juniorer, at least as powerful
Bruce Reilly
We are here. Like it or not, for good or bad, we are here. Who are we? We are the
downtrodden and dispossesed, the self-torturing, the disenfranchised convicts,
drug and alcohol addicts, the unemployed and unemployable. We are the children of
poverty, financial and spiritual. We have and will have children of our own,
grandchildren too. We are ex-cons, uninsured, homeless, of many colors and speaking
many tongues. We are the enemy in what has become a domestic war against ourselves.
And who are you? You who like the tough talk of Tough on Crime? You who watch as
budgets are cut in education and health care while you militarize a police force?
Bullet-proof vests, automatic weapons, helicopters, tanks, robots ... the
testosterone is oozing through the streets, more prisons, longer sentences, tighten
the belt, spartan conditions, task forces, gang units, gun courts. And what is there
to show for it? Unemployent stays low because half the population oversees those
"out of the workforce", the dregs, the rabble, the enemy? Please tell me there is a
deeper reason. Do you feel safer? More humane? More like a cohesive society with a
shared sense of purpose, who can identify Us and Them? Do you live in a gated
community or gentrified neighborhood? By the way, have you read the Declaration of
Independence and US Constitution - or do you only know the first phrases?
It's about time we got together. Please know that I have yet to meet a convict who
wants their child to be a thief, an addict, a dealer, a prostitute, or a violent
individual. Most of us still have hope for ourselves even when stuck in the darkest
dilemmas, ruts and catch-22s. Most of us believe in crafting laws and instilling
order. Many of us have burrowed beneath the surface to find a spiritual sense of
being, an understanding force at least as powerful as those we succumbed to, and many
of use wouldn't escape if you opened the front door. Did you know that approximately
10 million Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, on parole or once were in
those categories? Each of those 10 million have families, friends, neighbors ... and
so closer and closer does the We interface with the You. Don't you think it's time we
talked?
Are you ready? Can you accept that the road we are travelling points toward a grim
and painful future? Do you have the heart to face monumental failures while bravely
struggling beyond where we are now? I know that some of you are, and that some of us
are, and this is what gives me hope. You need our insights just as we need your
structure. It is never over, especially when a real solution, a real treatment for
our sickness, is yet to begin.
In Solidarity,
Bruce Reilly (a.k.a Bruha)
P.O.Box 8274
Cranston, RI 02920 USA
P.S. - I am trying to conceptualize an effective guerilla media campaign to promote
this cause. Ideas are welcome. Collaboration is prayed.
Japanese, Russian, Swedish,
Finnish, Icelandic, and Vietnamese that used the ASCII character set to
encode your national character set. The fundamental assumption of
most netnews software was that you're dealing with something that looks
a lot like US ASCII, but if you were willing to work within those bounds
and be clever it was quite possible to use ASCII to discuss things in
any language.
>13. Usenet is not software.
Usenet software had gotten much better over time to cope with the ever
increasing aggregate flow of netnews and (in some cases) the extreme
volume that newsgroups generated. If you had been reading news then with
the same news software that was running 10 years previous, you'd never have
been able to keep up. Your system would have choked and died and spent all
of its time either processing incoming news or expiring old news. Without
software and constant improvements to same, Usenet would not have been.
There was no "standard" Usenet software, but there were standards for
what Usenet articles looked like, and what sites were expected to do with
them. It was possible to write a fairly simple minded news system
directly from the standards documents and be reasonably sure that it
will work with other systems, though thorough testing was necessary if
it was going to be used in the real world. You did not assume that
all systems were tested before they have been deployed.
>WHAT USENET IS
>--------------
Usenet was in part about people. There were people who were "on the
net", who read rec.humor.funny every so often, who knew the same jokes
you did, who told you stories about funny or stupid th