The California Fires
They’re tired of the traffic. They’re tired of the smog. They’re tired of the noise and tired of being unable to see the stars at night. It makes all the sense in the world that some people take flight and go out to very outer edges of civilization--while staying within spitting distance of the usual urban amenities like movies and plays and such--in order to get away from it all. Except for California’s annual fire season, it makes perfect sense to build a home amongst the trees and brush in places like Running Springs.
It makes sense because, while the land is not cheap, the land is cheaper than it is closer to the California coast.
Of course, it’s not cheaper for us, the city-dwelling taxpayers. We wind up subsidizing the people who live in what’s now being called the “wildland-urban interface,” otherwise known as “out in the boondocks,” every time these homeowners have to be rescued from the flames of California’s ever wilder wildfire season.
Worse yet, the presence of people in and around the forests prevent us from allowing wild fires do what they’re designed to do, which is burn up forest generated trash. The inability of the forest to ‘put out the trash’ made up of dead brush, dead grass, and fallen tree limbs creates what’s called a large “fuel load” for fires to burn. And, an increasingly larger fuel load makes for increasingly larger fires.
Studies show that wildfires “clean” the forest of debris approximately every ten years and incinerate entire stands of trees once every hundred years. But now that people live in the wildland-urban interface, these fires are not being allowed to burn and do the job they once did.
California’s Mediterranean climate makes wildfires inevitable, but these fires don’t have to keep getting bigger and the properties at risk can be made more fire resistant, making heroic-expensive rescues less necessary.
Two things need to happen if tax-payers, who don’t live in the wildland-urban interface, are going to stop subsidizing those that do:1) The state needs to find a way to reduce the fuel load the way wildfires used to.
2) The properties in these areas need to built or adjusted so that they can survive anything but the largest of fires.
In the outlying areas, I believe the answer lies in letting some of those fires burn and making Home Owner's Associations mandatory.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
The Mosquito Coast Dash into the Flames:
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Breaking the Cradle to Prison Pipeline!
Imagine coming into this world
with a prison cell already reserved in your name.
Dear Reader:
That is the tragedy that awaits at least one in three Black boys. Millions of poor American children are condemned to prison by the time they reach their teens because they are failed at every turn in their lives — failed by their family, the child welfare system, and the juvenile justice system.
Consider this:
• Today, 580,000 Black males are serving sentences in state or federal prison, while fewer than 40,000 Black males earn a bachelor's degree each year.
• A child is born into poverty every 36 seconds and born to a teen mother every 60 seconds.
• Between 2000 and 2006, the number of children living in poverty increased by 1.2 million to reach 12.8 million children. One in six children is poor.
Frankie, who first appeared in juvenile court on a misdemeanor assault charge when he was barely ten years old, embodies this tragedy all too well.
Taken from his mother at birth, he was passed from one foster home to another for the first eight years of his life. At the age of ten, this troubled, depressed young boy hit an adult, the police were called and he took another step towards the adult criminal system.
Frankie was failed from birth by all those adults who should have protected and nurtured him — his family, the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system.
For a nation that claims to be the world's greatest democracy and a beacon for justice and freedom, the "Cradle to Prison Pipeline" is a national disgrace that costs billions of dollars, ruins tens of thousands of our children and deprives us of the young talent that could build a brighter future.
Join the CDF Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Initiative to dismantle the “pipeline” and help children like Frankie!
With your help CDF will:
• Continue to demand that public officials renew and increase funding for existing programs, such as early childhood education and health care, which are designed to keep children out of this pipeline.
• Partner with the faith community to create safe havens from the streets and help nurture the minds, bodies, and souls of our children.
Please join us… your contribution will make a critical difference as we launch this new movement for America's children.
Stand with us, and help prevent any more children from following Frankie down that pipeline to a prison cell.
Sincerely,
Marian Wright Edelman
President
Please remember to add support@childrensdefense.org to your address book to continue receiving our updates in your mailbox.
Donate by Mail:
Children's Defense Fund
Development Division
25 E Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20001
Monday, October 29, 2007
Self-Protectiveness: A Hardness of the Heart,Pt 6
Mar 4:40 And He said to them, Why are you so fearful? How do you not have faith?
I know that I’m not brave. I know that I'm not stronger than anybody.
So, if my introspection takes me deep enough to overcome my fears of people who think their racism is non-existent...If I can self-examine often enough to retain my idealism despite white males who approach me with brazen sexual innuendo as they think me one of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen wanna-be’s....If I can look inside and decide who I want to be, who I should be as a Christian, then I can have faith that everyone else can as well.
So while I understand the fear that drives the people at my church, I refuse to understand (what appears to be) their unwillingness to take responsibility for that fear.
Everyone Christian should know that:
1) IT’S MY FAULT WHEN I LET SOMEONE LIE TO ME TO MAKE MYSELF FEEL BETTER.
When a president says that we’re going to Iraq to get the Weapons of Mass Destruction and doesn’t find them, this “mistake” isn’t the point. The point is the first day of bombing was done under the heading of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” not “Operation Protect the U.S. from Terrorists who may have WMDs” And this is my opinion, but the first day of bombing should really be considered Operation Snow Job.
2) WHAT WE DO OR DON'T DO ISN'T THE MAIN ISSUE
It may well be that a man as evil as Hussein should not have been allowed to control such a large world resource, the oil, but again, that's not the point. Operation Snow Job shows us the quality of our leadership. And our lack of questioning and critical thinking might show us the content of our own collective character.
The Iraqis may or may be better off in the very, very long run, but you can’t say that when somewhere near a million Iraqi civilians are already dead. And as for democracy in Iraq, that’s not what we went there for.
The Iraqis are the ones who get to decide when they are willing to have hundreds of thousands of their own people die to achieve that freedom—just like the U.S. did it when it decided to end English rule, just like American Indians did when they resisted being put on reservations, just like African American's did when they decided it was time for the civil rights movement.
The people who are going to die, get to choose their time to die when it's for a cause. And usually they need a voice, a leader of the people to follow to the their own deaths so that some may survive and succeed and go on. Iraq doesn't appear to have this leader, therefore we have not helped them.
3) WE HAVE TO HAVE RESPECT FOR THE RULE OF LAW--especially when we're terrified
If the “United Nations isn’t doing anything,” as people so often complain, then what are we doing to fix it? The building is located here. We are one of its founders. Don’t we have a larger responsibility to make it work than most? And can you really say the United Nations isn’t doing anything when it warned us, again and again, not to invade Iraq because there was no evidence of WMDs there? What was the United Nations supposed to do after it said, “No” to the worlds’ only super power anyway?
We as a country already know that the rule of law must be respected on the smaller scale. This is why we have the justice system within our country that we do. We must believe in the same thing for those outside our country. Judgment by peers decreases the likelihood of the execution of a single entities agenda. We have to believe in a court system. Period. We have to believe in it even when it's not convenient and it feels bad to wait.
4) WE HAVE TO ASK OURSELVES IF WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE AS SAFE AS POSSIBLE
A few years ago, some professor on PBS said that the only real way to end the conflict between Palestine and Israel is to kill every last one of the Palestinians. I don't think he was really advocating this, he was theorizing about the age old conflict and the Palestine extremist's only method of fighting, the suicide bombings. I have little doubt that his opinion is absolutely correct; this is the safest quickest way to Israeli safety and freedom.
The United States could achieve the same thing by bombing Mexico and Canada out of existence and creating a 200 mile radius of bombs in the oceans to keep threats from the outside at a minimum. Then we would be 98% safe... and 100% immoral.
Maybe we have to consider that the only way for us to be 90% moral is to take actions that only leave us 85% safe? And then maybe we rely on God to close the gap as far as He chooses to close it. Why? If God expected the Israelites of the Old Testament to teach their children not to steal when they are hungry, I'm pretty sure He's not going to bless our 'anything goes attitude' when it comes to protecting ourselves.
I don’t know about you, but I'm pretty sure that means I cannot condone transporting people from one country to another for the purposes of torture, or holding people at Guantanamo without trials or at least an explanation of what they are suspected of doing just so I can feel safe...or even so me and mine can actually BE safe.
We have to live up to our own country's ideals and what God expects of us, both. We cannot be content to live down to our human nature.
Click Here To Read Entire Article!
Friday, October 26, 2007
Self-Protectiveness: A Hardeness of the Heart,Pt 5
I can’t help thinking that reason the American people went along with our government’s substituting Iraq for Saudi Arabia, as a target is in some way related to the ability that some to use the labels “Iraqi”, Arab”, “Terrorist” and “Muslim” interchangeably. And it could be that the inability to separate the people these labels represent the same Us. Vs. Them thinking that fuels the "racial turmoil" in this country.
In his book What’s Next, Walter Mosley asks a question I can’t get off my mind: If France had run planes into the World Trade Center, and the president said he was going to bomb Germany would predominantly white America had a few more questions about why we were even investigating Germany instead of France? (Paraphrased)
Even though I keep coming up with the same ugly answer each time I ask myself this, my own struggles with my own fears of people at my own church, of people within my own city (lately courtesy of the LAPD at MacArthur Park) all this made me more understanding of the kind of fear that hardens the heart.
Just like me, quasi-good people are capable of believing anything if they’re scared, which also means they are also capable of doing just about anything. Psychologists and philosophers, Christian and secular alike, have all told us that told us that this is true. I thought I believed and understood this, but I did not believe it down to my bones. I couldn’t have. That’s the only way for me to explain to myself the level of shock I’ve experienced over the people of this country, especially my fellow Christians have supported in regards to Iraq.
People who should be struggling with “turn the other cheek” and what that really means when you are thinking in terms self-defense, somehow supported pre-emptive strike without seeing very much evidence that they were in danger. I was shocked, but all that proves is that Christians just like me, can do horrible things when they are afraid.
Still, it’s not biblical for a Capital "C" Christian to be so fearful:
Mar 4:40 And He said to them, Why are you so fearful? How do you not have faith?
Heb 10:38 "But the just shall live by faith;" "and if he draws back," "My soul is not pleased in him." Hab. 2:4; Zeph. 1:6; Mal. 1:10
Pro 10:13 Wisdom is found in the lips of him who has understanding, but a rod is waiting for the back of him who lacks heart.
Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, voted to go to war on very little evidence. Republicans seem very fear based, in my biased opinion, and so their voting to go to war makes a certain kind of sense. However, if the Democrats aren't as fear based and reactionary then it seems like our Democratic Leaders should have known better than to vote to go to war. And, they probably did. They likely experienced a little McCarthy era fear of their own and voted in such a way as to be re-elected regardless of what they really believed. And something about that kind of cowardice seems so very much worse.
People of color saw the rush to judgment, the run up to this war, very differently than others. They’ve seen too many snap judgments made about a person’s guilt based on race alone, and the subsequent trial that’s no more than a rubber stamp on the original snap decision, to be surprised that President Bush may have actually believed there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The President’s decision to go to war and ignore the outcome of the U.N. Inspector’s reports that said they found no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), seemed like the standard operating procedure.
For people of color the slogan: Bush Lied; People Died was never about whether or not the President believed WMDs were in Iraq. For people of color, the President’s lies were always about the same thing the lies are always about: the existence and strength of the evidence. Fear, especially when combined with greed for oil (and empire) enables a leader to believe just about anything about anybody they want to believe it about.
However, the arrogance of our leaders isn’t what led us down the path to Iraq. Our leaders couldn’t have done it without us. And maybe they wouldn’t have done it if our faith, as Christians, had been stronger. Click Here To Read Entire Article!
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Self-Protectiveness: A Hardeness of the Heart,Pt 4
Fear hardens the heart.
Living as a minority in the United States often winds up being a constant struggle of both heart and mind. An overwhelming percentage of the majority seem to think that prejudice, and therefore hatred, is the basis of all race based problems which allows them to ignore all but the most blatant racists among them.
We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape [simply because we want to believe this about ourselves] And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them, and drives us further apart. (The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama, 2006)
Knowing this me leaves me, leaves most people of color, always having to fight the good fight within the self, especially when having thoughts like this one:
What if Arab-looking people leave the top of the Most Feared Brown People List because a Latin or African country is threatening the United States? American Taliban Guy, Timothy McVeigh, and the Unabomber don’t generate rallying cries around racial profiling, but they’ll Extraordinary Rendition me* and mine in a hot minute. And anecdotal evidence would suggest that 50% of my paler hued friends will either say nothing and support it OR come right out and say they support it.
Remembering to pray rather than imaging ever worsening scenarios doesn’t often give me immediate results, but calm always comes. Then I remember to remain faithful to what I know is right even it doesn’t feel right. I know I can’t prevent people from hurting me by avoiding them or hurting them first. I know that I have to sacrifice my immediate desires to feel safe in order to be safe myself.
In an effort to honor these intentions, I keep this in mind:
1) An American Indian elder described his own inner struggles this way: "Inside of me there two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time." When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most."
In other words: Everyone has to do battle with their own dark side (And if you feel nothing of the sort going on inside, you should be able to guess which side of you is currently winning.)
2) Psalms 37:7 -8 Rest in Jehovah and wait patiently for Him; inflame not yourself with him who prospers in his way, with the man practicing evil wiles. Abstain from anger and cease from fury; also do not inflame yourself to do evil.
In other words: Don’t let other people’s evil make you evil right back
Again, the good thing about learning to have patience and struggling with my own fears and wanting to withdraw into the fictitious safe haven of my own people is that I’ve had to take a deeper look at other people’s fears.
********************
My job used to make me miss the news for three days of every week. Consequently, I missed the a few crucial days of news in 2002. I wound up having to ask people at the church I go to, which is located in Republicanville: Why are we planning to invade Iraq when the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia? Did something change? Did they find out that the weapons or training came out of Iraq too? The answer I got was always a variation on this one: “I don’t know but there must be something.”
What she was telling me, what all of them were telling me, is that 9/11 had made them quietly hysterical.
They had to be hysterical--in my mind. Because I refused to believe, at the time, that good people could support bombing a major city in a country that hadn’t done anything to our country.
Now, I have to believe our country can bomb another country that has offended us with nothing but words because it has already happened. Our country bombed Iraq when the terrorists were predominantly from Saudi Arabia.
Click Here To Read Entire Article!
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Self Protectiveness: A Hardeness of the Heart,Pt 3
Growing up on a military base amongst a mixture of ethnicities and cultures at the back end of the civil rights movement, I have turned out to be more vulnerable and naive than I'd like.
I've begun letting things that I've heard via people from my nearly all white Orange County Church affect me. Examples:
“Why do black people expect something for nothing?”
“I’m half-Mexican. You can hardly tell.”
“I felt really out of place. I was the only Caucasian there,” from someone that WAS in Japan at the time, who IS Japanese to the tune of fifty-percent... and looks it.
I've started thinking that the most segregated hours in America, Sunday from nine to noon, are a good thing and an example for the rest of us. I've started thinking that children should be around their own until they are firmly okay with who they are and what they look like--within normal-dysfunctional teenage bounds of common sense--if you know what I mean.
Being surrounded by people that aren't like you physically, in an environment where most don't seem to learn to positively value themselves, different in color or culture or religion or not, clearly isn’t good for you. I’ve seen that this is not good for children of color over the years, but now I'm seeing just how much the adults don't "just get over it" when they're older.
And the informal segregation that exists in this country seems to leave whites even worse off in some ways.
Many whites can't see racism unless it's so blatant they can't turn away from it. And if they can't see blatant racism in others, how can they stem the subtle tide of race based snap judgments that surge and wane within themselves?
I mean, how hard is it to suppose that Mark Furman of the N-word MIGHT have tampered with evidence and compromised the O.J. Simpson case--and it is THAT which set O.J. free--and not the non-existent reverse-racism of the vindictive, "stupid," mostly black jury.
Did a certain senator mean to be offensive when he said Barack Obama is "clean and articulate?"
No, but that's irrelevant. The statement isn't offensive because of the way it SOUNDS but because of the way it IS in the head of the man who said it. If calling Obama clean and articulate is a compliment then that must mean the group he's a part of isn't? That's the only way "clean and articulate" can be a compliment for a college ed-ju-ma-cated man. And if the group, of which he is a part, isn't clean and articulate, then they, African Americans, are less hire-able, less promote-able, but way the heck more fire-able.
A reasonable person can believe that the senator can apologize and make a genuine effort to change, but a reasonable person cannot say that his calling Obama "clean and articulate" means nothing. Any Jewish person will tell you the very same thing in regards to poor Mel Gibson. (And I do feel sorry for him. If you know even a smidgen about his personal history, then you know that man never had a chance.)
How hard is it to further understand that if belief and action are directly connected, then unconscious belief and action are even more firmly connected? Why? When people believe themselves to be color blind (in truth, racism-blind and prejudice-deaf) they never think to take a step back and examine their own reactions to people who don't look or think like them.
All some people check themselves for is: Nope, I don't hate those people. Therefore, I don't make ZERO snap judgments based on race --despite being bathed in stereotypes for most of my life.
Sometimes I wonder if most of the self-proclaimed color-blind (SPCB) really think that ALL the members of the LAPD that beat Latinos in MacArthur Park last May are either innocent of having race based motives in regards to the beatings--OR-- are they card carrying racists who wish they could be in the KKK and have nothing to do with them, the morally superior SPCB?
Then again, it's probably more likely that SPCBs think-- that people of color think-- that every cop involved in such things are KKK member wanna be-s. After all, those people are soooo sensitive, and absolutely EVERYTHING is about race with them.
Yet, I don't know anybody darker than a paper bag (DTPB) that thinks of themselves as color blind.* Most DTPBs know that it's primarily the policemen that were raised by the self-proclaimed color-blind-- who enjoy leading the unexamined life not worth living-- that wind up being policeman that beat people of color for no reason (*= I don't KNOW Tiger Woods and I'm glad.)
People, of any color, that truly value being an anti-racist either say they are conscious to take one person at a time. They deal with the individual and take hold of any assumptions that might pop up and examine them. Or, they say something about how they're doing the best they can considering that some people are pushing them to the breaking point fairly regularly.
And, I for one, really resent being pushed into the latter group even occasionally.
On the military base I grew up on, we had our little incidents of --shall we say-- racial insensitivity. Nevertheless, there was such a mix of people, you could only get but so stupid, but for so long. When things went side ways, the friendships were real and were usually worth working out in a real way. But that was the 70s. Maybe we were more idealistic.
A few decades ago, I think young people had a real dedication to being a good person. Maybe I'm more nostalgic now than we were idealistic then, but it really seemed like we wanted to make a real change in our heart when we wronged someone (The civil rights movement's residual effect?). There was less, not absent but less, dedication to the shallow, ‘I don’t want people to think I am racist.’
Rather than a temporary segregation until a child is emotionally and mentally secure in who he or she is, a healthy mix of people is probably the real answer to the race problem, ethnicity problem, or us-them problem in or out of church.
Nevertheless, I think healthy mixes only exist in minuscule pockets around the country. And I don’t think one those pockets exists near me. I’ve looked and have not found. (By the way, having two families of out of two hundred be of another race in your neighborhood is 99% segregated, not “a healthy mix.” And for the two families, it’s an invitation to self-inflicted brain damage.)
So temporary segregation as a fall back position? I'd like to think the answer is no, but I'm not sure. I'd miss so many relationships that helped to form who I am now. Then again, Christian Churches all over the country are trying to segregate their children from non-Christians, at least temporarily, by putting them in Christian schools. Apparently, some people think this idea has merit.
I don't like it, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be best for some of us.
Even so, as rough as it gets in this country and in my church, the news is not all bad.
Praying about my own vulnerability has made me able to voluntarily be around why-do-black-people-expect-something-for-nothing, and even share some things with her. It took months but my face doesn't actually hurt if I smile in her direction now. That's all God, I promise you.
Just as I was about to jump ship and find a new church, more and more people of color started showing up at my church--I met a family from India the other day! However, the best thing that's come out of all this is that my attempts to resolve my own hardening of the heart has made me want to understand the heart hardening (that I've seen so very easily) in others.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Self Protectiveness: A Hardeness of the Heart,Pt 2
In the last few months I’ve heard things that made me more sad than upset while with people from the same church:
I didn't hear anything except this piece of the conversation. Yet, I'm trying to figure out what context would make this a healthy thing to say. Other people have told me about "passing" for white and the surprise people get when they find out their last name or something, but that's not nearly the same as, "I'm half Mexican; you can hardly tell." (And by the way--Sure! you can tell)
Worse yet, she said it in front of a teenage girl that lives in one of the half-way houses that our church serves-- who I am HOPING was not Mexican herself. (Keeping your face from showing anything is a survival technique our girls know well, so who knows if she heard it or not.)
Another friend told a group of us how uncomfortable she was while in a Japanese theater in Japan because:
A blind person, who could only hear and not see her, would never guess that she IS Japanese by fifty-percent. That’s why she was there. Her elderly mother wanted to visit her homeland.
There are worse things to experience than being subjected to people who are unconscious about their own racism and suddenly finding yourself rocketing from friend to credit to your race within one five second comment like: Why do black people expect something for nothing? And, absorbing the kind of repulsion and denial in regards to yourself, like the two people described above, is one of them.
I’m starting to see the reason why nine to noon on Sunday are the most segregated hours in America.Worse yet, I’m starting to think it should stay that way.
I'm starting to think that most people of color who have children should live so that there children aren't exposed to the dominant culture and it's images until their youngest child is at least 12 or 13 years old. I'm starting to think that those of us that are the diverse in diversity might need to that isolated time just to know who we are.
I'm starting to think this despite knowing that all my relatives in one room would look more like a United Nations after-party than a family.
And I don't know if that means, that deep down, I'm starting to think that all my family and my friends-- and even me, myself-- REALLY ARE credits to our race or what?
Monday, October 22, 2007
Self-protectiveness: A Hardness of the Heart,Pt 1
I tried to take the attitude of being flattered when I first heard this from a friend at church in Orange County. After all, she felt comfortable enough to ask me such a thing—despite the insult it implies. I answered her questions about black people and why some black leaders are so concerned about the 25% plus of our race that are poor.
However, I must not have been clear because a few weeks later she said it again:
I was not able to force myself to feel flattered. While letting go of my old position as friend and absorbing my new position as credit-to-my-race, I tried to explaining to this white woman why her underlying assumptions were not true-- again, in a different way. I tried explaining to her that most people don't change socio-economic classes. For example, she grew up middle class and had everything she needed, yet she is not rich. Most poor people can't make the jump to middle class either.
A few weeks later and she'd said it again, for the third time. Then she further expressed her opinion that poor (black) people could stop being poor if they only made a real effort just like So-And-So did.
Well, little black So-And-So had written a book, at 16 years of age or some other ridiculously young age, that made it pretty obvious that he’s a genius, super-talented, and ultra-driven —accent on the “ultra.”
As she seemed absent one scintilla of empathy for the average human being (so long as they had the misfortune to be black) my response to her may not have sounded as patient and understanding as it had--- the previous two times. STILL, I did NOT say, “Some people that are poor would like to become un-poor and have the same life you envision for your C-Average-having, car-stealing, recently-out-of-prison-being, finally-crack-free, rug-rat that you gave birth to.”
I didn’t say it because I actually know her daughter, Mary. (not her real name) And I find her to be a gentle and transparent soul. Why is she this way, despite her mother's attitude? Mary has been through something. She has disappointed herself in using the drugs and jail time and recovered from it. And through these trials she seems to have gained a real and solid faith.
I’m not going to lie though. I wish I didn’t know Mary. Blasting her mother would have felt SOOO good. Yet, I know now just like I knew then, if I had started down that road, I would have cussed her mother out--and we were in church.
Friday, October 19, 2007
POLICE BEATINGS: CAN THE CYCLE BE BROKEN?
1980s: Rodney King beaten while lying on the ground by more than a dozen officers, while openly using the N-word amongst themselves and over the police radio.
1990s: Rampart Division Scandal (Approximately 70 cops were accused of planting evidence, and physically abusing prisoners by another corrupt LAPD officer)
Now! 2000s: The MacArthur Park Police Beatings of Latinos on May Day 2007: Police officers were videotaped clubbing bystanders and members of the press—obvious members of the press carrying cameras, reporters with microphones and press credentials.
These are just the large scale highlights of police beatings. There were numerous incidents of LAPD beating individual brown and black people caught on tape when the cell phone companies first started putting cameras in their phones.
The LAPD's Investigative Report was more critical and detailed than ever before, largely thanks to Chief Bratton. The Report Said:
1) Less than half the number of officers that should have been there were there
2) Nobody knew who was in charge, resulting in conflicting orders being given
3) The officers had poor crowd control training due to budget cuts
4) All this resulted in the officers being "overwhelmed."
5) Twenty-six officers are being investigated (only those on video tape maybe?) but more than the twenty-six thought it was okay to baton people at will despite the LAPD's written regulations to the contrary.
6) Worst of all, the report says it appears that there wasn’t one officer that tried to stop the beatings and unnecessary shootings (with rubber bullets.) Could this mean that the policemen of the LAPD are even afraid of each other?
Being overwhelmed doesn't explain clubbing people who were obviously (obvious on videotape) not doing anything. Per the report itself, police officers thinking it was okay to bash people with their batons if they weren't moving fast enough does explain it.
How police officers can still think this, do this, and get away with it sixteen years after Rodney King is what needs explanation. How many times the LAPD’s police officers have used their batons inappropriately between Rodney King and Latino Beatings 2007 is the real question.
And when “overwhelmed” results in beating people for no apparent reason--no reason apparent on video tape-- then "overwhelmed" must mean "frightened and hysterical." Does the Latino Beatings Report of 2007 mean to say that the LAPD is hysterically afraid of anyone with dark skin?
I mean, can you imagine this happening in a crowd made up of white men, bleached blonds, and children in a community like Newport Beach? Can you honestly imagine 20 to 30 white teenagers in Newport Beach who've thrown rocks and bottles making those officers so crazed that they start a riot? And how is it 26 officers are supposed to have started a 5000 to 6000 person riot all by themselves?
And just because the products of rabid assimilation, Clarence-Thomas-type African-Americans and Justice-Gonzalez-type Latinos, may have been in uniform and full participants in the beatings, that doesn't that make racism any less a factor or any less likely the main motivation for the beatings.
Chief William Bratton of the LAPD has made much progress in community involvement and transparency during difficult times like these. He's even reduced crime by a large percentage. Still, he is only one man. And, nothing will change if the underlying problem of institutionalized racism isn't addressed. That’s been proven again and again.
If the attitudes of the policemen and the communities they are born and raised in don't change then the results the LAPD are getting aren't going to change either. We saw Rodney King beaten with batons, long after he was on the ground, for no apparent reason sixteen years ago; the community the officers come from exonerated them. The result of that was, and is, that LAPD is as easily "frightened" into beating black and brown skinned people (for nothing) now as they were then.
And I don’t even know that it's realistic to expect them to get better at this point in our countries history.
Think about this:
Our police officers are coming out of a community where most its people supported pre-emptive strike to destroy weapons of mass destruction. That community was wrong about WMDs being in Iraq, wrong to tune of hundreds of thousands Iraqi civilian lives and more than three thousand of our own troops' lives, yet they've made no apologies.
The police officers come from us, a nation who's motivation for starting the war in Iraq went from trying to protect ourselves from Saudi-Arabian terrorists by bombing Iraq TO creating democracy in Iraq without batting a hypocritical eyelash—and now some of us are upset that the Iraqi’s aren’t grateful. The police are part of a people that mostly don't care that Arab looking people are being extraordinarily-rendtioned and tortured--either by our own government or sanctioned by our own government.
I’d say that the LAPD's officers are acting normally considering the environment they’ve been raised in.
*Clarence Thomas Defining Moment: Two prison guards hand cuffed and beat up a Louisiana prisoner while their supervisor watched, warning them only “not to have too much fun.” Hudson suffered a split lip, loosened teeth, facial swelling and a broken dental plate. The court ruled 7-2 that guards used excessive force, violating the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Human rights groups and the first Bush administration backed the majority. Clarence Thomas, joined by Antonin Scalia, dissented. “In my view,” Thomas wrote, “a use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be tortuous, it may be criminal and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it is not ‘cruel and unusual punishment.”
**Judge Alberto Gonzales Defining Moment: In a January 2002 memorandum to George W. Bush, Gonzales emphasized that this new war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
Gonzales told George W. Bush that in denying "detainees"--many of them now held at Guantanamo for nearly three years without charges--prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions, the president didn't have to worry about being held accountable by the courts. As commander in chief, his actions were un-reviewable. (Supreme Court Disagreed).
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Latino Police Beatings of 2007
The LAPD's Investigative Report on the The May Day MacArthur Park Police Beatings of Latinos in 2007 said:
***1) There weren’t enough officers by at least half. The officers didn’t have enough training for crowd control. There were numerous people in charge giving contradictory instructions.
***2) Twenty-six officers are being investigated for violations (I’m guessing they are the ones that were filmed hitting people that were just standing around or carrying press badges and/or news cameras)
***3) It appears that ZERO officers made an attempt to stop the Latino Beatings that day.
***4) The officers, not just the twenty-six on the hot-seat, thought it legitimate to beat the protesters with their batons if they weren’t moving fast enough for them.
***5) The investigation revealed that the May Day Melee started because 20 to 30 protesters were throwing rocks and bottles at police, which made the police start batting practice on everyone in sight.
In Other Words: Police Outnumbered+ Police Overwhelmed=Police Beating Brown Skinned People At Will--when “overwhelmed” is translated as “frightened and hysterical”
The biggest question is this: How can any one of us be safe when there are police officers, PEOPLE WHO CARRY GUNS FOR A LIVING, who are silly enough to hit a reporter who’s holding a camera all the while knowing there are other cameras nearby videotaping him?
Doing the Math
Ultimately, I figure at least six to eight out of the twenty-six officers accused will be told they're innocent or only participated in a minor way. That’ll leave eighteen to twenty officers to face the music for approximately 250 lawsuits filed against the department.
Even if some of the complainants filed two lawsuits a piece, it seems like we have some baton swingers missing from our line up. How would the eighteen to twenty officers beat the crap out of that many of Arnold Swartzenegger's hot-blooded Latinos? Hot blooded doesn't just mean hot to trot. It means quick to get hot-headed too, violent even. The LAPD would have to have Jet Li, Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus on the job--punching, spinning, and karate-chopping like crazy for twenty of them to have done that much damage.
Solutions?
The Latino Police Beating Report is the most critical and transparent investigative report the LAPD has ever done on itself. The honesty of this report is all well and good, but I still don’t think we’re getting to the nitty gritty of the problem.
It is my belief that policeman are often macho dudes. Even if they loose control and beat somebody then wind up losing a whole 4 hours pay or something, they still strut around feeling cocky. There buddies pat them on the back and say things like, "You sure showed that ****** something.
Consequently, at least part of the solution is to making sure the press coverage doesn't pump them up even a tiny bit. Instead of Police Violate Victim type headlines, we should make sure the titles are something like:
RODNEY KING’S ATTEMPTS GET INTO FETAL POSITION, WHILE POLICE BEAT HIM, FRIGHTEN POLICE INTO BEATING HIM EVEN MORE AS HE LIES ON GROUND.
DIALLOS WILD LEFT HAND LUNGING FOR WALLET PANICS FOUR POLICE OFFICERS INTO SHOOTING AT HIM 41 TIMES THOUGH HE WAS UNARMED.
So with our new system for creating headlines, the latest news paper clipping for the Police Beatings Unlimited Scrap Book should have a title that says something like:
THIRTY PROTESTERS THROWING ROCKS AND BOTTLES FRIGHTEN 600 POLICE OFFICERS INTO HYSTERICALLY BEATING HUNDREDS OF LATINOS IN MACARTHUR PARK.
This is the kind of headline should takes the macho out sails. It's still too long, but you get the gist. We need the press to help us add some shame to their game.
I wonder if the officers they do finally hold responsible will be busted back to private or whatever the police have as.....
NO WAIT!
This situation calls for Jena 6 Justice: Each officer should be charged with attempted murder for each victim that spent any more than 2 hours in the emergency room then went to a high school function later that same evening.
Fair is fair..
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The New Mad Cow Disease
Relatively soon, cows will no longer need to have sex to reproduce. They're going to be crankier than that arthritic, old, white tiger that grabbed the latter half of Siegfried and Roy by the throat in Las Vegas a few years back.
Why? As of December 2006, the Food and Drug Administration(FDA) has said cloned meat is safe for consumption! This means that cows will be reproduced by man via cloning instead of having the cows reproduce themselves the old fashioned way.
The biotech companies pushing for this might be excited, but I'm worried. Cranky meat on the hoof can't be good for you.
Think about it. Sex deprived cows are probably putting out all sorts of stress hormones, like cortisol, and pumping it throughout their systems. Cortisol means more belly fat. More belly fat means more cow heart attacks. Meat from a cow that's been sex-starved and stressed-out since puberty, with a belly that drags the ground, and has had a heart attack long before middle age isn't going to make for good steak.
And I've got my own stress hormones, thank you very much. I don't need to eat more.
But, I don't want to cause a panic here. Most people don't need to worry about this. People living outside California won't even know when they're eating it. The FDA has decided cloned meat on our supermarket shelves doesn't need to be labeled as "cloned."
After all, the cloned animals are testing almost identical to the...to the uh....the um....natural cows. They don't know why the clones drop dead for no apparent reason at times, but that's a trifle not worth worrying about.Yet, the FDA's risk assessment "was discredited by a March 2007 report by the Center for Food Safety that exposed embarrassing inadequacies in the FDA's review; there are no peer-reviewed safety studies on meat from cloned cows, pigs or goats and only three inconclusive ones on milk. Even the National Academies of Science - the government's science adviser - has said that it's just not possible to adequately assess this foods' safety." (San Francisco Chronical, October 5, 2007)
Even if the FDA manages to jump this trifling, little safe food hurdle soon, we may still have a while to go before we're eating the new mad cows. These bad boys cost $6000 a head to breed.
Then again, I never thought flat TVs were going to become affordable either.
And, we could already be eating it. Farmers are only voluntarily participating in the governments ban on cloned food, and the cows are on U.S. Farms already. If the Farmer in the dell got a little careless with his breeding techniques last year, we could be already be eating it --even in California, home of the first cloned food label law.
Well....at least, I found out that I'll be eating it ahead of time (I hope). I didn't know that genetically modified (GMO) food had moved from the ethical-debate-phase to the in-the-supermarkets-and-you're-already-eating-it-phase until our government started trying to insist that Europe to eat it TOO.*
Saying grace before I eat is about to take on a whole new meaning.
*=The Green-Organic-folks had been raising Cain about GMO food long before the supermarkets started selling it. But, those people scream about everything, so I wasn't paying attention. Neither were you. Don't lie.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
I’LL TAKE MOVIE ANALOGIES FOR $500 ALEX!
Question:
If you build it they will come***is to*** Field of Dreams
AS
If you name it... it will begin to exist ***is to***____________
Answer?
Kurdistan
Explanation:
There are Kurds in
Last I heard, the only officially recognized area of Kurdistan is Iraqi-Kurdistan...which is fully expected to make the "real"
Hence, Turkey and Iran are nervous about nothing.
Oh yeah, break out your bicycles; gas prices are about to be up, up, Up AND AWAY!Click Here To Read Entire Article!
Monday, October 15, 2007
Racial Profiling Gone Hog Wild!?
President Bush told We-The-People and the whole world in a 2005 Interview with the [NY?] Times that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.”
However, He neglected to mention that the CIA has this program called, "Extraordinary Rendition."
****A) Definition: Terror suspects are picked up in one country, transferred to another country, put under the control of that foreign government, so that interrogation methods that are not permitted under U.S. law may be applied to the suspects. (Established during the Clinton Administration.)
****B) Real deal definition: Snatch a person from one country take them to another country , one that allows torture, then have the second country do the torturing for you. No trial or legal procedures are necessary.
****C) OOOPS! :CIA admits to making a mistake when they took German citizen Khaled el Masri. Khaled says he was taken from Bavaria to a U.S. controlled prison Afghanistan and tortured. The German government is helping to collect evidence that he was--which sounds like it might be the least the German government can do since it seems like they might have been the ones who told the CIA exactly where to find Khaled in the first place.
****D) Appropriate U.S. Response: CIA being investigated by an Inspector General, John Helgerson
****E) Inappropriate U.S. Response: CIA Investigates the Investigating Inspector--right back.
Whew! What a week. Oh, but there's more....
We-The-People couldn't find four Justices, just FOUR, sitting on OUR Supreme Court that were willing to hear the lawsuit from the German car salesman, Khaled el Masri, who said he "was wrongly abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA in a case of mistaken identity." (David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2007)
Okay...Okay...Okay...Um....I like....I only have like...a few questions:
1) Okay...when did this entire country agree to be teleported back through time and space to cold-war Russia, and how come nobody told me?
2) When did they invent the specialized lie detector (which actually measures stress levels) that
can separate what's being said into two categories
***a) lies told because one will say anything when in agony AND
***b)the truth?
3) And if this super-duper-cagifragilistic lie detector does exist, can we use it on the police officers involved in the Los Angeles Police Beatings of May 2007 in MacArthur Park?
4) If torture does actually work, then why do you suppose terrorists are predominantly born, created, and/or trained in the countries that use torture regularly--the countries we're now running to for assistance?
5)How many Christians can still believe that THIS is a Christian nation?
6)How many people think Extraordinary Rendition's new nick name should be Racial Profiling Gone Hog Wild? I mean, I don't think Khaled el Masri is a European name, do you? I'm thinking I see a pattern.
Next Month....
The supreme court is hearing testimony about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. I'm waiting with bated breathe. Aren't you?
Bottom Lining It:
If the unexamined life is not worth living, certainly it follows is the unexamined country is not worth living in. People who really love this country, or even just moderately like it, ought to be willing to help heal it when it's sick. And, torturing people on soil most of us wouldn't step on with ten inch platform shoes is as sick as it gets.
So, what should we do now? Just do a Nancy Reagan--Write "JUST SAY NO...TO TORTURE" on a post card and send it to your congressmen. Send it over and over again. Send them so much paper, they think it's snowing in doors.
P.S. And, isn't this special?
Rosario Gambino, of the Gambino crime family, who has served his 22 year sentence for drug trafficking can't be deported back to his homeland. Why? A U.S. court has ruled that Italy can't have Mr. Gambino because "the physical and psychological coercion used" in Italy's 41-bis prison system might be torture. It's a good thing other federal agencies are waiting in line to charge Gambino. At least he's likely to stay in jail.
Friday, October 12, 2007
RAGING BULLYS AND BUZZ WORDS
RE: LA TIMES ARTICLE: CIA INQUIRY TARGETS ITS OWN WATCH DOG.
BACKGROUND:
AND NOW...
DEFENDING THE CIA'S INVESTIGATION OF THE INVESTIGATOR:
1) His targets says, Helgerson's "PERSONAL BIASES" are the reason for the turning the tables and initiating their own probe.
2) A former high-ranking official says, Helgerson's " PERSONAL AGENDA ON ISSUES" is the reason for initiating their own investigation of the person investigating them.
ONE READER’S REACTION
Am I supposed to be so repulsed by very the idea that Helgerson might have an "AGENDA," that's very much like a purpose in mind, while he investigates whether or not our CIA is torturing prisoners (that haven't been tried)....so repulsed that I forget to recoil at what seems to be happening to my country's sense of integrity?
And when the CIA picks up the wrong citizen, ala German citizen Khaled El Masri, torture him, realize they have the wrong person, then drop him by the side of the road in Albania instead of taking him home, am I suppose to dismiss Helgerson's scathing reports because...egads!!!... the man even has "PERSONAL BIASES!" Tell me it's not true!
Okay. Now for the reality check: Don't these paltry explanations of why the CIA is investigating the man that is investigating them mean that the CIA thinks that I, John Q Citizen, am an idiot?
Whether I'm an idiot or not, I want my Inspector General to have a personal bias or two. I'd especially like him to have that bias that says torturing people is a bad thing. I'd like him to have an agenda where the goal is stopping torture from happening by exposing it to American people who refuse to act like the people who attacked us on 9/11 no matter what might actually be gained.
More of the Article's food for thought:
Over Seas Agents "feel they're being investigated by people who don't fully understand their business," says one former CIA official.
All I can say to that is, "So what's your point?" We don't fully understand, and my-part-of-We doesn't want to. We think you over seas agents might be too close to your work. In fact, we think you are too close to becoming your work. The IG investigates you for your own good, as well as the countries own good.
When we become too frightened, then over-react, and follow it up by acting in ways not consistent with our ideals, we need the watchdogs we’ve put in place to do their jobs and make sure we all reign ourselves in.
P.S.S. I'd also like to know if the friendly countries allowing(?) the CIA to torture other country’s citizens within its borders will be on the evil-axis list by the end of the decade?
Click Here To Read Entire Article!Thursday, October 11, 2007
ANNOUNCING: Trophy Wives United
The TWU Mission: Showing teenagers married to athletes how to stave off the abuse until they’re eligible to get 50 percent of his assets –OR- the maximum the pre-nup allows since 2007.
ABOUT US: We are the ex-wives of athletes that have lived to tell the story. We formed our group two months ago when we realized that the NFL, the general public, and justice system was more concerned about athletes like Michael Vick killing dogs than beating us to death. We are determined that there will never be another Mrs. Brett Meyers, or Mrs. Jason Rudd, or Mrs. OJ Simpson... The list of women beaten by athletes is endless while list of players banned or sanctioned is somewhere between short to non-existent as far as we can tell.
But never mind all that. Now that we’ve formed TWU, it doesn’t matter that nobody but a few strident, feminist looking women are on our side. We’ll be on your side.
We won’t waste you time like some of the other organizations do with walking, jiggling, and baby talk lessons. You already know how to do that, or you wouldn’t’ be married to him already, right?
At TWU, we focus on what's important. We can show you how to:
***** Make anorexia work with your body instead of against it
*****Shop without leaving a paper trail
*****Recover quickly if you accidentally let him see you thinking deep thoughts
*****Act surprised when he cheats on you
*****Pout and make him spend triple what he usually does on jewelry
*****Set up an off shore account for those little extras everybody needs to hide
*****Behave as if you haven’t the slightest interest in having a full life with all the trimmings like you are real human being. Making him believe that you live and breathe to be there for him at all times will be a cake walk when we get through.
*****Recognize the signs of steroid abuse before things get out of hand.
*****Take Jujitsu lessons in secret (Studies at Northeastern and University of Massachusetts found that although male athletes at 10 of those schools made up only 3.3 percent of the population, they were involved in 19 percent of the reported assaults....incidents most often go unreported -- especially when the alleged abuser is a well-known athlete)
*****Use your jujitsu in such a way that you temporarily disable him so that he can’t strike you, but recovers within 24 hours so that he makes his next game. (No need to stop the cash flow.)
*****Find a place to bury his body if things go sideways, then sell the story that he moved to Costa Rica for his mental health.
*****Get out when it’s time with the maximum the law allows. Ca-Ching!
Starting in December, we’ll have access to a psychologist for those of you who think it’s true love. But before you spend the money on Doctor Feel Good, maybe we can talk you down right here on the website.
Honey, he married you for your looks. Suck it up. Get over it. Think about this:
When a man or anybody else finds a beautiful painting in a museum, he may always love looking at that painting and always enjoy himself while he’s standing in front of it, but he always moves on to see what the rest of the museum has to offer. Now, don’t be such a nit-wit. Focus on your goal: Minimum time married and maximum money. You can marry for LUUUUV the second time around.
If you’re already divorced, but still both under the age of 27 and under100 pounds, you are as good as one of us already! Pleeease, do fill out the application below and help us help our younger sisters out there!
Real Articles can be found at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n47_v11/ai_17839414
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/53331/
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=3285
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Pssst! Secrets from the Christian Next Door: Fear, Death, and Heaven Too
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know that God exists, Jesus exists, and that everybody and everything that lives eventually dies. This didn’t scare me because, like most young children, I assumed death was for old people. Old age and death seemed a long way off for my parents and so far off for us kids, it seemed like we...well...um....It seemed like we were going to live forever.
By the time my grandparents could come across the country to meet me, I was in kindergarten. It didn’t take long for me to realize I shouldn’t get too terribly attached to them. They had gray hair, wrinkles, and were very nearly fifty. I figured they’d be meeting God face to face very soon.
As I got older, I developed a fear of dying. I don’t remember the details of that fear, but I remember how I dealt with it. You may be familiar with the technique: I raised the age at which old takes place, the age at which one becomes at-risk to die. High. Higher. Highest.
When I became aware that God’s ways are mysterious and that bad things happen to good people too, I learned to distrust Him for a while. I mean, I still believed in God. I just wasn’t so sure we were on the same page
Some time in my late teens, I began reconsidering my position on death and the goodness and trustworthiness of God. I came to the realization that my estimation of God’s trustworthiness was based my physical safety, amongst other things, in this life only. In other words, death was seen as all bad. And that’s a peculiar stance for a Christian to take since I’m supposed to be happy about going to Heaven.
Naturally, my next step was figuring out how I really felt about Heaven.
Then I had to admit certain things to myself. I had to admit that as much as I was looking forward to ending the pain and suffering of this life, I wasn’t all that happy about going to Heaven. It seemed like it was going to be one great big bore-fest. I imagined it was going to be like one of those seemingly endless three hour church services, that we had to go to whenever we visited my grandmother down south, only it really would be endless.
Now that I am an adult, my view of heaven and my thoughts on death have changed. Most days, I am aware that I am not afraid of being dead, going to heaven, or being bored endlessly. However, I am still quite apprehensive about the transition. I hope that I grow more courageous in this area because it really seems quite un-Christain-like to have the act of dying frighten me so.
Not that I think about dying all the time. In fact, I know that I’m frightened of it for precisely the opposite reason. I can tell that I’m terrified because I rarely ever let myself think about the act of dying at all, ever.
After talking to fellow Christians at my church and hearing various “Christian” opinions on television, I’ve become aware that other Christians must have doubts about the goodness of heaven too. I figure that’s the only way to explain why some of us act like we think being a good Christian will keep a person out of Heaven for as long as humanly possible.
Some of human beings will only live to be 8, some will only live to be 18, and some will live to be 80. For people who don’t believe in an after-life, death at two of those ages is a tragedy—a tragedy for the person that’s dead. What’s puzzling to me is that some of us Christians often see it that way too.
Shouldn’t we as Christians, once we are beyond the agony of separation that death brings, disagree that the end of a life at any age is a tragedy? I mean, you’d be unbearably sad if someone you loved was going away forever (or for the rest of their human life) to live in the amusement park they’ve dreamed of living in their entire life long, but you wouldn’t see it as tragedy—as a tragedy for them.
So now I’m wondering why some of us become bitter and vengeful whenever other Christians die at the hands of evil people—like the Christian wouldn’t have died at all at some point. Years after someone has died, you can hear Christians saying things like, “Jack didn’t deserve to die,” just like the atheists do.
And that’s a problem, isn’t it?
Saying, “Jack didn’t deserve to die,” is not the same as saying, “I love Jack. I’m devastated. I hope he didn’t suffer, and I’ll miss him, but I will see him again.” That’s more like saying, “I love Jack. I’ll miss him and he didn’t deserve to join God and go on all those rides in that rocking amusement park in sky.”
If we as Christians are bitter and vengeful when other Christians die, regardless of what we say with our lips, aren’t our hearts far from God in that we either don’t really believe in heaven or don’t want to go there?
By contrast, doesn’t it also make sense that Christ followers, who believe in Heaven, who want to go to Heaven, would see the deaths of non-Christians as the only deaths that qualify as tragic?
Our actions don’t reflect that we believe a non-Christians death is particularly tragic. But what if we did? What if we tried to see it that way? How could believing in Heaven, in our hearts as well as our heads, not change our approach to just about everything?
Wouldn’t we be much less into self-preservation than our non-Christian and non-after-life believing neighbors? More to the point, wouldn’t a deep desire for heaven make us less interested in preserving us and more interested in preserving them?
And wouldn’t the sight us, as Christians, being more for them than we are for ourselves be the best reason anyone could ever have for deciding to believe in Jesus Christ?
Monday, October 8, 2007
The Long, Dark Shadow of Phil The Spector
Phil Spector is a free man this week.
He’s free despite telling Adriano DeSouza, his chauffer, "I think I killed somebody." He is free despite DeSouza paraphrasing that same statement, and attributing it to Spector, during the 911 call to inform the police about Lana Clarkson’s death. Spector is free despite five women (the only ones to come forward) saying he either put a gun to their head or threatened them with a gun when they tried to leave early.
His DNA is not on the gun but neither are Lana Clarkson’s finger prints, who supposedly committed suicide—according to Spector.
Until somebody proves that Lana Clarkson rose from the dead, wiped her own fingerprints and Spector’s DNA off the gun, I’m going to remain 99.9% sure that he did it. He killed her. Not having been at this trial either, my gut says its at least 4.9% more sure that Spector did it than it is that OJ did it.
Why? I remember reading stories about Phil Spector waving guns around at parties back in the 1980s and thinking ‘They’re waiting for him to shoot somebody, right?’
And now, he’s finally done it.
So, why isn’t this man in jail? But more importantly, why aren’t the same ultra, law-abiding folks that were hysterically upset over OJ being "getting off" sixteen years ago just as hysterical this time?
It didn’t seem like people were upset when Robert Blake walked away from a murder conviction either. He was exonerated despite his attempt to hire some associates to kill the woman that, indeed, wound up dead. The I-left-my-gun-in-the-restaurant excuse always a little sounded shady to me. But I think the dead wife’s history seemed even shadier after a while. Her questionable past might be the reason nobody got real upset when Blake was set free—as compared to Simpson.
But....uh...Nobody’s upset about Phil Spector getting away with murder....for now—or at least getting away with manslaughter for now. He’s due to be tried next spring, but he’d be crazy not to use his millions leave the United States, making sure he gets away with it permanently.
Where’s the outrage?
When Simpson was exonerated many people in this country were pulling out their own hair, beating their chests, and crying about the injustice of it all, despite critical evidence being handled by a perjury-committing racist, despite 40% of 10ccs of Simpson’s blood being lost, and the spot of blood in Simpson’s unsecured car, that surely would have convicted him, can be seen being touched(?) by a passerby in a photograph.
This absence of reaction demonstrates the truth of what I’ve believed all along. The Mark Furman’s and the noose boys of Jena, Louisiana are a problem, but not a major problem. The normalness of milder forms of racism, that many people allow to go unaddressed and un-remarked within themselves is one of the major the problems because a majority of the people suffer from it. (Please go see Crash if you don’t think this applies to you.) The other problem is our tendency to play the blame game in such a way that we, the people, make sure we don’t have to actually do anything. That is, we make sure we blame things that absolutely cannot be fixed.
If the people who were angry that Simpson was freed had focused their attention on the obvious problems within the California Judicial System instead of how stupid, racist and vindictive* the Simpson jury was, Robert Blake and Phil Spector, both, might be in jail now.
Spector and Blake might be in jail because the public might have demanded their be accountability in the police department for things like keeping the suspects blood on your person for an inexplicably long time and then loosing 40% of it. There might be some sort of sanction for taking the suspect shoe’s to your house in the trunk of your car. And there would be a mechanism by which people like Furman are fired before they ever had the chance to taint a case against a suspect of any skin color.
If we, the people, hadn’t been so focused on the race of the man that killed a woman of another race, we might have focused on finding a way to stop a jury’s confusion or disagreement over premeditation from setting someone like that compensating-like-crazy, napoleon-complex having Phil Spector free.
We also might have realized that one of our judicial system’s biggest problems is its inability to stop rich men from killing whomever they want, so long as it’s not another rich man--not the rule of law, not beyond-a-reasonable-doubt, and not the stupid jury.
Friday, October 5, 2007
The War on PBS
Last week, a friend of mine said, “I know better now...but I can kinda understand why people hated the Japanese the way they did.” [during Word War II]
By the time she said this, I’d been watching the special about WWII called THE WAR on PBS for at least three nights. And I have to admit, at first, I had the same reaction to hearing details of the inhuman behavior of Japanese soldiers toward American soldiers. It was as if I’d forgotten what the Nazi’s did to the Jews --for a split second-- because it was happening to us!
Then, I remembered how little provocation it took for an American master to beat an African slave until bone was exposed, only eighty years before WWII. By the time the Bataan Death March segment aired, it didn’t take me a millisecond to remember Americans forcing the Cherokees along The Trail of Tears.
However, one of the greatest things about Ken Burn's The War is that you don’t have to reach deep into your memory banks to keep a balanced perspective of
He makes the story of WWII personal by telling it from the perspective of four American towns. Historians and experts weren't allowed to narrate from a perspective of power and glory in this documentary. The soldiers from the four towns tell their own stories. And their families; their fiancés; their children; everyone who was left behind; and all their letters and diaries tell their stories.
And, nobody’s story is left out.
The soldiers of a Japanese American unit, mostly recruited from internment camps, fought in
There were so many things I didn’t know. Americans in the
Still, the most unbelievable thing to me through the entire documentary was that our soldiers kept going. And, they didn't even know how to fight very well at first.
They kept going despite being stationed in places where they couldn’t get supplies for long periods of time. The ships that would have carried the supplies to them had been destroyed at
It’s bizarre to feel so immensely grateful to people for fighting on your behalf, when what they’ve experienced is something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. I can’t imagine how the ones that survived ever went on to lead full, successful lives with all those images and experiences imprinted on their souls.
All that's really left to say is, “Thank You” to the people who’ve fought for us in the past, are fighting us now, and will fight for us in the future.
Other than that, the only thing we can do is our part. Off the top of my head, I believe our part calls for at least two things. We can make sure we vote consciously. That is, we have to know what we're voting for and why, and we have to refuse to vote our fears.* The other thing we can do is make sure we demand accountability from those who have the authority to put America's sons and daughters in harm's way. Whether our soldiers die for us or come back home broken for us, we absolutely owe this to them.
I was pretty sure that we here at home have been falling down on the job in the areas of responsible voting and leadership accountability, especially during the last few years. After seeing The War, I was sure of it. The images I saw while watching The War showed me exactly what our failures here at home are costing the soldiers who fight on our behalf.
I can only hope that's what you'll see too--if you watch The War when it airs again on PBS.
*I woke up one day and found out we were going to bomb Iraq, so I asked several people what I'd missed. When I established that they still thought the 9/11 hijackers were predominantly from Saudi Arabia and none were from Iraq, I was confused. I asked, "So why are we bombing Iraq?" The answer I got most often was, "I don't know but there must be something." I think need to check out this book: The Myth of the Rational Voter
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Thursday, October 4, 2007
Why Blacks Vote For Democrats
I've never understood black Republicans. To me, a black joining the Republican Party is like a deer joining the National Rifle Association. "Yes, I'm a deer, but I'm not one of those deer!"
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Brave Ones?
You have to know that you're almost clean out of hope for **Can’t-we-all-just- get-along** when the first question you have upon hearing the tiniest bit of chatter about the Jena 6 is: Why did the six black teens jump the funny white guy with the nooses all at once instead of beating his butt one at a time, thereby having a series of fair-fights like they should have?
When I found out it wasn’t the noose boys that got beat up, but another white teen who made another racially motivated remark quite some time later--based on yet another race based incident, I wanted to know why they didn’t beat his butt in six fair-fights then move on to the noose boys and repeat the process six more times a piece. So long as they were laughing while the fists were flying, all they would have gotten was an in-school suspension for executing yet one more “tasteless joke” on school grounds—if the noose-boys’ punishment is any indication.
Once I calmed down, I remembered that I don’t believe in vigilante justice. I remembered that I shouldn’t believe in it even when someone (insert southern drawl here) makes a joke out of his grand-daddy’s posse hanging numerous someone else’s grand-daddies from trees for things like daring to back-talk a white person.
Hey, I'm human. I've shrugged it off. I just needed to take a couple of deep breathes and take some time out to remember who I am.
Sometimes, I think that we Americans hold fast to our desire for vigilante justice because we are not a people big on soul-searching. Maybe life gets so busy with the day-to-day that we just don’t stop and think. Whatever the reason, some of us believe that our desire for revenge is the same as having a desire for justice. Too many of us want laws created out of our basest instincts--if we even soul search often enough to realize that we have filthy little things like base instincts.
It was the lowest part of our natures that loved Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies. Then, we loved Charles Bronson in the Death Wish movies all the way through to Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movie(s). And we would have loved Jodie Foster’s movie, The Brave One, if she had simply killed and maimed numerous bad guys dead without a lick of remorse like her predecessors did.
The Brave One only really gets started after a vicious, late night attack in
I remember thinking that this was a dangerous movie to show a country just beginning to come down off a five year fear-high, to show to a country just beginning to wonder, ‘Maybe we let our fears get the best of us when we dropped bombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians, half of which are children, because we were convinced that those people* had weapons of mass destruction.’
It’s a good thing that nobody but the reviewers and me went to see this flick. Yet when I read the reviews, my own fears were surpassed. A number reviewers were angry that The Brave One wasn’t an updated Death Wish. They were irritated that Foster’s character was conflicted about killing and didn’t wipe out more of those two-dimensional scumbags.
I keep forgetting where I live.
Apparently, I still live in a country where many still hate criminals enough to love vigilantes, still love the idea of skipping the red tape that is the rule of law, and still hate that ‘stupid jury’(mostly African American) that let O.J. Simpson go because of a multi-fractured chain of evidence...even though he probably did it.
Americans love getting the bad guy no matter what. More and more often, a cry rises from the rabble: “Evidence-Schmevidence! Screw Beyond A Reasonable Doubt!”
So now that I have realigned my mind, and I remember where it is I’m living, I’m confused again. Why did there need to be protests, huge publicity, and a federal investigation to get the
Wait! I know! Maybe folks that put the
Yes, that’s it. They put the Jena 6 in jail for the attempted murder of Barker, who was out of the hospital in approximately two hours and went to a high school function later that same night, because the Jena 6 failed to take care of business—permanently ala Clint, Charlie, Uma and Jodie.
So the real question everyone should be asking is this: What else did the