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I laid awake in bed, thinking about New York, and the summer of 2001. The summer when I still believed in an American democracy, in the freedom of the press, and a time when it seemed like we were becoming a part of an international society.
That summer, I had stood in the shadows of the World Trade Centers and wondered whether lightning would strike again, thinking about the 1993 bombings. The worst answer came to that thought a week later when two planes hit the towers, and in turn, irrevocably changed my view about America.
In those first three months after the towers had fallen and when families still held out hope for the lost ones, we had a unprecedented solidarity with the rest of the world. That solidarity was pissed away in the wind by the leader of the most corrupt administration in our government.
Corporations benefitted, grew larger and fatter, and more Americans were getting laid off each week while their jobs were being outsourced to India or to China. They started drilling in once pristine woodlands, and fabricated lies to go to war with Iraq, killing over 500 of our soliders and over two hundred thousand Iraqi civilians in the process. Over lies, lies told on television by our President.
The media, the once free press now bought by corporations, parrotted the lies told by those in the White House and those in the majority of Congress. They kept praising Bush for how well the economy was doing when thousands and thousands of Americans were laid off. In the Clinton administration, twenty thousand jobs were created every hour. In the Bush administration, we have lost over three million jobs.
Our health care is a joke, and over forty-five million Americans have to decide between food and health care. The pills on the shelf or the bread on the shelf. What to choose? Starvation or Death? Old women, hobbled by arthritis and other ailments of old age, choose between a can of soup on the grocery shelf, and pills that help ease their arthritis. What to choose? Other nations, other countries, have universal health care where citizens do not have to worry about choosing food over medicine.
Housing costs have gone up, driving the middle class out of cities, and gas prices have gone up, forcing the middle class to ration their gas, and the poor to go on city buses. Oil is power. In Iraq, they station American soldiers around oil fields for Halliburton.
Halliburton is god in Iraq, as well in America. The Constitution to this administration is of corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. They overthrow democratically elected leaders in third world countries to have access to oil and cheap labor.
This is not the world I wanted to live in. This is not the world in which I want to marry my partner. This is not the world in which I want to raise my children, the sons and daughters of my womb. This is not America. This is not my dream. It is a nightmare.
Please let it end. Vote Bush out of office. Vote against the corporations. Vote against the enroachment of women's reproductive rights. Vote against the raping and pillaging of the environment. Vote against the free government handouts to corporations. Vote against those who do not care about us. Vote against those who want to use 9/11 for their convention, dancing and laughing on the bones of 3,000 dead men and women.
Hear my call for a free and a vibrant America. I want an America that is loved and respected by the world. I want my children to grow up strong and happy. I want them to laugh, to think freely, and to dare to hope. I will help do this by voting. Vote for a Democrat, not a Republican. Use that power of the ballot to voice your anger and protest against this corrupt administration, the pack of liars and scroundels. Vote.
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