Tag: social justice

Well I don’t have a lot to say tonight — but given my proclivities, I’m sure I’ll use a lot of words anyway.

I’ve had a tough couple of blogging weeks.  Mostly dealing with the issue of public housing in New Orleans.  ‘Course I also got in some scathing comments on a couple of immigration diaries.  Oddly, some of my enemies and I are beginning to acquire a bizarre form of camaraderie.  Ah, familiarity breeds a whole lot of things, it seems.

It wasn’t so much that I was fighting folks as struggling to communicate, which was frustrating.  Nightprowlkitty, SuperKitty of Justice(!) does not LIKE to be patient!  Seems, though, that patience is a requirement.

ek hornbeck has, though his writing, helped me enormously when it comes to another quality I have found is necessary if one is to engage in the dirty work of real communication of ideas and information and values – often to folks who may not know or trust me – and that is toughness.

To illustrate this helpfulness, I shall link a comment and response from one of his issues of the Stars Hollow Gazette.  I had commented one needs toughness to “save the internets” and his response has become my new mantra for 2008:

You can’t expect that people will treat you in any particular way.

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.

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.

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.

Let us talk about the problem of evil, Mr. Loran.  Where do we read about evil as a separate manifestation, as a result of too abundant a growth of the quality of judgment separated from the quality of mercy?

  –The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok

I read the NOLA blogs every day.  I read blogs in the diversosphere every day.  I read diaries and posts about undocumented migrants every day.

On all these subjects, I often find myself battling posters at Daily Kos who say things like “Oh well those folks in New Orleans shouldn’t have built their homes there, and they should just bulldoze the place, it’s environmentally unsafe!”  Or “I’m not a racist, so really that doesn’t apply to me, those folks are just oversensitive, besides that boy in Jena was a criminal, and Martin Luther King wouldn’t have defended him.”  Or “those illegal aliens are making it harder for those who are coming here legally and playing by the rules!  Why should I care about them — and besides, they’re hurting labor!”

I’ve experimented with many different responses, from aggressive and even profanity-laden to understanding and kind.  But those comments always hurt.  I don’t even know if I could explain why, they’re just words on a screen, aren’t they?

Judgment.  Well of course we are always using our judgment, from mundane things like choosing which toothpaste to buy to big philosophical and political decisions such as who to vote for, who to fight against and why.

And then there’s the judgment implied in the law.  This is wrong — if you do this you will pay the consequences, whether it be a fine, jail time, or even execution, even death.

In keeping with Buhdy’s vision of a manifesto (or whatever we end up calling it), I am grappling with the problems of social justice in the United States today.

Wasn’t feeling very inspired yesterday when I wrote my weekly piece here at Docudharma.  And it showed.

andgarden made a comment that wasn’t very tactful perhaps, but was deadly accurate:

I mostly agree, but

I hope it will be something new and different, that we’ll all find a way to change the paradigm of how we speak to each other as Americans.  I hope we’ll talk about social justice, the deep primal human needs that percolate through our sophisticated and civilized minds and find their finest expression in laws, laws that apply to everyone equally.

seems just a tad bombastic. I’m just here to pass the time. And, you know, maybe force the establishment to see the error of their ways–if that’s possible.

And that is true.  I was being more than a tad bombastic.  It’s hard sometimes to get down to the real feelings on this.  The very term “social justice” is a ponderous and bombastic couple of words.

So I’m gonna try again, leaving out the bombast, I hope, and reaching more for the nitty gritty.