Yesterday was the inauguration ceremony at the state house and a number of other scheduled festive events to ring in the new administrations. After doing some promotional chalkings around the perimeter of the building, I headed inside and met with other independent media personalities visiting town from Keene. When we discovered a line outside of the governor’s office, we were struck with the urge to file in.
A staffer noticed our rolling videocameras and informed us that the line was for a photograph with governor Maggie Hassan, but that she would not have time to dedicate to a videotaped interview. Darryl, Kate, and James decided to find other items to film, while I perused the posters featuring the event’s corporate sponsors, which included everything from New Hampshire businesses to pharmaceutical multinationals.
It was a very rushed encounter, as most happenings with lines tend to be. I quickly asked after handing off my rolling camera and being flashed by still cameras, “Will you be doing anything to decrease New Hampshire’s dependence on the United States federal government?”
“Uh, well, I think that’s something we’ll all talk about, thanks.”
I picked up a cheesecake item and walked to the house chamber to listen to a colorful choir. Outside of the office, the line to see the new state president grew. In the lobby, chocolate bears were being distributed. It was a statist synthesis of Christmas and Easter, and there was free stuff to go around.
On this first day of the New Year, I was motivated to do something I don’t normally, and that is contacting federal ‘representatives’. A website linked on my Facebook feed made it as easy as customizing a form letter to address three congressman and the president. The letter called for the immediate closing of the US Department of Defense’s School of the Americas, also known as WHINSEC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. WHINSEC is a training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia where primarily Latin American militants loyal to US foreign policy demands are instructed in tactics of controlling and killing. You don’t often (or ever) hear the four politicians who received my message discussing the collateral damage and crimes attributed to graduates of the school, which made it the most fitting way to frame a new year, while talking heads babble on about fiscal cliffs. For more on legislative and other actions to take against the School of the Americas, check out soawatch.org.
I’ve been working on a project to release my raw videos from the NATO Summit protests in Chicago and recently created an introduction segment. The videos will be released first as single videos featuring an entire day’s footage to Fr33manTVraw. From the single large video, a trimmed cut will be produced with audio commentary and released on the FreeConcordTV youtube channel. After creating the intro, I found that it worked very well as a trailer for the footage to come. It features video from both myself and other videographers, with channels cited in the video description.
Still more footage of KPD’s Ken Meola behaving poorly towards Dave Ridley. Ridley also suggests I am “passive aggressive” and that I’ve wasted my time having breakfast with people like Ken. I disagree that it’s time wasted conversing in a humane manner with government workers and politicians. Ridley may be angry, but I am generally not. If I find myself angry, I’ll do my best to admit it, and work on shifting to better feelings. As usual, when someone accuses me of being “passive aggressive”, I think that’s just projection on their part. Ridley wants me to be angry for him, because he feels, perhaps, as though he would be angry in the situations in question.
I’m long past being angry at the government guys. They are just humans doing the wrong thing by aggressing against their peaceful neighbors. Everyone can change – I know I have. Here’s Ridley’s report:
In the video, Woods provides a ringing endorsement for the Free State Project:
“We should support the Free State Project, I think it’s a great idea. But now I’m doubly enthusiastic for it because now I feel like we have to do it just to drive this woman [Cynthia Chase] crazy.”
Al Jazeera’s Inside Story program today published a twenty five minute segment on United States police militarization. It is a fitting story in light of the recent acquisition of Bearcats around the state. The program had previously run a story on police brutality following the violent response to police brutality protests in Anaheim, California last July.
It was a very rushed encounter, as most happenings with lines tend to be. I quickly asked after handing off my rolling camera and being flashed by still cameras, “Will you be doing anything to decrease New Hampshire’s dependence on the United States federal government?”
