What It Will Take

1976…32 years ago, Paddy Chayefsky:

Howard Beale:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.

Howard Beale: [shouting] You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’

The window thing was a good idea at the time, and great visuals for a movie….but now we have the internet.

And slowly but surely, America is waking up to the fact that they have access not just to information, but also to the ears of those in power.

Study: Americans use Net to look past sound bite

NEW YORK (AP) – Americans dissatisfied with political sound bites are turning to the Internet for a more complete picture, a new study finds.

In a report Sunday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said that nearly 30% of adults have used the Internet to read or watch unfiltered campaign material – footage of debates, position papers, announcements and transcripts of speeches.

“They want to see the full-blown campaign event. They want to read the speech from beginning to end,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew group. “It’s a push back from the sound-bite culture.”

Push back.

That’s What It Will Take.

Massive, semi-organized push back, coming from The People…over the internet.

For the record….I have no idea how that will happen and no nice tidy plan to make it do so. All I know is that that is what it will take.

That is how it will start, at least. If we can get The People in the streets, so much the better, but don’t count on it. For some reason…..The People are scared to get out in the streets and let their faces be seen by “Homeland Security” and become the targets of their massive domestic spying program.

The government, from our “representatives” in Congress to the cop on the beat, the media, massive faceless corporations and “business interests” (like the MIC) who demand the status quo be enforced so they can profit….all of these forces…The Establishment as we know it, have become more than ever enemies of The People. Their interests are now vastly different from ours. And they don’t care.

The raw power grabbing greed and bald faced looting of the middle and lower classes that the Republicans and George Bush have succeeded in carrying out….and that the Establishment faction of the Democratic Congress has now blatantly bought into… has drawn a line in the sand in a way that has never occurred before. They at least used to have the decency to pretend they cared about The People.

Under George Bush, the masks have come off. The pretense that the Lower and Middle Class are anything but sheep has been abandoned.

“They” are waging Class War. Though they deny it….even to themselves, and are shocked when accused of it.

Obama will NOT save us, he is smart enough to know he can’t, especially with the unholy mess he will be faced with when he takes office. The most he can do is allow us to do it, in fact, Obama is calling on US to save ourselves.

Massive, overwhelming, citizen involvement is what it will take to save us. With perhaps a few People’s Champions thrown in.

This is not news, or in any way original thought on my part. I am repeating myself ad the thoughts of others….but repetition is what it will take, pounding on the same themes, throwing more and more rocks in the pond to create those ripples, calling out again and again for those who are being treated as sheep …..to look up. To regain their voice, and to shout for all the world to hear…

‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’