Human Rights
The power of mass demonstrations to mobilize activism and move those in positions of power is minimized, first and foremost, by those opposed to popular power. Do not listen to them. Make them listen to us!
Can you give two days to stop the slaughter of innocents and the shameless profiteering from their blood? If you can give more, so much the better. But by giving two days, you will guarantee that others will give more. You will be part of building the necessary momentum, the key ingredient in social change.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies - in a sense - a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the threatening cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
This quote was from one of our countries most Distinguished Generals and Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Unfortunately, there are great profits in guns, warships, and rockets, and little profit in feeding our hungry children, clothing our cold children, and most importantly providing the educational, medical, mental, and social-net services that will give our children (yes, "our" children) a chance to succeed in our ever-more disconnected world. Our bloated military - industrial complex, with its huge profits, has taken over our lives and taken over our money, leaving little of our tax money for providing a safety-net for our children.
The cries of terror and disbelief continue. Teenagers lie down in front of the White House to protest the nation’s tepid, stalled gun-control legislation. Parents grieve for their children and stare at the wound carved into the American soul. Assault rifles have more rights than schoolchildren.
A movement simmers, or so it seems, a week after the latest deadly school shooting: seventeen people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, many more injured. A disturbed loner — yet another one — is arrested.
It’s not simply violence, but wildly profound violation, yet again, yet again, of the deepest of human values: Life is sacred.
Isn’t it?
How can this keep happening?
Nikolas Cruz, the south Florida shooter, was enrolled in the Army’s Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program as a 9th grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The Army taught Cruz to shoot lethal weapons at a very young and impressionable age.
Few in America have connected the dots between military indoctrination and firearms instruction on the one hand, and the propensity for training mass killers, whether their crimes are committed as enlisted soldiers in atrocities overseas or in American high schools.
Let’s examine the JROTC program and the militarization of Florida’s schools as a contributing factor to the Parkland massacre. When Cruz was apprehended he was wearing his JROTC polo shirt, sending a message to the world of his affiliation with the military program.
Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School practice in the school’s firing range.
Even in the age of Trump, there are wins. Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indians’ longtime mascot, is finally heading for the showers.
For decades my indigenous buddy Mark Welch trekked up from Columbus, Ohio to opening day at the Indians Major League Baseball stadium in Cleveland. He and fellow activists—indigenous and otherwise—would stand outside the gates of Progressive Field with signs demanding the team get rid of its god-awful, cringe-worthy, ridiculously offensive logo. The damn thing is a big-nosed, buck-toothed, feather-headed idiot grinning about something that made no sense.
The team hasn’t won a World Series since 1948, when it adopted a previous, even more offensive version of that logo.
reen Mountain homeboy Nathan Giffin was 32, white, and holding a BB pistol at his side when multiple police shot him multiple times outside the Montpelier High School he had once attended. Reportedly, Giffin had admitted addictions to cocaine and heroin, and maybe he even had an intent to die from suicide by cop. If so, he succeeded. Nine Vermont police officers pumped him full of bullets, dropping him on the spot as he stood passively at the far end of a football field after almost an hour standoff.
How is this not an extrajudicial execution that never should have happened?
The video of the shooting is clear. Giffin appears distracted, uncertain, he takes three slow steps forward, one backwards, then four to his left. Then he drops. This is a full-on shooting of a wandering young man by a disorderly firing squad that continues shooting for about three seconds after Giffin is down, mortally wounded.
Nazi rallies in the news in recent years have most prominently been held here in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, and in Ukraine. I want to send thoughts of solidarity to those in Ukraine resisting fascism. And I want to let you know that some of us are urging our government in Washington, D.C., to stop supporting fascism both in the United States and in Ukraine. In addition, we are pointing to the examples being set by so many shithole countries around the world that are 100% free of fascist rallies.
“Mr. Kim may be partly motivated by an intense need to roll back sanctions that, by all accounts, have begun to bite.”
Whoa and ouch. This was my wakeup paragraph. I was sitting at Starbucks, reading the New York Times, feeling confusing old emotions wash over me on the first day of the New Year, when suddenly these words hit me like a sucker punch: The sanctions against North Korea “have begun to bite”?
Below are two articles that nicely illustrate the cunning methods that ALL multinational mining, exploration, drilling, energy extractive or oil transporting corporations use to try to sanitize what in reality are greedy designs to enrich corporate stakeholders by raping, stealing, exploiting and permanently polluting the land, water and air that really has always belonged to the indigenous people and who simply want to protect what has always been theirs.
The first article illustrates how an otherwise respected major educational institution like Duke University (of Durham, North Carolina) could be easily bamboozled by financial enticements from an exploitive corporation. (Duke University was, incidentally, founded and funded by robber baron James Buchanan Duke,an exploitive tobacco and electric power industrialist that at one time acquired a monopoly on cigarettes and thus gained enormous wealth by marketing a highly addictive and deadly product.)