tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62111478807458280702024-02-20T15:28:50.456-08:00A Piece of My MindSarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-58806902927534904822015-04-02T15:38:00.001-07:002015-04-03T06:22:04.451-07:00Hitler's Birrthday in Ukraine<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
On April 20, 2015, the birthday of
Adolf Hitler, the United States government is sending American troops to train units
of the Ukrainian National Guard. How appropriate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The U.S. mass media has lionized
the new Ukrainian government as defenders of democracy and freedom. That always
rang false to an old Jew like me. After all, my grandparents, left Odessa at
the beginning of the Twentieth Century to avoid yet another pogrom in the
freedom loving Ukraine. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
And then, during World War II, many
Ukrainians joined the German Waffen SS in the extermination of Jews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baba Yar is the most famous of these. In this
case, over 30,000 Jewish men, women and children were killed in a two day
period by the Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist supporters. The Ukrainians
were responsible for seeing that the Jews were kept in line on the way to the
pits where they were forced to lie down and then machine gunned. Anybody who
resisted or hesitated was kicked or clubbed by the Ukrainian collaborators. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Baba Yar was one of many Ukrainian
sites where Jews were brought and killed as part of the “final solution.” In
Odessa, Romanian nationalists led in the murder of over thirty thousand
Jews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Seems like the Ukrainian
nationalists were the most zealous in carrying out the Nazi policies of
extermination. In Stepan, Lviv, and Zhytomyr,
Ukrainian nationalists led in the killing of Jews. A Ukrainian division of the
SS assisted the Waffen SS in its extermination policies.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
But collaboration with the Nazis
was the province of the ultra-nationalist Ukrainians. More than 4.5 million
Ukrainians joined the Red Army to fight Nazi Germany, and more than 250,000
served in Soviet partisan paramilitary units.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Fast forward to the demonstrations
that overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovich. Not to the tar the movement
with the brush of anti-Semitic atrocities, there were members of the
demonstrations who were, in fact, interested in having a democratic government.
Some of them, by the way, were hooted, harassed and beaten by the ultra-right nationalist
demonstrators there.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
So what does this all have to do
with Hitler’s birthday and the government of Ukraine? The government of Ukraine
is riddled with the heirs of Nazi collaborators. I know that sounds very
Putinesque, but the facts do speak. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
A few points: During the
demonstrations in Maidan Square that led to the doppling of Yankukovich, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ukrainian nationalists draped Confederate
flags (that’s right, American confederate flags), inside the occupied Kiev’s
city hall. They hoisted white power symbols and Nazi SS symbols over a toppled
statue of V.I.Lenin. They destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died fighting
the Nazis in World War II. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sieg Heil
salutes and the Nazi <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolfsangel </i>symbol
were common in the demonstrations and in the far right autonomous zones
established during the protests. Hardly auspicious.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The new
Ukrainian “freedom loving” government includes the ultra-nationalist Svoboda
party led by Oleh Tyahnbok. This fellow has called for the liberation of
Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This fellow is clear about his sympathies. After the conviction in 2010
of the Ukrainian <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nazi death camp guard
John Demjanjuk, known by the inmates as “Ivan the Terrible,” Tyahbok rushed to
Germany to declare that this man, responsible for the death of thirty thousand
people, was a “hero”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tyahnbok’s party
holds thirty-seven seats in the Ukrainian parliament. (His deputy, Yury
Mykhalchyshny, has founded a think tank called the “Joseph Goebbels Political
Research Center,” in honor of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has enjoyed “friendly” meetings with the
Svoboda leadership. “The Euro-Maidan movement has come to embody the principles
and values that are the cornerstones for all free democracies,” Nuland
proclaimed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Two weeks later, as reported by Max
Blumenthal, in the online blog, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alternet,
</i>15,000 Svoboda members held a torchlight ceremony<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/01/ukraine-bandera/4279897/"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"></span></a></span> in the city of Lviv in honor of Stepan Bandera, a World War
II-era Nazi collaborator who led the pro-fascist Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN-B). Lviv, the city renowned for its vigorous involvement in
the World War II extermination of Jews, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has become the epicenter
of neo-fascist activity in Ukraine. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Elected
Svoboda officials have waged <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a campaign
to rename its airport after Bandera and successfully changing the name of Peace
Street to the name of the Nachtigall Battalion, an OUN-B wing that participated
directly in the Holocaust. “’Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes,” a
Svoboda deputy explained.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The ultra-nationalists are in power
in the contemporary Ukrainian government. Unlike Germany there has been no
official <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>apology for the extermination
of Jews and Gypsies by Ukrainian collaborators. Unlike Germany schoolchildren
do not visit the sites, there is no memory. No memory of the victims. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, significant and powerful elements of
the Ukrainian government support the memory of those who committed the
atrocities rather than those who perished.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
All of this is quite personal.
After all, if my grandparents had not left the Ukraine in 1906, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I might
have been one of those Jewish children shot dead by the “freedom loving”
Ukrainian nationalists. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Hitler’s birthday! What an
auspicious time for the United States to send military aid to the “national
guard” of Ukraine.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-86721313819793941952014-10-26T18:54:00.001-07:002014-10-26T18:54:18.943-07:00In Memoriam: Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D.On August 26, 1948, Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D. ended his suffering that began four years earlier on the fields of France. My father was a country doctor. His love was medicine and he tended to the ill and wounded. It was his calling. In the small upstate town where he practiced he delivered babies in the office house where we lived. He drove out to remote farms to give the five daughters of a farmer their vaccinations. He healed broken bones and cut foreheads. But nothing prepared him for the slaughter that he encountered after he landed with the fourth wave at Normandy in June 1944. <br />
<br />
My experience of the war was my father's absence. He would send my mother and I funny little letters that would have sections blacked out. This was V-mail. I always thought it was strange that other people would read my father's letters to me. But the censors did read them and blocked out areas that they felt were sensitive to national security or something.<br />
<br />
He wrote me a continuing story about a friendly amoeba. There even were illustrations. In later years when I visited India I found it strange that people feared amoebas as much as they did. <br />
<br />
To my mother and aunts and grandparents he sent letters and watercolors. He was an artist as well as a physician and would, in those rare moments when he had a minute or two, paint a watercolor of where he was. We cherished those postcard size pictures painted with love, for they were not only beautiful but they represented a part of the artist that could not be expressed in words.<br />
<br />
Then, for three months, we heard nothing. No letters came. No pictures came. Nothing came. And with each day my mother became more and more distraught.<br />
<br />
This was the time when the Germans made a desperate attempt to counterattack the American forces. <br />
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This was the
time when the Germans made a desperate attempt to counterattack the American
forces. The German forces under the command of Field Marshall Gerd von Runstedt
had encircled the American forces centered at Ardennes, France. This was the
Battle of the Bulge. And for over a month, during the bitter winter, American
and German soldiers slaughtered each other. Nineteen thousand American soldiers
died. Six armies locked in battle in the coldest winter on record. Over a
million men fought in what was to be recorded as the worst battle of World War
II.<br />
<br />
Torn, ripped, cut and blown apart, young men passed through the field hospital
that my father headed. It was X-ray after X-ray after X-ray. It was an assembly
line of death and dying. There was no time for the physicians to protect
themselves from the deadly radiation. And it was this radiation that caused the
skin cancer that later was to take my father's life. <br />
<br />
When he returned from that war I was six years old. My father rarely spoke to
me about that war, only once, that I remember, to joke that he had a rifle in
the back of his jeep and that's where it stayed. He was a healer, not a killer.
He even received a Bronze Star for bravery and never told me what he did. It
was half a century later, when my brother and I were cleaning out my mother’s
house that I found the citation from the Major General to my father and the
reasons. My father received the Bronze Star for his service tending to the
wounded from France through Belgium and Germany, often on the front lines under
enemy fire. He was a lieutenant-colonel. He was chief of surgery. And he went
to the front lines, not as a hero, but as a healer. He knew that, for a wounded
soldier, the journey from the front lines to the field hospital could mean the
difference between life and death. He was just doing his job. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">My memories of Dr. Nathan Bluestone are
fragmentary and impressionistic. Mostly I remember how we would sing together
in the car, my father and I. "I've Got Sixpence", "Someone's in
the Kitchen with Dinah" and rounds and rounds.<br />
<br />
Much later a psychic told me that my father had been deeply wounded by his
inability to heal in the face of such overwhelming carnage. His soul, as much
as his body, had been gravely affected. That rings true.<br />
<br />
We moved back into the office house and my father continued the practice that
he had left four years earlier. But the cancer, first on his finger, spread and
slowly, he began to die. Bit by bit the doctors cut away my father. First they
took his finger. Then they took his right breast. And then he died.<br />
<br />
It has been almost sixty-five years since my father died. I have grown far from
that nine year old boy who couldn't understand why such a thing was possible.
And yet, after all this time, I still cry at the loss.<br />
<br />
On this day each year we are called upon to remember those who have died in the
service of their country. Politicians give speeches, flags are unfurled and hot
dogs are consumed.<br />
<br />
What we tend to forget is what General William Tecumseh Sherman once reminded a
group of young men. "War is hell." And the hell is for the living,
for those who survive the deaths of their beloveds as much as it is for those
who die on the fields of battle or in the hospitals. <br />
<br />
What we tend to forget is that war leaves lots of fatherless sons and
daughters. Today, for example, thousands of American and Iraqi <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Afghani sons and daughters will grow up
without their fathers and mothers. And for what?<br />
<br />
What we tend to forget are the children who are left behind. We forget that
fifty years from now there will be adults who still grieve for the loss of a
father or a mother--who still cry at the remembrance. Let us truly remember</span><br />
<br />Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-92145427727029511932009-05-22T12:55:00.001-07:002009-05-23T04:39:59.919-07:00In Defense of Torture<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CSarv%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader {margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:center 3.0in right 6.0in; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:22;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Sometimes I wonder if I have stepped into a perverse variation of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Can it actually be happening? Can it be that in this year 2009 there are people defending torture? Can it? </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">The former Vice President of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> defends pushing people’s heads under water until they almost drown. He defends stripping people naked and forcing them to undergo sleep and sensory deprivation. He defends using dogs, suffocation and other forms of “enhanced interrogation.” <span style=""> </span>He<span style=""> </span>supports torture of other human beings..</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">Now we know that this man, this former vice president of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> is crude. One merely needs to look at him to see that his ugliness is more than skin deep. The architects of torture must be crude. There is no room for sensitivity. This former vice president of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> was, after all, the man who told a Senator he disagreed with to “Go fuck yourself.”<span style=""> </span>And that on the floor of the United States Senate while this vice president was still serving as the presiding officer. What a disgusting little man he is. That the media was not up in arms about this is just another example of how ineffective the media have become.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">So let’s start with a basic. Torture of another human being is unacceptable. It is unacceptable morally. It is unacceptable according to the relatively civilized “rules of war” that have been supported by countries around the world, including our own.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">The lawyers of the last administration who have found the legal parsing to support torture are of the same category as the lawyers who helped build the legal system of the Third Reich. The Deputy Attorney General of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> famously declared that it would be justified to crush the testicles of a child to get information from his parent. To split hairs on torture is in the same genre as arguing the validity of race law and extermination. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">Marx once called this period in human history the pre history of human beings. When one listens to the little man who was once the vice president of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> we can see what he meant. This little man and all he represents is barbaric. That he still has an audience is both remarkable and tragic.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">It’s too bad that so much of the discussion has centered on the effectiveness of torture. That misses the point. The point is that if we begin to act like Nazi’s, just what is it that we are defending?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">On this Memorial Day weekend let us remember that in World War II, American and Allied forces died to destroy the very mentality that justified torture. Between fifty to seventy million people died in that struggle. There were almost a million American casualties in that war.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">Our men and women died in a struggle to defeat fascism and the barbarism of Hitler and his group of Nazis. People like the former vice president spit on the legacy of that war. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">Let us remember what this country is about. Let us remember those who have given their lives so that ugly little men cannot spread their barbarism. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span></p> <div menubottom="0" menuright="0" menutop="0" menuleft="0" activeid="-1" expanded="0" style="display: none;" id="divCleekiAttrib"></div>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-40290030921131195242009-03-22T16:57:00.000-07:002009-03-22T17:09:21.092-07:00Speaks for Itself<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Haaretz</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">, founded in 1918, is Israel's oldest newspaper. This appeared on March 20,2009. Once again the criticism of the Israeli army's attack on Gaza is greater in Israel than in the United States. That, in itself, is disgraceful.
<br /></span></span></span>
<br />
<br /><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2" class="t18B" valign="top"><span style="font-size:180%;">Shooting and crying'</span> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"><img src="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/images/0.gif" border="0" width="10" height="3" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" class="t11B" valign="top"> By <a href="mailto:contact@haaretz.co.il" class="tUbl2">Amos Harel</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"><img src="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/images/0.gif" border="0" width="10" height="5" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" height="1"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.haaretz.com/common/scripts/styles.css"> <span dir="ltr"><span class="tagTitle">Tags: </span><span><a class="tagsText" href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/tags/index.jhtml?tag=IDF" target="_top" onmouseover="this.className='tagBack tagsTextOver'" onmouseout="this.className='tagsText'">IDF</a></span><span>, <a class="tagsText" href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/tags/index.jhtml?tag=Israel+News" target="_top" onmouseover="this.className='tagBack tagsTextOver'" onmouseout="this.className='tagsText'">Israel News</a></span><span>, <a class="tagsText" href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/tags/index.jhtml?tag=Gaza" target="_top" onmouseover="this.className='tagBack tagsTextOver'" onmouseout="this.className='tagsText'">Gaza</a></span></span> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"> <span class="t15B"> </span>
<br /></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"><img src="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/images/0.gif" border="0" width="1" height="2" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /><span class="t13"> Less than a month after the end of Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, dozens of graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory program convened at Oranim Academic College in Kiryat Tivon. Since 1998 the program has prepared participants for what is considered meaningful military service. Many assume command positions in combat and other elite units of the Israel Defense Forces. The program's founder, Danny Zamir, still heads it today and also serves as deputy battalion commander in a reserve unit.
<br />
<br />The previous Friday, February 13, Zamir had invited combat soldiers and officers who graduated the program for a lengthy discussion of their experiences in Gaza. They spoke openly, but also with considerable frustration.
<br />
<br />Following are extensive excerpts from the transcript of the meeting, as it appears in the program's bulletin, Briza, which was published on Wednesday. The names of the soldiers have been changed to preserve their anonymity. The editors have also left out some of the details concerning the identity of the units that operated in a problematic way in Gaza. </span></span> </td></tr></tbody></table>
<br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="t13">Danny Zamir: "I don't intend for us to evaluate the achievements and the diplomatic-political significance of Operation Cast Lead this evening, nor need we deal with the systemic military aspect [of it]. However, discussion is necessary because this was, all told, an exceptional war action in terms of the history of the IDF, which has set new limits for the army's ethical code and that of the State of Israel as a whole.
<br />
<br /></span></span><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="t13">"This is an action that sowed massive destruction among civilians. It is not certain that it was possible do have done it differently, but ultimately we have emerged from this operation and are not facing real paralysis from the Qassams. It is very possible that we will repeat such an operation on a larger scale in the years to come, because the problem in the Gaza Strip is not simple and it is not at all certain that it has been solved. What we want this evening is to hear from the fighters."
<br />
<br />Aviv: "I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn't really like they say it is. It's more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.
<br />
<br />"Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn't get hurt and they wouldn't fire on us.
<br />
<br />"At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder ... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified - we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?
<br />
<br />"From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn't fled. I didn't really understand: On the one hand they don't really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they're telling us they hadn't fled so it's their fault ... This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: 'Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn't get out gets killed.'
<br />
<br />"I went to our soldiers and said, 'The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out ... This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, 'Why?' I said, 'What isn't clear? We don't want to kill innocent civilians.' He goes, 'Yeah? Anyone who's in there is a terrorist, that's a known fact.' I said, 'Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.' He says, 'That's clear,' and then his buddies join in: 'We need to murder any person who's in there. Yeah, any person who's in Gaza is a terrorist,' and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.
<br />
<br />"And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we'll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor - something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn't really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it's cool.
<br />
<br />"You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."
<br />
<br />"One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious - I don't know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood."
<br />
<br />Zamir: "I don't understand. Why did he shoot her?"
<br />
<br />Aviv: "That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her."
<br />
<br />Zvi: "Aviv's descriptions are accurate, but it's possible to understand where this is coming from. And that woman, you don't know whether she's ... She wasn't supposed to be there, because there were announcements and there were bombings. Logic says she shouldn't be there. The way you describe it, as murder in cold blood, that isn't right. It's known that they have lookouts and that sort of thing."
<br />
<br />Gilad: "Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the Second Lebanon War was the way the IDF goes in - with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers' lives by means of firepower. In the operation the IDF's losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed."
<br />
<br />Ram: "I serve in an operations company in the Givati Brigade. After we'd gone into the first houses, there was a house with a family inside. Entry was relatively calm. We didn't open fire, we just yelled at everyone to come down. We put them in a room and then left the house and entered it from a different lot. A few days after we went in, there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sharpshooters' position on the roof. The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go, and it was was okay and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."
<br />
<br />Question from the audience: "At what range was this?"
<br />
<br />Ram: "Between 100 and 200 meters, something like that. They had also came out of the house that he was on the roof of, they had advanced a bit and suddenly he saw then, people moving around in an area where they were forbidden to move around. I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way."
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<br />Yuval Friedman (chief instructor at the Rabin program): "Wasn't there a standing order to request permission to open fire?"
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<br />Ram: "No. It exists, beyond a certain line. The idea is that you are afraid that they are going to escape from you. If a terrorist is approaching and he is too close, he could blow up the house or something like that."
<br />
<br />Zamir: "After a killing like that, by mistake, do they do some sort of investigation in the IDF? Do they look into how they could have corrected it?"
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<br />Ram: "They haven't come from the Military Police's investigative unit yet. There hasn't been any ... For all incidents, there are individual investigations and general examinations, of all of the conduct of the war. But they haven't focused on this specifically."
<br />
<br />Moshe: "The attitude is very simple: It isn't pleasant to say so, but no one cares at all. We aren't investigating this. This is what happens during fighting and this is what happens during routine security."
<br />
<br />Ram: "What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that.
<br />
<br />"There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders - something about the history of Israel's fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and ... their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and 'explainer,' I attempted to talk about the politics - the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams."
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<br />Zamir: "I would like to ask the pilots who are here, Gideon and Yonatan, to tell us a little about their perspective. As an infantryman, this has always interested me. How does it feel when you bomb a city like that?"
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<br />Gideon: "First of all, about what you have said concerning the crazy amounts of firepower: Right in the first foray in the fighting, the quantities were very impressive, very large, and this is mainly what sent all the Hamasniks into hiding in the deepest shelters and kept them from showing their faces until some two weeks after the fighting.
<br />
<br />"In general the way that it works for us, just so you will understand the differences a bit, is that at night I would come to the squadron, do one foray in Gaza and go home to sleep. I go home to sleep in Tel Aviv, in my warm bed. I'm not stuck in a bed in the home of a Palestinian family, so life is a little better.
<br />
<br />"When I'm with the squadron, I don't see a terrorist who is launching a Qassam and then decide to fly out to get him. There is a whole system that supports us, that serves as eyes, ears and intelligence for every plane that takes off, and creates more and more targets in real-time, of one level of legitimacy or another. In any case, I try to believe that these are targets [determined according to] the highest possible level of legitimacy.
<br />
<br />"They dropped leaflets over Gaza and would sometimes fire a missile from a helicopter into the corner of some house, just to shake up the house a bit so everyone inside would flee. These things worked. The families came out, and really people [i.e., soldiers] did enter houses that were pretty empty, at least of innocent civilians. From this perspective it works.
<br />
<br />"In any case, I arrive at the squadron, I get a target with a description and coordinates, and basically just make sure it isn't within the line of our forces. I look at the picture of the house I am suppose to attack, I see that it matches reality, I take off, I push the button and the bomb takes itself exactly to within one meter of the target itself."
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<br />Zamir: "Among the pilots, is there also talk or thoughts of remorse? For example, I was terribly surprised by the enthusiasm surrounding the killing of the Gaza traffic police on the first day of the operation: They took out 180 traffic cops. As a pilot, I would have questioned that."
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<br />Gideon: "There are two parts to this. Tactically speaking, you call them 'police.' In any case, they are armed and belong to Hamas ... During better times, they take Fatah people and throw them off the roofs and see what happens.
<br />
<br />"With regard to the thoughts, you sit with the squadron and there are lots of discussions about the value-related significance of the fighting, about what we are doing; there is a lot to talk about. From the moment you start the plane's engine until the moment you turn it off, all of your thoughts, all of your concentration and all of your attention are on the mission you have to carry out. If you have an unjustified doubt, you're liable to cause a far greater screw-up and knock down a school with 40 children. If the building I hit isn't the one I am supposed to hit, but rather a house with our guys inside - the price of the mistake is very, very high."
<br />
<br />Question from the audience: "Was there anyone in the squadron who didn't push the button, who thought twice?"
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<br />Gideon: "That question should be addressed to those involved in the helicopter operation, or to the guys who see what they do. With the weapons I used, my ability to make a decision that contradicts what they told me up to that point is zero. I dispatch the bomb from a range within which I can see the entire Gaza Strip. I also see Haifa, I also see Sinai, but it's more or less the same. It's from really far away."
<br />
<br />Yossi: "I am a platoon sergeant in an operations company of the Paratroops Brigade. We were in a house and discovered a family inside that wasn't supposed to be there. We assembled them all in the basement, posted two guards at all times and made sure they didn't make any trouble. Gradually, the emotional distance between us broke down - we had cigarettes with them, we drank coffee with them, we talked about the meaning of life and the fighting in Gaza. After very many conversations the owner of the house, a man of 70-plus, was saying it's good we are in Gaza and it's good that the IDF is doing what it is doing.
<br />
<br />"The next day we sent the owner of the house and his son, a man of 40 or 50, for questioning. The day after that, we received an answer: We found out that both are political activists in Hamas. That was a little annoying - that they tell you how fine it is that you're here and good for you and blah-blah-blah, and then you find out that they were lying to your face the whole time.
<br />
<br />"What annoyed me was that in the end, after we understood that the members of this family weren't exactly our good friends and they pretty much deserved to be forcibly ejected from there, my platoon commander suggested that when we left the house, we should clean up all the stuff, pick up and collect all the garbage in bags, sweep and wash the floor, fold up the blankets we used, make a pile of the mattresses and put them back on the beds."
<br />
<br />Zamir: "What do you mean? Didn't every IDF unit that left a house do that?"
<br />
<br />Yossi: "No. Not at all. On the contrary: In most of the houses graffiti was left behind and things like that."
<br />
<br />Zamir: "That's simply behaving like animals."
<br />
<br />Yossi: "You aren't supposed to be concentrating on folding blankets when you're being shot at."
<br />
<br />Zamir: "I haven't heard all that much about you being shot at. It's not that I'm complaining, but if you've spent a week in a home, clean up your filth."
<br />
<br />Aviv: "We got an order one day: All of the equipment, all of the furniture - just clean out the whole house. We threw everything, everything, out of the windows to make room. The entire contents of the house went flying out the windows."
<br />
<br />Yossi: "There was one day when a Katyusha, a Grad, landed in Be'er Sheva and a mother and her baby were moderately to seriously injured. They were neighbors of one of my soldiers. We heard the whole story on the radio, and he didn't take it lightly - that his neighbors were seriously hurt. So the guy was a bit antsy, and you can understand him. To tell a person like that, 'Come on, let's wash the floor of the house of a political activist in Hamas, who has just fired a Katyusha at your neighbors that has amputated one of their legs' - this isn't easy to do, especially if you don't agree with it at all. When my platoon commander said, 'Okay, tell everyone to fold up blankets and pile up mattresses,' it wasn't easy for me to take. There was lot of shouting. In the end I was convinced and realized it really was the right thing to do. Today I appreciate and even admire him, the platoon commander, for what happened there. In the end I don't think that any army, the Syrian army, the Afghani army, would wash the floor of its enemy's houses, and it certainly wouldn't fold blankets and put them back in the closets."
<br />
<br />Zamir: "I think it would be important for parents to sit here and hear this discussion. I think it would be an instructive discussion, and also very dismaying and depressing. You are describing an army with very low value norms, that's the truth ... I am not judging you and I am not complaining about you. I'm just reflecting what I'm feeling after hearing your stories. I wasn't in Gaza, and I assume that among reserve soldiers the level of restraint and control is higher, but I think that all in all, you are reflecting and describing the kind of situation we were in.
<br />
<br />"After the Six-Day War, when people came back from the fighting, they sat in circles and described what they had been through. For many years the people who did this were said to be 'shooting and crying.' In 1983, when we came back from the Lebanon War, the same things were said about us. We need to think about the events we have been through. We need to grapple with them also, in terms of establishing a standard or different norms.
<br />
<br />"It is quite possible that Hamas and the Syrian army would behave differently from me. The point is that we aren't Hamas and we aren't the Syrian army or the Egyptian army, and if clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren't representative of the whole spectrum in the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population - what are we expecting? To whom are we complaining?
<br />
<br />"As reservists we don't take relate seriously to the orders of the regional brigades. We let the old people go through and we let families go through. Why kill people when it's clear to you that they are civilians? Which aspect of Israel's security will be harmed, who will be harmed? Exercise judgment, be human." </span></span> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="3"><span style="font-size:130%;"><img src="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/images/0.gif" border="0" width="1" height="10" /></span></td></tr></tbody></table>
<br />Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-85675485035533995652009-01-08T15:13:00.000-08:002009-01-09T06:36:10.048-08:00Grandpa, You Can Come If You Don't Talk About War<span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">I am about to head out to New Haven. It is always a pleasure. Not New Haven, but my daughter, Hira, my son in law, Todd, and my five year old grand daughter, Lucy. It's only two hours which is much better than the cross country trip that I would regularly take when they lived in Seattle.<br /><br />This time is different. I was to drive Vish, the father of Hira's best friend and the grandfather of Ruby, who is a year and a half. But Vish just called to say that he has a flu. It has been going around. This is a possible scenario: Ruby got it and gave it to her dad. Her dad gave it to Lucy at a Christmas party we had. Lucy had a cough and a fever and finally got on antibiotics and is getting over it. And now Vish may have it and can start the cycle all over again.<br /><br />Of course it's different when you have kids. Ailments go around and around and around. But neither Vish nor I wish to be the Typhoid Mary's for our respective grand children.<br /><br />Soooo, I am encouraging my friend not to go. Usually I go for more than a weekend. And I thought about not going--for a millisecond. I called Hira and told her of the situation. There was a sound from the background--a Lucy sound.<br /><br />Hira reported. "Lucy says you can come but you can't talk about war."<br /><br />Don't get me wrong. Lucy loves her grandpa (who she sometimes calls "grandpoo"). I feel confident of that. That confidence is borne of the fact that she does not mince her words.<br /><br />Lucy hates war. She hates everything that is connected to it. She hates the very mention of it. And there is nothing ideological about that.<br /><br />I tell her stories. In fact I have been telling one that involves some of her stuffed animals and a few others to boot. I do not fill these stories with killing. In fact they are very benign. Yet, every time there is something that is scary in the very least, Lucy will tell me to stop.<br /><br />I don't know when the issue of war entered into our discussion or stories. I can't even imagine. But I am sure there was something, sometime, somewhere. Maybe it was when I was telling her about the Civil War. And, perhaps, the fact that I can't remember is more a commentary on me than Lucy.<br /><br />Fact is that my five year old grand daughter is very clear. She wants nothing to do with anything involving killing or war. And when she is clear she makes that clarity known.<br /><br />Some people might smile and say that it is sweet that a child wants to avoid violence. Some people might say that this is something that she will outgrow as she learns what the "real" world is all about.<br /><br />I say that my five year old grand daughter has a more civilized view of the world than most of the adults who are running it. For repulsion at the very thought of killing other human beings is the most human of sentiments. War is the sanctioned murder of others. It is barbaric and I am amazed and pleased that my grand daughter can feel and see this. Let us hope that the five year olds will run the world someday.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-89498761629140504592009-01-03T09:51:00.000-08:002009-02-26T14:54:17.195-08:00I am a Jew<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CSarv%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader {margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:center 3.0in right 6.0in; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:28;"><span style=""> </span>
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>I am a Jew. Always have been. I never went to Hebrew school. I never got Bar Mitzvahed. But I am a Jew, nevertheless. In fact, being a secular Jew is as much a part of the Jewish tradition as being a devout Jew.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>For me being a Jew is not about religion. Religion is a very personal thing. I never have been into organized religion. Never did like the idea of people telling me what to believe or not believe. Never did like rules even if they had been around for a few thousand years.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>As I get older I am able to define just what it is about me that is Jewish, for it is ridiculous to say or think that culture makes no difference in the character of a person. <span style=""> </span>More and more I see that there are aspects of Jewish culture that are part of who I am. Recent events have brought this to the fore.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>As the armed forces of the State of Israel bombed and machine gunned people in <st1:city><st1:place>Gaza</st1:place></st1:city> I felt revolted. As the armed forces of the State of Israel made it impossible for hospitals to treat wounded, as the armed forces of the State of Israel blew apart women and children in the name of retribution, I felt sick to my stomach.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>So let me contradict myself and propose a rule. <i style="">Under no circumstances do you murder women and children.</i> I am really not interested in the reasons. We Jews are smart. We have a history of intellectual discussion. This is rooted in the Talmud itself. Maybe that’s why there are so many Jewish lawyers.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>We also have a healing tradition—a tradition of compassion. Maybe that’s why there are so many Jewish doctors.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>As Jews we have been subjected to millennia of persecution. Mothers have been killed in front of their children. Jewish children have been gassed, burned, shot and tortured for thousands of years.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>As a Jew, I cannot sanction the murder of women and children, no matter what excuse. I cannot support the killing of women and children at any time in any place. How can we?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>Where is our morality? Where is our memory? Have the echoes of the machine guns at Baba Yar or <st1:place>Auschwitz</st1:place> faded out so far that we don’t realize that murdering of innocents is unforgivable?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>There is a story of an ancient rabbi who sat with his students in an olive grove. He asked his students when we know the difference between dark and light.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>One student answered, “When we can tell the difference between a donkey and a camel.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>The rabbi shook his head.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>“Light is when we can distinguish the olive trees against the horizon,” another student said.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Again the rabbi shook his head.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>The students were getting agitated. “Is it when we can see our hands in front of our face? Is that when we can distinguish light from darkness, rabbi?” asked a third student.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Again the rabbi shook his head.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>“Tell us rabbi,” the students chorused. “When can we tell the difference between dark and light?”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>The old man pointed to the horizon and then to his hands. “It is neither there nor here,” he said. “Light is when we see ourselves in others. All else is darkness.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>This, to me, is the essence of being a Jew. Even as we are outsiders we can see ourselves in others. <i style="">Because</i> we have been outsiders we can see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. For me, compassion is the essence of being a Jew. In that sense it is no wonder that Christ comes out of the Jewish tradition.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>But governments have nothing to do with compassion. They never have. And armies are made for killing, whether they are Russian or German, Israeli or American. Finally, like that Dylan song, every country thinks they have God on their side. How many thousands of years have people slaughtered each other thinking that God was on their side?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Marx once spoke of this period in which we live as “prehistory”. It is prehistory when grown up human beings can actually justify the state murder of thousands.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Of course, the continual state sanctioned murder of women and children in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> is a modern atrocity that keeps on being renewed. This, too, is an abomination.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>But the calculated Israeli destruction of people in <st1:city><st1:place>Gaza</st1:place></st1:city> has a different flavor for me. It is the constantly perpetuated myth that the state of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> is somehow representative of Jewish culture. It is the constant lie that the State of Israel represents all Jews.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>The State of Israel is a state. Like all states, it has no heart and can be cynical and destructive. And now it is engaging in the killing of women and children. It does not represent me. Nor does it represent what I love about the Jewish tradition—compassion, sensitivity and wisdom.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Just as the Vietnamese were able to distinguish between the people of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the government which napalmed their population, so I distinguish between the State of Israel and the people of that country.<span style=""> </span>Apparently there is more serious protest in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> about the actions of the government than there is in this country. How strange is that?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>I really don’t care “who started it.” There is something very childish about that argument. I mean really childish. Just yesterday I saw two brothers, age five and six fighting. “He started it,” said the five year old, but the fight was in the relationship not the acts.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Can we learn nothing from five year olds? Look at our family. Jews and Muslims are of one blood. We are brothers and are fighting a family feud that began a very long time ago. It is time to grow up.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Of course the irony is that Jews and Muslims have lived together in peace for quite some time before this last century. While the Inquisitors of Christian Spain were burning Jews at the stake, the Caliphs of Bagdad welcomed Jews into the civilized culture of their world.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>I am not a pacifist by belief. In fact, I try not to believe in anything and really don’t hold much with the notion of faith. But in this day and age it is insane for states to operate as they have since <st1:place>Babylonia</st1:place>.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>We, in this country, are emerging from an eight year period of darkness. Millions of people adapted the slogan of “Yes We Can”. Like all slogans that can be cheapened and we Americans can turn anything into a bubble gum ad. But there was something much deeper in this last election. It is the possibility that people can start thinking in new ways.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>Maybe, in this tenth year of the twenty first century we can start thinking and acting in new ways. Maybe we can start to listen to our hearts. Maybe we can stop justifying the unjustifiable. Maybe.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-68462435494223651472008-11-05T12:44:00.000-08:002008-11-05T12:51:34.519-08:00Loud Hallelujahs Let Us Sing<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CSARVAN%7E1%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceName"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceType"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="State"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Never has history been so alive for me as at this very moment. Thomas Jefferson’s campaign song has been ringing in my ears for over a year now. I have been waiting to sing it. Now I can: <span style=""> </span>“The gloomy night before us flies, the reign of darkness now is over…”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>We have been in darkness these past eight years. It has been a darkness of fear and suspicion. Fear of terror. Terror of fear. Fear of Muslims or those who look slightly different. Fear of those who are not “real Americans” as the losing Vice Presidential candidate put it. Fear of foreigners as if we were not all born of foreigners. It has been a darkness of division and exclusion. It has been a darkness where politicians have manipulated our lowest animal instincts—our lizard brains. Our fears.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>We have been in darkness. Our congressional representatives in both parties have collaborated in the invasion of a country that posed no threat to us. We have watched as sons and daughters, father and mothers, sisters and brothers both American and Iraqi have been maimed and killed—for no good reason. We have watched super rich corporations get richer and richer in a war that has drained us dry. We have watched tax policies that grant the super wealthy tax cuts on a theory that was outdated seventy-five years ago. “Trickle down”??!! That went out with Herbert Hoover only to be resurrected by this moribund outgoing administration.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>We have been in darkness. Not even during the notoriously corrupt administration of Warren G. Harding have the corporate partners of the ruling party so blatantly robbed the public coffers as they have these past eight years.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>We have been in darkness where words have lost their meaning. “Freedom” has come to mean invasion and war. “<st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Liberty</st1:city></st1:place>” has come to mean government sanctioned torture and spying upon citizens without cause or legal permission. And “Prosperity” has come to mean growing indebtedness, crumbling roads and schools, unemployment, and economic collapse. Even George Orwell could not parody these past eight years.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>We have been in darkness.<span style=""> </span>And yet with darkness there is light. Always there is light, burning even brighter for the darkness itself.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>We Americans have a history of independence. As a country we were born in a revolution for independence. We have a history of resisting attempts to tell us what to do or who to be. We are a nation of uprooted people. We are a nation of strangers in a strange land. Most of us are descended from folks who pulled up stakes in their homeland to seek a new life in a new world. Or we were ripped from our homelands to servitude across the vast oceans that divide North America from <st1:place st="on">Africa</st1:place>.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Yet, for ninety years after the first guns of the American Revolution were fired at <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Lexington</st1:city></st1:place>, the curse of slavery lay across us like a shadow. Our liberty could not be liberty while millions were enslaved.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>There is no greater division in a country than civil war. The War came and slavery was abolished. <span style=""> </span>It was a long and bloody war of brother against brother. And, at the helm of the Union government was Abraham Lincoln, a self educated lawyer from <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">Illinois</st1:state></st1:place>. It was <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Lincoln</st1:city></st1:place> at his second inaugural address at the end of the War that called for “malice to none and charity to all.”<span style=""> </span>It was <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Lincoln</st1:city></st1:place> that called for healing after so many anguished years of death and division.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Today we stand divided. No civil war has torn us apart, but divided we are. This last campaign showed that. On one side there was an appeal to the “real” Americans. On one side there were as an article in Harper’s Magazine pointed out, more slime and lies than in any other campaign. On one side there was fear. There was hatred and there was anger. When the Republican candidate gave his concession speech, the crowd booed more than once at the mention of Obama. There was hatred. There was anger.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>On the other side, Barak Obama, a Black man, called for unity. He has called for a gathering of our people to solve the issues that need to be solved. He called upon our country as a whole to realize its potential—to recognize its unique history and move into the unknown. For moving into the unknown is part of our history from the gates of Ellis Island to the shores of Plymouth, from the slave ships at Charleston harbor to the “prairie schooners” <span style=""> </span>of Nebraska.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Barak Obama has consented to represent the best in us. And we have responded in kind.<span style=""> </span>There is no arrogance here but the greatest humility which is probably why he is the most unique political leader we have had since <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Lincoln</st1:city></st1:place>. President-Elect Obama has recognized his rendezvous with history profoundly. He nurtures the empowerment of an entire people. “Yes we can.” This is not just a slogan of a political campaign. It is something much larger even than the man himself. And he seems to clearly know that as well.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Never have I felt greater hope and excitement about our country than I do at this moment. Franklin D. Roosevelt took office at a time of crisis. “The only thing we have to fear,” he said, “is fear, itself.”
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>We are now in a moment of crisis. Yet there is a wave of hope throughout this land.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the constrictor. Fear is the opposite of love. President-elect Barak Obama is leading us out of fear by recognizing that we can change our lives---and ourselves. And the only way that healing and unity can occur is if people begin talking and listening and reaching out to each other. That can happen only on the basis of expansion and love. What a wondrous time this is!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Of course there are still private interests. Fact is, however, that ninety-nine per cent of the American people are potential friends. Fact is that improved quality of life is something that benefits us all.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>This is not just about a man. It is about what that man has taken upon himself to represent. And that defines the greatness of the man.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>Our history has been linked to song. At the <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Lincoln</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Monument</st1:placetype></st1:place> in 1963 Martin Luther King rang out the words “free at last! Free at last! Praise God almighty, we’re free at last.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span>When the powerful British army confronted the rag tag armies of the American colonists, another song rang out. William Billings of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Boston</st1:city></st1:place> was a classical American misfit. He had one eye, was lame in one leg, had a deformed arm and wrote the battle song of the American Revolution, “<st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Chester</st1:city></st1:place>.”<span style=""> </span>He wrote of how <span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">British<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><span style=""> </span><i style="">“vet'rans flee before our youth,<o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><i style=""><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">And gen'rals yield to beardless boys.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /><i style=""><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><span style=""> </span>Today is a victory for the young in heart as well as young in age.
<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">
<br /><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">The song concluded. It rings down to all of us.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i style=""><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">What grateful off'ring shall we bring,<o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i style=""><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">What shall we render to the Lord?<o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i style=""><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Loud hallelujahs let us sing</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /><i style=""><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i style=""><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><span style=""> </span>From the mountains of Vermont to the harbor of San Diego, from churches, synagogues and mosques, from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the Finger Lakes of New York--Loud hallelujahs let us sing. Amen!<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-19043615048350486442008-11-03T12:29:00.000-08:002008-11-07T15:23:23.450-08:00We Have Reasons to Be Proud<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CSARVAN%7E1%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceName"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceType"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader {margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:center 3.0in right 6.0in; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an excellent chance that a majority of the people in the <st1:country-region st="on">United States of America</st1:country-region> will have elected a Black man President of the <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">United States</st1:country-region></st1:place>.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an amazingly good chance that the people of the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> will have elected someone whose father was African and whose mother was Caucasian.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>By the morning of November 5, 2008, there is a wildly wonderful possibility that the people of the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> will elect someone who grew up in a non traditional family. He was raised by his single mother and his grandmother.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>How far we have come in such a short period of time.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"> <span style=""> </span>I remember my first visit to my relatives in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New Orleans</st1:place></st1:city>. It was in 1953 and I was fourteen. It was the first time I had ever seen the segregated south. There were water fountains for “Colored” and water fountains for “White”. There were adjustable seats in the trolleys where the rear section was “Colored” and the forward section was “White”. It seemed pretty stupid to me at the time and I liked to hear the story about how my grandma and her younger sister would come down South to visit and that the two old ladies would always march down to the “Colored” section and sit down. Nobody tried to tell my Grandma what to do.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">It would be two years after my visit that Emmett Till, a fourteen year old Black boy from Chicago was beaten, shot and killed in Money, Mississippi. His crime was to have whistled at a white woman. He was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable. It was a a ring that he wore that provided clear identification.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>It was only a few years earlier that the president of the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> abolished segregation in the military. Black soldiers did not mix with white before then. The catalyst for this change happened during the Korean War. A platoon of Black soldiers took a hill. Their white soldiers thought they were North Korean and shot them down.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>A year after my visit to New Orleans the United States Supreme Court struck down segregation in the schools and Jim Crow began to die. It was hastened on its way by a whole generation of young folks, black and white, marching, sitting, , waiting for service in restaurants, getting people to vote. But uniquely, the leadership of this movement was mainly young black men.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The late Chou En Lai, Premier of the <st1:placename st="on">Peoples</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Republic</st1:placetype> of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=""> </span>was a most sophisticated and well educated man. He had attended the Sorbonne in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:city>. He knew a great deal about world history. A few years ago, some interviewer asked Chou whether the French Revolution had any effect on <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the world. He thought for a moment and answered, “It’s too soon to tell.” The French Revolution had been around for almost two hundred years. The Chinese have a different historical perspective.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>A hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that a Negro had no rights that a White man was bound to respect. That was the law of the land.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>This same Supreme Court decision held that all people of African descent that were brought as slaves could never be citizens of the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. It held that the United States Congress could not prohibit slavery in the federal territories that would become states. That was the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court. That was the law of the land one hundred and fifty years ago. Some perspective: when I was born there were people alive who were alive when the Dred Scott decision was made. Not so long ago.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Less than a decade after this decision, slavery was over. Less than a decade later, Congress and the country amended the Constitution<span style=""> </span>extended the right to vote regardless of “previous condition of servitude.”
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>How fast things change. How fast people drop old beliefs.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>And then there’s the family. In that dulled period of the 1950’s the happy family was all over the place, on t.v., the movies.<span style=""> </span>Divorces were much rarer then.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>I went to a wonderfully nurturing very small camp called Journey’s End Farm. There were rarely more than twenty-four of us but there were a significant number of kids from “broken homes”. (My home was broken when I was nine and my dad died).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Single mothers were off my radar when I was a kid. With the exception of my own, of course. There just weren’t too many of them around.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>When I was a kid the one thing that was quite a bit weirder than “broken homes” was “mixed marriages”. My step father had a very close friend, Ray Stowe. He was a direct descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote <i style="">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i>. His wife, Bea, was Black. I think that they did not have kids because of just how complicated that could be. Even my open minded mother would lower her voice when talking about “mixed marriages” like it was a problem to be endured by those engaging in it.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>We, the people of the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> by the morning of November 5, 2008 very likely will have elected a man born of a marriage between a Black man and a white woman. We will have elected a man brought up by a single mother and a grandmother.
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>More than this, we will have elected a man who rose like an American myth through his hard work and persevering to transcend and to help us transcend our false divisions. This truly is an independently tough human being. (The other presidential candidate has rarely done anything new. I mean, after all, he went into the family business of war. No originality there. McCain and Grandsons—Killers of Men. Some Maverick. Raise the Flag. My Country Right or Wrong. All That Jazz.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>It is, perhaps, the unique greatness of the man that allows us to drop our old biases. It is the individuality and honesty of the man that touches us before we even notice the color of his skin. His intelligence and sincerity are intelligent and sincere.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Point is that millions upon millions of voices will be raised to elect a man president who would not have been able to sit in a Woolworth lunch counter if he had been born forty years earlier.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>We have got to this point, so many tens of millions of us. No matter what the results of November 4, we have got to this point. And for that we can be proud of ourselves as Americans.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-24309958272498216142008-10-07T11:50:00.000-07:002008-10-08T07:11:31.002-07:00The Gloomy Night Before Us Flies<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CSARVAN%7E1%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><u1:p></u1:p><u1:p></u1:p>We in Europe are at a loss to understand what is going in the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">USA</st1:place></st1:country-region></st1:place></st1:country-region>. We can only think that the American people are being fed pure propaganda, as was the case in Hitler's <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region></st1:place></st1:country-region> prior to the 2nd World War, and that because of this their ability to make reasoned and educated judgments has suffered a serious setback. Sadly, this is the only explanation that many of us can find. I, for one, find it almost beyond belief that Bush was re-elected. I would have thought that one term would have been more than enough. To me he is a madman in a Peter Sellers movie…..<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Poet In Residence<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:7;">[The above appeared as a comment to the previous article on this blog, “Feeding the Wolves, 2008”]</span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-->
<br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <u1:p></u1:p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><u1:p></u1:p><u1:p></u1:p><u1:p></u1:p><u1:p></u1:p>Dear Poet in Residence,<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">First, I want to say what a gas it is that we have already met. Both of us write haiku for the “Autumn Haiku” (which followed the “Summer Haiku”) site. I assume that’s where you found this site. So here we are, two poets mixed up in the center of things, trying to make sense out of insanity .Maybe politics really is too important to leave the politicians. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">No Peter Sellers movie ever captured the loonyness of this moment. We have, I think, reached the point in this country where a satirist might merely be a cold reporter of the news. That’s why John Stewart’s show is so popular. He’s not making jokes. He’s just putting out the facts, usually without any opinion. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">It’s hard to keep a sane head in this madness. And by madness I mean a presidential candidate making outright lies again and again. And these are lies that he knows are lies. The Republican candidate has lied about everything: his own record on regulation, his position on the economy. I don’t ever remember a presidential campaign where one of the candidates created such a litany of lies. And then, with the Vice Presidential candidate, the lying escalates. The Governor of Alaska is lying about her record as a “reformer”, “maverick” whatever. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">Now, these two Republican candidates have expanded their level of lies to attack Barak Obama. It is almost at the point where I hesitate even to give examples. Like Obama never advocated sex education for five year olds. Jesus! Peter Sellers could not have created a tragic-comedy as powerfully unreal as this reality. Not even Bertholt Brecht could do that. And we are living in it.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">After saying all this, I can’t imagine living in a more exciting time. No, I don’t think that Chinese wish, “may you live in interesting times,” is a curse. I think it is a blessing. I feel blessed to live in such times as these. And in such a place as this. Who needs boredom?<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I used to think that it was overboard when people made analogies between us in the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region></st1:place></st1:country-region> and the Germans in Nazi Germany. Of late, I have played with that analogy myself.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">There are some similarities. I don’t mean the similarities of storm troopers knocking at the door and arresting Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, Liberals. We are very far from that even with the present administration’s disregard for constitutional process. There are real similarities between what is going on in this country and what went on in Nazi Germany. But it is not the concentration camps nor the secret police.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">This country has invaded another country that posed it no threat. It has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people for a war whose very reasons for existence evaporated years ago. Nazi Germany invaded other countries on the pretext that its self interest was threatened. There’s a similarity.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">Young German boys bought the bullshit and died thinking they were protecting the homeland. How many American young men and young women have died thinking they were protecting our homeland? Homeland Security? <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">Another similarity is the big lie. The Nazi’s were really good at that. They would consciously create total lies and it seemed like a lot of folks believed them. Again, how many times does the Republican presidential candidate have to repeat the explicit and conscious lie that Barak Obama wants to teach sex education to five year olds? And the repetition gets stated over and over on the satellite propaganda machines of the media like Fox News. And what clever Republican Party Ph.D. in Psychological Manipulation thought of that wonderful way to link a child sexually to a Black Man?<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">The big lie is now the stock in trade of the Republican political machine and its candidates. Every time you think they can’t get any lower---they do.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">Another similarity between the Nazi’s and our government is that it is totally of, by, and for giant corporations. The biggest economic beneficiaries of the Hitler years were the loyal corporations. And today? And here.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">One other similarity between Nazi Germany and my country today is the manipulation of fear. There is no question that fear was the giant motivator in the Nazi invasions of other countries. Fear that the Germans would be brought to their knees again like they were after World War I. Fear that other countries feared them and would attack them. Fear. How many times did speakers use the word “terror” or “terrorist” at the Republican presidential nominating convention of 2004? This whole administration is based on fear—of terrorists—of losing your way of life—of gays—of [pick your own]. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">But there the similarities end. Karl Marx once said, “history repeats itself. The first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.” So you look at the Gotterdammerung of Nazi Germany—the fires that consumed a once proud people and raged into a Holocaust. An extermination of millions of people orchestrated by an intensely charismatic Fuehrer and his cohorts who consciously mobilized the power of the dark force in the psychic traditions of a people. Here truly was a Knight of Evil. This was tragedy beyond tragedy.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">John McCain as the Fuehrer? That’s farce. What a sad and querulous old man who probably knows next to nothing about what moves him. This is farce. Or how about George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler? Dick Cheney would, I guess, love to be able to be a Fuehrer. But would you buy a used car from a face like that?<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I love this country so very much. My study of American history was a labor of love from undergraduate school through a doctorate. Goose stepping is about as non American as you can get. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">There is a strong element of truth about the pioneer spirit. Not the Fourth of July day speech pioneer spirit. Fact is that all of our ancestors are immigrants. These were two groups of folks. There were those of us whose ancestors pulled up their roots and chose to enter a new world—an unknown world. There were those who were pulled up by the roots and brought in chains to this new world. All of us and our families have been strangers in a strange land and I do believe we carry that spirit with us. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I do believe that the American people have a short bullshit span. In some ways Americans are as hard to corral as cats. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">We Americans have been through periods of temporary insanity before. Take the McCarthy period. Please. I mean that guy really was leading the country with lie after lie after lie…….and fear. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I was a teenager during the McCarthy period and my parents were leftists. They were radicals. They were Reds. So I started off with a head start identifying the insanity. These were people I loved and they loved me. My stepfather, the guiding political light of the family, was a stubborn, bullheaded, dedicated, totally honest and caring human being. I guess he had to be single minded. The pressure during this period on anybody slightly left of center was great. And he lost job after job---as a professor of music, no less—after the F.B.I. whispered in the college president’s ear. Subversion of music was a serious thing back in the 1950’s. So I had a good view of the 1950’s madness that was quite different than that which people saw on the television program, “Happy Days”. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I was the enemy. I was the person that was going to subvert the government and destroy democracy. I was something to be feared. I, as the popular anti Communist t.v.show titled, “led three lives” or certainly two.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">And yet I had friends. I connected with the folks in my class. We respected each other as human beings. We had proms. We all knew each other since the class only had fifty four people. There was sanity in the midst of the insanity.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">By the time I graduated college, the 1960’s were dawning. It was like the heart of the country had opened up again. Where people were terrified to open their mouths in the 1950’s, ten years later, people were growing in the streets to express their opposition to American intervention in <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region></st1:country-region></st1:place>.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">There was a time in 1960, when I could actually feel a new and fresh wind blowing over the land. It was not, by the way, created by John F. Kennedy <i>et familia</i>, but was definitely used by them. In the midst of a horrendous war, it was the dawning of a new time. Aquarius or whatever.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I feel that dawning now. Thomas Jefferson was running against John Adams in 1800. <st1:place st="on"><st1:place st="on">Adams</st1:place></st1:place>, despite his other attributes, was overtaken by fear of “the others”—in this case the French and their sympathizers at home. (Remember how Congress changed the name of French fries to freedom fries in 2003 when the French wouldn’t support the invasion of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region></st1:place></st1:country-region>?) So the <st1:place st="on"><st1:place st="on">Adams</st1:place></st1:place> administration, out of fear of others, passed a series of acts. These were the Alien and Sedition Acts, which provided, among other things that newspaper editors could be thrown in jail for criticizing the president. This was another period of insanity. <st1:place st="on"><st1:place st="on">Adams</st1:place></st1:place> lost the election.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">There was a campaign song in the presidential campaign of Thomas Jefferson. I have sung the first verse so many times with glee over the past several years. It begins,<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">“The gloomy night before us flies<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">The reign of darkness now is over<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Its gags inquisitors and spies<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Its herd of harpies is no more.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u1:p></u1:p>Rejoice <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Columbia</st1:place></st1:city></st1:place></st1:city>’s sons, rejoice<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">To tyrants never bend the knee<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">But join with hand and heart and voice<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">For Jefferson and <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Liberty</st1:place></st1:city></st1:place></st1:city>.”<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">Now the gloomy night is fleeing. The spark that has ignited in this country cannot be quenched. It cannot be quenched even if Obama was not elected. Here another song wills to mind. Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” about the murder of a Black South African leader by the government:<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">You can blow out a candle<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">But you can’t blow out a fire<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Once the flames begin to catch<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">The wind will blow it higher.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">The candidacy of Barak Obama has come to represent something infinitely larger than the man himself. It has come represent a swelling group of Americans that are tired of division. It has come to represent people who are feeling the possibility of empowerment. And I definitely include myself in that swelling group. It is not a group of others. It is a group of <i>us. </i>It is a group of people that recognize that the overwhelming majority of Americans are potential friends. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I am writing this before the second debate between the Republican presidential candidate and Barak Obama. Chances are that the Republican candidate will continue to lie blatantly. (I must say that there are few times in my life when I recall anybody, other than a kid worried about being punished, consciously lying openly to my face). The latest lie is that Obama pals around with terrorists because he sat on a community group board with Bill Ayers, a former Weatherman who committed his violent acts when Obama was eight. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">Yes, there are people who believe the lies. But, like <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Lincoln</st1:place></st1:city></st1:place></st1:city> said, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And less and less people are being fooled. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I am writing this at a time when the middle is disappearing. There really are choices this time around. And sure Obama has corporate supporters, but even many of them have not benefited by the mayhem of these past eight years. We are part of those legions of supporters that are not corporate but just folks. Not the “just folks” of the Republicans that excludes other folks who are not like them. I am talking about the “just folks” that all of us are. There are a lot of us.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I am writing this a time when there is something much larger than Barak Obama happening. And I think he has the wisdom, experience and humility to recognize that. That is the kind of leader we need now.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I am writing this at a time when millions of Americans are looking for ways to change their lives. They recognize that our government is founded to “Promote the general Welfare.” Community—people taking care of each other—is part of our American heritage as well.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">On the frontier, in the slave cabins, in the trade unions, in the building of towns, community has been part of our history and our psyche. The Republican ideology has redefined community as corporate socialism and individualism as greed. What a perversion.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">However, community always seems to surface. It’s one of those things that define us as human beings. It is one of those things that define us as Americans. How appropriate that a community organizer is running for president. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I am writing at a time when I feel more kinship with my fellow Americans than I have in a long time. I know that there will be people who will believe the lies. There always are. There always will be. And hucksters from Karl Rove to P.T.Barnum have used that one. Still, even those who are duped can be unduped if we are willing to listen as well as talk. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">I am writing this at a time when there is a new burst of creativity in our land. It is the flip side of the dead old fears. I am writing this at a time where people are listening with their hearts as well as their minds. We come from the gloomy night of fear and suspicion into light. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">It is a time of poets, singers and artists, of writers and dancers as much as it is a time of politics as we have narrowly defined it. It is a time of celebration.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;" align="center"><b><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Sun spreads on the fields</span></b><o:p></o:p></p> <u1:p style="font-weight: bold;"></u1:p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;" align="center"><b><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Slowly emerging from the clouds,</span><o:p></o:p></b></p> <u1:p></u1:p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;" align="center"><b><span style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Like a second dawn.</span></b><o:p></o:p></p> <u1:p></u1:p> <p class="MsoNormal"><u1:p></u1:p><o:p> </o:p></p> <u1:p></u1:p>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-69688799420858800962008-09-25T17:28:00.001-07:002008-09-29T17:31:47.356-07:00Feeding the Wolves 2008It’s elections again. It’s another time, after four years, for us to elect a president. I have lived through the presidencies of 10 men. I have been able to vote since 1960, and, quite honestly, presidential campaigns have bored the hell out me. They have been so contrived—just what have been the differences? Very few. Until now. That includes the election of 1960 where John F. Kennedy faced off Richard M. Nixon. <br /><br />Let me be clear about my biases. I am not one of those who revere the Kennedy mystique. I remember the “debates’ between Kennedy and Nixon where the two tried to outdo each other on who would be the greater asshole towards Cuba. Sure, like that little island constituted a threat to the United States. It was a contest between a coiffed hairdo and Hollywood good looks, on the one hand and five o’clock shadow and shifty eyes on the other. An assassin’s bullet and a legion of mythmakers have transformed an otherwise mediocre president into sainthood. <br /><br />The presidential election of 2008 is different. I am so excited. My hope is rekindled. I feel the excitement that I have felt when I read about the election of 1860 – about the election of Abraham Lincoln. That was a time when the parties made a big difference and the minority Republican Party was the voice of the future. Then, the Republican Party was the voice of what was becoming – a new nation in birth based upon free labor and free men regardless of race “or previous condition of servitude.” <br /><br />It didn’t start that way, in 1860, but that’s what it became after four years of bloody civil war. And at the helm of the Republican Party in 1860 was a man, a man who had risen on the frontier. He really had. He was self-taught. There was no privilege or wealth in his background. And there was integrity about him. There was wisdom in his humility. That’s what made Abraham Lincoln great. <br /><br />“I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln wrote to a reporter. The reporter, in the middle of the Civil War, wrote to Lincoln to ask what it felt like to have controlled events. “I claim not to have controlled events. But confess plainly that events have controlled me.” In my view, without humility, “leadership” is pure ego and politics is an egoists’ playground.<br /><br />Lincoln knew his own demons well enough – his deep, deep depressions. He faced the core of his own soul – his darkness – and owned it. He wasn’t one to see evil outside of himself, although he came to detest the institution of slavery. Seems like Lincoln really didn’t judge people personally and built a cabinet of people, many of whom hated his guts. <br /><br />Then, the Republican Party, led by a poor Illinois lawyer, represented the exciting unknown. It represented a leap into the future. It represented the force of freedom.<br /><br />How times do change! Now, the Republican Party puts up an old man with old ideas. This old man stands against a man who personifies the American dream – a man who so clearly represents real change and hope as he has experienced it in his own life. You would think that this election would be a slam dunk. <br /><br />Just think. On one side is an old man who has grown up in privilege and has married into inestimable wealth – a man who has come from three generations of warriors. War is in his blood, you might say. That’s all he seems to know, and he fairly froths when he speaks of war or bombing or endless occupation. His main claim to fame is having survived a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam – a country that neither he nor the United States had any business being in to begin with. <br /><br />This is the candidate of the Republican Party – a party that has faithfully created and supported the policies of the administration of George W. Bush over the past eight years. It’s the party that has overseen an invasion and occupation of another country based on a tissue of lies. Even the Nazis had as coherent an argument for the invasion of Poland in 1939 as the United States’ “reasons” for the invasion of Iraq. And, of course, a good chunk of the Democratic Party crumbled, too. <br /><br />This old man represents what has become the party of Robin Hood in reverse. It has robbed from the poor and given to the rich. Never since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century has government policy so loyally served the greed of the few. At least the robber barons of the Gilded Age built something. J.P. Morgan consolidated banking and railroads. Our present robber barons are just robbers – gangsters in suits who swindle poor people out of their homes, oil barons whose profits leap over 30 percent in one year while prices soar, pharmaceutical bigwigs who oversee skyrocketing prices while health coverage declines, and so on…and so on…and so on.<br /><br />How can this be a contest? This John McCain is the candidate of the party that has bled us dry. The cost of this war was half a trillion dollars at four o’clock on September 14 and going up at the rate of a million dollars every five minutes. This McCain represents a party that has outsourced war itself, paying mercenaries ten times more than enlisted soldiers taking the same risks.Billions paid in a war that benefits only the investors in it. <br /><br />All this while schools, health care, roads, and quality of life itself dissolve before our eyes. How can this be a contest? This McCain reflects the self-interest of perhaps one percent of the entire population…or maybe less. <br /><br />On the other side is a candidate who, like Lincoln, comes from poor beginnings. Barack Obama is a man whose mother married a black man; whose father married a white woman. Here is a man brought up by a single parent. Through his own hard work this man achieved a scholarship to Columbia University, Harvard, and became the first African-American to become editor of the Harvard Law Review. This is the stuff of novels. Here is a man who is literate and intelligent, a man who writes his own speeches. Here is a man who speaks to us as if we, too, are intelligent. Here is a man who trusts us to look at the issues. What a change! Here is a man who chose to use his legal skills and training to help folks on the south side of Chicago. He could have made millions as a corporate lawyer, especially at that time when Wall Street wanted to look like it was an “equal opportunity employer.” Here is a candidate who opposed the US invasion of Iraq from the beginning. Sure, he wasn’t in the Senate then, but opposition to the Iraq invasion was a very unpopular opinion at that time. <br /><br />Here is a man who is calling for universal health care coverage. Here is a man calling for funds to rebuild our infrastructure. Here is someone calling for returning the taxes on the very wealthy that were cut during the past eight years. Here is a man who has spelled out the beginning of policies that would increase the quality of life for, and express the self-interest of, 99 percent of the country. It would seem that at least 90 percent of the population would support the candidacy of Barack Obama. There are no shades of difference here between the candidates – there is a Grand Canyon. <br /><br />What is going on? To me, what is going on is a crisis of consciousness. What is going on is the manipulation of our own unconsciousness. <br /><br />There is an old Cherokee tale that keeps coming back to me these days. An old grandfather is telling his grandson that there is a tumultuous fight going on inside of him. “It is a massive fight,” the old man said, “between two wolves, two wolves inside me. One is hateful. He is angry, judgmental, righteous, blameful, envious, suspicious, greedy, arrogant, full of self-pity, guilty. The other is lovely and loving. He is accepting, joyous, peaceful, filled with humility, kind, giving, compassionate, trusting, generous, and truthful.” <br /><br />The grandfather paused. “The same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person, too.” <br /><br />The boy thought about this for a moment and then asked. “Grandfather, which wolf will win?” <br /><br />The old man answered simply, “The one I feed.” <br /><br />More and more this election campaign has become a matter of feeding the wolves. Feeding the wolves of fear and anger has been part of the Republican strategy at least since the pioneer slimemaster, Lee Atwater, dragged out the Willie Horton ad campaign to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988. <br /><br />Jon Stewart, commenting on the Republican national nominating convention four years ago showed film clips with the speakers repeating “terror” and “terrorism” so many times that it became an hypnotic mantra. <br /><br />We all have the wolves. We all have the struggle inside of us. We all have our dark and our light side, our unaware and our aware, our bestial and our divine. That is what makes us human. As soon as we project our darkness outside of ourselves we give ourselves permission to act without compassion and without sensitivity. Witness the Nazis and the Jews. Witness the demonization of Arabs today. It is significant that in this election campaign Barack Obama has consistently appealed to our higher selves. He has consistently reminded us that power lies in the people. This comes from his experience as a community organizer, not from some glib speechwriter. He has told us again and again that we can make things happen. <br /><br />The Republicans have responded. The speech by the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, derided all of this. Before cheering crowds, the Republican vice-presidential candidate exhorted Americans to obey their worst impulses. It was “us” and “them” yet again. “Us” didn’t care about the rest of the world except that it constituted a threat. “Us” had no place in our minds or hearts for those who held other views, led other lifestyles—or were different. This voice of the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska was a voice from a dark cave, echoing with fear and cloaked in that last refuge of scoundrels – patriotism. <br /><br />We all have anger. I have noticed how easy it is for me to roar into rage when I read the latest distortions and outright lies perpetrated by the slime artists in the shadow of the RNC. And yet, am I not being manipulated by the very same forces that I oppose? We all have fear. <br /><br />I hear good people say that they are terrified about the outcome of this election. I have good and courageous folks tell me that they will leave the country if the old man from Arizona is elected president. One of these, my oldest friend and a brilliant artist, once told me that we cannot be creative from a space of fear. Are we not being manipulated by the very forces that we oppose? <br /><br />We all have envy and, that flip side of envy, superiority. How many times have I heard good people speak of the stupidity of the American people? Who are we and why do we separate ourselves? Why do we let ourselves be separated? Are we not being manipulated by the very forces that we oppose? <br /><br />So much of the social and political discussion of the past eight years has been dominated by the Bush administration and its spin masters. Even our great American majority has defined itself as against this administration. Against. Against. Against. In defining ourselves as “against” we are defining ourselves by that which we oppose. Are we not being manipulated by the very forces we oppose? <br /><br />This is a time of action, not reaction. Let the reactionaries react. And Barack Obama has chosen to be at the head of a movement that is much larger than he is. My guess is that, like Lincoln, he has the humility and intelligence to understand and act upon this. This election campaign is not about Barack Obama. It is not about just how pretty the Republican VP candidate is. Is about a sea change that is happening and Obama has tuned into it. Certainly he is a politician. So was Lincoln. <br /><br />No one has a monopoly on awareness. No one is a fountain of consciousness. Yet these times we live in have provided stark contrasts of darkness and light. In such times awareness can blossom. At this time we cannot lose. Polls, pundits and a rancid media cannot turn turds into gold. <br /><br />Perhaps for the first time in American history, the consciousness of the individual is a potent political force. It is not for “others” to become aware. It is for all of us, individually and together, to recognize the wolves that live inside of us, and we have the opportunity to choose our higher selves. People, we people, can take charge of our lives. <br /><br />How rare it is when the issue of consciousness becomes national. It happens at times of crisis. And, as the Chinese word for crisis (wei-chi) implies there is both danger and opportunity at such times. <br /><br />The nation is going through a dark night of the soul. Such journeys lead to consciousness. Such consciousness leads to light, freedom, and empowerment. We are all part of this journey. Let us rejoice!Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-41204358457794488582008-04-20T11:37:00.000-07:002008-04-20T12:31:12.575-07:00No Journalist Left Behind<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> The recent Democratic "debate" in Pennsylvania provided an example for present educational theory in this country. It was a classroom, broadcast to the nation and the world. No journalist was left behind. Yet, when the long hour was over, many viewers were wondering just what happened.</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> The ABC extravaganza is yesterday's news. But, like a plastic flower, it does not fade. </span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> At the time of the debate, people were losing their houses all over the country because of the unregulated greed of mortgage lenders. Oh yes, there were folks who thought that they could make a killing on their houses but the banks were the ones who profited. And, when it came time to pay the piper--when the house of cards collapsed and millions faced foreclosure--the government came to the rescue. It came to the rescue of the banks. The taxpayers of the United States bailed out the banks compliments of the present Republican administration.</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> At the time of the debate, the war in Iraq was moving towards draining a trillion dollars from the United States. The taxpayers of the United States were supporting a war that had lost <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span> of the original excuses for waging it. Everybody knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That had been conclusively proved . That was the first major rationale of the Bush war--down the drain. Then, on the same day that the press danced its righteous dance over the governor of New York's dalliance with a prostitute, the second pillar of the war collapsed. The report of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense officially declared that there was no evidence (that's <span style="font-style: italic;">no evidence</span>) of any connection between the government of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The second pillar of the war in Iraq crumbled even though Vice President Cheney repeated the fictional connection on the same day the Department of Defense made the report public. But, hey, who cares about facts?</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> A few facts do remain clear, however. On the day that George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson confronted Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, the economy was going down the tubes, the rationale for the war in Iraq had disappeared, billions were flowing out of the United States into the coffers of Halliburton. And United States servicemen and women were dying as well as hundred of thousands of Iraqis in the war that had no rationale.</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Health care is deteriorating in this country. The economy is going down the drain. Gas prices skyrocket while oil companies boast windfall profits. The government is no officially tied to torture. The United States has lost the respect of much of the world. There is certainly no shortage of issues this presidential campaign year.</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> ABC News' Charles Gibson and George </span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Stephanopoulos used up the first fifty minutes of the debate asking why Obama Baraka did not wear an American flag in his lapel or whether his minister loved America as much as he did or whether he disavowed his association with a political activist who had been a Weatherman when Obama was eight years old. (I am surprised that Obama's early toilet training didn't enter the debate).</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Now some people, like Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston <span style="font-style: italic;">Globe</span>, have suggested that Gibson and </span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Stephanopoulos were biased. Some folks have noted that when the now sanctified Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign in 1980 he chose a spot in Mississippi near where the three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 to proclaim his loyalty to "states rights" (i.e. segregation). Nobody from the media ever questioned Reagan about that in subsequent debates.<br /><br /> Some people have suggested that, as long as we are on the question of racial hatred, it is strange that neither Mitt Romney nor George Bush senior nor George Bush junior were ever questioned about their endorsement of and by Bob Jones University, a place that banned black students until the 1970's and prohibited interracial dating until 2000, just in time for the election of George junior.<br /><br /> Some people have suggested that the press, as represented by Gibsonstephanopoulos, is biased. Some have suggested that Stephanopoulos was a senior adviser to Bill Clinton might have some effect on the gentleness of his questioning of Hillary Clinton.<br /><br /> All of this may be true. But let me suggest that these two journalists are poster children for our present educational system.<br /><br /> The manic devotion to testing children has been rendered national in the "No Child Left Behind" act. Now, children are being tested from the first grade on. Simultaneously, play time, recess time, is disappearing throughout the country. When my daughter and I were investigating schools for my grand daughter in New Haven, we found a public magnet school that had a lovely feeling to it. The school boasted of two ten minute recess times for the kindergarten kids. That's twenty minute of play a day for five year olds. That qualifies as child abuse. But, the "No Child Left Behind" act deprives money from schools that don't meet the tests. And schools across the country, starving for funds, just aren't doing as well as, say, the mercenaries that taxpayers finance in Iraq.<br /><br /> The French educational pioneer, Jean Piaget, said famously that "play is the work of the child." These days there is no play and children are studying from the age of six to pass standardized tests. And teachers are teaching for the tests since they can lose their jobs if the kids don't score high enough.<br /><br /> There are a couple of flies in this testing ointment. For one thing, you can't test creativity. Creativity is based on what is not known. It is based on the ability to go beyond knowledge. The person who invented the wheel would not have done well on a test administered by the "No Child Left Behind" act. You can't test the ability to think for yourself. (Do you think it's possible that the authors of the "No Child Left Behind" act did not want kids to think for themselves?) You can't test thinking outside the box since the whole idea of standardized testing is a nationalized, standardized box. The idea is that if you can't test it, might as well throw it out. So art and music are joining recess as school districts across the country streamline for testing. You give the right answers for the right question so you won't be left behind.<br /><br /> In Japan there is a saying that "the nail that sticks up will be pounded down." The message is clear: you try to be unique or original you will be "pounded down." Seems like our educational system is taking a few pages from the Japanese book. Difference is that, in Japan, the trade off is that the individual is cared for by the society. No fear of that here where even wounded veterans are nickeled and dimed out of treatment and benefits by a government that needs to save its money---for war.<br /><br /> Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopoulos are poster children for our educational system. they are children who have not been left behind. Far from entering into the creative or original thought they stay comfortably within the journalistic box. Why Stephanopolous even took his questions from Fox fulminator Sean Hannity.<br /><br /> Of course the question is who administers the tests. After all, the person that poses the questions determines the right answers. Who pays the piper calls the tune. Gibson and Stephanopoulos were following scripts that had been prepared by other journalists. Who know where it began? Just gets digested, redigested and re-redigested. There wasn't a single original question during the whole debate.<br /><br /> Not a single original question. Rehash of old stuff--old accusations--old red herrings. These guys passed their test well. These journalists would not be left behind.<br /><br /> Self appointed teacher, David Brooks of the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times</span> dutifully graded his fellow journalistic students. ABC got a grade of "A" from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Times</span> headmaster. Clinton got a "B" and Barak Obama got a D+. I think that Brooks was being kind to Obama. Maybe it was because he was Black. After all, Obama has been doing the unthinkable. He has actually tried to raise real issues and has, more and more, been thinking outside of the box.<br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /></span></span></div>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-51022238017640539452008-02-29T15:19:00.000-08:002008-02-29T15:25:07.156-08:00Deja Vu All Over Again<span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">I just saw an ad that was placed by one of the candidates for the presidential nomination. I had heard it earlier on the radio. Children were sleeping and there was the sound of a phone ringing--presumably a red phone. The voice over declared that your children are sleeping safely but the red phone showed that there was something going on the in the world. the voice over asked whether you wanted someone who could handle issues of foreign importance. Blah. Blah. Blah. RED PHONE. RED PHONE!!!!!!!!!! Get it?<br /><br />I had assumed that it was the McCain campaign. After all, the Republicans have fostered and fed upon an atmosphere of fear for the past seven years. And fear, as the folks in the novel Dune declare, "is the mind killer." I assumed, of course, that it was John McCain.<br /><br />It was sponsored by Hillary Clinton. Enough said.<br /></span></span>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-36107526717376098522008-02-27T08:07:00.000-08:002008-04-12T05:10:09.481-07:00LETTER TO HILLARY CLINTON, 9/18/01<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">After the "debate" in Ohio yesterday between Obama and Clinton, I looked through my old e-mails and came up with an e-mail that I wrote to Sen. Hillary Clinton a week after September 11. You didn't have to be a psychic to see where things were going. And I am not happy to say that I was right, as were many who opposed the response of the Bush Administration together with congressional rubber stampers like Sen. Clinton. I did not, by the way, get a response from her office.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Dear Senator Clinton:</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">senator@clinton.senate.gov</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">I am writing to express my grave concern over the United </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">States government’s reaction to </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">the terrorist attacks last Tuesday. Our grief and horror </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">must not turn into blind rage. The </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">killing of innocents is vile and supremely reprehensible. We </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">cannot do the same thing.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">A massive military action against Afghanistan would result </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">in the deaths of countless </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">innocent civilians—men, women and children. How can we fight </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">terror with terror? Such </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">an action would escalate rather than defeat terrorism.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Further, calls in Congress to support the recruitment of </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">“unsavory” people to aid the </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">United States effort are equally misguided. It was the</span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> training of such people by the CIA </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">that gave us a highly organized and trained Osama bin Laden. </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Are we to create and train </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">more bin Ladens in the name of fighting terrorism? Has not </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">this policy shown itself to be </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">shortsighted and bankrupt over and over?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Finally, the stability of moderate governments in the Middle </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">East is tentative. A massive </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">United States military action in the area could easily </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">result in the overthrow of these </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">governments by powerful and vocal Islamic fundamentalists. </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Once again, the United States </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">has the potential to create the conditions for even greater </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">terrorism.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Terror begets terror. We must break the cycle. If the United </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">States is to present any </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">leadership in this, we must look to the roots of the </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">problem. The United States must use its </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">influence to see that the heart of the problem—the </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Israeli-Palestinian conflict—is resolved </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">equitably. For a start, we must throw our support behind the </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">implementation of the now </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">moribund Oslo accords. Once there is a fair resolution of </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">that issue, the roots of terrorism </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">will wither and die. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">In conclusion, I urge you to oppose any military action that </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">targets or involves civilian </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">populations. I urge you to oppose any efforts to turn back </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">to the discredit policy of allying </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">ourselves with people or regimes that oppose human rights. </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">And I urge you to support </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">efforts to involve the United States in the fair and </span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">peaceful settlement of the Palestinian </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">situation.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></div>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-11209422477337278222008-02-11T10:40:00.000-08:002008-02-11T11:21:59.370-08:00<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style="line-height: 200%;font-size:20;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style="line-height: 200%;font-size:20;" ><span style=""> </span><span style="font-size:180%;">Why I Cannot Support Hillary Clinton</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style="line-height: 200%;font-size:20;" ><span style=""> </span></span>A few weeks ago my daughter, Hira, called from <st1:city><st1:place>Seattle</st1:place></st1:city> where she lives. The <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:state> caucus was to take place shortly. She told me that she could not support Barak Obama.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>One of the things about Hira is that she has a low tolerance for bullshit of any kind. That is something that I have always admired and supported in her. Another thing is that she does her homework.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Hira listed the ways in which Hillary Clinton’s policies were better than Obama’s. Health care, of course, was high on the list. She summed up several other policies and concluded that Obama was “Bush Lite.” I could not disagree.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>I have experienced many decades of political bullshit. I have, for example, never been one of those who sanctifies President John F. Kennedy. I watched him debate Richard Nixon as they tried to outdo each other with their <st1:country-region><st1:place>Cuba</st1:place></st1:country-region> phobia. The main difference between the two men in those debates was that Nixon had five o’clock shadow. I read the stories of the way the election of 1960 was given to Kennedy by Mayor Richard J. Daley of <st1:city><st1:place>Chicago</st1:place></st1:city> who saw to it that large number of ballots for Nixon were dumped in the river. I saw the way in which President Kennedy sunk the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> into a murderous war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region>—slowly, sneakily and inexorably. And, despite the cinematic pipe dreams of Oliver Stone, Kennedy got us deeper <i style="">into</i> not <i style="">out of</i> that war.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Whatever was happening domestically, foreign policy in the Kennedy administration was aggressive and imperial. Lyndon B. Johnson simply followed the legacy of his predecessor. And <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> forces bombed, napalmed, machine gunned and poisoned a million people in a country that posed absolutely no threat to the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>So, when Edward and Caroline Kennedy anointed Barak Obama as the heir to JFK I was not impressed. The Camelot of King Arthur was much more real than the manufactured public relations fiction in <st1:place><st1:city>Washington</st1:city>, <st1:state>D.C.</st1:state></st1:place>.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>I began to resonate with the falseness of the Madison Avenue glitz of “Camelot” as the Obama campaign became vaguer and vaguer. Pretty soon all I was hearing was “change” and “unity” with less and less substance. Once again I was watching the hopes and longings of millions projected on the screen of a politician. Hira was right. In substantive domestic policies the small difference between the candidates balanced towards Hillary Clinton,</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>When I hung up the phone I had a gnawing sense of doubt. I felt an unease upon which I could not put my finger. Then it hit me.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Senator Hillary Clinton spoke for and voted for authorization of the war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. She did this for no other reason than political expediency. And she, together with her fellows, bears responsibility for the ongoing deaths of innocents.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>I listened to the Congressional debate on the war authorization over five years ago. It was like something out of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Anybody who bothered to read the reports of Hans Blix and the United Nations inspection team at that time knew that there was little likelihood of weapons of mass destruction. Anybody who listened to Scott Ritter, former chief <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> weapon inspector knew <i style="">then</i> that there was no Iraqi capability for constructing weapons of mass destruction. Anyone who bothered to go beyond the headlines could see the ways that Vice President Cheney was twisting arms to get the intelligence community to distort their findings in order to justify the invasion. If I was able to find this in 2002 then surely the junior senator from <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state>, with her efficient staff, could come up with the information. While the public might be excused for not digging deeper, a member of Congress, voting on war, cannot be excused.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The Congressional debate on war was disgraceful. Never have I seen a group of legislators illustrate so clearly how politicians are not leaders, but followers. Never have I seen such a Congressional disregard for the truth. A runner up was the <st1:place><st1:placetype>Gulf</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename>Tonkin</st1:placename></st1:place> resolution which facilitated the expansion of the Vietnam War based on another fiction.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Senator Robert Byrd of <st1:state><st1:place>West Virginia</st1:place></st1:state> was a voice in the wilderness of this “debate.” By voting the President a carte blanche to wage war, Byrd said, Congress was abandoning its responsibility to the people, country and constitution of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Hillary Clinton followed Byrd and spoke for the war. Considering the venue it was practically incoherent. It was political word salad. She provided no justification for authorizing an attack on a country that posed no threat to the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. It seemed quite clear that she was just getting on the bandwagon—no principles here—just expediency. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>And the war was waged. Today, five years later, the war is still being waged. The United Nations estimates that almost five million Iraqi’s have been displaced since the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> invaded their country. If that occurred here that would amount to about fifty-five million Americans being displaced. As for casualties, the British medical journal, <i style="">Lancet</i>, has estimated over one million. And a large number of those have been women and children. To put it bluntly hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died because of a war that Senator Hillary Clinton voted to authorize. Thousands of young American men and women have died in a meaningless and unjustified war that Senator Hillary Clinton voted to authorize. It’s murder pure and simple.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>, for me, is not just another campaign issue be balanced against pro-choice, NAFTA or health care. There can be no trade for homicide. The <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> entered into a war on <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> based on a tissue of lies. And this war continues to claim Iraqi and American lives.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>That Hillary Clinton supported this war is bad enough. Either she knew better or she is incompetent and irresponsible. That she makes no apology for her vote is arrogant and inexcusable. We’ve certainly had enough of that in the last eight years. It’s as if she keeps on voting for it again and again.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>It is true that Obama was not in Congress when this vote was taken. It is also true that he clearly and loudly denounced it at a time when it was not politically expedient to do so.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>It is time for people to stop playing political games. For me, the essential difference between the two candidates comes down to one issue. I will not support someone who has the blood of children on her hands and will not even wash them clean.<o:p></o:p></p>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-35402804966495777342007-05-28T10:42:00.001-07:002007-05-29T11:36:47.693-07:00In Memoriam: Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D.On August 26, 1948, Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D. ended his suffering that began four years earlier on the fields of France. My father was a country doctor. His love was medicine and he tended to the ill and wounded. It was his calling. In the small upstate New York town where he practiced he delivered babies in the office house where we lived. He drove out to remote farms to give the five daughters of a farmer their vaccinations. He healed broken bones and cut foreheads. But nothing prepared him for the slaughter that he encountered after he landed with the fourth wave at Normandy in June 1944. <br /><br />My experience of the war was my father's absence. He would send my mother and me funny little letters that would have sections blacked out. This was V-mail. I always thought it was strange that other people would read my father's letters to me. But the censors did read them and blocked out areas that they felt were sensitive to national security or something.<br /><br />He wrote me a continuing story about a friendly amoeba. There even were illustrations. In later years, when I visited India, I found it strange that people feared amoebas as much as they did. <br /><br />To my mother and aunts and grandparents he sent letters and watercolors. He was an artist as well as a physician and would, in those rare moments when he had a minute or two, paint a watercolor of where he was. We cherished those postcard size pictures painted with love, for they were not only beautiful but they represented a part of the artist that could not be expressed in words.<br /><br />Then, for what seemed to be an eternity, we heard nothing. No letters came. No pictures came. Nothing came. And with each day my mother became more and more distraught.<br /><br />This was the time when the Germans made a desperate attempt to counterattack the American forces. The German forces under the command of Field Marshall Gerd von Runstedt had encircled the American forces centered at Ardennes, France. This was the Battle of the Bulge. And for over a month, during the bitter winter, American and German soldiers slaughtered each other. Nineteen thousand American soldiers died. Six armies locked in battle in the coldest winter on record. Over a million men fought in what was to be recorded as the worst battle of World War II.<br /><br />Torn, ripped, cut and blown apart, young men passed through the field hospital that my father headed. It was X-ray after X-ray after X-ray. It was an assembly line of death and dying. There was no time for the physicians to protect themselves from the deadly radiation. And it was this radiation that caused the skin cancer that later was to take my father's life. <br /><br />When he returned from that war I was six years old. My father rarely spoke to me about that war, only once, that I remember, to joke that he had a rifle in the back of his jeep and that's where it stayed. He was a healer, not a killer. He even received a Bronze Star for bravery and never told me what he did. To this day I don't know why he got it.<br /><br />My memories of Dr. Nathan Bluestone are fragmentary and impressionistic. Mostly I remember how we would sing together in the car, my father and I. "I've Got Sixpence", "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" and rounds and rounds.<br /><br />Much later a psychic told me that my father had been deeply wounded by his inability to heal in the face of such overwhelming carnage. His soul, as much as his body, had been gravely affected. That rings true.<br /><br />We moved back into the office house and my father continued the practice that he had left four years earlier. But the cancer, first on his finger, spread and slowly, he began to die. Bit by bit the doctors cut away my father. First they took his finger. Then they took his right breast. And then he died.<br /><br />It has been almost fifty-nine years since my father died. I have grown far from that nine year old boy who couldn't understand why such a thing was possible. And yet, after all this time, I still cry at the loss.<br /><br />On this day each year we are called upon to remember those who have died in the service of their country. Politicians give speeches, flags are unfurled and hot dogs are consumed.<br /><br />What we tend to forget is what General William Tecumseh Sherman once reminded a group of young men. "War is hell." And the hell is for the living, for those who survive the deaths of their beloveds as much as it is for those who die on the fields of battle or in the hospitals. <br /><br />What we tend to forget is that war leaves lots of fatherless sons and daughters. Today, for example, thousands of American and Iraqi sons and daughters will grow up without their fathers and mothers. And for what?<br /><br />What we tend to forget are the children who are left behind. We forget that fifty years from now there will be adults who still grieve for the loss of a father or a mother--who still cry at the remembrance. Let us truly remember.Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-2073318602079255442007-03-22T08:25:00.000-07:002007-03-22T08:39:08.055-07:00<span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Two Poems:<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /> </span></span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Plague Light</span></span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><br /><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Where was the light in the Dark Ages?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Did it shine in the huts of the serfs,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Those stinking, dim hovels where birthing entwined dying<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>And food, piss and shit<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Coexisted with pigs and writhing sweating bodies?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Or did it glow in the halls of the lords<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Sputtering and hissing in the burning animal fat<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">That illumed the cold, moist <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Steps and walls, always clammy?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Did its rays fall upon the plains of war<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>Bouncing off bright crushed skulls and glistening viscera<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Swiftly covered by the diaphanous wings of flies and vultures?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Or was it in the churches<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">With their eternal darkness<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Reeking with a black bright hell<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">And promise of fiery damnation.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Or, did it sparkle in the fire of righteousness<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>That burned under the sizzling bare feet<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Of the sinful<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">As it slowly rose in clouds of smoke<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>And cooking living flesh?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>No.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The light was seen in the gleaming eyes of rats,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>As they streamed and stumbled off the Genoan boats<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Carrying the shiny shelled fleas<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>With their innocent deadly bite.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">It billowed high on burning pyres<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Where bodies stacked like wood<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Melted, their bulbous bubous black pustules<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Consumed forever.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">It broke through the clouds like an angel’s beam<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>And shone upon a landscape<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Forever changed,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Forever changed<br /><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> <br /></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:14;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> </span><span style="font-size:130%;">Amen</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><br /><br /></span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Boulevard l'Hopital: Paris--March 2006</span><br /><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a name="BoulevarddelHopitalParis033006"></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Frozen in time<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Fixed in space<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">A shutter speed<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Stopped:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The young mother<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Face turning<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>To face<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>The viewer<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">And her ten year old son:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Smiles<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Cascading<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>In waves<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">As does her <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Wild brown hair<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Kept demurely tamed<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">But not conquered<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>(Never conquered)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">We cannot see the boy’s face;<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>He is turned<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>To face<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>His mother<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Head tilted<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>To take in her warmth<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">(As a dandelion faces the sun and rain)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Dancing on the far side <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Of her mother<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>The eight year old<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Daughter/ sister<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Braids flying <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Leaping<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>And laughing<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>At her own dance<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>And at some joke<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>That is hers<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>(Alone)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Frozen in time<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Fixed in space<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>A shutter speed<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Stopped.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><br /></span></span>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-85242538187592939572007-03-14T12:48:00.000-07:002007-03-14T13:58:52.279-07:00ALBERT EINSTEIN--FAILURE<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> <br /><br /><br />Today is the birthday of Albert Einstein. What a failure he was. Of course we know him as the creator of the Theory of Relativity and Nobel laureate. But that is unimportant. He was a failure. Many of his early teachers thought he was mentally challenged. In those days they used the German equivalent of "retarded".<br /><br />Einstein didn't like to study except for those things that interested him. Albert was interested in mathematics and philosophy. He just didn't bother with the other stuff.<br /><br />A high school official wanted young Einstein expelled from school. The teacher complained that Einstein never said anything. He just sat in the back of the class and smiled. At the age of sixteen Albert dropped out of school.<br /><br />Albert Einstein would probably have fared even worse today in the United States than he did<br />in late Nineteenth Century Wurtemburg, Germany. He definitely would have been one child left behind in the era of No Child Left Behind.<br /><br />The No Child Left Behind act is a dismal reflection of the low level to which pedagogical discussion has sunk in the United States today. There are innumerable things wrong with this act. For those interested in checking out some of these issues I suggest visiting www.educatorrountable.org. But let's take one aspect.<br /><br />How do you quantify education. How do you measure how a student is learning. The simple (and simplistic) answer is through testing.<br /><br />The work of Howard Gardner has shown that people learn in different ways. Another educator pointed out that children's learning styles are as varied as the colors of the rainbow. There are probably as many different ways of learning as there are people. but, at least, we need to recognize that someone who does well on a test might not be the most intelligent on many levels.<br /><br />Testing only deals with accumulated knowledge. So a test can ascertain just how well a person has memorized required material in a course. Testing can measure how well a student can spew back what he has ingested. Digestion of this material is often not essential and can even be a distraction for the person taking the test.<br /><br />Testing determines the material to be tested. And there is a time and a place for that. However, only that which can be easily tested will be included in the testing program. As Albert Einstein put it, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"<br /><br />The present obsession with testing leads to an ever increasing number of teachers who teach solely for the test. Even the importance of the material itself falls by the wayside. The test's the thing. Students focus on what the "right" answers are.<br /><br />Creative teaching becomes more and more a luxury for school districts that face obliteration unless certain test scores are met. It is not surprising that the poorer school districts are in the greatest bind. These are most often the ones with the greatest problems and the greatest need for innovative approaches. But how can there be innovative approaches when the universal "fix" is testing? How can these schools encourage creativity in the face of the cyclones of "test-osterone" blowing in from Washington?<br /><br />Creative teachers fall by the wayside. Either that or they buckle under to meet the new "mandates."<br /><br />The Advanced Placement courses have long been infested with the test virus. As an historian I was shocked to see that the Advanced Placement course in American history at a local high school was simply a prolonged preparation for the test. The vital, complex and fascinating issues of American history were reduced to multiple choices or "correct" interpretative essays.<br /><br />It seems to me that one of the basic goals of education is to encourage people to think for themselves. It seems to me that one of the goals of education is to encourage people to find and develop their talents and potentials. Testing and the teaching associated with it do little if any of this.<br /><br />It's bizarre. They are testing kids in kindergarten. A whole new generation is growing up thinking that education is simply a succession of tests. Not only that. There isn't any break.<br /><br />Homework is the handmaiden of the testing model. Kids have to do schoolwork on weekends--even during the summer. It seems like robots have taken over the American school system. Or maybe it's just a repackaging of that old Puritan axiom: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Busy work substitutes for education. If Albert Einstein were a kid today he would probably drop out of school by third grade instead of eleventh.<br /><br />Of course testing is profitable--for the testing companies and all the peripheral industries. But there are a few things that can't be tested.<br /><br />You can't test creativity. You can't have a box that tests the ability of people to think outside the box. So Thomas Edison, Galileo, and e.e. cummings would simply not pass.<br /><br />You can't test art. You can't test music. Oh, yes, you can test knowledge of the scale. You can test musical theory. But how about the art itself?<br /><br />You can't test imagination. You can test knowledge. Once again some words from Albert Einstein. "Imagination is more important than knowledge," he said. "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the globe."<br /><br />Since you can't test creativity, the arts and imagination, they have little use as part of a school's curriculum. In fact, the arts are disappearing from schools across the country. The money is all in the tests.<br /><br />Where would we be without creativity and imagination? We would not exist as a species. For these are what take us beyond our limited known world. It is imagination and creativity that gave us fire and the wheel. And Albert Einstein.<br /><br />Which gets me back to the beginning. Happy Birthday Albert. Maybe you were right when you said, "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." It's becoming more and more true for millions of kids.<br /><br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span></span></div>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-22029441857511979202007-03-08T08:54:00.000-08:002007-03-08T08:57:04.971-08:00Today is Water<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Today there is water<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Rippling across the ice<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Glistening on the black road.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Today the sun slips<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Behind the clouds,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Then slips back and floods the path.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Shadows dance on the snow<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >A shadow tree limb bends and<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Touches a thick black shadow tree trunk.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >The wind whistles<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Across<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>The blank smooth white field;<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Then poof!<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >A white phantom rises<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>And dances in the snow.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Today, the stream rushes<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Under translucent layers of ice.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Today, there is the wind’s whisper<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>In the woods<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>That reaches out and touches my face.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Today there is water.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Yesterday was a gray day;<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Gray wisps of wood smoke<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Dissolved into a grayer sky.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>A car shushed behind<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Then shushed away.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >The field of snow was mushy;<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Even the woods looked soggy.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >(A black phantom moved among the trees<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>And sent a chill of excitement<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Up my spine).<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Yesterday winter retreated slightly<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>In the sloppy face of Spring. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Yesterday water was neither frozen<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Nor flowing<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>But in that mush time<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Between,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>That soggy limbo<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Of neither/nor;<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >And so was I<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >Who felt as out of sorts<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>As that softening snow bank<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span>Covered with road filth;<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:130%;" >But today there is water.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-56759473109017925772007-03-08T08:49:00.000-08:002007-03-10T06:50:48.562-08:00Enough is Enough is Enough<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="line-height: 200%;font-size:24;" ><span style=""> </span>Enough is Enough is Enough</span><span style="line-height: 200%;font-size:16;" ><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>What a time we live in. Sometimes I think I am in the middle of a large insane asylum. And, after a while, I begin to wonder if I am the one that is crazy. What to do in a world turned upside down? Where to begin?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span><st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Let’s take <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. That’s as good a place as any to begin.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Hillary Clinton said that she was duped by the administration. Hillary Clinton said she didn’t know better. The government misrepresented the facts. She’s not original of course. Lots of folks have said that they were misled. Enough of that.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Now I don’t care about or for Hilary Clinton. I don’t even really know who she is. Does anybody? <span style=""> </span>She’s a caricature of the opportunistic politician without any visible principles or integrity—just a sense of what will get votes. Take her recent co-sponsorship of a constitutional amendment prohibiting flag burning. You can almost see the bean crunchers in the <st1:city><st1:place>Clinton</st1:place></st1:city> campaign counting how many right wing votes Hillary would harvest with that one. But this claim of ignorance about <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> is the last straw.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Back in 2003 the facts were there for all who took the time to see them. Take Scott Ritter. He had been the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> weapons inspector in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. No friend of Saddam Hussein, Ritter was among those forced to leave. It was clear said Ritter again and again and again that <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> could not possibly have had weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi military capability had been devastated in the war of the first Bush. Then there was Lieutenant-General Brent Scowcroft, U.S. National Security Advisor under Presidents Ford and G.H.W. Bush. Scowcroft strongly opposed a war against <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. He stated that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—another one of the Administration’s arguments for attacking <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Or there was Hans Blix, Chief United Nations weapons inspector who, in 2002, presided over the <span style="">United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission</span> which found no weapons of mass destruction in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>This was public information. This was information that I was able to access at the time. In fact, every single reason that the Bush-Cheney White House gave for the invasion of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> was false and could be shown to be false before Congress voted to give the president the power of war. There were no weapons of mass destruction, nor was there any capability of producing them. There was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, they despised each other. Thus there was absolutely no connection between <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the attack on the <st1:place><st1:placename>World</st1:placename> <st1:placename>Trade</st1:placename> <st1:placetype>Center</st1:placetype></st1:place>. The entire justification for invading <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> was a tissue of lies.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Hillary Clinton and the Congress of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> swallowed these lies with almost no resistance in 2003 and authorized the president to wage war against a country that did not threaten the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. This is certainly criminal under the provisions of international law to say nothing of the United Nations' charter.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>I am sick and tired of hearing about faulty intelligence. Anyone who cared to look carefully at that time could see that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were twisting arms and sliming opponents to get “information” that would support their position. The "Downing Street Memo” illustrated this as did the testimony of former CIA officers. While one can understand that, given our educational system, people are not trained to think for themselves, the members of Congress have a minimal responsibility to ascertain facts before authorizing war. Or is that too radical a position</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>That the media collaborated in the lies simply makes the scandal more reprehensible. The complicity of<span style=""> </span><span style="font-style: italic;">The</span> <i style="">New York Times</i> with its story tellers like Judith Miller weaving fairy tales of aluminum tubes and big bombs is a disgraceful blot on the record of American journalism—such as it has become.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>In 1898 the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, sent the artist Frederick Remington to <st1:country-region><st1:place>Cuba</st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size:130%;"> to draw pictures of the insurrection.</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place></st1:place></st1:country-region><st1:country-region><st1:place>. Remington got to Cuba</st1:place></st1:country-region> and cabled Hearst, “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst cabled back, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war”. And so he did. Hearst lives on in our media and our government. Who cares if it’s true if it sells?<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>It’s a hoax. It’s a ghastly, grisly hoax. The reasons for a war are fabricated. Or, to be less polite, they are lies. It’s incredible that these lies have taken four years to unravel.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>There’s another way to put it. The war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> is a crime. It’s a crime against the men, women and children of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. It’s a crime against the American men and women who <span style=""> </span>are sent there to be killed or maimed. And those who continue to authorize this crime are criminals. It’s that simple.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>All this talk about how the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> should have done better is totally beside the point. And talk about how the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> now should do it better is absurd. There is only one way for the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> to do better in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> and that is to leave—NOW.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>There is no way to render an abomination pleasing. A criminal war is a criminal war. There is no way to make it more polite, more palatable, more refined. Congressional Democrats with your good old boy good will take heed. It’s a crime and the perpetrators of this crime—George Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and those who led us into this—are war criminals. And impeachment is off the table??!! Lying about a blow job is a greater crime than orchestrating the deaths of thousand upon thousands? Who’s crazy?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>This is about people—human beings. It is about men, women and children who have been killed or maimed because of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> attack and war upon <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Last October the <i style="">Lancet</i>, the British medical journal, estimated that between 426,000 and 793,000 Iraqis had been killed from the time the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States invaded until July 2006. If one were to project that number proportionally upon the </st1:place></st1:country-region><st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> that would amount to ten million Americans. Ten million American casualties. Can you imagine that? At least a million Iraqis are refugees in their own country. That would translate to twenty million Americans.<span style=""> </span>Think of ten million Americans killed and twenty million others wandering homeless around this country.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>As for <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> troops, the president of this country has already sacrificed more Americans in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> than<span style=""> </span>Osama bin Laden killed in the <st1:place><st1:placename>Twin</st1:placename> <st1:placetype>Towers</st1:placetype></st1:place>. Who’s crazy?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>And now the Vice President of this country, the man who twisted the information about <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> in 2002, is touring the world beating the drums against <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iran</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Once again unsubstantiated reports (rejected by U.S. Army officers) are brought forth to implicate <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iran</st1:place></st1:country-region> in the death of <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> soldiers. Let us bring this lunatic home. The only debatable issue here is whether he should be impeached or tried as a war criminal. But we need not collude any longer in the delusions of madmen.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>What about people? There are children who are blown up. What did they do? There are fathers who leave widows and orphans. There are women who leave motherless children. These are not statistics. They are living human beings as divine as any of us with every right to live and flourish. What right does this government have to turn a country into hell and destroy its citizenry?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>It’s obscene that this Congress can’t even debate a non binding resolution to end the war. Well, we do not need non binding resolutions. We need to get all <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> troops out of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> with all deliberate speed.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>We do not need discussions on how better to arrange American troops in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. We need to bring those troops home. We do not need to bolster <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> forces there. We need to remove them.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>At the time of writing, the Congress is poised to grant the administration one hundred billion dollars to continue the war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region><st1:place>Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Democratic party leaders claim that they oppose the war but don’t want to undermine our troops and put them in harm’s way. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Let’s forget about logic folks. But how can you fund a war that you oppose? Or, as one of the few sane senate voices, Patrick Leahy of <st1:state><st1:place>Vermont</st1:place></st1:state>, put it, cutting funding doesn’t leave the troops stranded. It brings them back home. He was echoed by a Marine sergeant who pointed out the absurdity of maintaining an opposition to a war that you finance. But, hey, logic has very little to do with it. Neither does sanity. Look at Republican Senator John Warner of <st1:state><st1:place>Virginia</st1:place></st1:state> supporting a filibuster to his own bill. As for the Democrats they are, once again, buckling under when the word “unpatriotic” is in the air. Does this sound familiar? Happened with the Vietnam War. Happened during the McCarthy period. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>The Democrats in Congress won on the issue of the war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. By and large they are being ever so polite. Impeachment off the table? I think not. This is not a time for politeness but for scathing rebuke. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>This country can no longer support the hell that it has created. Every second that we allow this war to continue diminishes our own humanity. Our representatives and, particularly, our senators must hear this. Let Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and the others put their ears to a thunder in the ground. Let them put their political fingers to a whirlwind. Let them feel a storm. They are our servants. We are not theirs. Enough is enough.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211147880745828070.post-5674240564107727562007-03-08T08:03:00.000-08:002007-03-08T08:48:46.054-08:00Welcome<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> What to do? When your guts are in an uproar you can see a gastro-enterologist or you can see a shrink. Or you can write.<br /><br /> There's nothing wrong with my digestive system. [Knock on wood or "Please God" as my late Uncle Joe would say]. And I will resist the stereotypical temptation of older folks to talk about their bodily functions.<br /><br /> As for seeing a shrink, I don't think my intestinal uproar is due to any deep rooted neurosis. I have other deep rooted neuroses. (Don't we all have them?)<br /><br /> So that leaves writing. I can share my upset with the world. I can throw my words into that mysterious space of the internet where millions can see it. that's what this is all about.<br /><br /> I can write anything I want. But my father's dictum still rings in my ears after over half a century: "any job worth doing is worth doing well." So I will spell correctly and do my best to write as clearly as possible.<br /><br /> As I see it, this site will give me an opportunity to bring forth issues that concern me. That's the nature of the first piece. "Enough is Enough is Enough" expresses it all in the title. It has been a long time coming.<br /><br /> But, lest you think that this will be entirely political, I also include a second piece, "Today is Water", a poem I wrote a few days ago.<br /><br /> There is only one thing more tedious than writing about what one is going to write about. That is reading about someone writing about what he is going to write about. So enough of that. In the words of Maurice Sendak, "let the rumpus begin."<br /></span></span>Sarvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12881357474259748662noreply@blogger.com1