Tag: Boston

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Columnist Glenn Greenwald explains what the Boston bombings and U.S. drone attacks have in common, and how secrecy leads to abuse of government power.

“Should we change or radically alter or dismantle our standard protocols of justice in the name of terrorism? That’s been the debate we’ve been having since the September 11th attack,” Greenwald tells Bill. “We can do what we’ve been doing, which is become a more closed society, authorize the government to read our emails, listen in our telephone calls, put people in prison without charges, enact laws that make it easier for the government to do those sorts of things. Or we can try and understand why it is that people want to come here and do that.” [..]

“There certainly are cases where the United States has very recklessly killed civilians,” he tells Bill. “So at some point, when a government engages in behavior year after year after year after year, that continues to kill innocent people in a very foreseeable way, and continues to do that, in my mind that reaches a level of recklessness that is very similar to intentional killing.”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Charlie Pierce  is a sportswriter, author and political blogger. He is also lives very near Boston. He writes several article a day for Esquire at his Politics Blog. His writing about the bombing incident and his appearances on “All In with Chris Hayes” over the last week have kept many of us grounded in seeking the facts. He now has a request of the “gobshites” that are still spinning on their speculative tops: “Please, for the love of almighty god, shut the fk up.”

I mean, seriously, padlock the pieholes. We are fine. We are muddling through. We are carrying on. We are getting up this morning and going about the business of our lives. We are riding the T, or driving on the Pike, or walking along open paths along the Charles River. We are eating lunch at Donohues or shopping at the Target in the Watertown Mall. (OK, some of us are still doing some rubbernecking at the several crime scenes.) We are dealing with the fact that Copley Square, the center of practically everything, is still something of a crime scene. (We’re getting a little grumpy about it, but that’s what we do here.) Our kids are going back to school. And we are doing all these things without particularly needing the pity, concern, or the Very Deep Thoughts of a pack of Green Room school nurses seeking to coin what we’ve all been through into their own unique brand of banality. We are not children here, and neither are our children. [..]

Seriously, though, people. We’re really doing OK. It was nice having y’all around for a week. Hope you spent a little dough. Now go home, please. We have lives to live.

Thanks, Charlie, we sure hope they take your advice but we have our doubts.

If you can make it to Faneuil Hall in Boston around 11:30 this Thursday that’d be great. If you can do something locally wherever you are that’d be great. If you can take some time and write to your congress critters that’d be great. If you can take some time and write some LTEs that’d be great. If you can take some time and call your congress critters or local rag that’d be great.

If you can join one of the many protests that seem to be naturally occurring simultaneously that’d be really great. The longshoremen’s union, the truckers and the immigrants will all be making a statement on the born-in-the-USA (Haymarket, Chicago, 1886, 8 hr workday movement) International Workers Day.

Don’t know about all of you out there but I just can’t sit around flinging IP packets into the bit-stream and waiting for something to happen. We can type away until our fingers fall off. It’ll change nothing. We gather here in web space and piss and moan to the chorus. We’re intelligent, we’re creative, we’re outraged by what is happening around us. We pour our hearts out. Nothing happens. We’d still be in Viet Nam if people hadn’t gone out of their way to show up by the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, to collectively vent their unwillingness to allow the desecration of all they held to be right to continue.

It has to start somewhere at some point in time with someone showing up in public to make the case for stopping the collective insanity. It looks like a lot of people have picked May One as the day. If you can’t bring yourself to participate, find something going on and go watch. Body counts matter. There’s enough of us who were around for the 60s and 70s protests to remember what it felt like to be part of a movement for peace. Movement is the key. Turn off the computer, go outside, find one other person to join you and go to the most heavily trafficked public place near you. See if anyone else shows up who may have the same feelings you do.

This May One thing is in our primitive neo-pagan history. It’s that cross-quarter day halfway between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice. There’s a primal nature behind the day. Get outside with other like-minded people and see what happens. Take pictures. YELL LOUDER!

May One. Take America Back.

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