ushering05401's Journal: To the Broken

Tonight my family has gathered. The eating is done. My nephews sang carols with the ladies, and when it was time for the men to join in we were as on-key as possible for a couple resentful former choirboys. Dishes are going into the sink. My sisters have settled in with their boys bundled in blankets to watch the Grinch, Frosty, and Santa.

Somewhere in rural Tennessee an ex-con uncle of mine has hopefully remembered to stock up on frozen meals so he doesn't have a repeat of last year, when he woke on Christmas morning to find that there was only one Hungry Man to split with his housemate and no stores open for miles.

Somewhere, every few minutes, a fellow American is checking to ensure that a certain Private is still in solitary Hell. Somewhere terrorists are plotting their revenge for crimes real and imagined. Somewhere, an African child is learning who and what America is and is all about. We can thank the private security forces and the American flags they fly at the refineries and pipelines for that. We will need to kill some of these children someday soon, and our politicians will tell us it is freedom the children hated, and that hatred is what made them take up arms. Our politicians are liars.

Tonight I have everything I need. Naturally, that is not enough anymore. I cannot heal the broken. I cannot heal the barrio. I cannot heal the wounds of life in a society of controlled neglect and premeditated ignorance that allows our industrial prison complex to thrive. Yet the words Ya Basta shall not cross these lips. It is time to finish the game.

Guilty or innocent, the form of our justice has failed the test of sanity. Our forms of discourse, appropriation, negotiation, and legislation have passed from flawed and of mortal vein to a type of perfection shared by all things that have been, and will not be again. Tonight I stand with the dispossessed and say to them - all you have seen in your American life will be thrown down and trod into the dust. The sins of our fathers are coming home.

I will not stop until the spirit of the Magna Carta is restored; the Constitution is observed; the lies of our modern history undone.

Merry Christmas if you roll that way. I'm thinking of you tonight.