The wolf shall dwell with the lamb

Via CommonDreams:

An Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People
From Current and Former Members of the U.S. Military

Peace be with you.

To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones during the July 2007 Baghdad shootings depicted in the "Collateral Murder" Wikileaks video:

We write to you, your family, and your community with awareness that our words and actions can never restore your losses.

We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions.

There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize what have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.

We have been speaking to whoever will listen, telling them that what was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created. From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.

We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.

More and more Americans are taking responsibility for what was done in our name. Though we have acted with cold hearts far too many times, we have not forgotten our actions towards you. Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.

Our government may ignore you, concerned more with its public image. It has also ignored many veterans who have returned physically injured or mentally troubled by what they saw and did in your country. But the time is long overdue that we say that the value of our nation's leaders no longer represent us. Our secretary of defense may say the U.S. won't lose its reputation over this, but we stand and say that our reputation's importance pales in comparison to our common humanity.

With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask. Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to speak out against the wars and military policies responsible for what happened to you and your loved ones. Our hearts are open to hearing how we can take any steps to support you through the pain that we have caused.

Solemnly and Sincerely,

Josh Stieber, former specialist, U.S. Army
Ethan McCord, former specialist, U.S. Army

A sliver of heartbreaking daylight bleeds through the deep darkness of this war's heartbreaking despair. Deus ibi est.

Peace be with you. —And also with you.

Keith Olbermann on Obama and executive power

He spends several minutes on the issue, during which I don't once feel like smacking him! Glenn Greenwald has the video, and commentary. Including this terribly relevant quote from the American Prospect:

From a civil libertarian point of view, we're in a much worse place than we were during the Bush administration, when Democrats were willing to oppose Bush's expansive claims of executive authority. Now we have only muted criticism from Democratic legislators and hysterical cries from Republicans that Obama isn't going far enough.

Ah, partisanship. Is there nothing you can't fuck up?

Holy Week in the Holy Land

Some of the highlights of this great video: Palestinian Christians in crowded old churches. Greek Orthodox services in Arabic. Competing for space with tourists and foreign Christians, who get preferential treatment (do the foreign Christians care?). Angry confrontations with Israeli police. A beautiful procession by candlelight. A troop of Palestinian Scouts! (Yes, as in "Boy Scouts" and "Girl Scouts".)

This is a job for Jean!

Taken in Iran last June:


Look at those poor, veiled Muslim women! If only they had a Jean Charest around to help them, give them some courage, teach them some good Canadian feminist ideals, then they might at long last learn to confront their male oppressors. But alas, without help from the West, what hope is there that they might actually stand up for themselves?

On Quebec's Bill 94

Disturbing news:

Following a controversial incident involving spousal abuse, the Liberal government in Quebec has introduced a bill that would prevent women with visible bruises (or other signs of physical trauma associated with spousal abuse) from working at publicly funded institutions. The bill would also remove their right to access services at those institutions, including schools, universities, and medical facilities.

Although the bill has come under fire from some quarters, proponents of the bill argue that bruises on battered women signal a rejection of common Quebecois values which is disturbing and disruptive to normal citizens. According to Premier Jean Charest, it is a "common sense" measure which should be considered elsewhere in Canada. Christine Pelchat of the Conseil du statut de la femme hailed it as "a bill to protect equality between women and men".

According to a poll by Angus-Reid, the bill has overwhelming popular support: 95% within Quebec, and 80% nationwide.

OK, truth be told, that isn't a real news story. But replace my references to battered women and the signs of their abuse with references to Muslim women who wear the niqab, and you basically have the story of Quebec's Bill 94, and the rationale that has been presented in support of it.

The bill. The polls.

A modicum of thoughtful analysis.

Commentary: Quebec's witch hunt against niqabi minority; Quebec unveils its own 'fragility'; Winterize that niqab -- just live and let live.

Some scattered thoughts, I am too angry to arrange them properly.

1. Maybe I should have known better. But I feel blind-sided. I confess that my attention is not chiefly on the women which this will directly affect. (In my defense, there are so few of them, and I don't know them.) I am more preoccupied by an intense feeling of disgust and shame at my country. That it should be infected by this Islamophobia. I of course know that there is racism and xenophobia everywhere, and throughout Canada. But this particular phenomenon I had thought more specific to the Old World, where people still cling to certain strong ideas of nationalism which we in the pluralistic New World have been forced to expel from the mainstream. That this small-minded, racist paranoia, so pathetic, so weak, turns out to have such a hold in Canada, makes me feel fucking sick.

This is not a figure of speech. Sick, in the gut.

We are a small, infantile people.

2. Across the political spectrum, westerners pass judgment on the Muslim veil based on any number of considerations. But rarely is any real knowledge of the particular women in question ever involved.

Have you had tea or broken bread with a woman who wears the veil, gotten a sense of what role it plays in her life? (If you are also a woman, and you meet with her in private, she may take off the veil. Perhaps that will make you less uncomfortable. She may even be wearing make-up underneath.) Has all your knowledge of it been derived from uninformed prejudice, or (in cases that are far better than average) some website on Islamic jurisprudence—written by some man who knows nothing more about any of these individual women than you do?

3. There is an deep strain of paternalism and sexism running throughout all of this—and all in the name of women's rights!

Jean Charest is here to protect you from the patriarchy, Muslim ladies—just do as he says. (It has been a joke between myself and Dawn that my role is to protect her from the patriarchy. It's supposed to be a joke.)

You poor, oppressed ladies: at long last, we are here to save you from the violence and oppression of Muslim men... just don't make us hold you down and rip the veil off of your fucking heads.

4. The veil can mean vastly different things to different women. I guarantee you, there are veiled women with a strength beyond anything your average pampered Canadian bourgeois could muster—and sometimes the veil will be part of an identity from which she draws some measure of that strength.

5. Azar Nafisi writes that her grandmother chose to take up the veil under the rule of the Shah in Iran—as a sign of protest against this Western-backed tyrant, who issued a ban against the veil. Perhaps there are Muslim (or even non-Muslim!) women considering something similar in Quebec today. Godspeed!

6. I am generally for liberal currents in Islam. Many argue that Islam, properly understood, does not require women to wear the veil. I approve, for whatever my opinion is worth. So that is one thing. But to jump from this to being offended at women who wear the veil? What sense does that make?

7. In some cases, no doubt, there is a man enforcing the veil with violence and coercion. How often does that happen? Among Canadian immigrants? Is anyone even interested in finding out? And when it does happen—someone please explain—how exactly does criticism come to rest upon the garment?

8. If someone professed to be concerned about battered women, and then proposed, as a solution, something along the lines of my parody above, would you not be a tad suspicious that perhaps they aren't quite letting you in on their real motives?

9. Are Christian monks a problem? What if they wear robes? What if their robes have hoods? What if it's a new-ager in a robe with a hood, claiming to be a druid?

Christian and Jewish women who refuse to go out in public without their heads covered—why does no one ever talk about them?

10. I'm not sure I've ever felt this awful about my country. I have certainly not felt this way about anything in America. It would not have hit me so terribly if this news had come out of anywhere in America. I have often felt outrage at politics where I currently live, in Chicago, in Illinois, in America. But never have I felt like this. Please understand that (like MLK's disappointment with America) this reaction is borne out of great love for my country and a foolish expectation that we can and should be better than this. Someday, insha'Allah.

(Thanks to Dawn for helping to craft the "bill".)

So mysterious

Dawn pointed me to this marvelous demonstration of... something. Some guy at the BBC ponders this very difficult question: why isn't Rudyard Kipling more popular in India?

Where I spend most of my time nowadays

On the SOUL site, where I am now more or less the head blogger, and on the Southside Solidarity Network site, where I've been responsible for about half of the (sporadic) posts.

Oh, and on Facebook, naturally.

Sell all your possessions and give to the poor

Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable

"It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is...."

He had similar feelings of guilt while on gliding trips in South America and Africa. "I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty," he said.

Corporations are people

There's a certain beauty to the decision. "Persons have an unalienable right to free speech, corporations are persons, and money is speech, therefore...." Given the premises, the conclusion follows inexorably; and the premises are what make America what it is today. This is just the elegant capstone to the plutocratic conquest of American democracy.

***

I think there needs to be a total war on corporate power, waged by those of us people who (unlike some other people) have bodies, minds, and souls, who sleep and can die of old age, who are capable of empathy and love, who bear the image of God, who can (if we so choose) live lives that aren't devoted entirely to the unmotivated pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all other considerations. We need to take down these zombies, legal fictions which have acquired a macabre semblance of life through the unholy power of judicial sorcery.

Oh no. Hold on. I think I might be a racist. I'm saying corporations aren't really deserving of moral respect. I think they don't feel pain the same way we do. If you cut them, they don't in fact bleed, and actually I'm not even sure you can cut them. If a child of mine ever married a corporation, they should expect to be disowned. Never would I recognize a half-human, half-corporate grandchild. No miscegenation across ontological categories, not in my family!

I think I might even be advocating genocide.

Someday in the future, in a more enlightened time, human beings and corporations will walk hand in imaginary hand, look back at this moment in history, and sadly shake their heads (one real, one metaphorical) at small-minded people like me.

Lovers in a dangerous time

Some of my favourite lyrics are in this song.

Positive

Some philosophy types need to take a look at this before some less humorous philosophy types go and change it.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Today I went to Advent vespers. That is, an evening service, in the season of Advent, which marks a period of waiting, both recalling the time before Christ, and marking the current age before the Second Coming. It's the "God is coming!" time of the liturgical calendar.

Given the occasion, the selection of the first scripture reading was interesting. It began:

"So I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me," says the LORD Almighty. (Malachi 3:5)

And if this is part of the Advent message, then it turns out that recent stories like this and this are very seasonal; and if we had any sense at all then maybe we (comfortable Christians in America) should probably be spending this season praying for Him to stay the hell away.

Elizabeth Warren on the middle class

Elizabeth Warren knows a lot about recent economic history, where that points to, and how to communicate this. A rare and lovely combination.

Stagnant wages, increasing cost of living, suffering busts while enjoying no booms, a top-heavy corporate economy functioning to siphon wealth out of just about everyone into the hands of a wealthy few, and a corrupt political system that (at the moment) promises not much hope and change but rather a lot of despair... get ready for America without a middle class.

"Obama Administration Will Not Sign Land Mine Ban"

Fired up!



Ready to go!



Story here.

Another big fight

Good Jobs Chicago: challenging big box stores to bring good jobs to our city.

You get a food stamp, you get a food stamp, everybody gets new food stamps!

The headline declares: Food Stamps Will Feed Half Of US Kids. But this is actually understating the findings. That prediction is based on stats collected in "1968 through 1997", according to which:

Overall, about 49 percent of all children were on food stamps at some point by the age of 20, the analysis found. That includes 90 percent of black children and 37 percent of whites.

So that's already happened. It's in the past and present, not the future.

Pause: Almost all black people (at least under the age of 60 or so) have been on food stamps. I read this article hours ago, and my mind is still metabolizing just that little snippet.

But (moving on) you can't just project that similar stats will be seen in the future. Income inequality has gotten worse, not better. And then came the latest financial / economic crash, which siphoned billions out of poor and (disproportionately) minority households (I forget where I read just how many billions, but it's a big number), and looks to be headed for a yet more spectacular sequel before too long.

Well, I've been working on not ending on downers, so here's a joke:

You might be living in a fundamentally unjust economic system if....

Getting weird....

One of the other rally organizers asked me if I wanted to pick up on an interview spot on Chicago Public Radio (or possibly NPR?).

I said no, of course. (That "of course" will make sense to you if you've ever listened to me try to think on my feet about complicated issues.)

Barbara Ehrenreich

...spoke on campus to promote her new book, Bright-Sided. That book was finished months ago, and since then she'd spent some time on a series of very fine columns on issues relating to the financial crisis, appearing in the NY Times (one, two, three, four).

So I sent her an email over the weekend, telling her a bunch of students here were organizing for the ABA counter-convention--and she wrote back to tell me I could make a spiel at the end of her talk, which actually ended with a call to activism (the solution to our problems is not to pretend they're not real problems, but to see them clearly and work to fix them).

So that was very cool. Also: Butterflies!

Showdown in Chicago

My chief extracurricular activity for the month of October.

More explanation to follow.

Homelessness and health care

Holy crap:

A ground-breaking demonstration in Chicago showed that providing housing and supportive services to chronically ill homeless people could reduce health care use by one-third. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that housing and social services could more than pay for themselves in reduced medical costs.

The provision of housing and support for the homeless is in any case a moral imperative. Not that this matters. But now it turns out that it's also a good idea in narrower economic terms.

Then again, I recently saw a clip of a woman condemning health care reform on the grounds that it would help out illegal immigrants... and then revealing that her own husband works 4 jobs, but still lacks health care. There are not a few who would sooner withhold help from those whom they consider undeserving, than see things improved for everyone, including themselves. I suppose the homeless are just looking for a free ride--and what's more important than spiting them?