Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.
- Mark Twain
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Well, Oregon, you let me down. Somebody left the gate open (musta been one of them city folks, don't know the rules of common sense) and now Cliven Bundy's spawn and his pack of armed whack-a-doodles have snuck in.
Yeah. The internet is abuzz.
Me? I think they're a bunch of yahoos with guns.
The "men" (term used loosely here) that have occupied Malheur Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon are no more than a bunch of fakes and flakes. And Cliven Bundy?
Cliven Bundy is a racist and a real welfare queen.
Ignorance at that level does not bode well for his cognition skills in other areas. I'm just sayin'...
As for his son and the clowns at Malheur (#VanillaIsis) I really don't know what (other than "not") they're thinking. They are not patriots and are far from "heroes." In fact there is a case of some stolen valor within the ranks of these faux militiamen.
The young men and women that "occupied" Wounded Knee ("occupying" their own land, go figure) are patriots. Mary and Carrie Dann are patriots.
In the early 1980s a movement that had built momentum from the '60s and '70s began protests across the country against the insane levels of nuclear weapons stockpiled (mostly) by the United States and the old Soviet Union. Over 30 thousand nuclear devices were ready for use by us and the Soviet Union had 20 thousand plus nuclear weapons in their arsenal. And people protested.
We occupied federal facilities. People like the Berrigan brothers, Wavy Gravy, Starhawk, Daniel Ellsberg - and me and hundreds of others - stood up face-to-face with federal authority. And we did it unarmed. Nationwide there were probably no more than a few thousand of us at several facilities (me at Vandenberg AFB in Central California).
Key phrase: unarmed and willing to be arrested. Which of course we were.
We claimed the higher moral ground. We faced the criticism, the name calling and insults. We were arrested and we served our sentences. And we did bring some sense to the issue.
In 1986 there were over 60,000 nuclear weapons world wide. By 1992 the nuclear stockpile was reduced by a third. By 2002 levels had been reduced by more than 2/3 from the 1986 peak of 65,000.
"Unarmed and willing to be arrested." That's how human beings being human do it. That's patriotism.
Go home fellas. Leave and close the gate behind you. You simply are not wanted, nor needed.
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The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.
- Mark Twain
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