Global
Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.
I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel — literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.
Identity is fluid, because concepts such as culture, history and collective self-perceptions are never fixed. They are in a constant state of flux and revision.
For hundreds of years, the map of the Roman Empire seemed more Mediterranean and, ultimately, Middle Eastern than European - per the geographic, or even geopolitical demarcation of today's Europe.
Hundreds of years of conflicts, wars and invasions redefined the Roman identity, splitting it, by the end of the fourth century, between West and East. But, even then, the political lines constantly changed, maps were repeatedly redrawn and identities fittingly redefined.
Mine! Mine! Mine! Praise God . . .
This is perhaps the worst thing human beings do: They take their deepest values — connection, love, empathy — simplify them down to a religion, a name (Christianity, let us say, or Judaism, or whatever) and suddenly they have a flag to wave and a “cause” to go to war for. And the blood flows. Kill the savages! Kill the non-believers! Kill the enemy! (Take their land.)
Here’s the question of the day, as Israel continues to inflict hell and starvation on Gaza, as brutal conflict and murder rage across the planet: How do we reclaim — and maintain — the integrity of our deepest values? Acting in love and connection with an “Other” is, or can be, remarkably complex; declaring the Other to be an evil being who doesn’t deserve to live not only simplifies things enormously, but allows part of humanity to connect with itself, in fear of that enemy.
VINNIE DESTEFANO’S information on Julian Assange includes a way YOU can help by calling your Senators & Representatives to get him FREE!
MYLA RESON, DAVID GURAN and WENDI LEDERMAN chime into the amazing battle to save the right to practice journalism anywhere on Earth.
RUTH STRAUSS talks to us about “Outside Agitators” and Joe Biden.
From Georgia's RAY MCCLENDON we hear the latest on the Trump prosecutions and also on the arrival of the Vogtle nuclear plant already devastating the Peach State economy.
Republican Arizona state Senator KEN BENNETT explains the 4-point program for guaranteeing safe, fair, digitally scanned paper ballots that produce accurate outcomes in public elections.
With legendary election protection pioneer JOHN BRAKEY we conduct an astonishing excursion into the workings of the AZ legislature’s progress into the world of actual democracy.
Will this publicly verifiable method of conducting the vote counting and auditing process become a national model? Let’s hope so.
Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ Indigenous peoples are being highlighted from May 1-10 at various L.A. venues and via an online platform during the 40th annual VC Film Fest (formerly the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented this festival, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” Although the majority of the productions screened are by Asian and Asian-American filmmakers, VCFF is arguably America’s top portal for films of Oceania, as L.A. is cinema’s global capital.
What is taking place in occupied Palestine is not a conflict, but a straightforward case of illegal military occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and outright genocide.
Those who insist on using ‘neutral’ language in depicting the crisis in Palestine are harming the Palestinian people beyond their seemingly innocuous words.
This morally non-committal, middle-ground language is now at work in Gaza. Here, the harm of this ‘impartiality’ is greatest.
