WHEN YOU GET BORED GRAB A ROPE (THEY ARE NOT OF THIS EARTH)

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a
depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar
buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the
counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who
seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to
breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some
local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three
violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad
- worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy,
so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are
living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us
alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted
radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone.

-Howard Beale, "Network," (1970)

[Williamsburg, Brooklyn, January 2008; Midwestern United States, January 2008; Monterrey, California, January 2008 ]