What happens when we totally reverse our thinking? A great exercise in how little it really takes to change the frame. H/t to Martha Allen for sharing this.
Don’t just listen, Watch:
From June Jordan’s “The Revolution Now”
The following is an excerpt from “The Revolution Now: Update On Beloved Community”, an essay by June Jordan written in 1997 and delivered at a celebration of Martin Luther King’s life. Necessary strength and faith during these overwhelming times, and still so relevant:
June Jordan
And you cannot achieve a stabilized mutually respectful, conscientious, neither dominant nor submissive, love, without a revolution of the spirit that invented and imposed and enforced iniquities of inequality in the first place.
Is there reason for hope?…
,,,I know there is.
It may be small. It may be dim. But there is a fire transfiguring the muted, the daunted spirit of people everywhere. Like the “still small voice” that came to the prophet Elijah, this is not a spectacular, televised conflagration. But the burning away of passivity and misplaced anger and self-loathing among the poor and the invisible and the inaudible and the insecure and the economically dispensable and the socially ostracized–that burning away persists like the undeniable light from the farthest stars.
I know that it is happening.
–from Affirmative Acts, pg. 207
Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me (With Apologies To Richard Farina)
On the morning after the British election Yahoo ran a headline that read, “‘Political vacuum’ sparks market jitters”. Just what we need after the Dow does a stomach tossing dive.
Only for sure thing--a pale white guy will be the next British PM
Should ‘market jitters’ indeed be a cause for concern after a day when the market plummeted? Yes in the sense that it has the potential of further destabilizing the already dicey European markets. But… My local paper ran a headline about yesterday’s Dow fiasco that read, “Dow plunges on Greek crisis, P&G sell order.” Truth–the market plunged because those events apparently triggered a bunch of algorithmic computer-driven sell orders that effectively fed upon each other and that is what really caused the market to plunge. In other words, a bunch of computers came perilously close to plunging the already fragile world economy into a death spiral.
For months now, I’ve been trying to understand how the market could keep going up when down here on the ground, things basically suck. Too many of us are poor, hungry, unemployed, sick and homeless. There is a huge disconnect between the health of the DOW and the health of the economy. What really hasn’t been discussed in depth yet is the impact of the mounting number of huge natural and unnatural disasters on our economic equilibrium; the utter destruction of entire countries in the aftermath of earthquakes, volcanoes that cost the airlines billions and utterly disrupt the transport system that we have become dependent upon.
And now the British Petroleum/Haliburton trashing of the Gulf of Mexico. A look at the long-term impact of the Exxon Valdez spill is instructive:
Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve.
The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt’s income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons’ college funds to support his family…
…The herring loss alone has cost the region about $400 million over the past 21 years, according to R.J. Kopchak, a former fisherman who is now developmental director at Cordova’s Prince William Sound Science Center.
The average fisherman suffered a 30 percent loss in income after the spill, but those who specialized in just herring lost everything, Kopchak said.
It is a fair assumption that tourism dollars will plummet along the Gulf and maybe up the eastern seaboard, unemployment in those states will rise, and if you take fish oil for your heart, the price is going up. And then there is the price that cannot be calculated for destroying ocean and wetland habitats, damage that can never be undone.
The HAL 9000
There are lessons to be learned from oil slicks that spiral out of control and computer programs that take off on their own (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s HAL) and make no mistake about it, these things are going to keep happening but unlike a roller coaster where you know that after the big plunge, the ride will go back up, here on planet Earth, there is no such guarantee. Time to fasten our seatbelts.
Peak-A-Boo
Hello U.S. media? Why exactly am I reading this story because of a link on Buzzflash to a blog that quotes a British newspaper?:
The good old days no more: "Come listen to a story about a man named Jed A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed, Then one day he was shootin' at some food, And up from the ground came a bubblin' crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea."
The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.
The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.
“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth (emphasis mine) in both the developing and developed worlds.
They are still concerned about growth? Talk about epic delusional understatement, survival might be the more relevant consideration. But hey, what me worry, think I’ll just drive over to the nearest java infusion station and read the local paper so I can learn which hunky guy is misbehaving with which starlet, but first I’m going to send some money to support independent media and you should too. Gotta have your priorities.
The Turning Point–Kent State 40 Years Ago Today
Do not forget:
Twenty-eight guardsmen have acknowledged firing from Blanket Hill. Of these, 25 fired 55 shots from rifles, two fired five shots from .45 caliber pistols, and one fired a single blast from a shotgun. Sound tracks indicate that the firing of these 61 shots lasted approximately 13 seconds. The time of the shooting was approximately 12:25 p.m.
Four persons were killed and nine were wounded. As determined by the FBI, their distances from the firing line and the types of wounds they received were as follows:
- Joseph Lewis, Jr., 20 yards, wounded in the right abdomen and the left lower leg.
- Thomas V. Grace, 20 yards, wounded in the left ankle.
- John R. Cleary, 37 yards, wounded in the left upper chest.
- Allen Michael Canfora, 75 yards, wounded in the right wrist.
- Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 85 to 90 yards, killed by a shot in the mouth.
- Dean R. Kahler, 95 to 100 yards, wounded in the left side of the small of his back. A bullet fragment lodged in his spine, and he is paralyzed from the waist down.
- Douglas Alan Wrentmore, 110 yards, wounded in the right knee.
- Allison B. Krause, 110 yards, killed by a bullet that passed through her left upper arm and into her left side
- James Dennis Russell, 125 to 130 yards, wounded in the right thigh and right forehead
- William K. Schroeder, 130 yards, killed by a shot in the left back at the seventh rib.
- Sandra Lee Scheuer,130 yards, killed by a shot through the left front side of the neck.
- Robert Stamps, 165 yards, wounded in the right buttock.
- Donald Scott Mackenzie, 245 to 250 yards, wounded in the left rear of the neck.
Reclaiming Medusa on Twitter
Just got up a Twitter feed for this blog, so you can now follow me there. Turns out that Reclaiming Medusa was one character too long, and some mean other Lucinda person is using my name (and not actively tweeting, which I suppose is a blessing) so the Twitter user name is MedusaMusings.
The Collateral Damage of an Unsustainable Lifestyle
There is so much to say about the the oil that is being spewed all over the Gulf of Mexico. Calling it a spill is a misnomer, that is what you say when a child accidentally tips over a glass of milk. This is an act of national and corporate terrorism. But still, Americans will buy gas for their cars at BP and I don’t hear Obama saying there will be a freeze on Halliburton contracts.
‘Experts’ are saying the the disaster ‘may’ cost upwards of $14 billion. No may about it, it will. Not only is there the environmental damage, we need to realize that the economy of the gulf shore is clearly shot to hell for the foreseeable future, energy prices will no doubt rise, and we already have a vulnerable economy. You add that up. And BP’s promises to pay for it, yeah, right.
Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the folly of our lack of attention to infrastructure is once more bearing fruit,
A major pipe bringing water to the Boston area has sprung a “catastrophic” leak and is dumping eight million gallons of water per hour into the Charles River. Governor Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency and issued a “boil-water” order for Boston and dozens of other communities.
The oil, the water pipe–these are disasters for which we have only ourselves to blame. But even if we suddenly became exemplary planetary citizens, the volcanic eruption in Iceland a few weeks ago that brought the European continent to a standstill reminds us that our future would still not be ours to control.
Perhaps Margaret Atwood has already described what may happen in The Year of the Flood, –the silent flood, a disaster of epic proportions, human-made or not (it doesn’t matter in the end) that we don’t see coming and is beyond all of our fancy science and technology.
Only time will tell, but I don’t think it will take too long.
———-
“But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need – if only we had eyes to see.” —Edward Abbey
Collateral damage from oil 'spill' washes ashore
Breaking Silence
It’s been awhile since I posted to this blog, for all the usual reasons–family obligations, other work, too much to say, no words to adequately say it, sheer exhaustion. In the meantime, I’ve been posting assorted links to the Reclaiming Medusa Facebook page, which has given me a chance to get a sense of which of the many stories of our day resonate most deeply within my psyche. Going forward, I hope to be able to post those here first, but at least for the next few weeks, due to other commitments, it will remain sporadic.
A few nights ago, I read a wonderful passage by Jeannette Armstrong in the 2010 We Moon calendar (p. 91) describing the Okangan Indian of having someone speak for each of the components that make up our world–water, air, elders, children, etc. as part of the community decision making process which also includes examining how any given decision will impact each of these components. She writes,
There’s a built-in principle in terms of how we interact…Someone has to ask those questions…
…When we include the perspective of land and include the perspective of human relationship, one of the things that happens is that community changes. People in the community change. The realization that people and community are there to sustain you creates the most secure feeling in the world.
Many years ago, I was visiting with a friend whose young child was on a streak of wild behavior. She looked at him in exasperation and said, “You are making a lot of decisions, most of them wrong.” I’m not sure that was the most pc way a super perfect parent would have phrased it, but it was a rather accurate observation from someone with the wisdom of seeing beyond the immediate time and space horizon of a toddler.
We live in a world where we seem to have about as much collective perspective as that adorable child had that morning way back when. As children do, he survived toddlerhood without too much damage and grew to be a wonderful young man. The grownup inhabitants of planet earth on the other hand seem to be throwing one perpetual tantrum and are in serious need of time out. One wonders what would happen if we were to mature out of this and adopt the wisdom of the Okangans.
Terrorizing Women And Children In The Name Of Democracy
Yesterday’s observance of International Women’s Day began for me with a sober reminder that women’s lives, and those of their children, are still under siege both here in the U.S. and everywhere. The front page of my morning newspaper carried this truly disheartening picture of women in black as it were, voting in Iraq, a testament to the deterioration of women’s rights in Iraq, where previous to the U.S. invasion, women were among the most privileged in the Arab world. Now they are seen in restrictive clothing, voting while invisible.
Radio Free Europe reports that,
“There’s been significant attention paid to the role of women in this weekend’s parliamentary elections, both as voters and as candidates. Much of the discussion has centered around how Iraqi women will participate in the vote. There’s been some concern over the potential for Iraqi men to unduly influence the votes of their female relatives. A number of citizens speaking to RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq admitted that such pressure was commonplace.
One citizen, Abu Milad, told RFI that he was sure his wife would vote for whomever he votes for. Hussein Abdel-Rahman, a young college student, admitted that he will attempt to sway his sisters’ voting choices, but attributed this phenomenon to the nature of Iraqi society, which is dominated by what he calls the “Eastern view” of relations between men and women…
…Young women from a village in Diyala province told RFI that many women in rural areas were being told that they were not allowed to leave their house to participate in the elections. They added that the male members of many households had collected the voter registration cards of all the women in their family, and planned to cast ballots on behalf of their female relatives, in addition to their own.”
Democracy? Not. But what nailed me was the article directly beneath the picture reporting that our state legislature in Kentucky once again is suffering from an acute case of brain in paranoid dick disease with some of our abortion phobic representatives trying to hijack 2 bills aimed at improving children’s lives by insisting on the addition of anti-abortion language.
Call it a tale of 2 fundamentalisms. If we really wanted to end terrorism, the first place to look is clearly at home.
On a related note, the U.S. military continues to prey on our children, marketing the fighting of war as an opportunity for occupational training and education, while the fine print on the sign up contract tells a different story. Young women in particular however face additional risk of being sexually assaulted by these snake oil recruiters. Learning Not Recruiting* has issued their annual compendium of suspect behavior by recruiters that has been reported (which they quickly point out is likely to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of actual number of cases). As they note in an email,
“With whatever other crimes in frauding, drug dealing, questionable enlistments, etc. that are committed, the vast majority of the reports involve sexual assault, rape and manipulation of young girls by recruiters.”
Documented reports for 2009:
1. Police: Army recruiter had sex contact with teen
recruit
2. Army Recruiter Arrested on Sex Charge
3. Army recruiter pleads not guilty
4. Recruiter uses slur at high schools
5. Former Recruiter Gets 3 Years on Child Sex
Charges
6. National Guard recruiter pleads guilty in theft
7. Marine guilty in sex assault of stepniece
8. Army recruiter disciplined
9. Ex-Guard recruiter sentenced to prison
10. Area Navy recruiter charged with statutory rape of
teenager
11. Marine recruiter faces 14 felonies
12. Case impugns Marine recruiting
13. Parents of recruit sue the Army, say they were
misled
14. Marine recruiter gets 3 years for sexual assault
15. Air Force recruiter charged with selling drugs
16. Marine recruiter charged with pimping girl, 14
17. Recruiter allegedly propositioned student
18. Ex-CCHS Army recruiter under investigation
19. Former Marine recruiter pleads guilty of rape
20. Miramontes guilty of manslaughter
21. Recruiter charged in child prostitution sting
22. 2 recruiting bosses fired after suicide probe
23. U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal
Appeals: US v. Scholz (Conviction upheld against
recruiter who had sex with and impregnated 14-
year-old 9th grade student)
24. Low morale, stress blamed in Army recruiter
suicides
25. U.S. Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals: US v.
Curran (Conviction of recruiter on multiple sex
offenses upheld)
26. Marine gunnery sergeant jailed 90 days for
adultery
27. Substance abuse appears a problem among stressed
Army recruiters
We read about the abuse of child soldiers in what the press paints as darkest Africa, all too easy to ignore because it is over there and it is someone else’s children. But it isn’t just over there, it is here too. It is terrorism being committed against our own children, and most assuredly not the defense of democracy.
Meanwhile, the military enjoys impunity from the damage caused by dumping toxics near military bases, perchlorate pollution and weaponry leashed on civilian populations such as Fallujah causing all manner of health problems, especially for children whose tiny bodies are the most vulnerable and birth defects and miscarriages.
Yet hardly a day goes by that we do not hear from our country’s leaders that they are spending billions more to fight terrorism and keep us safe from the enemy while our schools are pretty literally reduced to holding bake sales to stay solvent. Orwellian doublespeak at its finest, or as Pogo would have said, we have met the enemy and he is we. Poisoning children, sexually assaulting women and girls, depriving women of their rights while the country goes bankrupt–we are not safer and any notion that this is democracy is delusional. We are not only terrorizing others, we are terrorizing (and killing) ourselves.
———-
*With many thanks to Ret. Col. Ann Wright for bringing the recruiting abuse story to my attention.
The Accidental Terrorist
This morning I awoke to the image of a little girl in Afghanistan. I don’t know her name, let’s call her the Accidental Terrorist–she had the prettiest dark eyes, wide open staring sightless at the sky, her body mangled and bloody, a victim of one of the recent U.S. bombing attacks. She was just a little girl.
She must have run outside to play despite warnings from the soldiers to stay inside and keep her head down. She wasn’t a terrorist, and we are not safer for her death. Instead, we have destroyed a piece of the future of the world. It was not ours to so wantonly dismiss.
I wonder–did the young soldiers who dropped the bomb know that children would be killed? Can they live with that? What will they tell their children about the day they killed a little girl who ran out to play in Afghanistan?
Meanwhile back in this country it seems that a Saudi prince known for financing terrorism is now the 4th largest voting shareholder at Fox News’ parent company. You’ve got to admit, where Bin Laden left off, Glenn Beck has carried on quite nicely with his inaccurate, incendiary spew. Ingenious really.
We’ve gotten to a point in this country where it is almost like a case of mass assisted suicide. Jonestown without the koolaid. Our schools and roads are in disrepair. Sick, broke, unemployed and foreclosed have become our public lack of options. Our air is unbreathable and our water undrinkable, our press corp spends countless hours reporting on Tiger Woods’ apology and boys who don’t go up in balloons and teabag rallies and whether Sarah Palin is a creditable candidate for President. And in the name of ending terrorism, we send our children to kill other children half way around the world.
If Bin Laden is high-fiving somewhere out of sight, who can blame him for we have become the destructive force that he aspired to be.
She was just a little girl.
