It's the economy, stupid...

I am having a hard time believing that one-twelfth of 2010 is almost gone... Just before Christmas I bought a used leather couch from someone who was moving, actually, a loveseat, in good condition, and I had an old, once wonderful couch that my two cats had shredded (not the couch per se but the arm rests) so I was trying to figure out how I would get the old couch out, and get rid of it. The landlord wants these broken up with an ax so they can fit into the garbage container... otherwise he gets charged for removal. Anyway, a young friend who heard me talking about it said he had a neighbor with a bunch of children and others living in her apartment, because people have been losing their jobs and moving in together, and he thought she could use the couch!

I felt good and bad about my couch going to someone else, because even though it had been a very good couch, the arm rests looked terrible, but within a half hour someone from the woman's apartment came over and they loaded the couch away, and were very happy because the people who were sleeping on the floor would now have a comfortable couch to sleep in! One woman's castoffs is another woman's treasure, particularly in this economy...

Now today a neighbor visited; I have been helping her with a problem with Bank of America (one of their new ways of stealing money from their depositors... they 'sell' life insurance to people who would never buy it, and deduct outrageous monthly fees directly from their depositors' accounts... no policy is ever sent to the depositor, and it's an automatic deduction so people don't always realize for a while that their money is being taken...) This particular woman earns a pittance, and when she found out that she had been paying for $100,000 in life insurance... she joked that had she known this she might have killed him for the insurance!. Today she wanted to know if I could help her file her tax return; she has a 7 month-old baby who was happily gurgling away while she explained the situation, and a 14 year-old, and last year her common-law husband and she made, between the two of them, before taxes, $19,000. So I wondered if any of the people I hear talking about the economy and complaining about Obama's 'outrageous' 'socialist' measures could survive, a whole family of four or five (there is another daughter also...) on $19,000 before taxes...

We are doing health care rallies to get health care reform approved, and I don't understand how anyone can argue about this! I haven't had health care since 1995. I go to a dentist in Mexico, and although I use mostly alternative health care (chiropractors and acupuncturists, juicing and vitamins and meditation) it's a bit of a time bomb, were something to happen...

Health care is a fundamental human right, no different from the right to food and shelter and speech. And we are the only industrialized nation that has no health care policy covering all its citizens.

Revolution as the true spirit of Christmas

Christmas, navidad, natividad, the nativity, the birth of a powerful and holy being. You do not have to be Christian to acknowledge that the Jesus whose birth Christians celebrate at this time of year was a powerful and holy being, one who worked throughout his short life to ‘revolutionize’ the times, worlds without end. He came to enforce perennial principles, such as truth and love and beauty and yes, peace. As any revolutionary, he threatened the status quo, threatened the ‘business as usual’ of the time, because with his every word, he demanded a fundamental change, not in perennial principles but in the way they are conceived, understood, acted upon. For this, as with so many others who threaten ‘business as usual,’ he was imprisoned, tortured, and horribly put to death. Shades of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Often the simple way of seeing things is truly the best way. Then as now, the custom was to use simple words but to paint and clothe them in different fashions, what we call today, the spin or framing of issues. Thus, you could take a word such as peace and wage war ‘for’ peace. You could say that all men are created equal and then use that lofty principle to ensure unequal treatment based on race, nationality, gender, or even sexual preference. In the name of universal love, you could spread hatred far and wide.

The concepts were there, as Plato saw them, lofty and supreme, but it is what was done and what continues to be done with them that Jesus wanted to change; he wanted to ‘revolvere’ which is the Latin for revolve from which the term revolution issues; to turn something on its axis and bring it back to the starting point. He called for a change in paradigm, meaning, a fundamental change in how something is seen or visualized.

As I write this on December 23rd, millions go about shopping for gifts that they may celebrate a holy day honoring the birth of a man who was born in poverty and spent most of his life preaching with no recognition, no congressional seat, no official status or university doctoral dissertations. Millions more will die today and tomorrow and on Christmas day and on the day after that, including many new born babes, because they will lack the wherewithal to sustain life while others will exchange frequently meaningless gifts and engage in an orgy of food and celebration. In the US, some will jeopardize their continued existence, mortage payments, health, in the frenzy to have a “merry Christmas.”

For all who want truth, peace, love and justice for all, let us consider the spirit of this man of Galilee and what it is that he spoke about, what he represented. We have pallid representations of the things he said, for they were taken down by human messengers and translated, and things are frequently lost in translation, but we can glean even from the imperfect renderings the true message.

In one of his most famous speeches, which has become known as the Sermon on the Mount, he blesses those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled, and those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. He blesses the merciful who shall obtain mercy and the peacemakers who shall be called sons and daughters of God.

We are living in dire times, when more than ever we need the strength to seek righteousness, mercy, and peace. A time when, lacking leaders who stand firm on principles, we must be our own leaders. Jesus said that he had come to fulfill the law, eternal law, that which cannot be clothed or framed or disguised. It is time that we demand that the law, without spin or framing, be fulfilled to its last jot and tittle. That we demand an end to death, and torture, to war and the profiteering from war, to poverty in all its guises, and that we seek to secure the just punishment of all those who have broken the law. That we ask, as he asked, for true revolution. For only then may we be called the children of Spirit.

A thoughtful and revolutionary holiday to each and all of you, my brethren.


Main Entry: rev•o•lu•tion
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English revolucioun, from Middle French revolution, from Late Latin revolution-, revolutio, from Latin revolvere to revolve
1 a (1) : the action by a celestial body of going round in an orbit or elliptical course; also : apparent movement of such a body round the earth (2) : the time taken by a celestial body to make a complete round in its orbit (3) : the rotation of a celestial body on its axis b : completion of a course (as of years); also : the period made by the regular succession of a measure of time or by a succession of similar events c (1) : a progressive motion of a body around an axis so that any line of the body parallel to the axis returns to its initial position while remaining parallel to the axis in transit and usually at a constant distance from it (2) : motion of any figure about a center or axis (3) : ROTATION 1b
2 a : a sudden, radical, or complete change b : a fundamental change in political organization; especially : the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed c : activity or movement designed to effect fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation d : a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something : a change of paradigm e : a changeover in use or preference especially in technology

Libertad

El jueves salí de California para asistir de nuevo a la protesta masiva contra la Escuela de Asesinos en el Fuerte Benning, en Georgia, EEUU. De viernes a domingo fui intérprete voluntaria para víctimas de la tortura, personas cuyos seres queridos han sido asesinados en sus diferentes países, y todo a manos de soldados y oficiales entrenados en este fuerte por el ejército norteamericano. A través de todos los testimonios, difíciles de dar, escuchar e interpretar, se me ocurre que lo esencial es la libertad. Es esa libertad de poder ser 'humano' en el sentido más amplio de la palabra; libertad que se infringe a diario a nombre del poderoso caballero don Dinero...

Escuchando a un joven de Etiopía que había salido hace muy poco, meses solamente, de un centro de tortura en su país, donde fue torturado una y otra vez por meses y meses por haber ayudado en las urnas, escucharlo dar su testimonio mientras sollozaba, y yo le trataba de interpretar el testimonio roto y ensangrentado a un sacerdote colombiano que también fue torturado, por su trabajo por los pobres de la tierra, como dijera mi gran apóstol José Martí, comencé a escribir lo que tal vez es un himno... Tal vez le añada música...

Libertad

Soy incorruptible.
He nacido en las entrañas
de la vida,
y me nutro del aliento y de la sangre,
la sonrisa y la esperanza
de los seres de la tierra.
LIBERTAD

Soy indestructible.
Ni con golpes ni torturas,
ni con muertes ni prisiones,
sigo andado, siempre erguida,
cual bandera enarbolada,
siempre viva.
LIBERTAD

Soy amada y soy temible;
soy la libre incorruptible,
la esperanza ineludible,
libertad inquebrantable,
la esperanza del pasado,
luz brillante en horizonte
libertad, hoy y mañana,
soy tu madre, padre, hermana.

Libertad, dilo en voz alta,
libertad, piénsalo adentro,
en la sangre, las entrañas,
en testículo y ovario,
en la célula preciosa,
libertad, amada, amante.
¡LIBERTAD!

Luego venía recordando tanto testimonio triste... la valerosa Nerys, del Salvador, torturada en su octavo mes de embarazo, y tirada en una fosa común. Estuvo en coma por 6 meses; su crimen era que alfabetizaba a los niños indígenas... Conoció y trabajó con el santo de las Américas, el arzobispo Romero...

Mi patria fue títere de los EEUU hasta que Fulgencio Batista salió huyendo... Fuimos invadidos una y otra vez... Teníamos siempre que cumplir con los deseos del amo... Batista, apoyado por dólares, tenía su sarta de esbirros y torturadores... Recuerdo cuando empezaron a salir aquellas víctimas de la tortura, en enero de 1959.... Y luego viví en la República Dominicana cuando EEUU invadió a partir del golpe de estado contra el legítimo presidente, el Dr. Juan Bosch... Vi mucha hambre y miseria en Santo Domingo, mucho racismo, parecidos al racismo de mi patria, y el hambre y la miseria de mi patria...

Y no es que no tenga cosas que criticarle al gobierno revolucionario, pero no hay gobierno (en este caso, dictadura) sin problemas, y más con el monstruo a 90 millas... Lo dijo Martí: He vivido dentro del monstruo, y le conozco las entrañas. Lo dijo en otra forma Lorca, años después... en el barrio en el que vivo actualmente, los centroamericanos y mexicanos viven vidas difíciles, siempre sujetos al arresto y maltrato por la migra...

El viernes por la noche los que hablaban eran chicos y chicas que trabajaban recogiendo tomates en Immolakee, Florida; nos hablaron de la esclavitud, personas obligadas a trabajar bajo amenaza de muerte en los campos, por centavos... Y eso me recordó el trabajo que hice durante dos semanas cuando el desastre de Nueva Orleans... Estuve ayudando a llevar comida a un campamento para refugiados... En el medio del trabajo se me acercó un policía local a pedirme botellas de agua para su ciudad, no en Nueva Orleans sino en Texas, tan tristemente pobre que los alcantarillados no funcionaban, y el agua potable no lo era... De ahí el poema que sigue, mientras el entonces presidente Bush descansaba en su mansión veraniega....

Vengo como el ocaso

Vengo como el ocaso,
arrastrando tristezas,
hojas al viento, pétalos
de jazmines muertos, los últimos rayos
de un sol ensangrentado
en la campiña seca.

Aquellas horas últimas vimos llegar a los niños, los niños con esos rostros solemnes, que no pueden comprender tanto horror, que no se ríen ni sonríen, que caminan sonámbulos hacia el comedor de la iglesia, donde hay comida, agua, todo lo que faltó en aquel paraje triste donde hubo tanta belleza, tanta música, tanta risa.

El mundo sigue en sus asuntos
diarios, la gente camina por el aeropuerto,
los teléfonos suenan, las alarmas
gritan en sílabas estrepitosas.
En cada esquina una mujer
habla de sus compras.

Había una bebe negrita como un carboncillo, llorando desconsoladamente; aguantaba un osito que alguien le había dado, pero como con olvido, con desinterés, y cerca la madre, amamantando a un crío silencioso. Dos niños, dijeron tener doce años, mirándonos con la cara del que ha visitado el infierno y todavía no da pie con bola.

Los televisores todos reportaban
la continuidad de los desastres,
las aguas inundando ilusiones,
platos, cruces, tenedores y libros,
cadáveres, todo en una putrefacción
de 'limpieza étnica.'

Agua, jugos, sacos de papa, papel higiénico, cajas de galleticas dulces, y algo de abrazos y de besos, de un pedir perdón porque somos de la misma humanidad que los atropella, los abandona, los hace maldecir el mismo día de su nacimiento. Y al final, un abrazo empañado de lágrimas, y un querer quitarse hasta la ropa y los zapatos, hacer algo, algo, cualquier cosa, un alivio...

Fuimos a ofrecerle algo a los dos chicos,
una zanahoria, un trago de agua,
una tajada de manzana. Las miradas
decían, 'aparentamos vida,
solamente.'

He regresado. Me duele la espalda de acarrear bolsas de zanahorias, papas, me duele la vergüenza de una impotencia sorda. No tengo lenguaje. No tengo nada que decir. Cuando trato de expresar aquel horror imperdonable, la gente me dice que tal vez cuando duerma, que seguramente estoy algo cansada, que con los días se me 'pasará' la desesperación.

En un rancho lujoso
un presidente tocaba la guitarra
como Nerón tocando el violín
mientras ardía Roma. En las afueras
del lujo y la miseria, la muerte acecha, fiera.

Escribimos con sangre pero no perdura

The French did not learn the lessons of history,
nor the British, Spanish, German, Portuguese,
and we, the latest bloated children of empire,
have learned them least of all.

We write with blood but it does not last, it never
lasts; we guillotine, garrotte, nuke existence beyond
existence. The trees remember and they perdure,
but they do not speak. Late at night there is a susurration

of aimless human souls beckoning remembrance.
Alas, it is too quiet, gentle, too much a part
of the natural environment. We are the animal
that puts its hand twice, thrice, no, even unto

eternity on the burning fire, and are amazed
when the fire is hot, and burns it. We have no memory
of yesterday, of the singeing pain, of the pain
of our mothers holding their dismembered children.

Escribimos con sangre, pero no perdura.

Yesterday as I was driving back from a job, I listened to a report on China's black jails on NPR's All Things Considered. Jails where dissenters, people complaining about corruption, are locked away, sometimes tortured, and if not physically tortured, at least mentally tortured, in that they do not know why, or what or when will happen, whatever is going to happen. It brings the dissenters away from the main city, so that there can be an appearance of 'normality' and all things are bright and beautiful in this wonderful land. Obama talked about human rights in China... but no one is talking about the human rights of our prisoners, the ones in Guantánamo, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who knows where else...

Friday I leave for the SOAW, which trains foreign Latin American soldiers to engage in brutal repression (remember the recent Honduran coup d'état?) So it seems as though, in many ways, it is business as usual,
oh what a thrill, Lucille,
let's not complain, Lorraine,
we understand, Rostand,
and we haven't got time for the pain...

Oh, and, the economic recovery? The 'bailout'? For the rich and the superrich, mes amies. For the AIG's and the Bank of America and the major major fuckers... the University here, the State University, is increasing its tuition and costs by 32%. After all, we don't need no college degree to work in the McDonaldized future world...

O brave new world that has such people in it...

Letter to the President

I woke up very early with a protest in my dream. I had achieved something, which I cannot remember, and at the last minute I could not perform it, or read it, or whatever. I then started writing this very long letter to the President, which eventually also became a letter to Hugo Chávez, the WTO, and sundry. Especially sundry. So in the end I had this motley crew of people I was bitching to, and a realization that I had to finish writing the letter, request, yell, bitching, song, novel and perform it, whether anyone cared to listen or read or watch. Not very articulate today, am I...

Somewhere along the way I thought about something Amy Goodman said in a recent interview or talk about the media... she said something to the effect that if the media every day for a week, at the top of the news, showed the real footage of war, the dead children and the women trying to walk on bloody stumps or watching their dying babies, or even our own servicemen and women gutted by shrapnel, the "American people" who are not cruel as a rule, would say, war is not the answer to conflict.

And then there was one of the Yes Men, who talked about how when he spoke as a (fake) representative of the WTO and said that the WTO would disband within months and then reorganize with a view to the original founding principles, creating trading practices and regulations that were fair to the poorer countries and poorer people, for a couple of hours after it was reported in the news, before everyone realized that this was a hoax and not a real WTO pronouncement, everyone that was interviewed were amazed and excited that this was going to happen... and when they engaged in the DOW Chemical hoax, where he pretended to be a high representative from DOW who was finally going to take full responsibility for the BHOPAL incident, and pay 12 billion dollars to the injured, and to clean up the place (Dow had bought out Union Carbide, who ran the plant where this horrible industrial accident took place), the Dow Jones index went nuts, investors lost confidence and Dow Chemical lost billions...

So it's this greed factor in our world or global society that is in the middle of our inability to 'fix' the world...

And the question, as always, is, are we on the side of the angels or the greedy bastards who run it all?

Of course, somewhere in my letter there has to be an explanation of why America is not a country, and why the United States as a world power is so clear about this that when they opened the school of assassins to train torturers that would do the dirty deed throughout Latin American countries, they called it the "School of the Americas."

In November I am going down to Fort Benning again... last year the interpreting for the victims of torture took its toll on me, and I had a dizzy spell getting out of the airplane, so that the airline produced a wheelchair and nice man who wheeled me about. It is hard for them to speak about what went on, and the interpreter, whoever does it, has to live through what is being talked about by the victims. There were so many stories... the literacy teacher who was tortured in her 8th month of pregnancy for teaching indigenous people to read and write... and lost her baby and went into a coma for 6 months, and only survived because her torturers believed she was dead and threw her into a common grave. Or the sister of the doctor who treated the very poor and who disappeared, only to be found, his body a mangled bloody mess, dead on a roadway...

All of it, all of the wars, covert actions, military interventions, police actions (too many to mention, but some of them are listed here: http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/us-military-expansion-and-intervention/26024.html) had greed as their foundation. Greed for markets, for power and control, for hegemony. And of course, before the US, there were all the other empires, throughout the bloody history of mankind.

Ultimately, if we are to survive as a world, as a planet, we need to change our point of view, eliminate the greed factor... In Moore's latest film, and in his talks about it (Capitalism, A Love Story), he discusses the fact that throughout the world, countries have taken out the profit motive from the health question, as the right to medical treatment is one of the fundamental rights of man. But we are mired in a discussion that has profit at its bottom...

I want to know what it is that everyone out there is fed to keep them so compliant, so willing to cut their own throats on the altar of greed and capital... to act against their own interests.

The "I dont' want to do it/couldn't care less/am done with it/ because I'm sixty book club

Just a side commentary...

Yes, I'm sixty!

And that means "I don't want to/couldn't care less/am done with all of that.'

More on this later!!!!!!!!!!

P.D. I am thinking of bringing back hermitry... I am looking for someone who will give me a hermitage, with food and drink of course, overlooking some nice mountain. I do promise meaningful blog entries from time to time..

Welcome to Fascism 101

I almost don't want to actually write this down, but after reading Sara Robinson' "Fascist America: are we there yet?" http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009083205/fascist-america-are-we-there-yet, I "don't got no choice." Some years ago in the Poconos, at the end or start of one of our anti-war vigils, I talked about the rise and spread of fascism in the US, and it was picked up and printed in our local paper, and I was excoriated for it... One newspaper reader who always had something to say even suggested I be tried for sedition...

The truth is I don't want to talk about this, but yes, I do think if we are not there yet, we are very close. We've had the roving bands of nationalistic thugs around for a while (vigilante groups such as the Minute Men) and what I realized a while back, and a reason for my long silence from writing down my thoughts, is that the fact that we have a Black president who also has a foreign name, and actually God forbid a foreign parent (all the nonsense about his birth certificate is related to this) has pushed some final buttons in the minds of the 'thugs that be.' So in a way, it's all possible now. Welcome, not only to Fascism 101, but to Columbine redux!

More on all of this later...