As our infrastructure suffers more and more from neglect, and our systems and agencies that are supposedly designated to "help" become locked down, unaccountable, and protected from scrutiny, I share your fears.

I feel an unraveling. I feel it in multiple areas of our constructed ideal of "the American dream." Things have changed, and this change is marked under the misguided (I'd like to use a stronger word) policies of this disastrous administration. Try as hard as they might, though, it is my belief that bad seeds sown reap awful crops and the harvest is coming!

When a country can turn on a city like New Orleans, blaming victims for not miraculously removing themselves from disaster (as if there was some option they just didn't feel inclined to take), when we can watch an elderly ex-school teacher who hasn't imbued in decades having his head bashed against a wall, and a reporter smashed down on the hood of his car, we can no longer deny the state of fear and lock-down we are living in.

The only thing I know to do is write about it, talk about it, expose it to the best of my ability--and thank God there are people like you, Rowan, who are doing the same.

Thanks for the support Pamela. As bummed as I am feeling I thought others might be as well.

In my opinion, what happened in New Orleans is examples of the very best of what Human Beings are. It is only our inability to face this truth that leads us to believe otherwise, and to therefore remain incapable of doing anything about it. Sorry to say! Ed.

Okay, that came out completely opposite of what I was intending. This is a correction.

The horrors of Cops going over to the other side, of dogs being shot in schools apparently for fun, the looting that had nothing to do with survival, and the negligence all around at all levels, are the examples of the best that Human Beings can be, despite claims to the contrary, when in isolated instances, humans display heroic tendencies of selflessness. I did not intend to mean that slaughtering man's best friend for sport and thieving from neighborhood small business and cops outright slaughtering survivors should be viewed as an ideal we should urge our kids to emulate. I suggest a scientific study of the effects of an authoritarian/fascist religion on nearly two thousand years worth of generations of humans whose crime has been to want to seek what that religion said it was offering, but failed to provide, while instead giving subtle manipulation beyond the grasp of its victims, in order that it might achieve World Domination! And I screwed up the url for my web site. Ed.