THINGS

Fires continue fairly close by and around the region. No real rain anywhere but there are dry lightning strikes -- and more fires.  Pocatello set a heat record yesterday -- over 100 degrees. It's only a little cooler up where we are.  Since Climate Change/Global Warming doesn't seem inclined to leave, we're definitely going to have indoor air conditioning for next summer and will look for a "deal" when winter comes.  Difficult as the foregoing matters can be around here, there are, of course, vast numbers of other people who have it far worse then we.

And Winter will come.  Strong as the hand Global Warming holds, it'll be trumped by Seasonal Change.  (If that, by some unimaginable chance, doesn't come, then it likely is End Times. But I don't see that in the cards.]

The other day, I suggested that, if anyone feels his or her computer is being "monitored" -- and can point to some suspicious indications, and there is some kind of warranty involved, try writing directly to the "head office" of your system and say you want those problems corrected -- or you want a new computer.  You may well see things improve. On the other hand, of course, you should always assume the computer continues to be "monitored."

Frankly, having come of radical age in the mid-50s, I always assume everything is monitored by various adversaries. Some might call that "paranoid" but I like the term, "earned paranoia."

When I was field organizer for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, my office was based in our home in an all-Black outlying neighborhood at Raleigh, NC. Our phone situation became so difficult that it was often hard to hear anyone with whom I was conversing.  (Highly probable culprits were the FBI and the NC State Bureau of Investigation -- maybe hate groups.)  In those days, I was gone from home for long periods, sometimes in other parts of the South but very much up in our multi-county Northeastern NC Black Belt project -- anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours or more from Raleigh. Klan threats were constant -- our always armed neighbors watched things carefully when I was gone.  Even the hostile FBI felt obliged to warn us of the bomb plot against our home being jointly hatched by United Klans in North Carolina and Alabama [that scheme fizzled -- maybe because our neighborhood was known to be bristling with firearms]. Eldri was pregnant with Beba (John), Maria was tiny.  

And phone communication was beginning to feel like we were based on some far off planet.

On my mother's side of the family, there were some capitalists.  She, herself, had a fair amount of AT & T stock and her father and her two brothers each had a whole lot more.  Upshot was that a very strong message about our phone problems was conveyed by an uncle [in Birmingham, Alabama] directly to the top of AT & T.  And who should come scurrying to our modest little home but the general manager of the NC phone set up himself, with two assistants -- traveling 200 miles or so from Charlotte.  There was an ostensibly thorough investigation of our phone situation and, not surprisingly, we were finally informed weeks later that nothing adverse could be found.  But our heavy phone communication problems had ended long before that.  The FBI followed all of this closely, judging from the heavily blacked out pages on the phone matter in my huge cache of FBI files secured by me years later via FOIA/PA.  Even J. Edgar Hoover took note.

Up in the Black Belt, it was a local phone system owned by Congressman L.H. Fountain, a rank segregationist, of course, and very much an enemy.  There our phones were so heavily bugged we could even hear police calls.  That was so blatant that, the next time we encountered anything remotely similar, was here in Pocatello soon after we arrived fifteen years ago.

Our Black Belt project was a great success.  And, in that context, we drove the Klan out of the whole area.  Beba was born just fine -- and, in the years following, other offspring arrived -- and now many offspring of offspring.

But there have always been, wherever we are, enemies, some venomous -- and I've always had at least a couple of loaded firearms in our home.  That's quite true right here in Idaho where there are still some hostile indications.

Some people know guns, know the hunting cultures, know ethical self defense.  Others don't.  And some -- some of those who don't -- can be extremely obnoxious.

A word on "effete."  I picked that up when I was 21 and a student at the University of Arizona.  I was studying, outside of classes, the Western Federation of Miners.  Much WFM material was in special collections at the U of A.  Several WFM writers used the term, "effete", to refer to the American Federation of Labor -- of which the Western miners were most justifiably critical in those days.  As I mentioned on Redbadbear yesterday, if the usage of the term was good enough for Ed Boyce and Bill Haywood and Vincent St John, it's good enough for me.

Hunter Bear

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ 
and Ohkwari' 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded and with more photos in June, 2012.)
 
For the new, just out (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- 
with a new and substantial introduction by me.  We are now at 
the 50th Anniversary of the massive Jackson Movement of
1962-63.  http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm

And see My Community Organizing Mini-Course -- brimful
of practical, down to earth how-to material from decades of
personal experience. Updated into 2012:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm