cross posted from The Dream Antilles



Ingrid Betancourt In Captivity (11/30/07)

Ingrid Betancourt, while campaigning for the presidency of Colombia, was kidnapped by FARC on February 23, 2002.  More than six years later, she remains a hostage somewhere in Colombia.  She suffers from hepatitis B and leishmaniasis, a skin disease caused by insect bites.  She is also rumored to be losing the will to live. She is the public face of kidnapping in Colombia.  She is the most famous of hundreds of hostages.  Unlike most of the hostages, she has ties outside the country.

Please join me in the selva.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

I’m thinking about times almost forty years ago when I sang, “We Shall Overcome.”  I’m remembering how I felt when I sang it, holding hands, swaying, anticipation in the air.  I loved the idea of walking hand in hand, black and white together, and at the same time there was always a tension, a tightness in my jaw and in the pit of my stomach, the presence of fear.  The song’s purpose was to get ready to do what had to be done.  I’m committed to nonviolence, I recall thinking, but there are those who are not.  They shot James Meredith, and lynched Emmitt Till, and burned Greyhound buses, and unlike me, they don’t want me to be safe.  Uncertainty about what will happen tightens my jaw, while my heart commits me to the cause.

Remembering these fears rekindles my old thoughts.  I remember the policemen in the church parking lot writing down the license plate numbers as if it were the Apalachin Crime Convention.  My mind flashes from people sitting in a restaurant who stop eating to stare and sneer, to the incomprehensible Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to the repeated, threatening phone calls, to kids on a school bus yelling hate names through the windows, to the Klan and the police, and wondering how they were different.  I think about the person who ran over my dog.

I’m remembering singing “our song” in Port Gibson during the boycott trial and fearfully contemplating the long, dark ride home to Jackson on the Natchez Trace, an unlit, two-lane road that avoids all towns.

I’m remembering the Woolworth’s lunch counter and the bus station in Jackson, notorious before my arrival, at which friends were seriously injured.  I’m remembering the two unequal, racially labeled water fountains at the Courthouse in Laurel, and the three bathroom doors upstairs at the Mayflower Restaurant.  I’m remembering a black man pumping the gasoline, that his boss won’t let him touch the $5 I try to hand him.

I’m remembering a Mississippi judge hissing that he doesn’t have to put up with Communists– he’s talking about me– in his Court.  I’m remembering the Neshoba County Fair and what it must have been like on the night Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were all killed, how everyone there must have known about it.

Awash in this flood of distant memories, my remembrance of my own feelings is more opaque.  I was learning to be a good lawyer, and I was an optimist, believing that eventually, we would confront and overcome racism and poverty and oppression and violence.  But I was also numb while my unworkable marriage was sliding slowly, unconsciously and miserably to ultimate dissolution by another southern Court.

Then, in 1973, I started to represent inmates of the sprawling Mississippi State Hospital because Barry Powell, an excellent lawyer and mentor, “discovered” it and convinced himself and me that the issues should be litigated.  Most of the people warehoused there, it turned out, were safe to release, but the staff was too small to have any idea who was safe and who might be risky.  For obvious cases, like the four older women who played remarkably skilled bridge using sign language to bid and hadn’t seen a doctor in 7 years, release was accomplished simply, by my inquiry if they could go home and my veiled threat of a judicial proceeding if they couldn’t.

The harder cases were like Mr. O’Reilly (not his real name), who also wanted to be released.  Doctors thought Mr. O’Reilly might be mentally ill because he still believed that ten years before somebody, a relative most likely, stole a million dollars worth of gold coins from his trailer in rural Oktibehha County and he was mad about it.  According to the doctor, Mr. O’Reilly didn’t have any insight into his delusional system and his obvious anger made him dangerous.

Mr. O’Reilly was tall and sunburnt from years of taking major tranquilizers and being outside, and he walked with his back arched, elbows back, hands on the small of his back, another side effect of the drugs.  I explained the situation to Mr. O’Reilly.  I told him that the doctor didn’t believe the million dollar story, and that frankly, I didn’t either.  In fact, I doubted there were ever $50 worth of gold coins in his entire county, and that when he acted angry about the situation, he was scaring the doctor.  He laughed, “So is that what all the fuss’s about?  How come nobody told me this before?”  I shrugged.  He said, “Well, I guess I’ll be going home then,” and he shambled off, doing the phenothiazine walk.

At the time the Hospital Staff decided who would be released by individually interviewing all the inmates who requested release.  When asked, Mr. O’Reilly said he came in complaining about the theft of a million dollars worth of gold coins, that he didn’t blame anybody for not believing him, and that he doubted the story made sense.  Was he mad about it?   No, he said, just sad that he didn’t understand the problem earlier.  Could he go home?

After Mr. O’Reilly was released, the Mississippi Mental Health Commissioner, Reginald White, told me that he thought I was doing “litigation therapy” and that he was surprised that people who were so obviously disoriented when they arrived were now going home.  Did I think it was because of the intensive attention I was giving them?  Or was it just time, the drugs, spontaneous change, and “millieu therapy”?  At the time I didn’t have any idea.  I just wanted inmates who wanted to go home to be released.

And this past January, almost forty years later, with my wife of almost 30 years and two of my three children, I attended an Interfaith Service commemorating Dr. King’s Holiday in Hudson, New York.  After wonderful gospel music by the Shiloh Baptist Church choir, a sermon, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, prayer and scripture, the time came at last to sing “our song.”  It had been a long time.  My eyes grew wet.  I could feel an aching in my throat and in my heart my continuous, decades long love of justice, fairness, and equality.  And there was no fear.  Instead, there was only my unbounded joy that now, at last, my kids would learn and experience the magic of “our song.”  It was their turn to inherit the possibility of accomplishing the unthinkable, and it was their opportunity to forge a deep, personal heart connection with the community and movement for human dignity and justice.

“We Shall Overcome” has never been sweeter to me.  I can feel how very far I have traveled.  Although there remains an enormous journey to complete, the holiday celebration brought me the gift of seeing for the first time that my kids will soon be able, by themselves, to carry the movement on.  Forty years ago I never could have guessed how special, how complete and wonderful that would feel.

Dr. Martin Luther King

(January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

May he rest in peace.  And may we honor his memory.

Update: The rest of this essay is here.

NMSR reports:

NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city [Huntsville] are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature narrowly passed a law Friday [March 28, 2008] redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Bob Riley, who emphasized the Biblical reasons for the change in value, says he will sign it into law on Thursday.

The law took the state’s engineering community by surprise. “It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi,” said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi (p) is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisely defined by mathematics to be “3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate”.

“I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it,” said Lawson. “The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon’s Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass.”

Lawson, the article says, called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing an exact answer could harm students’ self-esteem. “We need to return to some absolutes in our society,” he said, “the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period.”

Governor Riley is expected to have a signing ceremony for the bill on Thursday in Montgomery at which former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore is expected to give an invocation.  Moore’s office today stated that the change in the value of pi to the Biblical value was a good, first, legislative step toward the Rapture, toward making the crooked straight and rough places plane.

Haven’t these people done enough already?  Is nothing sacrosanct?

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

The beautiful game

This isn’t about America’s so-called pastime, major league baseball, which begins tonight with the Braves playing the Nats and Commander Codpiece McFlyboy throwing out the ceremonial first ball. No. This is about something smaller, more intimate, and in many ways, much more a game of the People.  It’s about futbol, soccer, and how anti-immigrant local legislation in Northern Virginia has destroyed the local leagues.

It’s an infuriating story.  I’m angered not just because I love to play this game, but because of the important role it plays in the community.  I doubt you’ve heard about this before.

Please join me in the goal box.

Great news from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals:

ATLANTA, Ga. — The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has granted former Gov. Don Siegelman’s request to be released from prison pending the outcome of his appeal.

Siegelman is currently serving a 7-year sentence in the Oakdale Federal Correctional Complex in Louisiana following his 2006 public corruption conviction.

Acting U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin confirms the 11th Circuit granted Siegelman’s release in a fou- page order which states Siegelman had raised a “significant question” about his conviction.

source

Let the celebrations begin.  I am delighted for Don Siegelman and his family.

But it would a mistake, a serious mistake not to note that Siegelman was whisked from his sentencing to imprisonment, something I consider unprecedented, that the Eleventh Circuit and the judge in the Middle District of Alabama have played patsy with this case for the ten months Don has been incarcerated sending it back and forth without deciding his motion for bail pending appeal, and that the timing of his release comes just as it was announced today by John Conyers that Don Siegelman likely be testifying in DC about his conviction.  Put simply, the conviction reeks, and it has Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over it.

The feds should make sure they keep Don’s cell in Louisiana open, so that Karl Rove can move in as soon as possible.

For the details on the Don Siegelman case, try this diary by OPOL and this one by me.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

The Midway Islands

Recently, I wrote about Si’an Kaan in Mexico and the utter disgrace that its beaches were full of plastic.  Today, it’s the Midway Islands and a BBC story that plastic in these islands in the very middle of the Pacific Ocean is killing birds.  That’s right.  In the middle of nowhere, plastic is killing the birds.  And turtles.  And fish.  Plastic is everywhere.  It’s destroying wildlife.  It’s destroying the planet.

Join me in the ocean.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti

This morning’s NY Times has an extremely strange story about Haiti.  The premise is that things are now so bad in Haiti, that some Haitians wish they still had Papa Doc or Baby Doc Duvalier back as their military despot:

But Victor Planess, who works at the National Cemetery here, has a soft spot for Mr. Duvalier, the man known as Papa Doc. Standing graveside the other day, Mr. Planess reminisced about what he considered the good old days of Mr. Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, who together ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986.

“I’d rather have Papa Doc here than all those guys,” Mr. Planess said, gesturing toward the presidential palace down the street. “I would have had a better life if they were still around.”

Mr. Planess, 53, who complains that hunger has become so much a part of his life that his stomach does not even growl anymore, is not alone in his nostalgia for Haiti’s dictatorial past. Other Haitians speak longingly of the security that existed then as well as the lack of garbage in the streets, the lower food prices and the scholarships for overseas study.

Haiti may have made significant strides since President René Préval, elected in 2006, became the latest leader to pass through the revolving door of Haitian politics. But the changes he has pushed have been incremental, not fast enough for many down-and-out Haitians.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, primarily because of its conceit that Haiti, seething on one end of the island of Hispaniola in the midst of the US sphere of influence in the Caribbean, has developed its present dystopia all by its lonesome self, without any assistance worth mentioning from its gigantic hemispheric neighbor, the United States.

Join me in the Caribe.

A special treat.  The following is an op-ed written by my father and published in the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News on March 18, 2008, a week after his 89th birthday.  My dad asked me if I would put the piece up at my blog, The Dream Antilles, but on reflection, I thought more people would see and appreciate it here.  My dad is a retired school administrator with a doctorate, a fabulous pianist, a veteran and a patriot.  Here’s the piece:

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Don Siegelman, a former, Democratic governor of Alabama and a good guy, was railroaded to a federal prison where he’s now serving a 7-year sentence, in a case that has Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over it.  The case is a travesty and proof positive not only that there are political prisoners in the US but that Siegelman is one of them.

Yesterday, I wrote a diary about this disgraceful travesty because I wanted to keep the story alive.  I don’t want us to forget that this conviction is an example of why there was a US Attorney scandal and why investigation of that scandal must continue.

The best sources of information on Siegelman, if you’re not yet familiar with this mockery of justice, is OPOL’s Friday diary on the case, a diary with lots of video and background, and Siegelman’s web site.

What’s any of this got to do with Eliot Spitzer, who has been forced to resign as Governor of New York because of his hiring prostitutes?  Plenty.

Join me across the jump.