November 3, 2004
Please Distribute Widely

Dear Colleague,

The second Bush term is going to make the first four years look like the good old days.

Now that the American president really was elected, his gnawing sense of illegitimacy removed, his father's curse exorcized, his religious right flank empowered, and a hesitant world now falling to its knees to bow before him, watch out.

During the first four years, he and his gang restrained themselves from fully unleashing the repressive measures of the Patriot Act, knowing that it could cost them the election. The restraints are now gone.

And other repressive policies like the drug war? Watch that get used, now, as politically as the terror war.

It's mourning in America. My mailbox runneth over today with emails from friends and strangers who want to leave the United States and come down here to Latin America.

Nobody should do that to run from a fight: After all, if you are a citizen of the U.S.A., there is no place to hide from your own country's foreign policy.

And if Narco News, the first online newspaper to win First Amendment protections from the United States courts, reporting on the drug war and democracy from Latin America, has proved anything, it's that the fight can be waged very effectively from the outside and margins of the national borders, too.

So this is an invitation, both for those who now want to leave the United States (we help those who help themselves: many of my colleagues and I did it years ago), and for those who want to stay, but it is not an invitation to those who want to give up. This is only an invitation for those who want to continue fighting against the anti-democracy tyranny emanating from the North.

I'll tell you the specifics of that invitation in a moment, but first would like to reflect on yesterday's election and explain why I think the forces of change, and options for change agents, come out of it much stronger than before…

Read the whole essay – “Now What? First, We Kill the Media” – on Big Left Outside…

www.bigleftoutside.com/archives/000446.php

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al