Op-Ed
People living with mental illness share many common traits. In the advocacy world, we share many of them openly. We discuss the symptoms of the illness, the uncertainty, the fear, and we share ways that people with mental illness can receive better treatment, better services, more understanding, and have better outcomes.
We have another common trait that is seldom shared. We all experience it, on some level, and most of us share it only with our trusted friends and family. When we sit alone with other mentally ill people, we swap stories. That is when the true, unaltered, unpolished feelings come out. And what comes out is anger. More than anything, people with mental illness are pissed off.
I am pissed off.
This should not come as a surprise. The surprising thing would be if I wasn't. Pissed off should be expected. I have been discriminated against, marginalized, ignored, insulted, talked down to, and cast out by the greater society. I am viewed as defective.
My accomplishments are meaningless when compared to a medical diagnosis that I just happened to be unlucky enough to have.
A wave of action is coming on April 4th, the date they killed MLK, the date Cindy Sheehan lost her son, the date cherry blossoms and resisters to fascism begin to show after an endless winter of many, many years. Take a look at https://waveofaction.org
Electing a different president six years ago was not a partial step, a failed attempt, a warm-up round. It was a halftime show of circus clowns and cheerleaders. The partial step, the failed attempt, the warm up, the ground work, the base of experience and training and testing was Occupy.
And what's happened since? We've learned more about how close Occupy came to shifting the balance. We've learned more about how scared the bankers and the warmongers and their servants in the unconstitutional police-state acronym crowd were (the FBI-DHS-CIA-NSA-SOBs). We've learned about the plans in Houston to murder Occupiers. We've learned about the infiltration, the instigation, the expropriation. We've looked back at the counterproductive results of tolerating a bit of violence on the side of justice and peace. We've marveled at the mistake of calling violence inclusiveness and tolerance.
Oh lethal, ticklish topic. So many people love guns and swear by them — many of them people with whom I am otherwise in essential political agreement. And it’s not like I relish a debate about “gun control,” a tug-of-war about limits that offends most gun lovers and causes weapon-buying sprees after every mass murder.
But the topic is unavoidable. The gun industry is part of the military-industrial complex and its advertising war aimed at the American reptile brain is centered around a permanent state of fear and, even more significantly, helplessness. Most people, or at least most gun owners, think “disarmed” means “disempowered” and the debate, such as it is, ends there.
The quote above is from an extraordinary essay by poet Judy Juanita, which gets at the spiritual dimension of the matter:
“The Gun as steel metaphor carrying the human urge to dominate and lay waste to an enemy or perceived threat. Guns as import and export. Hollywood’s Gun, its cinematic ordnance, is the United States’ international calling card.
“The Gun is oh-so-social as it erases human inequality. Anyone can obtain one and point . . . shoot . . .
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Anyone who cares about our natural environment should be marking with great sadness the centenary of World War I. Beyond the incredible destruction in European battlefields, the intense harvesting of forests, and the new focus on the fossil fuels of the Middle East, the Great War was the Chemists' War. Poison gas became a weapon -- one that would be used against many forms of life.
Insecticides were developed alongside nerve gases and from byproducts of explosives. World War II -- the sequel made almost inevitable by the manner of ending the first one -- produced, among other things, nuclear bombs, DDT, and a common language for discussing both -- not to mention airplanes for delivering both.
War propagandists made killing easier by depicting foreign people as bugs. Insecticide marketers made buying their poisons patriotic by using war language to describe the "annihilation" of "invading" insects (never mind who was actually here first). DDT was made available for public purchase five days before the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
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So the Republican Party pulled it off. On Friday, March 7 Ohio Libertarian governor hopeful Charlie Earl and his Attorney General candidate Steve Linnabary found out they were no longer candidates. Through thuggish and authoritarian tactics the Republicans managed to knock the gubernatorial candidates of both the Ohio Libertarian and Ohio Green Parties off the 2014 primary ballot.
How did they do it?
Like any two-bit dictator, they did it by usurping the U.S. Constitution and simply outlawing all minor parties in the state of Ohio. It is very difficult to get signatures for a candidate when your party has been banned from the ballot.
In legal terms, it is called “irreparable harm.”
Before he was banished from the ballot, Earl was polling at 6 percent of the vote. Political pundits across the state speculated that he might cost John Kasich to lose his re-election bid. The day Earl initially announced for governor, a Republican Party Senator introduced a bill that would kill all minor parties in Ohio.
Critics aptly nicknamed the bill “The John Kasich Re-Election Protection Act.”
The blatantly unconstitutional bill struck down by the U.S.
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Intertextuality be the name of the game y'all. A few weeks ago, I focused on the way Western media employs Vladimir Putin as a useful villain for its imperial narratives. Not even a day after I emailed the piece, I was in an airport walking past a newsstand when I saw the cover of Bloomberg Markets, and this was pre-Crimea. On the cover was a giant picture of the dear Comrade with the headline “Russia's CEO.” The tag was “Vladimir Putin is using oil giant Rosneft to tighten his grip on the country's economy.” When trying to understand why certain places or governments occupy such villainy in the media landscape, from Russia to Venezuela, it's important to remember that there is one word more than any other that strikes fear straight into the heart of the capitalist class: expropriation.
As a head of state, you can feel free to oppress your people at will and expect relative silence from the West, but expropriate one little oil company (like Rosneft did with Yukos Oil), and like clockwork, you can expect the headlines calling you a power-mad dictator to start rolling in. Truly, you will be an enemy of freedom. Political freedom, yes, but more importantly economic freedom.
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Under the absurd guise of “fairness,” Ohio Secretary of State Husted announced statewide uniform times for early voting for the 2014 fall general election. Unlike in past elections, there will be no early voting on Sundays. The Republicans who dominate Ohio politics, like Jon Husted, are targeting black, poor, elderly and young voters for disenfranchisement. Just like “Driving While Black” (DWB) has become a well-known acronym, so it is joined by “Voting While Black” (VWB).
Husted is not a born-again fundamentalist acting on old-time “day of rest” principles in barring a Sabbath voting day. Rather, he’s prohibiting it because black preachers have urged their congregations to vote on Sundays after church services.
These well-known “Souls to the Polls” crusades should be applauded in a democratic society. Instead, Husted and his Republican Inane Clown Posse close down voting at the times most convenient for voters. Another tactic they use is so blatantly ridiculous that it needs little rebuttal.
Alright, so admittedly, at this point, Israeli Apartheid Week may be over, but you know what is not over? The occupation of Palestine. I will not front, when I came back to Columbus, I was hella on a despondency tip 'bout the radical consciousness of the equilibrium of settler colonial America, but as home to the one of the nation's largest universities, it really should be no surprise that the Palestinian justice movement is modestly on and poppin'. This shit give me hope y'all because Columbus is the social justice equivalent of Liza Minelli's New York, New York. If you can organize here, you can organize anywhere. If the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement can make traction here, it can make it anywhere.
At this point, if y'all been payin' attention, it should be redundant as to why the Palestinian justice movement deserves attention. Instead, I shall examine what it means to embrace this movement at the emotional and political center of the seat of imperial power. Too often it is fashionable to relegate this movement to the confines of academia and cable news segments.
I’m speaking out for the children who are bombarded everyday with visions and sounds and negative images that can change who they think they are, before they know who they are, in this world.
I’m speaking out for the children who have been told that they can’t be what they want to be by the media and thus by their parents, caregivers and guardians who allow them to be exposed to the media without supervision and proper guidance to ensure they understand the messages they are receiving.
As adults we sometimes feel we can do what we want, listen to what we want and take our children to see what we want without any negative consequences. We play all kinds of sounds and images that can do serious damage to our children’s emotional growth, damage that we may not see until they are teenagers and adults and find it hard to “cope” with society and the people who make up our society.
I’m speaking out for the children no matter what color, race, creed or age, they are who are forced to see movies, videos, DVDs and listen to music that degrades women and men.
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When I started to pay attention to the movies on the black and white television in our family room, I loved to watch the “silly” negro actors who occasionally showed up in the old black and white movies from the 1930s and 40s. At the time, as a young child, I liked them just as much as the “silly” white actors in the movies. The only difference that I saw in the acting of the comedians was that most of them were white, with the exception of the few black actors.
It wasn’t until I was older and my father began to teach me my Black and Cherokee history on his family side and my mother taught me my Black and “possibly” white history on her side that I realized that the negro actors that I had been watching, and laughing at, when I was a youth were wearing “blackface.”
That’s right! The black people who already had “brown skin” were forced to wear “blackface” in order to get a “part” in a movie or in the theatre. Let’s look at a few of the Black actors who had to play the “role” to get a part in the 1930s and 40s: