Human Rights

The Right to Be

May 15th was a day when bloggers around the world wrote about Human Rights. I was going to, but didn't. I got stuck. Here you can find a list of some of the posts. The 27th Comrade who did an excellent round-up of posts in the Ugandan blogosphere.

The real reason for not posting was I got distracted. But thinking about a post was harder than I thought. It's easy when I'm stuck about writing simply for me to ignore the blog. Daisy of Daisy's Dead Air tagged me with a meme and maybe it's just the right prodding to get unstuck and back writing on the blog. While I don't think too highly of any of my posts, I'm extraordinarily fond of the many blogs I read. It seems only fair to participate.

Seven Songs Meme

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring-summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Oh Happy Day--From Sister Act 2
Shostakovich - Symphony No. 11 `The Year 1905' Mvt.4(2/2)--NHK Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yukio Kitahara.
Lapowny--Geoffrey Oryema
Please Send Me Someone to Love--Jeff Buckley
Harvest For The World--The Isley Brothers
Redemption Song--Bob Marley
All Along the Watchtower--Sungha Jung

I'm all for crediting parents when their children grow up well, but am slow to blame parents when children go awry. There are many influences. I can hardly blame my parents for my many shortcomings. They tried very hard and both gave me so many gifts. Among the gifts I treasure from my mother is her lesson that everyone has a right to be.

Daisy blogs in Greenville, South Carolina. We moved there in the early 1960's and when my younger brother star started primer, my mother began teaching. It was the era of school desegregation, so in a way the dialog about race which Barak Obama speaks about in his speech A More Perfect Union (YouTube video) engaged me early on.

A memory from my mother came to me when thinking about human rights. She taught first grade at John Street School which probably isn't there anymore because it was an old school then. Her first year the school district went to a "freedom of choice" plan. What that meant for the John Street School is it went from being all white to mostly all black in a single year. The memory must be from the second year my mother taught there, and I must have been in sixth grade. Towards the end of the year she organized an excursion for her kids to the city park and I was brought along. Among the treats was a box of cupcakes with bright blue-green icing roughly applied provided by one of the children's mother. I must have looked at them with a scornful look because my mother said to me:

If you so much as say one unkind word about those cupcakes, I'll spank you in front of everybody.

I don't actually remember ever being spanked by my mother. She didn't believe in spanking in school, but certainly didn't believe she should take spanking out of her arsenal at home. Punishments at home were not very ritualized, and I'm grateful about that. In any case I knew my mother well enough to know she didn't make idle threats. And when I remember this, a face of a little girl with corn rows in her hair and missing her two front teeth is grinning widely at me. The feeling I get along with a picture of her in my head is her grin reflected schadenfreude; the teacher's boy got yelled at. It's probably just projection, I doubt my mother said that to me so she could hear. The message was clear: My mother loved every single one of these kids, just as she loved me. Beware hurting anyone my mother loved! And that's why the girl was grinning!

A song popular a year or two latter that always moves me, and I've listened two several times recently is "Oh Happy Day" by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Here's great version from the movie Sister Act 2 that captures something of the awkward joy of cultures interacting. The students and parents of the children she taught brought her great joy. As a child myself the great sin as she showed me was not to take joy, especially for stupid reasons of racism.

Racism is partly what got me stuck trying to write about human rights. Racism can be a personal characteristic, but there are also so many racist structures built into everyday existence. In R. D. Laing's book The politics of Experience, he writes:

It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence.

Keguro writes brilliantly and he has helped me to understand better this "wolf in sheep's clothing" quality of American politics--politics including how Americans ordinarily act. Mulling that sent my head spinning. I don't know how to deal with the cruelty my country perpetuates, but surely I can't expect my righteous indignation about other countries will wear well.

Earlier this month I went to the symphony with my father for a performance of Shostakovich - Symphony No. 11 `The Year 1905'. It was a moving performance. That clip is from the 4th movement. The reviewer criticized the balance and the brass as too loud. So you can see that the whole piece is not as quiet as the selection posted. In the quiet parts I thought of Gorecki Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Music is one way to be captured by sorrow and to heal.

I do feel sorrowful often these days, so some of the songs I've been listening to lately reflect that. I loved Geffrey Oryema's Lapowny when I first heard it. This is a great live version. It's worth checking out some of the other videos of Oryema too. From the album notes:

This song is about a school teacher whose body was found lying in a school compound. He was struck by lightening and died on the spot, just as he was getting ready to head home. He had a pile of exercise books which he was supposed to correct at home. As a tribute to their beloved teacher, the pupils composed a song that they entitled Lapwony. It rained heavily on the afternoon Lapwony died. Someone found his farewell letter, the ink all but washed away.

When I'm feeling down the great Percy Mayfield's song Please Send Me Someone to Love comes to mind:

I lay awake night and ponder world troubles.
My answer is always the same.
That unless men put an end to all of this,
Hate will put the world in a flame, (oh) what a shame.

And also this song: The Isley Brothers - Harvest For The World. The keys are, I suppose, love and gratitude. I so often am neglectful.

I am grateful that I got to see Bob Marley perform live here in Pittsburgh. Redemption Song is rather permanently in my head, and I love to hear it in all sorts of cover versions. When I think of human rights, of course I want rights of all to be respected. But rather quickly the problem those that have power over come to the fore. So the question of rights leads to how to do right. Marley's answer always moves and inspires me: "All I ever had are these songs of freedom. Won't you help me sing?"

I can't find a link, I'm almost sure that there is one at Tim Boucher's site, but I can't find it. In any case somewhere I read that when G. I. Gurdjieff was asked what we can do in the face of evil, he replied:

Create something good.

I like that very much.

One of the things I like most about YouTube is seeing people's creations. There is a young South Korean guitar prodigy named Sungha Jung. I love to watch and listen to him play. It's hard to pick a favorite, but his rendition of All Along the Watchtower is surely a favorite.

That's seven songs that have been meaningful to me lately. I won't tag anyone, I hardly know any bloggers well enough. I also know that YouTube is useless where bandwidth is low. But I would love it if others, especially in Africa, take up the meme and let me know you have.

Bloggers for Human Rights

Photo: Indybay 2007 Anti War Action.

BloggersUnite has set May 15th as a day for bloggers around the world to blog on Human Rights. Human Rights are essential so I could use the nudge to blog about, and to learn more about ways to promulgate Human Rights.

I never know what I'm going to write, but today I've been musing about politics as I've been turning the damp ground. Hardly an expert on American politics, I follow it a bit obsessively. Obama in the race and Clinton nipping at his heals has raised some interesting dynamics among people I know who vote fairly reliably for Democratic Party candidates. And one of those dynamics are about the awful subject of race.

In the printed version of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the front page was a story: Obama putting One-Drop Rule to test; online the heading is: Obama candidacy raises old questions about what is black which strikes me as a somewhat less obnoxious headline. The article made me squirm. It's written by L.A. Johnson and I've no idea whether L.A. is black or white, a woman or a man. I do know that Johnson has tackled the tangled subject of race in America for the newspaper before. In the fall, readers were able to spout off about being race 'ambassadors' which I thought was pretty cool because basically everybody said "What's with that?" or something to that effect. (Searching the archives for a link, I discovered that when L. A. Johnson gets and AP byline it's Linda A. Johnson, so I guess she's a woman.) I don't really fault Johnson that the article made me slightly sick, the problem is Americans in general are strangely warped about race and ethnicity and the article simply reflects that.

I'm just some blogger in a basement, and I'm identified as white. I self-identify as white simply because the option seems untenable. While I deeply resent the racism of the society in which I live, my anti-racist credentials are slight. Obama running has helpfully made the endemic racism of the USA so visible, but as a people we're still grappling for ways to discuss race.

Ethan Zuckerman is taking the month of May off the computer to recover from eye surgery. I wish him a good recovery and will miss his posts. One of Zuckerman's blog categories is xenophilia. Your Dictionary defines xenophilia as:

attraction to or admiration of strangers or foreigners or of anything foreign or strange

zuckerman is a proponent of xenophilia and has recently been engaging in blog conversations about homophily (use his xenophila category link. Homophily doesn't refer to gay people and issues, but rather the old adage:

Birds of a feather flock together.

In his post Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia he wrote:

I’ve been talking and writing about homophily as one of the concepts that helps explain the challenges and issues that surround Global Voices and my larger media attention work. It’s my contention that living in the 21st century requires understanding what people think, feel and want in different parts of the world, given that both the challenges and opportunities of next several decades are global, not local ones.

One of the advantages of reading a few Ugandan bloggers is getting to know a bit about how others view the USA. And I am especially grateful to The 27th Comrade for taking the time to specifically point out to me that the view of the USA from there isn't often rosy.

All of this long wind-up is to remark about an issue of American politics. The President of the United States under the Constitution must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." It is abundantly clear that president Bush has not done his duty in this regard. The list of law breaking that we know about is astoundingly large. The administration also has gone to great lengths to bury the evidence and to stretch reasonable interpretations beyond all recognition. Their is a Constitutional remedy for such a president; i.e., impeachment, but the Speaker of the House--where a bill of Impeachment originates--has taken it off the table. So most observers assume that he will follow his father's precident and pardon members of his administration for their crimes before he leaves office.

I agree that he probably will. But it occurred to me today that such pardons may not be the panacea imagined. The reason I believe so is because among the many crimes this administration has committed are War Crimes which are violations of International Law. It's true that the United States has refused to participate in the International Criminal Court. It also seems the case that Americans turning over those accused of committing crimes against humanity seems far-fetched now. However so damaged is the good opinion of the world about the USA, and that increasingly in the future a good opinion will be keenly in the national interest, that demands for the USA to be held to account may well be difficult to resist.

If the President uses his powers to pardon crimes against the United States, those pardons will most likely make prosecution of those implicated in crimes against International Law, impossible, or nearly so within our legal structures. Upon refusing to prosecute, the International Community, might demand extradition to the International Criminal Court. It's easy to predict that even a Democratic Party controlled government would refuse. However so extreme are the violations, for example torture of detainees being coordinated in the White House with the approval of the President, by highest ranking American officials, such refusal would severely undermine the myth of American goodness.

For so many in the world today, the myth of American goodness was debunked long ago. But it is a powerful myth for Americans and much depends on it. I believe that in the future Americans will want to sustain the myth.

So my argument to Bush not to grant pardons at the end of his term boils down to the notion that it's so likely that Americans will treat American officials leniently, perhaps even something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission where amnesty is nearly assured. This hardly would reverse world-wide condemnation, but would have some mollifying effect. I probably would go a long way to shoring up American perceptions of ourselves as good.

Such thinking probably "outs" me as a hypocrite. I'm not very comfortable with that, but on the other hand very much believe that it's good to be good. Nothing in politics is ever very pure. I suppose I'm simply grasping at straws to imagine some way that my country can move from our embrace of the dark side towards the light. There is precedent in our history. Martin Luther King observed:

“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Many outside the USA are demanding that we as a nation be held to account, if for no other reason than there can be no reconciliation until we as a people acknowledge our transgressions. Not all Americans are so blind. Humanity shares an obligation to bend towards justice. My hope is that Americans more generally will become concerned about human rights for all and work to make those rights real. Together we can create something good.

May Day

That's not a recent picture, I'm just not very good at taking pictures. I do like to look at pictures of the garden over time because they are a useful reminder of the changes taking place. My father did use the rototiller in his garden on Monday, so one of the garden plots looks just like that. Every fall he plants a crop of rye and then tills it into the soil in the spring. I'm not such a fan of rototilling as he is, so that lower garden bed hasn't been tilled in years.

One of the reasons I call myself an incompetent gardener is that in general I seem to make decisions that seem a wasteful or foolish to others. I'm quite accustomed to people not taking me seriously, which is quite a gift in the sense that it relieves pressure to take myself very seriously. So for example my father can't figure out why I don't like my garden beds runover with a tractor pulling a rototiller. The simple explanation is that it seems so much work. With a hoe and a rake I can plant what little I want and plan on some scheme for tending it. The tending part is what gets to me and long rows mean a lot of tending. I seem to get more done with smaller plots, planted one at a time. The beautifully planted farmers' fields of corn, wheat, hay, and oats seem all the more an accomplishment to one who's put a spade in the ground. The efficiency is remarkable. But when it comes to small gardens, hand tools seem the right tools to me.

The farmer who plants the fields plants in rotation. We've lived here for almost thirty years and over the years the front edge of the property bounding on the fields has been a question. My mother always imagined a fence. My father never wanted a fence, probably in no small part because of the expense. I've wanted to plant along the edge. Part of my reasoning for the planting is an idea that it's a good plan to design from the boundaries inward, or at least for many years doing just the opposite that's the conclusion I've come to.

Then again I'm pretty unrealistic about so many things in the garden. Lots of the soil around here when dry has the consistency of cement, and in the rockier places more like concrete. But the idea for that front boundary planting was nixed years ago.

The farmer is getting up in years. Last year while plowing a lever of the plow was down and he didn't notice making a furrow along the front edge of our property. I thought he did it on purpose to mark the boundary, but he insisted it was just a mistake. This year he had a young guy plow and when he plowed a field close to the house he seems to have used last year's furrow as a mark. The problem is that the tractor turning on our little stretch of ground busted up the sod with the tires, and harrow and left a very uneven line of disturbed soil along the edge. This made a big problem to mow with my lawnmower.

This is a dilemma for me: For more than thirty years the farmer has turned his tractor on a little stretch of our property. In the past there has been minor damage and inconvenience, but nothing really to speak of. This year's problem really stems from plowing just a few feet closer than they have in the past, but the damage was considerable from my perspective having to deal with it with garden tools, as opposed to farm-scale equipment. I told my father I was going to plant along our line in response. The prospect rather horrified him, but I don't think he really imagined I would; because it requires so much work.

I've got the sod removed from a section about 150 feet long by about 6 feet wide. There's an old white lilac in the front that had suckered under a tall canopy of fir trees. I've dug some up some of the suckers and planted them closely along the front edge of the bed. Last night he came out and his jaw dropped.

I haven't told him my plan to plant sunflowers all along the edge yet. Probably my favorite seed company is J. L. Hudson. This year they're offering a Russian variety, Peredovik, grown for making vegetable oil. They may not be the most fashionable flower, although I'm sure they'll look good, but will provide a useful seed for saving. The birds, of course will welcome them too.

I've still got about half the line to prepare, and it's slow going. The soil is compacted, and the best approach seems not to till all the grass into the soil. One reason is the sod with most of the soil shook loose is quite useful for adjusting the grade in another section of the boundary line. A second reason is there's a good deal of rhizomous grass and annuals like dandelions in the sod and tilling simply increases them.

I won't have enough of the lilac seedlings for the whole line as close as I'm planting them. Next year, if all goes well, I can dig up some of the lilacs, spacing them a little further apart to complete the whole line. I'll probably seed grass on the field side next spring too, so I'll have a narrow swath to mow on the public side of the hedge.

In several years, one May Day someone will look out from the road and see a hedge of white lilacs, a football field's length. It will be a splendid vista. It' isn't quite fair to say I planned it. Basically, I was mad about work the farmer's plowing caused me this Spring and wanted to do something to prevent it in the future. I spied the available plant material, the white lilacs, and set about to make a hedge with them. The plan make sense to me, even imagining the mature lilacs gives me a feeling of excitement. I also know that mostly people will think it a crazy or stupid idea, at least now the lilac seedlings look very insignificant. But the line is marked, something I've wanted for a long time, and never found a persuasive reason to argue about it in the past.

Most of the world celebrates May 1st as Labour Day. Through a quirk in history Labor Day here in the USA is celebrated in September. May Day is a wonderful holiday and a chance to reflect on and be grateful for the improvement in all our lives solidarity between working people has made. I wish everyone a wonderful May Day.

Qualifications

I have one face time friend who occasionally reads this blog. He pointed out that the word amateur means doing something for the love of it. I guess the incompetent gardener moniker which came up in my last post didn't seem quite right to him; i.e., incompetence implying that I'm really bad at gardening.

I had a couple of things in mind when I wrote that last post, and I suppose I'll get around to them in this post. But first I'll say a bit more about The Incompetent Gardener.

When I started to write about gardening as The Incompetent Gardener many years ago, I think what I had in mind wasn't so much being a bad gardener, as it was being a gardener without proper qualifications. One definition of qualification in the American Heritage Dictionary is:

Any quality, accomplishment, or ability that suits a person to a specific position or task.

Looking back after all these years, I suppose I was uniquely "qualified" to make my garden, but certainly I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't really even set about to make a garden.

Mostly what I've done is to try to solve problems. When we first moved here almost thirty years ago the grass and bramble was high and the place littered with remnants of a once productive farm. There were fallen down out buildings all over, the rusted body of and old egg truck, and a similar wreck of a combine or some such piece of farm equipment hidden in the weeds and debris. There were literally tons of debris. So the garden started out by way of clean up.

There's a story told, although I can't remember where I heard or read it, of a woman who every year for several years was enticed to buy seed packets by the lovely pictures of flowers on them. Every year for several years she got no flowers. then one year a packet also included a picture of what the seedlings look like. The picture looked familiar, and it dawned on her she'd been meticulously weeding out the flower seedlings. Once she let the seedlings grow the flowers seemed all the more wonderful for her years of fruitless effort, and she got hooked. Somewhere along the line I got hooked on gardening too.

Part of what I mean by calling myself an incompetent gardener are surprises similar to her misstep; where as much as we try to teach the land and flora a thing or two it's the land and flowers that teach us. Over the years I've written about my garden, and one place or another I can find a lump of this writing.

I've been in contact with a group of students at Makarere University in Kampala who have formed an organization to write and publish textbooks for use in Uganda. They hope to make them available to students cheaper than what's available now. The pressing challenge is some money to get this balloon off the ground. But that's just one of the many challenges.

I have thought to pull some of my garden writing together in a book published by the on-demand publisher Lulu. The organization has set some modest and attainable goals, foremost the acquisition of a computer. So I thought that sales of a book, The Incompetent Gardener, might be something I could do to assist them. that was the brainstorm anyway.

The idea for the book fits together with several other ideas. One of the issues is finding ways to use information and communication technologies to further education in Uganda. I'm so excited about the organization, they call themselves Science Publishing And Community Elevation, SPACE, because it's Ugandans making educational materials that will fit in Uganda. But the members are only just exploring computer software and Internet collaboration. So I thought to make the preparation of the book public and online, so that the members of SPACE could get a look at some of the ways of using online tools. And in the back of my mind the thought occurred to me that perhaps there are other authors who might consider using sales of Lulu published books in support of their effort in the future.

I haven't figured it all out yet, but that's what I was thinking about when I wrote about puttering in the garden. I still am puttering, the weather has been beautiful and spring in Western Pennsylvania is lovely. I'm not very good about getting my camera out, so the picture was taken several years ago. I chose it because now many of the white daffodils are in bloom. The ones in the picture are called Thalia or the Orchid Narcissus. They have a lovely fragrance, as do many of the later blooming daffodils. My favorite is the Poet's Narcissus, probably my favorite flower fragrance of all. They are so willing, that is they increase or naturalize easily. And the ones blooming now were planted long ago by former inhabitants here.

Puttering

Spring is here. There are daffodils blooming all around the garden and they cheer me. Most of the daffodils come from spreading about bulbs from a patch that's about the same size in the picture, in fact you can see that very patch in the distance in this photo. The daffodils are all around, but I'm disappointed that I can never seem to take pictures that capture the yellow riot of color. There are an incredible number of daffodil varieties. I've planted several which extend the blooming season considerably. I've not a clue as to this variety's name, but they are early and clearly naturalize well. I bet all of them have spread from just a few bulbs planted fifty years ago or more.

I like gardening very much, but I'm an incompetent gardener. I don't really mean to be self deprecating when I say that. My garden is a source of exercise, curiosity and delight, so I value the garden and gardening highly. I say incompetent more in defiance of formula, and in favor of and attitude of "go ahead and take a stab at it."

My mother was fond of naming what she spent a great deal of time doing as "to putter." The AH dictionary--the tattered First Edition by desk--notes that to putter in the way my mother used it is chiefly British: "To occupy oneself in an aimless or desultory manner." I'm more apt to say "putz." That word isn't in my book copy of the dictionary, but means much the same as putter. Putz is Yiddish. Not clear at all how it became part of my lexicon, nor whether it has a similar etymology to putter. Nevertheless, putz is vulgar slang for penis and I've never heard putter to mean that, although I suppose it may somewhere. Putzing in the garden is perhaps as masturbation is to copulation, and so like the distinction between an incompetent gardener and a real gardener. In any case, my approach to gardening is most certainly desultory: "Moving or jumping from one thing to another; disconnected; rambling."

In spring, I often also have the pleasure of working in other people's gardens. One friend gets my style and when working in her garden even encourages my rambling. Coordinating between vehicle availability and weather, she picked me up with her car so we had a chance to chat. The conversation turned to politics and I mentioned the current world food crisis triggered by rapidly rising commodity prices. As we approached our destination, she asked something to the effect: "Can we get out of this mess?" Or more to the point: "Tell me we're not doomed!"

Phil Jones points to two articles warning that food price increases will cause mass hunger. And he asks:

What are *you* doing to help produce more food and avert this?

I'm not doing enough, but at least the issue of famine is on my radar screen. Phil's question gets to the point, all of us ought take this challenge seriously and wonder what we can do.

Mostly what I do is to rearrange flowering plants in my garden. I've been gardening long enough to be happy I'm not dependent on my efforts for my food, it's not easy to raise crops.

My friend Nathan's CBO, the BSLA, in the Iganga is working with people in people in villages to form farmer groups. The particular emphasis is with widows caring for dependent children orphaned by AIDS. Education is a key component of the program, not just about HIV and AIDS but education especially about food production and post harvest handling. The BSLA provides help with inputs like fertilizer and seeds. They also conduct training in husbandry and other subjects at their offices in Iganga. This sort of community action is worthwhile, but difficult to find support for. I've got to give Nathan credit for sticking to the work even when the going gets really tough as far as finances go. Slum Doctor Programme a small non-profit in Washington State is providing generous assistance.

The current food crisis is precipitated by world economic events. But by in large the solutions to famine must be local developments. In 2005 I wrote a post titled But Let Us Cultivate Our Garden taken from the last sentence of Voltaire's Candide. I searched for the post as an easy way to find a quote from a wonderful Adam Gropnik review of Ian Davidson's Voltaire in Exile:

By “garden” Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action.

The modest help I'm able to lend to Nathan's BSLA program is important to me because I think it's helping. Yet I'm frustrated I don't do more in my locale. I do cultivate my garden. By doing more, I think I mean to encourage others nearby to cultivate their gardens too. Our gardens are indeed a proper answer to Phil's question about what we can do.

Talking Peace

March 19th Iraq War Blogswarm commemorates from a variety of perspectives the fifth anniversary of the launching o of the US war against Iraq.

As I feared, the day has come and I don't know what to say.

First of all the testimony of Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan is available, just not live. It can be seen at Iraq Veterans Against the War and also selections of testimony on The Real News at YouTube. I've been gradually watching in small doses. Penny Coleman's piece at AlterNet provides a very good overview of the event.

I went to Flickr to look for a picture for this post. I typed "peace" into the box, what I thought was everyone's photo's, but it turned out it was just my contacts photos. Over 260 pictures came up. My great friend pingting has lots of peace pictures up. He's an illustrator so keeps his permissions rather limited. My friend Mark Knobil is a great photographer and had plenty in the list. Global Peace Tiles won the prize for the most Peace hits. With my dozen or so contacts it's clear peace is on our on minds. We've not stopped talking about peace.

With an anniversary like this it's time to reflect. Credible estimates are that more than a million Iraqis have died in this conflict. Estimates are about 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan, and another 2.5 million internally displaced, homeless. This is the Internet, so I can hear the screams: "Links??" But the argument seems more denial than serious. It's the fidelity to a line of success that seems so fanciful to me. Yesterday's headline from McClatchy: Cheney cites 'phenomenal' Iraqi security progress as bombing kills 40 captures the disconnect aptly. The AP tells us "Bush Says Iraq War Was Worth It." That's an opinion not widely shared across the nation. John Cole had an amusing post with a single sentence synopsis of nine OpEds The New York Times ran to mark the fifth anniversary of the war. All the sentences use the f-word, which I don't in the blog for some reason, but consider entirely appropriate in this instance. Even the some of the strongest cheerleaders are saying "We f^cked up." Yet our leaders say all's well, indeed "phenomenal." It make me want to holler.

But over the past five years, I find fault in myself for not hollering more. Still, I've not been alone in talking about peace, many have never tired of it, even when so many of us have felt so discouraged. I was very heartened to see Darcy Burner and ten candidates for national office come out with A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq (PDF)a plan which addresses forthrightly the political failures of the war and our culpability for the great harm the war's conduct entails.

Col. Patrick Lang has been a steady realist about this conflict throughout. I've never served in the armed forces, so there's always been a slight disconnect in the lens through which we see it; nevertheless he's someone I found worth listening to. He favors Hilary Clinton and praises her plan.

I support Barak Obama for the Democratic Party candidacy for president. Today Obama gave a speech about race in America transcript and YouTube video. This speech further solidified my support of his candidacy. Theriomorph is a beautiful and smart writer and her blog attracts great comments. She publishes her blog posts on Sundays. Sometimes I wait to read them, just because I know I'll want to savor them. This week she weighed in on race and gender and animosity between the Obama and Clinton camps. At face value neither Obama's speech nor theriomorph's post were about Iraq. But both are examples of talking peace genuinely. Neither is simply: "Peace, Peace" but rather the work of facing truths and understanding perspectives of others.

Theriomorph wrote:

These false comparisons, the 'hierarchy of pain' pissing contest between oppressions which are similarly structured but not the same, the insistence on preferencing one kind of oppression over another to maintain privilege - these are defocusing tactics, and nothing more. It is never useful, it never accomplishes anything but fragmentation.

Barak Obama said today:

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems -- two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

The snippets are unfair to the nuances in both, but I think show how both theriomorph make the point that we can't wish differences away, but we can avoid distractions to our common purpose. To make peace it takes courage to face the truth and even with the fear and worry to proceed towards unity and perfection.

Perfection thought of in a Platonic way is ever elusive. But when we're thirsty a chipped cup is a perfect vessel. The outward appearance may be flawed or unexpected, but perfection holds together. Talking peace in one area aids peace in other areas. For Democrats the selection process for our presidential candidate is getting rather contentious. There's little possibility that Clinton can overcome her delegate deficit. So theriomorph and Obama are addressing necessary issues to find a way towards peace.

People are talking peace and making takes courage. May we encourage one another to end this unwise and immoral war. All of us can play a part and together we can enable peace.

War Is Not Healthy

March 19 is Iraq blogswarm. Bloggers all over will be blogging against the war in Iraq. I'd sign up, but I worry what to say, and whether I'll actually do it. So this post is sort of a practice piece.

Politics isn't my forte. I generally abhor violence, but it's also difficult for me to imagine a near future without armies and navies. That stipulation never seems enough to the many who think that even trying to imagine a world without war is naive and foolish in the extreme.

In this political season here in the USA talking about how the country under my flag got into this war is strictly off limits. Only proposals about what to do know are allowed and any deviation from the status quo is deemed surrender.

Since this is my blog, I'll revisit the taboo subject of how we went to war, if only to point out that many Americans were against it.

The picture is from Labor Day 2002, president Bush came to Pittsburgh to speak. I'm not a terribly political guy, and tend to be pretty shy. My experience with street protests are very meager. But in the summer before the war, I believed it was possible that American's could register their displeasure with going to war and avert it.

The night before the Labor Day event I went to a gathering of friends. When the hostess opened the door and saw that I'd arrived with poster board and markers, she said to me sharply: "You are not going to talk politics all evening."

It was a lovely late summer evening and we most of us sat outside and talked politics. People seemed very resigned to the situation, and nobody promised to join the protest. Even coming up with slogans to scrawl on the poster board was like pulling teeth; that is, for everyone except the daughter of a friend who was ten or eleven at the time. Her father is a marble sculptor and had lived her years up to that point in Italy where the marble is. Unencumbered by thinking too much about American politics, she felt free to come up with one protest sign masterpiece after another. We all loved "Monkey the Bush" and none of us really had a clue why or what it meant.

I did go and discovered what "free speech" zones are all about. Bill Neel was handcuffed and arrested for refusing to get behind the fence--and the phalanx of police and security. You can see from these pictures that people who heart Bush were allowed on the public sidewalks with signs, so only those citizens seeking to weigh in against the rush to war were to be isolated. The irony was too that Bill Neel had actually served in elective office as a Republican.

I was certain after seeing the president's motorcade go by and hearing the heckling of the crowd as they left the speech--one thing fences like that do is make it feel safe for hecklers to hurl insults--that the die had been cast and we were going to war. But by January 2003 many of my friends joined with thousands of others in Pittsburgh, on a brutally cold and snowy day to march against the war.

When I see that sign "Monkey the Bush" it makes me sad. That lively little girl is now a young woman. Last autumn I joined a bunch of social networking sites to look around. I do like to look at pictures people put up. And on social networks you can see people from all over. We put up all sorts of pictures on these sites, but very often we put up pictures of our dear ones. Pictures of big-eyed children with birthday cakes, teens hugging their mothers, girlfriends and boyfriends. Lovely pictures all. Across the whole round world there are somethings we share in common.

When I think of the millions of Iraqi's displaced, and the terrible air war the surge has wrought, I'm gripped with grief. I see the faces of loved ones, just like the photos I see posted online on social networks. On the PBS Newshour pictures and brief biographies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are posted in silence. I'm saddened. I aam also curious how they die. So many in the middle management ranks and I wonder, but the news never seems to tell. Juan Cole provides some context and points to reporting. Without Informed Comment I'd really be in the dark. Last week he posted an AP video up at YouTube about the five soldiers killed in Baghdad on Monday. Cole made this observation:

Why don’t bloggers do more posting of pieces like this AP video, below, about the 8 US troops killed on Monday. We are after all a tv network if we want to be.

It's a good point about being a TV network if we want to be.

I did not post in time to post notice of the live broadcast of Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan, however I can still point to the liveblog of the event. The War Prayer is a short story by Mark Twain which was published posthumously in Harper's Monthly, November 1916. Last year a film version was made, and on our TV network, it's worth watching.

That summer back in 2002, my hostess was very kind and sat with me for a while talking about the prospects of war. She wanted nothing to do with the poster making, except said that the line she always liked best was

War is not healthy for children or other living things.

Another Mother for Peace owns the copyright to Lorraine Schneider's famous poster and image. They use the proceeds to fund their peace activities. When I was a teenager I had a patch of that sunflower image on my Sunday blue blazer. I've always liked the slogan too. Schneider created the poster in 1965. Two years later fifteen friends met at her house to discuss "doing something" about Vietnam. They decided to send Mother's Day letters to Washington and used the image that Schneider had created for the cover of the card. The card read:

For my Mother’s Day gift of this year,
I don’t want candy or flowers.
I want an end to killing.

We who have given life
must be dedicated to preserving it.

Please talk peace.

I'm not sure what to write on the 19th. I am sure that talking peace is not foolish. We must find a way to do so.

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