Human Rights
Are veterans of the U.S. military disproportionately likely to be mass killers in the United States? Asking such a question is difficult, first because of concerns of profiling, discrimination, etc., and second, because it’s hard to answer.
It’s important to answer because it’s important for us to know whether military training is contributing to this epidemic, a fact that (one must rush to say) would not somehow eliminate the roles played by gender, guns, mental illness, domestic violence, a violent culture, the mass media, economic inequality, or anything else.
Basically, it’s kidnapping.
Were the Border Patrol agents wearing MAGA hats when they grabbed Rosa Maria Hernandez as she left her hospital room?
“It’s a shocking case — the most outrageous case I’ve ever seen. Is it a preview of things to come?” ACLU attorney Michael Tan said to me about the incident, shortly after the civil-rights group filed suit against the federal government demanding the 10-year-old child’s release from a detention facility in Texas, 150 miles from her home in Laredo.
Rosa Maria, who has cerebral palsy, was arrested at a children’s hospital on Oct. 25, the day after she had emergency gall bladder surgery. She’s been at the detention center for a week now, under the bureaucratic “care” of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which wants to ship her back to Mexico.
The child’s problem is that, although she has lived in the United States since she was three months old, she’s illegal. Her mother brought her into the U.S. — from Nuevo Laredo to Laredo — so she could get better medical care.
The swampish saga would be hard to invent. In early October, Puerto Rico’s Energy Power Authority awarded a $300 million tax-funded contract to reconstruct the island’s hurricane devastated power grid to a two-person, two-year-old firm based in the small Montana hometown of Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The company is financially backed by a major donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
About eighty percent of Puerto Rico is still without power. Many hospitals are still dark. Local citizens needing medical treatments such as surgeries or dialysis have been forced to flee to places where electric power is available.
“. . . insects as a group are in terrible trouble and the remorselessly expanding human enterprise has become too much, even for them.”
And instantly I’m beyond the realm of anything I know, as I consider the gradual disappearance not of whales but of . . . beetles, moths and hoverflies, thanks to the human enterprise we call civilization, as Michael McCarthy put it in The Guardian.
October 16th marked the 49th anniversary of an iconic moment in sports history, a moment which exemplified the unwavering dedication necessary to the conduction of actions of civil disobedience.
At the 1968 Olympics Games in Mexico City, two black U.S. medalists—Tommie Smith and John Carlos— had bowed their heads, closed their eyes and raised their glove-covered hands into the shape of a fist. This salute, also known as the “black power salute,” was held for the entire duration of the U.S. National Anthem. These men, in the course of a few minutes, had created waves in the international community and would forever be remembered for their influence on the Black liberation movement in the U.S. This silent protest was orchestrated in order to highlight the rampant racial inequality in the states and bring awareness to the racial injustices African-Americans faced on a daily basis.
For many years, I have held two shares in America’s only publicly owned major sports team, the Green Bay Packers. There are no dividends, no special seats, no stadium perks. I cannot sell the shares. I can only pass them on to immediate family. But owning these shares does in fact make me a part-owner. And as such, I am registering my first demand: The Pack must hire Colin Kaepernick.
Kaepernick’s pathbreaking “take a knee” before the national anthem guarantees him an historic place in the civil rights hall of fame. Begun last year, it is a carefully considered,well-timed, and very public call to pay attention to ongoing police brutality toward black people in this country.
“Dear NFL: We will not support millionaire ingrates who hate America and disrespect our Armed Forces and Veterans. Who wins a football game has ZERO impact on our lives. Who fights for and defends our nation has every impact on our lives. We stand with the Heroes, not a bunch of rich, entitled, arrogant, ungrateful, anti-American, degenerates. Signed, We the people.”
We have suffered brutal direct hits. Over half of the state of Florida is without power, in the dark. It is too soon to know what the losses are. Houston, America’s fourth largest city, suffered the most extreme rain event in U.S. history. Casualties are mounting; damages are estimated at a staggering $125 billion.
Ash from wildfires in the West is blanketing Seattle; every county in Washington is under state of an emergency. The smoke is felt in the air all the way to the East Coast. Last year was the hottest on record, exceeding the record set the year before that which exceeded the record set the year before that.
Extreme weather is becoming more frequent and more extreme. For climate scientists, this is predictable and predicted. As the Earth warms, the ice caps melt, the oceans grow warmer; more moisture is absorbed in the clouds, the rains become worse and the severe storms more severe.
“Even if you’re the one charged, you will help create the answer.”
And the court has now come to order.
The speaker is Colleen Sheehan, the presiding judge of the Restorative Justice Community Court, which opened last week in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale, after several years of intense planning.