To The Barricades!

by Lorenzo Hagerty, November 6, 2002

Another fake election is over, and no one should be surprised at the results. What do I mean by "fake" you ask? Well, just look at what has transpired in the weeks leading up to "election" day:

Florida prevented 91,000 legally registered voters from casting their ballots, and the majority of them were people of color. They did this by using the already discredited and politically questionable list of felons and dead people that they used to rig the 2000 election for the governor's brother.
In Minnesota, the corporate-controlled media prevented independent candidates from participating in the crucial debate between a tired old Democrat and the anointed business candidate.
Poor candidates were completely drowned out in a tidal wave of special interest campaign money, much of which was collected directly by Bush himself.
U.S. taxpayer money was used to fly Bush and his cronies around the country so they could spread more fear with their rhetoric about terrorists and the imminent destruction of all things American by Middle Easterners.
For some mysterious reason, no exit polling data was released. Thus, particularly in precincts that used computer terminals for voting, there was no way to determine how much fraud was being committed by election officials.
The power elite and their media lackeys intentionally obscured real issues, like the loss of jobs, corporate graft that is robbing our pension plans, and the devastation caused by a phony war on drugs.

I could go on, but you already know the story. The real question is "What are you going to do about it?" Are you going to roll over like just another wage slave, or are you going to stand up and be counted? For now, you still have a choice, but if you assume you can wait until November of 2004 to do something about the death of democracy in this country, you have already lost.

It is time for us to be brutally honest with ourselves. We are being lied to by the media and by almost every politician in Washington. Of course, the lies are extremely well packaged. For example, look at how skillfully the Bush-Cheney junta forced Congress to spend most of the pre-election period in a debate about whether we should abandon everything this once great nation stood for and adopt a first strike policy. Striking out in blind fear, as Congress has authorized our emperor to do, is simply un-American. How anyone could vote for a member of Congress that supported a first strike policy is beyond me. Yet almost all of those fearful and cowardly congress-people who voted for this insane policy were re-elected.

If we are to have any hope at all of unseating the oligarchy and returning to a republic, we must act now . . . TODAY! What makes you think you can wait another two years to effect change? We have already seen how a crazed, military-trained sniper can paralyze a city. If such a madman were loose in your city next election day, would you go out to vote? When you think about all of the insidious ways the will of the people can be thwarted on election day, it isn't hard to see that the usurpers who have captured the machinery of our government don't have to declare martial law to keep us in check. All they need is a few homegrown terrorists and a media machine to fuel the fear, and we sheep will remain indoors, watching sitcoms and dreaming about our new SUVs.

Are you an American or a slave? Are you going to sit behind your double-locked doors until November 2004 and hope for the best, or are you going to stand up and be counted? We have a war to stop! We have a democracy to restore! And we can't do it by staying home and watching TV.

If we can't trust the government, and if we can't trust the news media, whom can we trust? Each other! We can and should trust the common sense of one another. The days of quietly keeping your opinions to yourself at work, church, school, and in other public places is over. The moment has arrived for each and every one of us to speak out. To me, there is no discernable difference any more between the Democrats and the Republicans, but that doesn't mean I have no choices at the polls. I think we actually have a three party system: Green, Libertarian, and Rebublicrat. But I don't think those first two parties will have much of a chance unless we begin today to rebuild a free America. In November 2004, our cry will be "To the Polls." Until then, the best way to let the world know that there are still some freedom-loving people in this country is to turn out into the streets. First we demonstrate our unwillingness to send our children to be slaughtered in a quest to enrich a few oil companies and their military cousins like the Carlyle Group. Once we have prevented the Bush-Cheney junta from depleting our treasury and spilling innocent blood, we can focus on the important business of restoring democracy to this land.

Let our cry not be "Poor me. What can I do," but

To The Barricades!

"TO THE BARRICADES!"