No more stolen lives

I could not stop crying when Sandra-Juanita Cooper broke the news this morning ...

While Cooper and I (codirectors of Idriss Stelley Foundation) attended the first meeting of the new Police Commission at the Hall of Justice, police from the Western Addition and Park Police Stations killed 29-year-old African American, legless Cammerin Boyd, execution style ...

While the San Francisco Police Department praises the "immense success" of their expanded training and we faithfully try to celebrate the victory of S.F. police reform, our city has become the somber theater of an evil crusade, as demonstrated by the California Highway Patrol and SFPD raids on Bayview-Hunters Point and the Mission District for the past three days, against poor people of color, sheer retaliation for the unfortunate death of Officer Isaac Espinoza.

While African American Idriss Stelley and Richard Tim of San Francisco, Bruce Seward of Hayward, and Cau Tran Bich of San Jose (all disabled people of color) died under a rain of bullets, the stricken families of our fallen angels desperately seek solace in prayer, criminalized by the corporate media.

Mesha Monge-Irizarry

Idriss Stelley Foundation

San Francisco

A real draft

Uncle Sam Wants You!

Quietly bobbing up to the surface in House (H.R.163) and Senate (S.89) committees is the Universal National Service Act. In plain terms, the military draft.

On the following conditions only, I strongly recommend that everyone write his or her congresspeople and urge its passage:

1) That the very first military conscriptions be selected from the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of members of the House and Senate and the executive branch. (Can you imagine them asking anyone else to do what they and their kin wouldn't do for God and country?)

2) That above-mentioned conscriptees be assigned to combat units directly engaging the enemy, and that these conscriptees be monitored closely to ensure they are actually present performing their duties and not AWOL in some other country or state.

3) That the commander in chief, all his staff and aides, and members of the cabinet be required to relocate their headquarters to the front lines of whatever battle zones are in place at the time. (Presently that would be Iraq and Afghanistan and whatever third world country has strategic oil deposits.)

4) That, as in the days of yore when the king and commanding general rode at the head of the troops and proudly bore the scars of battle, the c in c and his staff also be extracted from their video war game stations, take Old Glory in hand, and ride point into every battle. Let them find out firsthand what blood and dirt smell like. And see firsthand the raw grisly stumps of legs blown off. And hear firsthand the screams of agony that the glories of war evoke from broken, mangled, maimed human beings, military and civilian.

5) That the c in c and all staff, and their relatives and business partners, be entirely divested of economic holdings and interests that might cause questions about the nobility of their stated aims to bring democracy to countries whose natural resources happen to fit perfectly with the needs and greed of certain business groups who make billions only if there is war.

That's the short list of conditions for bringing back the draft. Let your people know how you feel while you still can: www.theorator.com/bills108/hr163.html.

Printer Bowler

Missoula, Mont.

Remembering Thom Gunn

Good of you to step outside the whirl of fast obsolescence, both political and cultural, to note the passing of Thom Gunn, an enduringly fine poet. The last time I saw him read was at a Matt Gonzalez campaign party in someone's house on the downscale end of Fillmore Street. The reading was a part of the mind-opening alchemy of that campaign, melding progressive art and politics. I was there partly because the campaign was so much fun, and even more because I wanted to see Thom Gunn. These are lines of his that have always stuck in my head:

Across the open countryside,

Into the walls of rain I ride.

It beats my cheek, drenches my knees,

But I am being what I please.

They're from "The Unsettled Motorcyclist's Vision of His Death."

Kathy Ketman

via e-mail

For the record

We misidentified the address of DNA Lounge in a Bike to Work Day sidebar that ran with the article "The Road to Nowhere" (5/12/04). The correct address is 375 11th St., and the Bike to Work Night party takes place there Thurs/20 at 8 p.m.