geoffrey, who can identify Us and Them?
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.
that contains
the entire series, each at a smaller scale. This is great, it gives
everyone a chance to see if they're interested in the series at all, but
this does NOT mean that the poster should not use descriptions in the
individual postings! And a description of "this is the third pictures
from the index I posted the other day" doesn't cut it, either. As for
the "index" posting itself, a simple description of the entire series is
probably in order, but it's not necessary to describe each picture of the
series. Also, make sure that the index pictures aren't so small as to
make them unrecognizable - otherwise you're just wasting bandwidth! The
best format for an index posting is nearly always going to be JPEG, since
it can handle 24 bits worth of color. Even if the pictures of the index
are all 8-bit GIFs (256 colors), it's very unlikely that they all use the
*same* 256 colors - posting the index in GIF loses *a lot* of color, since
all the individual picture colors need to be re-mapped in order to share
a common set of 256 colors.
If you have a GIF file, don't bother trying to run some compression
routine on it... it *won't* work. LZW compression (the kind used in
GIF files) is a very efficient compression scheme, and happens to be
the one used in many common compression routines (including the standard
UNIX `compress' utility!). If you try to compress a GIF file, it will
usually just end up getting bigger, and cause undue hardship to those
trying to download and decode the picture as well.
The m