allen, unemployent stays low

Dear Judges, Lawyers, Policemen, Guards, Counselors, Taxpayers, et. al.,

We are here.  Like it or not, for good or bad, we are here.  Who are we?  We are the
downtrodden and dispossesed, the self-torturing, the disenfranchised convicts,
drug and alcohol addicts, the unemployed and unemployable.  We are the children of
poverty, financial and spiritual.  We have and will have children of our own,
grandchildren too.  We are ex-cons, uninsured, homeless, of many colors and speaking
many tongues.  We are the enemy in what has become a domestic war against ourselves.

And who are you?  You who like the tough talk of Tough on Crime?  You who watch as
budgets are cut in education and health care while you militarize a police force?
Bullet-proof vests, automatic weapons, helicopters, tanks, robots ... the
testosterone is oozing through the streets, more prisons, longer sentences, tighten
the belt, spartan conditions, task forces, gang units, gun courts.  And what is there
to show for it?  Unemployent stays low because half the population oversees those
"out of the workforce", the dregs, the rabble, the enemy?  Please tell me there is a
deeper reason.  Do you feel safer?  More humane?  More like a cohesive society with a
shared sense of purpose, who can identify Us and Them?  Do you live in a gated
community or gentrified neighborhood?  By the way, have you read the Declaration of
Independence and US Constitution - or do you only know the first phrases?

It's about time we got together.  Please know that I have yet to meet a convict who
wants their child to be a thief, an addict, a dealer, a prostitute, or a violent
individual.  Most of us still have hope for ourselves even when stuck in the darkest
dilemmas, ruts and catch-22s.  Most of us believe in crafting laws and instilling
order.  Many of us have burrowed beneath the surface to find a spiritual sense of
being, an understanding force at least as powerful as those we succumbed to, and many
of use wouldn't escape if you opened the front door.  Did you know that approximately
10 million Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, on parole or once were in
those categories?  Each of those 10 million have families, friends, neighbors ... and
so closer and closer does the We interface with the You.  Don't you think it's time we
talked?

Are you ready?  Can you accept that the road we are travelling points toward a grim
and painful future?  Do you have the heart to face monumental failures while bravely
struggling beyond where we are now?  I know that some of you are, and that some of us
are, and this is what gives me hope.  You need our insights just as we need your
structure.  It is never over, especially when a real solution, a real treatment for
our sickness, is yet to begin.

                                                   In Solidarity,

                                                   Bruce Reilly (a.k.a Bruha)
                                                   P.O.Box 8274
                                                   Cranston, RI 02920 USA

P.S. - I am trying to conceptualize an effective guerilla media campaign to promote
       this cause.  Ideas are welcome.  Collaboration is prayed.




















files, so set your transfer protocol accordingly.  
If you are moving around just the uuencoded data, an ASCII transfer will 
work just fine, however (you'll have to decode it eventually, of course).  
Note that if you *don't* transfer the decoded file in BINARY mode, 
everything will appear to work just fine - until you try to view the 
picture.  Then you'll get all sorts of undefined results...


III.  COMMON PICTURE TYPES

        Basic checklist:                Alternate checklist:
        ----------------                --------------------
        GIF viewer                      Multi-format viewer
        Format conversion tool(s)       Format conversion tool(s)
                                        Image manipulation tool(s)

OK.  Now you've got this great picture file from downloading it and 
running it through UUDECODE.  What is it, and what do you do with it?

The most common type of picture is the GIF format (which usually has
a .GIF or .gif file suffix).  GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format, 
and is a standard format for images that was developed by CompuServe to 
be a device-independent method of storing pictures.  It includes 
Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression, which makes the files fairly small.

JPEG is another standardized image compression mechanism, which stands 
for Joint Photographic Experts Group (the original name of the committee 
that wrote the standard).  It seems more and more common that JPEG-type 
pictures (.JPG or .jpg file suffix, usually) are getting posted to the 
net.  Some claim that JPEG is destined to overtake GIF format in popularity, 
because it