Lucky White Girl

You can't support a just cause through an unjust war: Why the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan

I was surprised by NPR's Scott Simon's morning commentary on Weekend Edition today.  [link coming soon] 

I normally love these commentaries of his.  They tend to be about some relevant issue of the day or some ponderings on life or what it means to be human.  Generally, I think they're very thoughtful and nuanced and when they're related to political issues, they usually present the issue in a way I haven't heard before. 

But this one was different.  In this one he was saying something like (and Mr Simon excuse my paraphrasing, I'm just going off memory here) how he thought it would be a mistake if we just focused on going after Al-Quaeda and didn't continue our "nation-building" mission in Afghanistan because the Taliban is really bad and the Afghan people deserve better.

This is the line the spin doctors used to sell the public on the war there.  No offense to you Mr Simon, but it's bullshit.

1.) There are lots of shitty governments in the world and long before the U.S. noticed the shitty one in Afghanistan, the people there had their own resistance movements. 

Take RAWA --the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan-- whose link has been on the sidebar of this blog since 2005, for example.  They've been around since the 70s, fighting and resisting the Taliban and we in the West, didn't lift a finger to help them.  We couldn't have cared less about the Taliban until our own interests in that country were at stake and then we realized we could use them as a convenient excuse to invade & occupy a foreign country. 

There's a simple explanation for this:

Nation-states rarely do anything out of anything other than their own self-interest.  There is no evidence to support the belief that good countries do sometimes act out of "the goodness of their hearts" for the sake of the people of some other country.  That's what people do.  Nation-states act to preserve their own geo-political interests.  In democracies, they might sell their actions to their public with such feel-good arguments but that's all it is: a sales pitch.

I've no doubt that Mr Simon does care about Afghanistan.  I think he cares deeply about the people he met there.  Though I don't have the personal connection to the country that he does, I also care in the same way that I care about all people trying to survive in this crazy world.  But I don't want to pretend that my government, whether under Bush or Obama, is in Afghanistan for anything other than geo-political interests. 

2.) Because the U.S. and its allies are not in Afghanistan to protect the interests of the Afghan people, doesn't mean that we-the-concerned-citizens-of-the-world should abandon the Afghan people or that the Taliban should be left alone to retake power in the country.  If we really want to support the people of Afghanistan, we should do it in a different way.  Not by sending in NATO and bombing it into submission but supporting a non-violent indigenous resistance movement there in as multi-lateral fashion as possible.

The non-violent resistance movement part is there in the form of RAWA (and possibly others, I don't know).  

The multi-lateral part means UN General Assembly, not the Security Council, which should be abolished really, and definitely not NATO.  The reason for this is that only the General Assembly is truly democratic.  The Security Council and NATO are powerful countries with a history of colonialism; they shouldn't be the ones making the decisions because the decisions they will make will inevitably be to preserve their own power (regardless of how they sell it to the rest of the world --see #1 above).

I believe in international institutions and collective action and I do think that the world as a whole has an interest in preventing violations of human rights wherever they happen.  The problem is how do we do that in a world of great inequalities of power, where you have some countries who are powerful and who have colonialized large chunks of the planet and other countries who have been the victims of these colonizers.  Collective action is great and uncomplicated in an imaginary world where all the players are equal but in a world of great power differences, how do you keep the powerful from using "collective action" as a guise for its own self-interest?

The answer to that is to give greater power to the General Assembly.  I admit it's a weak institution so far but hey, we've only been at this whole international organizations/ international law thing for less than a century.  The idea that the world could be run in a democratic fashion, that the we could have such a thing as international law instead of rule by force-of-whoever's strongest is really, really new.  Considering that we've never done anything like this in the history of the world, I'd say give it some time.  The UN is better than the League of Nations and whatever we come up with for some future form of an international organization like the UN will be better still.  

This is our greatest hope responding to injustice, in Afghanistan, in Darfur, in Myanmar, in an honest, effective way.

3.) All of this is completely separate from the issue of going after Al-Quaeda, which I've always thought should be more the target of an international police force and a law enforcement action rather than a war, but that's another post for another day.

Make the world beautiful

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about the American dream and sharing.  The obvious connection between those two things is immigration.  If the basic script of the American dream is to be able to live a simple, good life where all your basic needs are met and you and your family are taken care of, that's a beautiful dream.  But I'm only interested in the American dream if I can share it.  Otherwise it's not a very pretty dream is it?  What would kind of dream would it be if the script went like this: only some people are able to live a simple, good life where all their basic needs are met and they and their families are taken care of while others sit out in the cold suffering and staring in at us?  That's not a dream.  That's a nightmare.

In kindergarten most of us were taught that sharing our toys is fun and that being stingy is not the way to happiness. But some of us rejected that idea and grew up to embrace conservative ideology.  They don't want to share their things not because they're inherently bad people but because they fear that if they share they won't have anything left for themselves.  Conservativism is a philosophy fundamentally based in fear and lack of faith.  They don't believe the concepts of "to whom much is given, much will be required" or that what you give to others will be returned a thousand times over.  They don't trust that if they take care of others they also will be taken care of.  It's a faithless view that sees a cold, cruel dog-eat-dog world out there.  In this view, human nature is fundamentally flawed and evil.  They think that those who think otherwise are naive.

I believe we create our own realities.  If you see good and beauty in the world, then the world is indeed, good and beautiful.   If you see evil and ugliness, then the world is indeed evil and ugly, and the way we see the world will invariably creep over into our own way of being.  If you see good, you will act in a good and generous manner towards those around you, thereby increasing the goodness and beauty in the world.  If you see the world as bad, you will act in an ugly, selfish manner thereby increasing the ugliness and cruelty in the world.  This is called reification: our perceptions influence our reality and vice versa.

So to those who have bought into the conservative ideology, I'd say stop. Do not be afraid.  It's going to be okay.  The world is a beautiful, terrible place and human beings are fundamentally good.  Love them.  Love the world because the world is your creation.  Have faith in that.  Have faith in humanity.  I promise that if you trust in this, you will see the world differently because it will, in fact, be different.  Reality is what you make of it.  Make it beautiful.

No tomatoes in January, no oranges in July: Some thoughts on U.S. agriculture

Like lots of my friends, I've fallen victim to this little game on Facebook called "Farmville".  It's one of those virtual worlds, in this, a farm.  You plant seeds and in a certain period of time you get to harvest the crop.  You can building a whole farm with cows and chickens and barns and houses.  There's no point to it other than to keep you coming back to play the game (if you don't harvest your crops in a certain time frame, they wilt and you lose the "investment") but lots of us find these sorts of things addictive and I'm apparently one of them!

I was thinking about something though today as I planted pumpkin seeds on my little virtual farm.  When you buy the seeds, it will tell you how many coins you need to buy them, how much you'll get from the harvest and when they'll be ready.  Some take only a few hours, others take days.  You also have to earn a certain amount of experience in order to buy certain kinds of seeds.  Today I finally earned enough experience to buy pumpkin seeds and I noticed the time frame for harvest is 8 hours.  Having grown pumpkins before in real life, I know that they're a slow crop.  I think they take at least 3 months to mature. 

I thought the Farmville game would be cooler if the harvest times were based on real life, which made me think that the game has all sorts of possibilities to make actual political statements on food policy.  It could make wheat, soybeans and corn really cheap for example and inflate the profit margins on them because the US government gives subsidies for growing those things (if you're a big enough operation) while other fruits and vegetables like eggplant and squash --things that aren't turned into processed "foodstuffs"-- languish. 

What would be even cooler is if it took your geographical location and put that into the equation too, making the orange trees grow well in Florida but whither and die up north.  You could try to plant a cherry tree in south Florida for example but it wouldn't grow as well and you'd make less profit from it (probably would lose coins overall).

Think how useful this would be for teaching people about their local food-sheds!  I'm amazed at how many people will buy tomatoes in January in the U.S. because they don't know that tomatoes are a summer fruit and what they're buying at that time of year comes from the southern hemisphere, having traveled thousands of miles, and burned up who knows how much fossil fuel to get halfway across the world to their dinner table in Michigan where they'll bite into it and think 'this thing is tasteless".

Thinking of it that way, I realize the Farmville game already is political.  It reinforces the notion that our food comes mostly from happy cows on small family farms that grow a variety of crops like the ones we're building in our virtual worlds.  In reality U.S. agriculture is nothing like that.  It's mostly giant agri-businesses who plant thousands of acres in a single mono-crop (usually corn, soybeans or wheat) and grow cows on feedlots that never eat a blade of grass much less romp happily through green pastures.  The farms like the ones on Farmville are a tiny minority these days and most are struggling to survive.

Eating is one of the most basic things of life and it's interesting when you think about it, to realize how far we've gotten from something so basic as knowing where our food comes from (or even what "food" is for that matter: is food something like cheese or is it a Cheeszit?).  Most of these ideas of course are more developed in Michael Pollan's great book The Omnivore's Dilemma.  I think it's one of the most influential books I've ever read.  If you haven't read it, you should.  Or take a short-cut and see the film Food Inc.

I'm still playing Farmville on Facebook but more and more it makes me think about the differences between the game and the reality we've created for ourselves in real life.  Definitely something to think about.

The anger of the right

The teabaggers were here on Saturday.  They marched, they rallied and they were really, really angry. 

My roommate and I walked over to the Capitol to check them out.  Our estimate was that there were between ten and twenty thousand people there.  They had signs with Obama as Hitler, calling him a "Muslim - Marxist" (I wish!) and bemoaning our government's descent into --horror of horrors-- socialism!  Besides their wild exaggerated misinformed claims, what stuck out to me was their anger and their homogenity.  They were really angry and they were almost entirely older and white.  

What sort of sociological phenomena are we witnessing here?  What could be motivating these people to come out and apparently without shame hold up signs with wild and outrageous claims about bogeymen in Washington out to kill their grandmas?  The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Department of Homeland Security are documenting a rise hate group activity since Obama's election.  Angry protestors are waving Any Rand books and shouting about the government taking away their guns. The philosophy behind this movement is utterly revolting.  Why in the world would any grown up in this day and age embrace it? 

Bernie Sanders was on MSNBC last night offering one explanation.  He said simply, people are angry.  They have a right to be angry.  The economy is in shambles and they're hurting financially.  I think Sanders is on to something.   I think they're lashing out at thing they've been conditioned to hate: the government and black people.

After eight years of the Bush Administration's costly and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are in debt as never before.  As a result of many more years of deregulations of the financial markets and unbrindled capitalism, the economy has nearly collapased.  Obama has turned out to not own a magic wand and has not been able to clean everything up in 8 months and our country is still a mess.  Unemployment is still high (though no longer increasing) and many, many families are suffering.  Of course people are angry.

The problem is not that people are angry; the problem is that their justifiable anger about the state of the country is being exploited by powerful special interest groups, namely the insurance industry and right-wing elitists.  Most of the people at Saturday's rally haven't actually read Ayn Rand and I think they would be revolted by Objectivism if they knew anything at all about it. They don't know much about the health care debate either beyond a couple soundbites from Glen Beck.  They just know they're angry.

The thing is right now that anger has coalesced around two things that this particular audience is prone to distrust.  But for the most part, this is not the USA of George Wallace and despite this vocal minority Ayn Rand has never had a very large following here.  As a whole, we're better than that.  This is a country that yes, is flawed and has been hugely, tragically, immensely wrong in the past but, in the end I believe, we're a good people and we're getting better and right now we're blessed with a wise leader.  Despite the rally of hate on Saturday, this is still the country that united as never before on January 20th to celebrate the inauguration not only of our first black president but of a great statesman, plain and simple.  

These are tough times.  There's going to be ugliness.  There's going to be anger.  There's going to be racism.  It's part of our baggage as a country.  But it's not what defines us.  And for all their noise on Saturday, the angry tea-baggers waving racist signs and threatening armed revolution are not representative where this country is at today.  They're just not.

EDIT: for more of a sense of the march on Saturday, watch this video: