Tag: violence

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    “When will someone stand up and say traitor!?”

~snip~

   “The American way of life is being systematically dismantled and destroyed. The Republic is in danger. We are tired of everyone in the U.S. Congress, Democrats, Republicans, everyone, and they don’t care, but believe me, they better start. Otherwise, as I said on O’Reilly last night, we are entering the most dangerous time in American history.”

                 – Glenn Beck

   “It is not time to pick up guns . . . It is not time to blow anything up”

    I call bullshit on Beck’s pre-emptive Cover Your Ass job.

    Glenn Beck and his insane on air ravings are brought to you by billionaire Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation.

     

Not a good report, but with the stress levels of multiple tours and possibly in two theaters, longer tours for much of the time our soldiers have been in both theaters, stress of conflict, family, experiences and much more, this does not surprise! Nor will it when it doesn’t get the coverage it should among our talking heads and politicians, let alone a country that has pretty much forgotten both occupations.

I make it point to visit Obsidian Wings daily, and hilzoy is a favorite of mine, because she’s pretty darn thoughtful, but something was seriously off kilter today in her post about Obama’s Cairo speech.

This bit from Obama’s speech also struck me as very strong:

“Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”

The normal criticism of Palestinian violence is moral. That is as it should be, and Obama does not slight that: “That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.” But that criticism leaves open the possibility of framing the debate over Palestinian violence as one of principle versus effectiveness. As long as it is framed that way, one can understand (though not agree with) Palestinians who say: you’d think differently if you didn’t have a state; if it was your land that was constantly being seized, and your pregnant wife who had to wait for hours at a checkpoint to see a doctor. You’d put aside your principles and do what works.

That’s why it’s immensely important to say, clearly, that violence is not just wrong, but ineffective.

It’s not so much that I agree or disagree with the double-barreled blast of “morality AND effectiveness” lines of argument.  It’s kind of like the torture debate: it’s not only immoral; it plain doesn’t work reliably.  Blam!  Blam!  You dead!  Rhetorically speaking.  That’s fine.

The part of the argument that indicates a severe case of hemi-neglect (when a brain-damaged patient can easily lift one arm on command, but when asked to lift they other, they say, “What other?”), was when she suggested:

This bit from Obama’s speech also struck me as very strong.

As some of you have probably heard, I’ve been fairly ill for the past week.  I’ll include an update about that at the end of this piece.

But being ill…and it being the end of finals week, I had a difficult time generating a brand new topic.  Where are Bob and Doug when you need them?

So…like Felix…I reached into my bag of tricks and searched around for something to put together for tonight, even if it had to be somewhat hastily.

I remembered that I took some photographs at the end of the April, of the Bloomfield College 2009 observation of the Clothesline Project.

Cross-posted from www.Progressive-Independence.org

I was perusing a certain kind of ideological web site when I came upon the following article by Nicole Colson.

ONE AFTER another over the last month, the reports of terrible incidents of violence kept coming:

— A Vietnamese immigrant in Binghamton, N.Y., increasingly paranoid about police and upset after losing his job, kills 13 people at a center for immigrants before committing suicide.

— An Alabama man who had struggled to keep a job kills 10 people in a shooting spree before committing suicide.

— A Pittsburgh man, recently unemployed and afraid that the government would ban guns, opens fire on police responding to a domestic disturbance call, killing three.

These are just some of the recent eruptions of violence to make the headlines in U.S. newspapers. In the 30-day period between March 10 and April 10, there were at least nine multiple shootings across the U.S., claiming the lives of at least 58 people.

The individual motives and stories differ widely, but there’s a common thread among these incidents–the worsening economic crisis is becoming a factor in pushing some people who are already on the edge over it.

It seems nearly everyone is concerned with the ever-shrinking middle class, but almost no one is willing to discuss the social class those middlings are being tossed into: the POOR.  The platform, speaking for the poor, that John Edwards ran on during last year’s presidential election primaries resulted in his marginalization and eventual banishment from the public discourse as the elite weeded out those candidates who dare point out the disease of poverty.  But just because the messengers were silenced does not mean the larger problem went away; it continues to fester, with disastrous social consequences.

I’ve been feeling mournful of late.  Can’t say why.  Well I could but you don’t have all day.  Let’s just say things are catching up with me:  torture, war, theft, lies, fraud, corruption, joblessness, homelessness and doing nothing in the face of ecological disaster.

What a shame that we remain at war without reason.  Shame on us.

And what a shame that we continue to blunder down the path to biospheric disaster defying all logic and denying all science.

What is wrong with us?

There are at least two wars ongoing that our government could stop, and would, if they had an ounce of moral fiber…or a lick of sense.