As if losing everything you had in a hurricane, the likes of which devastated the country in unprecedented proportions, wasn’t bad enough, imagine if in the aftermath, the government drug their feet with any kind of emergency aid and relief to the detriment of thousands of people’s lives. Yours, your friends, your families, your neighbors, your fellow people’s lives destroyed and then the plight ignored by those in charge. Your tax dollars at work!

So, you’re angry, you’re feeling lost and cut-off from the world around you, that yesterday seemed warm, safe, inviting, and hopeful. It’s easy to see why you feel this way, but then something happens. Aid and relief arrive (albeit too fucking late for some), and the government that seemed to abandon you is coming to make amends. They start a grant program for housing relief, to provide money to those whom nature took everything from (nature with the help of that same government body who ignored calls for levee repairs long before the storm proved that they were as inadequate as the residents had been claiming all along). Maybe they are finally trying to repair these blatant breaches of trust and understood protection by offering an opportunity for you to re-build. I know it may be hard to imagine some of the finer points, but just stay with me on the gist and we should all arrive at the same place.

So to recap, you were completely jaded by your government, and now things are perhaps starting to look up. This grant program comes in, and drops massive funding on the residents, living out of formaldehyde scented government trailers, and you begin to see the community around you fill once more with hope. Then you get a letter saying that the company contracted out by your government to handle the grant’s financial distribution and operations, well they fucked up to the tune of $175 million! The letter explains that this contracted company (our government couldn’t have handled this themselves naturally, they don’t have the work force, organizational skills, or resources to implement such a massive operation just look at their first attempts at aid in the hurricane ravaged area) working as efficiently as our government would, bureaucratic red tape and all, feels just horribly about your situation and hopes that you sympathize with theirs as well as they ask you to pay back the money that they gave you too much of.

Actually the letter isn’t from them, exactly. Or even from the government that initially got this whole fucked up ball rolling. You see, technically, it’s from the collection agency that the second group hired to get the money back for the first group, who hired them to handle operations in the first place. I hope that’s confusing enough, otherwise you might be focusing on the most pertinent question of the entire situation, and not the distraction of the corporate cock-up clean-up crew unnecessarily pursuing this undertaking. And that question is, haven’t we been through enough?

We can drop the imagination game now, because if you haven’t figured it out yet, this is actually happening to some of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The company our government buddied the job off to, is seeking collection companies who can accommodate such a large order. They are seeking to recollect the excess $175 million they mistakenly dispensed. An amount, by their own admission, that is only a mere 4% error rate that should easily be accepted as a low margin for such a large federal program. So if it’s such an acceptable margin, why not write it off? Why does the money have to be recollected from the people who’ve suffered this tragedy? With an average collection claim of $35,000 per case. Is this what this community, trying so hard to rebuild right now needs to be concerned with? Collection agency calls harassing, belittling, and berating them for $35,000 they don’t have and whose error of receipt they were not responsible for. The grant evaluators made the judgment errs, not the residents, set to become further victims in this entire debacle of bureaucracy. Set, once again, to become angry, feeling lost and cut-off from the world around them, that yesterday was finally seeming to be warm, safe, inviting, and hopeful!

It was nicer in the realm of imagination wasn’t it? It was easier to swallow as a hypothetical. Not a realization of the world that you actually live in. The world where people won’t actually extended a kindness without hopes of a greater return. Or at least some kind of return. A world where communities no longer come together and rise up against the Legislative Corporate Conglomerate Money Machine in order to protect the stability and recovery of all of those around them. They can’t. That ability has been long taken from them. The world where money, even the American dollar with it’s declining value, has more worth, than the reconstruction of the American city, the American life, the American dream!

Haven’t they been through enough?

Here is the next installment of the BullShit Wars set. Once again I’d like to thank Dino Sarma for giving me the bullshit wars idea. Hopefully these are a good representation or realization of that idea. You can check out Dino at Alternative Vegan and show him some love! Without any further ado, here is my latest.

Bullshit Wars: A Christian War on the GLBT Community

America seems hellbent on preying. No I didn’t spell that wrong. If I was talking about prayer, I would have said hard-on, not hellbent. It would have just been too easy. We live in a domination minded culture, and since it’s been happening across the board no matter species, race, or gender, I shouldn’t have been surprised by this fact I realized today. Perhaps the only surprising part is that I never really looked at it like this before.

America needs it’s “dream” to keep the dreamers coming here to be exploited. Because who’s an easier target than a wide-eyed, hopeful dreamer? We are no longer the land of opportunity, but the land of opportunists! There’s a difference.

As an aspiring director and writer, I see it all the time. The ambitious dreamers trying to grab this elusive life and hold on to it. And ‘agencies’ and ‘professionals’ see these people, and they pounce, with their false promises and connections. Going to turn you on to the right people and the right groups so you can blossom, after you succeed in their ‘programs’ and ‘classes’ designed to teach you to play all the right games. And after the costly fees and expenses for the ‘training’, the prey are left with little else. I know that some will dismiss this, and say that’s the system, that’s Hollywood. But it’s the principle that I’m talking about. Don’t get me wrong, there are some brilliant people teaching wonderful skills in these areas, probably not very affordably but it’s been a while since education was affordable. I’m talking of the scams and schemers.

So I looked and saw this same system in all different areas. The exploited immigrants seeking the promise of a better future for their families, abused and misused maliciously by a corrupt system that disrespectfully discards them when it’s no further use for them. The struggling women, who want to succeed in their land and have pride in their country, despite the fact that it constantly opts to demean and demoralize them all the way up to the ever present glass ceiling. By the time they’ve reached it, they have already had to compromise so much of their strength and self to fit into the Boy’s Club, that they barely resemble the person they once were! And we prey on them. With no regard, with no respect, they are preyed upon and profited from! And the justice’s system’s preying upon the other races in this country alone is disgraceful enough, even when there aren’t dreamers among them due to the overwhelming tide of oppression they’ve constantly struggled against until most hope has been smashed from within those communities.

What is it about dreamers that America, the land of dreams, hates so much? I was just thinking today…

My blood is your blood,
Once it has been spilled.
My life is your life,
It’s for you I was killed.
My innocence is yours now,
It’s there for you to cling to
To feed your ignorance
And peace that it brings you.

Your apathy is my apathy
For it was my undoing.
Your cruelty is mine as well,
For you refuse it’s viewing.
Your greed is my greed
For I paid it’s full cost.
Your comfort, I’ll leave you
For mine’s long been lost!

You say it’s a need
When we know that it’s not!
It’s an ill planted seed,
But it’s all they you’ve got!

My fear is your fear
For it’s tied to your will.
My life is your life,
To have your gluttonous fill.
My hope belongs to you,
One more thing you can steal.
My pain is mine alone,
For you don’t think I can feel!

You say it’s god granted,
That it’s mankind’s right.
But that seeds ill-planted,
It’s less true, and more trite!
There is no good reason,
That you can ever give
For unneeded domination,
So you can excessively live!

Your heart is my heart,
For it’s my blood that now feeds it.
Poisoning it’s arteries
And hopefully, will disease it!
Forgive my ill wishes,
But I feel your aggression,
I don’t much like being
Treated as a possession.

You say it’s your choice,
And you will never change.
It’s good that you have a voice
To state your ignorant claims.
Some of our voices,
Get lost in the translation
And they aren’t given
So much consideration!

My tears are your tears
Garnishing your reasoning,
My death is your death,
To bitter the seasoning.
My compassion is yours,
Since you’ve none of your own.
And you have let the seeds
Of ignorance be sewn.

You say it’s a need,
But I say that it’s greed!
You say it’s god given,
I say you won’t be forgiven.

I speak for the voiceless,
The lives we can’t give back!
A steward to the battered!
What do you say to that?

This is my latest film from the Angry Hippie and WHATSABUDGET Films. It started as a blogpost here called Keep your God’s hands off my country where I listed some quotes re-affirming the fact that the US is not a Christian Nation. Well, I stepped it up a notch. Here is a more in depth examination of that topic as only an angry hippie could muster!

Here is, Separation of Church & State : Keep your God’s hands off my Country