MILITIAS

Whew!

What's going on with the Michigan Hutaree Christian Militia?

My shoulders are up around my ears!

It's a nightmare. I want to wake up, but I'm having a hard time.

These guys in this picture -- they're wearing camouflage, aiming their guns. They're quoting the bible -- not just talking about Obama as the anti-Christ --they're proclaiming that he is!

We're got arrests, FBI raids in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and suburban Chicago, rounding up other members of the group, a federal indictment calling the Hutaree an “anti-government extremist organization” intending to “levy war against the United States.”

The Michigan Hutaree Christian Militia is charged with seditious conspiracy, planning to kill a local policeman, kill people who came to his funeral, use weapons of mass destruction, (roadside bombs). Conviction could mean life imprisonment.

The Hutaree is one of 127 armed "hate groups" in the US. In 2008, when Obama was just a candidate, there were 42. When he was nominated, the Hutaree and other militias began to conduct military-style training.

The accused nine Hutaree -- David Brian Stone, his family, and five members of the group are being held without bond until the court determines the bond.

It's hot news on TV and the Internet.

I can't bear to hear it, read it, see it -- it's not okay -- I can't turn the page in my mind. I can't turn off what armed militias mean to me, and sit back and wait for more headlines, or hear what my favorite commentators say.

For more than a year -- good Lord, it's almost a year-and-a-half ... Ever since Barack Obama's election, people have been using their voices, their energies, expressing (every day more wildly, freely, uninhibitedly) their thoughts -- their fears, disappointment, frustration -- chanting about death panels, abortions, vowing not to obey the laws, belching, spewing out their outrage, ugly anger, shocking invective.

It's out of control and getting worse. Pro-Gun people are carrying guns openly into Starbucks, buying guns for family members, steely-eyed focused on the right to carry holstered handguns everywhere in daily American life. "Hey, " they say, "An un-exercised right is a right LOST, and the Anti-Gun lobby's furor over the presence of guns near the President is an attempt to reverse the normalization of guns!"

Have they forgotten (maybe they don't know) that U.S. Agencies still have the right they got during the Bush years, to assassinate Americans who are involved with terrorism? Oh sure, of Of course, there are rules -- a committee's permission is needed, but what committee, who's on it, why hasn't the signed G.W. Bush "Intelligence Finding" (that's what the law is called) been nullified?

With rules and laws being ignored, being broken everywhere, I'm trying to push away the sense that stuff is closing in on us, and we're racing, rushing, toward doom.

How can I do my day-to-day work, do good things, fun chores, and open new "cans of peas" (show biz lingo for finding new ideas) when I have to bang doors shut to keep out black thoughts about what's happening.

And black is BLACK -- my sense that the war against the BLACK man running the country is shutting out, closing off, common sense.

We have to be able to live and work and breathe together.

Have we forgotten how?

We'd rather be right about Health Care, and politics, than be alive?

"No, of course not," I tell myself, but I'm not sure that people on the other side of the fence will even agree with me about that.