Lucky White Girl

goodbye community?

  goodbye community? 
  Originally uploaded by vista desde aca.

What's your definition of community? For the McGurns and other downtown developers the word community does not include those who have nowhere to sleep. They've been fighting for years to get the city to pass various ordinances to make life even more difficult for homeless people (like making it illegal to sleep in public areas from 11pm to 6am, arresting people for peeing in the bushes while locking the public restrooms during those same hours and just generally harrassing people in the hopes that they will go somewhere out of sight.) Now it looks like they're finally going to get their way, at least for a little while... In about six months they're closing the plaza completely. If they can't keep homeless people out of the park, well, they'll just keep everyone out. They're going to use the area as a staging area while they're building a new hotel across the street. Kinda makes you wonder about some people's notions of community, don't it?

Carnival of the Liberals #13

Hello and Welcome to a special Carnival edition of LWG.  In honor of the Cannes Film Festival we have rolled out our red carpet, lined up our paparazzi, and shined up our lucky awards for blogs across the blogosphere. Tonight's events warrant a special guest host (sorry we couldn't get Al Gore he's on some book signing thingy and couldn't be with us) : Gil.  And co-hosting from the beautiful land of mountains and rainforests, the Lucky White Girl herself: barb!

We had a great response and it made for some tough decisions on which entries got into this week's carnival.   If you didn't get in this week's please submit to the next carnival over at Expert Opinion!

It looks like our first limo is arriving lets get down to Gil and barb at our red carpet.

barb: This really is an exciting time.  We received a ton of submissions and GIL did such a great job of reading through them all and picking his favorites I just have to take this opportunity to thank him for all his hard work!

GIL:  Thanks barb!  And now our first lucky winner is stepping out on the red carpet.  It's hard to get a look over the crowd but I think its ... Yep it's Atheist Ethicist who won our special "You're not paranoid they really are out to get you" Award with his post Signing Statements. 

barb: Gil, I think this entry shows once again that Bush doesn't need the constitution or congress to remake laws just his trusty Bic pen and lack of conscience.  He grows more insidious every day!

GIL:  You said it, barb!  And right behind Atheist is another limo arriving. It's In This Moment, winner of our "Most likely to be mistaken for a deer by Dick Cheney" Award posted  The life of an American Lesbian. To take the most basic tenant of love: marriage, and then to deny gays is not only wrong on a legal level but also, more importantly, wrong on moral grounds.

barb: You know gays and lesbians have really been struck hard by the Republicans these past few years.  More and more states are passing anti-marriage laws....  It is just looking pretty scary out there to a lot of folks right now.   Good thing we have carnivals to lighten things up for us!

GIL:  That's right, barb.  And pulling up now is our "Bruce Banner: Don't make me angry, You won't like me when I am angry" Award winner World Wide Webers.  Their post, Sometimes We Have a Good Reason to be Angry shows that anger is sometimes the right response to an intolerable situation.  Sometimes It is outrage that brings justice and compromise which secures our chains.

barb: Like the bumper sticker says, "if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention"

GIL: The crowd has begun doing the wave as our next winner The Bipolar View steps onto the red carpet.  Her entry: Liberals Do NOT Have My Back won the "The kids gloves are off award" Award for reminding us that when one person struggles we all struggle.  I don't usually like to get involved in other people's arguments but her post make an important point about liberal struggles:  We cannot free anyone if we leave one person in chains.

GIL:  Next up is our "Dorothy: We're not in Kansas anymore" Award winner Angry White Kid.  His post Bush's immigration plan: War and servitude shows that compassionate conservatism doesn't extend to everyone.  Does 3000 immigrant deaths make us safer? Can we really punish people fleeing the poverty we created through NAFTA?

barb: This country would collapse without our immigrants.  I don't know by what logic anyone can argue that we are not a nation of immigrants, GIL!

GIL: I don't know either, barb, but our next winner is The Boston Progressive who won our "All the news the media will never find fit to print" Award.  The post "Murdered while Black" = "Spike the Story"  shows once again that corporate media think death is only news when it happens to white people.  So many people suffer in silence while we worry about the next American Idol. It is no surprise how this country got its dysfunctional label.

GIL:  Now on the red carpet is the Neural Gourmet winner of the "Dead Poets Society: Captain my Captain" Award for the post: Carpe Diem.  It takes courage to lead and we need to take the chance of "looking bad" in order to do the right thing.  If we let the conservatives run the show like the Times suggest we may end up with no show left.

barb: Anyway to whom do we look bad in the first place?  To some people human rights and democracy looks bad.  Doesn't mean we don't work towards those things.

GIL:  Next up we have Don't Floss with Tinsel  whose post It's All Tied Together won our "Don't shop till children drop" Award. 

barb: Any kid can tell you that the legacy of Wal Mart is exploitation so turn that smile upside down!

GIL: It is the corporate greed of companies like this that have driven our modern economy.  And as we are shown in this blog, the cost of that cheap T-shirt is often your own community.

barb:  You said it GIL, what kind of world do we want to live in, anyway?  Hey, I'm having some trouble seeing the next winner over the large beach ball the crowd has begun batting around. 

GIL: Wait! I see it!  There's the limo.  It's No Right Turn whose post For Freedom of conscience won our "War what is it good for" Award.  Through non-violent protest conscientious objectors have led the struggle to end War.  The imprisonment and beatings they have suffered for their moral beliefs without sacrificing what they stand for is a testament to their courage.

GIL:  Well I'm going to let barb have the honor of introducing our last winner of the evening here...

barb: Thanks GIL, last but not least, GIL has selected have our "picture is worth a thousand words" Award go to Reyonthehill for his post But, mom.

GIL:  Yep, I liked that one because . . .  well, I thought it was just kinda funny.

barb:  LOL GIL, well there you have it our winners for COTL #13 and don't forget:

  The next Carnival of the Liberals (the 14th edition) will be at Expert Opinion on June 7th!  Send your submissions in asap!

Technorati tags: carnivals, liberal, liberalism, politics, carnival of the liberals

Howard Zinn and other great speakers

So yeah, I forgot to mention Howard Zinn was here last night.  Paul's got an excellent summary of what he said and is inviting discussion over at his blog so I don't want to pre-empt him.  Go over there to talk about Zinn.

For me, I was unenthusiastic about the event.  I heard him speak just last year in Tampa and this speech wasn't any different from that one.  I've read his books (People's History and You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train) and I read his articles and commentaries all the time.  What more can the dude say?  And ya know probably 1/4 of the crowd was in the same boat.  So why do people like us go to these things?  To see and be seen.  That's not a bad thing.  It's just socializing.  I saw people there I hadn't seen in years.  And I got to introduce GIL to some of my other activist friends, and tell him about one of the sponsoring organizations, Veterans for Peace, which I'm kinda hoping he might get active in.

You know who I would like to see come speak here someday?  Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky.  He writes a lot about the IMF/World Bank/WTO and trade issues as well as various Western war ventures.  He first hit my radar during the Kosovo war.  I really like him.  He's very smart and very cool.

Or how 'bout Arundhati Roy? The author of the The God of Small Things, she's also active in anti-war campaigns, resisting the Narmada Dam project, banning nuclear weapons and the promotion of equal rights in India.

Or, although it's unlikely he has a lot of time outside of being senator and all, I'd be interested in hearing Barak Obama.  Maybe he'll run for president one day!

All this is not that I don't like people like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky but please, let's get someone different next time.  I would like to see someone I haven't seen before or am unlikely to see.  That's why Spike Lee was so great when he was here.  We tend to hear the same old voices and yeah, it's great to introduce them to people who haven't heard them before but c'mon.  That's why they wrote their books.  They're old; they probably want to retire.  Let's give someone else a chance.

Who would you like to see give a talk on a campus near you?

On speaking out

So the local paper actually is going to run my editorial.  They emailed me and asked for a headshot yesterday.  Although I really wanted my voice to be heard on this issue, I have kinda mixed feelings about this.  First all, everyone in my department at school is going to see it and I generally like to keep a low profile but this is just cowardice on my part.  Also, one of my professors is from Israel and I don't think he's a Zionist, but I still worry about alienating him.  We've never really talked about the Palestinian thing.  It makes me a little nervous.

The other reason I have mixed feelings is that reading the piece again I now realize I made a really crucial mistake.  I corrected it and sent them back a revised version and now I'm crossing my fingers hoping they run the edited version and not the original.

The mistake was that I forgot to point out that the majority of the protesters were NOT violent and that the "image of an enraged, violent Muslim world" is a distortion mostly of the Western media.  I still stand by my original point, that we should understand violence wherever it occurs, but I don't want to propagate an untrue picture of the Muslim world. 

Now that I think about it, there's so much I left out.  I could've included the point that Tariq Ali made in his editorial recently that we here in the West continue to see Muslims as "the other" and that the protests weren't as large and widespread as reported:

In reality, the number of original demonstrators was tiny: 300 in Pakistan, 400 in Indonesia, 200 in Tripoli, a few hundred in Britain (before Saturday's bigger reconciliation march), and government-organised hoodlums in Damascus burning an embassy. Beirut was a bit larger. Why blow this up and pretend that the protests had entered the subsoil of spontaneous mass anger? They certainly haven't anywhere in the Muslim world, though the European media has been busy fertilising the widespread ignorance that exists in this continent.

(I do disagree with him when further on in the editorial he says that the protests "ignore the real tragedy" of the brutality of colonial occupations.  I don't think they're ignoring them at all.  I think that's the context of this whole event.  Now he writes about this area of the world all the time and is much more of an expert than I am so you have to weigh that in the balance too, but still, I don't really understand why he, too, thinks that yes, this is just about some cartoons and not really about larger socio-political reality)

And finally, I have some old friends and aquaintences in the Muslim community down south of here and I sorta wonder what they'll think of it for the same reasons cited above.  In short, I feel like the old man in the fable who's walking with his son and their donkey to the market.  Along the way they meet all these people and each tells them that the way they're walking is wrong.  Some say that the old man should ride the donkey because he is old, others say that the child should ride the donkey because he is a child and still others argue that the humans should carry the donkey because he's the one who usually carries the load and deserves a break.  The moral of course is that you can't please everyone.  I know this and certain people I'm glad to not please.  I'm glad to not please the administration of this country for example.  But other people are harder; they make good points.  I listen to them.  But at some point we just have to accept that we're imperfect.  It's not a perfect editorial.  It doesn't make every point perfectly.  It makes one or two imperfectly.

There will probably be some fallout from the editorial, if only in the form of angry letters to the editor (hopefully not in the form of angry letters from my professor).  I'm nervous about it.  It's a scary thing to speak out.  We risk so much sometimes.  Others have risked much more.  But it must be done.  Imperfectly, humbly, and honestly, we make ourselves vulnerable in order to push the dialogue along.  We risk losing so many things when we do: our pride, our jobs, the safe cloak of anonymity and neutrality.  But we lose so much more if we don't. 

So like the bumper sticker says, "speak your mind, even if your voice shakes".

Legislated full employment?

Here's an idea!  An article in the Sunday New York Times about what full employment is, why we stopped talking about achieving it and why we should bring it back asks the following question: Given that we've only achieved it by market forces alone very rarely and very briefly, should the government legislate full employment? 

FDR wanted it back in 1944, arguing that the right to a job is a human right (indeed, article 23 and 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says exactly that).   If the number of people seeking jobs is larger than the number of jobs that are vacant, the government could create those needed jobs.  We actually did this back in the 70s under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) (until Reagan ended it, of course). But the article profiles William Darity Jr., an economist at UNC Chapel Hill, who argues that we should do something like that again.

"not to supply make-work jobs, but to satisfy pressing social needs with projects like public school construction or a national teachers corps or high-speed rail lines. 'Certainly there are areas that the private sector does not find profitable,' Mr. Darity said, 'but the public needs and the private sector would find useful'."

I think it sounds great.  What do you think?

In response to some comments on my editorial

While I was writing that last post someone was posting a new comment, (don't read it yet) which is in reply to some discussions related to my editorial that are taking place elsewhere.  The backstory to this that got lost on the previous post is that I read a post on a popular progressive website (that will remain unnamed because I don't want to sound like I'm dumping on them) about the protests to the Danish cartoons and I felt it was a really not-well thought out post, kinda reactionary.  I can't send you the link because the guy took it down, (which sorta ticked me off but we're not there yet).  Anyway, I commented on that post saying pretty much the same thing I said in my editorial.  And I said, "for me, a liberal, progressive response seeks to understand the other side’s point of view.  Not doing that is something that is more characteristic of a conservative George-Bush style response."  Anyway, he got all mad and said he doesn't "tow the line" for any party liberal or conservative and he took his original post down and replaced it with one in which he talks about the virtue of being a nonconformist!

A nonconformist!  Excuse me, but it seems like voices calling for understanding the Muslim point of view are sorely lacking in this country.  That's why I wrote my post in the first place.  (I get all huffy).

So anyway, that's the back story to all this.  After he posted that he gots tons of comments commending him for his "nonviolence"!  That's where Ken-the commentator's response comes in (you can read it now).

Now for my response to Ken and any others who are coming over here from that popular progressive blog I mentioned (actually no one is coming over here from that site, but just in case they do).

Equity.

Wow, check out the NY Times magazine this week.  There are two really great articles, the cover story on the living wage and also an essay by a Yale law professor who argues that the new form of discrimation targets, not groups of people, but individuals that refuse to assimilate. 

"Civil rights law is peopled with plaintiffs who were severely punished for daring to be openly different.... African-Americans cannot be fired for their skin color, but they could be fired for wearing cornrows.  Potential jurors cannot be struck for their ethnicity but can be struck for speaking Spanish.  Women cannot be discharged for having two X chromosomes but can be penalized for becoming mothers.  Although the weaker protections for sexual orientation mean gays can sometimes be fired for their status alone, they be much more vulnerable if they are perceived to "flaunt" their sexuality.  Jews cannot be seperated from the military for being Jewish but can be discharged for wearing yarmulkes"

Protecting against non-existent threats by cutting off Medicaid to poor people

There's a huge threat to the Medicaid system here in the U.S. but not from where you're thinking.  Apparently two Republican lawmakers want to protect you from illegal immigrants falsely claiming citizenship in order to get on the Medicaid program.  These lawmakers --Nathan Deal and Charlie Norwood of Georgia-- have bravely stepped forward to protect us all from such threats.  Only one problem.

There's no actual evidence that people are doing this. 

But they might!  And so, they've put a little provision into the budget bill to be voted on in Feburary, which will require poor people to prove their US citizenship before receiving any kind of health care under Medicaid.  No exceptions. 

This, according to Bob Herbert's column today "may be especially harmful to poor blacks, most of whom do not have passports and many of whom do not have birth certificates" because when they were born there was this little thing called Jim Crow laws (you might've heard of them?) which meant many southern black women couldn't give birth in hospitals back then because of racial discrimination (no!  Say it ain't so!) and consequently don't have birth certificates.

Hmmmm.... First, we're gonna kick you in the teeth.  Then, we're gonna say people who don't have teeth can't get any help from the government.  And then we're gonna blame you for your low socio-economic position because everyone knows we all start on an even playing field because this is America.

Good Lord.  If you're not cynical, you're not paying attention. 

Carnival of the Feminists

The 6th Carnival of the Feminists is up over at reappropriate.  Be sure to have plenty of time for some good reading, commenting and blogrolling because there are lots of great posts there specifically centered around the intersection of race and gender among other things.  Happy reading!

On refreshing indignation

I was just listening to a clip of Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.  He was outraged at the President's use of the NSA to engage in domestic survelliance without a court approval.  Here's what he had to say:

"And this warentless eavesdropping program is not authorized by the Patriot Act.  It's not authorized by any act of Congress and it's not overseen by any court...  It's being conducted under a secret Presidential order, based on secret legal opinions by the same Justice department lawyers who argued secretly that the President could justify the use of torture!  Mr. President, it's time we had some checks and balances in this country.  We are a democracy!"

Aw, that's so cute, isn't it?  I mean doesn't it just get you right here [taps heart].  That tone of righteous anger.  Of indignation.  Of shock.  It reminds me of a sign I saw a lot of during the clumsily fradulent presidental election of 2000.  "This is America. Count every vote."  The people who held those signs were so great.  They were shocked that something like that could happen.  That the Bush family could manipulate the most powerful country on the planet to install their idiot son in the White House.

Maybe I'm just too cynical in my old age but it's been a long time since I could work up a good tone of shocked indignation.  It makes me feel a little nostalgic when I hear it.  A little sad, too.  Because I know this country is long past the Age of Innocence and well into the Empire stage.  But sometimes I wish it wasn't.

New links for your reading pleasure

I was cleaning out and rearranging my bookmarks this morning (no comments on anal-retentiveness, please! lol) and I realized I haven't updated my blogroll in a long time.  Here are some of the blogs I've run across lately.

The Other Dark Meat... "pissing off the dominant culture since 1540" is a blog like this one that is both personal and political at the same time.  This is my favorite kind of blog to read.  The ones below don't tell as many personal stories and are more political commentary type blogs.

Philobiblon ...is a booklover and feminist, founder of Carnival of the Feminists to which I plan to contribute a post... someday.
Factesque ... has great commentary on current affairs, a little wordy but worth it. 
Black Feminism.org ...is not really a group blog, and seems to be going in many directions at once but still is refreshingly sassy and worth checking out.
Doug Ireland...had an essay up on Commondreams recently about implications/possibilities for impeachment hearings coming out of Bush's secret domestic wiretapping and I liked it so much I checked his blog and bookmarked it.  Lots of good commentary.

And finally from the ever popular feministe! this link to a Swedish website revealing how much retouching has to be done to make models look like they do.  What a great interactive demonstration of the impossibility of western beauty standards!  Things like this make me very excited and hopeful about the educational opportunities of the Internet.  Really.  Check this out, you'll love it!  There are so many young girls I know who could benefit from seeing this.

Happy reading!

On the language of power

Speaking of language and its power to manipulate thought, you can find a great analysis of the language of the Amazing Bubble-boy as revealed in his address to the nation last night over here at Fact-esque.  You don't have to be a linguist to hear how true this rings.

On the (mis)trial of Sadaam

I was just thinking this morning about the trial of Sadaam Hussein.  I think it's really too bad that it's happening this way.  Because he was such an awful dictator.  Ideally, any trial should be done by the Iraqi people who do it themselves of their own volition out of a motivation of self-determination and true democracy (by which I mean here democracy in the classic sense of the word, rule by the people, as opposed to the US definition which means adoption of neo-liberal economics).  Such a trial would unite Iraqis and create a more just country.  As it is, we have a psuedo-trial done as a show of humiliation and conquest by a US puppet regime under occupation as a means of retaliation and vengeance by some Iraqis on the part of other Iraqis.  Such a trial only further entrenches the ethnic and religious hatreds that will fragment the country for years to come.

Ramsey Clark is right in his remarks to the court.  "Unless it is seen as absolutely fair, and fair in fact, it will divide rather than reconcile Iraq."  This trial is not a legitimate trial and it won't be seen as legitimate by a large segment of the population over there.  It sets him --Hussein-- up as the victim of US occupation and ennobles him in the eyes of the resistance.  We've changed Hussein's image from that of a brutal dictator to that of a noble resistor of foreign control and occupation.  The result of this trial will not be to incease peace and justice in Iraq.  It will be like throwing gasoline on a fire.  And that is a shameful missed opportunity.

Class discussion, caffeine overdose energizes

God, you know, I just have to say, I think I know why I was depressed last week.  We didn't have class!  I missed it.  I'm serious.  I love class.  I get so energized by it.  I love the discussions, sometimes they mystify me but most of the time they amaze and intrigue me and I love it.  It's like a drug, I feel so alive, I get so many ideas shooting through my head that I just can't wait to get out and get them all down on paper or my blog or anything but instead I usually have to go straight to statistics class and think about numbers which is okay actually because I seem to do better in there too when I've just come from my theory class (as opposed to Thursdays when I only have stats and no theory).

I sorta had a paper due today.  "Sorta" meaning I should've written my sixth paper for the class because we need to have nine total by the end of the semester and I've only done five and from here on out I need to be writing a paper every week but I could find absolutely no motivation even to read the article much less write a paper responding to it.  I go to class and we start talking about it and tie everything together and you can watch the pieces just falling into place and you're like wow! this is amazing sh*t!  I've gotta read this other book that was optional reading for this week.  The title threw me and I didn't look twice at it but wow what she went over in class was friggin' interesting!  All about sovereign spaces and the lack thereof and this concept he [the author, Agamben] calls "bare life" which is like the person stripped of their political identity, [e.g. the political prisoner] the person merely as an animal with no rights or anything (yeah, I know! scary stuff!) and how the state can do that to certain people who are "outsiders" (like Jews in Germany in the 30s or Muslims today in the US) and they do that legally, because the state CREATES legality and so what this dude Agamben was asking was how did the Holocaust, or how does a place like a concentration camp, LEGALLY exist within a sovereign state?  Everything the Nazis did was LEGAL, right?  So how does that happen?  And he says it happens when states declare marshal law, states of emergency.  Which redefines legality.  Because if the state creates rules, it can also create exceptions to those rules. And so what Hitler did was turn that state of emergency into a NORM! 

Holy sh*t!

A concentration camp/Guantanamo/Abu Ghrab is a legalized, localized version of that norm!

And she mentioned another book on the same idea by Hannah Arendt and dang, I gotta get that too because that's really interesting when you think about it, how states are supposed to provide security but what if you have a person without a state?  Where's their security?  Think residents aliens in this country.  Think Palestinians.  Think all those people locked up in Guantanamo and all the other secret prisons we have. 

All this came about because we read an article by Charles Tilly who's this stuffy British chap who argues that state-making and war-making are like racketeering.  Racketeering is where you park your car in New York City and some thug comes up and says he'll watch over it if you pay him $20 and you know the deal really is that if you don't pay him the $20 he smashes your windows, right?  So nation-states create these threats, get you the citizen all hyped up and scared about Al-Quaeda right and then offers to protect you from those threats for a price (taxes).  Dude's got a point.  It is a racket if you think about it but that's the way the whole nation-state system works.  Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1600 something when those of us in Europe, you know, moved from medeval kingdoms to actual nation-states as we know them today....blah, blah, blah

[And what do I mean by constructed threat?  Well, like, what are you afraid of for example?  You watch Fox News, you're probably afraid of Al-Quaeda, right?  Even though other threats to your life, such as your car and other people's cars, are much more dangerous statistically.  So that's how threats are constructed.  Lots of things can kill us but the ones we're scared of are the ones that our society tells us to be scared of.  I bet before Katrina most of the people in New Orleans were much more afraid of terrorists than they were of hurricanes but which one actually wiped them out, eh?  So that's what's meant when we talk about how threats are constructed.  It's the perceptions of threats, actually, that are constructed by the society around you by not so disinterested parties I might add.]

Anyway I gotta write about this.  I am so motivated right now.   I'm a little hyper, I know, but that probably also has something to do with the fact that I forgot to eat anything so far today and I'm running off three cups of coffee and some little bit of leftover chocolate I found in my purse.  Gawd, I feel so much better!  It's like therapy.  I can think of it this way: I can spend money on a therapist to treat my depression or I can spend money on tuition to keep taking classes the rest of my life, which is better?  Classes, right?  I knew you'd say that! ;-)

Talk to the Germans

I keep thinking that I would really like to talk to some elderly Germans.  You know, that generation that lived through Hitler and World War II.  Especially those who were part of the resistance.  I think there's a lot of wisdom there and it's not going to be around forever. 

I'm thinking this especially on the announcement this morning of Samuel A. Alito to be the next Supreme Court nominee.  Yeah, it happens sometimes in a democracy that people (through fraud or stupidity) elect Nazis to be their leaders and then have to sit back and watch them appoint oppressive thugs to positions of power.

What does it feel like to watch your country's ideal crumble before your very eyes?  How did you deal with the fear?  How did you resist? 

We should talk to the Germans before we repeat the past.

Florida winters still deadly for those without homes

We have heat now.  It's now 20 degrees warmer in my house.  It feels absolutely wonderful.  And I found out the heat in our house is a new system that uses the hot water from the water heater to heat the air as well so it's super efficient.  You're only heating one thing and getting both hot water and hot air from it.  Also the water heater is electric so it'll be cheaper than gas this winter. 

So all that's good and means GIL and I will have a nice warm, snuggly winter.  I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, cooking, sweet potato pie, candied yams, spinach cassarole, collard greens, then spending our first Christmas together, buying a little live Christmas tree and hanging my grandmother's Christmas ornaments on it, doing lots of new knitting projects for presents, maybe going to Christmas Eve mass at the Catholic church.

Heat is such a luxury.  Winter is wonderful if you can spend it indoors.  Here's something to think about:  North Florida winters are not mild to those having to live outside.  Every year we have memorial services here for those who don't make it. 

27% of those who are homeless are children.  Some are pregnant women.  Some are elderly.  Many have jobs and a large percentage are veterans.  There may be some who fit the profile of the lazy man who prefers to sleep outside but in five years of living in this community and associating with the homeless I have yet to meet him.  No matter what end of the political spectrum you stand on, leaving our fellow citizens to freeze to death outside is unconscionable and that’s not the sort of community we want to live in. 

And yet every year, our community does just that.  This year one of our city commissioners has proposed putting up temporary shelters in each quadrant of the city.  He is being lambasted by other commissioners and patronized by our local paper for not having asked for the money to do this ($500,000, a fraction of what the city gives away regularly to developers to produce more upscale housing) several months ago when they were discussing the budget.  Both arguments miss the simple point that people die here in winter and we have an opportunity to be the kind of community we think we are: caring, compassionate, progressive. 

It's nice to have a warm home.  Most of us are only a paycheck or two away from losing ours.  What's your city doing to take care of its most vulnerable citizens this winter?  What are we all doing?

Not very Christian of him, is it?

Pat Robertson apparently misses one the main themes of the religion he claims to profess.  He called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recently.  Here's the story in the NY Times.

On [non] zero-sum games

My best friend, Beth and I used to play a specialized version of Monopoly when we were kids.  We liked playing more than we liked winning or losing and so we would change the rule that made the game finite: namely, whoever goes bankrupt first, loses.  In our version, whenever anyone ran out of money, the other person would just loan them some so they could keep playing.  Eventually they might pay off the debt and come out ahead in the next round and be loaning money back to the first person.  It made for one giant infinite game of Monopoly but without realizing it we were subverting the capitalist system even then.  Little girls know a lot about how to have fun without having winners and losers.

Robbie and I play chess in a similar manner.  We might want to play out a scenario just to see what happens but then we can back up several moves and try something different.  Today he won the "official" second game but then we hit the rewind button to see what would happen if I had moved elsewhere and I won the "addendum".  We help each other think out all the possible scenarios to a potential move too or he tells me what his next few moves are so I can try to impede him better.  In this way I can play a game that I otherwise might find too aggressive and confrontative to really enjoy and I do think I'm getting better at it.

There's probably always a way you can take any competitive zero-sum game and subvert it and I'd like to encourage this with my own kids someday.  The only drawback is that you have a game that technically doesn't ever come to an end but how many kids actually sit through to the end of games anyway?  The point is the playing, not the ending.

Crackdown begins under new pope

The Vatican just ordered the editor of the Catholic magazine America, to resign.  America is known for down-to-earth, progressive editorials on real life issues such as the drug war, Medicare cuts, and third world debt. The Rev. Thomas Reese, 60, is a highly regarded political scientist who permitted the publication of articles critical of the church.  He also "has written several books that examine the Roman Catholic Church as a political institution as well as a religious one, a rather secular approach that was not appreciated in Cardinal Ratzinger's office".  The order was issued by the Vatican's office of doctrinal enforcement under Ratzinger in mid-March before he became pope.  Read the full NY Times article. 

I think the message under our new pope is clear: no dissent, no analysis, don't even think about questioning church authority.  It's a great time to be Catholic --if you're a nonthinking drone!

Florida Senate abides by NRA's ruling

The National Rifle Association successfully lobbied the Florida State Senate this past week to pass SB 436 the vigilante justice bill, which will bring, in Martin Dyckman's words, "the Wild West" to our streets (I'd link to his excellent column in Sunday's St. Pete Times but they usually take a few weeks to publish stuff on the web).  The bill says that "a person who is attacked in any ...place where he or she has a right to be [that means in public] has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so..".  That's right, any Joe now with a gun can exercise the same decisions over life and death that police officers are so extensively trained to do in dangerous situations.  Dyckman wonders if this will result in scenarios such as two drivers arguing over a traffic accident, one reaches for a pen and paper the other thinks he's reaching for a gun and BLAMO!  The other driver thought he was in danger and had "no duty to retreat" and "stood his ground".  Ahh... the freedom to blow the head of anyone I think may be a potential threat!  Hmmm.... does that mean we can make preemptive strikes too?  Shoot them now before they have a chance to go get a gun and shoot you!

Oh by the way, this bill was passed unanimously.  Nobody wanted to be perceived as being soft on crime.  Brave, brave legislators!

The vanguard of the revolution

What a wonderful thing is it is to get something in the mail unexpectedly!  This is a gift basket from my old neighbors in Miami.  They just sent me this out of the blue for no reason.  They have a little girl who turned 5 last fall and we used to hang out and play video games a lot.  She's going to be starting school in the fall so I've been sending her books.  I'm worried for her because she didn't get to go to preschool.  She's starting kindergarten already behind the majority of her classmates.  Her family is poor but devoted.  They aren't that into books.  In fact I don't think she had any before I sent her some but she's not the only one who grew up in a family who didn't know about books.  My books came from the grocery store when I was a kid (thank god for those little end aisle displays of Sesame Street books and Archie comics!).  Who knew?  We can get hooked any number of ways and I am trying to hook my little five year old neighbor by being her book fairy. 

Who doesn't get excited at going out to get the mail and finding a package waiting?!  This is contagious!  We should start a chain reaction.  Pick someone at random and send them something nice just out of the blue.  A leaf or a dried flower if they live in another part of the world maybe.  A picture.  A book.  Several books.  Books are wonderful things to recieve in the mail.

My secret agenda with every child is to subvert them by turning them on to reading.  I have lots of theories about this.  One, is that you have to start young, you lose your chances as children get older (but it's never too late so buy books for your 13 year old anyway).  And two, is that a book for a child is never, ever, ever a waste of money.  Even if it just lays there and you think they're not going to read it, it's laying there with all this potential.  They might pick it up and discover a whole new world and they might not but the potential is priceless.  It's worth it just to have books within reach.  Every child should grow up in a home where books are present.  Books are as necessary as air and water to children.  And look at children's books today if you haven't in awhile.  I remember the old P.D Eastman books (who wrote books like Are you my mother? and Go, dog, go!) with those great illustrations, you remember those?  They're great but children's book illustrations are just so much more elaborate these days.  They're little works of art in and of themselves. 

Books are wonderful.  Books are freedom.  Books are compassion.  The world will be saved by books because tyranny, oppression, heartlessness and fear are all dispelled by reading.  When a child opens a book they learn that the world is a place bigger than their immediate surroundings.  That other children live in far off distant places and do things differently.  That other worlds are possible.  That anything is possible.  Through books children walk in other people's shoes and learn they aren't the only ones on the planet.  They learn compassion.  This is why imagination is much more than just a nice thing to develop in children.  Children with good active imaginations grow up to become more compassionate understanding adults.  I think childhood is ultimately the most subversive stage of the human life cycle.  Nothing is sacred.  Everything is questioned.  Joy and other emotions are pure and unrefined.  Everyone is a liberal at birth.  It's only through indoctrinization that conservatives are made! lol... I know it sounds silly but I think there is a grain of truth in this: books will save the world.  Children armed with books are the vanguard of the revolution.

Like the US in the 80s or Germany in the 30s?

Coping with the second term under the madman.

Somedays I feel more optimistic than others.  An older friend of mine who knows about such things reminds me that he and many others felt the same way in the 1980s when Ronald Reagon got elected.  "Those were bad times, for sure," he says "but we survived 'em.  We'll get through the next four years of Bush the same way,"  I feel a momentary glimmer of hope.  Maybe that's true.  Maybe I don't have enough perspective on such things yet.  Maybe the country really will survive another four years of Bush.

Then I read the headlines. 

Bolton just part of reg. pattern

Where have you heard this before: Oh, we're so surprised!  It's shocking [that Bush nominated John Bolton, someone famous for denigrating the UN to be the new US ambassador to it].  It's not shocking at all.  We said the same thing about Gail Norton, someone who spent her career lobbying against environmental regulation, being appointed Secretary of the Interior back in 2001 and more recently we expressed shock and awe that he would nominate someone famous for condoning torture to be Attorney General.  How can anyone be shocked by this behavior?  The day I'm shocked by Bush's behavior is the day he does something completely out-of-character, like announce that the US is withdrawing from all imperialist ventures overseas and is going to leave the rest of the world alone for awhile.

Pulitzer prize journalist slams US media

Laurie Garrett delivered a stinging indictment of US media in her memo announcing her resignation from the periodical Newsday.  You can read excerpts of her memo here.  In her resignation memo, she said

"This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47
states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the
horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had
on the national psyche. I have found America a place of
great and confused fearfulness."

That pretty much sums it up.

By the way, in an attempt to reinfuse my life with a modicum of sanity I'm on a new quest to find blogs "from the rest of the world", if you run across any good ones, let me know.  They don't even have to be entirely to my own liking politically; I just want to hear what the rest of the world is saying.  I understand it'll be a biased sample.

Resolution: thoughts on going back to school

Ok, first of all I have to say thanks to Stephen, aka the Whiney Limey, for sending me a link Relief.net listing all the cool overseas jobs I'd qualify for if I go back and finish my degree (if you visit stephen's blog I'd like to encourage everyone to give him a good punch in the arm for his obnoxious post about International Women's Day -which is today, by the way, if you haven't heard.  In celebration, my pooch is off at the Humane Society getting fixed to free her canine self from the burdens of motherhood and me from having to feed and house any potential offspring.) 

My halfway complete Master's degree is in International Relations and my classmates at the U of Florida tended to be either of two kinds: mid-level military guys or up-n-coming eager young politicians-to-be who wanted to go work for the State department.  I was one of 3 women in my class.

This was rather discouraging to me back then (I started the program in 2000) because I had the radical notion that I wanted to study war in order to learn how to stop it (rather antiquated idea, I know but I've always been drawn to early 20th century idealism).  So it's easy to see why I became disillusioned and left when I got the opportunity to go to Colombia with a North American peacemaking team to do international accompaniment.  That was basically what I wanted to do in the first place when I started the degree so I dropped out.  Now I'm trying to figure out how to re-illusion myself and build up the motivation to go back to that not-so-sympathetic environment and finish the damn thing.

One thing I have going for me is that I'm a bit tougher and more cynical now than I was before.  The other thing is that I have a great desire to not be living in this country very much longer.  I assure you this is an entirely practical consideration.  It has nothing to do with fear of being disintegrated in another terrorist attack on the US in retaliation this time for our colonization of Iraq.  Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that we elected a monkey for president.  No.  It has to do with the fact that as I get older and think about starting a family and having kids and growing old and frail and in-need of accessible health care I really start to worry that we are dismantaling the social safety net in this country.  Granted, I know many of you don't have a choice in the matter but I want to say that I don't know if it's entirely responsible to start a family in this country!  Unless you're sure you're going to be part of the ruling class.  If you are, that's fine, we have the best health care money can buy.  As long as you have no doubts that you're always going to have money and will always have access to that healthcare, fine.  I won't blame you for staying.  But if you have doubts that you can do what needs to be done to be a successful American (and I know I'm not a very successful American) then it makes sense to think about the responsible thing to do. 

I, personally, want to go where human beings have organized themselves and created a system that serves to better our living conditions for everyone.  Not just for those who have money.  Or who are white.  Or who are good at playing the stock market.  Everyone.  Someplace that believes health care is a right, not a privilege, that education is more important than having the latest B2 bomber, that our elderly deserve good, quality care and respect not to be shut away in an institution for their final days.  Someplace that doesn't lock up such a large percentage of their population for nonviolent consensual crimes.  I want to live in a country that isn't so damned aggressive.  It's like living with your neighbor's rabid out of control pitbull.  It's dangerous.  That rabid pitbull doesn't think about who it's going to attack, it just attacks and there's no reason it won't turn around and attack us, its own citizens.  Look at the Patriot Act.   It's not fun living in the U.S.  It's insane.

So the next time I think about how I don't really want to go back to the polisci department at UF, I'll re-read this post and remember why I'm doing it.  In pursuit of sanity.