This is a Foleygate post — some are calling it Pagegate … just the fun bits and snips. Hastart is still being dogged over this and the whole thing is taking up waaay too much political oxygen — as well as being an insulting discussion for national air time. Buchanan’s tirade about Foley being a flamer is particularly offensive — they play it over and over. It all works to good though, as the internal becomes visible … information is our friend.
Meanwhile, Denny is in heavy defense posture and swearing he’ll find out who allowed this to happen on his watch … which should be interesting, since it was HIM.
Foley had wanted out of the Congressional fox-trot in the worst way, having hit his glass-ceiling as a gay Pub — it was our old friend Mr. Rove who twisted his arm back into line … even a Gay Pub is better than NO Pub, I guess. I rather like that … another of the back-stage maneuvers that have come back to bite.
Oh — one serious bit. In an effort to turn the direction of the conversation, Harry Reid has come under attack. While I don’t believe that anybody in Congress is squeaky clean, the Pub’s have to do a lot better than this to get our attention off their own flaming corruption.
Jude
Stewart Comments Of “Network Of Gay Staffers That Covered For Foley”…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/10/11/stewart-comments-of-netw_n_31508.html
[video]
Gay Republicans? All My Fault
I caused it. I did it. Foley, sex, pedophiles and the implosion of the GOP. And I apologize
Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/y9xqyr
I secretly hoped for it. I secretly prayed for it. Actually, it wasn’t a secret at all. I was shouting it from the cosmic rooftops, extolling its virtues to anyone who would listen, tossing shiny pennies of burning hope into karmic wishing wells. Couldn’t help it, really.
And I’m here to say: I’m sorry for it.
See, for years, I’ve wanted in my heart of hearts for some sort of nasty and riotous and well-deserved scandal to rock the GOP, to shake it to its homophobic hypocritical core and reveal these jackals and warmongers and abusers of women’s rights and gay rights and human rights as what they really are, to have their glistening masks of sweat and wax and false piety peeled away to expose the rashy psoriatic snakeskin underneath.
More than anything, I wanted all the country and the world to see the viciousness and the duplicity of this particular administration, though to be honest I was hoping at least one of the scandals might somehow involve Sept. 11 and its related conspiracies, for one or more of the many deeply disturbing, still-unanswered questions surrounding the tragedy to finally come to public light and reveal the Republican leadership to be far more complicit in some of those dire events than anyone imagined.
I know, it’s not very nice. It’s not all that tolerant, rational, cosmically magnanimous. It’s also, in a way, sort of horrible, to wish such ugliness upon anyone, no matter how much they seem to deserve it and no matter how much they really were involved in such horrors as Sept. 11 (which, I must admit, I still truly believe they were).
This is why I’m offering up an apology, right here and now, for bringing this current rain of Mark Foley sex-scandal ugliness down upon the GOP’s sticky little head.
Yes, I caused it. Well, I and the tens of millions of other progressive open-minded liberals in this wary and Bush-stabbed nation who, I am quite sure, have all been down on bended knee every day, just like me, offering up the vibes and praying for the true blackness of the GOP soul to be revealed so we may finally snap out of this horrific bleakness and move the hell on.
We all did it. Clearly, we pumped enough energy into the cosmos to cause the Foley scandal to erupt, thus pounding yet another nine-inch nail into the BushCo coffin.
Problem is, such fervent prayers tend to evoke some ugly karma. Sure, no one deserves a scathing, vaguely pedophilic sex scandal more than the violently homophobic, self-righteous GOP, but I know such energies have a nasty tendency to backfire, to swing the other way. And that’s never a good thing.
Put it this way: If the Dems do indeed reclaim Congress and soon after the presidency, if they then take a bloodstained page from the thuggish Bush playbook and begin to steamroll the nation with their own lopsided agenda, well, the inevitable will happen and their power will become too great, and scandal will invariably erupt like a torrent of genital blisters and eventually take them down, too, and all desire for a progressive and diplomatic and integrity-filled spiritually open America will be lost.
Proof: Just look at what bilious right-wing hatemongers wished for during the Clinton years: a complete reversal of power, ultimate GOP control of everything. Well, they got it. And our nation has never been more corrupt, more divided, more globally loathed, closer to the edge of collapse. Translation: You gotta be careful what you wish for, even if you wish for Karl Rove’s head on the hood of Satan’s Cadillac.
Which is not to say that the prayers of us liberals haven’t already been answered, in spades, well before Mark Foley proved himself to be the perfect icing on the cake of GOP doom, the money shot of poetic justice, the period in this never-ending Republican sentence.
Jack Abramoff was a damn fine answer to the prayer, though that beautiful firestorm dealt mostly with finance and slimy payoffs, and what good taxpaying American doesn’t fully expect every member of Congress to be rolling in dirty lobbyist payoffs? But Abramoff did have one glorious outcome: It put a stake straight through the heart of Tom DeLlay, perhaps the nastiest and most thuggish political vampire in all of Congress, a worthwhile outcome all by itself.
Valerie Plame? Also a delicious scandal, given how leaked CIA info is always a powerful destroyer of faith in current regimes, and this one snared Scooter Libby and poked a sharp stick into Karl Rove. But still the GOP hobbled on.
The list goes on: WMD, Niger, bogus anthrax scares, Abu Ghraib, illegal wiretapping, gay male escorts hired to masquerade as sycophantic White House reporters — hell, it’s been a veritable fire hose of Republican scandals, indictments, violations, probes, investigations, arrests and abuses of power (not to mention all manner of sex scandals) lo these past years — so many it takes entire Web sites and multiple books to keep track of them all.
Problem is, these scandals just don’t seem to be having the satisfying effect of shutting down the nasty GOP machine once and for all. It’s still hobbling along, weak and yet still incredibly nasty.
Just last week we lost habeas corpus, a bedrock law of a free America, the right not to be taken into prison and have the key tossed away without any sort of representation, should the government deem you a threat to society. It’s the one true mark of a fascist state. Translation: The November congressional elections cannot happen soon enough.
But now the end is near. Now Mark Foley comes along and is making almost all liberal dreams come true and seriously, I’m sorry for it. See, I believe in karma. I believe what comes around goes around and I know full well that it’s just bad juju to wish such a level of turmoil and ill upon other humans, warmongering gay-hating maladroits or no, and that the real path of enlightenment is paved with forgiveness and progress and white-hot love and turning the other cheek and scotch.
In fact, Jesus said something about that, I do believe. He said, “Knock it off already with the warmongering and the hating of each other and let’s all get some wine and party like it’s 2012.”
Then again, he never saw Karl Rove stab the nation with the dull ice pick of bogus fear. He never heard George W. Bush describe brutal war and the death of tens of thousands as “just a comma” in world history.
Check that. Maybe I’m not so sorry after all.
Nice Closet You Got Here. Be a Shame if Anything, uh, “Happened” to It.
TRex
10/8
http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/10/08/late-nite-fdl-nice-closet-you-got-here-be-a-shame-if-anything-uh-happened-to-it/#more-4880
Dear Gay Republicans,
Hi, it’s TRex and I was wondering if we could talk some time real soon. I know we’ve had our differences in the past and all, and that some of the things I have said about you self-hating, traitorous, invertebrate bitchez have been less than kind. But I also understand that things have gotten a little uncomfortable for y’all over there in the stuffy, dirty closets of RNC headquarters of late, so I thought that out of the goodness of my heart, I would offer you this one last opportunity for polite discourse before the November elections come and a Democratic Congress proceeds to hose down your lives with shit-sauce on the one side while the Christian Right try to burn you at the stake on the other.
Never mind that we told you so. Never mind that all this time you’ve surely known at some level that your affiliation with the Republican Party was wrong. The Mark Foley debacle is a grenade in the gay GOP foxhole. This scandal has legs. Mark Foley’s legs. And they’re in the air. With the elections a month away, the Reich Wing is going to be looking for a scapegoat, and guess who that’s going to be? Funny how things work out, isn’t it?
After all the mass deception, all the media manipulation, the phony war, the thousands of dead, the cronyism, the corruption, the incompetence, the bullying and intimidation, the bashing of all that is sensible and scientific, the looting of the treasury, and the serial mutilation of our Consititution, the issue that has finally slipped the noose around the elephant’s neck is a Big Gay Congressman and his predilection for stalking underage boys. At this juncture, there is no worse position in Washington to be in (well, besides maybe underneath Mark Foley) than to be a Gay Republican.
No matter that your operatives have been an integral part of the lube job that enabled the Neocons to bugger this country senseless. No matter that you are arrayed as high up into your party’s power structure as the eye can see (and beyond!). The same rock-throwing villagers who would come after all of us Reality-Based Gays are now mounting up the road to your (terribly expensive, overdecorated) castle, lighting their torches and waving their pitchforks high in the air.
Jeff Gannon, David Dreier, Ken Mehlman (and et tu, Huckleberry?), welcome to your own Night of the Long Knives. There aren’t enough buses in the entire Distict of Columbia to handle the sheer number of you who are about to be thrown beneath their merciless wheels. I have wondered before whether it was going to be your cognitive dissonance or the party faithful’s that would be first to reach critical mass and send you flying headlong out of the GOP’s revival tent. Well, now I know.
And it figures. I mean, I guess it was inevitable that the Talibangelicals would be the ones trying to purge the gays from the Republican Party and not the other way around because apparently nothing short of death camps was going to convince you all that working for those lying, murderous fuckers was anything but a fantastic idea. What could possibly go wrong?
The next few weeks are going to be bloody. Ugly as hell. You are all about to be flushed from the closet like covey of farm-raised quail from the underbrush. And somebody’s about to get shot in the face.
But we may be able to help you. See, there’s one of two ways we can go about this.
As a representative of the Gay Mafia, I am prepared to offer excellent terms to you on behalf of my capo. You can be driven forth and shot from the sky by battalion after battalion of bloodthirsty muckrakers and satirists like myself, no salacious detail of your secret lives too dirty or shameful to serve up for the titilation and amusement of our readers…
-OR!-
You can come along quietly and accept the role of captured Nazi rocket scientists. We know that you know where all the bodies are buried. That’s something you can take to the bank with every sell-out. You’ve been willing to carry water other operatives wouldn’t carry. You’ve been buying your position among them by being willing to prove your loyalty again and again, to go above and beyond the call of duty, to do jobs that their other drones wouldn’t do.
So, spill it. Come on over to our side and we’ll do what we can to offer you amnesty, but at a price. Your crimes are such that we cannot let you off with impunity. You are going to need to provide us with some information.
Or you can stay where you are and try your luck at the hands of the bloodthirsty mob. I think I can hear them off in the distance now. What’s that they’re chanting over and over? It sounds like, “THE CHIL-DREN, THE CHIL-DREN, THE CHIL-DREN!!”
I think once they get in here there won’t enough left of you guys to fit in the top of an aspirin bottle. You might want to think fast. This is your Hour of the Wolf.
Let us know what you decide.
Ta-taaaaaaaaa,
T. Rex, Esq.
P.S. You can’t bring Matt Drudge. No amnesty for him! Leave him for the villagers.
Getting De-Foley-Ated: Republican Fatigue Will Clear The Deck
Alan Bisbort
Oct 12 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/1636
Wow. That was fun, in a sick, sad and sordid way, wasn’t it? Every single synapse of the Great American Media Machine drifted into the Black Hole of FoleyGate. From the newsrooms of the big city dailies to the talking heads on cable TV, this is a better story than the runaway bride or the white girl on Antigua; plus, it’s cheaper to cover.
While America was collectively De-Foley-Ated, Bush was left all alone to bark his fear-and-torture mantra into the abyss of his own empty soul, and 20 more American soldiers died. No one even noticed that Homeland Security issued a suspiciously timed “elevated terror alert” on Friday.
Now, we all await the latest poop on the Congressional page scandal. More is forthcoming, I guarantee it. You don’t let a pedophile run free for 10 years and not leave a trail. Nonetheless, something feels — I’ll admit it — forced in all this gloating. One part of me says, “Whatever it takes to get these bastards out of office.” Indeed, the Republicans nearly ran a president out of office over consensual adult sex, so the Democrats could conceivably ride a child predator at least that far. Still, another part of me thought, “Something’s going on here, and it’s much worse than this particular story.”
I can still hear the plaint of the schoolmarms and Fox News harridans during the Bill and Monica debacle: What will we tell the children? So, I suppose I should be grateful for small favors, as the Republicans have found a way to top that: What will we tell our constituents? What will we tell Joe Six-Pack and Jane Soccer Mom? Alas, there’s not much the GOP can tell them that will convince. Unlike WMDs, “elevated terror alerts” and “habeas corpus,” American adults don’t need pundits or politicians to explain this story. It has only one interpretation: The Republicans must be defeated. For the children, if for nobody else. Children are being flirted with in Congress and killed in Iraq. We’ve had enough.
Call it Republican fatigue. But come Nov. 8, the Madness of King George will no longer have partisan enablers in Congress. Whether they can hold the line for two years against a renegade White House is another matter.
For now, focus on Congress. Ask yourself: What are my elected officials saying about FoleyGate? Take my Congresswoman … please. Rep. Nancy Johnson’s Web site barely mentions the scandal. Instead, her top item claims that Chris Murphy, her Democratic opponent, would “raise taxes $70 billion.” That’s what desperation will do. Make up a number, put a “billion” in front of it and claim your opponent is in favor of it. Never mind that Johnson has rubber-stamped bill after bill for an administration that has run up the highest deficit in U.S. history. Getting lectured about fiscal responsibility by someone with a record like Nancy Johnson’s is like getting lectured on morality by, well, Mark Foley.
Almost as sick as Foley was the cast of characters shuttled out to do spin for the GOP: Newt Gingrich, Matt Drudge, Dick Morris, Katherine Harris, Rush Limbaugh, even Holy Joe Lieberman, who’s still feeling icky about Clinton’s blowjob, while giving a thumbs up to torture, rape and child predation. What is Lieberman’s point in defending Denny Hastert? Will someone please defeat this clown?
Bottom line: Our nation has drifted so far from its moorings — advocating torture and preemptive nuclear attacks, suspending habeas corpus — that FoleyGate seems a cheap way to run the current crop of rabid dogs out of the people’s house. I look up and there’s the untried war criminal Henry Kissinger, running around the White House, advising Bush on foreign policy. And I recall Kissinger’s famous adage: “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” Like I said, whatever it takes.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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October 12th, 2006
The Amish schoolhouse where ten little girls were shot, and five killed, was razed today in an effort to heal the community. This story has caught the attention of Americans — and there are good reasons why it should. The Amish are “forgivers” — and we evidently don’t know what to make of such a thing.
I live in Amish country. We have caution signs along the road with pictures of horse-drawn buggy’s. If you want the best corn of the season, you have to get up at the crack of dawn and get over to Moses Shrock’s farm before the pick of the day is gone. Other of the “plain folk” set up roadside stands to sell their produce and some stop to buy just so their kids can pet the patient, and usually exquisite, horse standing by. If you want sturdy and artful homemade furniture, you stop by to see them — and they will build your barn or your house for you if you wish, but they’ll take their sweet time … not only because they’re true artisans, but because getting to a job site after prayers and by buggy whittles away at productive time.
We have pockets of Mennonites, too, who aren’t Amish but are first-cousins in the brotherhood of Anabaptist religious groups which includes the Brethern. Slightly less strict, the Mennonites show up in public and commerce, and you can tell which cars are theirs because they are always black and all chrome has been stripped from them as too “worldly.” And of course you can’t miss them in a crowd … the women in caps, the men in flat-brimmed hats.
The Amish are linked to the Quakers only in the adoption of dressing plainly, which Quakers no longer do as a whole, and the fact that none of the aforementioned religions consider government authority as potent as God’s … nor do they aggress — they are pacifist’s.
There are a zillion wrinkles in the Amish story that includes the dangers of interbreeding, the problems with unyielding gender roles, the issue of not educating past the eighth grade, the perils of a closed community and the fact that the Amish live within the stricture of a very narrow Biblical box.
There have been allegations among the stricter Old Order groups of the toleration of sexual abuse — dicey since Amish do not consider themselves organized under the authority of American law, so these things are seldom reported. They hold their own courts within the community, “shunning” those who have transgressed, in the same way that many of the Native Indigenous people’s of this country handled those who broke tribal law. A recent case by an ex-Amish woman who was repeatedly raped by her brothers showed that the men had been chastised and shunned for a period of time … and then their offense was expunged from the memory of the community. The law didn’t accept their internal verdict and did some indictment of its own — but that explains a good deal about what we’ve seen coming out of Pennsylvania in the wake of the child killings.
A word often used regarding these people is “non-resistance.” Non-resistance is part of the practice of peace — and it’s roots are found in the territory of the Christ message [which sadly is not synonymous with the Christian religion.] Non-resistance is not for sissies … non-resistance is faith with teeth. I’m sure you’ve all read about how the Amish embraced the family of the man who killed their children — and how perplexed commentators and reporters were with such a notion. A few years back, an Amish woman and several of her children were killed locally when a semi plowed into their buggy — the Amish community supported the family of the disabled driver until he was able to work again.
No matter what other problems the Amish have as a social order, their ability to embrace, forgive and walk the walk of love and forgiveness is stunning to too many of us in the world, and in this country. That this is remarkable tells us something about our national religious understanding, and it’s not flattering.
We’ve forgotten what being Christian means … if we ever knew … which somehow seems unlikely in the wake of the re-election of George Bush even after he had thrown the civilized world into a mad and darkening downward spiral that threw off sparks of violence and revenge. When the christocrats talk the talk, while supporting vengeance and separation, the mainstream church becomes a cult — when the Amish, who are themselves considered a cult, walk the walk of non-violence and forgiveness including the embrace of those who trespass against them, they throw a mirror into the mix of narrow minded meanness and jihadism that has become Christianity today.
On the day of the shooting, one of the children’s grandfathers was interviewed on CNN … he kept his back to the camera, as is the Amish way. “Can you forgive him?” asked a reporter. “We already have,” answered the old man. “How is that possible?” she continued, her own bewilderment betrayed in her tone. “With God’s help,” he answered, short and to the point — and that was the answer that we all knew was coming … it was pronounced simply, with a flutter of the wings of Higher Angels … and it was a statement that too many of us couldn’t believe we heard.
Course in Miracles tells us that unless we can offer forgiveness to another, we cannot accept it for ourselves — unless we offer them peace, we can obtain none. If we do not see ourselves in the other, we do not understand who we are. As long as we stand as judge and punisher, we are lost in the loop of lovelessness … and we are the problem, not the solution.
We already have all the revelation we need to heal the world … we just have to walk the walk, like the old man with his back to the lens … we have to do the hard work.
“With God’s help.” Indeed.
Jude
What kind of people are these?
Sister Joan Chittister, OSB
Oct 9, 2006
http://ncrcafe.org/node/513
The country that went through the rabid slaughter of children at Columbine high school several years ago once again stood stunned at the rampage in a tiny Amish school this month.
We were, in fact, more than unusually saddened by this particular display of viciousness. It was, of course, an attack on 10 little girls. Amish. Five dead. Five wounded. Most people called it “tragic.” After all, the Amish represent no threat to society, provide no excuse for the rationalization of the violence so easily practiced by the world around them.
Nevertheless, in a nation steeped in violence — from its video games to its military history, in foreign policy and on its streets — the question remains: Why did this particular disaster affect us like it did? You’d think we’d be accustomed to mayhem by now.
But there was something different about this one. What was it?
Make no mistake about it: the Amish are not strangers to violence.
The kind of ferocity experienced by the Amish as they buried the five girl-children murdered by a crazed gunmen two weeks ago has not really been foreign to Amish life and the history of this peaceful people.
This is a people born out of opposition to violence — and, at the same time, persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants in the era before religious tolerance.
Having failed to adhere to the orthodoxy of one or the other of the controlling theocracies of their home territories, they were banished, executed, imprisoned, drowned or burned at the stake by both groups.
But for over 300 years, they have persisted in their intention to be who and what they said they were.
Founded by a once-Catholic priest in the late 17century, as part of the reformist movements of the time, the Mennonites — from which the Amish later sprung — were, from the beginning, a simple movement. They believe in adult baptism, pacifism, religious tolerance, separation of church and state, opposition to capital punishment, and opposition to oaths and civil office.
They organize themselves into local house churches. They separate from the “evil” of the world around them. They live simple lives opposed to the technological devices — and even the changing clothing styles — which, in their view, encourage the individualism, the pride, that erodes community, family, a righteous society. They work hard. They’re self-sufficient; they refuse both Medicare and Social Security monies from the state. And though the community has suffered its own internal violence from time to time, they have inflicted none on anyone around them.
Without doubt, to see such a peaceful people brutally attacked would surely leave any decent human being appalled.
But it was not the violence suffered by the Amish community last week that surprised people. Our newspapers are full of brutal and barbarian violence day after day after day — both national and personal.
No, what really stunned the country about the attack on the small Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania was that the Amish community itself simply refused to hate what had hurt them.
“Do not think evil of this man,” the Amish grandfather told his children at the mouth of one little girl’s grave.
“Do not leave this area. Stay in your home here.” the Amish delegation told the family of the murderer. “We forgive this man.”
No, it was not the murders, not the violence, that shocked us; it was the forgiveness that followed it for which we were not prepared. It was the lack of recrimination, the dearth of vindictiveness that left us amazed. Baffled. Confounded.
It was the Christianity we all profess but which they practiced that left us stunned.
Never had we seen such a thing.
Here they were, those whom our Christian ancestors called “heretics,” who were modeling Christianity for all the world to see. The whole lot of them. The entire community of them. Thousands of them at one time.
The real problem with the whole situation is that down deep we know that we had the chance to do the same. After the fall of the Twin Towers we had the sympathy, the concern, the support of the entire world.
You can’t help but wonder, when you see something like this, what the world would be like today if, instead of using the fall of the Twin Towers as an excuse to invade a nation, we had simply gone to every Muslim country on earth and said, “Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We know that this is coming from only a fringe of society, and we ask your help in saving others from this same kind of violence.”
“Too idealistic,” you say. Maybe. But since we didn’t try, we’ll never know, will we?
Instead, we have sparked fear of violence in the rest of the world ourselves. So much so, that they are now making nuclear bombs to save themselves. From whom? From us, of course.
The record is clear. Instead of exercising more vigilance at our borders, listening to our allies and becoming more of what we say we are, we are becoming who they said we are.
For the 3,000 dead in the fall of the Twin Towers at the hands of 19 religious fanatics, we have more than 2,700 U.S. soldiers now killed in military action, more than 20,600 wounded, more than 10,000 permanently disabled. We have thousands of widows and orphans, a constitution at risk, a president that asked for and a Congress that just voted to allow torture, and a national infrastructure in jeopardy for want of future funding.
And nobody’s even sure how many thousand innocent Iraqis are dead now, too.
Indeed, we have done exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do. We have proven that we are the oppressors, the exploiters, the demons they now fear we are. And — read the international press — few people are saying otherwise around the world.
From where I stand, it seems to me that we ourselves are no longer so sure just exactly what kind of people we have now apparently become.
Interestingly enough, we do know what kind of people the Amish are — and, like the early Romans, we, too, are astounded at it. “Christian” they call it.
The Amish protest against evil
The Monitor’s View
October 06, 2006
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1006/p08s01-comv.html
The Amish of Lancaster County, often seen as living in an idyllic but archaic past, have given a powerful example for the future. Their actions since the school shootings that killed five Amish girls provide one of many ways to prevent such tragedies.
Previous school shootings, notably the 1999 murders at Columbine High School, have led to calls for any number of useful, preventive measures, such as tighter security, more federal gun control, antibullying training for young children, more parental vigilance in communities, and closer screening of wayward students. And perhaps, as a result, many shootings have been prevented.
Those Old Order Amish who live a secluded life near the school at Nickel Mines, Pa., have a different idea.
Their faith in the power of forgiveness led them to invite the widow of the nonAmish killer, Charles Carl Roberts IV, to the funeral for four of the slain girls. One Amish woman told a reporter, “It’s our Christian love to show to her we have not any grudges against her.”
This isn’t surprising. It is common for the Amish to invite car drivers who have killed one of their community members to the funeral. Such a compassionate response reveals a belief that each individual is responsible to counter violence by expressing comfort - a sort of prayer in action.
After Monday’s killings, the grandfather of one of the slain girls went to the home of Roberts’s father, consoling and hugging him, pouring forth a love and innocence of the kind remembered of the girls in the school. “He extended the hope of forgiveness that we all need these days,” said a Roberts family spokesman, the Rev. Dwight Lefever of Living Faith Church of God. “‘God met us in that kitchen.”
Such examples of forgiveness are often inspiring because, to many, they are so difficult and so rare. After previous school shootings, some families of victims have also sought to extend forgiveness to the killers of their children. The Amish, although known for a rigid shunning of members who adopt other ways, are emphatic about forgiveness, perhaps making it easier for them. It’s one way they’ve held their communities together since the 18th century.
Like everyone, the Amish also seek justice for a crime, even as they struggle to forgive. Even so, as Abraham Lincoln said, “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”
Such qualities are a corrective to the tendency to see evil as a real possibility and fear of it as necessary. “I don’t understand it,” said one Mennonite woman, speaking of the shooting, “but it’s not from God. He wants us to love one another.” Forgiveness helps resist the impression that humans can act like animals. It spreads a sensitivity to the needs of others, especially those whose inner torments might lead to shootings.
Some Amish saw Roberts as someone in need of help. Despite the guilt of his act, he was probably a man who needed to regain his child-like innocence, and heal his anger and the mental demons of the past.
While Roberts is now gone, the Amish example of forgiveness is a reminder that real safety lies less in acting out of fear to prevent violence and more on qualities such as forgiveness that better connect people. Such compassion reduces fears and reaches those prone to violence.
What the Amish are Teaching America
Sally Kohn
Friday, October 6, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1006-33.htm
On October 2, Charles Carl Roberts entered a one-room schoolhouse in the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He lined up eleven young girls from the class and shot them each at point blank range. The gruesome depths of this crime are hard for any community to grasp, but certainly for the Amish — who live such a secluded and peaceful life, removed even from the everyday depictions of violence on TV. When the Amish were suddenly pierced by violence, how did they respond?
The evening of the shooting, Amish neighbors from the Nickel Mines community gathered to process their grief with each other and mental health counselors. As of that evening, three little girls were dead. Eight were hospitalized in critical condition. (One more girl has died since.) According to reports by counselors who attended the grief session, the Amish family members grappled with a number of questions: Do we send our kids to school tomorrow? What if they want to sleep in our beds tonight, is that okay? But one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? Plans were already underway for a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit Charles Carl Roberts’ family with offers of food and condolences. The Amish, it seems, don’t automatically translate their grieving into revenge. Rather, they believe in redemption.
Meanwhile, the United States culture from which the Amish are isolated is moving in the other direction — increasingly exacting revenge for crimes and punishing violence with more violence. In 26 states and at the federal level, there are “three strikes” laws in place. Conviction for three felonies in a row now warrants a life sentence, even for the most minor crimes. For instance, Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence, his final crime involving the theft of nine children’s videos — including “Cinderella” and “Free Willy” — from a Kmart.
Similarly, in many states and at the federal level, possession of even small amounts of drugs trigger mandatory minimum sentences of extreme duration. In New York, Elaine Bartlett was just released from prison, serving a 20-year sentence for possessing only four ounces of cocaine. This is in addition to the 60 people who were executed in the United States in 2005, among the more than a thousand killed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. And the President of the United States is still actively seeking authority to torture and abuse alleged terrorists, whom he consistently dehumanizes as rats to be “smoked from their holes”, even without evidence of their guilt.
Our patterns of punishment and revenge are fundamentally at odds with the deeper values of common humanity that the tragic experience of the Amish are helping to reveal. Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done in life. Someone who cheats is not only a cheater. Someone who steals something is not only a thief. And someone who commits a murder is not only a murderer. The same is true of Charles Carl Roberts. We don’t yet know the details of the episode in his past for which, in his suicide note, he said he was seeking revenge. It may be a sad and sympathetic tale.
It may not. Either way, there’s no excusing his actions. Whatever happened to Roberts in the past, taking the lives of others is never justified. But nothing Roberts has done changes the fact that he was a human being, like all of us. We all make mistakes. Roberts’ were considerably and egregiously larger than most. But the Amish in Nickel Mines seem to have been able to see past Roberts’ actions and recognize his humanity, sympathize with his family for their loss, and move forward with compassion not vengeful hate.
We’ve come to think that “an eye for an eye” is a natural, human reaction to violence. The Amish, who live a truly natural life apart from the influences of our violence-infused culture, are proving otherwise. If, as Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” then the Amish are providing the rest of us with an eye-opening lesson.
Naked and afraid
Robert C. Koehler
Oct 12 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/1636
What blessings, what outrage.
The Amish child said, “Shoot me first.” The survivors counseled forgiveness and prayed for the soul of the murderer. This was all too solemn and too real to be purveyed by the mainstream media as picturesque curiosity, horse-and-buggy morality in the age of the Hummer.
The Amish modeled courage and healing for the rest of America. They modeled a peace built not on intimidation and conquest but on respect and forgiveness. They shut down the cynics for almost a week. They grieved, they buried their dead and they reached out to the killer’s widow.
Kneel with them, mourn with them, rise up angry.
The body count in our nation’s schools over a period of barely a week was eight innocents: students, a teacher, a principal, shot point-blank by psycho-terrorists with easy access to personal arsenals. Another eight were injured and at least one of them, an Amish girl, is in grave condition. More than 400 people have died in school violence in the last dozen years, many hundreds of others have been wounded, and uncounted close calls - like the one this past Monday morning - have been averted.
On Monday, a 13-year-old boy in a black trench coat walked into his school in Joplin, Mo., with a Mac-90 assault rifle and fired it into the ceiling. No one was injured, but “it was a very close call,” the superintendent said. Let me repeat: 13-year-old boy, Mac-90. An officer interviewed by the Associated Press said, “Police believe they know where the student got the weapon but would not disclose those details. He said it was not uncommon for people in the area to own high-power firearms.”
We’re stalled in the pretense of not knowing. “Experts can only speculate …” Who the hell are these experts the media invoke in the wake of every slaughter, to blink and shrug through their fog of innocence and tell us nothing? We know, I submit, more than we think we know. We know that the path to begin addressing this horror lies in the direction we most fear: the path of disarmament.
“This is imitation of Christ at its most naked,” author Tom Shachtman told the New York Times, speaking of the Amish practice of nonviolence (I came across the quote in a fine column by Rod Dreher in the Dallas Morning News). Who of us dares to stand naked in the presence of our deepest fears? Yet this is what we must do. What a leap we’ll have to make if we are to save our children - if we are to survive.
This is not about having the right religion. This is not about being Amish. This is about living our lives with a calm courage that understands that survival lies in reaching out, not striking back. Even more so, it is about renouncing the culture of heavily armed fear that surrounds us. Look where it’s gotten us.
Consider: “But the enduring tragedy of Bush’s ‘mother of all presidential miscalculations,’” writes Robert Parry for Consortium News, “is that his underlying theory for addressing the problem of Islamic militancy hasn’t changed. It is still a strategy of ‘kill, kill, kill’ - get revenge for 9/11 even against Muslims who had nothing to do with it - and that is likely to continue, if not expand, after the Nov. 7 elections.”
Milk-truck driver Charlie Roberts, who was angry with God, had pretty much the same policy. So did the Columbine killers and all the other lost souls who have yielded to the ultimate temptation of our times. What if this kind of behavior were not role-modeled from the top?
A week after the murder of the schoolgirls in Lancaster County, Pa., and the day after the 13-year-old boy loosed a round of Mac-90 ammo at a water pipe on the ceiling of his school in Joplin, the Bush administration convened a summit on school violence in Maryland. It was led by, of all people, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the guy who called the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and asserted that torture was legal.
The highlight of the summit seems to have been a rebuke of Bush administration policy by the manager of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence in Raleigh, N.C. He wanted to know why the administration attempted to cut the $347 million allotted for school-safety grants for states this year.
In the context of what the administration actually stands for - bloated militarism, niggardly incompetence in the social sphere and, of course, a president who’s above the law - the platitudes the first lady and others mouthed at the summit were particularly painful. “I urge all adults across the country to take their responsibility to children - their own children, and their community’s children - seriously,” Laura Bush said.
Responsibility this vague has a way of being passed along to someone else. I fear Marian Fisher won’t be the last child to have to say, “Shoot me first.”
Coverage of ‘School Shootings’ Avoids the Central Issue
Jackson Katz
Wednesday, October 11, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1011-36.htm
In the many hours devoted to analyzing the recent school shootings, once again we see that as a society we seem constitutionally unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge a simple but disturbing fact: these shootings are an extreme manifestation of one of contemporary American society’s biggest problems — the ongoing crisis of men’s violence against women.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so let’s take a good hard look at these latest horrific cases of violence on the domestic front. On September 27, a heavily armed 53-year-old man walked into a Colorado high school classroom, forced male students to leave, and took a group of girls hostage. He then proceeded to terrorize the girls for several hours, killing one and allegedly sexually assaulting some or all of the others before killing himself.
Less than a week later, a heavily armed 32-year-old man walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and ordered about 15 boys to leave the room, along with a pregnant woman and three women with infants. He forced the remaining girls, aged 6 to 13, to line up against a blackboard, where he tied their feet together. He then methodically executed five of the girls with shots to the head and critically wounded several others before taking his own life.
Just after the Amish schoolhouse massacre, Pennsylvania Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said in an emotional press conference, “It seems as though (the perpetrator) wanted to attack young, female victims.”
How did mainstream media cover these unspeakable acts of gender violence? The New York Times ran an editorial that identified the “most important” cause as the easy access to guns in our society. NPR did a show which focused on problems in rural America. Forensic psychologists and criminal profilers filled the airwaves with talk about how difficult it is to predict when a “person” will snap. And countless exasperated commentators — from fundamentalist preachers to secular social critics — abandoned any pretense toward logic and reason in their rush to weigh in with metaphysical musings on the incomprehensibility of “evil.”
Incredibly, few if any prominent voices in the broadcast or print media have called the incidents what they are: hate crimes perpetrated by angry white men against defenseless young girls, who – whatever the twisted motives of the shooters — were targeted for sexual assault and murder precisely because they are girls.
What is it going to take for our society to deal honestly with the extent and depth of this problem? How many more young girls have to die before decision-makers in media and other influential institutions stop averting their eyes from the lethal mix of deep misogyny and violent masculinity at work here? In response to the recent spate of shootings, the White House announced plans to bring together experts in education and law enforcement. The goal was to discuss “the nature of the problem” and federal action that can assist communities with violence prevention. This approach is misdirected. Instead of convening a group of experts on “school safety,” the president should catalyze a long-overdue national conversation about sexism, masculinity, and men’s violence against women.
For us to have any hope of truly preventing not only extreme acts of gender violence, but also the incidents of rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence that are a daily part of millions of women’s and girls’ lives, we need to have this conversation. And we need many more men to participate. Men from every level of society need to recognize that violence against women is a men’s issue.
A similar incident to the Amish schoolhouse massacre took place in Canada in 1989. A heavily armed 25-year-old man walked into a classroom at the University of Montreal. He forced the men out of the classroom at gunpoint, and then opened fire on the women. He killed fourteen women and injured many more, before committing suicide.
In response to this atrocity, in 1991 a number of Canadian men created the White Ribbon Campaign. The idea was for men to wear a white ribbon as a way of making a visible and public pledge “never to commit, condone, nor remain silent about violence against women.” The White Ribbon Campaign has since become a part of Canadian culture, and it has been adapted in dozens of countries.
After the horrors in this country over the past two weeks, the challenge for American men is clear: will we respond to these recent tragedies by averting our eyes and pretending that none of this happened? Or will we at long last break our complicit silence and work together with women to turn these tragedies into a transformative cultural moment?
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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October 12th, 2006