Mr. President, Please Leave Syria Alone

I posted the following on FB yesterday

‘While we are playing Bejeweled, Angry Birds and anxiously awaiting the next episode of Scandal our country is planning to disobey the 6th Commandment and bomb Syria. Is there anyway we can collectively convince our President and his war-mongering advisers that we have no business in Syria and ask them to remember..."Thou Shall Not Kill"? 
Can we demand that we war no more? I mean when will our elected officials actually do the will of the people? What do we have to do?’

The following question was asked:

“I don’t understand the moral calculus that says its OK to stand by and watch a despot kill hundreds of people at a clip. What do you suggest Ty, as alternatives to ending the genocide in Syria.”

What do I suggest we do?

I suggest we mind our own business, that’s what I suggest. Who appointed America the world’s police in the first place? I suggest we remember Iraq and how nobody ever found a chemical play-set, much less chemical weapons. I suggest that we remember that every time we stick our noses in someone else’s affairs, millions of people die and billions of dollars just go up in smoke. They are still bombing in Iraq as the result of our so-called peace-keeping. Let’s see how much good we’ve actually done attempting to be the world’s protectors. Almost 60 thousand of our own died in Vietnam and we were complicit in 3.8 million of Vietnamese being murdered.

Let’s look at how helpful we have been in Iraq. Four thousand five hundred American soldiers killed; more than thirty thousand severely wounded and more than two-2 trillion dollars wasted. Over 650 thousand Iraqis killed and more than a million wounded because we want play police. Remember they said the same thing about Saddam Hussein as they are saying about Assad.  Thousands killed to date in Afghanistan, with the death toll climbing and thousands of the Afghan people dead because we have to HELP. Please; how are we helping with so many dying?  Please keep in mind and mark these words; Assad proclaims his innocence and that he did not do this to his own people, the same way Saddam proclaimed there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction.

What do I suggest? I suggest we turn our attention to the chemical warfare raging right here in our back yards. If we are talking about attacking injustice and fighting for human dignity then attack the murderers who are dropping the bomb of heroin on the inner-city streets of every major metropolis where there are large concentrations of our people. I suggest you demand our officials to spend the billions of dollars they propose to defend Syria on cleaning up our streets. Defend American citizens, the Syrians can take care of themselves. And history has shown they will be much better off without our “so-called assistance” And please don’t tell me that cleaning up our streets is something we have to do ourselves and pass the buck. You damn right we have to do it ourselves, by demanding that those we elect do our bidding.

What do I suggest? I suggest we launch investigations on how it is that chemicals only invade the neighborhoods where there are large concentrations of black and brown people. I suggest we leave Syrian people’s business to Syrian people and we attend to our own. I suggest we demand that someone explain how there are thousands of shootings in our hoods and no one has attacked that problem. I suggest that if you want to attack something, attack the out of control murder rates in every major city were we reside. I suggest we attack the chemical war-mongers who keep shipping crack, heroin, meth and opiate-laced marijuana onto our streets and that they use those resources to stop our children from being gunned down daily on the streets of Chicago. Stop the chemical warfare raging against us in Philadelphia, Little Rock, Detroit, South Central L.A.,  Oakland and a hundred other cities across America.

You talk about us standing around and watching a despot murder hundreds of people. I don’t understand your question when you stand around every week and watch a thousand gunned down in your own neighborhoods.

Let me end by saying that our ‘so-called OBLIGATION TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT’ has never quite panned out. We have become the world’s bullies. We are the most hypocritical nation on earth. We say we are about love, truth, peace, freedom and justice but we demonstrate hatred, lewdness, slander, murder, theft and everything that harms. America has become the world’s terrorist dropping drones on innocent people.  We are hypocritically the pot, calling the kettle black. We are supposed to be a Christian nation that abides by the laws handed down from God that direct us ‘not to murder’. The Sixth Commandment says, “THOU SHALL NOT KILL”.  Period! There are no caveats or exceptions to the rule. If we are to be Christ-Like then we have to stop making excuses for murder. It is a shame and a sin and it hurts my heart that we have become so callous. It hurts my heart that we can take someone’s life so easily.

Finally, what do I suggest? I suggest that reconsider the principle of ‘as you sew, so shall you reap’. I suggest we remember we are willfully taking human lives and I suggest we stop killing people now, because eventually they will start killing us.

~Ty Gray-EL is an author, poet and activist who escaped from a federal prison plantation through the back fence of Education more than 30 years ago. He escaped under threat of death for disclosing that education is the key to unlock all the gates in every facility on every plantation. He is the Chief Creative Officer of Gray-EL Edutainment Ministry Services, a Cultural Enrichment Ministry dedicated to raising levels of consciousness and self-esteem among African Americans. He lives with his wife on the outskirts of Washington DC. in Prince Georges County MD. He can be reached at www.breathofmyancestors.com

Constitutional Outcast-America’s Slave Laborers and the Complex Prison Industrial Complex

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, some of us are aware but most are not, that slavery has never actually been abolished in America. A few short months after old honest Abe declared freedom for the enslaved with the Emancipation Proclamation the U.S. Congress cleverly inserted the 13^th Amendment. This congressional act, without doubt or contradiction, rescinded the Proclamation. In January of 1863 the President issued the executive order that all slaves would be free. Consider that on December 6^th 1865, less than three years later, the 13^th Amendment was adopted. That amendment clearly repeals the Emancipation Proclamation yet no one ever brings it before the bar of justice. Read it for your self:

13^th Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”   

What does EXCEPT mean?

It means that slavery ‘can’ exist as long as the government can acquire a conviction. We are all suffering from extreme cases of myopia if we cannot see what’s going on in the prison system. Every State has the first-right-of-refusal to sell their goods and services manufactured by the ‘convicted’ laborers in their prisons. The States have not only bee manufacturing goods but they’ve also been manufacturing slaves since 1866 by manipulating laws that keep their prisons full of black laborers. So make no mistake, slavery is alive and well in America and has never been abolished.

Consider: The ‘Industrial Prison Complex” is aptly named and truly complex because of its enormity, with a labor force of more than 2 million, closer to 3 million as of this writing in April of 2013. It is big business, and not just the individual States; but the Federal Government has been totally complicit as well.

The Federal Prison Industry program called UNICOR has been exploiting black people and promoting slavery since the 1930's. When you click on the Clothing and Textile  

link understand that the Federal Government gets 'first-rite-of-refusal’ to sell their goods and services to all State, Local and Federal Government agencies.

http://www.unicor.gov/?navlocation=ClothingTextiles

Check the link on Furniture and remember that prisoners are manufacturing these items at the rate of fifty cents per hour. In some States prisoners are making no more than fifty cents per day, two cents an hour. If that is not a slave-labor-wage in 2013, you tell me what is. http://www.unicor.gov/?navlocation=OfficeFurniture

Click on INDUSTRIAL Products: http://www.unicor.gov/?navlocation=IndustrialProducts

Look at the list of goods prisoners are making; view the comprehensive video and keep in mind they are talking about prison facilities and prisoners. The propaganda is so shrewd that you would never dream this was a federal prison. They even have a couple of inmates lying about opportunities for jobs once they are released. I know they are lying personally because I couldn’t land a job anywhere. I ended up having to toss furniture around for a moving company and I was qualified to supervise at NASA, McDonald/Douglas and Lockheed/Martin

And here’s one more thing. At the bottom of the page put your cursor on Services http://www.unicor.gov/services/

and click on the little pop-up icon that says 'Comprehensive Video.' They say their program is "a best kept secret" well, I guess it is, hidden in plain sight. Ninety-nine percent of our population is not aware that this kind of slave labor, which they call 'unique labor’, is being exploited in the United States. And I bet you didn’t know that the next time you order that scarlet-red lingerie from Victoria’s Secret you might be speaking to a federal prisoner.

When you click Electronics Comprehensive Video below please understand that I am not referring to something I heard about. No one told me this is happening. This is something I did for 4 years of my life. I was literally a slave from 1978 to 1982. I manufactured cables and circuit boards that go into electronic devices from as small as a hand-held transistor radio chip to as large as cable connectors used in nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. http://www.unicor.gov/?navlocation=Electronics

My friend, whether you choose to admit it or not, slavery exists TODAY in the United States of America, according the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution. READ IT! It is legal; the same as buying alcohol from your neighborhood liquor store. If you don’t believe it, just click this link...read it and weep.
http://www.unicor.gov/

The solution to this problem is community outrage that demands Congressional and Senatorial support to repeal the 13^th Amendment.  The same as the 21^st Amendment, in effect repealed the eighteenth and did away with Prohibition; we need to demand that our attorneys, scholars and politicians draft a bill that prohibits legalized slavery in these United States.

~Ty Gray-EL is an author, poet, playwright and activist and the Chief Creative Officer of Breath of Breath of My Ancestors, a Cultural Enrichment Ministry dedicated to raising levels of consciousness and self-esteem among African Americans. He lives with his wife on the outskirts of Washington, DC. He can be reached at www.breathofmyancestors.com