Global
I usually try not to pay too much attention to the ubiquitous and repetitious, end-of-year summaries that media outlets feel compelled to publish in the week leading up to New Year’s Day. Not a lot of original journalism gets done during the last week of the year. The week after Christmas is vacation time for a lot of newspapers’ employees. Recycling old news reports from the past year is something even a newspaper’s unpaid interns can do.
In many ways it is painful to reflect on the year 2018; a year of vital opportunities lost when so much is at stake.
Whether politically, militarily, socially, economically, financially or ecologically, humanity took some giant strides backwards while passing up endless opportunities to make a positive difference in our world.
Let me, very briefly, identify some of the more crucial backward steps, starting with the recognition by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January that the year had already started badly when they moved the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, the closest it has ever been to ‘doomsday’ (and equal to 1953 when the Soviet Union first exploded a thermonuclear weapon matching the US capacity). See ‘It is now two minutes to midnight’.
The Offense was an alternative music fanzine published by Tim Anstaett that appeared between April '80 and March '82, according it its Facebook Event page. Anstaett covered the punk and alternative music scene in Columbus from 1982 through 1989. Some Columbus-ites will remember the campus scene when Crazy Mama’s was the place to be.
The Offense was “…one of the longest-running and most prolific punk fanzines of the midwest. The fanzine was one of the primary sources in the US for information on post-punk and goth acts of the time as well, with features on Nick Cave, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Wolfgang Press, and other acts. This run includes the rare unnumbered Cave Report issue, a one sheet issued to report on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' visit to the Midwest,” writes www.divisionleap.com.
Here in Charlottesville, as in most places, we like our stories simple. Most books by local author John Grisham have good guys and bad guys. When a UVa sports team wins, everybody says “Yay, we won!” When it loses, three-quarters of the people say “Boo, we lost!” Reality that gets messier than a coyote and roadrunner adventure gives us trouble.
When we’re fed a fictional tale of sexual assault at a UVa fraternity by Rollingstone magazine, we like to declare that every other tale except that one is true or, alternatively, that every other tale is, just like that one, false. We’re less comfortable with the notion that a lot of tales are true and a lot of other ones false, and yet other ones partially true and partially false. It seems too sloppy. What are people supposed to wear, gray hats? How do we distinguish the angels from the demons, the bunny from the lisping hunter?
We particularly struggle with our national and international news stories that involve someone local dying: Humayun Khan, Otto Warmbier, Heather Heyer.
You’ve got 5,000 armed foreign troops stationed in your country. You don’t say a word until the idiot foreign emperor stages a surprise visit. Then you’re outraged principally because he didn’t notify you or meet with you or put up any pretense that your country belonged to you in any way. At that point you demand that the U.S. occupation of Iraq finally be brought to a bitter better-late-than-never end. And you’re damn right.
On Christmas day Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney biopic Vice was released, with John Hillner (Law & Order) portraying George Bush Sr. After the ex-president’s Nov. 30 death, as accolades were heaped upon George Herbert Walker Bush even before his cadaver was cold I wondered who were they talking about? The effusive eulogizing reminded me of Ted Rall’s August 28 column headlined “Please Speak Ill of the Dead.” The columnist/cartoonist wrote: “‘Too soon!’ That was a standard response to my criticisms of John McCain following his death… ‘Do not speak ill of the dead.’ This dictum, attributed to the 6th century BCE philosopher Chilon of Sparta, may be appropriate at your uncle’s funeral… Public figures are different.”
The environmental policy centerpiece of the incoming Democratic House of Representatives has ignited tremendous grassroots enthusiasm.
The environmental policy centerpiece of the incoming Democratic House of Representatives is what’s now known as “The Green New Deal.” But it’s already hit deeply polarizing pushback from the old-line Democratic leadership. And it faces divisive jockeying over the future of nuclear power.
The Green New Deal’s most visible public advocate, newly elected twenty-nine-year-old U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, has laid out a preliminary blueprint advocating an energy economy meant to be based entirely on “renewable” and “clean” sources. According to a report in The Hill, fossil fuels and nuclear power are “completely out” of her plan.
Oppression has many layers and one of the most significant and difficult to overcome is internalized oppression. This conditioning, operating on conscious and subconscious levels, leads us to choose what hurts us because we’ve been taught to believe that we have no other options.
For those of us conditioned as passive enablers of white supremacy, we don’t tend to enter the fight in earnest until we feel we have skin in the game. It wasn’t until Mike Brown’s killer Darren Wilson didn’t even get indicted by the grand jury that I realized I was also a piece and the entire game was rigged. The realization left me so disturbed that I physically felt compelled to action. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that my inability to see the humanity in my own people from the point of a life being taken, rather than the point of an institution “failing,” was contributing to the problem of action without movement.