Welcome to the handbasket

And this is why we tremble

2009-04-16T10:49:00.001-07:00

Rape. What is it good for? Depends on who you ask, I guess.

I've been thinking about the topic of for awhile now, probably not surprising given that I'm a woman and others (usually women) forward me emails telling me which precautions to take in order to avoid rape. I remember one email in particular where the only conclusion one could draw was that death was the only protection against rape.

Of course, most of the information in these email forwards is hogwash, if not utter crap. I'll not do it the service of repeating it, but in case you have never received such an email, I suggest you go here and read one. Then, continue on to read how totally stupid and baseless most of the claims are.

Despite the lack of evidence to support such claims, the rumors are paralyzing enough. Generations of American women look over their shoulders, avoid making too much or not enough eye contact with men they don't know, wear their scarves in a particular way so that it can't be grabbed from behind and used to choke them, etc. etc. etc.

To some extent, I've grown somewhat immune or accustomed to most of this drivel. I get the emails and read them just to see what new absurdity has been put on the list. At some point, I figured "Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. Rape is like death and taxes. Might was well just live until it happens." Luckily though, I haven't had to pay up yet. Still, I'll admit, that sometimes I look under my car before I get in, just in case there's someone waiting underneath with a box cutter, waiting to slash my ankles [my grandmother sowed this lovely piece of paranoia].

But despite my fatalistic emotional distancing, every now and again, I get chills and feel sick. This is one of those weeks.

I happened upon a petition to South African leaders urging them to do something about "corrective rapes," i.e. rapes to cure women of being lesbians. It seemed too surreal, too absurd, too asinine, so I knew it was probably true. The 'logic' is breathtaking: problem with dykes - they haven't had a good fucking yet.

But I suppose one might expect this from South Africa, considering it has the highest instance of [reported] rape in the world. And they have a lovely practice of raping children and infants to cure HIV/AIDS, and they -- not unlike other African countries -- also rape your non-child virgins to cure or ward off HIV/AIDS.

Here are lovely facts about the flavors of rape, but keep in mind, these are by NO means particular to South Africa. The myth of the "virgin cure" is alive in well in many/most developing countries, such as India, and was once active in Europe and Christianity as a cure for other STDs.

On infant/child rape:

There were 294 patients, 254 females and 40 males. Victims ranged from 10 months to 13 years in age (mean 5.8 years). The number of cases and severity of injuries increased annually. There were 14 third-degree, 22 second-degree and 91 first-degree injuries. Seventy-nine per cent of assaults were by a perpetrator known to the victim. All but 5 perpetrators were male. Fifty-eight per cent of rapes occurred in the patient’s own home or that of a friend or relative.On "corrective rape":

Eudy Simelane

33 such rapes

On martial rape (which might be ok and not technically a crime in some countries):

10% of all rapes

the USA

And this is why we tremble. This is why we look over our shoulders. This is why we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that it doesn't matter. This is why we push victims away. It is too horrific, too damning to deal with.

When no woman or child is safe from even her own family and where any excuse to humiliate, dominate, and destroy another's dignity and humanity through what should be a pleasurable and mutually enjoyable act, there is nothing left to do but tremble.

And the winner is...

2009-03-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

CALIFORNIA!

That's right, beautiful California has the highest number of hate groups (84) in the United States, leading Texas (66) and third-place Florida (56). My home state, Illinois, is getting its ass kicked (23) by New Jersey (40). Come on guys, we've got nearly 1.5 times more people than them (IL: 12,852,548 NJ:8,685,920). I think we can be doing a bit better than 23, and really, can we diversify a bit more? All our hate groups are of the same ilk: white supremacy. But overall, I think we - as a nation - are doing much better at showing our xenophobic nature (our 'true colors' if you will).

According the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of "neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, skinheads and others - have grown in number by 54%." With Obama in the White House, the economy in the crapper, and Mexico on the verge of spilling over into Texas, these numbers are only likely to rise.

I wish I knew the remedy for the type of stupidity that leads to racism and hate. Sadly, I'm a mere graduate student, and not a very good one. But I do have this to say: The more they scream, the less they have to say. The more the media screech the same message at the top of their lungs, the more likely they are to be wrong. The more inflammatory the rhetoric, the less substance there is to support it. The more black-and-white the presentation . . . you get the point.

A friend of mine recently said that the whole situation (meaning everything from the corporate-ization of the world, to the atrocities in Africa, to the systematic profiling of Americans by the police, to the unwarranted tracking of places of worship and homes) is simply too overwhelming. Sadly, he's right. And sadly, many people respond to this overwhelmingness by giving up and focusing on what is immediately in front of them rather than turning to address the world.

The problem with pure hate and with hate groups is that there is no logic or argument that can undermine them. They are devoid of true logic. Thus, they are immune to it. They start with a grievance, find a target, make up some excuse to attack the target (often using misinterpretations of history and/or religion), and then re-frame reality to match their explanations.

So what do can we do when even California, that basin of granola-loving-tree-hugging lefties, is being overrun by hate? In times like this, I like to think back to high school, when morality, purpose, and direction seemed so clear. During these painful, pimple-filled years, I filled my time with Orwell, Kafka, and (my love) Vonnegut Jr. And it was Vonnegut who most clearly explained what one should do.

In his book Player Piano, the main character joins an organization called The Ghost Shirts to oppose an impending technology-spawed class war. Unbeknown to him, the Ghost Shirt movement, from which the organization got its name, was pretty much a failure. The founding Native Americans were not able to stop the encroachment of the Americans and were massacred for their movement. At the end of the book, when everyone realizes their opposition was futile and that they couldn't stop the wheels of progress, they realize that their mission was not to win in the moment but to give hope to future generations.

However romantic and toothless it sounds, there is a whole lotta truth to this realization. We must get it into to the record book that we tried to stop it. We must show up as blips in the history books as those who stood against hate and confronted intolerance, even if it ended up leading to nothing. Even if all we can do is scratch at the mountain, we have to do something.

So get to work.

Just you wait and see

2009-03-28T22:01:00.001-07:00

In the run up to the war in Iraq, my WFT sensors went haywire. And now they're blaring again. Turns out that we poor American's are on the verge of being overrun by drug cartels in Mexico, and Mexico is on the verge of becoming ((gasp)) a failed state. Whatever can we American's do to forestall this impending crisis?! Of course - send in the military and "help" the failing state before it blows up and takes us all out with it.

We're getting really good at being the world's cleaning lady. First, we'll clean up Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and now . . . Pakistan? Mexico? Oh, the messes keep piling up, and someone's got to take out the trash.

Recently, the Director of National Intelligence tried to slow down the insanity, claiming that the Pentagon report that we were on the brink of Armageddon was, perhaps, a bit over stated. Blair stated:

Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. [Let me] repeat that. Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. The violence we see now is the result of Mexico taking action against the drug cartels. So it is in fact the result of positive moves, which the Mexican government has taken to break the baneful influence that many of these cartels have had on many aspects of Mexican government and Mexican life.

Of course, this isn't going to amount to much, not when the media and the military industrial complex can exploit American's xenophobia and distrust of anyone darker than a marshmallow to make a profit. What I find especially troubling is the ease with which we - the American public - have swallowed this line. Granted, there are drugs there, and granted there are bad (VERY bad) people doing bad (VERY VERY bad) things, but we need to hit the pause button for a second here and think about what might be helping to fan the fear (e.g. racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, "free" trade agreements, a desire for the Mexican oil (PEMEX)).

I really hope I'm wrong about this, and I hope that we've learned from our knee-jerk response in the past, but I doubt it.

Don't get me wrong -- the reports we hear coming out of Mexico are awful. Something like 6000 people murdered in the past year, women and children (and probably a few men here and there) disappearing, a rise in drug use and drug-related crime. These things are shameful and should be addressed. But addressing a problem doesn't mean shooting bullets at it. In fact, maybe culling the number of bullets involved would solve it.

If we really want to support Mexico and help stem the growing violence and mayhem, maybe we could stop buying their drugs or selling them automatic weapons, ammunition, and other fun-filled hardware? Oh, maybe we could actually enforce laws that would limit the ability of cartels to smuggle money and weapons into Mexico? Before we go in, guns a'blazin, maybe we should use the legal and potentially more useful tools we already have.

Failed state my ass.

Stupid stupidheads & their army that shoot people in the head

2009-03-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

I am so thoroughly annoyed right now.

In case you haven't heard (and I'm guessing you haven't), last Friday, Tristan Anderson was shot in the head by the IDF (the Israeli Defense Forces, aka the Insane Dumbass F*ckers) with a tear gas canister while attending an anti-separation wall protest with other unarmed civilians. He's now lying in a comma, with his right eye severely damage, his skull shattered open, and probable brain damage to boot.

The IDF's rationalization: "They threw rocks at us." Ok, Goliath, but note that the vicious, deadly rocking throwing incident occurred at the wall in the morning whereas the justifiable, necessary targeted shooting of a peace observer occurred in the village hours later.

Tristan was/is a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the same movement who gave us Rachel Corrie, the young woman who was run over by an IDF bulldozer. She had the gall to stand between the IDF and the continual illegal demolition of a Palestinian home, demolations that even the UN has condemned for years.

Given Israel's track record of condoning even the most despicable of IDF actions (from supporting the slaughter of Palestinians in Lebanon to the beating of school children in the occupied territories), I doubt we'll ever know why Tristan was shot in the face with tear gas, though suspicion of US complicity has been voiced.

I'm not really surprised that the IDF and Israel shot Tristan. Not to be smug, but he's not Israeli, so why give a shit? And not to point out the obvious, but if this is how they treat peaceful protesters from their #1 fans in the international community, one wonders how they would the average Palestinian standing between them and the fulfillment of their destiny.

Same ol' same ol'

2009-03-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

So I was actually reading this article my brother sent me about Hamas when I clicked a link to an article about David Ben-Gurion. Turns out that he was both the first prime minister of Israel a first-class jerk off.

To make the story short, he and his platoon-mates shot an Arab man, took the young girl who was with him, "washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her." Nice. The platoon leader denied having sex with her, saying, "Morally speaking, it was impossible to sleep with such a dirty girl." [I don't think anyone mentioned anything about 'sleeping' with her - you raped her you frickin' a-hole.] Anyway, the girl was shot dead in the dunes rather than "waste the petrol" to take her home.

Now, the article does not explicitly say that Ben-Gurion raped or killed the girl, but he did mention it in his diary and must have been (at least) involved in its cover-up. But boys will be boys. And during war, it's ok for boys to be monsters.

But perhaps I'm overreacting. Rape is supposed to be a crime -- hell even the Hauge and the UN know that. But it turns out that your normal guy (or gal) on the street isn't quite so sure. Here are some nauseating facts for you. After reading a short story about a date rape...

37% [of the men] identified with the rapist. 26% said the rapist was justified (presumably because of the perceived insult). 38% said the victim enjoyed being raped, while 47% of the women said the woman enjoyed being raped . . . 8% of the men said the victim could have stopped the rape, while 57% of the women thought she could have stopped it. 36% of the men thought *all women* would enjoy victimization, while 32% of the women thought *all women* would enjoy victimization . . .49% of the men said that the believe that other men would rape if they could get away with it . . . [and] on a scale of 1-5, 1 being most likely, when asked if *THEY* personally would rape if the could get away with it 51% fell between 1 and 2, and 21% fell on 3.Just to make the math clear, in this study 72% of the men said they would be very likely to moderately likely to rape (3 is the 50/50 point).

Dear God. It's times like this when I'm almost happy I don't have children -- heaven forbid one of them ends up in that 72% or dating someone in that 72%.

But alas, I digress. Back to Ben-Gurion for a moment. So he was involved in some capacity in the rape, torture, and death of a young girl. Maybe that makes him a bad person. Maybe that makes him the Prime Minister. Maybe that makes him just another "human being" who doesn't see people but sees opportunities and obstacles.

You can find these types of people all the world over. We've got some in our military. Such as the lovely US army lads who raped and killed an Iraqi woman. Or the Iraqi woman who had other women raped in order to convince them to become martyrs. Or the US soldiers and colleagues of a female paramedic working for a military contractor in Iraqi who raped her orally and anally and then threatened her if she reported it. [At least she didn't get killed.] And then there's Darfur, DR Congo, South Africa, hell - all of Africa. And the list goes on.

This is likely to go on my permanent record

2009-03-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure I already have a file with the FBI and/or some other government agency. If not, then this one is likely to get me my own, personal manila folder.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the Director of National Intelligence appointed a man named Charles "Chas" Freeman chairman on the National Intelligence Committee. The only problem (in some people’s eyes) is that he has questioned unwavering support for Israel and has ::gasp:: worked with the Saudis (as if our former administration wasn't completely in bed with the Saudis).

For an introduction to this matter, you may want to start here.

I am thoroughly annoyed with the strong-arm tactics of special interest groups (e.g. neocons, AIPAC and the Jewish lobby more generally). They appear to want nothing than the perpetuation of their own self-importance, often at the expense of a peace that would sustain not only Jews and Israelis but also the international community more broadly. Granted, I don't hold much sway, but what the heck - I'm going to write. Below is my first letter to the Department of National Intelligence. For good measure, I also wrote the White House, the Director of National Security himself, Diane Feinstein and Kit Bond (co-chairs of Senate Select Committee on National Intelligence), and I'm contemplating writing Rahm Emanuel too. Let them choose to ignore me - that's what I say.

TO: Mr. Edward Maguire, Inspector General
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
RE: Support for the appointment of Chas Freeman

Dear Honorable Inspector General Maguire,

I know that you have been called on to deepen your probe into the appointment and history of Chas Freeman. This letter is a plea for a fair, balanced investigation, one that does not pander to the personal, political interests of organizations like AIPAC and other members of the Jewish lobby. These groups do not speak for all Jews or Americans, and I am concerned that their current attacks on Freeman are motivated more by an attempt to control US policy regarding Israel than to find the best candidate for the position. Their campaign seems like nothing more than attempt to undermine the Obama Administration's attempt to build new, better relations with the Middle East and bring different ideas and views to the table.

I strongly support the rights of the administration to nominate and appoint the men and women deemed most qualified. Thus, I support the appointment of Chas Freeman and will stand behind the administration and its right to appoint those who have opinions and experiences that may challenge the status quo. Such challenges should not be feared but embraced as tools to explore all sides of an issue.

Please do not capitulate to those who clamor for his removal. Freeman is but one voice that will contribute to the conversation. If Israel has nothing to fear, then it can handle the questions and probes of one man. However, if Israel and its supporters have become so entrenched in a mentality of persecution that can justify even the most unjustifiable of actions, then even mild dissent will be cast as being unfair and anti-Semitic.

It is neither unfair nor anti-Semitic to want peace in the Middle East, and to accomplish such a task, the US government must have legitimacy and respect of all parties in the region. Israel and the Jewish lobby have been dinning at the table of American favoritism since at least the end of WWII. Men and women like Freeman bring that to the table and perhaps help us all to achieve our mutual dream: sustainable peace.

I request that you do your job as openly as possible and that you remain free of political and special interest influence.

Sincerely,
Me

Get thee to the Hague

2009-03-05T07:04:00.000-08:00

Way back when I was in high school in the early 90s, I had an "underground" magazine called The Esoteric Address (I cannot claim the title - I had to look up esoteric when one of the co-founders suggested it). Anyway, one of my first front-page articles was about the Sudan and the atrocities there. Heaven knows why I was interested in the Sudan. The problems there were not as grievous as those in other African nations (they were, I believe, in the midst of low-level civil-war-like aggression). I don't think I even bothered looking it up on a map. Regardless, I was inflamed with teenage moral certitude and wanted to rail against what I deemed to be injustice and hypocrisy.

Now, well over a decade after my sophomoric rant, I am happy to announce that Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, President of Sudan, accused perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity, is on the International Criminal Court hit list. They had early wanted to include charges of genocide but removed these charges due to lack of sufficient evidence and because they wanted to have a sure-fire case against al-Bashir.

al-Bashir, for his part, has basically told the ICC to shove it, claiming that he doesn't recognize the court's authority and dismissing the charges as yet another neo-colonialist, racist, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim tactic of the West. Were it not for the fact that an over 300,000 people were displaced, murdered, raped, tortured, or otherwise abused, I might give him the benefit of the doubt. But all roads from the hell that is Darfur lead back to Sudan, and all roads of power in Darfur lead back to al-Bashir.

So what did al-Bashir do to mark the injustice of these colonial bigots' accusations? Exactly what you'd expect a despotic, masochistic, megalomaniac ruler to do: screw the people. The Sudanese government revoked the licenses of Oxfam and other aid agencies, who were [not surprisingly] the last, best hope of the people to, oh I don't know, eat.

((sigh))

It makes me wonder about Africa. What happened? Why is it so amazingly F***ed up? Why does it seem as though all leaders there basically hate - if not despise - their own people? I'm sure I'm missing something here.

Still, I'm happy that the ICC has made it clear what anyone with eyes can see, al-Bashir is not a man to be trusted with the welfare of a used wad of toilet paper, let alone human beings. Now for the second, hard step - getting him to the Hague.

In like a lion -- out like a lamb

2009-03-02T19:22:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Women's History Month.
This month, as time permits, I will focus on various strides we ladies have made in our endless quest to be fully recognized human beings - go team!

I'm going to start our journey with UN Security Resolution 1820: Women, peace and security. This lovely little document was ratified back the the summer of 2008 and made it clear once and for all that systematic rape during war is a crime against humanity. Woo-wee! We've come a long way, baby!

Of course this doesn't mean that rape wasn't a bad thing before or that it wasn't a punishable war crime prior to 2008. During the trials after World War II, instances of rape and violence against women were discussed but weren't treated as crimes worthy of being considered separately. As time passed, rape became a bit more salient as a form of terrorism and as a crime punishable by international courts. The systematic rape of Muslim women in Bosnia led to eight men being charged for war crimes in 1996 -- notable primarily because these charges were independent of other charges, finally. And in 2001, three Serbian men were found guilty of mass rape and sexual slavery. More recently, rape has been labeled a tool of genocide. In mid 2008, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court accused Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir, President of Sudan, of using rape for ethnic cleansing. We'll see whether an indictment goes anywhere.

About nine years prior to UN Resolution 1820,David J. Scheffer stated:

In the past, . . . rape and acts of sexual violence against women went unrecognized and unchallenged. In many conflicts, some soldiers, perpetrators, and world leaders viewed rape as a fringe benefit of war, an unspoken perk. While some observers have dismissed incidents of rape, with the reason that men, or as so often seen, boys, simply get out of hand or out of control after a rough day on the battlefield, recent history has shown that organized, systematic patterns of rape are a component of deliberate ethnic cleansing. The world community, on occasion, ignored the truth that these acts are not simply acts of recklessness, but acts of torture.But no longer! Now that we have the UN on our side, nothing can hurt us . . . if only the UN had any real power. Sadly, UN resolutions can be about as valuable as the paper they're written on. Men such as Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe and his troops in Zimbabwe, or the militants in North India, or even US military forces in Iraq don't really give a rat's pa-toot about UN resolutions. Still, ladies, it's a step in the right direction.

Dear Honorable Senator Dick Durbin: Part II

2009-02-24T10:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Honorable Senator Durbin,

I would like to thank you and your staff for your response to my previous letter. It was apparent that the topic and intent of my letter were understood, and I appreciate your efforts to address my concerns. Furthermore, I am glad to hear that we are both concerned about the “tragic cycle of violence” and that we both hope that diplomatic measures can be taken to bring about a more equitable arrangement than what currently exists.

That said, I would like to point out a few notable word choices in the letter as way of warning. Sometimes words are carefully chosen out of political necessity. At other times, words are used without consideration, thereby revealing biases that even the writer may not be aware of. It is not up to me to determine which of these holds true in the current context. I am here simply to point them out.

The first notable choice is the use of word however in the following sentence “However, these goals [i.e. Palestinian safety, sovereignty, and democracy] cannot be achieved at the expense of Israel’s sovereignty or the safety of its citizens.” The use of this word not only negates the assertion in the previous sentence (i.e. that Palestinians have rights), but it also presupposes that the goals of Palestinians and the goals of Israelis are at odds and, thus, Palestinians must acquiesce. Sometimes, a period should be a period. Palestinians have rights. Israelis have rights. These rights extend to the point where they intrude on the rights of the other. Enough said.

The second point I would like to address is the use of modals, in particular the words must and should. You state that Hamas must reject terrorism and bombings but that Israel should take steps to address illegal settlements and improve the daily lives of Palestinians. As in your previous statement, the onus appears to be wholly on the backs of the Palestinians and, in particular, on Hamas. Palestine must comply, must accept the resolutions and must abide by cease-fire agreements. Israel should strongly consider curbing their activities. At what point will we demand that Israel fulfill its obligations as set out in various ceasefire agreements? At what point will Israel be told to comply with international law and basic humanitarian rights? For example, when will Israel be told (rather than encouraged) to ease restrictions on border crossing? In 2005, the border crossing into Gaza became even more guarded, leading to a slow strangle of the Gazan economy and viability and an increasing dire humanitarian crisis. One can only assume that this tightening was in retaliation for the democratic election of Hamas. And let us not forget the “security” wall, which was deemed illegal by the international courts, the expansion in Jerusalem in violation of Security Council orders, or the numerous illegal settlements breaking up the West back, despite UN Resolutions denouncing them and Israeli internal reports admitting their illegality.

One final point, as we consider this particular sentence and what Hamas must do. I take issue with the general supposition that Hamas is the barrier to peace. Although I can appreciate the desire not to encourage terrorism, the argument that Hamas cannot be involved in peace talks is simply absurd. It sounds like nothing more than a repeat of what was said about Arafat and the PLO. They too were deemed terrorists and, hence, unapproachable, but this terrorist designation itself may be suspect. It may be hard to distinguish between an organization opposing armed occupation and a bunch of thugs, but in the current case, the occupation is apparent, as are the arms of the militaristic superiority of the occupier. The UN recognized the right of peoples to struggle against armed occupation back in the mid-80s, thereby allowing some wiggle room for Palestinian resistance. Although this doesn’t grant blanket approval to violent struggle, it does allow for the right to confront imperialistic forces. Still, even if we determine that Hamas is a thuggish, terrorist group, its incorporation the peace process is necessary for progress. If the conflict in Northern Ireland taught us nothing, it taught us that the surest way to peace is through talks with one’s enemies. Only when the IRA was brought into peace talks was any sustainable progress made. Thus, even if Hamas is a terrorist organization, not talking to them will serve only to impede a peaceful resolution.

Overall, the word of the day must be equality. Each group has suffered deeply. Each side has significant and valid grievances. Each faction must be held equally accountable. If Israel has the right to protect its people with white phosphorus and D.I.M.E bombs, then perhaps Hamas has the right to protect its people with Qassam rockets and suicide bombings. Though I would prefer more peaceful forms of resistance, such as those used by the Women in Black in Israel and the strikes and boycotts used by Palestinians during the first Intifada, we seem to be living in less patient times. However, we must still pursue the path of equality and justice, until we can find the road of mercy. Either violence is never an acceptable form of justified struggle, or it equally acceptable from both sides of a conflict. Either everyone can ignore agreements and laws, or no one can.

Thank you again for your time and for attending to my comments and concerns. I hope that soon we will not need to discuss the conflict between Israel and Palestine because a peaceful resolution has been achieved. Until then, I will continue to address what I feel are lapses in logic and morality, lest we become absurd or hypocrites.

Yours truly,
MJL

This is just the beginning (of the end (of days))

2009-02-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

***The US governments seems so bent on "winning" this war against terrorism that it's willing to train its own executioners. File this one under: WTFAWD? (what-the-f**k-are-we-doing)***

Due to recruiting pressures, two wars, and growing anti-war sentiment, the military has been turning a blind eye and accepting white supremacists and other lovely racists into its ranks. Don't be surprised. The military isn't. They've known about the growing numbers of extremists in the service since at least 2006.

They join not because they want to wage war abroad (though that is -- I'm sure -- an added bonus). Rather, they join to prepare for the upcoming war at home. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that tracks hate groups here in the US, cites a former Special Ops officer and neo-Nazi, Steven Barry, who explains why white supremacists need to join the Army:

"As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."

Members of extremist hate groups (as if there could be another type of hate group) place a high value on military service, and those who have a military background often rise to positions of power and share their training with others in the group. They're going to be all that they can be and then some.

Remember Timothy McVeigh? His military experience came in handy, didn't it? Why don't we ask the victims of and the families of the 168 people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing how useful his training was.

And now we have new crazies climbing the ranks. For example, take Marine Lance Cpl. Kody Brittingham, who was recently arrested on unrelated charges when a search dredged up a journal containing white-supremacist material and a plot to kill President Obama. And there are a litany of others, many of whom the SPLC warned the military about. There was Forrest Mackley Fogarty, stationed in Iraq through the Army National Guard; Matt Buschbacher, a Navy SEAL; and Shawn Stuart, who served two tours of duty in Iraq to mention a few. The SPLC reports that "None of them were ever disciplined for neo-Nazi activities. All were honorably discharged."

One wonders how enlisting men like this, training them, arming them, and then shipping them into Iraq or Afghanistan is going to help win the hearts and minds of the people. A man identifying himself as Jacob Berg told an investigative reporter:

"Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don't every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I'm so proud of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn."Crap like this makes my blood run cold. It's enough to make women sterile and to curdle milk in the teat. You know what, Jacob, I'll pass on your new dawn.

With the crazy Christian Zionists and Dominionists nipping at one heel, AIPAC at another, and white supremacists creeping up from behind, one wonders where front line for the war against terror really is or where it really should be.
::shudder::

My newest favoritist site EVER!

2009-02-18T06:26:00.001-08:00

OMG. Let me repeat: O-M-G!!! This site is AWESOME, and I don't use all caps lightly.
I took my last two posts and made pictures of them. Amazing, if I do say so myself.

You take a bunch of text or words, plug it into their applet, and it creates a "word cloud", or as we in the business like to call it a semantic network. It weights each word by frequency, excluding common words and randomly aligns them. You can adjust the colors, fonts, and other features. Frickin AWESOME!

This one is called "Take Courage"
I call this one "Avigdor Lieberman"

You're not alone

2009-02-17T17:23:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting here in the atrium of Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern, watching the students filter in for lunch and networking while I listen to Andrew Bird’s “Take Courage,” and I’m starting to have one of those existential moments, contemplating human nature, free will, and plants.

It began with Andrew Bird and my current obsession with this song. I woke with it in my head, went to gym, ate breakfast, read a few online papers, wrote a letter to the State Department, all while hearing his whistle in my mind. I do not believe that artists speak to me directly. In fact, I think they really speak to no one save maybe themselves, saying what they wish to hear, painting what they want to see, filling their voids for themselves. We just get to benefit from their nature to abhor a vacuum and use their art to fill our own. Why do they bother, these artists even when they may remain obscure or poor? Because it is their nature to. The caged bird sings, because that’s what birds do. The cut grass grows, because that’s what grass does. Business students network, because that’s what markets do.

So what then if we allowed all people to pursue their interests and predilection as their natures lead them? Would we end up with savants in random fields or solipsistic bloggers? Would we descend into chaos? If structure was not imposed on our activities and on our possible futures, who would do the hard or undesirable work? Who would farm or bury the dead? Who would collect the garbage? Would we have a world of daydreamers, video game players, and sloths? And what about those among us who feel compelled to humiliate, victimize, rape and murder? What would constrain them?

And this is where the plants come in. Nothing grows completely wild. Even the weeds must share the soil with other roots and must bend to find the light. Even the trees depend on the rain and are twisted and shaped by the winds. The mere presence of other plants dictates the height, width, and lifespan of a plant, sometimes aiding, sometimes impeding.

So what are the forces of nature that (would) constrain us? Culture? Religion? Reason? I don’t know, but I believe they exist. It may be as simple as the mere presence of other people or of other life that keeps up within the acceptable range. Maybe the weight of humanity keeps us grounded.

Of course, I’m one of those who believe that human nature is not inherently evil. At the same time, I don’t believe it’s inherently good. I do, however, believe it is inherently in harmony, which transcends distinctions such as good or evil. It simply is because it is and whistles because it can.

Dearest State Department . . .

2009-02-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Honorable Secretary Clinton,

I would like to encourage the Department of State to continue to list Kach and Kahane Chai on the list of known terrorist organizations. Furthermore, I encourage you to deny visas to those who are or were associated with these organizations. These groups have been listed as terrorist organizations since 1994 for contending that Arabs should be removed from the biblical lands of Israel by force when necessary. They condone violence against non-Jews in Israel/Palestine as an appropriate means to establish a religiously homogeneous state and are, therefore, rightfully listed as terrorists and deserving of a fitting response.

Although their last major attack was in 1994,* they have continued to incite and encourage “low-level attacks” against Arabs, both Israeli and Palestinian. In 2005, an Israeli solider associated with Kahane Chai opened fire on a bus of Arab-Israelis, killing four,** and there have been reports of others associated with these groups condoning, if not planning, violence against the civilian population. Israel, itself, has banned these two groups and regards them as extremists, despite the groups’ attempts to become more legitimate and allowed into the government.

The recent electoral ascent of Avigdor Lieberman*** and his Yisrael Beiteinu Party in the Knesset may put the State Department in the awkward position of having to deny an elected official a visa. However, due to his pass membership in the Kahane Chai and our position on former terrorists and those associated with terrorist organizations, we must not capitulate. We cannot tolerate extremist groups and their members, regardless of which side of the line their sentiments fall. If we are to deny visas to men like the Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan for his alleged connections to Hamas or to women like the Nicaraguan historian Dora María Téllez for alleged terrorist activities, then we must remain consistent and deny visas to those associated with Kach and Kahane Chai.

Sincerely,
Meredith Larson

Footnotes:

* This 1994 attack refers to the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in which Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslims visiting a mosque, killing 29 of them. One rabbic commentator noted the irony of Israel's response to this terrorist action. It is common for Israel to punish the families of Arab terrorists by doing such things as bulldozing or sealing their homes. However...

When has Israel destroyed or sealed the home of a Jewish terrorist? After Baruch Goldstein went on his rampage of murder on Purim 1994, gunning down 29 Palestinians in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, not only was his home not sealed, but the Palestinian population was placed under a 24-hour curfew for more than two weeks - all the while having to watch from their windows the fanatic group of settlers in Hebron dancing freely in the streets in joyous celebration of Goldstein’s heinous crime. While Israel understandably forbids a condolence tent being set up by the family of a terrorist killed in his perverted line of duty, to this day hundreds of Jews still gather undisturbed at the memorial site for Goldstein on the anniversary of his massacre of innocent Palestinians.** I thought this too was worth more than a just hot link. I vaguely remember this. Back in 2005, an AWOL solider opened fire on a bus load of people, killing 4 wounding 12. As he was reloading, a mob grabbed him and killed him. Totally understandable, in my opinion. However, it would seem that not everyone thought his death was justified. I encourage you to read "Where the Killer is a Victim", an article in which the author lambastes another author for saying (and I quote because the word-choice amazes me in its one-sidedness):

"A mob of Palestinians tonight murdered a Jewish Israeli man in a police uniform after he opened fire on a bus and killed four Arabs, allegedly in protest of the Gaza withdrawal plan."Oy vey!

**Avigdor Lieberman has inspired a good deal of concern within the Jewish diaspora and Israel itself. More left-leaning Israelis are starting a petition to keep him and his party out of high-level positions. While there may be many reasons for their disdain, I assume that most of the reasons stem from his demand for Loyalty Oaths from all Israelis (though one would guess primarily non-Jews) and his extreme and (at least) mildly racist rhetoric.

An open letter to U.S. Rep. Janice ("Jan") Schakowsky

2009-02-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

Dear Honorable Representative Jan Schakowsky,

I wanted to take a moment to offer you my sincere thanks for the email you sent. I am happy to see that our opinions on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza are similar. Your letter reflects an awareness of both the severity of the situation Palestinians find themselves in and the desperation to be heard that your constituents feel.

In particular, I appreciate the fact that you see the death told as “truly tragic” and that you reached out to both the International Committee of the Red Cross and Israeli Ambassador Meridor to expedite humanitarian relief. And while I am glad you feel that we need to address the Israel/Palestine situation diplomatically, I am a bit concerned about the way you present the preconditions for peace. You state that Palestinians must recognize Israel’s “right to exist” and to “abandon terrorism” while neglecting to mention that Israel must recognize certain Palestinian rights, such as the right to not be bombed by the IDF, to receive necessary medical care, to import necessary goods such as fuel and medicine, to cross borders, and basically to be allowed some modicum of self-respect and security.

As for Israel’s survival as a Jewish democratic state, well, considering the current rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his party's desire to have all Israelis (Jews, Arabs, and the like) sign loyalty oaths or lose their citizenship, one might wonder if Israel is going to be able to save itself and remain a democracy or if it will descend into a McCarthyistic fascist (thought Jewish!) state. And as for the two-state solution you mention, I agree that we need a place to start, and I guess even moldy bread would look good to the starving. But I wonder if this will truly bring sustained peace and prosperity to both the Israelis and Palestinians. If certain other issues, such as the status of Jerusalem, the right to return, and the settlers are not handled openly and equitably, no number of states (2 or 2000) will save the people.

Personally, I am deeply concerned about the way politicians and leaders (Israeli, Palestinian, and American) are manipulating this tragedy to secure their own power. I desperately hope that mercy and justice, rather than racism/antisemitism and revenge, begin to guide our policies. I believe that we are moving in that direction, but I, like many others, am growing impatient. Ultimately, it is not for us Americans to decide what is good for the Middle East. We must avoid be perceived as imposing our will and instead allow the sides to reach a common agreement for goodwill.

Recently, I had a less favorable exchange with a certain senator from our state. He too responded to my call and emails for a cease-fire and for strengthened humanitarian intervention, but his response was nothing more than a myopic, militaristic love fest in which he touted his unwavering support for Israel (even when its actions are, as some describe, genocidal) and his backing of $30 billion dollars for defense aid to Israel as though these things were diamonds to showcase and not the dog turds they truly are.

So again, I would like to thank you and your staff for the correspondence. I hope that you take it as a badge of pride that some have called you a moonbat. Someone needs to be pulling to the left to keep us moving straight and centered.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Sincerely,
Meredith

Before the Law

2009-02-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

Franz Kafka, one of my favorite writers back when I was in high-school , wrote a story called "Before the Law," in which a man comes to the gates of the Law and asks the gatekeeper for permission to enter. The gatekeeper tells him he has to wait but that he will probably get to enter. The story goes on to chronicle the man's attempt to bribe the gatekeeper, so he can enter, but years pass. Then, just as the man is about to die, he asks the gatekeeper why no one else has ever come to seek justice with the Law. The gatekeeper tells him that this doorway was meant only for him (the seeker) and that only he could have entered here. Then he shuts the door forever.

As with all of his stories, Kafka's view of justice and the law seem imbued with a sense of hopelessness, alienation,and self-blame. His characters try to do what is right in order to be accepted and respected by the power structure. But if "Metamorphosis" and The Trial have taught us nothing, such outcomes are highly unlikely. More probable is emptiness, denial, and despair. I believe this expectation of continuous disenfranchisement is the universal norm, rather than some depressing, Kafkaesque anomaly.

And so it is with great pleasure that I now introduce some of people who have been dragged into the courtyard of the Law, in person, in corporate form, and in absentia if necessary.

(In progress at the Hague)

Name

Location of offense

Charge

11 counts including murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during the 1996-2002 civil war in the impoverished West African state

Details

encouraged cannibalism

human sacrifice, and buried pregnant women alive

ring in hell

January 26, 2009, International Criminal Court

Name

Location of offense

Charge

Details

conscripting and enlisting children under the age of fifteen years and using them to participate actively in hostilities

some contend

January 30, 2009 – reopening of a case by US Court of Appeals

Name

Location of offense

Charge

Tort

Details

The defendants

(Coming soon to a New York court by you) April 29, 2009

Name

Location of offense

Charge

complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria, including the execution and torture of members of a group of environmental leaders, known as the Ogoni 9

Details

EarthRights International

Ogoni 9

The mettle of mothers

2009-02-07T18:49:00.000-08:00

One of my absolute favorite people, Nick Hockings, once said to me, "Wars will end when parents stop accepting flags for their dead children." He was referring to the war in Iraq at the time, but his was a timeless observation. Martyrs, flags, and dog tags make for poor substitutes for children. Any parent can attest to that.

As a slight change of pace, I'd like to talk a bit about two instances of courage and hope in the face of despair, times when parents -- actually mothers and women more generally -- have decided they'd rather have their sons and daughters and neighbors to corpses. In some cases, these women affected the course of history and their cultures, and in others they are still affecting a change and may (godwilling) alter the course of insanity.

Act 1: Madres de Plaza de Mayo
For seven years, starting in 1976, the junta of Argentina waged war against its citizens. The "Dirty War," as it is called, began after President Peron's death. His wife and vice president, Isabel Peron, took hold of the government but was soon removed from power by the military, who then attempted to consolidate its position by committing genocide against its people. Ultimately, between 10,000 and 30,000 people were "disappeared" or murdered, most of them trade unionist, students, and activist - your normal undesirables.

Although some say the Falklands War with Britain was the reason for the Dirty War's ending, there was a growing movement of opposition during the war led by the mothers of the disappeared. And their protest helped to undermine the junta both nationally and internationally.

During their campaign of terror, the government abducted "subversives" and innocents alike, tortured them, drugged them and dropped them alive out of airplanes into the ocean, stole the babies from pregnant prisoners, and denied any knowledge of even the existence of the abductees.

Starting on a Saturday in 1977, mothers of children who had disappeared gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, wearing white head scarves with the names of their missing children written on them. Some even wore pictures of their children around their necks. Soon the women began to meet every Thursday to demand answers, marching to see their children again or to know what had happened to them.

The government, of course, denied any knowledge of their children's whereabouts and tried to ignore the uppity mothers, calling them crazies and subversives, in the hopes that they'd go away. They didn't.

Although everyone knew the government was behind the mass disappearances, no one spoke up, no one except the mothers. In Latin America, and especially the Catholic Argentina, women had one of two roles: the public role, which usually translated into 'prostitute', and the private role, which was the respectable 'mother.' Good women did not engage in the public sphere, making the very public, very focused, very political actions of the mothers all the more powerful. As Gilda Rodriguez writes:

By showcasing their grief in public, the Madres turned their motherhood and their bodies into political tools to hold the government accountable for its actions.Over time, their actions drew the attention of the international community. Human rights organizations helped the mothers to organize, to learn to give speeches, and to focus their movement. It has been said that

As mothers, they presented a powerful moral symbol which, over time, transformed them from women seeking to protect their children to women wishing to transform the state so that it reflected maternal values.Although some of the mothers were themselves disappeared, the movement continued to grow, placing pressure on the government and on the country as a whole.

For years, the mothers were the only public sign of dissent, but slowly the movement grew to include the middle class and workers more generally. On December 10, 1982, they held a 24-hour protest, this time with thousands behind them. By 1983, the government's disdain for the mothers' movement went public, as police used tear gas and sticks to break up and break down the mothers. But theirs was a "a tenacity born out of a mother's love," and it would not be broken so easily.

Eventually, with the help of international pressure and the fall of the military junta during the Falklands War, the Dirty War came to an end, but the mothers kept going. They demanded that those responsible be held accountable, and while many children never came home and many parents never found out what happen to their babies, the movement changed the way women and mothers were perceived. No longer relegated to the private sphere alone, these women marked their ground in the public sphere and called tyranny by name.

Act 2: Women in Black
During the first Intifada in 1987, Israeli women began to gather in vigils. By 1988, these small vigils became a movement with weekly demonstrations in Jerusalem on Fridays (I assume because of Sabbath). Arab-Israeli and Palestinian women joined in, leading to a coalition of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian women. They had no agenda or platform other than the end of aggression and occupation.

The women extended support to one another, crossing the Green Line, visiting Palestinians in Israeli prisons. They gathered at regular intervals, always wearing all black to represent mourning, always keeping their message focused on ending the occupation, aways non-violent, though not always silent. They were often harassed, mostly - but not completely - verbally. Men and boys would spit on them and drop their pants to show off their asses and genitals. Fruit, sandwiches, eggs, waters - basically anything throwable was thrown at them. But such actions seemed only to strengthen their resolve.

Gila Svirsky, one of the women in the early years of the movement, recalls the attacks in detail, pointing out that such abuses were always sexually motivated.

For the record, I repeat here some of the most common invective: “whores” (in general), “whores of the Arabs” or “whores of Arafat” (in particular), “You girls need a rape to make you feel better”, “What’s wrong with Jewish men?”, “Is fucking Arabs (or Arafat) better?”, “Shove it, babies, good and hard,” and the endless staple of “Fuck you”. These were often accompanied by appropriate hand gestures. “Whores”, the most common appellation, was often delivered in Arabic (sharmuta), although there’s a perfectly good word for it in Hebrew (zona), and those speaking were always Jewish....There is no question that much of the reaction to us was based upon our gender, not our politics. In mixed male and female demonstrations, the abuse is predominantly political, with words and phrases like “traitors”, “fifth column”, “anti-Semites”, “no memory of the Holocaust”, and the like. We had our share of this, but by and large the curses reserved for Women in Black were sexual.The women endured and continued to stand vigil, week after week. After the Oslo Accord, the vigils slowed down. The women thought that the occupation was coming to an end. Sadly, they were wrong. As tensions flared up, so to did their vigils.

It didn't take long for the international community to become aware of what the Women in Black were doing. The movement continued to grow and crossed borders. By the end of the 1980s, women across the world were dressing in black, taking to the streets, and demanding an end to aggression and occupation in their own countries and abroad.

In the 1990s, women in former Yugoslavia donned all black and protested the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Slobodian dismissed them as witches, but needless to say, he didn't win that fight. In December of 2001, over 5,000 Palestinian and Israeli Women in Black and men marched in Jerusalem. In the same year, the movement received the Millennium Peace Prize for Women from United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the Serbian and Israeli branches were (combined) nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Perhaps they have to wait until the occupation actually ends before they can win that prize, but if peace actually comes, I don't think the Nobel Prize will really much matter.

Better than a coffin
These are by no means the only stories of women opposing oppression and genocide. There was the Black Shash Movement in South Africa, for instance, but Africa deserves its own posting to cover all the grassroots movements to bring peace and end genocide. And while I focused on women here, we should not forget that men too have stood to bear witness along with their sisters.

But there is something inspiring about the presence of political women, of mothers unwilling to give up on their children or on the future. There is something tangibly powerful, though impossible to define, in seeing such actions. Perhaps it takes the unwillingness of the most marginalized elements of society to abandon hope and accept the status quo and all its violence to remind us of our conscious. Perhaps because women are often viewed to be unaware, powerless, or ready-made victims, their chutzpah is more powerful.

I don't know.

But one thing I'm sure of is that if I had to choose one person who I know would fight heaven and hell for me and whom I'd want to be at my side during a time of trial, it'd be my mom.

DAMN YOU WORD LIMIT!

2009-02-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

So I had this quasi-brillant Letter to the Editor that I was all ready to send to the local papers here in Chicago, until the ACLU told me (not directly - via a mass email) that most papers will not publish anything over 250 words and that most people won't read the long letters. So ::sigh:: I hacked my beautiful 650-word essay almost in half. But I'll be darnedtoheck if I don't say everything I want to say somewhere.

And really, this is a much better forum, as I can put all my hotlinks back in, so people don't think I'm making this stuff up.

Letter to the Editor: The director's cut

In discussions about what to do with the men currently held in Guantanamo Bay, people often forget two important facts: (1) many of them have already been cleared of any wrong doing and--in our own government’s words--were not and are not a threat, and (2) the few men who are a threat can indeed be handled in our federal prison system.

Rather than focus on these facts and on the task at hand, i.e. ending an unjust practice, we squabble about recidivism rates and whether or not cities that house former Gitmo inmates would be the focus of future terrorist attacks. First off, many including CNN and law experts seriously doubt the recidivism statistics, as they have traditionally been wrong and have included men who wrote op-ed pieces or attended documentary film fests as “returning to the fight.” And housing accused terrorists hasn't gotten Cuba blown up. Once again, our leaders appear to be manipulating numbers to strengthen their weak arguments, and various shock-jocks are exploiting fear and prejudice to glean higher ratings.

But what we are truly missing here is that we have become bound by fear. We are constantly looking over our shoulders, fearful of all of “them.” We must break out of this bondage and not be so afraid of the actions of one or two men that we end up denying the rights and freedoms of hundreds.

For years, many prisoners have languished in confinement, despite having been cleared. Take for instance the seventeen Uighurs (WEE-gurz) who were cleared in 2004 but are still in Cuba because (i) China, their home country, is likely to oppress them if they go back, (ii) we won’t take them, and (iii) China is threatening other countries that might be willing to take them. And there are others as well, other men and boys who have lost years of their lives, who may never see their families or homes again, and who have done little if anything deserving of imprisonment. Surely, keeping the innocent in prison to avoid the possibility that someone might someday do something we don’t like is no more than throwing the baby out with the bath water, or more accurately burning the baby to boil the bath water.

And as for the argument that we cannot house those who do pose a threat to us – patently false. The USA has the largest prison system in the industrialized world. We have over 2,000,000 people currently in the prison system, almost 0.7% of our population. If anything, we should be arguing that we can’t take them because we don’t have room not because they’re too dangerous. Our justice system, although by no means perfect, has been able to deal with homegrown and international terrorists. Our prisons currently house Jose Padilla, Zacarias Moussaoui, Theodore Kaczynski, and Terry Nichols all in the same Colorado prison. So why are we so opposed to taking in a few more? What are truly afraid of?

Perhaps we are not ready to do the soul-searching necessary to understand what has happened to our country since September 2001, but our inability to confront mistakes and fears cannot come at the expense of justice. Other nations are able and willing to help absorb the innocent, but we must take the lead on this. We had the “moral authority” to take the men to Cuba. Now we must find the moral strength to do what is right. For those who need to remain in prison, we have plenty of concrete for them. For those who need to be freed, we have a compassionate and thriving culture that can absorb them. If we are to be able to look the world in the face and ask them to do their part to help, we must be willing to do our part too.

Sincerely,
Me

This little light of mine

2009-02-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite gospels is the Secret Gospel of Thomas (the doubter). Unsurprisingly, it's not part of the canon, probably because it is very cryptic, doesn't have a nice narrative, lacks miracles, and presents a Jesus that is confrontational and challenging. It's a nice change of pace, in my opinion.

Anyway, there's a verse in the gospel that came to mind tonight as I was listening to Bill Ayers at a panel discussion at Northwestern. The scripture goes like this:

As I read it, this verse is a call to action. It is Jesus's attempt to tell "those who have ears to hear and eyes to see" not just to listen to a message but to spread the word, not just to become aware of a situation but also to help others become aware. What has been whispered into our ears, we are to then whisper in the ears of others. But what is the news we are to spread? It's not just the "Good News," no no. This message from Jesus is a call to bear witness, to move into action and call others into action as well, both at the level of the spirit and of social justice.

During his talk this evening, Bill Ayers mentioned that even one candle in room challenges the darkness of the whole room. Once we have lit our candles and made that stand against the darkness, against apathy, against injustice, we seek out the other candles and grow in our light and in our challenge of darkness. We have a duty to ourselves and to one another, regardless of our beliefs or non-beliefs, not to become so accustomed to being in the dark and to capitulating to our anger and despair that we forget to challenge our darkness and the injustice around us.

And for those of us who take comfort in such things, we should remember that God does not create a light so that it can be hidden. Rather, God exists in the light. And this light stands as testament to hope and reconciliation. So take heart and remember that even one small candle can dispel the seemingly endless darkness around us. Even one flicker destroys the myth that darkness has overcome us.

Bondage

2009-02-04T14:27:00.000-08:00

During my descent into the Christian Dominionist ethos, I stumbled upon their belief that perhaps we should reinstate slavery here in the US. Like the good bleeding-heart liberal that I am, I found this prospect horrifying and have been expressing my dismay with virtual anyone who has the patience to indulge me. My brother, God bless him, pointed out that I was assuming that slavery had ended and that I assumed we (meaning the USA) didn't actively engage in slavery. Both of these assumptions are false. As one site so stingly notes: Slavery occurs in every continent in the world except Antarctica.

Slavery is alive and well in the world and in our communities here at home, and lest anyone else has forgotten, I would like to take a moment to bear witness to my sisters and brothers in bondage. So here's my first stab at it.

There are currently more slaves today then at any time in human history (or at least there are more reported slaves nowadays). Slavery is often divided into four main types: chattel slavery, debt bondage, forced labor, sex slavery. Chattel slavery is what we often think of, as it is closest to what we had in force here in the states with the African slaves. But as we often forget, it is not the only type. To be clear, the most common form of slavery today is actually debt bondage, in which a person does labor (of whatever sort their master wishes) to pay of a loan or debt. But it doesn't end there. Slavery includes forced marriages, especially of young children, to relieve debt or gain favor. And then there are the civilians in war-torn areas, who often find themselves cast into sMany victims of the war in the Congo are forced into slavery by the competing factions, forced under threat of death or dismemberment to work in mineral mines. And we should never forget those who lost limbs and lives slaving in the diamond trade in Sierra Leone. In the USA, there are at least 10,000 slaves working on any given day. In 2004, the Department of Justice reported that"14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked annually into the United States, and 600,000 to 800,000 are trafficked globally."

Not surprisingly--children and women bear the brunt of slavery, being already marginalized and expendable in many cultures. They (or rather "we", depending on who you are) are especially vulnerable to sex slavery, and young virgin girls are particularly slave-worthy. Women comprise about 80% of the slave trade, with 70% of us being sold into the sex trade. One article reported the following:

I'll admit, I take these types of stories particularly hard. I remember being 13. I have a niece who is 10. The terror and helplessness of this - I cannot stomach it.

But it's a story as old as time itself. Heck - it's in the Bible. Judges 19 has a nice little story about a concubine being repeatedly "abused" over the course of the night by the village folk. She's dumped at the house where her master, who willingly gave her to them to save his own skin, is staying. He later cuts her up into 12 pieces and scatters her remains across the land. [Interesting aside: in scripture, lawful wives were sometimes called concubines, so it may have been his wife that he gave up and later hacked into pieces. Chew on that one for a while.] Sadly, we haven't learned much since then. Bodies are still exchanged, ravaged, and slaughtered. People are still commodities.

Modern day slavery is another case where the sheer enormity of the offense makes it almost incomprehensible. As in so many situations of pure depravity, those among us who are even slightly aware of the problem feel unable to confront it, politically, emotionally, or spiritually. It's sad that we still need to have organizations to end slavery, but luckily they exist. As time permits, I will investigate them and suggest ones that are most active, most efficient, and most deserving of assistance. For now, if you do nothing else, consider signing this petition.

No rest for the weary

2009-01-31T07:13:00.000-08:00

A recent study by British researchers found yet another significant difference between your typical woman (British, at least) and your typical man. Women have more nightmares than men, and men dream about sex more often than women. And even when women do dream about sex, they are less likely to dream of actual intercourse and more likely to dream about kissing and less favorable sexual encounters than men. Great.

Add this to the fact that women, regardless of nationality, cry more often than men, and you've got yet more evidence that being female is potentially way less fun than being male. American women, in particular, cry more than their brothers, a whopping 47.8 times per year compared to 6.5 times for men. And don't forget that women get more headaches, and more migraines and severe headaches than their male counterparts. I suppose this would explain why I often wake up crying and with a headache. Maybe it's my body's way of getting it all over in one shot.

And as if we didn't have it bad enough, we end up living longer on average. Maybe this is to make sure that we truly appreciate the pain of our lot. ::sigh:: That said, men tend to be killed in war more often than women (as I reported in an earlier post), but women tend to be the victims of war more often than men (e.g. rape, torture, disfigurement). So I suppose that makes it fair.

I'm sure there's some advantage to being female, but a cursory exploration of the scientific data doesn't suggest to me what it may be. More nightmares, more tears, more headaches and rapes...hmm. Sometimes I really wish I were a boy.

A just and sustainable peace

2009-01-30T07:34:00.000-08:00

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes that he is fed up with the

...white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."King's frustration and disappointment with white moderates is palpable and still resonates with many of us today. The oppressed and neglected communities throughout the world are still imprisoned, still waiting for their white moderates to do more than agree to the principles of a resolution and to actually take steps towards realizing them. But so often, the moderates of the world community tell the oppressed to wait just a little bit longer, to not be so reactionary, to let things happen according to dominate society's timetable and in accordance with their sensibilities. It is easy to tell the hungry to wait when you yourself are full.

In his letter, King challenges the moderates to look beyond simply establishing order and to immersing themselves in justice. Implicit in his juxtaposition is the idea that justice is not orderly and that peace must be more than just the absence of war. Peace is an active, messy process of building ties, seeking justice, and extending active, stubborn mercy. Sometimes in order to strengthen those who have been denied access, those of privileged have to live with a bit of chaos and relinquish a tinge of control. Sometimes we must invite a bit of disorder in to break free of institutionalized and fossilized inequalities.

In doing so, in opening ourselves up to change, we must never forget the purpose of our mission. If we seek only negative peace, i.e. the absence of destruction, then our efforts will ultimately not be sustainable nor satisfying. But if we seek positive peace, i.e. the creation of a new order based in mutual justice and cooperation, then a self-perpetuating peace can be established and nurtured. To tend to the garden, we can mow down the weeds. But they will simply grow back. We can tear the weeds out by the roots. But the seeds have already been spread. Or we can change the nature of the soil, make it inhospitable to weeds. Plant new flowers and grasses to crowd out the weeds. Ultimately, the choice is not either-or. It is through some combination of these that the garden is ultimately sustained: remove the threats and change the context.

Gordon Bennet writes that positive peace-building "involves helping nations develop more just and democratic systems in which poverty, illiteracy, and other root causes of terrorism and conflict are eliminated and the poorer nations are given a 'hand up' the ladders of economic development." This path is more complex, time consuming, and (seemingly) more prone to failure than negative peace. Negative peace is relatively easier - take away the bombs, the guns, the knives and presto change-o, we have peace!

But true peace is not the absence of struggle. Rather it is the presence of perpetual struggle, struggle to join with others, to lift up and be lifted up, to prosper and grow, and there's no better time to get our hands dirty and to start planting the seeds and irrigating our minds and hearts than now.

For the record

2009-01-30T07:30:00.000-08:00

Probably one of my greatest language pet peeves is the misuse of sayings and idioms. As a linguist and grammar maven, I feel it is incumbent on me to clarify these misuses from time to time, so may I begin…

having your cake and eating it too
The correct expression, if you wish to be truthful or at least make some sense, is “You cannot EAT your cake and HAVE it too”, not the other way around.

Why? Good question.

For the semantics among us, the two expressions are propositionally equivalent. If we follow propositional logic, the ordering of phrases should not matter. “You cannot X & Y” is logically the same as “you cannot Y & X.” But we are not talking about semantic or propositional equivalence. We are talking about functional equivalence. If we take the interpretation of and to mean “and then” (and there’s psycholinguistic work to suggest that this is a ‘default’ interpretation of and), then the two expressions “you cannot have your cake and then eat it too” and “you cannot eat your cake and then have it too” are not describing the same series of events or possible worlds. Thus, they do not mean the same things.

The first assertion is just false. Of course you can have your cake and then eat it. How else could you eat something if you didn’t first have it? However, you cannot eat something and then ‘have’ it, where have means something along the lines of ‘holding’ or ‘possessing’, unless you want to count digested form as ‘possession’. So for the love of truth and function, let’s get it right: You cannot eat your cake and have it too!

The American Taliban

2009-01-26T18:15:00.000-08:00

The more I read about the Christian Right, especially the far right movements, the more sick I feel. From Joel's Army to plain-old Dominionism, the use of religion as a justification for aggression and bigotry disgusts me. In future posts, I will try to explain the beliefs of such groups, but as a foretaste, here are some of the highlights.

The "Christian" Dominionist movement contends that they have a mandate from God to prepare the world for Christ's return and that Christ will return only when the world is Christian. To make sure we are making progress on this point, good God-fearing Christians must prepare themselves politically, militaristically, and economically to wage war against non-believers. They want to establish Hebrew law in the US by using the very institution of democracy to set up a theocracy.

Hard-line Dominionists see the role of all Christian men as being the establishment of a Christian world order in which all non-Christians and all Christians who don't conform to their interpretation of scripture would be second-class citizens, at best. Some fear an even worse fate:

Any person who advocated or practiced other religious beliefs outside of their home would be tried for idolatry and executed. Blasphemy, adultery and homosexual behavior would be criminalized; those found guilty would also be executed. At that time that this essay was originally written, this was the only religious movement in North America of which we were aware which advocates genocide for followers of minority religions and non-conforming members of their own religion.Pretty much all of us would be stoned to death or burned alive, if they held dominion. We recently dodged a Dominionist bullet in Sarah Palin, but don't worry. They'll get another chance in 2012. And no one can stop the second coming of Ester, as Ms. Palin is said to be. ::shudder::

Like other fundamentalist religious groups, this movement contends that they are the elect, that they are wholly correct, and that those who don't agree with them must move out of the way, by force if necessary. And as we saw in the Christian Zionist's anti-peace agenda outlined in yesterday's post, war and genocide are quite likely a necessary condition for salvation.

There's a (corny) saying that whenever you point a finger at someone, there are three pointing back at you. (Look at your hand while pointing your finger, and you'll see why.) I'm personally covering my mouth so as not to vomit more so than I am pointing my finger, but I bring this saying up as a way to bridge to our condemnation of certain groups that have co-opted the West's understanding of Islam and made it seem as though Islam promotes violent, repressive, or bigoted actions. However, we allow our crazy, fundamentalist Christian cousins to go around terrorizing clinics, denying gays rights, espousing religious hate, etc. etc. etc., making Christianity look as though it promotes intolerance and violence.

The truth is that no religion has a corner on peace or violence. Sadly, all the major world religions have been both victims and aggressors. Thus, we cannot say that any one religion -- or even being religious for that matter -- leads us toward or away from hate. The enemy isn't Christians/Jews/Muslims/Atheists/etc. The enemy, if it can be called such, is fear and the human tendency toward authoritarianism.

When Americans, specifically non-Muslim Americans, wag their finger at men like Osama Bin Laden, we confuse our disdain for a certain mentality and pattern of behavior with a religion. Bin Laden speaks for all of Islam (I think) no more so then Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell (among others) speak for all of Christianity. In my opinion, these people are just branches of the same tree. This tree is based not on religion, per se, but on a personality type that Theodor Adorno marked as having the following the characteristics:

Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong
Respect for submission to acknowledged authority
Belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different
A negative view of people in general - i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity
A need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power
A belief in simple answers and polemics - i.e. The media controls us all or The source of all our problems is the loss of morals these days.
Resistance to creative, dangerous ideas. A black and white worldview
A tendency to project one's own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group
A preoccupation with violence and sex

Take these traits, add a dash of religious symbolism or rhetoric, sprinkle in some good ol' racism, sexism, and homophobia, and you get Relgiofacism -- sure to work in any country! Religofacism exploits what should be a comfort-giving institution and turns it into a factory of fear and oppression. It is self-justifying and circular and, thus, immune from logical criticism.

It is not any one religion or religion itself that we need to be wary of. It is the authoritarian personality that we all share elements of.

Sunday Edition

2009-01-25T06:29:00.000-08:00

Back in the early 90s, my mother had a sticker that read "The Christian Right is Neither." Thoroughly confused, I asked her about it, and she said, "The Christian Right is neither Christian nor right." The older I get and the more I learn about the Christian Right, specifically the Zionists –i.e. those in the Christian Right who are obsessed with Rapture, the End of Days, and Israel—the more convinced I am that she was right: They're not Christians; they’re a f---ing crazy death cult that's going to start WW III.

I find the Christian Zionist (and by extension the political arm of the Christian Right) movement enormously troubling, especially as a religious person and baptized/confirmed Christian. It's as though someone stole my identity and is going around town kicking children in the back, punching old ladies in the gut, and crapping on faces of cancer patients.

Below is my initial attempt and figuring out what in heaven's name is going on. If I find out I am incorrect, I will update this, but for now this is the truth as I know it.

The people in your neighborhood
The USA is a religious country, to be sure, with over 80% of Americans never doubting the existence of (a) God. Though overwhelming Christian, Protestant specifically, we have our Catholics, Mormons, and non-Christians to boot. However, the Christian Right/Zionists and branches of the evangelical movement are worth particular attention, as the total number of evangelicals comprise about 1/3 of the American population. The majority of evangelicals are made up of African Americans, who tend to be the more liberal evangelicals, and white, southern conservatives. A 2003 report from Pew Research stated that nearly 50% of African Americans describe themselves as evangelicals and 28% of whites do.

Before I go any further, let me state unequivocally: being evangelical does not entail being a Christian Zionist, though being a Christian Zionist almost assuredly means being evangelical. The two terms should not be thought of as wholly interchangeable. Zionists and other evangelicals can differ drastically on their assumptions about Christianity and in their political/social agendas. The important thing to remember is that as the evangelical movement is growing so is the Christian Right and the Christian Zionist movements.

So why should we take the time to learn about these growing groups? Mainly because they have a great deal of political influence. They are overwhelmingly Republican, nearly 2-to-1 for the white evangelicals and have had the ear of D.C. and one of their own in the White House for eight years (i.e. George W. Bush). Furthermore, they are one of the fastest-growing religious voting blocks, increasing by 3% between the 2004 and 2008 elections while many other groups decreased. The Christian Right agenda has permeated all aspects of American life, leading some to compare its fundamentalist influence on the USA to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

While the Christian Right has influenced domestic policy (same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, etc), it has distorted and warped foreign policy, in particular Middle Eastern policy, to suit its needs. With groups such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) joining forces and pressing policies that undermine peace efforts in the Middle East, we must attend to this segment, lest we walk blindly into WW III. And WW III is what Christian Zionists are hoping for. More precisely, they’re hoping for Armageddon. The Christian Zionist movement has its eyes set steadily on Israel usually at the expense of Palestinians. They are over three-times as likely to support Israeli aggression than moderate Americans, mostly because they see the state of Israel as necessary for the second coming of Christ.

However, they are not alone in their sentiments about Israel or their disdain for Palestine. Around 36% of Americans see the formation of Israel as a sign of the impending return of Jesus, and most Americans, regardless of political or religious affiliation, tend to lack support for Palestine or Palestinians, though one assumes this does not apply to Palestinian-Americans and the majority of Muslim-Americans. Charles E. Carlson recently wrote:

The Judeo-Christians remain the only political faction driven directly by religious beliefs that war and the support of the state of Israel is right, that distrust, even hatred, of Israel’s perceived enemy Islam, is a necessity and prophetic.
With this level of religious motivation to demonize one group and blindly support another plus the proliferation of weapons added to an extreme amount of political influence…indeed, Christian Zionists are worth our attention.

This they believe
Full disclosure: While I consider myself Christian, I debate the basic tenants of even mainstream Protestantism, so when I try to wrap my mind around the belief system of the Christian Zionists, I feel like I’m trapped in some psychic debate about characters from a demonic Dr. Suess story. I can barely recognize anything that I would define as Christian, save the use of certain names and references to scripture. It’s like they took my toothpaste, band-aids, and down comforter and made an A-bomb with them. I find it difficult to see how we could look at the same raw materials and come up with such radically different interpretations. That said, I will try to explain the differences between Zionist-bending evangelicals and your more mainstream evangelicals.

The first thing to keep in mind about Christianity (especially if you weren’t raised by a Christian theologian or aren’t one yourself) is that Christianity is based on this idea that human beings are fallen and that we broke our covenant with God. Jesus is seen as coming to address the rift between God and humanity and the status of the covenant. However, this is where things start to break down between Catholics/mainstream-Protestants and the Christian Right/Zionists.

Was Jesus the fulfillment of prophecy? Did Jesus’s life and death mark the beginning of a new covenant? Are we in an age of progression in which God’s revelation is continually unfolding or is God’s promise currently being suspended? If you agree with the former and with the idea that we are age of a new covenant, you’re a “conventionalist.” If you believe we are not and that the old covenant still applies (at least to the Jews), then you’re a “dispensationalist.” The dispensationalist view holds that there are two aspects: the church and Israel. The latter is still subject to the old covenant, which they broke, and the former is, basically evangelical Christians. Because the old covenant still holds and the world is still being tested by God (and failing), dispensationalists look toward Israel for clues of God's intentions for the world. Conventionalists, as I understand them, believe God has already made God's intentions clear and that we were given our marching orders thousands of years ago.

So how does this relate to Israel? For those dispensationalist waiting for God's final test, the story goes like this:

The end of days is upon us. Soon there will be Rapture, during which the faithful Christians will ascend directly to heaven, where they will get new immortal bodies while the rest of the world burns for seven years until the end of human history. Rapture will come when Jesus returns, but he won’t just come unannounced. No-no, there will be signs, and there are necessary conditions, and this is where Israel comes in. As good Christians in waiting, Christian Zionists believe they should work towards achieving these conditions, and here's the game plan:

Establish a (purely) Jewish state in the biblical, Holy Land.
Reconstruct the Jewish temple. [This must be built on the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites of Muslims and the reported site of the former Jewish temple.]
Then, the Antichrist must desecrate the temple.
Horrible disasters, as detailed in the Book of Revelation, will ravage the planet.
Jesus will return, and any Jews that convert can ascend to heaven. [I assume everyone else goes to hell.]

Now, there are many steps to achieving these necessary conditions. Some are well on their way. Others are not. The war of 1948 helped to make a great deal of progress on (1). The 1967 war that won (or stole) Jerusalem for Israel got them closer to (2). However, Muslims still claim the Dome of the Rock as their own, thus standing in the way of the reconstruction of the temple. [If the reconstruction means Armageddon, I personally want Muslims to have full and exclusive rights to the Dome of the Rock.] And if this all wasn’t bizarre enough, in order to sanctify the reconstructed temple, a priest has to be purified using the ashes of a red heifer that has never been yoked. For this reason, American Christian Zionists were collecting donations to send red heifers to Israel. After the temple is rebuilt, the Jewish state and the Muslims must fight it out, and from what I gather, the Jews need to be slaughtered or convert. To ensure (3) and the ensuing wars, we've been very helpful by undermining the peace process thereby keeping the flames of hate between Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews smoldering enough to lead to war.

The Christian Zionist movement has a vested interest in avoiding peace in the Middle East and in establishing a purely Jewish state in Israel at the expense of all other groups, Muslims, Christians, etc. This end-of-days interest gives an ominous tone to Thomas Ice’s conjecture that

[It] is safe to say that there has not been a group of Christians who have cared more for the Jewish people and their destiny than dispensationalists in the 2,000-year history of the church. Previous to the rise of dispensationalism, Christians did not seem to be able to acknowledge that God had a future plan of glory for national Israel, without at the same time making the church subordinate to Judaism.Of course they're concerned about the destiny of the Jewish people. Their ascension to heaven rests on the state of Israel and its ultimate destruction. And God's future plan of glory...it's going to be gory. Considering the dark implications of Christian Zionist support for Israel, perhaps Christian apathy for Israel/Jews would be preferable to this type of "care."

That lingering feeling of doom
As a Christian, I assumed we were supposed to put loving our neighbor before inciting war, and I assumed that God was present here and now, and not waiting for the burning of some red cow before taking action on Earth. But alas, Christian Zionist have co-opted the dialog and have changed the Middle East (Israel/Palestine in particular) into the theater of some self-directed play between good and evil to bring about the end of days on their timetable. Sadly, Palestinians and Israelis are suffering as is what I consider to be the soul of Christianity.

So how do we end this insanity? How can someone fight a world view that is so damaging and so devoid of logic, that has so much sway over the political reality of the US? How do we uproot a preposterous mandate that has permeated both major parties and the very core of US foreign policy? Good question. Stephen Zunes is probably at least partially right when he states:

It is unlikely that [American politicians] will change, however, until liberal-to-mainline churches mobilize their resources toward demanding justice as strongly as right-wing fundamentalists have mobilized their resources in support of repression.I hate to think that peace in the Middle East rests solely in the hands of non-fundamentalist American Christians. We're not that good at organizing or fighting in my opinion, due to our penchant for person-and-private experiences of faith. But one thing is for sure, we've been out of the fray for too long. We've been too apathetic, lazy, or afraid of being called anti-semitic for too long. Perhaps it's time that we are the keepers of our all our sisters and brothers and stand up to our "Christian" siblings directly and remind them that just because they call themselves the "Christian Right" it doesn't mean that they're either.

Et tu, Chomsky?

2009-01-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

Now, Noam Chomsky's copyin' my style. DAMN YOU NOAM! Ok, so neither one of us was the first to contend that perhaps the US-Israel marriage is based on common, weapon interests, but come on Chomsky, syntactician to syntactican, can't you leave me some small sense of originality?

And did you have to state the position better than me? Couldn't you have at least been less informative? Ok, I'll cite the master:

The huge flow of arms to Israel serves many subsidiary purposes. Middle East policy analyst Mouin Rabbani observes that Israel can test newly developed weapons systems against defenseless targets. This is of value to Israel and the US "twice over, in fact, because less effective versions of these same weapons systems are subsequently sold at hugely inflated prices to Arab states, which effectively subsidizes the U.S. weapons industry and U.S. military grants to Israel." These are additional functions of Israel in the US-dominated Middle East system, and among the reasons why Israel is so favored by the state authorities, along with a wide range of US high-tech corporations, and of course military industry and intelligence.

I was down with the Titanic DAYS ago

2009-01-22T19:03:00.001-08:00

::BONUS UPDATE::
I just want to say that the BBC and other news agencies are totally ripping me off. Granted, they're talking about how nice the Brits are and how bossy Americans are, and I was talking about statistics during war and diminishing the suffering of men, but seriously, people, come up with your own topics. Stop stealin' my style. I don't have that much to spread around. Hello - "women and children first" was sooooo last week. Get with the program people!

It's all about perspective

2009-01-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

The mind wants unity. It wants structure, order, and wholeness. But nature and life often overload the system with sometimes purely random details. Nature hates a vacuum, but the mind hates ambiguity, and thus the battle is waged.

According to gestalt psychology, the mind (especially the perceptual system) will naturally arrange information to make sense of the input. This need to organize according to basic heuristics can, according to gestaltists, explain why people see either a vase or two faces in the picture to the left (but never both concurrently) or why we have the impression that the moon is following us or why the trees in the distance seem to be still, as we race pass in a train. As is so often said, perspective is everything.

There are five basic laws for gestalt perception:

The Law of Similarity: Things that look alike are grouped alike.
The Law of Prananz: The mind prefers the simplest representation, also known as the foreground/background distinction.
The Law of Proximity: Things that are close together are grouped together.
The Law of Continuity: The mind prefers things to move in smooth, constant directions.
The Law of Closure: Objects that are grouped together become one unit.

True to the 4th law, the mind extends this pattern of organization to more than just visual stimuli. All input is organized, compartmentalized, explained, and thank heavens it is! When there is pure chaos, there can be no progress. Progress presupposes direction, which entails a path, and both of these necessitate some organization, even if it is contrived.

The effects of gestalt are found not only in our perception of pictures or distant trees but also in our perception of one another. When thinking about some of the current conflicts, it's hard for me not to think of the gestalt and wonder how our perspectives may be seriously skewed, how we've spent so long seeing vases, that we have forgotten that there are also faces (law 2), how we've spent so long assuming all things and people who look alike are alike and should be treated alike (laws 1, 3, and 5), how we assume that, just because things are a certain way today, they have always been as such and always will be as such (law 4).

It may be human nature to use gestalt perception as a way to structure and comprehend our world, but it is also human nature to fight our human nature and challenge our assumptions about our world. In thinking about the current conflict in Israel/Palestine, we should we wary of our gestaltist nature. It is not true that the Middle East has always been or must always be a place of tragedy and religious/national intolerance. It is not true that all Israelis or Palestinians think or feel the same or should be lumped together. It is not true that only one side is blameless or at fault ubiquitously. Just as there is a vase, so are there faces. Just as there is true pain, so is there equal possibilities.

While I feel odd saying it's just a matter of perception, in someways it is just a matter of perception. We must never forget that both truths are equally as present and equally a valid and that it is our current perspective that leads to the illusion of all-or-nothingness. We have stared so long at the situation with the perspective of "Who started it?" and "Who's terrorizing whom?" that we've forgotten that we have the ability to change our perspective to "Who is going to end this?" and "Who is going to heal whom?"

Although we may have to go cross-eyed for awhile, and although we may get a bit of a headache, we can change the context and can change the meaning. It may take a bit of effort, but we can see the forgotten possibility. And we can choose to make the image we have of each other and questions we ask of each other the ones that are most likely to bring us peace. We can choose to move from seeing only death to seeing beauty instead.

Open Letter to the Honorable Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois

2009-01-21T11:47:00.000-08:00

Dear Honorable Senator Durbin,

I would like to thank you and your staff for your correspondence and your total disregard for my opinion. I am honored that you didn’t take the time to read even the subject line of my emails or attend to even one phrase of my phone call. You and your staff must be very well trained in either filtering out any comment from a constituent that does not echo your own position or completely disregarding the messages your constituents are trying to relay. This is truly a clear demonstration of representational democracy in action, and I am proud to be a meaningless cog in the state’s machine.

Despite the indifference your response suggests, I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you intended to send a message that would express some minimal level of awareness of my opinions, but you misplaced it. So I will try once more to make my position clear, and with any luck your next letter will demonstrate that someone in your office at least attempted to address my concerns.

First off, you state in your letter, “I appreciate hearing from you and share your concern for Israel's security and the safety of its citizens.” I clearly wrote and called in regards to the security and safety of Palestinian civilians. I know this is an easy mistake to make: Palestinian…Israel pretty much exactly the same, i.e. a group of people living in fear of their neighbors and feeling hated and forgotten by the rest of the world. And while I agree with your conjecture that “No cause or grievance can justify the deliberate killing of innocent civilians,” I am deeply concern about the context of this sentence, as it was couched in terms referring strictly to Israelis while flagrantly disregarding the deliberate killing of innocent Palestinian civilians seeking shelter in UN schools and hospitals, for timely example.

Secondly, I think you accidentally deleted a sentence or two in the following paragraph:

The Israeli people deserve safety and security. Palestinians should have a safe and sovereign homeland and a voice in deciding their own destiny. But these goals for Palestinians cannot be achieved at the expense of Israel's sovereignty or the safety of its citizens. The establishment of a Palestinian state must come through peaceful negotiations, not violence.The sentence “Nor can the goal of safety and security for Israel come at the expense of the safety and dignity of Palestinians” seems to be missing from your argument. Please reinsert it.

But I think one of my greatest concerns is the pride you take in cosponsoring S. Res. 10, the resolution I called explicitly to denounce. I find this resolution one-sided, reactionary, and lacking in vision. Rather than focusing on finding real solutions and acknowledging the humanitarian crisis caused by reckless bombing of civilian sites, it persists in our policy of blind, unilateral support for Israeli, whose adherence to the ceasefire is also dubious at best and whose track record of listening to the UN is spotty at best.

Furthermore, the $30+ billion military aid package that you mention in your letter is not something we should take pride in for multiple reasons, one obvious one being the current recession. Nor do I want you to support such packages. Perhaps you forgot previous letters I sent in which I fervently questioned the wisdom of such aid in light of other needs, e.g., stemming the rise of HIV/AIDS in Africa or reconstructing Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, you express approval of President Obama’s former statements for support of Israel. I have also been writing him since he was a senator expressing my opinions against this position. I hope he and his staff listen better to the opinions and ideas of their constituents.

Please be(come) aware that, even if American politicians are of one mind about Israel/Palestine, the American people are not. We question our history and our future in the Middle East, and many of us doubt the intelligence and sincerity of our current policies. Seeing as how our names are on the bombs Israel is buy from the US to drop on Gaza, we would like to have our dissent acknowledged. This conflict and our position in it are not improving the situation for anyone. We have not helped to bring more safety to Israelis. We have not helped support the sovereignty of Palestinians. We have not improved our security abroad either. In fact, I would contend that we have undermined all of these goals by not approaching the situation with a well-rounded perspective that takes both sides’ humanitarian needs into account in equal measure.

I hope this letter more fully explains my position and helps to direct our conversation more clearly. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Meredith Larson
Chicago, IL

Be not far from me...come quickly, O my God, to help me

2009-01-20T05:57:00.000-08:00

"But as for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more. My mouth will tell of your righteousness, of your salvation all day long, though I know not its measure." Psalm 71:14-15

I'm currently watching, actually listening, to live coverage of the inauguration. This is the first one that I've actually wanted to see. The past two made me sick. This one gives me cautious hope.

I've always been a sentimentalist, and it's a painful path to tend to. There are many thorns and many holes to stumble in, but the destination is (hopefully) blessed. Today's post is just a list of some of the things I hope for.

That Obama gives an awesome speech.
That everyone in D.C. is safe and has a wonderful time.
That we take this opportunity to see ourselves as potential agents of change.
That our leaders inspire us to do (1).
That we make a substantial change in our awareness of and involvement in the conflicts that ravage our world from Zimbabwe, to Israel/Palestine, to Detroit.
That we look at the ways we are in bondage to our past and to our fears through our addiction to oil and money, through our fear of others, through our lack of regard to our own inherent worth and the inherent worth of all life and that we free ourselves from them.
That I am able to continue to have hope in the face of my neurotransmitters, the economy, and the tragedies that surround me.
That Obama makes significant moves in foreign and national policies during his first 100 days and that these moves are in keeping with what is most merciful and best for all.
That I don't sell out. That Obama and his administration don't sell out.
That the snow (literal and metaphoric) melt and don't drown us in the process.

Hey brother, can you spare a D.I.M.E?

2009-01-18T19:45:00.000-08:00

More reports are coming out of Gaza about strange "mysterious wounds" , confounding and frightening doctors. But there is nothing truly mysterious about them. The medical community has seen them before.(Scroll down for an in-text example, if you'd like.)They're called Dense Inert Metal Explosion (D.I.M.E.) bombs.

They're made with a lovely cocktail of metals that not only tunnel through armor but have extra bonus of also melting of skin, burrowing through limbs, and contaminating the entire site where the bomb landed. ((go science!!!)) The bomb was created to minimize collateral damage and to make it possible for armies to attack previously "off-limits" areas, i.e. those with civilians. The bomb was supposed to destroy only a small radius and kill everything within it and nothing outside of it, but it also has a nasty habit of causing cancer, oops. This smart bomb was supposed to make war more civilized and to avoid the unfortunate accident of killing innocent bystanders. Here's a thought: if you want war to be less deadly - don't wage one. And here's a question for ya: how can a bomb be smart if the people ordering that they be dropped are idiots?

These bombs, lovingly crafted and shared by the US, have been used on Gazans before. Back in 2006, the Israeli army dropped a couple bombs which led to the death of at least 200 people and serious injuries, many of which were barely treatable and which led to amputations. We here in the US may not have heard anything about it were it not for a few brave Italian reporters and scientists who ignored Israeli and US pressure.

Back in 2006 when the use of this type of weapon first came to light, Israel fiercely denied that it was using illegal weapons, which may technically have been true at the time, seeing as how the weapons were too new to have been deemed illegal by international law. These days, the effects of D.I.M.E. bombs is quite well known, though I am still unsure on their legal status. Of course, there are a lot of things that people aren't "sure" about when it comes to D.I.M.E. bombs, like -- oh -- say the fact that the metals used in them will give you cancer (FYI: I'm being sarcastic). More ethical hair-splitting, really. Scientists had evidence that the heavy metal–tungsten alloys (HMTAs) used in these bombs would cause tumors at least as early as 2001, but according to the military's scientists, the evidence was "incomplete," and therefore, I assume, ok to use until the evidence conclusively proved the bombs were evil.

So we know where this insanity is being played out most currently: Gaza. But where did it begin? In our own backyard. The Manhattan Project to be more specific. People have always been trying to make bigger and better bombs, and we here in the states have made an art of it. With each new weapon, we push ourselves to improve it, make it more deadly, make it more stealth, more sexy. Can we increase the kill ratio? Can we streamline the production? Can we market this baby?

Yes we can!

And so we do. Each question asked becomes a question answered, leading to greater and greater evil possibilities for our weaponry. Sooner or later, we'll need to test these theories and inventions. Perhaps this helps to explain the strange relationship between the US and Israel. Rather than sully our own hands, we have our friends run experiments for us. Or maybe we can split the work! We'll drop some chemical agents on Iraqis, and they'll drop other bombs on Palestinians! Oooo, and just because we're such good scientists, we can have the Israeli's replicate our results by dropping even more chemicals on Palestinians!

The sheer extent of this insanity makes me sick. It makes me hate being a scientist and hate being an American and hate knowing that my name is on those bombs and hate being so helpless to stop any of this.

Like most American children, I grew up knowing who Satan was and knowing that devils were short, red-skinned beings with horns, hooves, and tails. Evil was a sort of communicable disease and something that was external, something that took control over us. But the older I get, the more sure I am that evil doesn't exist, at least not in this form. Evil isn't something that finds us; it comes from us. Evil is the sum total of local, independent random acts of self-delusion. Each time someone exerts his or her will without pausing to consider the wisdom of the act, it is an evil. Every time someone has to rationalize his or her behavior and tell him or herself that this is really ok despite that little tingle in the gut, it's an evil. Yes, evil exists, but not in little red demons or some monstrous fallen angel. The source is much closer to home, and the face is a bit more familiar.

Palestinian boy killed as he lay sleeping by an unidentified weapon used by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip (The WE/www.kawther.info)

For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also

2009-01-18T07:23:00.000-08:00

There was a short article on the BBC News online today about a recent archelogical find in the UK. They found 840 gold coins dating back to somewhere between 40BC and 15AD. The approximate value of the coins at the time: £500,000 t0 £1m or $746,000 to $1.5m. It's worth considerably less now.

They are thought to have belonged to Boudica, the Queen of the Iceni tribe of Wales. She's actually quite an interesting woman. Her husband had been a client king of the Roman empire, and when he died, he left his kingdom to be split according to his will between his daughters and Nero (our favorite emperor). Needless to say, the Romans scoffed at the idea of a woman inheriting a kingdom, so they sent troops to claim it. Boudica was flogged, her daughters raped, and the kingdom was taken from them. She led an uprising against the Romans and did a pretty decent job, all in all. But ultimately, she lost. She put up a good fight though.

History has a way of circling back and tripping us up all over again. Buried treasure, in particular, has a way of bending back on itself and smacking us in the face with our weakness and greed. Things so seemingly precious at the time lose their value and lose their meaning. The people that sought after it, that died for it, that buried it far away from some enemy are long since dead, worm food eaten by worms eaten by worms. The treasures of the past are now quaint little tokens that we put in museums and nod at.

But we continue to do the same thing, century after century . Scrambling to collect things, to hoard them, to polish them up and set them in precious metals, to adorn ourselves, to fatten ourselves. Like squirrels who instinctively bury nuts without any hope of remembering where they are or why they're burying them.

Chapter One: Outside of the acupuncture clinic

2009-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

To all the homeless and crazies I have known: A love letter to Chicago

I had an appointment one Saturday morning maybe back in October at the acupuncture clinic off of Broadway. When I parked my car, there were these two obviously drunk homeless men sitting against the wall consoling one another as only drunken men can at 9:00 a.m. When I came back out to my car, one was still there though he was lying in a fetal position on the sidewalk unmoving. I walked by, as did about two other people, each of us giving the man plenty of room. I unlocked my car and watched another person pass. Then the guilt set in. What if he was dead? What if he was sick? Maybe I should find a police officer and tell him. Maybe I should see if he’s just sleeping. But if he is dead, I’d have to do something about it. And I don’t really want to touch him. And you can’t just kick a person, even if he is dead. What if he isn’t dead and I kick him or poke him with a stick or something? That’d be rude. But I couldn’t just drive away either.

The guilt and curiosity were killing me. So I got out of my car, walked passed him again, and went into the Walgreens. I walked up and down the food isle and decided on whole wheat bread, a package of turkey meat (I couldn’t bring myself to buy ham – what if he were Jewish or something?), and cheese sticks (in case he was a vegetarian), and a bottle of water. I paid for the items and walked back outside holding the groceries, which I was prepared to take home if – God forbid – the guy was actually dead.

I came up to him and first waited to see if he was breathing. I couldn’t tell, so I kicked his foot gently. He moved a little bit but didn’t wake up. So I kicked his foot again and said, “Hey, wake up. I got something for you.” At this he woke up. I handed him the bag and said, “Drink the water first. I think you could use it. I hope wheat’s ok.” He gave me this rather weird look, took the bag, and then pulled out the meat and the bread and seemed confused. I think he said “thanks,” but I can’t remember for sure. I was just happy he wasn’t dead. I didn’t want to have to make a police report.

My sister, Florida

2009-01-16T16:40:00.000-08:00

Just over a year ago, I stumbled upon an article on Salon.com about the women of the Congo. Horrified by the stories of doctors trying to recreate women's vaginas and digestive tracks that had been shot out by rapist, asshole 'soldiers', I did the typical 30-something, tech savvy thing and posted an article on Facebook. For some reason, this just didn't feel fulfilling.

So I poked around a bit more, and found this organization called Women for Women International. I have a few qualms about the name, as it seems to suggest that only women are for women and that men, well...they're hopeless. But that aside, the organization itself seemed to do pretty decent things, and it gets pretty decent ratings. And being a woman and being generally pro-woman (pro-humanity, actually), I figure what the hell and decided to work with them.

I rehearsed my plan aloud, as is my custom, with a friend of mine (let's call her Lynn) and talked about how I was going to sponsor a woman in the Congo. I'd always wanted a sister, and now Women for Women was going to give me one. Lynn thought this was a good idea, so we decided to co-sponsor a sister and, thus, became related to Ms. Florida Fuaha M'maumbuko, mother of two, wife, farmer, and (thanks to W4W) student. For the past year, she was studying at their facilities learning about soap making and other job skills. She recently graduated from the program, and with a somewhat heavy heart, I say "goodbye" to the sister I have not ever met.

I worry about her future, and the future of her children. In her exit interview, she said that relations with her husband and children have improved and that she was able to buy medicine, clothing, food, two rabbits and ten guinea pigs with the money she received from the program. I'm happy for her, but damn, it just doesn't feel like enough. She lives in the Congo, for Christ's sake! The country with the second-highest rate of war deaths in 2002, THE most deadly conflict since WWII, a country that hope seems to have forgotten all together. But life is as it is, I suppose.

Florida is now (God willing) in a better position, even if her geography is hell. And Lynn and I have a new sister for a year, Ms. Jeanne Gurhahoza Mmutagoyola, born 1968, wife and mother of 8 (7 girls, 1 boy), an internally displaced farmer looking forward to the opprotunity to develop vocational and literary skills, and with any luck, she'll have enough change left over to buy a couple rabbits and maybe some guinea pigs.

It never feels like enough. I'd like to wax all poetic about how at least she has a name, at least she was treated with some regard, that at least we were able to extend some small amount of human decency. But really...I'm just some soft, over-fed, bleeding-heart intellectual trying to pinch myself out of complacency one electronic transfer at a time. But at least I had/have a little sister now.

The unconscionable

2009-01-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

Apathy(n): (1)lack of feeling or emotion; (2) lack of interest or concern; from the Ancient Greek apatheia impassibility, insensibility, freedom from emotion; apathes not suffering or having suffered, without experience of suffering; apatheō to be free from suffering.

A popular bumper sticker around these parts reads "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention." It captures this underlying belief that moral outrage is a necessary condition and a logical consequence of basic social awareness and that, given the news and the reality of the world, only the comatosed or deliberately ignorant would be anything but vacillating between despair and rage. Indeed, the world gives us plenty to despair about and plenty of stories that should enrage us. But all too often, one man's moral outrage is met by another man's apathy.

Back in 2005, the Belgian arm of UNICEF aired a commercial in which a happy, little village of peace-loving-three-apple-high Smurfs was carpet bombed. It starts off smurfily enough, with happy, hopping bunnies, a Smurf band playing as the village of Smurfs danced around. Only to cut to a sky full of bombs and a shot of Smurfette laying dead next to blue body buried under rubble and crying baby Smurf. The ad was intended to help raise money to address the needs of child soldiers. Needless to say, it generated both contributions and controversy. Viewers were horrified (save Smurf-haters, still getting over the smurfiness of the 1980s), and some pundits were smugly pleased with the response. The irony of public outrage to the needless Smurf-focused violence wasn't lost on them.

UNICEF specifically chose the Smurfs because "traditional images of suffering in Third World war zones had lost their power to move television viewers". For some reason, real blood-covered 6-year olds crying next to the corps of their dead mother just don't have the same kick as they used to. So send in the Smurfs to remind us of our moral outrage, to reawaken our humanity. Thus, the smug among us (rightfully) pointed out that compassion is easy to find for little blue characters but so hard to muster for real victims.

But apathy isn't necessarily soulessness. No one, not even victims themselves, can live in perpetual sorrow or fury. Continually identifying with or as the victim is difficult. For we observers, it lead us to adopt suffering that isn't ours and to invite another's fear into our lives. Emotionally, psychologically, maybe even spiritually, we need to protect ourselves from extreme pain, even if it means distancing ourselves from victims and wearing a cloak of ambivalence and apathy. In order to function in a world that won't let us forget how brutal it can be, we must distance ourselves from victimhood (even our own) and not identify too much or too often with victims, as empathy for the victim entails experiencing some aspect of the trauma yourself.

Judith Herman (1992) reminds us that studying trauma "means bearing witness to horrible events. When the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between the victim and the perpetrator....The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden or the pain." (p 8)

It is emotionally and physically taxing to be a victim, even by proxy. Thus, we distance ourselves from pain. This need for distance may explain why female jurist can be more likely to blame rape victims or why some PTSD victims can't remember the trauma. We want the victims to be "them" or the event to never have occurred.

So are we lost? Are we doomed to be desensitized to pain in order to function? Herman (1992) continues, writing, "In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation and denial are phenomena of a social as well as individual consciousness." Only through vigilance can we keep the victims and horrors in sight. Only with willful effort can we continuously extend our compassion and empathy. Without it, we suffer a sort of emotional entropy, a sort of Second Law of Emotionaldynamics.

This effort comes at a cost, and eventually we all must rest. Enter in apathy. Rest is meant to reinvigorate us, to prepare us for another day, but sleep is so tempting and complacency so soothing. We must allow ourselves occasional moments of apathy, and pray that someone (perhaps a Smurf) will come to wake us up.

The monster under your bed

2009-01-14T09:22:00.000-08:00

Nothing bothers me more than hate cloaked in compassionate concern, and nothing demonstrates this bastardization of compassion more than Arkansas's Initiative 1, which states that no individual cohabiting outside of a valid marriage can adopt or foster a child under 18. The passage of this proposition (57% to 43%)creates a state constitutional law that was intended to (and does)prohibit gays and lesbians and other unsavory couples from adopting or fostering children.

The logic, if it can be called such, is not new. The basic gist is that homosexual parents will raise homosexual children. And since being homosexual is inherently evil, well, then forcing otherwise good, heterosexual children to be gay is double-plus evil. The number of levels that this is wrong on makes arguing against it pointless. But for many of those who supported the bill, some form of this logic made sense to them. Save the children! Keep them safe from those dirty, nasty, corrupting gays! But it was not love for children that truly motivated them. Rather, it was hate for other adults.

And as always, when hate leads, children and families suffer.

Nationwide, there were over 490,000 children in foster care in 2007. 130,000 were waiting for adoption. 51,000 were actually adopted. In 2006 in Arkansas, there were around 3400 children in foster care, with about 28% of them waiting for adoption. The numbers may be even higher these days with nearly three times the number of children waiting to be adopted as the number of people willing to adopt them and at least 500 children waiting on any given day. Many of these children have been abused, neglected, and/or abandoned by their (probably) heterosexual parents, but still two straight abusive idiots who abandoned the child are better for a his or her wellbeing than two non-married or homosexual adults who wish to create a stable, loving home. If given the choice between a loving committed homosexual couple or the warmth of a state institution, I think most children would choose the homosexual household. Even monkeys know that a soft and comforting caretaker is worth clinging too, even if it can't provide a "normal" lifestyle.

Homophobia is not new. We've been burning homosexuals at the stake since at least the 4th century when it became a policy of the Christian state. And today we still wage war against the threat of some sort of gay insurgency. Proposition 8 reminds us that all institutions need to be protected from them. While I may not agree with the effects of Proposition 8, it somehow seems like a more fair injustice than Initiative 1. At least in California it was adults attacking adults about adult behavior rather than holding out the most vulnerable wards of the state as sacrificial lambs to punish non-heterosexuals.

But let's not lose site of the wording of this Initiative. It never explicitly says "No fags or dykes can adopt", though that may have been the translation some voters were working with. It prohibits individuals cohabiting outside of a valid marriage. This includes not just homosexuals but numerous heterosexual couples, as even the supporters admit. People wishing to adopt or foster are always subjected to interviews and training, but now having that wedding ring on your finger becomes crucial. People may choose not to marry, such as elderly couples who do not want to risk government benefits, but now they are denied the opportunity to adopt their grandchildren along side of homosexual relatives who may wish to adopt an orphaned niece or nephew. So much for honoring families or protecting children.

This Initiative (now an Act, I believe) and those like it are simply hate wrapped in the rhetoric of love - pure propaganda for a campaign of prejudice. The concern for the wellbeing of children may be real and probably honestly exists in the hearts of those who voted for this Initiative. But by tapping into this love in order to single out "deviant" adults and perpetuate fear and hate, it lost all hope of being anything but a knife at the throats of children.

We all agree, I believe, that children need love and that adults should provide this and protect them from adults who may harm them. But loving children is very easy and does not require constitutional amendments. Are they warm? Are they fed? Are they stimulated intellectually, artistically, and socially? Are they comforted and reassured? Then they are loved. Job done. And who has a right to love children? According to Arkansas law, anyone who's married and no one who isn't.

Women and children first

2009-01-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

As the Titanic slipped deeper and deeper into the sea, the boats were lowered down to the B deck, where the women and children were waiting to be shepherded onto the lifeboats. One by one, they got on the boats, probably clutching their confused, groggy children, wondering if they would see their husbands, brothers, and fathers when the ordeal was done. Major Butt stood guard, gun in hand, keeping eye on the pacing men smoking cigars looking anxiously as each successive boat was filled and cast off. Some men tried to jump aboard, overcome by fear (a natural response to imminent death). One such bloke tried to make a run for it, only to be grabbed by the back of the next (so reports say) by Major Butt and thrown back on deck to wait his rightful turn to die like a man.

Needless to say, the night did not end well for most of the people on board, men, women, children or rats. But -- by Jove! -- the women and children went first. God bless chivalry. Perhaps not always valued or fully appreciated in life, the women and children were allowed to go first.

Being a woman, I can't say I wouldn't have appreciated a bit of that consideration as the Titanic married the icy waters, were I there. Who wouldn't want to be insured safe passage when things get rough? Still, we pooh-pooh the rich and those of privileged who feel entitled to special consideration and access. But we embrace the ideal that the gentler sex and the innocent children need special protections, though maybe only at the very very end of life.

During day-to-day living, children are kidnapped and forced into armies, forced to shoot their parents and strangers, to rape and be raped, to become walking bombs, little boys and little girls.
And women are calculated pawns, raped and disfigured to make a point and to shame their villages and families. But war is war. Women and children first, you know.

More recently, I have been troubled by the way the media presents the casualty statistics for the current war in Gaza. The number is, of course, saddening in and of itself, but the way the numbers are arranged is also troubling. Currently, we stand at at least 900 dead, 270 children 95 women, according to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. I've seen different numbers, some say closer to 100 women dead and around 1/4 of all the causalities children. I suppose this is to be expected, seeing as how the fighting is taking place in large urban areas where families tend to be big, the population young, and women mostly house-bound. The Israeli deaths are sometimes given (currently 3 civilians and 7 soldiers, some killed by friendly fire). But just as saddening as the violence and needless endings of their collective lives is so is the way we read these numbers, or rather, the way we read lives as numbers and do arithmetic with flesh and blood.

900:10, hmm...that seems out of proportion (as if tit-for-tat murder would make it somehow more fair or expectable). 270 children plus 95 women out of 900, leaving 535 men dead. Of these, at least some must have been armed, but some of them were probably much too old or not mentally stable enough to fight. Maybe 100 (random guess). Let's be generous to both the Israel intelligence and Hamas' desire to be a formidable armed force and say half of the remaining were 'soldiers'. That would leave us with about 218 'fair' targets, 316 civilian men (elderly and young alike) and then a few women and children to boot. Ah math and statistics, the final refuge of a mind too ashamed to face horrors.

But after all these calculations, I keep coming back to the presentation. 900 dead. 270 children and 95 women. Oh, the humanity! Oh, the heartless Israeli army and its slaughter of the poor, weak, frightened women and children! As if the men being shot at and bombed weren't equally as scared, weren't equally as likely to piss themselves or cry for their mothers while bleeding out. As if soldiers weren't equally as likely to wonder where God is when their intestines are staring back at them.

Let us not kid ourselves. All human life, male or female, young or old, Palestinian or Israeli, is equally as valuable or worthless. Still we put the women and children first. First in line for the boats, first to be held up as evidence to shame the aggressors or to horrify the international audience. While more men may die and while more women and children may be victims, the truth is that no one on any side or from any walk of life escapes war without some wounds.

It's not that I don't want people to pause and offer a hand to those segments of society who may need assistance. We should help and be helped in proportion to need. But let us never forget that all humans share the same desire to live and let live, to die peacefully, to not be shot at, to not hold a dying child, to not slip into the freezing waters. Desire for life and fear of death transcends gender, nationality, age, class, or religion.