I always considered articles such as these to be manifestations of a conspiracy theory. After all, our government leaders don't really want to undermine the people of this country, do they? Even though the messed up policies they are enacting are undermining us, this is not being done with malice aforethought, is it?

Not long ago, a certain gentleman called me about writing his story. He had married young woman from a foreign country who was willing to do anything she could to get a green card, so that she could stay here permanently. Now, most people are not aware of the obtuse situations our citizenship laws have made for immigrants to this country. In the normal order of things, an individual applying to live here generally must wait at least five years for that coveted green card. However, if that individual manages to marry a U S citizen, they only have to wait for two years. And their U.S. spouse must sign documents with our government promising to support the immigrant for the rest of his or her life, whether or not the couple stays married.

Now, if the immigrant has ambitions of going out on her own and establishing a career, without being encumbered by a husband, whom she might or might not like at the moment, the easiest and the most lucrative thing she can do, as far as our laws are concerned, is to stage numerous battles with her American husband. You see, according to Federal law, all a woman has to do is proclaim before a judge that she is afraid her husband might hit her. Her husband does not even have to look at her cross-eyed. It is even better for her if she is able to establish a criminal record against him. This will involve calling the police numerous times and complaining to them about what he is doing.

When a woman used to call the police to say her husband was beating her up, they did not want to get involved. Now, the police come out to the house in herds, and they will do everything in their power to make the woman feel comfortable with them. They will even bring interpreters with them if she does not speak English well. And the husband is told to stay out of the way, and what he has to say for himself is never given any consideration. The police never seem to tire of coming out for these calls, and some women have been able to get five and six burly young men to come out to her home three and four times a day, every day for weeks at a time, even though the husband is not harming her in any way. Under these circumstances, the man has small recourse except to file for divorce. However, doing that can open a tinder-box of law-suits from the immigrant wife.

Recently, I saw an ad from Verizon, the Internet provider. They have hired a crew of people to help foreign women who are involved in marriages where their husbands are abusing them. Our laws are so heavily skewed against the man in these situations, why is a company like Verizon interested in tipping the scales against our men even more than they already are? What is in it for such a large corporation? It is enough to make me think that there is truth to what I have read about groups like The Family, and the Carlisle Group, and the news that I have read from time to time about the banking interests undermining large portions of our population.

I just learned from one of my news sources this morning that the US has been bombing the great island of Hawaii, in the name of teaching the soldiers how to fly B2 bombers over Korea. And that this has been going on since October this year. Would somebody please get the facts straight for me?

After the stories were out about the sorts of testing that went on in Nevada from the 1950s through the 70s, the radiation our citizens were exposed to during that time, in the name of science, we maintained the rather smug belief we all had that this was a dark period of our history, brought on by the necessities of the Cold War, and that it would not be repeated again. After all, so we told ourselves, Nevada has large tracts of undeveloped real-estate that no one else wants. Besides, we had the excuse then that we did not know how high levels of radiation would affect large portions of our population. At least this is what we can tell ourselves as the stories still come out about the misery people are still dealing with as a result of those experiments.

But Hawaii? Hawaii is a series of tiny jewels in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with an ecosystem like no other in the world, and a dense population. According to my statistics, 160 thousand people live and work there year round, and on the large island - get the size from the Internet - about 1.5 million tourists from all over the world visit there every year.

So now, our army has chosen Pohakuloa, an area that is heavily infested with depleted uranium from past testing-to drop bombs out of B2 bombers. Instead of cleaning the area up, they are stirring up the pollution, so that our citizens can breathe it in.

The army is sending B2 bombers over the island, carrying a payload of what they call dummy bombs. These bombs are said to be inert-non-explosive. But each of these supposed inert bombs weighs 376 thousand pounds, and they are being dropped from 18 thousand feet above the mountains. And to add insult, the mayor of Hawaii, Harry Kim, was not told what our beloved army has been up to.

So now, if the bomb hits the intended target, DU laiden dust is kicked up into the air. And if it misses, and lands for instance on a playground, or on someone's home, or a public school, or office building, it's oh, so sorry, we'll do better next time.

Here I thought Hawaii was one of our states and that the Hawaiians were honored citizens of this country, with all the rights and privileges that go with that.

Please, tell me this is not happening.

For the last few weeks, I have been participating in the local police citizens' academy, here in Waltham, MA. It's a program they offer a few times a year to the general public, free of charge. Various policemen participate in this program, and I am certain that they are picked because they know how to talk, and they love the work they do for the force. This is, after all, a wonderful chance for them to enhance the public image of our police force. When considered from that standpoint, this class is largely a success. Most of the people who come to these classes are enthusiastic about what they learn there. And most of the men who have been talking are intelligent and thoughtful.

However, this writer has a number of questions about the philosophy these men have been speaking. Questions about the rightness of what they do. My questions were crystallized on the evening two women officers spoke with us. These were good, caring women who spoke of what it was like to work in a male dominated profession where being physically fit and aggressive are considered absolutely necessary. Among the things they said is that most women do not have the upper body strength that most men have, so when they are in a situation where they are expected to subdue a presumed criminal, or bad man, as they like to call such people, they cannot do this with punches and kicks as easily as a man could. Instead, they must talk him down.

This writer asked whether they received training to do this, and their answer was no, that they had to learn how to manage while on the job.

The emphasis here is on the use of force, much as if the police force were part of the army. Some of the men spoke of getting their kicks by shooting weapons at people-in the name of crowd control. Their job is to uphold the law, and defend the status quo. They are not there to make waves, or to make drastic changes in policy regarding how our laws will be upheld.

In this country, which has the highest proportion of its population in prison, one of their detectives said that 90 percent of the crimes they receive are never solved. Even so, it is their job to arrest someone. And then, no matter what the stated ideals are, it is up to that person to prove he is innocent.

Men are chosen for this job because they enjoy using force against other people, and in many situations they have only fractional seconds to decide how they will deal with what is happening. Logic would tell you that yes, there will b an abundance of incidents of police using more force than would be necessary. It is no wonder that nearly every day another story comes out in the news concerning police brutality. And it is easy to see why the general population does not trust policemen.

The problem lies in our system, and this is just one more sign that it is sick. However, last night I rode around with one police officer for a couple of hours. It was a quiet night. He drove up one street and down another, covering his beat, and we spent that time talking. He was a thoughtful and well educated young man, who reads and analyzes what he reads, and he thinks about how his job affects the rest of society. And I am gladdened to know that there are such men on the force.

Yes, things do happen for a reason, but let us remember that reason is out of our immediate control. We may become infected with a virus or bacteria and get sick. Those things are opportunistic beasts that have no ability to care whether their host is the much revered leader of a country, or an innocent child. All they know, if they can be said to know anything, is that in this body they have found fertile ground to reproduce.

A corporation downsizes. We've been hearing a lot about that sort of thing. Thousands of people lose their jobs, as the work they had been doing is sent overseas to people who are willing to do the same work for wages that no one in this country would be able to live on. Whose fault is that? Is it the fault of the individuals who have lost their jobs, or the fault of the stock holders who vote for any policy that will raise the value of their stock from one year to the next? It is the displaced people who bear the burden of those policies, and then get blamed by the rest of society, because their lives are not going well.

Yes, it is easy to blame the victim. He's standing in front of you, with his hat in hand, asking for help, and you have little or none to give him, because you are fighting the same battles to keep up with your bills that he had been, up until he lost his job.

And the people who are to blame are so difficult to identify and to locate, that in terms of our daily lives, they hardly exist. For they are we. We are the ones buying a bit of stock now and then-attempting to build up a portfolio that will supplement our retirement income. We pay little attention to how the large stockholders vote; only noting that the value of our small portion may have gone up as a result of policies that mean little to us. So, where does the blame lie? It lies with all of us. As with bacterial parasites, we pay little attention to our hosts-those workers who nourish the rest of society by the labors.

To borrow a term from the techies, perhaps we are hard-wired to be oblivious to the people we take advantage of, much as bacterial parasites are. But, if that is the case, we are also hard-wired to be aware of what we are, and to learn good ways to make things better.

First of all, I want to say that this woman was singing-to-the-choir. As concerned Jews at this meeting, we all want the battles in Israel to end. What Israel has been doing to the Palestinians has been variously compared with what Germany did to the Jews in1933, and worse. There are some survivors of that outrage who will weep and say that nothing could possibly be as bad as what happened to them during the Holocaust. And it is true-when such atrocities happen to oneself, nothing that happens to anyone else ever seems so wretched.

However, this writer, this very concerned Jewess, gets the same bad feelings in her chest when she listens to a Palestinian from Gaza or the West Bank describe what he is experiencing, as she does when she listens to a Holocaust survivor recount what he lost in the last war.

We have officially gone from being victims to being victimizers. The professor at this meeting recounted in monotone the statistics of the losses on both sides. She spoke of people being separated from their families, because Israel decides who will live in Palestine and who will not. She cited the numbers of people living in Palestine who cannot get medical treatment.

She cited the deaths, and she cited the Israeli abuse of Palestinian children, all in the same monotone, matter-of-fact numbers. It is only as I go back through my notes that I can grieve over the enormity of the situation there.

And she went on to say that we cannot publicly label what is happening there as another holocaust, because many Jews will claim that we are anti-Semitic. The word to use now is apartheid. And so, we struggle over semantics while people are dying.

I wish I did not have to be ashamed of Israel. I read the news coming out of that country, devout Jew that I am, I wish the Balfour Treaty had never been signed. It has been said that there was a time when the surviving Jews could have been permitted to settle in Israel without the battles that have been fought over that land ever since. Some form of agreement had been laid out that would have given most people there what they wanted-without the bloodshed. But the decision was made to do it the way it is now.

And I am ashamed.