By combining the absolute certainties of fundamentalist religion with a model of "success" in the rigid structure and discipline of the military, we have a perfect tool of seduction and manipulation. Children will know that the way to power is to learn to kill for the rich -- mostly white -- elite that throws crumbs to the poor.
Note that we do not have enough money for public schools and parks and various already-established social programs. We do, however, seem to have money to spend on programs which play upon the rage, fears, and phobias of our culture, and which melds them into glorification of God-ordained, government sanctioned, Empire-building War.
What will the kids who go to this recruiting station for God's own war machine actually be doing in a few years, as money becomes even more scarce for education, health, and housing? They will do this:
http://207.44.245.159/article8258.htm "Extreme Cinema Verite" -- our troops are making their own home videos of the war, setting battle scenes to heavy metal rock music and displaying charred, decapitated bodies, and bodies of Iraqi people in pools of blood, as a form of entertainment for the folks back home.
Some soldiers pose with gruesomely mutilated bodies, waving the dead hands in mock greeting and so disrespecting the very people we are told we are "liberating." This violates the Geneva Convention, but those who go to the Colin Powell center will eventually learn that God and the Imperial Religion are above the piddling nuisance of such "man-made" laws.
The fusion of religion, military, and corporatists largesse will turn the most vulnerable victims of injustice in Minneapolis -- poor children, especially poor children of color -- into cannon fodder and into monstrous soldiers.
We know that soldiers are now pumped up with drugs and attend pre-battle services where they listen to Christian heavy-metal rock music and sing and pray in order to be worked into a righteous frenzy. The Colin Powell Center is not a tool to help poor inner-city children. It will be a recruitment and propaganda center for the War Machine.
Check out this "News you won't find on CNN" -- http://207.44.245.159/article8214.htm
The Colin Powell Center will have funding because it is a local expression of twisting the American mind into a frightened, belligerent war mentality. The public schools and parks and even religious and social programs that do not fit this agenda will be told that there is not enough money to fund them.
I attended Park Avenue United Methodist Church while Art Erickson was there. I do know that the church believed that homosexuals should be converted to become heterosexuals. This is one of the forms of bigotry that fascism plays on -- when convenient -- to frighten and manipulate people to conform and comply. Remember the article I've alluded to in the past, by former US Vice President Henry Wallace (served under FDR, second term). Long ago, he wrote an article in the New York Times on "American Fascism." He predicted that fascism would rise in America by poisoning the stream of information to the people, and by playing upon fear and bigotry.
The Colin Powell Center will be funded and celebrated in Minneapolis. The next Mayor -- whoever that is -- will be obliged to attend the opening ceremony with many other officials -- maybe Colin Powell himself and other national figures. City Council members and State Legislators, Congressional and Senate representatives will all be there. Ministers will pray prayers....but I can no longer run with that lawless crowd....the killers in high places pray their prayers out loud..." (from memory -- Leonard Cohen?) Any politician who does not approve will be ostracize and targeted as "a hater of America" and a "God-hater." And so fascism will seep even deeper into the fabric of Minneapolis life.
I pray that this will not be our future, but we seem to demand it by the very way we live. We want war for cheap petroleum. We want to be consumers with jobs, people who never grow up, people who only want a "job" so that we can suck compliantly at the teat of our nanny the corporation, which fuses with the corporate-welfare state, which fuses with the paternalistic, patriarchical religious heresy of American Imperialism. We want to be told what to do and when to do it. We want a media that is merely the extension of the shopping mall. We want the stories of war to be told to us by Disney and TimeWarner, unless we enjoy the Cinema Verite of those soldiers we send to turn into monsters overseas. Some of those soldiers will come back to Minneapolis, too., of course. We will not have enough money to help them, but we will have plenty of money for prisons.
--sad today....pedaling for peace and ecojustice, but wondering why Minneapolitans are in such denial.....fromLynnhurst, for now -- Gary Hoover
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