$40,000


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Posted by pancho from ? (64.79.4.3) on Thursday, March 28, 2002 at 9:08AM :

I hear that's what Jackie's Club cleared from the convention. That's wonderful, power to them...they worked hard for the money...so did we.

I hear they will send or have sent this money to relieve Assyrians in Iraq and elsewhere. That's commendable on the surface of it, but a futile gesture.

Our needs are way beyond the capacity of our purse and certainly well beyond our willingness to commit. When I suggested to my Armenian friend that his community get a sculptor to place a monument in San Francisco...he replied that they would like nothing better, but had other obligations and priorities. Each Armenian community in any city in this country is obliged to come up with a specified amount each year. These funds are pooled together and go to pay a lobbying firm in Washington DC.

The net result is that $300,000 paid to a lobbyist, a GOOD one and not necessarily an Armenian one...results in millions in aid to their homeland from the Congress. Everyone else lines up at the public trough EXCEPT us. We are so "proud" we will not ask for help...oh no not us...though we will blather and bleat about someone owing us an entire country!

You'd think Narsai changed the way the sun rose when he insisted on hiring someone to do the work at AAS. We have this infantile notion that help for Assyria has to come from the heart...that and an impoverished mind. To pay someone, we think, is to secure the services of a whore...though we can't seem to get enough money for our own services from whatever corporation we work for.

This is a step we have to take...we learned to cook meat three thousand years ago and haven't caught up to much else since then. We could also pool resources, if we could trust these goddamn leaders from hell, each bent on their own puny glory, into some sort of fund to hire a lobbyist. In the first year or two not much more would come back than perhaps the fee we paid. But if we get enough to hire the BEST...we could soon be getting money from the US Congress as well.

But things go hand in hand. If we were ever to mature to that point, it would only be because we had developed some sane leadership that could inspire some cooperation across the country. That seems a long way off as we split up and fight within cities and form jealousies between regions no less. Like the villagers of old, the Mountaineers opposed to the Lowlanders...that's how backwards we are.

But if that step is taken...we might have a national leadership that could coordinate such a move and would then be in place and qualified to dispense the funds SERIOUSLY and not for the personal benefit of all these fractuous factions we have now, each insisting that HE or she is the Grat Leeder of this Nayshun.

-- pancho
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