November 10, 2005
Ten Years Gone
It's already been ten years since Ken Saro-Wiwa was murdered. A song about another murdered freedom fighter, Steve Biko, makes a claim:
You can blow out a candle But you can't blow out a fire Once the flames begin to catch The wind will blow it higher
I don't know. I think the ruling powers often operate on the assumption that this isn't true. They believe you can blow out candles and crush movements before the flames catch. I think the record is mixed. So many times, you blow out enough candles, the fire will die down.
Posted by zeynep at 05:59 PM | Comments (1)
October 30, 2005
The Scandal etc.
Frankly, from where I look, the acute "scandals" are over, as far as the Bush administration is concerned.
Lewis Libby is a person of very little consequence, in the larger scheme of things. He'll go down, perhaps even be convicted -- and promptly pardoned.
Miers has bowed out and will now likely be replaced with someone much smarter, also someone whose more developed ideology better masks their humanity -- Miers merely seemed a bit slow and very much a loyal team player. She would have voted along the party lines, but that's not enough. They need someone who can justify torture with long words, someone who can throw out the constitution while producing coherent sentences littered with Latin.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of someone who will put their loyalty to this team in power above their sense of decency. Still, my impression of the argument over Miers in the right wing was that they feared that she was still a bit of a human. "Movement conservatism" seems more and more to demand that one accept a theory, a cold and cruel theory, above and beyond everything. By "constitutional scholar", they mean someone who has digested the theory so deeply that they will not be swayed by consequences.
Assuming Lewis Libby is not an idiot, a safe assumption I would say because you have to be very, very, very stupid to lie so very, very, very stupidly, I figure this is it. He's covered up whatever it was he was trying to cover up. Most likely Cheney's involvement. He'll go down, and he'll probably feel good doing so he'll convince himself this is just one more sacrifice that a man has to make in the big battle against evil.
The problem for the administration, however, isn't that these scandals are here to stay. Their problem is that people don't trust them anymore. It is not that people supported their Iraq policy because they understood or cared. Most of their support came from people who assumed that these guys knew what they were doing. Hurricane Katrina, continuing carnage in Iraq, Miers nomination, etc. has shattered this impression; many people now seemed to have lost their confidence in the ability of this administration to steer things.
That is very hard to fix for any political party, so, yes, the administration is in trouble. But that is not necessarily good for progressives because I see no evidence that values we care about have been or about to be injected into the debate. And no amount of waiting for Fitzgerald to expand his investigation and/or indict Rove and/or look into the Niger documents will accomplish that.
Posted by zeynep at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2004
The Disappeared Mayor and the Person of the Year
[From Justin again]
Since I can't fill Zeynep's shoes, let me try to offer something on Colombia. Ah, Colombia, that place of drug cartels, Marxist guerrillas, and paramilitary killers, that playground of US imperialism, where the helpless hapless population is trapped between all these vicious actors - right?
Well, no. Not quite, anyhow.
At least in this sense. Colombia's population is not helpless. Instead, it is moving. Colombia's movements are extraordinary. Considering the opposition that is arrayed against them, the amount of military hardware that the United States has set upon them, and the paramilitary savagery that has plagued them, their resilience and continuing strength has been outstanding. I have good friends who predicted in 2000 that if Plan Colombia (a plan to supply the Colombian government with billions in military aid, mostly in the form of US helicopters to protect planes to do aerial fumigation - otherwise known as chemical warfare - against peasants, called 'narcotraffickers' or 'narco-guerrillas' in common parlance. Its principal effect was to displace those peasants so that multinational corporations and big landlords could take over their lands, for speculation and for megaproject schemes and fantasies) took its course the social movements would be exterminated in 4-5 years. Here we are 4-5 years later and, while the paramilitary massacres against unionists and movement leaders have certainly been vicious, movements remain.
Among the most remarkable of these movements is Colombia's diverse indigenous movement. Colombia's constitution of 1991 is probably second only to Venezuela's 1998 constitution in its recognition of indigenous rights. Meanwhile the Colombian government and paramilitaries continue to do their best to follow the unbroken 500 year pattern of dispossession and extermination against the indigenous peoples, ignoring the decent intentions of the constitution.
But the indigenous not only resist, they have also become the ethical and political guide of the other movements in the country. In the midst of such an incredibly repressive context, they managed to organize a march of indigenous dignity with tens of thousands marching to the public square in Cali which they filled to overflowing.
Not only did they do this, organizing openly and publicly despite all the threats, but they foiled every attempt at repression against them. In the days leading up to the march, in late August, one of the most remarkable leaders of the movement, Arquimedes Vitonas, was kidnapped. I wrote about the kidnapping at the time. Another one of their leaders, Alcibiades Escue, was arrested and jailed on the most preposterous charge of 'paramilitarism' - a leader of a movement most victimized by paramilitaries accused of 'paramilitarism' by a government that arms and deploys those paramilitaries.
Well, before the march, the 'indigenous guards', trained and disciplined indigenous activists who 'guard' their communities with only their moral authority (symbolized in the batons they carry) traveled to Caguan from Northern Cauca to rescue Arquimedes Vitonas, and succeeded. After the march, a group of indigenous guards went to the prison where Alcibiades Escue was being held and brought him back to indigenous territory after the government dropped their outrageously false charges.
The march was remarkable in other ways. Instead of making demands of the government, the indigenous people put forward a political proposal for a different kind of country, moving forward from the gains of the constitution of 1991. Then they proceeded, as some other indigenous movements have done, to move that proposal forward.
In this context, the decision on the part of Colombia's national newspaper, El Tiempo, to make Arquimedes Vitonas the person of the year, might seem odd. El Tiempo is an establishment paper. Why would it make a leader of indigenous resistance its person of the year? Perhaps because Arquimedes was kidnapped and released by FARC, and El Tiempo, like the rest of the Colombian establishment, wants to use the moral authority of the indigenous against the guerrillas. But the indigenous never play that game. Even when the FARC refuse to respect their autonomy, they do not allow themselves to be used as tools of the counterinsurgency.
But the reason is not unrelated. The fact is that the indigenous movement is a fact which, by virtue of its moral and political strength, cannot be ignored. With the March (called the Minga for Life) they were on the Colombian stage, putting Colombia's corrupt president and elite to shame. Repression could easily backfire politically. But if El Tiempo's recognition of Arquimedes was an attempt at co-optation, it won't work either. Instead, like the many other awards won by the innovative development programs and experiments in local democracy championed by the indigenous, it will simply be used as another platform where this remarkable movement can make its voice heard.
I can say this for sure. They might both be establishment outlets, but El Tiempo has much better taste in person of the year than Time Magazine.
Posted by justin at 11:12 PM | Comments (1)
November 29, 2004
Sudan and Activism
In the comments section of my entry on the situation in the Sudan, there have been some discussion about what to do. I obviously don't have the perfect, complete and ready-to-implement answer. So here are a few thoughts.
It's hard for a blog to produce one-size-fits-all recommendations about becoming involved. It depends on who you are, where you are, and what you are willing and able to do. It's about your choices and your opportunities and the intersection of those options with what's politically useful and beneficial -- which isn't always easy to see in advance, so there's certainly an argument to try whatever you are moved to do. Who knows what will work in this climate of apathy and callousness?
And the basics --writing letters to elected representatives, newspapers, holding demonstrations, leaflets-- many not sound glamorous or innovative, but they are the requisites for any political campaign. Without some level of buzz and pressure on the media and the politicians nothing will get off the ground, and all our bright and smart ideas will not have the ground upon which they can stand.
As for groups that have been working politically on this issue, I can name Trans Africa Forum and Africa Action as good places to start. There are others, of course, and please do feel free to chime in with comments about your experience and your ideas about what to do. Also, the humanitarian organization Conscience International has just sent a delegation to Darfur and they have first hand stories of a very grim situation. Conscience International's web page doesn't yet have an update of this trip -- that's partly because they are a low-budget operation. CI's president Jim Jennings, who was on that trip to Darfur, can be reached at jimjennings (at) earthlink.net.
Now, there is some real political thorny issues around the question of calling fro military intervention. As we all witnessed, humanitarian disguises have been repeatedly used to justify good ol' military interventions, most recently in Iraq.
The thorniness of the issues should not make us ignore it. We must confront this question because humanitarian tragedies sometimes do require some form of peacekeeping / military intervention and our justified resistance to imperialism should not mean we are going to ignore real victims to grave crimes against humanity.
And there are many options short of military intervention that haven't been tried and our focus should first be there. That's another political trap that I think the anti-war movement has largely failed to avoid. The establishment points at a real tragedy, say Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and manages to frame large scale military intervention as the only possible intervention. While we end up justly arguing against the military intervention, we are unable advance any arguments about what should actually be done because, well, they've corrupted and dismantled all the other options and because we too have been largely ignoring the issue until the rulers pushed it on the agenda.
For example, running up to the Iraq war, the United States dismantled efforts to bring in Iraq under a chemical weapons convention, and further random, independent inspections, because it would have taken away an excuse to go to war -- they even fired Jose Bustani, director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, because he was so successful and determined to try to help eliminate a whole category of weapons of mass destruction. Then they turned around and ran a successful propaganda campaign claiming that there were no other solution to problems of WMD proliferation besides regime change implemented by the U.S. armed forces.
But, I digress. I think, in the case of the Sudan, what's necessary is political pressure, first and foremost on the central government and perhaps at some of the rebel groups to provide an environment that aid groups can operate in. A global campaign, a pouring of resources, a concentrated political, diplomatic and material aid campaign... In a sane world, these would be the issues that dominate the news every morning and every night.
We need to work on this issue now, and not just frantically try to respond when they decide it's time for them to pick it up and use it as an excuse to invade, distract or otherwise mislead. For one thing, that's a recipe for political defeat. And more importantly, there are hundreds of thousands of people who may well be dead by then.
Posted by zeynep at 10:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 29, 2004
"Black-skinned storm troopers" "in a Nazi-like salute"
"Black-skinned storm troopers" who gave "a Nazi-like salute" was how press and pundits described Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gave the iconic black power salute in in 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
Not surprising to anyone who's been following media leading up to the RNC protests, as pundits and the elites "advise" us with great passion about what kind of protests are acceptable and what kind are not.
Unfortunately, all this unsolicited and insincere advise has generated some unproductive responses: some people seem to have decided to lump together everyone criticizing the current dominant protest model with the insincere criticisms of the powerbrokers; and some people have taken that "advise" to heart and go out of their way to assuage the elites that the protests will be well-behaved and irrelevant. I think we should not let this cacaphony of "advice" and misdirection drown out the need for a real assessment of our methods of dissent.
The current "big-protest-for-one-day" model has run its course. Frankly, I believe, it's become relatively inept and almost disempowering. However, at this point in history, it might be more disempowering not to hold them before the movement can formulate better models so I am not advocating not holding them.
I am, however advocating coming to terms with a model that has been pushed to the limits of its success. The discussion has to be taken beyond those whose main aim is well-behaved protests and those who very mistakenly believe random destruction of a few windows is a sign of radicalness. In fact, window-breaking has evolved into the tamest of protests with a very predictable course. The media gets their images, all the pundits on their side and all our spokespeople know their well-rehearsed lines, the window-replacers come the next day and the whole country shrugs.
We need a new discussion, anchored by a new commitment and unburdened by the current straitjackets. We need a discussion free from the overwhelming worry of the current organizers of those big-protests about receiving a tsk-tsk from the elites or the punditry and free from the mistaken and misplaced energy that equates radicalness with the random destruction of windows and trash cans.
These are difficult and thorny issues and it's hard to judge the success of failure of a method in the heat of the moment. Here’s a bit more about what happened to Carlos and Smith after that iconic moment:
But the reaction was as swift as it was negative. In the US there was outrage from many white Americans. People saw heads bowed as disrespectful towards the American flag. They mistakenly saw the clenched fists as supportive of the Black Panthers.The Associated Press report described them "in a Nazi-like salute". Chicago columnist Brent Musburger called them "black-skinned storm troopers".
The outspoken Carlos made the kind of comments that only inflamed the establishment. After the ceremony he said: "We're sort of show horses out there for the white people. They give us peanuts, pat us on the back and say, 'Boy, you did fine.' "
The International Olympic Committee demanded the US Olympic Committee ban them from the Games, but it refused. The next day the IOC said if the sprinters were not banned, the entire US track and field team would be barred from further competition. The USOC caved in.
Smith and Carlos were withdrawn from the relays and expelled from the Olympic Village. When they returned home, Smith and Carlos were ostracised. Jobs became scarce. They received death threats and their homes were attacked."One rock came through our front window into our living room, where we had the crib," Smith said. "It seemed like everybody hated me. I had no food. My baby was hungry. My wife had no dresses."
Even today, there are those who remain angry and full of hatred.
"There are still threats," Carlos said. "I was never concerned about those punks. I just let them know it will be remembered, that life doesn't stop when you leave this planet."After graduating, Smith was given an honourable discharge from army service for "un-American activities" That probably did him a huge favour, since the Vietnam war was raging and the body count growing.
"I was going to 'Nam," Smith said. "I could see myself in rice paddies. I believe there's a God. Sixty-eight had its downfall, but it had its protection for me. I might not be alive."
Carlos had two brothers serving, but after his protest both were immediately discharged.
Smith borrowed money to complete his education and get his teaching qualification. He tried gridiron for a few years with the Cincinnati Bengals, then finally got a job as a track coach in Ohio. In 1978 he moved to Santa Monica College, where he has been a social science and health teacher, and coaches track and field.
Carlos had an even more trying time, working as a security guard and bouncer, among other jobs.
"I'd get minimum wage and then go to Vegas and roll the dice to get it up to something to feed my family," he said. "We had to chop up furniture, the kids' beds, to stay warm."
Looking back, the first thing that comes to him is basic.
"That I survived," he said. "That I still have any sanity.
"My first wife is deceased as a result. She took her life because she couldn't deal with the pressure from the results of Mexico."
Posted by zeynep at 01:42 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 08, 2004
Truth in Advertising
I've always wondered about the military recruiters. How do they feel when a kid they've promised a college education and some cash on the side dies fighting an aggressive war based on lies? I thought the miked-up recruiters was the most interesting part of Michael Moore's film: their slick, practiced hooks sinking into confused, cornered youngsters. I can certainly understand how many felt like they needed to go out there and defend their country after September 11. I can understand how hard it must be for them to understand that their leaders were interested mainly in extending U.S. domination, which, let along fight terrorism, increases the risks from terrorism.
But now? After all of what's happenned? After Fallujah and Abu Ghraib? How do you recruit?
Mostly the same as always, it seems, according to a story in today's Washington Post. What has changed is that now many parents try to block the military recruiters efforts:
Poor and patriotic regions like this one are the lifeblood of America's volunteer military. Kids join as soon as they leave high school, for the college money, the job training, the opportunities so scarce at home. They join because they're proud of their country and they want to help. But during the past three years, they've been seeing more combat and less college. Every reserve unit in this area has been called to the Middle East at least once. Two active duty soldiers died, one with young kids, the other a kid himself. Then came Abu Ghraib and the photos that disgusted the world. Now, pride comes mixed with anger and growing doubts about the war."It's the parents holding me back," Broadwater says. When he calls, they hang up the phone, refuse to put their children on the line, tell him off. They try to talk their sons and daughters out of joining, and, more often now, they succeed.
Broadwater pushes the numbers hard: Serve one weekend a month for six years and earn thousands in college money, bonuses and pay. He tells the mothers, "If the Lord's going to take you, he'll take you sitting right there in your chair." They remind him that an Iraqi bomb took Pvt. Brandon L. Davis, 20, this spring. The parts of his body that could be identified were buried near his home in Cumberland, Md., and the rest, weeks later, in Arlington. It was a mortar attack that took Sgt. George A. Mitchell of Antioch, W.Va., a soldier's soldier who used to take his toddlers to church on Sundays so his wife could get some sleep.
There is also a very illuminating exchange where an administrator, who knew one of the kids killed, tries to stop the recruiter:
A week ago, Broadwater was at another college when an administrator tried to run him off. She knew Davis, the dead soldier from Cumberland, and she told Broadwater that she'd tear down his recruiting posters. Broadwater lost his temper. "He died for your right for complain!" he shouted at her.
This "they died for your freedom" is one of the main myths of holding up the pro-war ideological superstructure: somehow, the imperial stance is merged with domestic freedoms even though historical evidence is that there is an inverse correlation between them. It's hard to be both an empire and a republic, as Mark Twain observed more than a century ago.
It seems hard for the left to take this issue head-on because of many reasons. First, it raises immediate flak and ire. It's a very important pillar; its defense is proportionally vigorous. Second, it's just hard to say that so many deaths were caused by manipulative, imperial planners. It seems easier to accept a death in service of a noble cause.
Yet, what do we get by not confronting the truth? Many more deaths in vain -- deaths not in service of the causes that these youngster were led to believe they would be serving. Where is the honor in that?
Naomi Klein has an article about the "Mother of All Anti-War Forces," the mothers of dead soldiers.
Upon hearing the news, his mother, Rose Gentle, immediately blamed the government of Tony Blair, saying that, "My son was just a bit of meat to them, just a number . . . This is not our war, my son has died in their war over oil."...
At Patrick McCaffrey's military funeral last week, Paul Harris, chaplain of the 579th Engineer Battalion, informed the mourners that, "What Patrick was doing was good and right and noble . . . There are thousands, no, millions, of Iraqis who are grateful for his sacrifice."
Nadia McCaffrey knows better and is insisting on carrying her son's own feelings of deep disappointment from beyond the grave. "He was so ashamed by the prisoner-abuse scandal," Ms. McCaffrey told The Independent. "He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there." Freed from the military censors who prevent soldiers from speaking their minds when they are alive, Lila Lipscomb has also shared her son's doubts about his work in Iraq. In Fahrenheit 9/11 she reads from a letter Michael Pederson mailed home. "What in the world is wrong with George, trying to be like his dad, Bush. He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I'm so furious right now, Mama."
So, what are we tell mothers of future dead soldiers? We were afraid to be seen as less than supporting of the troops so we will let them be sent to kill and get killed in an immoral occupation?
I am not saying that it was not hard to voice these truths, especially before all the evidence became widely available and before the body bags and bodies missing parts started streaming back home. It is partly a question of confidence in your analysis: it's harder to stand firm and face the flak if you don't have confidence in your understanding of the world and your powers of prediction. The anti-war movement before the invasion might have been sizeable but what analysis that did exist was mostly weak, superficial, inconsistent and full of holes -- with some notable exceptions. It was right but it wasn't on strong ground.
Posted by zeynep at 12:17 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
May 31, 2004
A Life Lived and a Memorial Day Movie: “Dreams and Nightmares”
What would you call people who had abandoned their homes, risked their lives and traveled across the ocean to fight the threat of fascism that was to engulf Europe and leave millions dead in its wake?
“Premature anti-fascists.” That’s what the U.S. army called them when the survivors tried to sign up to fight the Nazis after they had returned from fighting fascism in Spain. Their files marked them as “premature anti-fascists” and in many cases held them back from the front.
So it was with Abe Osheroff, one of the last survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the under-equipped, under-fed, rag-tag group of Americans who joined the 50,000 men, and a few women, who gathered from around the world to die for freedom in Spain. After returning from Spain, with half his comrades dead, he volunteered to fight in World War II -- as had done almost all the able-bodied veterans of Spain. Because he was a “premature anti-fascist,” the army wouldn’t deploy him to the front even after his unit was shipped off there -- and he had to first fight the Army in order to be sent to fight the Nazis, which he eventually did.
Unfortunately, freedom lost in Spain as the great powers of the day, Britain, France and the United States, secretly and sometimes not-so-secretly hoped. Well, they didn't just hope, they tried to move things along in that direction sometimes by impeding those that would help the anti-fascist forces and sometimes by directly and indirectly aiding the fascist forces. But it turned out that the beast you nourish may turn around bite you too. How surprising.
But I’m not going to recount all that history. Grab a copy of Abe Osheroff’s award winning documentary, “Dreams and Nightmares.” Not only is the movie amazing, it features pretty rare footage ingeniously finagled out of the CIA and Pentagon by Abe. Amazing how much they’ll cough up if you tell them you’re making a film called "The Shield Against Communism: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization."
I’m thinking about Abe today, amidst all the pompous celebration of war thinly disguised as "memorial day." You know the name’s a misnomer because a true memorial day would almost necessarily be anti-war. Veterans are both perpetrators and victims of war and, as first-hand witnesses, would play a crucial role in a true national accounting and soul-searching about war and what it really means, why it was really fought, who paid the price and who benefited from the oft-accompanying plunder. Consequently, veterans are perhaps the most-managed constituency: barraged by speeches, crocodile tears, ugly monuments, garish parades and what-not.
Abe is one of those people who should have already died in about 83 different incidents. His ship to Spain was sunk by fascists two miles from shore -- so he swam to Spain. “I was baptized,” he says of the incident. His life is a history of just causes and near-deaths. His car was firebombed in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. Carpenter by trade, he went to Nicaragua in the 1980s to build houses for the poor while their elected government, the Sandinistas, battled terrorists funded by us.
But, miraculously, Abe Osheroff is now 89 years old and very much alive. I met him a few years ago. To say that it was a moving experience would be quite an understatement. There was the movie which I can’t recount -- you really just have to watch it. Anyway, I bawl through it every time I try to watch it from beginning to end so any review by me would probably be incomplete. No matter how many things one reads, it’s sometimes hard to believe that Spain in 1937 existed. The international effort for Spanish freedom was one of the most noble and most tragic moments in modern history and the generation that rallied around Spain may well be the greatest generation. And here was a flesh and blood person talking about it, as he saw it and felt it. You know, maybe it did all happen, maybe it is true and not just some embellished myth.
And let me say clearly, I do now about the sordid side of that history -- the sectarian fratricide, the short-sighted and sometimes criminal stupidity of some who fought on the Republican side, the leaders who sought to use “la causa” to entrench themselves further in power. None of that changes the awesomeness of the realization that tens of thousands of people around the world voluntarily left behind their homes, their families and their lives to bleed and to die for freedom in a far away country. Not for a flag or a medal, not for the promise of glory or plunder and not to kill heathens and go to heaven.
Perhaps the most wonderful part of meeting Abe all was that I found myself vehemently disagreeing with his take on the left’s response to 9-11. Abe’s no old furniture to be occasionally dusted and annually memorialized. The man is the epitome of alive. He’s not just going to tell you some cool stories from the past, instead he has strong opinions about the world around him -- as he always did.
He meant to live and he still does. When he talks to the younger generation, he never blabbers about “sacrifice” -- instead he talks about the incredible rewarding life of a social activist that he led.
Thus marches on Abe Osheroff, a humble Jewish carpenter with the strength to die for his beliefs.
Posted by zeynep at 04:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 28, 2004
Reclaiming Our Sanity
After I wrote phrase "the better [the site] will become" in the previous post, I started wondering what I meant by "better." Better written, better known, more widely read? Well, sure, but something else.
It's a world where an insidious form of immorality is pretty much the reigning norm, it’s hard not to feel insane of sorts. To effect change in such a world thus requires a double-bootstrapping: one has to regain one’s sense of self and one has to find ways to come together with others.
On the one hand, I think we have to start with individual moral agency -- if for nothing else, as humans, we are individuals in separate minds and bodies. I'm not a transnational entity, neither are you. On the other hand, no matter what one does, as long as the "I" in the "what can I do" isn't pooled into something larger than each of us, there is no good answer -- if for no reason other than the simple fact that forces arrayed against us are so large. Not that there is a nice, easy answer in collectivity but there is a distinction between choosing the most moral path open to an individual and achieving effectiveness. And effectiveness does require some form of collectivity. And morality without effectiveness can, and often does, induce despair, hopelessness and inaction.
So, where do we go from there? Faced with massive forces, seemingly impossible odds and made to doubt our sanity, our basic moral truths?
First and foremost, I think that we have to believe in our understanding of the world. In spite of all this massive ideological onslaught, we have to accept that, in this world, under these conditions, these are the sane positions, these are the moral considerations. It is sane and moral to be centered in this way. The greatest success of the ideology disseminated by the current power structures is in the way they make us feel uncentered, weird, a little loony, corny, pretentious or well-meaning but stupid for feeling this way.
I’m not saying we have a monopoly on immutable and transcendent truths. But not all moral beliefs are equally thorny and complicated. One can start somewhere while conceding a lack of full and comprehensive answers to everything.
Here's a few. It is simply wrong, wrong, wrong to have almost a billion malnourished people while a part of the world is drowning in almost obscene levels of cornucopia. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong to have millions die of easily curable or controllable diseases when the global luxury retail market alone is upwards of $100 billion. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong to be the five percent of the planet’s population while consuming from 25 to 40 percent of its resources -- and going to war under these set of circumstances in the heart of the region producing the most strategic resource in the world.
That's all wrong and I think we all know it. And most everything in the modern, affluent lifestyle and cultural climate that surrounds us is designed anesthetize us to that knowledge. We have to take back our own hearts and minds before worrying about who else’s we’re losing or winning.
What to do about it all may not be simple but it has to start with reclaiming what we do know as that which what we do know. (And, no, I don’t mean that as a tautological statement. It might be one for a machine but it’s not one for us humans who often hold multiple levels of beliefs filtered through inconsistent ideologies.)
As a friend of mine once put it, it's like there is this evil person/machine throwing kids to a raging river. Do you go try to save one? What about all the others? If you decide it's more important to stop him for once and for all, what about all those kids who drown while we gnaw at his ankle, relatively unnoticed? And why not just give up rather than take responsibility, confront difficult choices -- and pretend not to have noticed?
And, yes, there are many thorny issues beyond that. But how does one even start thinking, start doing something about it all before being able to stand on some ground that feels like it’s there -- rather than in our loony heads?
I think the way out is the way we know anything else in this world: we reference our minds with other people’s minds. That’s almost how one can define insanity: it’s that state when your reality is so distinct, so incommunicable to others that you become trapped in your own mind. In the same way, being able to share the reality reflected in your mind with kindred souls is how people achieve that state of mind called sanity.
So, in many ways, that what the effort in this site is about; it’s not just about writing and it’s not just about being read. It’s about reclaiming both a sense sanity and a knowledge of that moral center -- mine, yours and ours. The more we get there, the better it is.
Posted by zeynep at 01:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack