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Tag: global environment

Stuff that Caught My Eye – Ouch!

Stuff that Caught My Eye – Ouch!

A snapshot of recent bits:

Video

So Called “War on Christmas” Persecution

To this strawman viral post:

“We can’t say Merry Christmas, now we have to say Happy Holidays? We can’t call it a Christmas tree, it’s now called a Holiday tree? Because it might offend someone? If you don’t like our “Customs” and it offends you so much then LEAVE!!! I will help you pack. They are called customs and we have our traditions. If you agree with this please post this as your status!! I AM A PROUD USA CITIZEN… MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!! Do you have what it takes to repost this?”

Response:

You can say Merry Christmas as much as you want. We just want you to be tolerant of those who prefer to say Happy Holidays or celebrate the season in a way different from the way you do. You can call it a Christmas tree too. You just need to be tolerant of those who prefer to have a secular Holiday tree, or perhaps a Menorah. If you don’t like living in the SECULAR America that the forefathers intended, LEAVE. I will help you pack. Perhaps you can move to a theocracy like Iran or a country with less government involvement like Somalia. I AM A PROUD AMERICAN CITIZEN. Happy holidays to all of you, no matter how you choose to celebrate the season! Do you have what it takes to repost? Happy Holidays Everyone!!!!

Walls Don’t Work

Walls Don’t Work

We are wall-eyed, our vision mis-aligned. We construct walls and eye them, while simultaneously looking away. My eyes hurt just thinking about it. We’ve lost our depth perception.

It’s a pathetic, futile thing (and a profound forgetting of history) to engage in wall building. But it’s something to do, and there are hatreds to be stoked, fears to be placated, monies to be gathered.

Shakespeare used the term “wall-eyed” to express reproach, metaphorically extending the literal misalignment of the eye’s vision in order to criticize interpretive vision. A “wall-eyed” wretch has more than distorted literal vision. The implication is that he (or she) is out of alignment with social reality, totally lacking in empathy, knowing no pity – unnatural, alienated, and irretrievably perverted.

I just think of the meaningless, baleful sort of gaze of the fish – the walleye. Nobody home. In denial of reality, in paranoia and fear, in ethnocentrism and narcissism and xenophobia, and in misaligned vision – we construct more walls. Mine! Mine! Here us, there all of you things. Disney nightmares notwithstanding, it is a small world after all – we’re stuck with each other. It’s just not going to work.

Stricter border controls and higher penalties will not stop illegal immigration either. They don’t address the root causes of the problem: a stagnant Mexican economy and strong demand for cheap labor in the U.S. market.

Building a wall may mean safety for some but tragedy for many. I got my indoctrination into the horror of mortar and concrete on August 13, 1961, watching East German communist police close off East Berlin, first with barbed wire, then with concrete. On the West Berlin side, people came up to the wall in tears as families were divided and East Berliners were cut off from their jobs in the West.

…This memory comes back to me because we seem to be afflicted with another spell of “wallitis” – hoping that closing off problems will solve them.

American soldiers have been engaged in a project of closing off the Sunni district of Adhamiya in Baghdad. Israel has been working for years on a 436-mile fence that, in part, closes off the Arab section of East Jerusalem. Pakistan is building a fence to close off Taliban routes into Afghanistan. And, lest the United States miss out on the closing-off festival, it has started work on what will eventually be a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border.

Proponents of that wall speak of keeping out terrorists as well as job-seeking illegal immigrants. That is hard to establish. But what can be established is that the projected fence has helped to stimulate a booming business in tunnel building and another booming business in forging identity documents.*

As Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” – From Daniel Schorr, “Closing off problems with walls doesn’t solve them,” Christian Science Monitor, Friday May 25, 2007

*Not to mention a booming business…. in building walls.

Almost all of us are immigrants. We are the children of immigrants and exiles.
Inscribed on a table within the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
– “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

If that’s over, how about the global community? Or should we only realize our common humanity when we are threated by global extinction (more nukes, more toxins, kill everything – yar).

Work on smarter solutions now. It’s a simple demographic. A shortage of skilled workers approacheth.

Wall-building is so contagious, but it doesn’t really work in microcosm either. The walled complex, the walled community.

We’re disrupting the rhythms of human life and interaction to our disgrace – and peril.

Less interaction, less understanding = more hostility, fake security.

You build the walls, and then you need the guards, and the passwords. And you live behind the wall, or you’re kept out by the wall. You hire bodyguards if you’re rich enough. You hide your children.

Who is the greater hostage of the bunker/fortress/rabbit hole/prison mentality? The gated community (even when you’ve seized a natural resource for colonization), is still a prison. You’re locked inside just as surely.

(Note to self: Objects – intended uses not limit/closer than they appear, panoptican, circulation/exchange, lines of flight, sca-venge.)

NION – Bush Crimes Against Humanity

NION – Bush Crimes Against Humanity

No election, whether fair or fraudulent, can legitimize criminal wars on foreign countries, torture, the wholesale violation of human rights, and the end of science and reason.

Not in Our Name has announced that they will be sponsoring an International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration.

As the charter for the commission states, “When the possibility of far-reaching war crimes and crimes against humanity exists, people of conscience have a solemn responsibility to inquire into the nature and scope of these acts and to determine if they do in fact rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The commission will meet in New York in October and will consider evidence on four specific issues:

  1. Wars of Aggression, with particular reference to the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
  2. Torture and Indefinite Detention, with particular reference to the abandonment of international standards concerning the treatment of prisoners of war and the use of torture.
  3. Destruction of the Global Environment, with particular reference to systematic policies contributing to the catastrophic effects of global warming.
  4. Attacks on Global Public Health and Reproductive Rights, with particular reference to the genocidal effects of forcing international agencies to promote “abstinence only” in the midst of a global AIDS epidemic.