rudy, who are we?
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.
had a Usenet feed could send mail to you from the
Internet, but even that was not guaranteed in some odd cases (news feeds
sent on CD-ROM, for instance).
> 9. Usenet is not a UUCP network.
UUCP carried the first netnews traffic, and a considerable number
of sites got their newsfeed using UUCP. But was also fed using
NNTP, mag tapes, CD-ROMs, and printed out on paper to be tacked up
on bulletin boards and pasted on refrigerators.
>10. Usenet is not a United States network.
A 1991 analysis of the top 1000 Usenet sites showed about 58% US
sites, 15% unknown, 8% Germany, 6% Canada, 2-3% each the UK, Japan,
and Australia, and the rest mostly scattered around Europe.
The state of California was the center of the net, with about 14% of
the mapped top sites there. The Washington, DC area was also the center
of the net, with several large providers headquartered there. You
could read netnews on all seven continents, including Antarctica.
If you were looking for a somewhat less US-centered view of the world,
you could have tried reading regional newsgroups from various different
states or groups from various far-away places (which depending on where
you are at could be Japanese, German, Canadian, or Australian). There were a
lot of people out there who were different from you.
>11. Usenet is not a UNIX network.
Well...ok, if you didn't have a UNIX machine, you could read news. In
fact, there were substantial sets of newsgroups (bit.*) which were
transported and gatewayed primarily through IBM VM systems, and a set
of newsgroups (vmsnet.*) which had major traffic through DEC VMS
systems. Reasonable news relay software ran on Macs (uAccess), Amiga
(a C news port), MS-DOS (Waffle), and no doubt quite a few more. I'm
was typing on a DOS machine when I first wrote this sentence, and it's
been edited on Macs and X terminals since then.
There was a certain culture about the net that grew up on Unix
machines, which occasionally ran into fierce clashes with t