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Just thought you should see this.  Bound and Gagged.

I have to link to this.  (Found from links at r@d@r's excellent blog.)

And the same day I found that (today), I also wrote this to my Senators, Kennedy and Kerry, regarding Constitutional amendments to bar flag burning:

Why deny?

I probably should apologize for that last entry. I mean, it's not exactly flattering to display the sides of me that hate, especially when I am trying to be all about peace, compassion, and understanding. Besides, prudence dictates that one not fuck with the sacred cows of the ruling regime. Then I saw that slimeball Cheney pitching his eulogy-rag.

No. Pretending that I do not contain vile emotions toward baby murderers, mother-rapists, and refugee slaughterers would be employing the same kind of perception management as them. Only worse. Instead of the public deception they practice so as to cloak their schemes under apparent legitimacy, I would be decieving myself so as to pretend that I really did not hate them.

Hate is not the enemy; clinging to hate, harboring hate, and feeding hate--that is the enemy. Holding on to hate out of fear works to close off my heart, and thus I preserve my preciousness within an impenetrable fortress of misery. That's fine, if that is what I want to do. But it is not. And denying hatred--when it's really there--is not a benevolent act, it simply cuts me off from myself. As much as I scare myself, and sometimes try to disown myself, in the end I never want to lose myself.

I have compassion: I can but imagine the wails of sorrow that have wracked the widow, Nancy. I can only speculate what torture the last decade of his dying has been for her. And as if to mock her suffering, she recieves as final compensation the loss of him forever.

I have compassion: I can but imagine the livid screams of a Guatamalan mother who sees her infant baby bayoneted in mid-air. I can only suspect that whatever subsequent monstrosities she endured, they left her dull, and her own death came welcome to her.

Hate is not the enemy, but it is there; if your cardiac muscle still twitches and your arteries still pulse with life, then life will bring to you from time to time, along with all the other things, a thing to raise in you a sentiment of hate. Do not deny that it is there. Acknowledge it, own it, claim possession of it. Then define it as clearly as you can--writing, like this, can help.

Then, simply, let it go.

I wish I said it myself. 

Sometimes I don't trust my intuition.  Sometimes, words come to mind forthrightly, words which I don't speak because of that pesky frontal lobe--the Great Inhibitor.  Sometimes I look upon parts of my own soul as alien because of nothing more than the fact that nobody has given me permission to own them.  And I hide these corpses in my conscience because of nothing less than the State's discouragement of dissent.

I hate Ronald Reagan, and I hate the government for which he stood.  Not the constitutionally-intended government which we all learned about in Civics class, but the illegal, criminal and immoral government which hid behind the disinformation of the 'Great Communicator'; the thinly veiled black government which still thrives, and continues to cultivate a seething contempt for the encumbrances of humane ideals such as justice and free speech.  I hate the conspiracy that promoted Reagan--and others before him and since--as its cover, its front-man, and in so doing reduced the dignity of the presidency--our head of state--to that of a mob boss. 

His suffering is over.  He could not have died soon enough to make up for all the lives he cut short, nor could he have lived a sufficient number of lifetimes in agony to compensate for all the suffering he caused. 

I wonder what dying will be like.  I wonder if we will be finally un-anchored from all that binds us to time and place, I wonder if we will be able to really float away from the 'here and now' and go back to the 'then and there' of first loves (or second loves) and new discoveries.  I wonder if we will be able to revisit, even as we fly through the air, passing by those nagging memories of youth: The icewater spring gurgling quietly in the perfectly silent snow-filled woods on that overcast day ten or twenty years ago (or could it be thirty?)  That day when snowflakes lingered and floated in the air before falling, as if wanting to start a conversation.

I wonder if on the way, we can pause and lay again in the grass where we watched clouds form distorted faces, and horses heads as they passed us by.  I wonder if, as we fly away from here, we will be able to find again that fleeting time and moment when we suddenly knew something indescribable about everything, and we knew we knew it, but we knew we wouldn't be able to make it stay, and we watched as it slipped away in time, and we hoped we might come back to it again someday. Will we ever be able to have that again, do you think?