I’m trying to figure out how to write about why I started blogging over at the Great Orange Satan on immigration.

There’s so much information I have packed into my poor brain over the past several months, that I don’t know where to begin.

Guess perhaps I should start at the beginning!

Ok, will do.

kyledeb’s The Correct Term is Migrant on August 22.  

It is impossible to have a real conversation about immigration in the U.S. if people can’t even agree on the terminology that they are debating with. Conservatives automatically become hostile when they read or hear the word “undocumented immigrant”, and progressives often call people that use the term “illegal alien” racists. Both terms are incorrect.

When describing the 12 million people that have illegally immigrated into the U.S. the best term to use is the word “migrant”. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if people opposed this, this shouldn’t be a controversial claim. The rest of the world uses the term migrant to describe people that immigrate into the country illegally. The BBC uses the word migrant. So does Prensa Libre, Guatemala’s main newspaper. The list goes on and on.

Immigration is actually a U.S.-centric term. An immigrant is someone who migrates into your country, an emigrant describes someone who migrates out of your country, but the accurate term to describe this population from a global perspective is migrant. It flies in the face of the U.S. citizen ego, but most migrants come to the U.S. with the intention of returning, and many do. Migration describes their movements better than immigration does.

The typical comment:

You can respectfully disagree

with the actual definitions of words all you want.

But using your special definitions of words instead of the generally agreed upon definitions will achieve only one thing – guaranteeing that you will not effectively communicate with anyone who does not already agree with you.

My very first comment was a response to Mariachi Mama’s comment:

sorry too late to tip or rec nt

To which I added one of my most insightful comments:

ditto. nt.

December 1 is my birthday.  It is the day of my mother’s funeral, back in 1992.  The day that Brown v. Board of education ended segregation in our nation’s school

It is also World AIDS day.

I moved to New York City in September of 1981.  My best friend and soulmate, Jeff, lived there and I was going to stay with him and his lover until I got my own apartment.

My first job was at a lawfirm, I remember a gay friend and co-worker telling me about the “gay cancer.”  I quickly forgot about it, knowing Tom was a terrible hypochondriac.

Jeff was a renaissance man in many ways.  He was always active, never idle.  He painted, worked hard as a photo retoucher, danced beautifully and went out constantly to the bars to party till the break of dawn.  His cooking was legendary.  His sense of humor was what bonded us the most — I loved to make him laugh.  He had no tact and often got in trouble with folks because of that, but would usually win them back by having them over for dinner.

His sexual exploits were also legendary and I was his confidante for many stories.

His temper was terrible as well and we often fought, though we always made up.

When I had my mental problems back in the late 70’s, Jeff would call my mother to comfort her (I only found this out several years later).  He wrote me a little picture book to cheer me up, a humerous biography with hand-made pop-out drawings of my plight.  I still have that book.

All block quotes are from And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts (1987):

By October 2, 1985, the morning Rock Hudson died, the word was familiar to almost every household in the Western World.

AIDS

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome had seemed a comfortably distant threat to most of those who had heard of it before, the misfortune of people who fit into rather distinct classes of outcasts and social pariahs.  But suddenly, in the summer of 1985, when a movie star was diagnosed with the disease and the newspapers couldn’t stop talking about it, the AIDS epidemic became palpable and the threat loomed everywhere.

Suddenly there were children with AIDS who wanted to go to school, laborers with AIDS who wanted to work, and researchers who wanted funding, and there was a threat to the nation’s public health that could no longer be ignored.  Most significantly, there were the first glimmers of awareness that the future would always contain this strange new word.  AIDS would become a part of American culture and indelibly change the course of our lives.

The implications would not be fleshed out for another few years, but on that October day in 1985 the first awareness existed just the same.  Rock Hudson riveted America’s attention upon this deadly new threat for the first time, and his diagnosis became a demarcation that would separate the history of America before AIDS from the history that came after.

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.

Tis the start of the festive season, so I was goofing around on Gabcast and did my own version of George Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” … and I even scat!  Badly, but then it’s Wednesday, so I don’t care.  Let all my enemies scoff, I say HA!

Anyway, life is always good even when it’s bad.  Sort of like sex.  Or chocolate.  Or something.

If you do listen, please remember to turn the volume down – I am singing sans music over the phone so there’s some distortion.

And seeing as the new soapblox we have here will not allow me to directy link a plug-in to Gabcast, here’s a link to Episode 4

Later, gators.

So in my blogging around the b’sphere, I have been battling memes.  I am a meme killer!  Woo hoo!

Latest is over the immigration issue, Spitzer, the Dems, the third rail, all that jazz.  The meme that makes me most murderous is the notion “What is it about illegal you don’t understand?”  All of a sudden seemingly liberal bloggers have become law & order Wyatt Earp’s, deciding that the rule of law is far more important than silly feel-good stuff like human rights and human rights abuses.  It appears to me that if someone has broken a law, it is then very easy to hide behind that thought even when the enforcement of that law entails violence and punishments far outweighing the crime.

But this essay is not about the immigration issue.  One of the biggest frustrations in blogging about what is called “social justice” is there are so many injustices?  Which do I choose?  New Orleans?  Burma?  Mexico?  Darfur?  Gaza?

I choose not to choose.  I choose to deny any lines between these injustices.  For they all have the same root cause.

I’d like to introduce everyone (or re-introduce if you already know her) to Helen Bamber.  She is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story.

From a New York Times review by Sara Ivy of Helen’s biography, “The Good Listener,” by Neil Belton:

Helen Bamber grew up in London during World War II in an embittered Jewish refugee family and was scarcely an adult when she traveled as a relief worker to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just after the end of the war. Struck by the physical and spiritual wreckage she witnessed among the survivors of Nazi persecution, she decided to spend her life helping to rehabilitate torture victims by listening to their stories and advocating against similar abuses.

In his first book, ”The Good Listener,” Neil Belton suggests that for Bamber this work has fulfilled a moral imperative; ignoring human rights violations means being an acomplice in such behavior. It also means invalidating the victim’s experience of suffering and hampering his ability to recover.

Belton has written a comprehensive, thoughtful biography of a woman who possesses a near compulsion to challenge the brutality that those in power sometimes inflict. He includes wrenching recent examples of torture of political prisoners in Chile, South Africa and Israel. He proposes that systematic mental and physical abuses are neither impulsive nor merely sadistic; in this century, torture has become a ”bureaucratic industry’…

I read this book years ago and have recently thought again of Helen Bamber.  She was a complex person, did not consider herself a “good” person.  Her father read Mein Kampf to her when she was little, he was a fearful and bitter man.  Her mother compensated by being overly frivolous and indulgent in socializing.

We have all heard the arguments on impeachment, pro and con.  We have all heard about whether or not we “have the votes.”  Whether or not this will ruin our chances in 2008 for a Democratic victory.  We have all discussed every possible permutation, and we have no consensus.  Ok.  I accept that.  My decision is to support anyone who is for impeachment, and that includes Kucinich, who I think is doing a great job getting this issue in the spotlight.

This diary isn’t just about impeachment.  It’s also about what can happen if we don’t impeach this crew, and asks the question of what we will do if any of these things come to pass.  As much as I’m pro-impeachment, if it doesn’t happen I’m not going to lay down and die — I want to know the consequences and take action.

One of the consequences has to do with the 2008 Presidential election.

None of this may come to pass, and I hope that is the case.  I am claiming no precognitive abilities here.

But I do think Naomi Wolf has some interesting things to say as far as these consequences, in her post over at Firedoglake, A “Presidential Coup,” The Continuity of Government, And Blackwater Watching Midtown Manhattan

I have argued that in the closing stages of a `fascist shift’, events cascade. I am hearing about them, even across the globe. Here in Australia I hear from the nation’s best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer’, she told TSA agents. `Ma’am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,’ they replied. `You have not entered the United States.’

…

Increasingly, reputable figures are starting to talk about `a coup.’ Jim Hightower notes in an important essay, “Is a Presidential Coup Under Way?,” that a coup is defined in the dictionary as a sudden forced change in the form of government. (He also spells out the basis for a rigorously modeled impeachment and criminal prosecution.) Daniel Ellsberg’s much-emailed speech on recent events notes that, in his view, a `coup’ has already taken place. Ron Rosenbaum speculates in an essay on Slate about the reasons the Bush administration is withholding even from members of Congress its plans for Continuity of Government in an emergency – noting that those worrying about a coup are no longer so marginal. Frank Rich notes the parallels between ourselves and the Good Germans. And Congress belatedly realizes as if waking from a drugged sleep that it might not be okay for the Attorney General to say the President need not obey the law. Congress may realize why Mukasey CAN’T say that `waterboarding is torture’ – the minute he does so he has laid the grounds for Bush, Cheney and any number of CIA and Blackwater interrogators to be tried and convicted for war crimes. They are so keenly aware that what they have been doing is criminal that laws such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 have been drafted specifically to protect them and the torturers and murderers they have directed from criminal prosecution. That is why insisting that Mukasey say that waterboarding is torture is, in spite of the alarming apparent defection of Feinstein and Schumer, an important tactic and even the perfect opening for the impeachment bid that Kucinich is bringing on November 6th to be followed by Congressional investigations into possible criminality.

They do, you know.  Fisherman can’t always go out to sea, bad weather sometimes makes it impossible, among other obstacles.  But they’re always busy, there’s always something to do.

Same can be said of politics, I think.

A year ago I was happy because Democrats took the majority, yay!

Now I’m not so happy because the Democratic leadership is a bunch of damned fools and they’re doing everything but leading (Pelosi’s snark notwithstanding).

Via zuky, I journeyed over to ultrabrown, where this video protest song caught my eye and ear.

The juxtaposition of comedy, biting commentary and tragic footage strikes home.

Ah, American moral leadership.  Did we ever have it?  Or is it, as in our own individual lives, moments of clarity and humanity, moments where we are our best selves but then we go back to our emotional conflicts, neuroses, fears, and can’t really look in the mirror and call ourselves heros?

From our great Congress, a resolution:

Iran Sees Venezuela as Doorway to Americas, Republican Says:

Top U.S. officials who avoid confrontation with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez should exchange their passivity for a more forceful Latin American policy, Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) said in an exclusive interview with the Cybercast News Service.

Otherwise, rogue nations and terrorists will continue to use Venezuela as a conduit for dangerous enterprises that jeopardize U.S. interests, the Florida Republican argued. As it stands, Iran’s influence in the region is already growing at a quick pace thanks in large measure to the Chavez government, said Mack.

…

In October, Mack worked with colleague Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.) to help pass House Resolution 435. It calls on the U.S. government to combat the influence and clout that Iran and Hezbollah now exercise in Latin America.

…

Mack declined to comment on specific details as they relate to the military arrangement between Iran and Venezuela. However, he indicated that U.S. officials need to entertain “more severe polices” towards Venezuela in the near-future, if they do not otherwise re-kindle key alliances in the region.

Yeah, those damned terrists are everywhere!