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May 18, 2004
Welcome and intro
Welcome. This site has just been put up so a bit of patience in the beginning is required while things are tweaked and colors adjusted. I promise the orange will be less bright.
I've posted some of my articles from the last few years -- they are listed to the right under recent entries. Categories aren't fully functional yet.
The topics I have written about have mostly been AIDS, Africa, famine, and war but this site will be discussing many more topics in a part blog, part essay style.
Actually, most everything I write or think about is connected in my mind but they span over many categories.
My fundamental belief is quite simple: every life is worthy of equal consideration and everyone's time on earth is equally precious. The AIDS holocaust represents the most striking violation of this principle in my lifetime; that's why I end up writing about it a lot.
I have never forgotten my visit to the Dachau concentration camp as a child. I still choke up even thinking about it so I'm going to skip to the point I want to make.
In the camp, there is a structure built by Yugoslav Partisan Glid Nandor that looks like barbed wire from a distance but it's actually composed of starving, skeletal human bodies in pain twisted into the shape of barbed wire. Right next to it is an inscription that says "never again" in five languages. I have never shaken the feeling of standing right there, infinitely despairing and infinitely hopeful.
I still think of Dachau quite often -- that visit imparted on me an existential awareness which, quite honestly, most of the time, I find very liberating although from time to time it does feel crushing. I realize such an awareness could take a hedonistic turn but I do try to center it around the "never again."
And let me end this round of self-disclosure, carried out mostly because I believe any attempt to communicate should include some, with one more anecdote. During a class in college, each of us in the class was made to write ten attributes that were important to our sense of self on index cards and meditate on them as we tried to sort the bunch in order of importance, contemplate discarding some them, etc.
I could only come up with three major ones: empathy, curiosity and passion. Everything else was a mile away.
That is not to suggest that I'm capable of infinite empathy, boundless curiosity and endless passion! Rather, I am in awe of those qualities; even writing the previous sentence kind of took my breath away. What I mean is that, in this world, empathy, curiosity and passion are what I look to with appreciation, and sometimes envy, when I notice them in others and what I find gratifying to share -- hopefully through this site as well. (Well, okay, okay, enough with the pretentious stuff. I also do really, really envy people with perfect pitch, sense of rhythm and/or exceptional memory. I turn green with jealousy around them. Please do not tell me you know someone with all three. If you are one, feel free to not mention it. The list used to include the ability to do chin-ups but on March 31, 2002, I conquered that one after only a measly year of training.)
Posted by zeynep at May 18, 2004 11:58 AM
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Comments
I like the bright orange. Please keep it.
Posted by: bill black at May 19, 2004 08:16 AM
I only have relative pitch, cannot keep time, and...what was the third item?
Have posted your site among my favorites along with wildfirejo, empire notes, juan cole, tomdispatch, etc. etc.
Posted by: peter harty at May 19, 2004 09:29 AM
I only have "relative" pitch, cannot keep time,
and what was the third item? I have posted your site among my favorites along with empirenotes, wildfirejo, buzzflash, juancole, etc, etc. You appear to be a reasonably literate member of the species; I look forward to your musings.
Posted by: Petey at May 19, 2004 09:36 AM
I have relative pitch, can keep time (but can't dance, just ask my wife), can remember numbers well, but not names.
We are all citizens of a relatively small rock and I believe the interests of all of us are closely intertwined. Your efforts and viewpoints will be greatly appreciated. I especially enjoyed your piece on moral agency.
Posted by: Steve Chandler at May 19, 2004 11:55 AM
Zeynep abla
I love your stuff and will be a frequent visitor to this site.
I know the region between Adapazari and Düzce quite well and wish I could have been there to help after the earthquake. My son, who is in an international rescue unit of the Swiss army, had the same symptoms (smell) after retrieving bodies from a mud avalanche. He's okay now but says he just hopes he'll never be deployed to a disaster area in hot weather.
Posted by: Barbara Stiner at May 19, 2004 03:14 PM
Dear editor
It's great that you post your conscientious notes on delicate issues like the savage, barbarian and middleages-like occupation of my country ,Iraq by the neocons-run US administration.I hope that you design the notes not on a chronlogically rolling sequence.I would rather see them designed across the page with some graphics.And don't forget the colour of the font.It's really so faint that it exausts the reader's eyes.I hope you also post other writers'
articles which complement yours.
Cheers!
Posted by: N.Ahmad at May 30, 2004 06:49 PM
I just wanted to say hi to the owner of a great site. I found a lot of interesting
stuff here. Thanks..
Posted by: Josefine Laonie at October 1, 2004 05:27 AM