____________________________________________________________________ Back when I was a youth (yes, it was before TV, Taco Bell, and Twitter) when milk was delivered to our house by an actual milkman, we used to get our entertainment (and get out of our parent's hair) from the movie theatres. We'd walk over to the Ramona Theater on Gratiot and McNichols (6 Mile to natives of "The Strait") and catch the Saturday matinee, usually featuring a western where the good guys wore white hats (and were white), a serial where Commander Cody saved the world from creepy denizens of another country, and in between...

____________________________________________________________________ Sunset is an angel weeping Holding out a bloody sword No matter how I squint I cannot Make out what it's pointing toward Sometimes you feel like you live too long Days drip slowly on the page You catch yourself Pacing the cage. --- Bruce Cockburn

_____________________________________________________________________ Pins and Needles. When was the last time you got picked on for doing something you either didn’t do, or failed to do, or forgot to do, or did the opposite of doing, or actually did do but in your own mind felt justified in doing? Yeah, I know. This is a classic example of a martyr complex or guilt by dissociation; a self-imposed behavioral conditioning programmed by our socialization process that puts our ego at the center of our own universe vis a vis that of the “greater good”.

_____________________________________________________________________ A Pre-Dystopian Tale. You can't live a post-revolutionary existence in a pre-revolutionary society. This quote has stuck with me over the years, since I first heard it during the early 1970’s in the dining room of a longtime friend's home in the Haight while interviewing spokespersons for a film I was shooting about a group of activists that had been instumental in creatiing the Free Clinic, the Food Bank, and had been active in several other Bay Area coalitions related to housing and healthcare for the indigent and homeless....

______________________________________________________________________ POVERTY MATTERS Poverty is created. Poverty is neither inherent in nor a product of nature since by its nature, poverty is an unnatural state imposed upon the powerless. Humans have created engines for extracting vast amounts of wealth from nature, using the economic power of that largesse to exploit, subjugate and marginalize the majority of the world's population in effect keeping them in a chronic state of poverty.