TW3 … and Love

January 23rd, 2008

That Was The Week That Was … the “new true,” this violence and struggle we see all around us. The bit out of Kenya is disheartening, but no more so, I suppose, than the business with the overpass or the stake through the head — just organized.

The cheese has slipped off of many a cracker out there … which creates nasty surprises and a pervasive sense of danger. The economic downturn will encourage a more aggressive criminal class, too — reports of theft are up. When stuff is hard come by, yours looks pretty good.

As regards the clown statistic, I haven’t felt cozy with white-face since I read Stephen King’s “It.” Jeez! When even clowns make ya nervous, we’re in a hell of a mess, huh?

To turn the conversation, I’ve included a moving read by Norm Solomon; he reminds us of what’s best in our society. What is real enough, tried and true, resides within us despite what’s happening “out there” … if we’ve got that, the compass will always show true North.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
January 22, 2008

President George W. Bush called for $145 billion in tax
cuts, describing the measures as a “shot in the arm” for
the U.S. economy, which caused stock values to plunge in
Australia, Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, and across
Europe. “There’s something approaching panic in the
market,” said an analyst with Bank of America. “The
short-term risks,” explained Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson, “are to the downside.” Researchers found that
foreigners invested $414 billion in American companies in
2007, up 90 percent from 2006. “This is a vote of
confidence in the American economy,” said Deputy Treasury
Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt. “Do we want the communists to
own the banks, or the terrorists?” asked financial
commentator Jim Cramer. “I’ll take any of it.” John McCain
won the South Carolina Republican primary, Mitt Romney and
Hillary Clinton won in the Nevada caucuses, and the
Supreme Court decided that Texas could exclude Dennis
Kucinich’s name from the ballots in the Democratic primary
because Kucinich refused to take a party loyalty
oath. British researchers determined that children
universally dislike clowns, finding them “unknowable,” and
a German merchant ship set sail for Venezuela partially
powered by a fuel-saving kite.

It emerged that the ongoing riots that followed the Kenyan
presidential election, in which at least 650 people were
killed, had been partially planned; leaflets calling for
ethnic killings had been distributed prior to the
election, and village elders had encouraged young Kalenjin
men (allied with the defeated Raila Odinga) to hunt
Kikuyus (allied with victor Mwai Kibaki) with bows and
arrows. “We attack people, we burn their homes, and then
we take their animals,” said a Kalenjin man. “The
community raised the money for the gasoline.” A babysitter
in Honolulu threw a toddler off an overpass into busy
traffic, and parents in Australia were suing an
embryo-testing clinic for allowing their child to carry a
cancer gene. Researchers in San Diego announced that they
had cloned human embryos from skin cells, the FDA
determined that cloned animals are acceptable food, and
Hungarian scientists created a computer program that,
based on its analysis of 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian
sheepdogs, can exceed human capability in accurately
classifying sheepdog barks. The thoughts of a monkey in
North Carolina controlled the actions of a robot in Japan.

The lone power plant operating in Hamas-controlled Gaza
was shut down for lack of fuel. “At least 800,000 people,”
said official Derar Abu Sissi, “are now in darkness.”
Chess master Bobby Fischer died in Iceland, a man in Las
Vegas was arrested for killing his girlfriend by driving a
six-inch stake into her head, and a Winchester, Virginia,
man was arrested for burning an 11-year-old girl with a
Hot Pocket sandwich. A New York City construction worker
was suing a hospital for treating his head injury by
knocking him out and giving him an unwanted rectal exam,
and the ACLU filed a brief in support of Senator Larry
Craig (R., Idaho), arguing that people who engage in sex
acts in public bathrooms have an expectation of
privacy. Scientists funded by mobile-phone companies found
that if the phones are used before bedtime their radiation
can reduce sleep and cause headaches and confusion; the
Mobile Manufacturers Forum insisted that the “results were
inconclusive.” It was observed that Tahina spectabilis, a
giant palm tree of Madagascar, commits suicide when it
flowers at the end of its century-long lifespan, and New
York researchers using carbon nanotubes created the
darkest material known to history. Scientists in Chicago
found that lonely people are more likely to assign human
qualities to their pets and to believe in God, and Louis
de Cazenave of the Fifth Senegalese Rifles, one of the
last two French veterans of World War I, died at age
110. “War,” he explained in 2005, “is something absurd,
useless, that nothing can justify.”

– Paul Ford
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/WeeklyReview2008-01-22

In Honor of My Mother and the Power of Love
Norman Solomon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 23 January 2008

The last time my mother was in a hospital, an essay by Thich Nhat Hanh moved in front of my eyes. “Our mother is the teacher who first teaches us love, the most important subject in life,” he wrote. “Without my mother I could never have known how to love. Thanks to her I can love my neighbors. Thanks to her I can love all living beings. Through her I acquired my first notions of understanding and compassion.”

My mother, Miriam A. Solomon, died on January 20, which happened to be the seventh anniversary of the inauguration of a man and a presidential regime that she loathed. Once, several years ago, when I referred to George W. Bush as “an idiot,” she made a correction by pointing out he’s much worse than that; she used the adjective “evil.”

At my parents’ apartment, taped on the front door for a long time, a little poster said: “The America I Believe In Doesn’t Torture People.” The poster was from Amnesty International USA - an organization my mom wrote many protest letters to dictators for - and it summed up her devotion to human decency rather than counterfeit versions of American democracy.

On Monday, the day after my mom died, The Washington Post that arrived on the apartment doorstep carried a lead editorial under the headline “Martin Luther King Jr.: His Words Are More Relevant Than Ever This Election Year.” But the editorial did not include the word “war” - even while it grandly commented on “the vision of Dr. King” and, of course, quoted from his “I Have a Dream” speech.

My mother was among the hundreds of thousands of civil rights supporters who gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial and heard King’s speech that day in 1963. But unlike the Post’s editorial writers, she did not suffer from arrested development in subsequent decades.

She shared in King’s expansive view of essential struggles for human rights during the last few years of his life. And in the decades that followed, she took to heart his denunciations of economic injustice and what he called “the madness of militarism.”

In contrast to The Washington Post - with its fevered editorial support for the war in Vietnam and, a third of a century later, the war in Iraq - my mother was a humanist who cared about human life far more than geopolitical positioning. In October 1967, then a 46-year-old mother of four children, she joined in the large antiwar march to the Pentagon.

She was passionate about the Bill of Rights. In the early 1970s she did extensive volunteer work for the ACLU in defense of the civil liberties of antiwar demonstrators. And for decades, she worked to get progressive Democrats elected to office. She was never in the limelight, and she never sought it.

Sometimes she’d tell me about her father, Abe Abramowitz, a socialist who did tireless political work in Brooklyn. As a girl, she went with him to branch meetings of The Workmen’s Circle, where social justice was on the agenda. Once, she showed me how he showed her how to quickly seal a lot of envelopes by wetting many flaps all at once with a sponge. Along the way, he supported Norman Thomas for president; later on, as circumstances and possibilities shifted, he opted for Franklin Roosevelt.

My mom adored her father, who had a sparkling sense of humor, a love of literature, and - most of all - an overflow of humanistic kindness. He died young, when she was only in her mid-thirties. It must have been a terrible blow to my mother.

My mother did not die young (she was 86), but since then I’ve felt awful waves of sadness. And sometimes, I think of people who are mourning loved ones of all ages, due to distinctly unnatural causes. The people dying in Iraq as a consequence of the US war effort. The children in so many countries who lose their lives to the ravages of poverty. The health care system in the United States that - in the absence of full medical coverage for everyone as a human right - means avoidable death and suffering on a large scale.

In media-speak and political discourse, the human toll of corporate domination and the warfare state is routinely abstract. But the results - in true human terms - add rage and more grief on top of grief.

Our own mourning should help us understand and strive to prevent the unspeakable pain of others. And whatever love we have for one person, we should try to apply to the world. I won’t ever be able to talk with my mother again, but I’m sure that she would agree.

After my mother died, I learned about a poem that she wrote long ago - apparently soon after her father passed away. The poem is titled “Bereavement.” Here is how it ends:

More than cherished memories are left behind; they leave us - us to know our duties and our powers and to carry on without much fuss.

In the crushing grief of the moment, we think of how vital and good our loved ones were, and vow to be worthy of them.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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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