Doug Hughes the Flying Mailman - Madman or Martyr?

By Mel Carriere

I can't precisely remember where I was when I first heard some nutbag had crashed on the Capitol lawn in a Gyrocopter, whatever that is.  On the contrary, I will always recall exactly my exact location when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, when the 9/11 attacks were announced, even when they finally got Osama. But to me the Doug Hughes report of last April 15 was just another in a string of half-heard mundane news items  that you forget about as soon as you hear them.  I even wondered if it wasn't just some lame Jeff Bezos stunt to demonstrate the delivery power of his Amazon Air Force!

Neither was I particularly thrilled to learn, sometime later, that this psycho pilot on a flying bicycle was a letter carrier.  In fact, I think I shook my head and rolled my eyes a little, thinking that's all we need, another screwball in a postal uniform to deepen the public perception that postal employees are just overpaid malcontent misfits who can't play well with the other kids.

Little by little I finally learned the truth about Doug Hughes, but it didn't happen right away, probably because it took a while for the details of his assault on US Capitol corruption and cronyism to be sorted out and trickle down the news pipeline.  One of the details I didn't know right away was that he had written a letter to all 535 members of Congress.  This was another eye-rolling moment, because  I assumed it was something along the lines of the letters celebrity stalkers write to their famous crushes, full of incoherent rants and half baked paranoid delusions.  I tuned it all out; glad that at the very least he had not killed or injured anybody.  Then I swept the whole mess into my mental file that that includes the deranged fence jumper that assaulted the White House with a knife last September 20th, and asked myself what he hell is going on with the Washington DC security?

Eventually the details of Doug Hughes' impassioned manifesto came out, and I began to wonder if he really was a kook or a danger to society after all.  Because we blog writers are always trolling for ideas and a lot of times there's just nothing biting in the mental waters that we go fishing in, I decided I would write an article about this flying mailman, as much for my own edification, to learn what he really stood for, as well as for the entertainment and education of my blog audience.

The more I dug into the life of the flying mailman from Florida and the details of his aerial assault on Washington, the more I realized the precision of his planning and the depth of his intellect.  Yes, Doug pulled off a magnificent stunt in catching Washington with its pants down, but Mr. Hughes was not a mere circus clown making a mockery of the DC authorities as he whisked through the air defenses of our nation's capital unopposed.  His was a carefully conceived and executed act of civil disobedience, two and a half years in the making, and he has specifically enumerated and well defined grievances that inspired the flight, ideas that we should all pay attention to.

What Doug Hughes was trying to tell us, and what we should all start to take seriously before it completely destroys us, is that Congress is on the take.  Democrats and Republicans alike are both in the back pockets of corporations, and even though the amount of money our lawmakers can accept from individual campaign donors is restricted by law, the promise of a cushy lobbyist job paying 14 times Congressional salary upon leaving Congress is pretty good incentive for the crooks of Capitol Hill to betray their constituents in favor of the deep pockets of their corporate overlords.

I won't make any attempt to paraphrase Doug's ideas here.  He is a very learned, articulate gentleman who is more than capable of speaking for himself, so you should read what he has to say in his own words.  With this in mind, I am going to post a link to Doug's website, and also a link to the copy of his letter to Congress.  There is also a place you can go to donate to his defense fund.  I encourage you to do so, because our Mailman brother from Florida who really did deliver to the Capitol lawn faces 9 years in prison just for telling the truth.   

Yeah, but come on Mel, there are other avenues to do this, you say.  You don't have to jump on some weird airborne gizmo and scare the hell out of people who think ISIS is carrying out a terror attack by dropping in on propeller beanie hats.  In response to this, I say that a lot of people, such as myself, constantly wear ourselves out trying to point out this corruption through more conventional means, such as our facebook pages, twitter feeds, and blogs, but NO ONE F---ING LISTENS!

The flying mailman knew that the only way to get people to wake up and pay attention to the problems in Washington was to do something weird, unexpected, and perhaps a little bit frightening.  Don't let Doug's flight be for nothing.  Please read what he has to say, and then support him.

Click here to visit Doug's Democracy Club

Click here to donate to Doug's defense

Click here to read Doug's letter to Congress

Neil Young: Another great voice of protest from the past:



 

Image from:  http://www.wusa9.com/story/news/local/dc/2015/07/03/doug-hughes-capitol-gyrocopter-pilot-fired-post-service/29687225/

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