Category: 1 Uncategorized

First I want to send my condolences out to the friends and family of those hurt or murdered in London during the terrorist attacks on 7/7/05.

Today I was having a rather sluggish day getting back into the Monday grind, when I stopped by the corner Starbucks for a pick up. This one happens to be right outside a subway station near Times Square so it’s quite busy and yet again, proves to be the slowest service coffee shop I’ve been to. Unlike most days, I experienced first hand the raised level of awarness of the people here in NYC. The shop filled with about 15 people and as I was waiting for my tall misto a woman sholder tapped me, asking if a small black bag by the door was mine. I looked like a nice TUMI computer bag but as the woman asked around the store to whom it belonged to, she was visably more concerned with each denial.

Aloud I heard a few uncomforting comments “Well is anyone going to call it in or should I!”, “I’m not touching it cuz it might go BOOM” and “Shit!”. Just when someone was about to toss the back out into the street, a lady walks in, closing up her cell phone and picks up the bag. Apparently she was outside phoning her friends for their Starbucks order while leaving her case in the doorway. I thought the sholder tapping lady was going to beat her from the tounge lashing she doled out but no one can blame her.

Everyone’s on edge right now in the city… Reports of misbehavior, and suspiscious packages have doubled. Two rafters were detained today as well as they were rafting under the George Washington bridge and I saw two men in suits arrested for apparently yelling bomb in the subway.

I hear the phrase “Well its the sign of the times” more and more often and it chills me to know that social measures are possible to avoid such behaviors given the right tact and patience. However, the path we are on has been chosen some time ago and much before I even understood world politics, however, I consistantly believe there are many more opportunities to bring the US back to a more settled state.

Who knows if I’ll see those days… Until then I walk the streets with other New Yorkers; an eye peering constantly in the corners, shadows and on suspicious characters, keeping watch and looking out for not only personal threats but community ones as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Some how I’m just not as motivated this year to celebrate as I was last year… I’m in NYC, but honestly, I’ve rarely heard excitement about it like when we were kids, shooting bottle rockets at each other and throwing ‘flowers’ into the neighbors pools… maybe the current state of the world has something to do with it.. at any rate, I’ll be BBQin’, riding jet skis and havin a roof top party – I hope not to burn down our pre-war building…

Be safe out there and please don’t try these at home:

*Click on a pic to see full view*

“I think younger workers?first of all, younger workers have been promised benefits the government?promises that have been promised, benefits that we can’t keep. That’s just the way it is.”
?President George W. Bush – Washington, D.C., May 4, 2005

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
??President George W. Bush – Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security…”.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. …

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it… unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic Germans’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

“Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something — but then it was too late.”

“You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? — Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?”

excerpts from-

They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1933-45 – Milton Mayer -(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

(Mayer, an author and journalist and an American Jew of German descent, went to Germany looking for the “average German.” in an attempt to understand the development of Nazism in Germany )