Think on These Things

I just finished up filling out an online application for the Peace Corps. I got rejected right away because I don’t have a college degree. Never mind my intense desire to help other people, and further the cause of world peace; never mind my strong work-ethic and stick-to-it-tiveness; never mind the fact that I’d be willing to do anything I can to the best of my abilities. No, I don’t have a college degree. Sure, I can wait until I finish up at Bunker Hill, but even then opportunities for Community College graduates in the Peace Corps are still negligible.  Peace Corps: I’m sorry I wasn’t a dedicated student in high school, but I’m smart, I promise. I’m sorry that even if my grades were better in high school, I would’ve gone to BHCC anyway because my family is stuck in the missing class. Won’t you please reconsider?

So a guy calls in to a radio show to let Rudy Giuliani know just exactly how much of a low-life scum-bag he really is. Rudy proceeds to make fun of the man and suggests he needs psychiatric help. The caller is a parkinsonian who who has lost his food stamps and Medicaid.

Sure Giuliani is a scum bag, but these actions are not unique to him. It is the philosophy of conservatism, of me not you, of haves and have-nots. How bad will it get? Our society is structured as such that being hungry is not a prerequisite for obtaining food, one must have the money to obtain food, and one must work to obtain that money, most likely as a wage-slave. Likewise, in the capitalist way of things, being ill is often not reason enough to receive treatment, one must be able to pay for that treatment. And this is how it works, with no sense of equality or humanity. If you happen to have a lot of money, you’ll also have a lot of food while your brother starves in the gutter. We have more food than we can eat in this country, just see how much food your supermarket throws out at the end of the day, yet people starve anyway. The man in the video does not work because he cannot work. No money, no medicine. Welcome to the new America. Survival of the richest.

How can we possible call such a society civilized?

Via breibart.tv, a man in a Vancouver airport was tazed to death after being held in a security checkpoint for almost ten hours. As you’ll see in the video report, the man is agitated and begins throwing objects, but once the police arrive the man abruptly stops throwing things. The man does not take any aggressive action toward the  police, yet they taze him anyway. The police continue to taze the man even after he has fallen to the ground screaming.

I’m going to follow this story, I’d like to see how these police officers are punished. Most likely they will not be punished very harshly if at all. I don’t think police nor government authorities realize that tazers are not safe “non-lethal” weapons. It’s a shame a man had to die for it, but hopefully the incident will force them to realize this.The police officers, from what can been see in this video, had no reason to use such excessive force on this man.

This goes beyond excessive force, what happened in that airport was plain murder.

If I have to, I’ll go alone, but damn I’d sure like someone to experience it with me. After seeing many travel blogs here on wordpress, I can’t stand thinking that I am not doing the same thing.