I live in upstate new york- there is no more beautiful spot in the early
summer- trust me. it is green and sunny- not too hot- and birds chirping all day. Idyllic. Peaceful even. I can only imagine what it must be like- no strike that- i can't imagine what it must be like for iraqi families who live in constant fear amidst the filth and ruin of their home. I can't imagine what it is like for the iraqi refugees fleeing the chaos and death on all sides- only to be turned away from some countries.
Now- triple or quadruple that to include the palestinians, the folks in bosnia, the folks in darfur- you get the idea. We may not have direct control over many troubled parts of the world- but we do have influence. We are directly responsible for iraq. It is arrogant and disgusting to feel that we 'fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them here.' Why are our lives so much more precious? The short answer is- they aren't. We need to pressure our "leaders" to stop
this way of thinking and to stop fighting everywhere. If folks attack,
then we defend- here. A free and open society has to take that risk- otherwise what is the point? How can we advocate for our democracy when we are forcing it on others? Peace-- in our time.
Monday
Peace In Our Time
Saturday
DOES AMERICA NEED A PRESIDENT?
Introducing a friend of Peace; Daniel Smythe of Seeking Utopia.
Does America Need a President?
"America in 2007 has massive debt, its people have had many
of their rights taken away, they have to get permission to
march, they are spied upon by their government agencies..."
Since the year 2000 I have followed two world events very closely. There was the moment when Sharon invaded Temple Mount and the Palestinian Intifada began and there was also the election of George Bush. I hailed both events at the time, events which are strangely related, then watched in horror as they both began to unravel.
Leaving the Palestinians issue for another time, since the election of Bush there are two things I'm certain of: Australia should never become a republic and America should get rid of the Executive Branch as fast as possible. Bush has exposed the tragic weaknesses of a republic for the whole world to see.
Firstly, prior to his election, he presented himself as being someone that he's not (not unusual for a politician). For example, he seemed to be reasonably intelligent man of the world who had served his country. He even had a Masters Degree from a (once?) prestigious University. He spoke forcefully, the constant errors in his language and cognitive processes for some reason not all that evident. Gradually the truth about him began to dribble out.
Now, if you read the Bushisms in my sidebar, they reveal much about his erratic, incoherent thought processes. As for being a man of the world, he didn't even know that much of the world existed. He obviously thought that America was the world, had never travelled and knew absolutely nothing about history. As for serving his country, he turned up missing when it came time to go to Vietnam yet he attacked and denigrated Kerry, a decorated war hero, when he came up against him during his re-election bid. What hypocrisy!
I still remember the debates with Gore and the smiling, self-assured Bush promising to govern for all the people. As his presidency unfolded, he clearly governed primarily for the rich, for the corporations, for the religious fundamentalists, for the Zionists, for the media barons, for those who would make America an Empire which controls the world by force. Oh, I forgot, he governs for God too, a shadowy entity that George talks to and who George mistakenly thinks he is an emissary of.
Came 9/11 and Bush for a short period looked like a statesman albeit one who, deep down inside, was looking for someone to attack, someone who he would make pay for attacking America, someone that would elevate him, he who avoided military service, into the status of 'Commander'. Bush was a man who didn't have the wit to understand that America had created many enemies over many years because of its legion of disastrous foreign policy decisions, its hot and cold support for people like Saddam and Bin Laden, its military expansion all over the world, its organizing of coups, etc.
As the war drums began to beat the lies began, the deceptions, the propaganda based on the Axis of Evil and Weapons of Mass Destruction, the fiasco of Powell at the U.N. with his charts, etc. Afghanistan was first cab off the rank. It was followed by Iraq. But neither venture went as well as the incompetent planners and neocons had hoped and today both countries are hotbeds of terrorism despite the massive military force which America has exerted. Then Katrina came along and exposed Bush's incompetency in yet another area to say nothing of the parade of failed officials he'd appointed who came and went like April showers.
And now, using his seemingly unlimited powers as Commander in Chief, Bush has usurped the legitimately elected Democratic Congress and Senate and, despite all the waffle about impeachment, has further escalated the war in Iraq and is happily skipping hand in hand with Israel down a crooked path towards a nuclear attack on Iran, a doomed project which may well end the world.
America in 2007 has massive debt, its people have had many of their rights taken away, they have to get permission to march, they are spied upon by their government agencies, their soldiers are forced to do more and more terms in war zones despite the casualties, the American dollar is under siege, the real estate bubble is about to burst, etc, etc.
America would make a gigantic step forward if it immediately got rid of Bush and the complete Executive Branch forever. It would then make further progress if it completely eradicated all influence by Big Business, Billionaires and carping lobby groups on its Parliamentarians (who should be means-tested and excluded if they are too wealthy).
That done, some sanity might once again prevail in our world! And, as a byproduct, the case for making Australia a Republic would cease forever!
Amen to that!
Please visit Daniel at Seeking Utopia.
Friday
SOLILOQUY
FROM
ANONYMOUS MIDDLE AMERICAN
and everything that matters
is destroyed within sight
who has time or the patience
for whats right?
i work 9-5 and i watch
my fox news at night
when i stare at the tv
it gives me back the light
on pbh too
NEXT TO THE GREAT, GREEN SEA by Helen Losse
next to the great, rolling sea. The ocean
breeze felt as soft as my lover’s
eye-kiss. The color of ocean was green.
God’s greatest hope is a great, green earth—
a brother hugging a brother, a sister her
sister. The sky held the cinema show,
Concerning Clouds. One of the clouds told
the unedited story. So it’s normal that
news about starvation unsettled me:
The ugly facts: a blotchy face, a bloated
belly. Myriads of people. Mushy-brown rice.
Black maggots, maybe. Maybe.
Then why a rainbow came clearly informs.
Seven soft pastels over the water,
spilling onto the beach in concentric bands.
God-promised colors by the great, green sea
answer several questions I did not ask.
Previous Post - ESTHER SPARKS (New Orleans) - PEACE
Saturday
THIS VESSEL
O! This vessel!It wants! O! It requests
Bravery within it! As a child
In a storm.
We know terror.
It kills, and it drives our minds
To heart-thrusted vengeance
Of an incident, a day, a moment
Replayed over and over.
Ominous! War is ominous!
O! War! War
Abhors hope! Hates it
Like a field of dancing flowers
And children clad in dreams
Upon their delight.
But peace.
O! Peace is the ship of our existence
Floating upon the waters of our desire.
O! Peace brings laughter upon humankind
And makes an ally of terror and war
And the warmongers into utter fools.
For peace has the dancing flowers
Growing upon its fields
As the child its enchantment.
O! This vessel!
It must be wanted.
This ship needs sailing,
Guided bravely through!
This peace is full of living things;
Laughter and children’s unbridled glee
Holding not revenge in their hearts
Or weapons in their hands.
Wednesday
SENSELESS
(Chris Wilcox)
HEMORRHAGE
Thirty-three crows strut crudely before me,
Their black beaks pounding the ground;
Echoes of a distant thinking
Rebelling against the wind.
Thirty-three far-flung voices climbed the sky,
Their stained hands groping plaintively near;
Spirits of the far-away land
Absently rasping the storm.
Thirty-three students prone upon their loss,
Hemorrhage in the shock of undue vacancy;
Stunned gasps rasp our ears
With a hollow astonishment.
© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman
Sunday
Taking a Break
Greetings All,You may have noticed I have not been getting much done around the blog lately.
Although it may sound cliché, it seems that I have found myself at a crossroad in my life that demands my full attention at this time. One of those critical crossroads in life where I have to make a shift up in consciousness or admit defeat.
Not my style to admit defeat so…it means change and living in a different way. Those changes, in my case, bring with them a lot of turbulence, so I am taking the blog off my table for now in an effort to clear some space to work on other priorities.
I thank you all for your support and I do hope you will visit the contributing author’s pages for some great blogging.
I will be leaving the blog up for the time being.
Peace y’all
Thursday
Bushwhacked! There He Goes Again!
Today we have a post from Peace Tree contributing author, Christopher Wilcox.Bushwhacked! There He Goes Again!
On Wednesday
A war with Iran would involve American sailors at keyboards 100 miles off shore targeting Patriot missiles deep into the heart of Iran and F18 Hornets flying deadly sorties over Tehran. I’m just thinking that provoking an escalation of Middle East tensions was not very wise on Iran’s part. Not only that but it’s our job to escalate Middle East tensions damn it! Just who in this dad-burned-world does Ahmadinejad think he is anyway? It was very disappointing to see Iran take such a provocative stance. World opinion was on the verge of looking to Iran as possibly playing a stabilizing role, along with other Middle Eastern powers, in defusing tensions in Iraq. Now we might dismiss them as lacking the rationality necessary to be instrumental in any semblance of a peace initiative in the region. Any political capital Iran had gained as a result of the findings from the Iraq Study Group was blown in a flash of bravado when Iran took the British sailors captive simply because they could.
Just as it has been suggested that Bush has squandered the world support given after the attack against America on 9/11 Iran now appears to be a loose cannon. So now we have the two biggest kids on the block lacking the credibility to bring an end to sectarian violence or earn the confidence of other nations that we can be trusted in our motives. When the talk of there being no “good way” to end our commitment in Iraq, when our nation is divided with a heavy dominance by anti-war sentiment and when hundreds of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians are dying every month it would be easy to lose hope.
There is hope, however. Congress is beginning to regain some swagger as they reclaim their constitutional powers and confront the president with the reality that our mission is not working and a majority in America no longer supports it. And then there is Nancy Pelosi, bravely heeding the advice of the Iraq Study Group, ignoring criticism from the White House and traveling to Syria for a meeting with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Remarkable news came from her visit to Syria. Al-Assad claimed to be ready to begin peace negotiations with Israel. While I won’t hold my breath it is at least a beginning to dialogue on a very important issue. Oh, and if you are one of the few people who think Pelosi was irresponsible for visiting Syria, GOP Representatives Frank Wolf - VA, Robert Aderholt - AL and Joseph Pitts – PA have just returned from a visit to Syria that was condoned by the White House. While the White House was very vocal in their criticism of Pelosi they tried to keep quiet the GOP delegation visit. So while we tell the Middle East that they need to learn to cooperate and find political solutions for their differences we have a president in the United States who never makes a decision without political one-up-man-ship as his objective.
Take for instance our new ambassador to Belgium. In a move that could be described no more accurately than “Bush-whacked” the president bypassed the Congress in the appointment of Swift Boater Sam Fox as ambassador to Belgium. Once again, the president did not step outside the law but in making his recess appointment the unpopular lame duck president deceptively circumvented Congress and clearly demonstrated his word can not be trusted. Last month Bush knew he would not have sufficient votes to secure confirmation for Fox and withdrew the nomination. Yesterday, as soon as Congress had left town to meet with constituents over Easter break Bush appointed Fox without Senate confirmation. The unilateral decision making of this president, in spite of opposition from the very people he was elected to serve, is filling the airwaves with endless charges of misdeeds, corruption and question of illegalities.
When I heard the news of the Fox appointment the famous debate words of Ronald Reagan instantly came to mind. “There you go again!” Bush continues to pull stunts like this. He continually flouts democratic principles and then wonders why 200 million Americans question his integrity. And his remaining supporters question why we think he is dumb. So it goes.
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Peace y'all
Wednesday
The Bush Administration Is...
Today we have a post from Peace Tree Contributing author, W. Christopher Epler.The Bush Administration is a fragile mobile of Political/financial/religious forces; not a unified political juggernaut.
It's like an animal that shouldn't even exist, since the probability that the Christian Right would unite with
But this is exactly what happened, even though any historian would be laughed out of his/her tenure ship had they predicted such a fantastic collage of seemingly disparate interests could last for more than five minutes.
However, mobiles go out of balance very easily and rag tag coalitions of virtually different life forms never last, and the signs are everywhere that the Bush/Republican/Evangelical/lunatic-fringe-Israeli army of insanity is beginning to implode.
The reason is simple. Each of these Hydra Heads has its own agenda and "compromise" is not the name of the game with profoundly irrational and selfish people. In short, thieves fall out.
Probably never in American history has there ever been such a concantation of evil -- and such an IMPROBABLE concantation of evil. Creatures like Tom Delay, for example, are simply off the chart. Consider a man who will almost certainly end up in prison for several
years who repeatedly justified his political/financial atrocities with Biblical scripture.
And who would EVER have thought that Baptist lunatic fringers (which certainly doesn't include moral heroes like President Jimmy Carter) would march arm in arm with the political/religious Israeli lunatic fringe (which certainly doesn't speak for the complex State of Israel, e.g., the labor party).
Lunatic fringers all, but lunatic fringers with profoundly different agendas. It's a miracle they even speak to each other.
The hopeful moral in all this, of course, is that coalitions of diverse fanatics NEVER LAST. People in the psychotic grip of their designer ideologies may eat at the same table, but they never worship the same gods. Behind the public charade of unity the cult leaders sneer at each other and bide their time. Each Hydra Head secretly thinks it will outlast all the others.
Lastly, in the context of these delicately interlocked evils, people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are given far too much credit (or discredit!) for current events. As Tolstoy said of Napoleon, these scum are merely surfing vast national/international currents and as move the currents, so moves history. Rove, Cheney, Bush, etc. are simply the bubbles of the day, and high probability always wins over low probability so this fantastically improbable network of mutually reinforcing corruption is disintegrating before our eyes as we speak.
W. Christopher Epler (Bill)
Y'all visit Bill at his home blog The Liberation of Realism
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Peace y'all
Monday
Hate By Any Other Name
Today we have a guest post from Peace Tree Contributing author, Patricia Goldsmith.Hate By Any Other Name
Larry Kramer was one of the very first people to recognize the AIDS epidemic for what it was. While the Reagan administration refused to acknowledge the burgeoning epidemic and gay men didn’t want to believe it, Kramer helped found the legendary group ACT-UP, whose motto was Silence=Death.
Twenty years later, Larry Kramer has re-ignited ACT-UP to wake us up to another grim reality we’d rather not face. “The needs are different now. Then it was AIDS, and now” he says, “it is utter sheer hate hurled at us right and left.”
As blunt and confrontational as ever, Kramer began an open letter to straight people in the Los Angeles Times with the question, “Why do you hate gay people so much?” Put another way, why do those who claim to hate the sin but love the sinner often seem, instead, to love the hate but hate the h word.
For example, when former NBA player Tim Hardaway came right out and said, “I hate gay people,” Concerned Women for
Hardaway’s comments are both unfortunate and inappropriate. They provide political fodder for those who wish to paint all opposition to the homosexual lifestyle as being rooted in “hate.” It’s important to note that Hardaway’s words represent the feelings of Hardaway. His words do not represent the feelings of the vast majority of people opposed to the homosexual agenda. ... Thousands of former homosexuals have been freed from the homosexual lifestyle through acts of love. Hardaway’s comments only serve to foment misperceptions of widespread homosexual “victimhood” which the homosexual lobby has craftily manufactured. [from Matt Barber of Concerned Women for
It’s funny how much “hate” feels like the real thing when you’re on the receiving end.
Maintaining an emotional disconnect from the pain they inflict is crucial to the anti-gay project. It’s a hard balancing act to pull off, particularly these days, when it seems that the right is running on nothing but fumes and hate. The media seem to think it’s enough to ban the use of the word faggot.
By that reckoning, General Peter Pace’s recent statement that gays should not be allowed to serve in the military because homosexuality is immoral should be no big deal; after all, he didn’t use any naughty words. And yet somehow one feels the hate is there. Former Senator Alan Simpson, Republican from Wyoming, lays it out in a piece for the Washington Post entitled “Bigotry That Hurts Our Military”:
According to the Government Accountability Office, more than 300 language experts have been fired under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. This when even Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice recently acknowledged the nation’s “foreign language deficit” and how much our government needs Farsi and Arabic speakers. Is there a “straight” way to translate Arabic? Is there a “gay” Farsi? My God, we’d better start talking sense before it is too late. . . .
To fill its needs, the Army is granting a record number of “moral waivers,” allowing even felons to enlist. Yet we turn away patriotic gay and lesbian citizens.
Peter Pace would rather recruit criminals who would otherwise be sitting in prison than retain highly qualified -- even indispensable -- LGBT personnel under his command. You can call that General Pace’s religion or his personal opinion. You can even call it love if you have the nerve, but it’s hatred all the same.
Pace’s bigotry has proved somewhat awkward, since it lays him open, at the very least, to charges of serious managerial incompetence, but it’s exactly the kind of divisiveness the rightwing political blogosphere glories in. Consider, for example, this posting by Mike Adams on Townhall.com, regarding the suggestion that, as with the n word, only gay people can use the word faggot without giving offense:
This is an unspeakable insult to black people. Gay persecution does not rival black persecution in the annals (I could not find a better word to insert here) of American history. Any assertion to the contrary is simply too queer to take seriously.
The distinction between racial and gay prejudice is wholly artificial. In real life, hate runs roughshod over such careful (and clever: “annals” looks like “anal” and then you “insert,” get it?) boundaries. For example, when a black man named Corey Andrew recently told Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode that he was gay, this is where she went (via email):
GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE.
Mr. Adams’ article has the charming title, “How_to_bomb_a_gay_bath_house” and I highly recommend it. Read it and experience the “hate” for yourself. And yes, he does recommend that Ann Coulter follow six steps for bombing a gay bath house -- but it’s not what you think! It’s all good, clean fun.
Hatred is explicitly Adams’ subject:
Perhaps the most compelling reason for Ann to refrain from issuing an apology is that it might send the message that homosexuality is somehow “wrong.” Those saying that the implication that Edwards is a homosexual is “defamatory” are suggesting that homosexuality is “bad.” This flies in the face of the teachings of the official religion of the Diversity Movement, which is, of course, moral relativism.
Every time I get into a discussion about homosexuality I am accused of being “secretly gay.” When the accuser is strait (sic), he shows how much he secretly hates homosexuals. When the accuser is gay, he shows how much he secretly hates himself. Ann should not mimic this hatred by apologizing for something Leftists do regularly and unapologetically.
Q.E.D. And yet in the middle of this farrago of taunts, incitements to violence, and monster wit, Adams actually does, in a way, answer Larry Kramer’s question. He recounts an occasion when, during a casual visit with a man who “happened to be gay,” the gay guy joked that he had furnished his place in “Early 20th Century Colonial Faggot.” He made the joke partially because he had a few too many drinks before his guests arrived. But he also did it because many homosexuals have never really aspired to the goal of making everyone feel as comfortable as they feel they have a right to feel at all times.
Interestingly enough, this sounds a note very similar to one hit by Garrison Keillor in a recent piece entitled, “Stating the obvious,” in which the homespun humorist bemoans what he calls serial monogamy (and what my old Lutheran pastor more sternly called serial polygamy), and in which he advises “stereotypical gay men” to can the flamboyance if they want to be “accepted as couples and daddies.”
I agree with his idea that children should take center stage in the family drama, but he would have come across as a whole lot less snide and sanctimonious if the thrice-married Keillor had mentioned his own serial polygamy.
And his timing is atrocious. We are in the middle of a veritable heat wave of anti-gay hate -- when the state of Virginia, as an example, has passed a draconian anti-equality amendment that forbids any marriage-mimicking legal contracts between gay couples, including simple power of attorney arrangements. In other words, the people of Virginia voted to curtail the freedom of some -- but only some -- taxpaying citizens to legally designate the person who is closest to them emotionally to act on their behalf if they’re incapacitated.
This is an amendment with a purpose: to drive openly gay people from the state.
I don’t believe that Garrison Keillor is anti-gay, but he definitely represents the problem Larry Kramer is talking about. While the fundamentalists are totally fixated on wiping same sex love off the face of the earth, our friends are often lukewarm. Candidates are cowardly because they know very well that discomfort with the social change that gay equality represents cuts across the ideological spectrum. That’s why it’s so valuable to the right. It magnifies the ability of an embattled minority to dominate the rest of us.
Fighting with each other while these madmen take over the world only benefits Halliburton. It’s time for people of good will to unite and ACT-UP against the real source of social instability, which is and always has been hate.
Patricia Goldsmith is a member of Long Island Media Watch, a grassroots free media and democracy watchdog group.
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Peace Y'all
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