Howard Zinn has read my mind

This is exactly how I feel.

I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over. Those Mexican workers trying to cross the border--dying in the attempt to evade immigration officials (ironically, trying to cross into land taken from Mexico by the United States in 1848)--those Mexican workers are not alien to me. Those millions of people in this country who are not citizens and therefore, by the Patriot Act, are subject to being pulled out of their homes and held indefinitely by the FBI, with no constitutional rights--those people are not alien to me. But this small group of men who have taken power in Washington, they are alien to me.

I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water, the air. And I wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit. More Americans are beginning to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that something is terribly wrong, that this is not what we want our country to be.

Something is horribly, horribly wrong--the straw has, long ago, broken the camel's back. There is no other choice but to kick the thugs in suits and their trained chimp out of the White House. Lighting candles and saying novenas is not going to cut it, my friend. We have to exert ourselves and break a sweat on this one. Wake up your loved ones as if your house was on fire. Wake up your neighbors as if their house was on fire. WAKE UP!