Many people have asked me, “Why a balloon release?”
Their concerns are varied and valid.
I will first say that I wanted, needed to do something. Like so many others, I have grown increasingly frustrated over the years and more recently by an ever-increasing and relentless stream of plutocratic and greed-centered assaults on our world and the people who live in it. And I am guilty.
Too many times I chose not to vote because none of the candidates suited me. Too many times I did nothing to counter injustice when it didn’t seem to impact me directly. Too many times I was simply complacent and even lazy. And I was wrong. Injury to one is injury to us all. Ignorance is only bliss for those who wish to keep us ignorant and enslave us.
Around the world I am not alone in these perceptions and in the feeling that I have become irrelevant, disenfranchised, and mute. I an not alone with the concern that even now as my discontent is realized that no matter how hard I scream, nobody will hear me. Nobody will care.
And I feel weak.
But we are NOT alone. And this must be our fundamental awakening.
Around this country, around the globe, across states, borders, oceans, religion, race and philosophies, on each side of all that separates us we are all, after all, people. We laugh, we cry, we live and we die. Too often we cry for our loved ones who die in the senseless rhetoric of wars, nationalism and even misguided religion. And not of our doing when the truth is finally uncovered. But rather in service to the cold, heartless greed of wealth, of power and of another’s desire to subjugate and bind us.
We need to put aside the differences that don’t matter and cling to the realities of life that do matter. We need to learn to be a united family of man. In this unity, no 1% of the wealthy will be able to hold down the welfare of the Rest of Us.
“The Rest of Us”.
We really don’t know how to work together. Wherever, whenever we congregate, be it in town halls, church, mosque, synagogue, we are too often compelled by those who lead us to see only differences. We are taught that discrimination is good, necessary, vital and that we should construct divisions for our own salvation. We are trained from the cradle to the grave by those that would hold power over us not to unite, not to work together, that we can never become one. This, in the age where science shows us that we have all sprung from the same fountainhead.
Why would our leaders desire so uniformly to keep us divided, keep us ignorant and then, as so often is the case, lead us as sheep to slaughter.?
The bigger question now is, why do we go?
I am one man, the same as you, and you and you. I am looking for a way that we can all come together. I am proposing an exercise in unity as we break the shackles we have been conditioned to wear as a badge of honor. I want the Rest of Us to finally realize the potential of our unity.
The union of humanity is necessary to the salvation of humanity.
We have tried it their way and to what end. To a poisoned environment, a tainted consciousness, a sickened society and a life of diminishing freedom and dignity.
If we could realize our strength and potential in a unified resistance to all that would condemn our very future, if we could only see...
WE CAN SEE IT. The whole WORLD and the powers that be will see it to. If, on May 8th, around the globe the Voice of The Rest of US rises up in a visual demonstration, without violence, without malice, and without scorn. Imagine the hope and joy to see our messages and our unified words rising up.
So great a demonstration that notice will be served around the globe.
Realize it. Make it happen. On May 8th, 2011, take back your life. Take back your freedoms. Give this world and the Rest of Us who are the being of humanity a new beginning. | 
