Current Invective

The main thing we learn when official secrets are revealed is something we already know: secrecy is a convenient and effective means of covering up malfeasance. Give a public official the power to conceal information under a security classification, and he will eventually turn that power to personal advantage.

Million bucks missing? No problem. Stamp the account “Secret” and blame the Afghans. Missiles launched on your own soldiers? Not to worry. Bury the documentary evidence under a “Top Secret” classification and tell everybody they were killed in action. Give them all medals.

I’ve been a protector of secrets, and it’s a mark of status to be entrusted with them. While I was studying Hungarian at a military language school, the FBI visited people I knew at home to find out whether I was fit to be cleared for espionage. At twenty, you get a little puffed up when your clearance arrives, but it doesn’t take long to see through the scam. In fact as in fiction, secrecy is deception, and secrecy breeds corruption. An official with the power to dispense security classifications can safely exaggerate the importance of what he tells you and devalue what he isn’t able to find out. Bad intelligence can look pretty good when the supplier doesn’t have to say where he got it.

My highly professional outfit was a case in point. My superiors could and should have anticipated Israel’s June 1967 offensive against Egypt and Syria. They didn’t, but their failure is shrouded in secrecy, and this puts them beyond accountability. My outfit had the run of the sky over the Mediterranean, and we could and should have uncovered the truth about the attack on our naval counterpart, the USS Liberty, in that same engagement. We didn’t, but that’s a secret and not to be discussed. We could and should have detected the movements leading to the Prague summer of 1968; we didn’t, but that’s a secret, too.

Secrecy has allowed five successive presidential administrations, including the one now sitting, to skirt laws and defy constitutional proscriptions, causing the people serious damage. Corruption in the classification of official secrets has been uncovered over and over again, but Americans seem to have more faith than ever in the ability of anonymous government officials to decide what should and shouldn’t be revealed. This is a recent development. People used to have to be reminded that “loose lips sink ships.” It’s a free country, after all. Nobody ever had to caution citizens of the Reich or the USSR not to blab, and we used to be proud and grateful that we were different. Today, not so much.

Newsmongers want us to believe that official secrecy should be accepted without question, and maybe we do believe that. Maybe the stream of lies from the embedded mass media in support of corrupt government has changed our values. It’s also possible that our apparent support for secrecy and the trappings of the police state is itself a lie. Either way, a powerful dose of official secrets should be administered regularly, and we should thank the leakers when they succeed.

The government/media complex claims lives will be lost because Afghanistan war plans have been revealed in the latest disclosures. We might all do well to mark history’s lesson that for evey life put at risk because a guilty secret was compromised, ten or a hundred lives may be removed from harm’s way when corruption is exposed.

“WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama sacked his loose-lipped Afghanistan commander Wednesday, a seismic shift for the military order in wartime, and chose the familiar, admired — and tightly disciplined — Gen. David Petraeus to replace him. Petraeus, architect of the Iraq war turnaround, was once again to take hands-on leadership of a troubled war effort.” Obama ousts McChrystal from Afghan command, chooses Iraq war architect Petraeus as successor , Associated Press, June 23, 2010

I count six misleading metaphors in this snippet of gossip masquerading as the lead paragraph of an Associated Press news report. Did Obama “sack” the general? Is the general “loose-lipped?” Is this a “seismic shift?’ Was Petraeus really the “architect” of a “turnaround” in Iraq? And what is “hands-on” leadership? This isn’t just bad writing. It’s disinformation, and the reporters should be sent for additional training. Ten people reading this would come away with ten distinct ideas of what really happened.

“Sack” is a slang term. It means discharge from employment. Most readers would think of a sacking as an abrupt decision prompted by poor performance on the part of the discharged employee or some other cause for dissatisfaction on the part of the employer. The use of this term leaves the reader to decide which interpretation to adopt. It this case, it gives an altogether inaccurate impression of what really happened. In fact, Obama accepted the general’s resignation.

“Loose-lipped” comes from a government poster circulated widely during World War II with this caption: “Loose lips sink ships.” A loose-lipped person is understood to endanger a military operation by reckless talk about some aspect of it, such as the time, place, equipment, strategy, or tactic. McChrystal isn’t loose-lipped at all. He didn’t endanger the operation, and he didn’t talk recklessly but deliberately and to a specific purpose: to impress lifelong civilians like Obama, his entourage, and the vast majority of Americans with the gravity of the military situation and their dismal failure to understand it, much less handle it.

“Seismic shift” is an unnecessarily technical term for earthquake. It’s a change in the topography casued by movement below the earth’s surface. To apply the term to a change of military command is not just an exaggeration; it’s an obfuscation, and it’s also redundant. What the writers seem to want to get across is that this is a big deal. Do readers really need to be told that a change in the high military command is a big deal? And how big a deal is a “seismic shift?” The writers don’t know, and they don’t care either. They wanted a picturesque (if trite) metaphor, and they found one.

An architect is a designer of buildings. A military strategist is not an architect. Calling a general an architect implies that military strategy is a creative activity of some kind, when in fact it’s an altogether destructive endeavor in all its aspects. Generals undo the work of architects by bombing buildings and unleashing artillery on them. These reporters mean to glorify this general, and describing him inaccurately as an architect is their means of accomplishing this.

“Turnaround” means a change of direction. Has there been a change of direction in Iraq? Do these reporters want us to believe that the USA is winning now when it was losing before? Do they want us to think there’s peace now, when there was violence before? What turnaround are they talking about? Who knows? Who cares?

“Hands-on” leadership is meant to imply close personal involvement in every function performed by the people being led. Is that what generals actually do? Mostly not. These reporters were looking for a complimentary metaphor to attach to this particular general’s personal style, so they took this nearly meaningless but ultimately misleading term and just threw it in there for the heck of it.

Two reporters, Anne Gearan and Jennifer Loven, and at least one editor had to sign off on this disinforming lead paragraph. What motivated them to do that? Why didn’t somebody object? The reporters could have said this: “President Barack Obama accepted the resignation of his Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal Wednesday, after remarks critical of the civilian command and attributed to McChrystal appeared in a national magazine. The President chose Gen. David Petraeus to replace McChrystal. Petraeus commanded US forces in Iraq under President Obama and is very popular among Washington politicians and the media.”

I don’t know what motivates reporters and editors to mislead us, but I suspect it’s part of the dumbing-down that’s been accelerating in recent years. They use shorthand and metaphor because they take us readers for idiots. They think we won’t read their account if it’s long or complicated or informative in any way. We”ll get bored, they think, and quit reading. Instead of telling us what happened–a bunch of facts and details that are just too complicated for us cretins to understand– they tell us what we should think about what happened. This is win-win for the reporters: they don’t have to do any actual work, and their stuff is accepted gratefully by the corrupt media they serve. They call this journalism .

Helen Thomas is neck-deep in Judaic fury, but she’s right. The transplantation of European refugees to Palestine was a bad idea. It displaced millions of non-Europeans to make room for the transplants, and it eventually produced a racist government with a state religion that claims exalted status in the eyes of its god and a license to kill.

I suppose Helen Thomas gets as angry as I do when she runs across an “Israeli” from Brooklyn or London. What entitles these people to live on lands that were seized from folks who were born there? Don’t say it’s because they’re God’s chosen people, because anybody can say that. I’ve never known a thief who didn’t claim other peoiple’s property was put in his possession by providence.

Israel should have been created in Texas or rhe Rheinland or Ukraine, on lands seized from the chauvinistic peoples that spawned world war, and not in Palestine, among peoples that had come to spurn warfare and nationalism. It was morally wrong for the war’s winners to destroy a peaceful nation with an indigenous culture–Palestine, where religious tolerance had reigned for generations–to create a warlike nation with an alien, hostile culture in its place.

Time hasn’t healed any of the wounds inflicted by the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. That’s because the Jewish state recognizes the full citizenship of Jews only. Jews, whether from Russia, North America, Africa or elsewhere, enjoy privileges in Israel that indigenous non-Jews don’t. Arabs who can’t produce the requisite ownership documents may be evicted from their homes, even today, to be replaced by Jews from the farthest corners of the earth.

Eventually, Israel will destroy the Jewish religion. It’s hard to maintain a moral code alongside a military code that encourages the slaughter of civilians and a civil code that dispossesses innocents. It’s a religion that seems to mistake retribution for self-defense. “Do unto others,” Israeli Jews seem to be saying, “but do it first. ”

Of course, no American, not Helen Thomas and not Steve Fournier, is in a position to lecture Israel. Americans kill children by remote control in Pakistan so we can assassinate their parents, and we don’t apologize for it. Americans displaced huge segments of the population of Iraq and erected barriers–physical and political–to keep them from ever returning. As bad as Israel is, we’re worse.

But when you’re right, you’re right, and Helen Thomas is right about Palestine.

Who else thinks BP should be disqualified to make decisions about how to stop the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico? Here’s a company that has a responsibility to its investors to maximize profits. Doesn’t this create a potential conflict of interests for the BP officials who must deal with the deluge?

If you’ve had a look at pictures of the installation that failed a mile underwater, you see a series of members bolted together, maybe 50 feet tall, topped by a partially crimped pipe that angles off toward the bottom when it ought to be pointing straight up. Suppose there were a method of collapsing the pipe or isolating the assembly that would make the oil in that reservoir permanently inaccessible to BP. Would BP consider that course, even if it had a 90% chance of succeeding? Do you see the potential for conflict here? If independent engineers and scientists were making decisions about how to stop the flow, they might worry less about the value of the oil being lost than someone who actually owns that oil.

This logic could not have escaped Barack Obama and his minions. Their claim that only BP has the resources to shut off the flow is mockery. Even the dumbest of us knows better than to entrust an emergency to the guys who created it.

Or not. We plotted a dangerous course when we set out to make ourselves dumb enough to believe what’s on TV without becoming too dumb to carry out the obligations of citizenship. This event will test whether there’s anything left of American ingenuity.

All indications are that we’re as helpless as lambs and as clueless as the hacks who populate government and the media. The networks and newspapers give us plenty of BP-bashing and similar gossip, but nothing from scientists or engineers or smart people of any kind on how to stop the leak, where the oil has gone so far, how much might come out, where it will go, just what harm it will do, how much it would cost if the spill were stopped now and how much it will cost each day it continues.

The media and government won’t tell us the names of the racketeers that let this happen, and we can expect them to wait till Obama’s popularity falls below 50% a couple of weeks from now before they start talking about his accountability. Depend on the media and government not to call for a temporary halt to expensive military adventures so we can tend to our precious waters.

Do they take us for idiots? No question about that. Are we idiots?
The gusher in the Gulf will tell us one way or another. History could record that the future of humanity was entrusted to fat, stupid, pretty folk who did as people like that usually do.

We take it for granted that government service is a perquisite of the politically-connected. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to hear that two of our chief executives, the current resident and one of his predecessors, conspired to offer a high-status government post to a potential challenger to one of their political allies. The fact that two presidents were willing to do this doesn’t make the practice any less corrupt.

The economic disaster in Greece and the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are both directly attributable to corrupt government, and both will eventually hurt vast numbers of bystanders. Not necessarily innocent bystanders, but certainly not the parties responsible for the corrupt practices that caused the harm.

In Greece, government officials allowed lenders to collude with government borrowers to understate the size of the debts being contracted. With each new advance, bankers, lawyers, and political patrons pocketed a cut of the proceeds, When assets everywhere lost value a couple of years ago, the Greek government got hassled by its creditors, and the truth about the size of the debt eventually slipped out.

As usually happens in cases of insolvency, Greece couldn’t make its payments without more credit. To keep Greece out of bankruptcy–for now–the functioning national economies of Europe–all two of them–had to cough up, and Greek workers had to accept layoffs, pay cuts and tight credit to make the payments. The financiers and corrupt officials who profited from the credit bubble get to keep their spoils.

In the Gulf of Mexico, government officials allowed offshore oil prospectors to conspire with environmental protection enforcers to relax regulation. In exchange, the enforcers and their facilitators got wined, dined and sexed by oil industry prostitutes. So pervasive was the corruption that Barack Obama himself refers to “a culture” in the Minerals Management Service that made it immune to reform, despite the election of a new president and Congress.

So relaxed was the regulation, under Obama as under his predecessor, that companies like British Petroleum were allowed to drill at unprecedented depths without proper safeguards against releases. Of course, there was an accident, and it’s hard to look at the video of it without losing hope for the future of your grandkids. One person got fired, but most of the people who gained from offshore oil get to keep their profits.

Neither event came as a surprise to serious analysts. In Greece (as everywhere else), only idiots and crooks maintained that the inflation of monetary value that supported all that borrowing could go on indefinitely. The crooks and idiots were in charge, however, and the Greek people didn’t hear much about the bubble and what might happen at pop-time.

Here in the USA, even in the corrupt Minerals Management Service there were voices that warned against the manifest risk of offshore drilling at extreme depths. The oil industry didn’t allow them to be heard, and neither did the Obama adminstration. As for our media, they routinely censor news critical of major advertisers like BP. The risk to humanity of deepwater drilling was suppressed accordingly. Still is.

Assuming that the gusher in the gulf hasn’t done enough damage already to cause mass extinctions, including us, what should people be doing? Greeks took to the streets for a few days and went home. Americans, who blend cowardice with conservatism in a way that keeps them home at all costs, prefer to fret over stuff they can’t do anything about, like discontented Arabs and other people’s wombs. Governments don’t pay attention to protesters anyway, except to gas them and beat them every so often.

As a last resort, Americans might try to organize locally and by state, as if there were an election coming. Oh, yeah, there is an election coming. I haven’t heard a candidate talk about Greece or Oil and what to do about them. That’s because political candidates don’t know what to do. We take this for granted, knowing, as we do, that the strategy of Pubs and Crats is to select people who have no firm convictions and no fixed notions of any kind. People who can be molded. They know only what they need to know, and they don’t know how to deal with big bad debt or big bad pollution.

Stuffing politicians into the hole in the bottom of the sea won’t help, but it’s probably not too late to recruit candidates who can unseat the current office-holders–all of them–and bring rogue government and its racketeering officials and naive facilitators to justice. Pubs and Crats won’t do it, so it’s up to the people to find new leaders who will.

I’ve bet heavily on people to take up this challenge by making myself a candidate. If the voters of Connecticut have the guts to elect me as their attorney general, I’ve pledged to cause heartburn to some people in the federal government who deserve it. I know that running for office is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. You should do it, too, or find someone who will.

I caught parts of Joseph Lieberman’s senate committee hearing on the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. His witnesses were cabinet secretary Janet Napolitano and an emergency response officer from the Coast Guard. Napolitano offered no apology on behalf of the government for the calamity. Neither did Lieberman or his Republican counterpart, Susan Collins.

Lieberman, who referred repeatedly to the “Minerals and Mining Service,” doesn’t even know the name of the agency he’s supposed to be overseeing. It’s as if these people had deliberately turned their backs on the most dangerous enterprise in human history. Was this because they couldn’t bear to face the patent risk of catastrophe, or was it just that they’d sold out to rich folks? Today, they say they’re ready to do something, now that it’s too late.

In some cultures public officers would have resigned already and maybe made a discreet exit from this life. Here they survive somehow and prosper. Lieberman, who scans the distant eastern horizon endlessly for signs of danger, had his contemplations interrupted by this very local event. Now that the gusher has their attention, will Lieberman or Collins or Barack Obama grasp the manifest madness of for-profit offshore oil recovery?

Don’t hold your breath. We know that when people organize to make money, they’ll do just about anything to make the greatest possible amount of it. If they’re rich enough and powerful enough, they can and will risk all humanity for the right sum. That’s what the oil industry has done, with the connivance of the federal government. Oh, well.

So Lieberman and his witnesses perform an elaborate dance. He may now be prepared to question the agency whose name he does not know, but government dares not make a move that will disrupt the flow of oil, even if continuing the flow means the end of mankind. BP and the oil industry have Lieberman and the rest of us by the short hairs, just as too-big-to-fail bankers do. If they stop what they’re doing, the consumer economy, as we know it, skids to a halt. Some of us worry that that’s going to happen anyway, and so it seems we might be better off to know when and by what means than to wait for the capitulation.

If only there could be an interrogation of some kind, but that tactic is reserved for brown-skinned plotters, not white guys in suits. Lieberman could have had his committee use a lawyer who knows something about oil spills to ask the questions instead of grandstanding and getting nothing of value. We waited for somebody to ask what sort of government it is that would allow this to happen. If there is an activity in which the federal government should be fully immersed, it’s offshore drilling. Where was the notoriously corrupt agency that “regulates” offshore drilling? Napolitano’s not saying. Lieberman’s not saying.

Another question we might like to hear asked is what will happen to all that oil. ‘Crats don’t know. ‘Pubs don’t know. And they don’t want to know either. Lieberman’s committee unanimously facilitated the oil industry and its agents in government, including the president himself, in a joint effort to minimize the seriousness of the situation in the Gulf of Mexico.

You may have noticed that the media censored news of this event for weeks. Like the government, they took BP at its word. They could have dropped a video camera into the water or demanded precise estimates of the discharge from the government, but they didn’t. Instead, they interviewed tearful shrimpers. They didn’t suggest (and still don’t) that the government act unilaterally. They didn’t fault lax enforcement. They didn’t resurrect the scandals of a couple of years ago, when big oil was found to have corrupted the Minerals Management Service. They didn’t seem to want to take on a big, powerful company and frequent advertiser.

You can, like Lieberman, choose to be afraid of what probably won’t happen, like being killed by an Iranian, or what probably will: a catastrophe caused by corruption. The gusher in the Gulf is such an event, the worst ever, and it’s a direct result of the corruption of federal officials by the oil industry. Not just a few government officials. All of them. The states should band together, to the extent legally permissible, to foreclose the federal government. Take it into receivership. Two-thirds can call a constitutional convention to take away the powers of the reckless, greedy despots and courtesans who poisoned our waters and ruined our children’s future.

What we did was to entrust the future of the planet as a place hospitable to humans to a few greedy American and British businessmen, and they’ve opened a passage to hell. What’s pouring into the Gulf of Mexico stands to be dispersed from Cuba to Gibraltar and to all points in between.

People in our government let British Petroleum operate an unsafe rig in the Gulf, and nobody made the company install a proper shutoff. The oil is flowing freely at a rate that can only be estimated, and it’s already created a slick almost the size of Connecticut. The authorities and the company have no idea how to stop the flow and it is likely to continue for weeks.

Media coverage of the event seems to focus on the short-term effects on local fisheries. There’s hardly any discussion of the true consequences. On CBS, the reporter didn’t talk to a single scientist or engineer, except for a BP hack who said about 25 words. If anyone has occasion to review this coverage a few weeks from now, it will be deemed superficial, at best, and, at worst, deliberately misleading, to the advantage of the culpable company–a regular advertiser.

By my elementary reckoning, accepting recent estimates of 5,000 barrels leaking per day, this spill exceeds Exxon Valdez after 50 days. And nobody’s saying the spill gets contained within 50 days. Tell me if I’m wrong on this, but isn’t the water in the Gulf flushing continually into the Atlantic, passing the entire East Coast of the US in its journey to Western Europe?

What we’re looking at is an unfolding catastrophe, not just for local shrimpers and sea birds but for the entire Atlantic. When the world catches on to what our corrupt government has done here, unleashing poison in unprecedented volume into a stream that touches the whole western world, people are going to get mad.

Overlooked by the news reporter from CBS was the probable destination of the oil. If it follows the prevailing currents, as it has so far, and if it leaks for 90 days, it will pass between Cuba and Florida, kiss the North American coast from Miami to Newfoundland and then cross the Atlantic to foul the North Sea and Baltic Sea beaches of our partner in oil, Britain, and its erstwhile mates along the North and West Coast of Europe.

Looking at it from a lawyer’s point of view, I see unprecedented liability, and I see it falling not only on BP and the US government but on each and every one of us. The USA and Britain will be taken into receivership over this, in my opinion, and the reparations will make the penalties inflicted on Weimar Germany look paltry by comparison.

America should know this: if the flow of oil is not stanched within days, there will almost certainly be another collapse of value in the US economy in the near term. People will get out while the getting is good, before the public catches on to what’s ahead. I suspect the short-sellers are on the prowl as I write, with the news-reporters and financiers scrambling to liquidate before anybody starts talking about how bad this really is.

In line with the old adage that you can’t fight city hall, a judge dismissed my lawsuit against Hartford’s police chief. I had sued him for corralling me and a group of protesters in an area a block away from the public street where George Bush passed by about two years ago. The Connecticut constitution gives me an explicit right to “apply to those invested with the powers of government, for redress of grievances, or other proper purposes, by petition, address or remonstrance,.” The judge said I suffered no injury when this right was denied me. The judge recpgnized that I was chilled but found that chiliing is not injury.

In a curious twist, the judge ruled that the establishment of the free-speech zone was reasonable and that I was unreasonable in expecting to get close enough to George Bush to remonstrate with him. She didn’t need a second legal justification for dismissing my case–sound jurisprudence discourages judges from making rules unnecessarily–but she felt compelled to rule that the protection of the president preempts the duties of citizenship.

I could appeal this case, but I’m chilled, more by the judge than I was by the police chief. Chilled to the point of utter conviction that I’m on a fool’s errand. Constitution, indeed. These are lawless times, and government, not to exclude the wheels of official justice, is a racket. I’ve spent enough of myself on futility and failure. I’ve been writing incessantly and without remuneration, stuff that gives my readers a stomach ache, to no discernible effect. I involve myself in electoral politics, and the returns are an embarrassment to me and my party. I inflict myself on public access TV viewers, who probably see me as living proof that it’s still a free country and things are not as bad as they seem. I’ve managed to delude myself that this enterprise is worthwhile in some way and that I’m not just a crank, as the judge judged me. In fact, I was just about to begin a regular radio program when my reverie was interrupted.

In this case, as in my other activities as a gadfly, I’ve done more harm than good. We now have a Connecticut judge on record legalizing free-speech zones. I’d appeal if I thought I had an outside chance of winning, but I don’t and so I’m quitting. All of it. I’ve been writing and ranting and politicking by way of apology to my grandchildren. Over my strenuous objections–the last of which have now finally been uttered–we’ll be leaving their generation a degraded earth and a corrupt and bankrupt USA. I’m betting that I’ve finally accumulated sufficient dissenting opinion to spur somebody to say, on Grave Defilement Day 2060, “Don’t water Grandpa. He tried.”

Good-bye.

There’s a piece of the downtown Hartford skyline, popularly known as the butt-ugly building, that protrudes so forlornly from the surrounding sea of parked cars that it draws the attention of motorists passing through on the interstate.  To some, it must symbolize the failure of our once-great little city. 

The building is located at what used to be a busy commercial corner, now isolated by highway interchanges.  It’s been vacant for years.  It used to have stores at the ground level and miscellaneous businesses above.  It was within easy walking distance of movie theaters, restaurants, and department stores and adjacent to a neighborhood of residential tenements, and it was near the intersection of just about every city bus and trolley line.  It was surrounded by other buildings, all gone now to make room for local and interstate traffic.  It’s on a hill, and you can see it from a quarter mile away in every direction, with the adjoining land partly paved and covered with parked cars during the day.  

Development in Hartford has been very slow for quite some time, and the butt-ugly building stands as mute testimony to our decline.  Hartford’s in trouble partly because of economics–unemployment is endemic in cities that used to make things but don’t anymore–and partly because of a lack of confidence in the city’s capacity to govern itself.  The butt-ugly building, with paint half-peeled from the brick and windows broken throughout, is pretty much worthless in these depressed conditions, except as a parking lot, its highest and best use.  Last I  heard, the landlord was asking for permission to knock it down, and some people think that’s a pretty good idea.  I don’t.

I look at the building and I imagine the parking lot as a green and the building in use.  In my vision, it’s a travel hub, with underground parking and no-fare public transportation in every direction.  Or, on limited capital, the building and land are converted to agriculture.  Urban farms are “cropping up” in vacant lots and factory buildings here in the Northeast, and this spot has plenty of land, especially if the whole vacant area were taken by eminent domain.  There’s a great southern exposure, there’s a ready supply of organic waste matter to nourish whatever gets planted, there’s plenty of labor available, and there’s a local market for the harvest.

Urban farming could be done at the butt-ugly building even with a small, private collective.  Raise capital with bonds, grants and savings.  Lease or buy the building and land.  Put the parking underground or simply green the whole lot.  Put a wind  turbine on top of the building to catch the breeze generated by the cars zooming through on the highways and put a garden and photovoltaics up there, too.  Move the members of the collective, maybe a few families, into the building to live and work. Refit the building to farm hydroponically on three or four of the six floors.  Make it Hartford’s own hanging garden.  And do the same thing for a dozen other butt-ugly vacant buildings within a mile of this one.

So many things to do and so many people to do them, and we’re paralyzed, waiting and hoping that something nice will happen to us.  Next time you’re on Route 84, take a second look at the butt-ugly building (if it’s still there).  Read its message: “People!  Do something!”