November 2007 archive

Last week, I tried to explain as best I could what I felt could be part of a solid, sound, moral, ethical and spiritual basis to rely upon in fighting for social justice.  To be a witness rather than a bystander when confronting man’s inhumanity to man.  In that essay, Journey to the Core of the Human Spirit, I tried to be as substantive as I could about an aspect of ourselves that is in so many ways intangible and open to misinterpretation.

This essay will be about an even more seemingly intangible phenomenon.

It’s all well and good to have an ethical and spiritual foundation in order to fight for social justice.

But as in all dangerous and difficult quests, once you set out, obstacles appear.

My latest obstacle is not a huge one, but it is extremely irritating!

When I enter and comment in diaries about immigration (yes, over at the Great Orange Satan, but it could be anywhere among Democrats), I have found a new meme floating around.  It goes something like this:

“Yeah, and if you don’t agree 100% with them then they call you a racist or a xenophobe!”

There are hundreds of variations on this tired theme.  One of the most annoying (though, in retrospect, funny if it weren’t so sad) new variations I encountered was when someone said that calling a person a racist is using the “biggest beat stick” be it secular or religious and thus implying this was akin to both hate speech and, perhaps, causing someone to lose their life in a fiery explosion from hell.

So I have tried to come up with an answer to that meme, to overcome this obstacle to real dialogue.

(The following was first posted on January 7, 2007 at the Daily Kos website. It is being reprinted here as of significant interest to readers of this blog. I have no reason to believe that anything important has changed since this article was originally written. One exception might be the peregrinations undertaken by the American Psychological Association on the question of interrogations, which can be followed in numerous other articles at my blog. Another exception would be revelations that emerged during the year regarding psychologist participation in U.S. government torture, and this additional material is included in the following text in the form of an editorial emendation.)

I recently came across an FBI report on a conference jointly sponsored by the FBI and the American Psychological Association. Given the recent and ongoing controversies over the use of psychologists and other medical personnel in U.S. torture programs abroad, I thought a close examination of the matter of this conference could be interesting. — What you will read may shock you (especially if you are interested in mental health practice). It will certainly enlighten you, and help fill in the gaps that exist in our understanding of U.S. interrogation techniques, the “war on terror”, and the government campaign to curtail our liberties.

From the master of such things as left overs… I give you Martha Stewart’s take on the day after…

Leftovers can serve as the main ingredients for dishes you might not otherwise make. Sliced turkey can become the main ingredient in an open-faced sandwich, a turkey-and-green-chile burrito, or a turkey-salad sandwich. Leftover mashed potatoes can be used to make gnocchi or a potato-chive souffle; sweet potatoes can be turned into sweet-potato biscuits or sweet-potato butter. Even the turkey bones can have a second life: Use them as the basis of a delicious turkey stock, which can be frozen for up to four months and used in any recipe calling for chicken stock.

The Associated Press reports:

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, said this week he supports Democratic legislation that calls for most troops to come home within a year.

The remarks will be aired Saturday, as part of the weekly Democratic radio address, and right wing blowholes will undoubtedly begin emitting noxious fumes about General Sanchez hating America. Let the facts speak for themselves: General Sanchez was there; he knows what he’s talking about; the gasbag pundits sit in hermetically sealed sound studios spewing lies.

The legislation, passed by the House, blocked by Senate Republicans, and threatened with a veto by Bush, would have paid for further combat operations, while setting a goal to end combat operations by the middle of next December. It wasn’t even a hard demand to end combat operations, but even just setting such a goal was too odious for the chickenhawk warmongers of the Republican Party.

The Pentagon, of course, announced on Tuesday that they will begin laying off up to 200,000 civilian employees and contractors, unless Congress passes a bill Bush will sign. Nice framing, that. What the Pentagon really means is that they will start laying off 200,000 civilian employees unless the spoiled brat Bush gets his way.

General Sanchez takes a certain blaming-the-victim angle to his explanation, pointing out that our troops are sacrificing life and limb for an Iraqi government that continues to fail to govern. Of course, after blowing their country all to hell, failing to repair the damage, and inciting a civil war, while the majority of foreign fighters entering the country to add to the mayhem come from our ostensible allies, it’s probably not the easiest thing in the world for the factions of our puppet government to settle millenia-old differences. Even so, there’s also a pragmatic realism to the general’s comments, for the Iraqi political leaders are continually failing to meet the benchmarks that are supposed to measure their progress. They are, in fact, not doing the job our troops are supposedly there to give them a chance to do.

“There is no evidence that the Iraqis will choose to do so in the near future or that we have an ability to force that result,” he said.

Sanchez added that the House bill “makes the proper preparation of our deploying troops a priority and requires the type of shift in their mission that will allow their numbers to be reduced substantially.”

Meanwhile, the cost to our troops has once again been revealed to have been understated. USA Today reports:

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon’s official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.

There’s not much more to say, except this: end the war and bring the troops home!  

Corruption, in addition to climate change, may have been responsible for the devastation caused by the Tabasco floods.  You’ll remember that floods in Tabasco last month, caused by up to 30 inches of rain, ruined all of the crops, stopped oil production, and caused one million people, about half the state’s population to be displaced.  About 70,000 people were in shelters in Villahermosa and another 20,000 were living on their roofs.  Indigenous people in the interior found themselves stuck on islands in the flood water.  And recently, it was reported that the entire state was being sprayed with insecticides to prevent an outbreak of dengue, a mosquito born disease similar to malaria.  280 people are still unaccounted for.

Today the AP, comparing the situation in Tabasco to Katrina, reported:

The government knew Mexico’s Gulf coast was a disaster in waiting long before three rivers surged out of their banks, flooding nearly every inch of the low-lying state of Tabasco and leaving more than 1 million homes under water.

But officials admit they never finished a $190 million levee project that was supposed to have been done by 2006 and would have held back much of the rising waters that flooded Tabasco at the end of October.

The tragedy was reminiscent of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005, when levees failed and swamped much of New Orleans, forcing people to flee by wading through dirty waters. In Tabasco, days of relentless rain – not a hurricane – were to blame.