"WHAT DO YOU THINK - OUR COUNTRY'S SO INNOCENT?"
Monday
February 6, 2017

As an inmate, I was unable to cast my own vote in last year's election, and had I been able to, I certainly wouldn't have cost a vote for Trump. At the same time, I wouldn't have voted for "Crooked Hillary," either. I think they both have some seriously disturbing issues which prevents them from being a good leader, so rather then trying to figure out which of these two I'd rather vote for, I would have opted to think "outside the box," examining the third party candidates in search for a more suitable replacement.

with that said, while I'm not a "Trump supporter," that's not to say I disagree with everything he's said or done, either on his way to the White House, or since being sworn in as President. One thing that immediately comes to mind is Trump's response to Fox's Bill O'Reilly. When O'Reilly called Russian's President Putin a "killer," Trump responded, stating that "[t]here are a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What do you think - our country's so innocent?" When O'Reilly pressed on, pointing to allegations that Putin has had some of his political opponents murdered, Trump responded, doubled down by stating "[a] lot of killers around, believe me."

Mainstream media's response was both swift and harsh. His reasoning for providing the response he did has been blamed on everything from being blackmailed by Putin to trying to pay Putin back for "hacking the election," but personally, I'm not buying it. While I certainly don't agree with many of the things Trump has done or said, in this instance, I agree, and more importantly, support his assertions concerning our own country's innocence.

Is it just me? Or does mainstream media suffer from "selective amnesia?" Just a couple of days before Trump made these most recent controversial comments, the local PBS affiliate, KVIE, did a special that I believe was called "Reel South." It was about a program called "Eugenics." As I understood it, this was a forced sterilization program which our own government carried out on its "undesirables," those serving time in prison, those with "mental health issues," etc. When people started trying to stand up for their reproductive rights, rather then striking down these unjust laws, our own judicial system, which included the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that such tactics were permissible, allowing the forced sterilization to continue in States like North Carolina for years before they finally ended. But perhaps this isn't such a good example because, after all, the government wasn't actually killing anyone, just violating people's reproductive rights, their religious rights, in many cases, without any form of due process whatsoever.

The list of crimes carried out by the US government on her citizens is staggering, and horrendous. Hundreds of black men were intentionally inflicted with syphilis and then denied treatment, so scientists could better understand the disease; government officials intentionally infected the citizens of San Francisco with a biological weapon in an attempt to study dispersal patterns; inmates in the Texas Department of Corrections were used to test a component of Agent Orange; disease carrying mosquitoes were intentionally set free in parts of Florida; the list goes on and on, and these are just the crimes we know about, just imagine the things we're unaware of, and while some of these examples are several decades old, I can assure you that there are plenty of examples which aren't. For instance, take a look at the water crisis still unfolding in Flint, Michigan. Regardless of how it came about, the simple fact is that the government knew about it, and still failed to take action, in the process doing who knows how much irreparable damage to its own citizens. Personally, I'd be very interested in seeing a complete list of the atrocities the U.S. government has carried out on her own citizens.

As far as Trump's very public comments regarding America's lack of innocence, I'm still uncertain why mainstream media was so upset. After all, aren't these the very people who exposed some of those events? Did they not use the existence of those events to bring their ratings up? Maybe, instead of pretending these sorts of things haven't been carried out with the government's approval and punishing those who reveal those secrets, what we need to be doing is demanding that those responsible be held accountable for their atrocities. Whether Trump was referring to the crimes carried out by the American government against her own citizens, and on American soil, or crimes carried out against citizens of other nations is immaterial, for the moment. Trump has at least acknowledged that her hands aren't as clean as we constantly try to pretend, and now that we've started to acknowledge this, perhaps we can take the next step of actually cleaning them, for the whole world to see, and in the process of doing so, set an example.

Shawn L. Perrot CDCR# V-42461
MCSP Cell# C-13-229L
P.O. Box 409060
Ione, CA. 95640