roger, have you read the US Constitution

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.












------
        At least one clue
        Some small level of intelligence
        Self-determination

Well, you've downloaded the file, tried to view it, and got garbage.  
What went wrong?

The two most likely places for something to go wrong are both in the 
transmission of the file.  The first is this:  when you downloaded the 
file to your home computer, did you remember to tell the modem- 
transfer software that you're sending a binary file?

The second-most likely is that you forgot to say TENEX before you 
grabbed the file via FTP.

Either of these will result in mangled files that are unviewable by 
anything known to man.

Also: did you remember to trim off the header and trailer information if
you are/were using a "simple" uudecoder?  The symptom of forgetting to
do this is usually a message something like "short file" from your GIF
viewer.  There could also be the problem where blank lines are left 
between parts (or anywhere for that matter) within the 'begin' and 'end' 
lines of the uuencoded file.  Uudecode will get through them fine, but some
GIF viewers will choke on the results.  The only blank line I've seen
get by is the one just before the 'end' statement.  Beware of taking
too much or not enough off of the headers and trailers.

Another common problem is this one:  IBM mainframes often use an 
EBCDIC character set (yes, there's more than one EBCDIC set!) instead 
of the ASCII set used by everyone else.  This wouldn't be a problem except 
that most ASCII-EBCDIC converters have a bug which mungs the translation 
of several characters, including ^ { } and a few others.  Even this 
wouldn't be a problem except that the particular munging it does is to 
map several of these characters onto the *same* wrong character.  Ooops.

The way around this is not to use uuencode to transfer these files,
but to use xx-encode, which produces files which look almost exactly
like uu-encoded files, but the