Oh... Martin luther King Jr. Where art thou?

With each passing year our financial stress expands while our freedom is compressed. Where are the fearless members of society that once represented the good of the nation and not the goods of our merchants?

Farmers would raise their pitchforks and veterans would march to the beat of a different drum. We used to protest when treated unfairly and fight for our freedom, we used to let the government know through boycotts and other means that we would not support companies that didn’t support us. Should we revert to revolution in order to lengthen the distance that our voices can travel? It seems, we have no choice.

Our country has is set in our constitution that they can use the military to quell rebellion. Martial law was once used for all the right reasons in Arkansas during the desegregation era when white students in Little Rock refused to allow minority students access to school and in doing so forced the hand of President Eisenhower to send in the National Guard and Federal soldiers to iron fist and enforce this new law. That was set up by people strong enough to gather millions and march. The country defended us then and they’ll defend us now. Pride was our number 1 consumer, and our main import was change. Tourism was extravagant and sexy in our cities, now it’s all flashy lights and no heart.
We are being taken advantage of. Our kindness is being confused for weakness, and our strength for not strong enough. The ties that bind us together aren’t democrat or republican, they’re not issues and propaganda, and they’re not hard hitting documentaries. The band that aids lies in the fact that we’re all individuals. So ask your neighbors, despite differences, what changes should be made and it will finally be quite clear of the commonalities that we share. The U.S. Government has so much faith that it’s people will not rebel that it pushes the limits of how much they can get away with.

A $13 dollar toll between Brooklyn and Staten Island is ridiculous. For thirteen bucks a ride it better have an elevator, bottle of wine, gourmet cheese and a window washer at the end of it. 190,000 vehicles cross the Verrazano Bridge everyday. Cut that number in half and multiply it by 13. Once you have that number multiply it by 365. It’s numbing to believe that this toll price is even conceivable and further mind stretching to try and figure out where all of this money is going. There was an article in the Staten Island Advance about how a high ranking member of the EZ Pass company was directly related to the mafia and mobster families. It seems the story didn’t make the 10 o’clock news. In fact it never made any waves in N.Y.C. The journalist who wrote the piece for all we know, was never heard from again.

How, during the middle of a financial recession, when people have the least amount of money would the MTA keep putting us on track to run us over with their trains? They take away our high school students’ metro card, they hike the prices of our daily commutes, they reduce services, and make lay offs. Yet we do nothing but appear on the news and tell them how unhappy we are. New Yorkers take 2.6 billion trips a year via public transportation. At $2.50 per ride it equals a figure that can only be expressed in scientific notation. This number doesn’t even include 5 dollar express buses, interstate transit, or the Long Island Rail Road.

How did they get away with this clear taxation without representation? The answer is quite clear, it’s because you and you and everyone out there let it happen. All of the residents of Staten Island and Brooklyn, moped, cried, and frowned but then went about their day as usual. Nobody bothered to fight it or to defend us against it. Our leaders are weak and unless the people form a union of our own we will continue to be treated as if we really were the ant sized humans that they look down at from their private jets. Realistically not all of our leaders are miserable. Politicians like Ruben Diaz Jr. the Borough President of the Bronx, rolled up his sleeves, got his hands dirty and protested right beside us as we tried to protect our public schools from closing.

We try to ban guns but powerful lobby groups such as the National Rifle Association shot that down. We made scientific advantages in inventing the first electric car which would run 90 miles per hour for up to 120 miles on full charge without using any fuel and ironically Texaco bought the rights to the battery and the electric vehicle was thereafter sentenced to death. We emerged from the last depression by making alcohol legal and doing away with prohibition, yet the Food and Drug Administration refuses to admit to the profoundly positive financial and medical effects that legalizing marijuana can have for this country.

The same year that Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city would be laying off teachers and closing schools he also announced the building of a fifteen million dollar waterfall over the Hudson River. New York City has no shortage of artists or architects so why hire Olafur Eliasson a Danish-Icelandic artist to complete an art project here? Granted that the money for it was donated by private art funds, it still stands lifeless because it doesn’t speak for the people of this great city, and yells at us as part of the problem. The waterfalls represent money flowing from the over privileged into the brown swamp waters of the Hudson as a means of toilet decoration. Sure it looks nice, but it still stinks. We might as well have built an artsy fartsy fireplace to incinerate what little worth our currency has left.

We need trials and convictions of the culprits who killed the electric car, put Trolls on our tolls and outsourced our nationalistic artwork. If I was an American artist I’d build a bridge into a train station with a toll at the end of it holding a sign that says “The train is free today but donate to the red cross, public schools and the liberation of Staten Island.” Our students now, will be the future of this nation in times to come. Our last resort is to breathe life, liberty, and motivation into the next Martin Luther King Jr.’s of our time because right now, we all know we need them.