Give them no ribbons. My dear friend who was following orders in Vietnam
was blown to bits when he tripped a wire. Give him no ribbons. Ribbons and medals will not bring him back to his wife who is now in her mid-70s, whose two sons and one daughter each have families of their own, but have no Grandpa whose knee to sit on and play games with and just have fun and laugh with. Michael Dillinger went to Iraq to fight because W told him to. Unfortunately, his amored truck hit a road mine and killed Michael instantly.
Ribbons? They gave ribbons to Michael's mother before they buried Michael in Arlington? Ribbons, for God's sake! Did those ribbons and medals really help console Michael's mother? Did Cheney ever call her to see how she was doing? No, he was in charge of creating what he called "enhanced interrogation," a gross euphemism for unspeakable torture and terror that went on at countless, secret camps in the countries of our allies, and still goes on at Guantanamo even today. Give them no ribbons. Take all the ribbons and medals you can find that were given to those soldiers who gave their very lives for lies, for all those soldiers now lying in all the VA hospitals throughout our country, their bodies permanently disfigured, their minds completely lost, and dump that pile of ribbons and medals in the front yard of wherever W lives in the suburbs of Dallas.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

I have only time and dreams. I do not know how much more time I have, but I do know that the time I shall have is, pardoxically, timeless, as are dreams. I shall use the time I have left to continue to dream--to dream not about the impossible, but about the inevitable. I shall dream about caring instead of uncaring, of helping instead of hurting, of loving instead of hating. I shall dream of a world of peace, a world on which all the billions of human beings come inexorably to realize their innate worth, their inviolate sacred spirit, a moment in the not too distant future when all will not only join hands, but also join hearts, a spiritual ecology that will complement a climate ecology. Instead of self-aggrandizing, we all will be accruing love--of self, and therefore ineluctably, of all other creations on Earth. At this moment, our world is turned inside out. Our "values" are convoluted, contorted, twisted. The world is presently controlled by inimical forces that bring torture and terror to Earth, that think weapons and wars are their their sole prerogative. But Earth's destiny negates this notion. This is not just my time and dreams, but the time and dreams of all. And sooner than later, the time will be now and the dreams will be manifest.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Living in the USA is harder than dying if you are hungry and/or homeless and/or hopeless and/or if the color of your skin is something other than white.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

I have lived a blessed life. I have been a poet and human-rights advocate
my entire adult life. Money and the material things that it can buy have never
mattered to me;  their worth is illusory, yet, it seems at times the whole world
has bought into these falsehoods, and look where they have got us:  hunger,
homelessness, hopelessness. The 7.5 billion of us presently residing on this
planet face two foreboding existential threats:  catastrophic climate change
and imminent nuclear holocaust, while **** Trump is only concerned with
shaving a few more points off his handicap at Mar-a-lago every weekend.
So where do I find solace? I find it in the bright and beautiful I have been
blessed to experience:  meeting the dispossessd;  the social outcasts;  the down-and-outs;  the forgotten;  the socially disgraced of the world. But I have found my gold:  the goodness, in fact, of everyone, if only each knew where inside themselves to look. "Goodness" is not out there. It is deep within each
of us. Why am I rich? Because I know where and how to mine the heart
of anyone.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Disparity and desperation are not synonyms, but they allude to the same suffering.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

You know what the world needs after it recovers from this pandemic
is a universal family picnic. You know we're all related, don't you?
There's a nice little TV show that shows different people where they
came from, using DNA and that sort of thing. But you know that
little TV show doesn't go back far enough to tell you the whole
story, to show you the big picture. I'm not just talking about ****
sapiens. That would be missing the big point, the point being that
regardless of our evolution, all our forebearers were still related to
each other even as they evolved as far back as 6 million years ago,
not just several hundred years ago, which is pretty much what those
interesting little TV shows talk about. The point is that we human
beings now don't keep in mind how long we've been related, even
as we have gone through the evolutionary processes. Now we have
the Internet. Now we are able to go half way around the world in
seconds, not months or longer. Ecologically we are forced to realize
we are all in this together, that we are one, but this critical realization
is true not just ecologically, but also genetically, and most importantly, spiritually. We have been connected, related, God knows how long, and
our survival is dependent not just in realizing our interconnectedness,
but acting upon it. So let's have a universal picnic, have fun, get to know
each other, laugh with each other, break bread (and some ice cream maybe) with each other. Wars are insane. They are anachronistic. They **** our
distant, and not so distant, relatives, as well as our close family members. Good old USA spends over half our money (taxes) on killing machines.
Crazy ****. Let's clean our air, our seas, our fallow lands. Let's cure all diseases. Let's stop profiting from others' pain. Let's stop hunger and homelessness and hopelessness. Let's stop killing each other and start
saving each other. And after we right all our wrongs, let's celebrate by
having a universal family picnic, maybe every month. There are about 7.8 billion human beings on Earth right now. Let them vote using smart
phones to see if they would like Peace on Earth. Let them govern Earth.
We are all Citizens of the Earth.  

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

The nakedness of a woman, her quintessence, is up
and to the right. This is the locus of her femininity. I
feel it. It is, of course, exquisite. When I hold her, it is
her ineffable womanness that embraces me. I am in-
ebriated by her beauty, drunk with euphoria. She pours
all of herself into me. She saturates me with every drop
of her being. She is my ultimate complement, spiritually
and sexually. Her hair, her skin, her gentle, blue eyes
increase exponentially her limitless, spellbinding aura.
Is she not the glory of the heavens? I am enchanted
forever--forever, my dearest.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks