Lucky White Girl

foreboding

My nephew's joining the Marines. They promised him money for college and training as a helicopter technician. He'll almost certain to be sent to Iraq.

I don't care what anyone says, I cannot see how it's possible that he is NOT making a huge mistake. It's possible that he'll come out of it okay. But I feel it's more possible that he won't.  Much more possible.  Even if he isn't killed. What he'll be doing over there... will very likely mess him up. His life will be forever changed.

I think about what this will mean for my family. What it would be like for my sister, my parents, if he didn't come back. It makes me think of something that happened a long, long time ago when my own parents lost their son at a really young age. It happened before I was born but for as much as it impacted my life, it may as well have happened last year. So much of who we are and why my family is the way they are is due to that single tragedy. The reverberations are still felt today, more than 30 years later.

My nephew's going to Iraq and I have the most awful feeling about this...

We are the ones

Bush explains the global food crisis

Isn't it reassuring to think we have someone so smart running the country?  Bush's comment over the weekend that the food crisis is due to countries like India raising their standard of living has really pissed off the developing world:

"When you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food.  And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.

What a moron!  The global food crisis is caused by people in poor countries eating more!  Sometimes I can't decide if he's an asshole or just stupid.  He could take some lessons from this columnist in the Hindustan Times:

"these comments are a brazen admission by the industrialised West that their levels of prosperity are mainly dependent upon the levels of impoverishment and malnutrition in the developing world.  Having plundered for centuries through colonialism, they seek to continue to fatten themselves by a similar plunder through current phase of imperialist globalisation, whose hallmark is the sharp escalation of inequalities"  full column here.

This is going to be excellent fodder for editorial cartoonists all over the world!  I can't wait to see pictures of the US as a bloated overweight giant looking at this average sized kid sitting next to him and telling him he's eating up all the food!  If you see any please leave a link here and I'll be sure to post the ones I find too!

You've gotta hear this!

Oh wow there is the most incredible story on NPR right now about transgender children!  They explore two cases of very young children, both biologically male, who strongly believe they are really females.  Each set of parents have completely different responses to this: the first boy/girl's parents take him/her to a therapist who bans girl things and pretty much forces them to make the child "learn to be comfortable with being a boy" saying it's like a black child who wants to be white it's the product of dysfunction.   The second boy/girl's parents let the child be the person she feels she is.  They take her to buy her first dress and let her start kindergarten as a girl.  They say they don't want to repeat the mistakes of years ago when homosexuality was viewed as a dysfunction and therapists encouraged patients to repress it.

It was such a powerful story I'm still crying as I'm typing this.   If you haven't read the novel Middlesex yet, you should! My god it's good!

Rich on "The All-White Elephant in the Room"

Here's an even better column on the controversial issue of candidates and their loud-mouth preachers.  Frank Rich says

... it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

...which means all these white Republicans seeking out endorsements from racist bigots like the Rev. John Hagee, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell better think twice about throwing stones at Obama.  What's more,

...the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house.

Thanks for the perspective, Mr. Rich!

Thanks EJ!

Finally!  I've been waiting for someone to say something that makes a little bit of sense in the Obama-Wright controversy.  No surprise that EJ Dionne steps up to the plate, pointing out the hypocrisy of how quick our society is to condemn radical black preachers while being more diplomatic and understanding of racist white preachers who say things like "God doesn't hear the prayers of the Jews" and call the Catholic church "the anti-Christ". 

I disagree with the biblical scholar he quotes towards the end of the piece who says Wright was wrong to cloak himself in the mantle of a prophet because "prophets of old didn't announce their prophetic prerogatives at press conferences and press clubs".  Well, duh! They lived 2,000 years ago!  That has nothing to do with anything.  I think we do have prophets today just as human society had prophets 2,000 years ago and just as we will 2,000 years from now.  Who knows how they're going to deliver their messages?  Prophets just might use press conferences and press clubs to speak truth to power.  Whether Rev. Wright is one or not is up for debate but it's silly to attack the means of delivery instead of the message.

Happy Maypril's Fool's Day --from the White House!

This cracked me up!  In a pathetic attempt to draw attention away from the rallies and marches around the country yesterday --and I have to say this is also an example of very unsuccessful "framing"--the White House has proclaimed May Day as um, hold on, I can't type it without laughing... er-hem, excuse me, International Loyalty Day!  I have to believe this is some belated April Fool's Day joke because it's just so hilarious --in an slightly Orwellian kind of way.  Just the sort of humor this administration might be expected to have.  Anyway I hope you all got out to a march yesterday, danced around a May pole and enjoyed your International Loyalty to the Worker Day!

Why hire a PR firm when you have the Washington Post?

A few weeks ago I pointed out the Washington Post's editorial in support of the free trade deal with Colombia.  On Sunday there was an interview published with Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, a man who has openly acknowledged having ties to paramilitary groups in the past.  Here are some of the questions this hard-hitting PR flak --er, I mean "reporter" had for Mr. Uribe:

• Haven't you stuck your neck out to be a good US ally in the war on terrorism and the war on drugs? Are you thinking about alternatives  to your alliance with the US if this [trade deal] does not go through?

• Try to explain to the American people how important the [deal] is to your country --what it means in terms of growth and how damaging it would be to you, who have been a strong US ally if the agreement is rejected?

• You put so much on the line for an ally, and Washington doesn't come through for you?

Today Mr. Uribe's administration is in the news again for another scandal (they've been having to deal with recent revelations that many other people in his administration have ties to paramilitary groups also.  The documentation of corruption and human rights violations in Colombia under the Uribe administration is compelling.  Here's just a sampling:

Reuters: Colombia scandal creeps closer to Uribe (April 2007)

National Security Archive: Documents Implicate Colombian Government in Chiquita Terror Scandal (March 2007)

Washington Post: Paramilitary Ties to Elite in Colombia (March 2007)

Council on Foreign Relations: Colombia Scandal Imperils US Alliance (May 2007)

The House Democrats are right to block a trade deal with a country so corrupt.  Uribe is not a honorable character and we should not be validating his administration with any kind of alliance. 

CBS story on racial disparities in media coverage of missing/abused women

I was pleasantly surprised to see this is a CBS story:

Murdered Pregnant Women: The Racial Divide:

"Cases of maternal homicide involving minority women are underreported and underpublicized"

And by the way, that link goes to a blog called Black and Missing!! which is linked to down there under Tamika Huston's picture (whose link is dead by the way, I'll have to fix that.  The site that was dedicated to publicizing her disappearance later reported on her death and had lots of resources on taking action to change this.  Now the domain name's up for sale.)

Could this be a sign we're having an influence on mainstream media?  That they've started taking these stories seriously I think is thanks to the work of all the great bloggers out there who've repeatedly put stories like this in the spotlight.  Many of them are listed in my blogroll.  Check them out!

 

Big ol' messy world

You know the opening scene in Blue Velvet where you see the beautiful idyllic scene of the "typical" middle class family in front of their house with the beautiful yard and then the man watering the grass has a heart attack and dies and the camera follows the arc of the water from the hose down to the grass and then into the grass and underneath the grass and you start to see all the stuff that's going on beneath the surface?

Some of you were wondering how long it'd be until I used that analogy to talk about DC!

I know it's kind of a cliche but I have two observations: one, today it dawned on me that it's not just a cliche, it's really true --I saw it! and two, it's a little more complicated than that.

Everyone knows the complicated messy underbelly of the city is there but I think people pretty much fall into one of the following two camps: those who think you should pretend it's not and those who are okay with it.  They're even (like me), more than okay with it, they relish it.  They like the complicatedness.  They like messiness.  That's the humanity of it.  Blurry lines may lead to much uncertainty and vulnerability but that's a delicious part of being human and it would be with much resistance that I get dragged over to the other side where I can neatly compartmentalize my life and pretend --and forget I'm pretending-- that it's all just an illusion.

WP editorial on Colombian free trade deal

The Washington Post editorialized today in support of the new free trade agreement with Colombia!  It was probably a necessary reality check for those of us hoping for a revival of the distinction between left and right in this country and a reminder that we need to renewed opposition to legislation such as this that is harmful to the interests of working class people and the values of this country.  Globalization should be about human rights and common welfare for all, not outsourcing labor to whoever will work for the least amount of money!

Working Life,a good blog for labor issues, has a link to a Public Citizen report that reminds us of some of these issues as well as a post about how the human rights situation in Colombia continues to be problematic.

Shame on the Post for its support of profits for the few and misery for the majority!

"You mean you're 32 and you're not a lawyer yet??"

I should say first that I love DC.  Moving up here and starting this job has been the best thing to happen to me since...well, in a long time!  I'm lucky enough to work with really nice down-to-earth people who simply do good, honest work to make the world a better place.  And that's just it.  They're really good people, all of them, doing really good work!  If they were corporate types I wouldn't be feeling this way at all, but last night I met this guy who's 26 and does employment law which is, I guess, kind of a civil rights thing (you know, like discrimination etc)  and he's about to finish law school and take the bar exam and then he'll keep doing civil rights work and he was just so cool.  I was jealous.

And that's the thing about this city.  I'm feeling the pressure.  Am I a slacker?  I'm thinking thoughts I never thought before like, gee, I'm 32 and I'm not a lawyer yet! What's wrong with me?? lol...

Everyone here is a good-guy lawyer (okay well not *everyone* in the city but everyone I'm meeting in non-profit-land!).  I've never been even remotely interested in anything like law school.  The closest I've come is taking a few international law courses but now I find myself wondering about it.  You could argue that I should consider international law because I've always been inclined towards the theoretical (sorry that's an IR joke!) but if you want to make a real impact on people's lives it seems like domestic law would be more practical.  Save some family from being homeless.  Keep immigrant parents from being separated from their kids.  Challenge big corporations that spray their workers with pesticides.

Why am I so enamored with lawyers now you ask?  Is this just a phase?  Will I grow out of it?  Maybe...

But you see, lawyers are like the Catholic church.

I'll pause a second for that to catch your attention! Lol....

Okay, no, it's true: Lawyers are like the Catholic Church.  Both have bad reputations among certain sectors of the general public, right?  And to an extent there are valid reasons for those bad reputations.  But I didn't grow up around Catholics and I didn't grow up around lawyers and by the time I met both as an adult I was politically active enough to be meeting the cool ones.  I met the liberation theology Catholics and poverty lawyers.  The Catholics were organizing against US sponsored violence in Latin America and the lawyers were helping out people who were getting evicted from their homes.  What's not to love?

Law school would be a lot of time and money and effort.  About the equivalent of having a child (except that it ends in three years instead of eighteen) and since I'm now considering the very real possibility that having children might not be my lot in life, I think I've decided this: If I don't have a child, should I go to law school?

What do you think?

 

ouch.

Breaking my long blog-fast to share this with you

Pew Research Finds Fewer Voters Identify as Republicans

Nader, say it ain't so!

Ralph Nader just said he's entering the race!  Please, someone tell me he's joking!  That is just... a bit hard to swallow.  I have multiple reactions to this news.  First I'm outraged.  Nader's candidacy made sense back when there was no discernible difference between the Democrats and the Republicans but now we have Obama!  Do you hear me Mr. Nader?  We have Obama!  What the f*ck are you thinking?  Then it's just embarrassing because it seems so obviously egotistic (because don't the Greens already have a presidential candidate this year?)  And then it fades into a so-what kind of reaction.  No one's going to pay him any mind.  Not this time.  Mr. Nader go home.  You're embarrassing yourself and those of us who once voted for you.  We (still) like you, Ralph.  But we don't want you at this party.  We need you in the fight but not here; not now.  Go home.  Go sue Microsoft or something.  Be useful to the cause.  Not a hindrance to it!

They wouldn't dare... would they?

Democrats fear superdelegates could overrule voters:

"The problem is [if] people perceive that voters have not made the decision -- instead, insiders have made the decision -- then all of these new people who are being attracted to the process, particularly the young people who are voting for the first time, will feel disenfranchised or in some way alienated," he said.

Hell yes, I would feel disenfranchised!  I've been saying there's no way the Dems can flub the election this time with support for the war at an all time low, the Republicans divided over multiple weak candidates...etc.  but now I think there is one way they could screw up and throw this election which should be a cakewalk for them and that's if they were to do such a thing as this!  They wouldn't dare... would they?

Super Tuesday!

Okay all you in Super Tuesday states: get out there and vote today!  We're depending on you!

MoveOn.org endorses Obama!

Good for them!

The Florida primaries

So I temporarily switched my party affiliation from Green to Democrat just so I could vote in the primaries for the first time EVER (I never thought much enough of a Democratic candidate before to care who their nominee was) and what do they do? They get penalized for moving up the primary date and lose all their delegates! LOL... So Florida has no say in who the Democratic nominee is.

But I have to do something because this is the first time a truly progressive candidate has a shot at the White House. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN MY LIFETIME! Here in DC I walk past the White House sometimes and wonder what it would be like to not feel ashamed of who lives there representing us to the rest of the world. I wonder what it'd be like to actually be proud of the President of the United States. I never thought Obama would actually compete with the Clinton dynasty but when he won in Iowa I started to feel something I never felt before. It's not just rhetoric. Maybe after eight years of Bush people are ready for change. There is hope. Now he's won in South Carolina and momentum is building. Let's keep it up!

If you're a Democrat in Florida your vote for who the Democratic nominee should be won't count. So do something else. I've pledge to help fundraise instead and this is my appeal. Listen. I've never donated money to a presidential candidate before but now I'll tell you all that I gave Obama $250! (wow, I know! I was shocked too!) but that's how much I believe in this. I'd give more if I could. Because we can do this. Really. Obama is as good as Bush was bad. (well, maybe not quite; Bush was pretty bad and Obama would have to be Mother Theresa to compare but you know what I mean!) I tell you all this because I want to encourage you to do the same if you agree.

If you click the link below you can donate to his campaign and it'll count towards my fundraising goal of $1000.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/barbhowe

Si, se puede! Yes, we can!

Only One Candidate can say this

“When I am this party's nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I supported Bush-Cheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don't like. And he will not be able to say that I wavered on something as fundamental as whether or not it is ok for America to torture — because it is never ok… I will end the war in Iraq… I will close Guantanamo. I will restore habeas corpus. I will finish the fight against Al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. And I will send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says, "You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.”

    — Barack Obama, Des Moines, Iowa, November 10, 2007

OMG!!! He did it!

Iowa wasn't a fluke!!

What would Chavez do?

My roommate woke up this morning to me talking back to the radio announcer informing us that the United Farm Workers had endorsed Clinton.  What???  I shouted a little too loudly.  Nooo...... why would they do that?  It's like seeing a good friend of yours passing up the perfect date --the cool, good-looking idealistic young man ready to fight the good fight-- and going out instead with a ho-hum bloke who doesn't stand for anything.  Like I said I don't hate Hillary.  I just think that she's not the most progressive candidate in the race.  I could see the UFW endorsing her if she were the only reasonable candidate in the race but she's the establishment candidate!  Why endorse the establishment candidate when for the first time in recent memory you have a real blue blood progressive who didn't support the Iraq war and didn't go along with an inflammatory vote meant to provoke Iran and pave the way for a war with that country as well.  For the first time we have someone like Barack Obama! Why, oh why would they endorse Hillary???

I'm not too far off in my thinking here apparently.  Randy Shaw of San Francisco's Alternative paper, BeyondChron uses history to make the point that this is NOT what the iconic labor leader would've done: 

"[Again and again] Chavez and the UFW defied the Establishment candidate to back a more progressive Democratic insurgent. And Chavez did so even when this meant bucking most of organized labor, and supporting an outsider against an incumbent Democratic President. [full article here]"

What a shame to break with that history now; to play it "safe" instead of daring to push forward a bold new agenda for a more progressive US!  This is our day!  Don't they see?  The Republicans are divided, their candidates suck and yet still some on the left seem to be unable to shake that old habit of wanting to be as conservative as possible because they feel the country doesn't really support progressive values such as human rights and equality for all.  We do!  They have to believe in the people of this country!  Have faith in us!  We are not really a confederacy of dunces, despite the past two elections.  We can do better than a blue dog Democrat.  And --someone please tell the UFW-- we can do better than Hillary.

Sometimes I wonder.

You ever watch Spanish telenovelas?  Well, you know how there's always the villain --this woman who is so quintessentially evil so as to provide a foil to the pure-heartedness of the heroine?  Well, even though I know it's true that people aren't so one-sided in real life I also think it's true that these caricatures represent some fundamental truth about human nature, just isolated and concentrated and drawn out for emphasis.

Sometimes I wonder why it's so difficult for me to be good.  I have to try so hard NOT to be that villain!  It takes much conscious effort on my part to remember NOT to hate everyone; to remember to love; to remember to forgive; to remember to be kind and magnanimous and think about others before myself.  I shudder to think how awful a person I'd be if I didn't put so much work into it!  And heaven forbid I get busy with a new job and a new life in a new city and suddenly have much less time to devote to the cause!

I forgot a friend's birthday.  And not just for a little while.  For nearly a week!  And not just any friend!  A friend who went out of his way to help me through one of the most difficult times of my life when I was looking for a job and not finding anything and was more depressed than I had been in years and years and years!  That's what kind of friend he was!  And I thank him by completely forgetting about his birthday because I was so wrapped up in myself and my life and figuring out the idiosyncrasies of cascading style sheets!

And it's not the first time that I realize I've been rude, forgetful and thoughtless lately with other people's lives and other people's feelings.  I think the only difference between me and one of those villains on a telenovela is that they consciously *try* to hurt other people and I do it absent-mindedly because I forget!  But it's the same effect.  (I know intent is supposed to count for something but I don't really understand why.  A drunk driver might not intend to kill someone but the end result is the same as if they'd plotted murder so what's the difference?)

I know I've said in the past that I think human nature is fundamentally good and it's society that messes us up but now I'm beginning to wonder.  Maybe institutionalized religion exists for just this purpose.  Because we all need a hell of a lot of help to not hurt each other so much!

Aspen, CO: Meet a black person!

Bob Herbert speaks of the big pink elephant

Check out Bob Herbert's column this morning.  No bones about it: we live in a msyogynistic society, he says, and that needs to be a major issue in 2008.  Kudos, Mr. Herbert, brave man!