Bill Snowden's Blog

You don't have to be Conservative to have a conscience or to be a good American

You don't have to be Conservative to have a conscience or to be a good American: Common sense American's: liberal or conservative and even those in the middle, have access to the same moral conscience, to the same facts; we may reach very different but honest conclusions.  I reach mine ( Liberal) based on the principle of the "Social Contract" and the Magna Carta- History has lessons for those who don't need labels... i.e.: socialism,tea baggers etc.

 What are History's Lessons?  

 We just need a cosmic-big picture-sense of humor and an understanding of the basic social contract to see them. Simply: the peasants agreed to not rise and kill the kings, if the kings agreed to the end of feudalism and to allow ownership of land ( the Magna Carta- remember that document?). Translated to 2009 and t0 20th/21st century terms, that means: we ( those who have more) agree to give to those that have less, a certain safety net of social services,i.e.:unemployment, welfare,medicare, The VA, etc; they ( those who have less) agree to live with their economic lives subject to the whim of large business shipping their jobs overseas or robbing their life savings( enron),the new serfs- those that just live their lives, raise their families and depend on the larger economic fabric to treat them fairly; They Agree to not rise up and revolt and kill everyone who has more than them. Thats the social contract..

America is  a republic based on certain balances.

If we don't get that, then we are a poor students of history and the socialogical lessons of the industrial revolution up to todays economies. Our social net or socialism as the birthers/teabaggers like to call it- communism, as the more ignorant call it- this balancing act of haves and have nots has been going on since the 1200's...Conservatives mix capitalism and free markets and usually understand neither. Free markets are not free, not when the haves can control it or manipulate it -remember the railroad monopolies of the 1800's, child labor, slavery, etc?  All of those  greed based motives affected the so called free market- what morality is inherient in that kind of capitalism? None- There's nothing democratic about that form of thug capitalism and free markets aren't free when those conditions exist- The social contract as exercised in our constitutional government causes the peoples representatives to make laws that prohibit those motives from conrtolling the free market.  

Morality must govern our treatment of others economically-

 It goes way beyond providing just opportunity. as for myself, I've started and run businesses for 30 years, developed real estate for over 25 years, I've experienced the best and the worst of our markets and capitalism, I've been elected to and served on over a dozen boards and committees in my community. The admonition by conservatives that liberals don't realize what an immigrant trying to get into America does, falls flat. I realize this; there are no easy glenn beck/rush/hannity cliches that honestly describe our social safety net and what they call 'socialism' is nothing more than the amount of balance it takes to keep the have nots from tearing your throats out. AIG, Enron, oil traders last year($150bl oil), they all appreciated republuican Senator phil gramms removal of decades long controls on how much oil could be traded, then Gramm( with the help of democrats as well) removed regulations on banks and mortgages- opportunity? yes, for the greedy. When I state that morality is the basis of our democracy, I mean it- it's about what's right. Not what can we get away with, it's about not ignoring the consequences of our economic actions( Enron, ect) on working families,consumers and investors. Does America provide Opportunity? Yes, the opportunity to do the fair, the reasonable and the morally right thing? It takes a conscience to be a good American, not a conservative.

1 comment »

You don't have to be Conservative to have a conscience or to be a good American

You don't have to be Conservative to have a conscience or to be a good American: Common sense American's: liberal or conservative and even those in the middle, have access to the same moral conscience, to the same facts; we may reach very different but honest conclusions.  I reach mine ( Liberal) based on the principle of the "Social Contract" and the Magna Carta- History has lessons for those who don't need labels... i.e.: socialism,tea baggers etc.

 What are History's Lessons?  

 We just need a cosmic-big picture-sense of humor and an understanding of the basic social contract to see them. Simply: the peasants agreed to not rise and kill the kings, if the kings agreed to the end of feudalism and to allow ownership of land ( the Magna Carta- remember that document?). Translated to 2009 and t0 20th/21st century terms, that means: we ( those who have more) agree to give to those that have less, a certain safety net of social services,i.e.:unemployment, welfare,medicare, The VA, etc; they ( those who have less) agree to live with their economic lives subject to the whim of large business shipping their jobs overseas or robbing their life savings( enron),the new serfs- those that just live their lives, raise their families and depend on the larger economic fabric to treat them fairly; They Agree to not rise up and revolt and kill everyone who has more than them. Thats the social contract..

America is  a republic based on certain balances.

If we don't get that, then we are a poor students of history and the socialogical lessons of the industrial revolution up to todays economies. Our social net or socialism as the birthers/teabaggers like to call it- communism, as the more ignorant call it- this balancing act of haves and have nots has been going on since the 1200's...Conservatives mix capitalism and free markets and usually understand neither. Free markets are not free, not when the haves can control it or manipulate it -remember the railroad monopolies of the 1800's, child labor, slavery, etc?  All of those  greed based motives affected the so called free market- what morality is inherient in that kind of capitalism? None- There's nothing democratic about that form of thug capitalism and free markets aren't free when those conditions exist- The social contract as exercised in our constitutional government causes the peoples representatives to make laws that prohibit those motives from conrtolling the free market.  

Morality must govern our treatment of others economically-

 It goes way beyond providing just opportunity. as for myself, I've started and run businesses for 30 years, developed real estate for over 25 years, I've experienced the best and the worst of our markets and capitalism, I've been elected to and served on over a dozen boards and committees in my community. The admonition by conservatives that liberals don't realize what an immigrant trying to get into America does, falls flat. I realize this; there are no easy glenn beck/rush/hannity cliches that honestly describe our social safety net and what they call 'socialism' is nothing more than the amount of balance it takes to keep the have nots from tearing your throats out. AIG, Enron, oil traders last year($150bl oil), they all appreciated republuican Senator phil gramms removal of decades long controls on how much oil could be traded, then Gramm( with the help of democrats as well) removed regulations on banks and mortgages- opportunity? yes, for the greedy. When I state that morality is the basis of our democracy, I mean it- it's about what's right. Not what can we get away with, it's about not ignoring the consequences of our economic actions( Enron, ect) on working families,consumers and investors. Does America provide Opportunity? Yes, the opportunity to do the fair, the reasonable and the morally right thing? It takes a conscience to be a good American, not a conservative.

2 comments »

A true story from Route 66

   The death of a hippie march in November 1967 in the Haight Ashbury. 

Growing up on Cape Cod, the ocean has always been my spiritual connection. But in 1967 a road gave me my first taste of freedom.

When I was a kid, I hitchhiked to California on the old Route 66. It was 8:00 am, August 4th, 1967. I walked out of Horatio Hall, Tobler's barn in Chatham , where I'd lived and had my first acid trip that summer. I walked down to Main street, Chatham, pointed my body west and put my thumb out. I had forty dollars hidden in my underwear and a piece of paper in my pocket from a waiter at the Columns Restaurant of the name and address of a guy in San Diego who would sell me a kilo of grass for 20 bucks. I was gonna find him and turn around and hitch back home so me and my friends could smoke weed all winter. I had no clue what I was doing. Hitch hiking cross country based on some deep guidance. I was in the hands of fate and destiny. In life it helps to be young when we take risks that we don't even realize are risks.  I was going to hitch hike across America. I had just turned 19, the week before.

My journey to Rte 66 started on the Cape and wound thru the Midwest, going south all the way to Los Angeles. Rte 66; a two lane asphalt history lesson, all 2,000 miles, unwinding like an old black phonograph record track; scored, scarred and full of every dream, regret and sorrow America recorded on it's asphalt since the Great Depression.  Every mile I walked and rode on it felt like an old 78 rpm, hand cranked song, singing a feeling of wide openness, a time when there weren't so many of us. Every deserted gas station I saw from Oklahoma to Arizona sang of the Joads, hobos and Oakies, of Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, of Jack Kerouac's, "On the Road" and Neil Cassidy, of nameless long dead mothers who lost their kids in childbirth, while pulled over on the grassy shoulder of Hope's Highway. Route 66 started somewhere for everyone who took it.  It was a wonderful old road, as long, endless and hopeful as the dreams of its travelers. But like all dreams hitting reality, it, too, came to a dead end sooner or later.

I was on that road three days in early August, 1967 and my dreams were mighty damn big.

Late the third day, into the fourth, I got to L.A. It was like 2 am, a pitch black, moonless night. I said to the truck driver that'd picked me up in Arizona,

"Just take me to the ocean and I'll know where I'm supposed to go."

He dropped me off in Malibu about 3:00 am, just north of where Route 66 ended and Coastal Route 1 began. Facing the Pacific was a weird experience. My Atlantic ocean left shoulder was used to facing north, everything here was reversed and I could feel it. Standing in the dark, smelling familiar salt air, hearing the waves in the Pacific night, something made me abandon the notion of scoring a kilo for me and my friends back on the Cape, and my life turned me North, up coastal route 1 toward San Francisco. Fourty years later, I still can't tell you why, but I'm grateful Life chose me to be on the bus even if I was just catching it leaving the psychedelic station.. A couple of groggy hours and one ride later, a Boeing factory worker on break between double shifts building bombers for Viet Nam let me out on a cliff over the dark Pacific somewhere near Big Sur. I could smell the heavy salt air and taste the spray from waves I could hear down below. There was a bent over street pole light up ahead on my side of the road. The fog created a yellowish beam, an angled lampshade line right down to the crushed cinders under my feet. My bomber building ride banged a u-e and screeched back south towards L.A. I'd barely straightened up to get my thumb out when a blue Ford Falcon station wagon came outa the night and pulled over, skidding in the ciders about 20 feet ahead of me. Its cracked windshield was half lit under the street lamp. I ran towards the car, and the Falcon's passenger door flew open but no one was sitting there. As I leaned in, the unseen driver's, slow,long voice said, "Where are the Snowdens' of yesteryear?" I peered in and said, "My name's Snowden, where're ya going?"

Just another chance meeting, another dream song, another dead child, another miracle birth, another chance robbery, anotherunexpected kindness of a generous stranger, another storydelivered from a trip on a dead end highway. Route 66.

That night, destiny sent me north and I spent the next 18 months in the Haight Ashbury, northern California and the jungles and beaches of Mexico. It was the summer of love, 1967. Quite the trip. The voice in the Falcon station wagon, Dwight Carson, became a life long, though troubled friend. That night, when he flung the passenger door open, he'd just finsihed reading "Catch 22" and he'd yelled out Yossarian's quote about the "Snowden's of yesteryear". Carson was random like that before random was cool or diagnosed treatable. What were the odds that a guy named Snowden would peer in your car after you blurt that out? If you think that was a flash; honestly, it was a minor ripple compared to the Psychic/Soul experiences waiting for me when I got to the Haight Ashbury. That was just the first door of perception to crash open. When you hear the phrase, ‘we are all one'. Well, it's one thing to hear it and something infinitely, indescribably else to "experience" oneness with All energy and space, with the Creative Intelligence of the Universe. After that, you absolutely are no longer in Kansas, Dorthy and clicking your heels twice will never make you come home. It was life changing, consciousness changing , dangerous, risky, firing line of life stuff. I wouldn't recommend my kids do it but I'm at peace now with my adventure and grateful for the Blessing that still lives in me as a result of being willing to cast my fate to the wind.

Rte 66 was replaced a few years later by a big Federal, impersonal Interstate Highway. All the towns along 66 began their death rattle as America made more and more of ourselves to fill in the spaces between the two coasts.

I had a chance to walk on Rte 66 in 1967, when I was 19 years old.  I Meet hobos and old people who didn't have anything to say. I got a chance to listen to accapella songs from an ancient fiddler who, after he got up from the seat next to me, literally disappeared on a moving train. I got  get rides from people I'd never see till Judgment Day. I was nineteen, incredibly alive and dangerously free. You know what the freedom was? From us. From all of us. From too many human beings. I got a chance to walk and ride, alone,  across a vast open land and on a Highway that hadn't seen so many lives that it couldn't hold the song of their individual memories in its long grooved track of a road. And I am so grateful that the year 1967 cranked that handle and played the feelings of those lives back to me.

What a sweet, sweet smell solitude is, served fresh on a long open road when you're young.

billy snowden

Haight Ashbury, Summer of 67'

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Results of NY's 23rd signals end of GOP. Here's why.

Conservatives are pumped! The eventual end of the GOP was written in the NY 23rd race yesterday and nobody's getting it.. Here's why. Ben Adler, as noted by Greg Hilton, in his Newsweek article makes seemingly good sense  about Dems leaving the party in Westchester, NY; there's a message to be sent to Axelrod, that's for sure. BUT the GOP wake up call is ringing way, way louder. I'll say it again, for the 3rd time today. They should have easily won the 23rd. It's a poorer area than Westchester and the Ny Suburbs mentioned in the Newsweek piece. My analysis and my contacts tell me that the GOP is on the verge of a seething civil war. Hoffman didnt even concede in the 23rd, he dismissed the election results with a terse sarcastic comment and pledged to fight on. Pundits and analysts are missing the breadcrumbs that are leading to the oven that's roaring with the fires of Cheny/Palin/Rush?hannity and Beck- They are stoking the split that the 23rd revealed. The Conservative wing came in and was able to pressure the republican candidate out. The analysts this week are of base: Here's what they're missing:  In poorer Congressional districts, unlike Westchester, the Govt is still seen as more of a lifeline than conservative ideology is. They don't sense any hope OR FOOD OR COLLEGE TUITION in the conservative message. Not in bleak times. Westchester is not the NY 23rd. GOP voters with no real assurrance their unemployment insurance will continue under the Repubs/conservatives voted for the Democrat.  Moderate republican's, economic insecurity makes the split in their party ineveitable-

YOU HEARD IT HERE-  A new national Conservative Party is in the making. They are  willing to sacrifice the 2012  Prez election by running a splinter conservative candidate in all 50 states, they are willing to strip Republican votes from the GOP nominee and tip obama the election in 2012 for a possible 2016- full boat run - as a major party.They are gambling that the country will be so sick of the left that they can catapult to a win. I'm a liberal and I'm going to share something, If Obama stays the punch puller he is, they will probably win in 2016. After 8 years of medicocre leadership style ( Obama's style is leadership by subtraction)a bare majority will embrace this form of hated filled conservatism, just as a rudderless, hyperinflated, defeated Germany embraced the 3rd Reich.

 There's an upside to this, at least for thoughtful  liberals like myself:  I can't wait for the Conservative litmus test/inqisistion purges to begin this year!! What a show, as they jettison the wimp O' cons over the walls: It's gonna look like the flying cow scene outa Monty Pythons 'holy grail'. As vetted wimp o' cons are rejected and shot over the walls of true conservatism, the shouts of 'throw out your weak conservatives' will grow through the village. Children will tell on their parents,  texting Con Party auditors that their parents watched Rachel Maddow last night or worse, Keith Oberman...And they thought the Purges of Stalin and Chairman Mao were colorful? Wait till himself, Senor Rush, gets a table set up in the courtyard of the first conservative party convention; you thought the preening,bouncy boy of last year regurgatating?Imagine, He, Hannity, Beck, with their power of the TV/Radio pulpit, exorcising the Party phonys and unworthy till they have the Aryan purity of undefiled Christian Conservatism.

You want to know why that spells the end game of the GOP as a major party? Cause, now,each needs one another: the conservatives and the GOP are like a surrogate mother forced to carry Rosemarys baby; each hates the other and can't wait to kill it. but they will marginalize one another when they do. But the conservative party( we're not tallking real Conservatives here-those with a capitol "C" - we're talking vituperous hate and condemnation little 'c' conservatives, the kind hooked on bile and ignorance and blinded by the mishegas of their myopic uneducated twisted world view, these Hannity/Rush/Savage/Beck troglodytes are willing to gamble a few years of political marginalization, along the way win a few dozen or so Cong seats, maybe a senate seat or two, some local legislative seats, a few state house wins, maybe a govenorship; with that base in place over 6 years, these loonies will then go for the Presidency. That demarcation will spell permanent minority party status for the GOP. The conservatives will have left the GOP, most the money will follow them. The GOP unwinding has begun. Its just a matter of time. Watch for the Hoffman follow up in the 23rd, watch the conservative pundits/Palin to build on his near win. Mike Steele is a jobless man walking. Make way.

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A Cape Cod Life: Bill Snowden

Introducing Bill Snowden

Bill Snowden grew up on Cape Cod. Summers, at 11, unknown to his working mother, he piloted his 12-fooot skiff with a 3-hp hand pull Johnson engine along the Cape's beautiful undeveloped southside, exploring estuaries from Hyannisport to Waquoit.

He sailed Crosby Beettle Cats till High School, Played football at D-Y. At 4 C's he was president of the Student Senate, editor of the newspaper and the literary magazine.

At Suffolk University he was a National Award winning debater and forensic speaker. He took 9 years to get a college degree, drawn to a trip to the Haight Ashbury, the summer of love,1967, In the Haight he met Allen Ginsberg, Tim Leary, Baba Ram Dass, lived down stairs from Janis Joplin and her band, he left San Francisco in his VW bus, went solo to mexico at 19; lived,surfed on a empty beach on the Pacific, met and was blessed by a Huichole Medicine Man on that beach and came home convinced that " if you can't change your own town, how can you expect to change your country?"

He still passionately lives that.

Bill Snowden has been in Cape politics since he was 20 years old, winning office at age 21 in Dennis and the following year became the Youngest Selectmen ever elected in the Cape's oldest population town.

He has served on over a dozen boards and committees in three towns over 40 years. There are few on the Cape political scene with his longevity and perspective.

He's owned Restaurants and developed real estate and was one of the Cape's first 40B developers.

He now manages Hawk's Wing Organic Farm and Orchard in Yarmouthport with his children. He's Chair of the Yarmouth Agricultural Commission and a controversial new member of the Yarmouth Board of Health. He is a strong advocate for Cape Cod acheiving agricultural/aquacultural sustainability over the next 20 years.

You can email Bill, and please remeber the commenting rules:

1. Stay on topic.
2. No personal attacks.
3. No slander or libelous statements.

Commenters who can not follow these rules will be deleted.

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