It's Okay, White People, We Can Admit The Truth.

POSTED BY JHW22

When the Trayvon Martin news became a big social media event, I was on vacation in the beautiful woods of Oklahoma - yes they exist. I went to two Walmarts for groceries and was nervous as hell for my car with the Obama sunrise O sitting out in the parking lot. My hope was no one knew what that was. It was creepy. I was surrounded by hunters and obvious Tea Partiers. I felt like I'd walked into the wrong universe.

I am a white woman, so I guess there was no real way to identify me as an outsider -- although, I do look like Rachel Maddow's twin, so it's possible someone could have assumed I was a lesbian liberal Yankee and I'd have been in trouble. I'm not a lesbian but I am a liberal and was raised in New Hampshire, so I was shaky.

But I was lucky. No one sniffed me out. For that period of time, I felt vulnerable. It was my own brain doing that to me, though. No one else.

I read about Trayvon one of the days on that vacation when I hopped online for a few minutes. My immediate thought was, "I can't read that, it's gonna hurt too much". I knew there was nothing good in a story about a dead, beautiful kid. I couldn't bring myself to know what happened because I don't handle grief so well anymore.

After several losses of loved ones in the last six years, and after becoming a mom, I can't watch movies or read books that even touch on a child's death, a parent's death -- or anything sentimental for that matter.

Then we got home and unpacked and I read. I spent the next two days reading and crying and thinking about Trayvon. Thinking I'd had days where I could choose to avoid the grief. His parents had had weeks of nothing but facing theirs. And I got mad. I got mad at a law that allows police to be lackluster, to take the word of a a living man against the silence of a dead kid. I got mad at the man who stalked a child then claimed self-defense.

And now I am mad at the people who haven't uttered a peep. I am mad at apologists trying to make self-defense apply to one person but not another.

And now I am awake.

For years I have read about black men being imprisoned at higher rates than white men. I have read about more black men being falsely incarcerated and later exonerated, than white men. I have read that more black communities suffer from hunger, lack of safe housing, weaker education, slower police response times, and on and on. I've known the data. I was a Sociology minor. I'm a Democrat. I know all of the data.

But until Trayvon Martin was killed and I had to face the sadness and read and listen, I never woke up to the life. The life that is lived by a person who has lived with a system set against him in ways he never knew. In a way society still whispers in our ears but never wants to address.

I have been accused of being a Becky, or of saying the wrong thing when my intent was clearly something benign. I have been stupid and at times in my life, extremely naive. I imagine most of us have thought or said ignorant or fearful things. But we can't play tit for tat or argue over a person's past statements and deeds in lieu of listening and watching current motivation. We can't treat this time as a moment of race-baiting or PC-idealism. And that being said, we HAVE to talk about the fact that Trayvon Martin was killed because he was black. It's okay to actually say it and not feel like backs need to hunch or defensive retorts need to be spit. It's not anti-white people to say it. We can all acknowledge the truth. We, as white people can say, "I don't like that a kid died because he was black". No spite is needed. There's no need to defend Zimmerman's actions because white people are on trial for perpetuating racism by not ever wanting to admit racism. We don't need to find lame excuses or ways to blame a dead kid. It's okay to admit that the President is not being divisive when he says that if he had a son, "He'd look like Trayvon". We don't need to play stupid and act like that wasn't profound as hell. It's alright, white America, to say, "A kid died because he was black and he matters to me".

The Martin family can't hide from the loss and we can't hide from the truth. We can move forward by admitting we are sad and angry and awake.

And yes, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and every vile white person posting at Fox.com, I'm talking to you.

What's Prayer Got to Do With It?

POSTED BY JHW22

For decades, we have been told that the removal of God from schools has caused all of our problems.

For starters, God wasn’t removed from schools and neither was prayer. Any teacher can pray any day, any time, anywhere in a public school. So can students. The only change made since the good ol’ days is that prayer cannot be school-sanctioned or led: we can no longer have a prayer led by school staff. But we have a moment of silence that is specifically for anyone who wants to pray to have time to do so and for anyone who doesn’t want to pray to think about something else. Sometimes I wonder if Christian parents are afraid that their kids aren’t praying during that time thus all the hubbub. Are they really bothered because they think their children aren’t praying when they aren’t there to make them do it? Just a curiosity, but seems plausible.

In addition to America sucking because God isn’t going to school anymore (us sucking is according to the very people who don't like it when Democrats take responsibility for our nation's mistakes), we have been told that natural disasters are the result of gay people being gay. Never mind that straight people die in those disasters and some are probably prayerful homophobes.

Now, if we’re a "Christian Nation," I often wonder why all the Christians haven’t been able to prevent all this crap they blame on the lack of school prayer. I mean they ARE the majority and they pray at home and church and at restaurants and in the car and on Facebook and in email chains, etc. So why do we still have so many problems if prayer is the answer and they all pray so much? Is the lack of prayer led by teachers THE reason? Are gay people really to blame? Seems like I, as a non-prayer, am being blamed for bad things I don't do. I am being blamed for crime and vile sex acts and other sins simply because I don't support proselytizing in public schools.

So then Reagan's line (that Palin just had to cite) about only the criminal being to blame, yadda, yadda, doesn't apply when prayer is on the line? So, if we don't pray as a class, we're all to blame for a classmate going crazy and killing someone?

If Christian kids are raised right, they should be taking advantage of prayer all the time and privately. So it can’t be MY fault -- as an atheist who doesn’t want to hear or have to use part of my time participating in something irrelevant to me – when Christian kids don't pray whenever and wherever. It’s not because of my lack of belief if a child doesn’t pray enough. Don’t pretend that public prayer is more consequential than silent prayer. And don’t blame the lack of required public prayer for our ills while avoiding responsibility for not praying enough or well enough or for the right things on your own time.

Finally, if all of this is true, why is the absence of something they think is good so impactful, yet violent rhetoric isn’t?

When someone from the “prayer should be in schools to prevent horrors” side of the debate uses language to divide and imply violence is a solution, don’t then say words don’t matter and that only the criminal is accountable. Or if you want to say that only the criminal is accountable, then don’t blame the lack of school prayer for someone's crimes.

I leave you with this poll that is quite relevant and helped me formulate my thoughts even though it's not specifically what I wrote about.

Social Justice (UPDATED)

posted by Armadillo Joe*

Per fraulein's suggestion, I am creating a post for the comment thread from Broadway Carl's response (A Response To "Arrgh, Me Mateys") to my initial Somali pirates post (Arrgh, Me Mateys), wherein I argued that the Somali pirates are not criminals in the sense that most people understand because these lawless men haven't chosen to reject the laws that ought to bind us all, those laws having never applied to them in the first place -- hence "lawless", and Carl countered that they are criminals for the simple fact that they chose to become pirates in the first place. In looking more closely at the whole issue, I see now that we are in fact arguing apples and oranges. My point is a philosophical one with a moral and ethical component, wherein Carl's point is strictly practical, with a social and political component.

Thus, inter-related and overlapping, sure. But not the same thing.

The comment exchange:

Matt Osborne said...
You're right to say there's no sympathy due the pirates NOW. But we do have to understand how they happened: a vacuum of power, anarchy on the seas, greedy European corporations, and starving native fishermen.Like most things in this world, the Somali pirates started out with the best of intentions, but you're right -- that's not important. What's important is that Obama has the opportunity to fix the situation and start fixing Africa in the process.

And we should be trumpeting the Somali pirates as an example of what happens in a land without government.

April 13, 2009 9:52:00 PM EDT


Armadillo Hussein Joe said...
Thank you, Matt, for ferreting out my underlying meaning in earlier posts.

I feel like my initial argument was mis-characterized because the idea of piracy on the seas is so frightening and repellent to most people that any attempt on my part to understand or plumb the causes of it is an expression of sympathy for the pirates' actions. It isn't. It is an expression of sympathy for the social and political conditions that drove them to it.

Sun Tzu urged us to know our enemies. The fact that we are complicit in the creation of those enemies doesn't make them any less potent or us any less guilty, but to pretend that they have just mysteriously appeared as some kind of fully-formed menace previously unknown in any way whatsoever is intellectually dishonest. We cannot truly know them if we don't acknowledge our role in their creation and growth.

A crime of inaction is still a crime and we allowed the horrifying conditions in Somalia to fester because to deal with them was politically inconvenient.

April 13, 2009 11:18:00 PM EDT

The upshot for me, more or less, is this: the Somali pirates are victims of the ugly reality of the true Golden Rule -- the one with the gold makes the rules. We have lots of stuff. They don't have stuff. They take our stuff and we brand them as thieves.

The Somali pirate situation is a tidy symbol for our income equality problems in this country, but written on a global scale. More than just another example of moonbat, bleeding-heart drivel, what I mean is that the tension between the haves and have-nots in this country can only be addressed when it is truly addressed on a global scale. American and European wealth, stability and prosperity has not happened without consequences elsewhere (Africa, South & Central America, the Middle East) anymore than skyrocketing wealth within America's borders hasn't happened without consequences in the inner cities and rural mountains and elsewhere. The long-term solution at home isn't for the wealthy to retreat into gated communities and beef-up the police departments -- even if specific criminal acts require specific police action in a given moment -- anymore than the long-term solution abroad is to close our borders and hoard our stuff with a beefed-up military presence to intimidate and punish anyone who dare threaten our material prosperity.

It's the difference between strategy and tactics.

The long-term soution domestically and internationally is to be less provincial and, frankly, greedy and search for solutions that -- here it comes -- spread the wealth. Globally. When the average Somali starves because he literally has nothing to eat while a wealthy Parisian sips wine and eats the fish plucked from what should be Somali sovereign waters, how can we smugly say that the Somali is a criminal for any action he takes, however violent or inconvenient to our comfortable lifestyle?

In the eyes of most of the rest of the planet, we Americans and Europeans are all unimaginably wealthy. Whether a lowly iPod or a high-flying corporate jet, both are equally unattainable to most people in the world and the relative difference in cost is still orders of magnitude more than most of them will ever earn in a lifetime.

The idea is not to stop the criminals but to banish the conditions that give rise to them.

* I like that fraulein always has a specific font and color for her dateline, so I'm trying out something of my own. Opinions?

UPDATE:

In comments, Annette pointed me towards this fascinating and thoroughly on-point article by a gent named Jeffrey Gettleman at Foreign Policy magazine's website, ominously entitled "The Most Dangerous Place in the World." Of course, he paints the same picture we always get of Somalia: violent, anarchic, the nearest thing to a Hobbesian State of Man in Nature anywhere on earth:

To call it even a failed state was generous. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a failed state. So is Zimbabwe. But those places at least have national armies and national bureaucracies, however corrupt. Since 1991, Somalia has not been a state so much as a lawless, ungoverned space on the map between its neighbors and the sea.

He argues that the current scourge of piracy off the Horn of Africa is the result of this anarchy, which didn't happen overnight or happen spontaneously, but rather has resulted due to three mistakes of American policy over the last two decades. The first was the Battle of Mogadishu -- immortalized in the film Black Hawk Down -- the punctuation mark at the tail-end of our failed humanitarian effort there, resulting in the death of hundreds of Somalis and 18 American servicemen.

The second and third mistakes, unsurprisingly, were made by the hysterical chickenhawks of our recently departed Rethugli-goon administration, scared as they were after 9/11 changed everything™ of their own shadows and every dark-skinned taqiyah-wearer ever to answer the adhān.

Mistake #2 was to undermine -- out of the usual CIA bag of tricks with guns, money & free advice funneled to the already unpopular warlords -- the emerging and popular Islamist government for fear of an al Qaeda safe-haven on the Horn of Africa, a government that was cracking-down on piracy, BTW.

Mistake #3 was to back, again with guns & logistical support, an invasion by christian Ethiopia for the same purpose of toppling the Islamist government. The puppet government installed by the christian leadership of Ethiopia is predictably ineffective -- which is by design, of course -- and has resulted in anarchy, war and death spilling into every neighboring country and the adjacent blue sea.

Hence, pirates.

Add to that vicious cocktail an ocean empty of food and full of other country's toxic waste and no one should be surprised at the level of violence and lawlessness we see today in that part of the world. As Gettleman says at the end of his do-not-miss article:

Nearly an entire generation of Somalis has absolutely no idea what a government is or how it functions. I’ve seen this glassy-eyed generation all across the country, lounging on bullet-pocked street corners and spaced out in the back of pickup trucks, Kalashnikovs in their hands and nowhere to go. To them, law and order are thoroughly abstract concepts. To them, the only law in the land is the business end of a machine gun.