Gimme Back My Bullets

[Daveparts]

Gimme Back My Bullets
By David Glenn Cox




So as we stand at the vestibule of hard times and remain unacknowledged by those who would just as soon wipe us from the bottom of their shoes. We must again remind ourselves and our leaders that we are more than just generalities and statistics. That we the people are not tenant farmers or renters here but the owners and regents of this land. Your wealth is at our discretion; our poverty is not at yours. That a fair chance for opportunity and prosperity isn’t a social program or charity but a sovereign right.

We live in a land of daily Katrina’s, of millions flooded from their homes by seas of red ink. Our leaders tell us, that due to the uncertainties of the business model and world commerce that these are things that cannot be helped. Even going so far as telling us that in the grand scheme of things it is perhaps actually good for us. How callously they cast away women, children and families whose only crime is the date of their birth in America.

Two million homes foreclosed in 2007 with an estimated two million more in 2008, if we assume an average of four persons in each home that is 16 million Americans out into the street in twenty four months. The deaths of 3,500 Americans was justified as reason enough to go to war and kill tens of thousands of innocents half way around the globe yet 16 million Americans in the street is viewed as an abstract problem. So let the professors of economic mathematics cipher on that problem and then incrementally push a pawn of interest rate cuts. Changing the doilies on the Titanic, keeping the champagne well iced as the hull slips into the abyss.

Our inebriated president slurs and swaggers that he has dealt with our anxiety before and he will deal with it again now, as if we are just nervous nellies lacking testicles. But there is a big difference between spreading bullshit and dealing with the horns the President talks about anxiety but we are living in it. The President has offered us a crust of stale bread in his HOPE program. In it, the banks decide who may keep their homes, provided that their credit is good and if they not delinquent in their payments along with others methods of straining and sifting the flour of our population. Our Christian leader forgetting Christ’s admonishment that the healthy have no need of physicians.

Our Congress plays games treating us like caterpillars to be pushed and directed with sticks. They ride the economic unicycle while juggling hand grenades believing that we have no alternative, that they are the only game in town. The rub their hands with glee awaiting the next election cycle sowing the wind but forgetting that it will be their job to reap the whirlwind. Celebrating their chance to be in complete control, in complete control of a sinking ship and it only cost 16 million Americans thrown out into the street.

The candidates for the Presidency are exasperatingly clueless, Hillary? America’s corporate choice or Obama? Corporate lite. John Edward’s change by speaking to the people but working through the system. Then there are the Republican candidates, so loony as to be a worry if allowed to roam free on the streets let alone the Presidency. The cross dressing Rudy, the Mormon Mitt, the aged John McCain who promised if elected he will catch Osama Bin Laden? Give it a rest, in five years the United States was able break Hitler’s armies and destroy the Japanese military machine does McCain really believe that changing one man will make all the difference? Then there is Hucabee, who believes that to solve America’s economic problems we need only to tax the working consumer more so as to lighten the load on the poor working rich.

The failure of the candidates to address the real issues mirrors the failure of the system to deal with the real issues. The weakness of the candidates is the weakness of the system and if this is the best we can do? Then tear it down, for we are faced with revolutionary times and challenges that call for revolutionary actions to avert and mitigate catastrophe. That the politics of a little to the left or a little to the right ignore the pain of 16 million Americans out into the street. It would be tantamount to we the people, as a nation playing air guitar while ignoring their suffering.

They are the canary in the coalmine, they are not the result of the illness they are a symptom of the illness. An illness that if not treated and dealt with could matastisize into a vortex of failure and engulf us all.

We lament the loss of civil discourse and decorum, but we should not. We should understand this loss for what it is. Civil behavior should only be expected from those treated with civility and decorum from those treated with respect. The 16 million are treated with neither. The are ejected, treated as criminals and heaped with disdain and spoken of in the abstract. If they were to respond with civility and decorum I would lose respect for them not gain it. For they are being punished for the sins of others makings. They carry the chain and ball not for their own sins but for their class.

They are angry and should be, for American rage is wholly part and parcel of being an American, the refusal to accept the mal treatment at the hands of their government. They are scattered today but if they were to congeal then the world of those in new cars with summer homes could disappear entirely and we could enter into a dark tunnel from where no one knows where we might emerge. They are angry and should be and so should you be.

The Primary season is still just budding on the branches and already talk of voter fraud in New Hampshire has begun. Of hand counted ballot totals not matching optically scanned ballot counts, continuing the erosion of confidence that this is democracy at all as begun by the debacle of 2000 and the repeat of 04. Once the magician’s tricks are exposed the illusion is broken forever. Making our anger ever more fervent and ever more justified evolving our struggle from a quest to a moral imperative. Fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me.

If it is as we are promised in the American dream, that we all have a place at the table then there is good reason and a desire for us to be on our best behavior. But if we should continue in our slash and burn, sink or swim economy then why should I drown quietly? Where is the advantage in just following the cow in front of me into the slaughterhouse? If our elections have become a Punch and Judy side show then decorum and civility on our party would be completely inappropriate. To steal from us our birthright and to defraud us of our voice is not a crime to be litigated but a crime to be liquidated.


“Life is so strange when its changin, yes indeed
Well I’ve seen the hard times and the pressures been on me
But I keep on workin like the workin man do
And I’ve got my act together, gonna walk all over you”

“Sweet talkin people done ran me out of town
And I drank enough whiskey to float a battleship around
But I’m leavin this game one step ahead of you
And you will not hear me cry cause I do not sing the blues”

“Been up and down since I turned seventeen
Well I’ve been on top, and then it seems I lost my dream
But I got it back, I’m feelin better everyday
Tell all those pencil pushers, better get out of my way”

“Gimme back my bullets
Put em back where they belong
Ain’t foolin around, cause I done had my fun
Ain’t gonna see no more damage done
Gimme back, gimme back my bullets
Oh put em back where they belong
Gimme back my bullets”

(Allen Collins -- Ronnie Vanzant)