I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

When any of us follow blindly, we risk giving away the lives of our children and taking away the lives of other people's children. We have put power into the hands of evil people. And we have done that through disregard, laziness, and simply not caring about our governments and the things they do in OUR names. We have allowed organizations within our governments to corrupt the fabric of our nations, and we have made it possible to accept great lies because we pretend we can do nothing to change the course of our futures. There has developed over the past fifty years a serious sickness in capitols of this world. A sickness so perverse that we no longer recognize it as such.

When world leaders get angry, and citizens get carried away with nationalistic emotions--emotions engineered and coerced and manipulated by fabrications in the press, and by television clips meant to have us react in anger and rage--we fall far short in the effort to reach a destiny that is so far beyond these differences that are NOT between men and women, but are instead between the desires of leaders to control the resources and people of this planet, Earth.

Until we treat world leaders as the pariahs they are, and multi-nationals as the bloodsuckers they are, and until we treat all humanity as our brethren and subsequently worthy of our assistance and love, until then, we will willingly buy into that old lie, "Dulse et decorum est pro patria mori."

I no longer believe a single damned thing any government official says. Period. Nor do I believe news broadcasters who spend time getting their hair done while they should be digesting the reports they are about to deliver. What kind of people have we become, and what kind of people are we perceived to be by corporations, when we need our opinions formed for us by television sets? Just what the hell have we become when we so easily send our children to kill other people's children in the name of whatever 'ism' seems like it will sell, will exonerate us of our guilt, our complicity? And what kind of people have we become when the obvious solution--the incarceration of all world leaders--is an idea so much beyond our imaginations that we dare not even think of it?

Indeed, the greatest trick the Devil ever did was convincing us that he doesn't exist. We shall pay a tremendous price for our collective corruption. The innocent will pay as dearly as the guilty, for we are none of us beyond ownership of the seeds of hatred that have been sown in our names.

Now, I am going to go bitch at Little Hawk for not getting his goat to me, because I too feel as deeply and darkly as many of my peers. Esmerelda, where the hell are you?