OF THE
TIMES
No charges have been filed against anyone, yet the state of Arizona has already begun the TPR process, Termination of Parental Rights."It's like a bad nightmare you can't wake up from," says Jeff.
Well, it's one, two, three, look at that amputee,There was the old American lefty paper, the Guardian, and the Village Voice, which beat the Sixties into the world, and its later imitators like the Boston Phoenix. There was Liberation News Service, the Rat in New York, the Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, the Old Mole in Boston, the distinctly psychedelic Chicago Seed, Leviathan, Viet-Report, and the L.A. Free Press, as well as that Texas paper whose name I long ago forgot that was partial to armadillo cartoons. And they existed, in the 1960s and early 1970s, amid a jostling crowd of hundreds of "underground" newspapers -- all quite aboveground but the word sounded so romantic in that political moment. There were G.I. antiwar papers by the score and high school rags by the hundreds in an "alternate" universe of opposition that somehow made the rounds by mail or got passed on hand-to-hand in a now almost unimaginable world of interpersonal social networking that preceded the Internet by decades. And then, of course, there was I.F. Stone's Weekly (1953-1971): one dedicated journalist, 19 years, every word his own (except, of course, for the endless foolishness he mined from the reams of official documentation produced in Washington, Vietnam, and elsewhere).
At least it's below the knee,
Could have been worse, you see.
Well, it's true your kids look at you differently,
But you came in an ambulance instead of a hearse,
That's the phrase of the trade,
It could have been worse.
-- First verse of a Vietnam-era song written by U.S. Air Force medic Bob Boardman off Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag"
Guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.
"I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?"
Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities - the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths.
Comment:
ExceptionalismAcceptionalism This author may be correct in the idea that Americans no longer engage in life-mattering things. We have morphed into a subdued and unresponsive society, living vicariously through our cell phones, computer programs, WIFI and zombified television. We are monitored, spied upon, dumbed down, subliminally messaged, drugged, poisoned and lied to. Diversity has become a life-threatening word. We have lost hands-on tangibility, shopping online and never "fingering the cloth" before we buy it. We become more and more satisfied to settle for subpar, uncreative mass production which reflects ourqualityquantity of life and what we are willing to do, in other words, our comfort zone in the new normal. If it isn't convenient, we are too lazy to find it. We text in cryptic language bites instead of having real face-to-face conversation, discussion or debate. We live second-handedly, removed, insulated, believing we are actually alive, accepting what we are told, defying nothing. And the next generation is becoming even more "remote" while the beast, just below the surface, is growing stronger every day. Something should matter. If it does, we are labeled "radicals." So, really, we don't much give a damn. Too bad. We should.