war was in response to the crime? Did we
miss all this? Were we talking about something else when all this happened?



<font color="#000000">[img][/img] </font>4.
Now America can bomb anyone it wants to for any reason. The reasons don't have
to be the truth, or even grounded in reality. They can be total fantasy. This
is the scenario we are now witnessing in Iraq, where even proven presidential
lies barely raise eyebrows and most agree that Iraq needed to be bombed
because the president and the TV anchors said so. What was it we were doing
when this became a logical action? What trip were we taking when we missed
that point that honesty was no longer necessary for doing business in the
world? And once they decided they could kill all those innocent prisoners at
Guantanamo without real trials, where we going then? What was the sound of the
Constitution being ridiculed by federal judges and taken away forever? Did you
hear it? What did it sound like?



Was it like T. S. Eliot's"not with a bang, but with a whimper"?



Right after all those wonderful millennium fireworks celebrations, we came to
a fork in the road, only almost nobody noticed, because we were all too busy
having so much fun and congratulating ourselves about what a wonderful world
we had.



Since that magical moment, we have been travelling full speed down the wrong
road, with most of us still pretending that everything's OK, that when we wake
up in the morning, things will be as they always have been, the stock market
will rise, certain alluring items at the store will be on sale, that our jobs
will be there and we'll always have plenty of gas in our cars. What was it we
were talking about when these events happened? What did we think about them?
What did we do about them?



What will you be talking about when you pass the point of no return? Baseball?
Dietary supplements? Social obligations?



We're going full speed down a road of no return. We took a wrong turn at the
millennium fork. Plenty of people noticed, but nobody said anything. We were
all making too much money, all having too much fun.



Had we been a realistic, functional society" one that cast our focus on
the health and maintenance of our lives and our world rather than one that
seeks to escape from our responsibilities because we are so afraid of death
" we could have learned plenty from those four post-millenium events that
have so profoundly changed our world for the worse



Were we not led in the wrong direction by the pathetic prostitutes we see on
the TV screens every night, we could have found out that Katherine Harris and
Jeb Bush conspired to deprive over 90,000 people of their legitimate right to
vote. I'm not saying any of the subsequent events would have changed if Al
Gore had been the president (after all, Bill Clinton bombed the hell out of
Yugoslavia at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, and the murderous
masquerades in Waco and Oklahoma City were not exactly good advertisements for
an open, honest government), but it doesn't seem as likely that Gore would
have rammed the Patriot Act down our throats, despite the fact that it was
written by Democrats, or bombed New York City on the basis of Dick Cheney's
think-tank report. Who knows? Maybe he would have. The people in OKC sure
think he might have.



The great lesson that has been missed by the stifling of the investigation
into the World Trade Center disaster is the opportunity to see a continuity of
manipulative aggression in the foreign policy of the United States throughout
the 20th Century. I mean, the situation now is not that much different than it
was in the 1890s when a stock market crash was engineered by rich
industrialists, and then a new grand plan of imperialism was undertaken by
U.S. presidents that resulted in major carnage in the Philippines, Cuba and
even Hawaii that rivals in dishonest insincerity what has recently taken place
in Afghanistan and Iraq.



Had there been a legitimate and independent investigation into the horror of
9/11, more people could have seen that the land of the free and the home of
the brave has been provoking wars for profit around the world throughout the
20th Century, and that even the U.S. motivation for participation in World
Wars I and II are subject to alternative interpretations that clearly reveal
the main cause of them was manipulative profit-seeking from Wall Street and
Washington.



A truly legitimate investigation into the grand deception of what is called
9/11 might also have revealed that it doesn't really matter who is president
" that the tyranny and the murder goes on no matter who is president,
because that's the way it has always been in America.



A real investigation into 9/11 might just have allowed us the opportunity to
at least hope for a humane world, and possibly work toward one. A real
investigation would have enabled us to see, perhaps, that American capitalism
engineered by behind-the-scenes billionaires, funding both the Bolsheviks and
Hitler, has caused all the wars of the 20th Century.



But now the cat is out of the bag for all the world to see. Naked and vicious
power, with nothing" secular or sacred" able to stand in its way.
No reason needed to use it, only an impulse toward gluttony by a sufficient
number of godless petronazis mouthing religious phrases to keep the
evangelical zombies lulled ecstatically in their apocalyptic aspirations.



As one commentator said the other day, the neocon conspiracy that has grabbed
control of the United States and its military might is now much more dangerous
than Hitler's Third Reich or the Soviet Union's Red Menace ever were, in part
because there is no one to stop America from turning the whole world into a
radioactive wasteland like the one that now exists in Iraq, but also because
there is no voice of freedom anywhere in the world able to stand up and oppose
the American Zionist propaganda machine that trumpets is new, horrid messages
that twist the truth and obscure the atrocities. Like"freedom is
economic slavery" and"democracy is a one-party system where all
opposition is treason." The irony is that the rich patricians uttering
these sadistic slogans are the ones who are the real traitors to the people of
the world, and everything human and holy.



There was a time, not too long ago (I'm thinking '60s or '70s here), when
idealism could have prevailed, where the noble nuances of selflessness and
concern for others could have determined the future we have chosen for
ourselves. But corporate fascism belittled and marginalized such quaint
sentiments as inferior to naked profits and sophisticated selfishness, and now
we are travelling down a road on which there are no U-turns. Although it
happened very recently, we are well past the point of no return, and the road
not taken will forever haunt us in our dreams, in each needlessly dead body we
see sacrificed on the evil highway of pure profit.



What was it we were talking about when all this happened, and how important
does it seem to us now, now that we can no longer turn back around, and make
all those needlessly dead people live again?



And we teach our children that stealing money from the dead is all we need to
make us feel good. Rejoice, ye faithful, this is the new American way.



Surely, this is the point of no return. We passed it some time ago. What was
it you were saying when we passed it?</font>




</font> 


</div>