Many of you may find this announcement quite a surprise.  Have I been guzzling Republican Kool-Aid?  Certainly not!  Am I on the verge of commitment to an institution to be treated for insaniTEA?  God forbid! Am I angry at Democrats?  I am at some of them, but that has nothing to do with it.  Have I decided to vote for a third party?  No.  While I prefer a more social democratic platform than what the Democrats offer, I would not want to waste my vote on a candidate with no chance of election, especially when the Republicans present such a threat to our livelihood, our human rights, our Constitution, our standing in the world, and what’s left about our society, that I hold dear, that Republicans have not already destroyed.  I have not changed my position that Democrats, flawed though they may be, are a far better option than Republicans, who govern exclusively for the benefit of criminal corporations and the richest 1%.  So why am a refusing to vote for Democrats this year?  The answer may surprise you.

Here in Oregon, we have vote by mail.  It’s an excellent system.  The only way I have seen Republicans able to cheat the system is to get alcoholic transients to register and trade their signature on pre-filled ballots for beer or wine.  I broke up such an exchange in 2004, but the effects of that are far less that Republican election day scams in other parts of the country.  I mailed my ballot today, and voted for Ron Wyden (D) for Senator, David Wu (D) for Representative, John Kitzhaber (D) for Governor. Ted Wheeler (D) for Treasurer, and Mary Nolan (D) for state Representative.  These are the only partisan races in my district this year.

So the reason I will vote for no Democrats this year is simple.  It’s illegal for me to vote twice.  The Republicans claim that we fraudulently vote over and over again is a lie.  A much as I would like more, I only get one vote per race.  I’ve done my part.  It’s your turn.

On September 11, 2001 I left for work right after the first airliner hit.  My job that day was to contact executives in Fortune 500 companies in New York to arrange site visits from a team of researchers for a major software development company.  I did not think it was an appropriate time to call New York, and said so, but the Account Executive had not yet arrived, and his assistant, a Republican airhead, insisted that we could not allow terrorists to stop us from doing business.  I called several companies with no answer at the switchboard or my contact unavailable, for obvious reasons.  I dialed a contact whose direct line I already had.  Someone else answered the phone.  He was in one of the twin towers, above the fire.  He asked me to call his wife and tell her he loved her, because the phones there were not working to dial out.  I did.  She cried.  I cried.  I was done.  I refused to call New York any more that day.  The airhead fumed, but a few minutes later, the Account Executive arrived, agreed with me, and called her on her insensitivity.  A few of us gathered around the TV in the lunch room.  Someone asked what it all meant.  I said that I expected Bush to use the attack as an excuse to blame and invade Iraq and as an excuse to curtail our civil liberties.  As horrific as that day was, and with respect for the victims’ families, I wish to focus today on the other 9/11, 9/11/1973, because Americans are not the only ones to have been victims of terror.

On September 11, 1973, Salvatore Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile was overthrown and murdered in a coup orchestrated by Republicans, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, installing Agosto Pinochet as dictator.  Allende was a Marxist, but he was a Social Democrat, not a totalitarian.  In the terror that followed, thousands died.  The following is part of the 2002 reflections of Tito Tricot, who experienced these events:

Our dreams were shattered one cloudy morning when the military overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Twenty-nine years later, at midday, Chile’s’s firemen sounded their sirens paying tribute to thousands of men and women who lost their lives without really understanding what was happening.

It was a moment of remembrance, not for the victims of the military coup, but for those killed at the World Trade Centre in New York. Sad as that might have been, it is even sadder that Chilean firemen have never sounded their sirens to remember our own dead. And there are thousands of them, including many children, who were murdered by the military.

It is not a matter of comparing sorrow and pain, but for the past year the US media has tried to convince us that north American lives are worth more than other people’s lives. After all, we are from the third world, citizens of underdeveloped countries who deserve to be arrested, tortured and killed. How else are we interpret the fact that the military coup in our country was planned in the United States?

The truth is that no US president ever shed a tear for our dead; no US politician ever sent a flower to our widows. The US government and media use different standards to measure suffering. It is precisely this hypocrisy and these double standards that make us sick, especially when on such a symbolic day for Chileans, the president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos, attended a memorial service at the United States embassy where the ambassador, William Brownfield, stated that "people who hate the United States must be controlled, arrested or eliminated".

In what kind of a world are we living? Can we stand idly by while in the name of the fight against terrorism countries are bombed or invaded by the US war machine? I think not, especially because, irrespective of the horror of the World Trade Centre attacks, the US has no moral right to impose its will on our continent. After all, we in Latin America have ample experience with US terrorist tactics. In our continent alone 90,000 people disappeared as a direct result of the operation of the School of the Americas and US "counterinsurgency" policies – 30 times more than the victims of the World Trade Centre… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Guardian>

Terrorism should be opposed, but in order to have the moral standing to oppose it, the United States must stay out of the terrorism business ourselves.  If the rest of the world seems less than supportive of our war on terrorism, its because they rightly see us as the architect of more state sponsored terror than any other nation.  Republicans may accuse me of hating America for saying this, but that’s a lie.  Because I love this nation, I want us to do right, be honorable in our dealings with the rest of the world, and benefit from the standing that honor will bring.

A good start would be to keep Republicans out of power.  I readily admit that the Democrats’ track record in this area is not pure, but compared to the Republicans, we are babes in the woods.  Just since Eisenhower took office, Republican administrations have covertly overthrown, attempted to overthrow, or participated in the overthrow if the following nations: Guatemala, the Congo, Chile, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cambodia, Angola, the Philippines, Venezuela, Haiti, the Palestinian Authority, and Iran.

In memory of this day and all the victims of terror everywhere, let peace without terror be our common goal.

Last year I broke from my tradition of covering “I have a Dream” on this day and covered “Beyond Vietnam”, the other Dr. King speech I personally attended, instead.  This year, I return to tradition.  Although Glen Beck’s exploitation of this event dominates the news cycle, I will not cover that in this article, because of who Dr. King was, and who Beck will never be.

When I was a ten year old boy, I was diving for mussels in the bay.  I came up under a boat, hit my head, and knocked myself silly.  When I came to, a black boy about my age was holding onto me with one arm and the boat with the other.  We talked for a couple hours, and I came to realize that all the hateful things my father had taught me about negroes (that was the polite term in 1958; African-American had not yet been invented.) didn’t fit this boy at all.  In youthful innocence, I took him home to meet my family.  When we walked into the living room, my father turned beet red and screamed “Get that little n*gg*r out of my house!”  After I exposed him to that, the boy was no longer interested in being my friend, but I became the only ten year old civil rights activist in the neighborhood.

Five years later, at fifteen, I had already been to the south to protest for civil rights, and on August 28, 1963, I was in the crowd on the mall.  I did not meet Dr. King until an organizational meeting for Vietnam Summer, shortly before his “Beyond Vietnam” speech kicked it off, but his message that day was so clear, I felt I did.

Without further ado, here is “I Have a Dream” in its entirety.

The message and the dream still live.

If you prefer text, click here.