Fun and Games at “NATO”

by , posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2012 at 9:33 am

My grandfather lived almost 100 years. That was his goal but he missed it by about 7 months. He wanted to make it not so much because he was having a good time but because it was a goal he had set himself. His mind was sound but his body just couldn’t take it anymore. One of his legs was going gangrene from diabetes and it would have had to be amputated. It wasn’t practical to him to just stay alive and have pieces of himself cut off just to say he’d made it to 100. So my Mom and he agreed that he wouldn’t have the operation.

Gramps was a farmer and he’d spent his life working with nature, figuring how he could make his farm work, keep it going. He had to make hard decisions many times and when it came to spending money on an operation to cut off his leg so he could live a little longer it just didn’t add up.

I spent a good deal of time talking with my Gramps about politics and what was going on in the world and what was happening to America. One day not too long before he had to go live in a nursing home we were talking and I looked over to see tears rolling down his weathered face. I was startled because Gramps was a pretty tough old geezer even at his age. I always respected him and not to many people dared to fuck with him.

When I saw those tears it wasn’t an easy thing to see. He told me why he was mad. He said, “to think that I spent 18 months in the mud and muck of France fighting in that damn war. To think how hard your Grandma and I worked to keep the farm going during the Depression and then worked to feed people during World War II – to see this great country destroying itself.”

Grandpa was a smart guy he spent his life figuring the angles and he died a wealthy man. He also died knowing the country he loved was in deep trouble. He knew it long before a couple of buildings in New York came down, long before the start of this lousy “Long Depression”. He always trusted the Democratic Party but if he were alive today I really think he wouldn’t trust it and neither do I.

I spent a long day in Chicago on the day of the NATO protest. It was hot and I got sunburned but I got 3.5 hours of great video. I taped the organizer’s press conference, I taped the march from beginning to end and I taped the medal ceremony. My arms ached from holding my camera high above my head stuck on the end of an old monopod.

I got a pretty good angle on the kids in black hoods as they formed their phalanx and made their push on the police line. I wasn’t as close as I would have liked and I only got shots of police batons as they arced in the air above the black hoods but I did get shots of the bloodied kids as they left to get bandaged up.

I don’t know what Gramps would say about those kids pushing the police but he often surprised me. I think if he had lived to see it and had lived through what the government has done over the last couple of decades he would have been mad as hell. He would have understood that something has to be done to stop what the corporations are doing. He would have understood that Obama is just a tool.

I admire those kids in their black hoods, they’ve got guts. In spite of all the lies and propaganda spewed out by the hack media, in spite of the militarized police they stuck to it. They had a plan and they carried it out. I have less admiration for all those who said they wanted to be there but let the propaganda frighten them.

We must look to the kids to get us out of this mess because we adults are apparently too good at rationalizing ourselves into inaction. The black hoods, the Masks of Anonymous, Wikileaks, the Occupy Movement, they represent action, all the rest, just talk. Keep goin’ kids, the rest of us are back there someplace.

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