Bowing Down to Our Own Violence

When a mentally unstable person goes on a shooting rampage in the United States, no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is 100 percent.

However — even after four years of a U.S. war in Iraq that has been increasingly deplored by the American public — the standard violence directed from the Pentagon does not undergo much critical scrutiny from American journalists. The president’s war policies may come under withering media fire, but the daily activities of the U.S. armed forces are subjected to scant moral condemnation. Yet, under orders from the top, they routinely continue to inflict — or serve as a catalyst for — violence far more extensive than the shooting sprees that turned a placid Virginia campus into a slaughterhouse.

News outlets in the United States combine the totally proper condemnation of killing at home with a notably different affect toward the methodical killing abroad that is funded by the U.S. Treasury. We often read, see and hear explicit media commendations that praise as heroic the Americans in uniform who are trying to kill, and to avoid being killed, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In recent decades, the trends of war have been clear. A majority of the dead — estimated at 75 to 90 percent — are civilians. They are no less innocent than the more than 30 people who suddenly died from gunshots at Virginia Tech.

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams

April 21st, 2007 || PermaLink

Democracy and Education

Democracy is a form of associated living that fosters the growth of the individual through her participation in social affairs. Free, reflective, critical inquiry and the welfare of others undergird interaction, communion, and community building. Unlike authoritarian modes of government, democracy requires its members to participate in the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions affecting their development and, unlike authoritarian countries, democracies believe in the capacity of ordinary individuals to direct the affairs of their communities, especially their schools.

The trajectory our schools now follow does not bode well for democracy. The No Child Left Behind Act produces a hyper-productive, blindly obedient, worksheet completing citizenry, one capable of voting for American Idols, but one unable to recognize larger threats to humanity. In place of NCLB, Americans must develop education for democratic participation, a type of education that helps children mature into intelligent, critical, engaged, reflective, and compassionate members of their schools and communities.

Active participation in institutions prevents authoritarianism and allows for individual and community re-creation and growth. Privatizing or standardizing institutions does quite the opposite.

Philip Kovacs | CommonDreams 

April 20th, 2007 || PermaLink

A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

Bob Herbert | The New York Times 

April 20th, 2007 || PermaLink

Arming Ourselves as the World Burns

At present, for every $1 spent on alternative energy research in the United States, $200 is spent on the military. It has been estimated that over 40% of each American citizen’s tax bill goes to war.

The earth is being choked by carbon emissions as the nations of the world continue to spend their money on perceived short-term threats rather than on the future needs of their children. Much of the world looks to the United States as a global leader. We need a national leader who will direct our goals away from confrontation and toward cooperation in the search for life-giving energy.

Paul Buchheit | CommonDreams 

April 19th, 2007 || PermaLink

What I Think About Guns

Guns have no other purpose than killing someone or something. All the other murder weapons Americans use, from automobiles to blunt objects, exist for another purpose and sometimes are used to kill.

But guns are manufactured and bought to kill. They invite their owners to think about killing, to practice killing, and, eventually, to kill, if not other people, then animals.

They are objects of temptation, and every so often, someone comes along who cannot resist the temptation — someone who would not have murdered, or murdered so many, if he did not have a gun, if he were reduced to a knife or a bludgeon or his own strength.

I wish that the right wing would admit that, while people kill people and even an “automatic” weapon needs a shooter, people with guns kill more people than people without guns do.

Jane Smiley | HuffingtonPost 

April 18th, 2007 || PermaLink

New Thinking To Save The Earth

Once, this nation took for granted that its power in the world depended on the sway of the American idea — liberal democracy, freedom, opportunity, equality. But in the middle of the 20th century that changed, a move away from influence to imposition. Power came from an arsenal, and ultimate power from a nuclear arsenal. Today’s Pentagon budget is at Cold War levels without the Cold War because we Americans no longer believe in the power of our own idea. But military power is an illusion, as Iraq shows, like Vietnam before it. Resisting populations cannot finally be coerced, only killed. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons still threaten the environment more than anything.

Global warming can prompt a terrible fatalism, as if forecast catastrophes are certain to befall the planet. But the future is not an extension through time of what is already perceived. That’s the point of revised thinking about everything from nature to power, since history shows that thought is the soul of creativity, and therefore of creation. Human choices brought the earth to this brink of ultimate harm, and human choices, informed by changed ideas, can rescue it.

James Carroll | The Boston Globe 

April 17th, 2007 || PermaLink

The Fantasy Behind the Scandal

Last week, we learned that the administration edited a government-ordered report on voter fraud to support its fantasy. The original version concluded that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud.” But the publicly released version said, “There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.” It’s hard to see that as anything but a deliberate effort to mislead the public.

Sound familiar? In President Bush’s first term, a White House official, who had been the oil industry’s front man in trying to discredit the science of global warming, repeatedly edited government reports to play down links between climate change and greenhouse gases. And then there was the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which turned reports on old, dubious and false tales about weapons of mass destruction into warnings of clear, present and supposedly mortal dangers.

It’s obvious why the Bush administration would edit those documents, but why the voting report? Because charges of voter fraud are a key component of the Republican electoral strategy. If the public believes there are rampant efforts to vote fraudulently, or to register voters improperly, it increases support for measures like special voter ID’s, which work against the poor, the elderly, minorities and other disenfranchised groups that tend to support Democrats. Claims of rampant voter fraud also give the administration an excuse to cut back prosecutions of the real problem: officials who block voters’ access to the polls.

The New York Times | Editorial 

April 16th, 2007 || PermaLink

Bowing Down to Our Own Violence

When a mentally unstable person goes on a shooting rampage in the United States, no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is 100 percent.

However — even after four years of a U.S. war in Iraq that has been increasingly deplored by the American public — the standard violence directed from the Pentagon does not undergo much critical scrutiny from American journalists. The president’s war policies may come under withering media fire, but the daily activities of the U.S. armed forces are subjected to scant moral condemnation. Yet, under orders from the top, they routinely continue to inflict — or serve as a catalyst for — violence far more extensive than the shooting sprees that turned a placid Virginia campus into a slaughterhouse.

News outlets in the United States combine the totally proper condemnation of killing at home with a notably different affect toward the methodical killing abroad that is funded by the U.S. Treasury. We often read, see and hear explicit media commendations that praise as heroic the Americans in uniform who are trying to kill, and to avoid being killed, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In recent decades, the trends of war have been clear. A majority of the dead — estimated at 75 to 90 percent — are civilians. They are no less innocent than the more than 30 people who suddenly died from gunshots at Virginia Tech.

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams

April 21st, 2007 || PermaLink

Democracy and Education

Democracy is a form of associated living that fosters the growth of the individual through her participation in social affairs. Free, reflective, critical inquiry and the welfare of others undergird interaction, communion, and community building. Unlike authoritarian modes of government, democracy requires its members to participate in the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions affecting their development and, unlike authoritarian countries, democracies believe in the capacity of ordinary individuals to direct the affairs of their communities, especially their schools.

The trajectory our schools now follow does not bode well for democracy. The No Child Left Behind Act produces a hyper-productive, blindly obedient, worksheet completing citizenry, one capable of voting for American Idols, but one unable to recognize larger threats to humanity. In place of NCLB, Americans must develop education for democratic participation, a type of education that helps children mature into intelligent, critical, engaged, reflective, and compassionate members of their schools and communities.

Active participation in institutions prevents authoritarianism and allows for individual and community re-creation and growth. Privatizing or standardizing institutions does quite the opposite.

Philip Kovacs | CommonDreams 

April 20th, 2007 || PermaLink

A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

Bob Herbert | The New York Times 

April 20th, 2007 || PermaLink

Arming Ourselves as the World Burns

At present, for every $1 spent on alternative energy research in the United States, $200 is spent on the military. It has been estimated that over 40% of each American citizen’s tax bill goes to war.

The earth is being choked by carbon emissions as the nations of the world continue to spend their money on perceived short-term threats rather than on the future needs of their children. Much of the world looks to the United States as a global leader. We need a national leader who will direct our goals away from confrontation and toward cooperation in the search for life-giving energy.

Paul Buchheit | CommonDreams 

April 19th, 2007 || PermaLink

What I Think About Guns

Guns have no other purpose than killing someone or something. All the other murder weapons Americans use, from automobiles to blunt objects, exist for another purpose and sometimes are used to kill.

But guns are manufactured and bought to kill. They invite their owners to think about killing, to practice killing, and, eventually, to kill, if not other people, then animals.

They are objects of temptation, and every so often, someone comes along who cannot resist the temptation — someone who would not have murdered, or murdered so many, if he did not have a gun, if he were reduced to a knife or a bludgeon or his own strength.

I wish that the right wing would admit that, while people kill people and even an “automatic” weapon needs a shooter, people with guns kill more people than people without guns do.

Jane Smiley | HuffingtonPost 

April 18th, 2007 || PermaLink

New Thinking To Save The Earth

Once, this nation took for granted that its power in the world depended on the sway of the American idea — liberal democracy, freedom, opportunity, equality. But in the middle of the 20th century that changed, a move away from influence to imposition. Power came from an arsenal, and ultimate power from a nuclear arsenal. Today’s Pentagon budget is at Cold War levels without the Cold War because we Americans no longer believe in the power of our own idea. But military power is an illusion, as Iraq shows, like Vietnam before it. Resisting populations cannot finally be coerced, only killed. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons still threaten the environment more than anything.

Global warming can prompt a terrible fatalism, as if forecast catastrophes are certain to befall the planet. But the future is not an extension through time of what is already perceived. That’s the point of revised thinking about everything from nature to power, since history shows that thought is the soul of creativity, and therefore of creation. Human choices brought the earth to this brink of ultimate harm, and human choices, informed by changed ideas, can rescue it.

James Carroll | The Boston Globe 

April 17th, 2007 || PermaLink

The Fantasy Behind the Scandal

Last week, we learned that the administration edited a government-ordered report on voter fraud to support its fantasy. The original version concluded that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud.” But the publicly released version said, “There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.” It’s hard to see that as anything but a deliberate effort to mislead the public.

Sound familiar? In President Bush’s first term, a White House official, who had been the oil industry’s front man in trying to discredit the science of global warming, repeatedly edited government reports to play down links between climate change and greenhouse gases. And then there was the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which turned reports on old, dubious and false tales about weapons of mass destruction into warnings of clear, present and supposedly mortal dangers.

It’s obvious why the Bush administration would edit those documents, but why the voting report? Because charges of voter fraud are a key component of the Republican electoral strategy. If the public believes there are rampant efforts to vote fraudulently, or to register voters improperly, it increases support for measures like special voter ID’s, which work against the poor, the elderly, minorities and other disenfranchised groups that tend to support Democrats. Claims of rampant voter fraud also give the administration an excuse to cut back prosecutions of the real problem: officials who block voters’ access to the polls.

The New York Times | Editorial 

April 16th, 2007 || PermaLink