19.2 - Re-introducing myself on our 6th anniversary

Re-introducing myself on our 6th anniversary

Okay, I’m going to spend the rest of the show on that more sort of personal note.

Knowing that only a very small number of you have seen the show from the beginning - in fact only a very small number could have seen the show from the beginning - I thought I’d take advantage of the anniversary to give myself a break from the worries of the world and spend the rest of the show introducing (or re-introducing) myself, so that what I say here can be put into a broader context of ethical, moral, and political convictions. Which, by the way, is something I think all political commentators should do at some point to give their viewers or readers a context into which what they say can be placed.

I have several times described What's Left as an example of what’s known as advocacy journalism, a type of journalism that respects the standards of accuracy and the separation of fact and interpretation of fact from opinion but nonetheless has a definite and clear point of view. It is journalism intended to inform and inspire and by putting facts into an ethical context to spur action. That is and always has been my goal here.

So to introduce myself, I'm going to start out by talking about a socio-psychological concept called "worldview." Your worldview is your way of mentally organizing the world around you so that it makes sense, your way of putting order to what you perceive.

We all have a worldview. And not just individuals, cultures have a worldview. In fact, one of the things that defines a culture is a shared worldview, a generally-shared (but often implicit) understanding of how reality functions. That worldview can be radically different from one culture to another and can vary within a culture over time. For example, the worldview we hold today in this culture is dramatically different from the worldview held by the first wave of European settlers of North America in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The point is, still, that no matter what the particular worldview is, every culture has one; without a shared worldview, a culture will fracture for lack of a bond to hold it together.*

The same holds true for individuals: You have a worldview, you need to have a worldview as it is difficult if not impossible to function otherwise. Without a worldview, everything appears as chaos. Even something as seemingly basic and obvious as cause and effect is part of your worldview, a concept of how reality works. Imagine trying to function without any notion of cause and effect. That will give you a sense of trying to function without a worldview.

More important to my immediate purpose is that within your worldview, there is a more limited version of it which applies to political/moral/ethical considerations. That worldview drives your sense of right and wrong, proper and improper; it informs your convictions about what should and shouldn't be.

For most people, forming that personal worldview is part of maturation. Again for most people, that worldview doesn't change much once it is formed. It can, but not usually and even then by very much. Even what appear to be such changes, for example in political beliefs, often enough are not changes in basic concepts that constitute a worldview but in the interpretation of events and experiences in light of that worldview. Your worldview, that is, is part of your basic psychological make-up - and that doesn't change easily once formed. That doesn’t mean it can’t change - but it is quite uncommon.

So having said that, what I want to do is lay out what I think are important elements of how I reached the final, you could say mature, form of my worldview.

Perhaps the most important thing to say is that I am, in many ways, "a child of the '60s," having come to political awareness during that brief (and, some would have it, mythical) interregnum marked at one end by the Sgt. Pepper summer, known to some as the Summer of Love, and at the other by Altamont - or, if you prefer a political description, by Flower Power and the Days of Rage.

For those of you who are less than about 55 and have no idea what those terms mean, you can look them up. For now, it's enough to know that we're talking about the period of say, 1967-1970.

Like most - at least male - members of my generation, it was Vietnam, the Vietnam War, that initially drew me beyond vague "concern" into concrete political involvement: Even for those of us "safe" with draft deferments - and again, that's something that folks now maybe can't relate to, the fact that there was a military draft, under which you could be required under pain of lengthy imprisonment to join the Army and go wherever they sent you, even into a war you thought criminal, and the fact that you can't relate to that is something about which I'm glad - but during the Vietnam era, even for those of us with deferments, who could feel confident that at least for now you couldn't be drafted, that war was always there. It swirled around us like a mist, a fog, it tugged at us like an undertow, it threaded in and out of our lives, our thoughts about our futures, our consciousnesses, and the only way you could ignore it was by making the focused effort to do so.

In fact, I think that those of what I'll call the "Vietnam generation" have a greater understanding of the impact that World War II had on our parents than those of what I'll call the "Iraq generation" have of the impact Vietnam had on us. Because no matter how you measure it, the Vietnam War - which is properly called the Indochina War because it involved Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia - was a much bigger war than Iraq or Afghanistan ever were.

For example, peak US troop strength in Iraq was 168,000 and the peak year for Iraq and Afghanistan troop strength combined was fiscal 2008, at 188,000. Peak US troop strength in Vietnam was over 536,000, nearly three times as many - and by the way, South Vietnam, where the vast majority of those troops were, was about 40% the size of Iraq.

US troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, up to April 18 of this year, total just over 6,900. US troops killed in the Indochina War totaled over well over 58,000 - well over eight times as many. US wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan combined reached around 50,000; those wounded in Indochina were over 300,000, over six times as many.

So yes, a much bigger war. Significantly more troops, significantly more wounded, significantly more dead. And for those of us who questioned the war, who asked our government about the whens, wherefores, and, most importantly, whys of the war, it seemed that each of the "answers" we got just raised at least two new questions.

Politically, I had grown up in the mold of my parents, a mold that was at one time called a "(Hubert) Humphrey Democrat" and which I came to call a "right wing liberal," a type that is now commonly called a "liberal war hawk," that species of American political animal that's at least fairly liberal on domestic issues and clearly conservative on foreign policy, a type whose philosophy I later summed up as "hooray for justice, beauty, truth, and Kill Commies."

My personal breaking point over the war came when I heard the man who was then the commander of US forces in the war, I believe it was William Westmoreland, say "We're winning the war, just give us six more months" - and I recalled having heard exactly the same thing six months earlier. I still recall thinking "Okay, I'll give you your six months - but after that you've lost me."

And of course, the war didn't end in six months, it dragged on for years more amid repeated promises that it was, really, already over.

The sort of, the term was and is, increasing alienation that generated plus mounting evidence of what the governments we supported in South Vietnam were really like - brutal dictatorships - eventually prompted me to, very shyly, attend a meeting of a local peace group. That was, if memory serves, in the fall of 1968. I still remember walking into this room in a church basement and being greeted by a tall man with a beard and a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. In fact, he later added a mustache because he got tired of the Lincoln jokes. His name was Jack Caroli.

Okay, you can relax; it's over now. I've no intention of inflicting my entire autobiography on you.

But knowing the roots of my involvement in the movement may help to some degree to explain where I've wound up: I'm an aging hippie, an educator, and a political activist, the terms' order of presentation depending on circumstances and my mood of the moment. I'm also a democratic socialist-green with an anarchist bent and a civil liberties absolutist who has, by both logical conclusion and moral compulsion, a commitment to active nonviolence both as political tactic and way of life. The only isms I wholeheartedly endorse are skepticism and eclecticism.

I have also flippantly described myself at times as a socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclecticist-iconoclast. After people's eyes stop glazing over, I explain:

I'm a capitalist in that I believe in the "Ma and Pa" store, the community-level enterprise, the small factory, the two- or three-store chain.

I'm a communalist in that I believe that cooperative ventures are better than competitive ones.

I'm a socialist in that I believe that beyond a certain size, profit-seeking enterprises cannot be trusted to be responsible to the communities in which they operate and at that point the community as a whole has the right and the responsibility to step in to exercise control and make decisions, up to and including assuming ownership.

I'm an anarchist in that I believe in doing that with as little government as necessary and with individual freedom and civil liberties being at the maximum possible consistent with social justice.

I'm an eclecticist in that I believe you can put this together into a reasonably coherent social philosophy.

And I'm an iconoclast in that - well, you may have heard that the I Ching, the Chinese "book of changes," is based on the notion that "the only thing that doesn't change is the fact that everything else changes." My version of this is that I believe "the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer" and so if we ever did build a society along the lines I envision the first thing I'd do is to try to figure out what was wrong with that one and how it could be improved.

In doing this show, I'm guided by four editorial principles:

1) "To thine own self be true." Which, as I expect you know, is a quote from Shakespeare.

2) "The US isn't the worst - but it is the biggest." That's a quote from Joan Baez.

3) "Sometimes a bit of humor contains more inner truth than the most serious seriousness." That's from a chess grandmaster named Aron Nimzovich.

4) "No one but no one, no matter their ideology, political perspective, or status as 'left' or 'right,' can be by that reason exempt from either criticism or praise." That's from me.

The bottom line point is that I have always believed that in any political movement, everyone has some skill they can use, some skill they can contribute to advance the cause. While my list of inadequacies on any compilation of useful skills is quite lengthy, I do have some skill with words. With writing. Talking. Giving speeches. And like that.

In front of a gray wall

So this, ultimately, is just another way I think I can be of use, another way to try to advance the idea of justice, another attempt to maintain the hope that is the only thing that keeps us going. It is, if you will, another light against the darkness, another, again if you will and if you remember the song, another candle in the rain.**

That’s enough about me. As for the show itself, there have been some changes in it over the time it's been on. At first, the show consisted of just me standing in front of a gray background, rambling on about whatever I was rambling on about that week.

After a time, in order to keep the camera crew from going insane trying to follow me around as I wandered around the stage as I talked, we went to having me sit on a stool and around that time we added graphics.

On a stool with graphics

But I was just more comfortable standing, so we set up a podium and there I was, standing with my right hand leaning on a podium, still in front of that same gray background. This made me happy because I was standing and made the camera crew happy because I was standing in one place.

Then it got fun because we were able to start using what's technically called chroma key but is more commonly known as green screen, where we can replace the background with whatever image we want to put up. As I do the show, all that is behind me is a blank green wall. But through the magic of computers, we can replace that with whatever we want. So we had me, my podium, and graphics. What more could I ask.

At the podium

Then I blew out my knee bad enough that I couldn't stand without crutches. So we started used the desk-style look while I recovered - which yes, I did some time back, thank you for asking - but after a few weeks, I decided I like it. So that's the look we have for now - but don't be shocked if you see me standing again at some point.

Over the course of doing the show, we developed two regular features: One is the Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity, which was supposed to be an occasional feature but there has been more than enough stupidity to keep it going, and it has become, I think, our most popular feature. The other regular feature, of course, is the Outrage of the Week because what would I do if I couldn't be outraged about something.

We also have developed some occasional features, which pop up time to time, including the Hero Award, given to recognize someone who just did the right thing on a matter big or small; Everything You Need To Know, where a truth can be revealed in no more than a sentence or two; The Little Thing, where some passing reference in a news story points to something significant which isn't getting enough notice; And Another Thing, for fun science stuff; For the Record, where we address issues briefly just to make sure they don't get ignored; Updates on old stories; and of course the not-quite-regular but happily frequent feature, Good News.

I have been helped so much over these past six years by several people without who this simply would not have happened or even if it did would not have gone on nearly so long as it has and hopefully will. These folks have helped me and do help me. So I want to acknowledge them and say thank you.

First and foremost, my deepest thanks to Donna, just for being Donna. She is my strength, my source, my reason to get up each day.

Next there are the folks here at the station where I do this, leading off with Will McKinnon - cameraman and video editor extraordinaire of song and fable.

Then there is or there are Kris, Yvanna, and Dylan, who keep things moving around here with their youthful energy and can, amazingly, even make the old fart sometimes feel like one of the gang.

And there’s Rich Goulart, Executive Director and the all-around go-to guy here, who was willing to take a chance: When I first approached him about doing a weekly show of political commentary, one I flippantly described as a left-wing Glenn Beck minus the chalkboard and the paranoia, he - I could tell - wasn't too sure that it wouldn't peter out after a few weeks. But he took the chance to let me do it my way and I hope in the time since he's been given enough cause to be happy with his decision.

Finally, I want to thank not a person but a concept: public access television.

You're watching me on TV right now (unless you're watching on YouTube). Yes, it's TV - but it's special. It's public access TV - also called cable access television, community access television, and community television.

Whatever you call it, public access TV involves providing equipment, training, and airtime so members of the general public can produce their own programs and deliver them to the audience of that local cable TV system.

And potentially far beyond: This show is regularly seen, to my knowledge, on four cable systems covering more than a dozen communities with a combined subscriber base likely in excess of 250,000. So potentially, hypothetically, this show could be seen in 250,000 households. Just me, just an ordinary schlub - how did Eric Burden describe himself in that song? "An overfed, long-haired, leaping gnome." And there could potentially be thousands of people hearing what I have to say.

It's public access TV which makes that possible.

From its roots in the late '60s and despite initial intense opposition form the cable industry, public access TV has become firmly established. It's now estimated that over 1500 cities, town, and regions across the country have public access channels available and those 1500 areas are managing something like 5000 channels.

You're watching one of those channels now. This is public access TV. Public access TV. That means it's for you. It's for us. It's for all of us. Take advantage of it. It doesn't have to be political. It could be about a hobby, about an interest, whatever. It doesn't have to be a series, it could be a one-off: Maybe you  have a story you want to tell about some place or some person or some historical event. Take advantage of public access TV. Go to your local cable access station and talk to them - I bet they'll be glad to help.

Public access television. I took advantage of it. You should, too.

Let me finish up by thanking those of you who watch the show and those of you who have commented on it. Thank you for taking the time and I look forward to more comments and, I hope, to make a show worth watching. Let me know how I do.

*The possibility of social fracture from lack of a shared worldview is an issue that appears to be arising in the US. It may be that fault line has always been there but just has been successfully papered over until recently - which means it could be again - or it could mean that in terms of worldview, we really are becoming two different societies trying to share a common geography with all the risks of intensifying conflict that entails.

**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaiT8gATzxc

Annual May Day post

In May 2002, someone on a mailing list I was on posted a message asking people to take a moment of silence on Memorial Day, saying "Let us ensure that those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom are not forgotten."

In response, I wrote this, which I like to recall every Memorial Day:

And in that silent moment remember, too, the many nonviolent warriors who struggled, searched, sacrificed, for justice and freedom, who remain without songs or memorials to celebrate their lives or their passing, but who at some moment stood weaponless against the machinery of oppression and showed in their simple “No more” a force that can move history.

And here now in 2016, with our "practical" choice limited to on the one hand someone who voted for the Iraq War, took credit for the Libya attack, approves of the drone wars, and would have undermined the nuclear deal with Iran and on the other hand someone whose rambling, self-indulgent monologues make George Bush seem coherent - that is, between the hawk and the doofus more interested in seeing if he can score the ultimate pitch than in actually being president - it is wise to remember that while some describe war as a force that gives us meaning, it is better described as a racket and a lie.

246.9 - RIP: Dan Berrigan

RIP: Dan Berrigan

We end this week with an RIP. I have on several past occasions introduced one of these with some form of the phrase "another part of my youth slips away." So it is here, but this one is different, because it's not a part of my cultural youth, it's a part of for lack of a better term my spirit.

Dan Berrigan - teacher, author of more than 50 books of poetry and essays - Dan Berrigan - playwright, protestor, prisoner, and prophet - died on April 30, nine days short of his 95th birthday. The cause of death was heart failure after a lengthy illness.

Berrigan - more formally Father Daniel Berrigan, as he was a Jesuit priest - was at one time one of the best-known and most controversial figures on the American political scene and a figure whose grace and courage were a major inspiration to me as during the latter 1960s my eyes were opened and my political beliefs were turned radical by the Indochina War along with the words of humanity, insight, and truth from, among others, Dan Berrigan.

Even though his activism against poverty and other wrongs both predates and postdates it, Dan Berrigan first came to widespread public awareness through his opposition to the war that radicalized so many of my generation. With Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, he helped found Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. With his younger brother Phil, another Catholic priest who later left the priesthood to get married, he founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship.

Fr. Daniel Berrigan

But he really came to public attention on May 17, 1968, when he, Phil, and seven others took over 300 draft files out of the Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, brought them to the parking lot, and burned them with homemade napalm, created for the occasion based on a recipe in a Green Beret handbook.

He turned the record of the ensuing trial into a play which became a movie, both called, appropriately, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, the text for which consisted mostly of trial transcripts.

It included this line which has forever since echoed across my conscience. Quoting himself, Dan wrote

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

One historian called the Catonsville action "the single most powerful anti-war act in American history."  It lead to more than 100 similar raids on draft board, throwing a huge monkey wrench into the machine grinding out cannon fodder for an increasingly-unpopular war.

The nine were of course convicted - but when appeals ran out in 1970, Dan surprised everyone by refusing to report to federal prison. He went underground, from safe house to safe house, and spent four months dodging the FBI. During that time, he gave interviews and even a couple of speeches - he was, in the words of Phil Berrigan's wife Liz McAllister, "available to everyone except the FBI." This was so embarrassing to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI that Dan became the first priest ever to be on the agency's 10 Most Wanted list.

Ultimately, of course, he was caught as he knew he eventually would be. His hosts and guides made a mistake and he was arrested on Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, the "Island" in "Block Island" being the mistake. He then spent two years in prison.

That, however, was far from the end of his story. On September 9, 1980, Dan, with seven other people, again including his brother Phil, walked into a GE plant in the town of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, right past startled security guards, and started hammering on nose cones being fashioned for the MK (or "Mark") 12A, a highly-advanced, precision-targeted, nuclear weapon. They were trying symbolically to "hammer swords into plowshares," thus giving rise to the name the Plowshares Movement. Again, it inspired and in fact continues to inspire similar actions of what came to be known as "direct disarmament." But in the short term, it meant more prison time for Dan and others.

He never retreated from his radicalism, his pacifism, his nonviolence, or his activism. He continued to speak, write, and march. His last arrest for civil disobedience, as far as I know, was in 2006 at the age of 85.

I never met Dan Berrigan. I would have liked to but the chance never arose; the closest I came was being in the same room and that was partly of my doing. Every year, the War Resisters League had a Peace Dinner during which they gave a peace award to someone. It always had a very wonderfully nonviolent-lefty-activist vibe: no fancy meal on linen tablecloths with embroidered cloth napkins in front of a raised dais, it was a large-scale pot-luck, usually at a church hall somewhere in lower Manhattan.

In 1974, Dan had published an essay about the Middle East which was critical of Israel and if you think it can be hard to criticize Israel today because of the flak you get, those decades back it was much worse. The denunciations of him as everything from ignorant to pro-terrorist to antisemitic poured out of various voices, including a distressing number on the left. The word was he was feeling depressed and isolated by the reaction.

The Catonsville 9, May 17, 1968

The League had been planning on giving the award that year to Dave Dellinger, but the suggestion was made to switch it to Dan as encouragement and a display of solidarity. I was at the time on the Executive Committee of the War Resisters League and was one of those who convinced the others to make the change.

(Parenthetically, it developed that Dave Dellinger, when asked about it, enthusiastically endorsed the change.)

My other connection to Dan Berrigan, one even more tenuous, was during his time evading the FBI. The possibility was raised that my house was one of the ones he would stay in. It never got beyond the point of a possibility and I suspect there were in those months a lot more possibilities raised than were seriously pursued, but still it seemed pretty cool at the time. And still does, in fact.

Now, I didn't agree with Dan Berrigan on everything - for example, he was opposed to both euthanasia and abortion and I am strongly in favor of the right to both. And while I don't know what his feelings were on the matters, given his background and training I would not be surprised to find such disagreements over matters such as LGBTQ rights.

But despite those disagreements and despite not having met him, I did encounter his writings and more importantly his actions, which taken together became one of the things that helped to form and to inform the person I have become.

Because I've talked here about how I'm a green, a leftist, a radical, a democratic socialist, and such. But there is something I haven't talked about much that also informs my opinions and analyses: I am a pacifist.

Which usually is something you say on TV when you want to lose viewers. But it's true and, thanks in part to, among others, Dan Berrigan, it's part of who I am.

I am not going to inflict my autobiography on you; if you want to know how I shifted from what would these days be called a "liberal warhawk" to where I've wound up, ask. For the moment, I'll just say that my experience of actual - not movie, not cartoon, not play, but actual - violence and seeing its effects and seeing how people responded to it provoked my conscience to an utter clarity of "this cannot be right." That large-scale organized violence cannot be right.

And no, I'm not interested in any cliche tsk-tsking and tut-tutting about how "unrealistic" I'm being, nor do I need any lectures on the destructiveness of institutional violence, nor do I need to be reminded that it's easy for those of us not suffering under the yoke of an oppressor to urge the oppressed to foreswear murderous violence, especially when it is equally easy for us to romanticize such violence, to embrace it as "necessary" or "liberating" when we do not have to live with blood and gore and shredded limbs and the shrieks of the wounded, writhing in pain, and the wails of the widows and the widowers and the orphans and the cries of the parents holding their dead children while sitting among the smoking ruins of what had been their homes and fields.

Because that is the reality hidden behind the "necessity" of violence, a reality of tens - of hundreds - of millions around the world, past and present, abused by military power of one sort or another, almost if not always in the name of some supposed "higher purpose." A reality of the real effect of real violence on real people.

Wars and armed conflicts of one sort or another are now going on in Nigeria, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and who knows how many other places, and in every one of them you can be damn sure that no one on any side has picked up a gun or dropped a bomb or fired a rocket or laid a mine or set a booby-trap without claiming to be on the side of the angels; no one has blown someone's head off or burned a village to the ground or tortured a prisoner without claiming it's in pursuit of "justice" or "freedom" or "self-defense" or the "glory of God" (or "Jesus" or "Allah" or whoever).

Peace and RIP, Dan Berrigan

That's the reality. Not musings about how you'd "prefer" nonviolence or about "self-defense" or, horribly, the "creative" aspects of violence. The reality, rather, of death, destruction, and despair in which everyone on every side claims that they are the wounded innocents and they had "no other choice."

But we refuse to see that reality, we ignore it, we repress it, even as despite that we know it. We repress it so far that we commit to its opposite, we commit to the notion that "security" outranks "justice" and that such security is found in being rough and tough rather than in being fair and just.

Dan Berrigan saw it and could not ignore it, could not repress it. Instead, he threw his life against it, fully embracing his own credo that "One is called to live nonviolently even if the change one works for seems impossible."

Because it is only by hammering on the impossible that it can be reformed first into the unlikely and then into the inevitable. Dan Berrigan has laid down his hammer. Let's hope that enough among us find the grace and courage to pick it up.

RIP, Dan Berrigan.

Sources cited in links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Berrigan
http://ncronline.org/news/people/daniel-berrigan-priest-prisoner-anti-war-crusader-dies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/daniel-j-berrigan-pacifist-priest-who-led-antiwar-protests-dies-at-94/2016/04/30/44606680-0f1e-11e6-8ab8-9ad050f76d7d_story.html
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/04/30/daniel-berrigan-dead-94
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/2/rip_father_daniel_berrigan_remembering_the
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/break-in-at-y-12
https://transformnowplowshares.wordpress.com/
https://www.warresisters.org/
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/5/27/revolutionary_non_violence_remembering_dave_dellinger
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dave_Dellinger
http://warprayer.org/

Left Side of the Aisle #246

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of May 5-11, 2016

This week:
Good News: Connecticut controls guns
http://abcnews.go.com/US/connecticut-state-legislature-passes-gun-control-bill-aimed/story?id=38846693
http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Senate-approves-gun-seizures-7388578.php

Good News: "Bathroom bill" fails in conservative Texas city
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwall,_Texas
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/rockwall-rowlett/headlines/20130817-editor-s-note-yes-there-are-democrats-in-rockwall.ece
https://www.texasobserver.org/rockwall-rejects-anti-trans-bathroom-ordinance/
http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/03/20/15-experts-debunk-right-wing-transgender-bathro/198533

Not Good News: Racism persists
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/05/02/this-old-navy-ad-featuring-an-interracial-family-is-being-attack/21368996/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/04/04/do-blacks-feel-less-pain-than-whites-their-doctors-may-think-so/

A new definition of chutzpah
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/chutzpah?s=t
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/04/23/darnell-earley-attorney-flint-water/83382484/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/26/1491846/-E-mails-show-Michigan-Gov-Snyder-s-aides-warned-about-degraded-water-quality-in-Flint-early-on

Clown Award: psychologist James Mitchell
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cia-prisoners-torture_us_5718140ce4b0479c59d6f894
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cia-torture-lawsuit_us_571a8fdbe4b0d0042da94ac0
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cia-torture-program-psychologist-book_us_57226af8e4b0f309baf04616

Virginia extends voting rights
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/02/2371-good-news-some-voting-rights.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/04/2433-supreme-court-unanimously-smacks.html
http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/politics/virginias-awesomely-sneaky-governor-screws-republicans-restores-voting-rights-to-200000-americans/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/04/22/about-200000-convicted-felons-in-virginia-will-now-have-the-right-to-vote-in-november/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/us/governor-terry-mcauliffe-virginia-voting-rights-convicted-felons.html

Outrage of the Week: Wisconsin restricts voting rights
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/5/1510915/-Scott-Walker-s-Wisconsin-may-disenfranchise-300-000-Americans-in-blatant-voter-fraud-scheme
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/todd-allbaugh-voter-id-wisconsin-gop
http://www.wpr.org/walker-signs-bill-blocking-communities-issuing-ids-voting

Lovely little war: Navy SEALs involved in direct combat with Daesh
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/05/03/us-service-member-killed-in-northern-iraq.html

RIP: Dan Berrigan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Berrigan
http://ncronline.org/news/people/daniel-berrigan-priest-prisoner-anti-war-crusader-dies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/daniel-j-berrigan-pacifist-priest-who-led-antiwar-protests-dies-at-94/2016/04/30/44606680-0f1e-11e6-8ab8-9ad050f76d7d_story.html
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/04/30/daniel-berrigan-dead-94
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/2/rip_father_daniel_berrigan_remembering_the
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/5/27/revolutionary_non_violence_remembering_dave_dellinger
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dave_Dellinger
http://warprayer.org/

169.5 - Nonviolence and Me, Part 5

Nonviolence and Me, Part 5

[This week's show was one long discussion of my commitment to nonviolence. For ease of reading, I have broken it into five parts, this being the fifth.]

I can understand the lure of violence. I can. With violence, more than with nonviolence, you can feel that you're doing something. You can see a result of an action. For an example, we need look no further than Israel and the Palestinians. I'm quite sure that every time Hamas or some other militant group fires a rocket into southern Israel, it feels like they are striking a blow against the oppressor - even though after decades of violence against Israelis they are no closer to justice or a homeland of their own.

Israelis, for their part, no doubt feel that the incursions in the West Bank and the slaughter in Gaza are landing telling blows against the "threat" - even though after decades of violence against Palestinians they are no closer to security or peace.

Violence has clearly failed for both antagonists, yet neither seems willing or even able to realize it.

So it’s simply not true that there’s "no choice," even less that the only choice is between murderous violence and passivity. There is a choice: the choice of seeking to preserve life rather than destroy it, to think in terms of "we" rather than "us versus them," to control conflict rather than to "cry havoc," to, in short, struggle to achieve just ends while minimizing the suffering of opponents rather than maximizing the suffering of "enemies." That is the choice of nonviolence and nonviolent action. It is nonviolence, not violence, which eschews hate and fear and thereby offers our best - ultimately, our only - hope for long-term peace and justice.

Most, I fully realize, including most of you watching, find that hopelessly romantic. I find it eminently practical. Not only because, as Edmund Burke said, "a conscientious man should be cautious in how he deals in blood," but because, as a Life magazine editorial put it in the issue of August 20, 1945,

our sole safeguard against the very real danger of a reversion to barbarism is the kind of morality which compels the individual conscience, be the group right or wrong...There is no other way.

There is no other way.

169.4 - Nonviolence and Me, Part 4

Nonviolence and Me, Part 4

[This week's show was one long discussion of my commitment to nonviolence. For ease of reading, I have broken it into five parts, this being the fourth.]

Consider these quotes:

Those who organized this provocation deliberately desired a further aggravation of the international situation by striving to smear us, sow hostility towards us, and cast aspersions on our peace-loving policies.

Something said by, who, I don't know, maybe the rebels in Ukraine? Or maybe about those rebels? Neither. It’s from a TASS wire service dispatch, September 3, 1983. It’s about the US.

...to save the freedom of the world, to save liberty, to save the honor of women and children, everyone who loves freedom and honor, everyone who puts principle before ease and life itself before mere living, is banded in a great crusade - we cannot deny it - to kill Muslims, to kill them not for the sake of killing but to save the world...to kill them lest the civilization of the world itself be killed.

Other than being blunter than most, is this truly different from many sentiments expressed during our so-called War on Terror? But in the original version, "Muslims" was "Germans," and the quote is from a sermon preached by the Bishop of London during World War I.

We concur in considering [them] ...as totally without morality, insolent beyond bearing, inflated with vanity and ambition aiming at the exclusive domination of the world, lost in corruption, of deep-rooted hatred toward us, hostile to liberty wherever it endeavors to show its head, and the eternal disturber of the peace of the world.

The style may be stilted, but I'd defy anyone to tell me any fundamental difference between these sentiments and those directed against Hamas to justify the attack on Gaza - or, for that matter, any different from those directed against Jews by any number of anti-Semites across the ages. But the year was 1815, the speaker was President Thomas Jefferson, and the "them" in question was Great Britain.

It's always the same. Every time, the same arguments are trotted out. "They" are evil, immoral, corrupt, cruel; "they" can’t be trusted; "they" understand only force; "they" don’t respect human life the way we do; it’s sad, but "they" have given us no choice; blah, blah, and more blah, as we go about convincing ourselves that "they" are "other," are fundamentally different, and when we kill them - except we don't, do we, no, instead we "secure targets" and "achieve objectives" and "deny the enemy resources" - and when we kill them we imagine that there are none left behind to mourn, for the "other" has no wife or husband, no sons or daughters, no sisters or brothers, no parents, no aunts or uncles or grandparents or cousins or friends or neighbors or colleagues or co-workers, they are merely an instrumentality of the enemy, denied their humanity so they may be denied their life, because "they" are "other" and so not really "alive," not like "we" are.

It has been charged that nonviolence gives "fear and hatred an opportunity to triumph." Well, I say that with murderous violence, fear and hatred always triumph. I say that might does not make right. I say that the ends do not justify the means - which, no matter how many colors are cast on it, is still the primer under the entire argument - but they are affected by them.

I say that humanity cannot be conveniently divided into our friends, the victimized innocents, and our foes, the venal infidels. That war solves no problems except as it replaces them with new ones; that mass murder does not bring any peace except that of the graveyard; that hatreds do not produce love; that a river of blood, no matter how thick, deep, wide, or red, does not, cannot, will not mark the path to justice. Because justice must be justice for "them" as well as for "us," for "enemy" the same as for "friend," or it's not justice at all but mere favoritism.

Ultimately, I agree with Gandhi's statement that "the only thing worse than violence is cowardly refusal to act in the face of injustice. But nonviolent action is always superior to violent action."

Contrary to the underlying, unspoken conviction of those who, despite their claims to the contrary, do endorse mass violence, pacifism does not mean passivity and nonviolence does not mean non-action; they do not involve, as I was once accused of advocating, allowing ourselves to "get butchered" in order to "be morally superior."

Let me be clear: I believe we are responsible for that which we approve, and that applies to me as much as to others; perhaps more so because I make the choice so consciously. I know the course I've chosen carries risks, that nonviolent action isn't "safe," that it may (and for some in some circumstances surely would) involve risking one's life, and that the greatest risk is that of failure, of seeing injustice ascendant.

But every one of those risks applies equally strongly to violent action, which carries the added risks, risks so often realized they're less risks than a process, of destroying that which you say you'd save and of becoming that which you say you oppose.

Nonviolent action is not without risk, not without pain, not without suffering, and aggressive nonviolent techniques - such as economic sanctions - can put such pain and suffering on others, including innocents.

No, there are no ironclad guarantees of success, and yes, there would be losses as well as victories. But all of that - all of that, despite any romanticized notions to the contrary - is equally true of violence.

169.3 - Nonviolence and Me, Part 3

Nonviolence and Me, Part 3

[This week's show was one long discussion of my commitment to nonviolence. For ease of reading, I have broken it into five parts, this being the third.]

In fact, when do those looking to excuse the bloodshed for which they're responsible (or of which they tacitly or expressly approve) describe pacifism and nonviolence in terms other than "doctrinaire" or "knee-jerk" or other equally dismissive adjectives? When is the refusal to commit mass murder not brushed off as "hopelessly idealistic," always with the required sighs of regret, by those who imagine that both revolution and self-defense are marked by how many you kill rather than by how many you change - except, that is, for those times when a commitment to nonviolence is denounced as a tool of the ruling class?

And no, I need no lectures on the destructiveness of institutional violence, nor do I need to be reminded that it's easy for those of us not suffering under the yoke of an oppressor to urge the oppressed to foreswear murderous violence, especially when it is equally easy for us to embrace such violence as "necessary" or "liberating" when we do not have to live with blood and gore and shredded limbs and the shrieks of the wounded, writhing in pain, and the wails of the widows and the orphans and the cries of the parents holding their dead children while sitting among the smoking ruins of what had been their homes and fields.

That is the painful reality hidden behind that "necessity" of violence, a reality of tens - of hundreds - of millions around the world, past and present, abused by military power of one sort or another, almost if not always in the name of some supposed “higher purpose.” A reality of the real effect of real violence on real people.

As I said before, wars of one sort or another are now going on in who knows how many places, and in every one of them you can be damn sure that no one on any side has picked up a gun or dropped a bomb or fired a rocket or laid a mine or set a booby-trap without claiming to be on the side of the angels; no one has blown someone’s head off or burned a village to the ground or tortured a prisoner without claiming it’s in pursuit of “justice” or “freedom” or “self-defense” or the “glory of God” (or "Jesus" or “Allah” or whoever).

That’s the reality. Not musings about how you'd "prefer" nonviolence or about "self-defense" or, horribly, the "creative" aspects of violence. The reality, rather, of death, destruction, and despair in which everyone claims that they are the wounded innocents.

169.2 - Nonviolence and Me, Part 2

Nonviolence and Me, Part 2

[This week's show was one long discussion of my commitment to nonviolence. For ease of reading, I have broken it into five parts, this being the second.]

Being me, I had to see if I could intellectually justify my emotional reaction. So I read pamphlets on pacifism and nonviolence. I read books on pacifism and nonviolence. I read scientific articles on the psychology of violence, both individual violence and group violence. I read histories of nonviolent campaigns around the world, including both successful and unsuccessful ones. I read essays on the philosophy of government.

That is, being me, I had to see if I could make a logical case for deep morality, a logical case for conscience. It didn't have to be an airtight case, it didn't have to be of a sort that would convince everyone or even anyone else: Conscience is an intensely personal thing; recently on the show I called conscience "the most human of human rights."

But for me, for myself, my conviction about organized violence had to be based on something more than an emotional reaction, it had to be conscience rooted in something beyond itself. Again, it didn't have to be absolute proof but for me conscience had to have some logical foundation or at least logical support to stand on. You had to be able to make some kind of case.

Ultimately, I decided couldn't justify the full extent of emotional reaction, an extent that said I would never raise my hand against anyone no matter what, but I could justify the baseline conviction that large-scale organized violence cannot be right. Ever.

A big reason for that is that there are alternatives. There is extensive literature on the use of nonviolence, of nonviolent action, to achieve justice. Gandhi was just a small, even a tiny, part of that history. In fact, he credited Henry David Thoreau as one of his influences; one story says he had read Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience so many times that he had it memorized.

That essay, called "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," was Thoreau's explanation of why he refused to pay a tax levy intended to help pay for the war with Mexico in 1848. These are my favorite lines from that essay, which I think present the core of the argument:

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth ... but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

This idea, this concept, of using nonviolent action, nonviolent resistance, as a means for working for justice, is not only ancient, it goes up to and includes nonviolent national defense - that is, defending the nation without an army.

But of course if you say this to anybody, if you argue that nonviolence is both a moral and a logical imperative, especially if you say it to politically-oriented or involved people, and especially when the issue at hand is a matter of justice or people resisting oppression (which is usually when it comes up), you will get the standard pushback of how "that would be nice but it won't work" or "nonviolence only works when everyone is ready to agree," often enough (in an odd twist on Godwin's law) including some reference to the supposedly self-evident absurdity of using nonviolence against Hitler.

And then after all that these same people will say how they'd prefer nonviolence, it's just, "y'know, it's naive, and y'know, I'm not glorifying violence you understand, of course not" and so forth and so on.

Well, of course such people are glorifying violence. They are glorifying violence as a - indeed, as the only reliable - means of self-defense and achieving justice. Indeed, the political philosopher Franz Fanon openly glorified violence itself, declaring not only that it was the only way for the colonized peoples of the world to be liberated but that it itself, that the very act of violence, was liberating.

The argument, stripped to its essence, is that nonviolence, well, yeah, it might work sometimes - but violence always does. Nonviolence can fail, but violence never does; just hasn't succeeded yet. The argument allows for no option under which violence fails, even less for one where violence fails but nonviolence succeeds. Even when the conflict goes on, as some in world have, for decades, in some - in too many - minds, including if not especially among those not directly affected, the thought "violence has failed" never seems to arise.

169.1 - Nonviolence and Me, Part 1

Nonviolence and Me, Part 1

[This week's show was one long discussion of my commitment to nonviolence. For ease of reading, I have broken it into five parts, this being the first.]

I have from time to time talked about my convictions - and here I don't mean judgments or opinions about issues, but about the baseline convictions that drive and inform those judgments. I think that everyone who does the kind of thing I do, who analyzes and comments on events, should do that so that people who see or read them can put what they say in a context.

I've talked about how I'm a green, a leftist, a radical, a democratic socialist and such. But there is something I haven't talked about much if at all that also is a moral conviction that informs my opinions and analyses: I am also a pacifist.

Which usually is something you say on TV when you want to lose viewers. But I hope you'll bear with me as I talk about that today.

This is why I bring it up now: I mentioned in the last show I did how I sometimes feel, as I put it although perhaps not originally, "the world is too much with me" and for a time - usually a short time - I'm just overwhelmed with an emotional awareness of the enormity of suffering in world: the hunger, poverty, oppression, exploitation, the homelessness, and how much of it is driven by war.

What got me started this time was news about fighting in Libya, where since the fall of Qaddafi the fighting has never really stopped. And I thought about the fact that I knew that at that moment there were wars of one sort of another going on in Libya, South Sudan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and who knows how many more places - with some of those wars having gone on for decades, some of them with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions.

Which in turn got me to remembering watching on TV the violence in the streets outside the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968 as police attacked antiwar protesters in what was later labeled "a police riot" by an investigating commission.

Watching that - I was young, a teenager, still at home, politically a good liberal who was finding it increasingly hard to maintain his patriotic support for the Vietnam war, or maybe by that time I had already turned against it, I'm not sure - anyway, the thing is, watching the events that night, events that were origination of the chant "the whole world watching," was my first exposure to actual violence. Not just kids fighting, not just schoolyard tussles, not the staged pretend violence of movies or TV, but actual violence. I still have a memory, an image of a cop with his club raised and his arm outstretched, chasing a long-haired kid down street, trying to catch him to beat him up.

Watching that, I had a visceral, gut reaction - I wrote later that "a reality of which I was somehow already aware was clubbed into eyes until I had to admit to it." I went to work the next day full of righteous liberal indignation only to discover a chorus from my co-workers of "the only thing the cops did wrong was not beat those punks harder."

I was so upset, I left work, I just walked out and walked home. I had there experienced violence for the second time - this was an emotional, a verbal violence, but still it was violence - and it changed me. Or, more likely, it just brought out what was already there. I don't know and it really doesn't matter.

I became in that moment what I later called an "emotional pacifist." That is, emotional in the sense that this was not the result of logical argument or thinking it through or whatever. It was a response of pure conscience: the utter clarity of "this cannot be right." That violence, particularly organized violence, is wrong. Period.

Left Side of the Aisle #169

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of August 7-13, 2014

This week:

Nonviolence as part of my worldview
http://www.transcendentalists.com/civil_disobedience.htm
http://warprayer.org/

160.4 - A Memorial Day thought

A Memorial Day thought

Just speaking of things about the flag and the like, I missed mentioning Memorial Day last week because, well, frankly, because I'm old and I never got used to it being a moveable holiday and not on May 30.

But because May 30 is traditional day and that is this week, I figure I can still mention this now.

First I want to note that even though there is always a touch of "the honor and glory of war" about the day, not everyone embraces that:

The Boston chapter of Veterans for Peace marked the day with a ceremony to remember both the dead and the wounded, both physically and psychically, from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and to call for an end to war.

The Boston "Globe" quoted Pat Scanlon of the Smedley D. Butler Brigade of the Veterans for Peace as saying “Memorial Day is not a day to espouse militarism. Memorial Day is a day to remember.”

Maybe that was why, on a day peppered nationwide with parades, 21-gun salutes, patriotic speeches, and praise of all things military, the observance of the Veterans for Peace was what the "Globe" called "stunningly quiet." As, I would think, it should be.

One other thought: In May 2002, someone on a mailing list I was on posted a message asking people to take a moment of silence on Memorial Day, saying "Let us ensure that those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom are not forgotten."

In response, I wrote this, which I like to recall every Memorial Day:

And in that silent moment remember, too, the many nonviolent warriors who struggled, searched, sacrificed, for justice and freedom, who remain without songs or memorials to celebrate their lives or their passing, but who at some moment stood weaponless against the machinery of oppression and showed in their simple “No more” a force that can move history.

It is indicative of how we as a culture regard things, that on the whole, we celebrate our soldiers while they are alive and our nonviolent warriors only when they are safely dead. Then again, I'm not so sure we're so different from others in that way.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/26/veterans-for-peace-remember-fallen-soldiers-with-harbor-front-ceremony-advocating-end-war/aylGYUlJt83qIvWyAdBsgL/story.html

Left Side of the Aisle #160

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of May 29 - June 4, 2014

This week:

Some dare to say "gun control"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/24/315425094/shooting-near-uc-santa-barbara-leaves-3-dead
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/24/315624700/alleged-shooter-in-california-left-vast-digital-trail
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/05/24/nr-california-shooting-victims-father-press-conference.cnn.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/25/peter-king-gun-control_n_5390146.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/25/senate-gun-control-bills_n_5389192.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/us/16cnd-shooting.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.bradycampaign.org/sites/default/files/GunDeathandInjuryStatSheet3YearAverageFINAL.pdf
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/27/deleo-unveils-bill-strengthen-gun-laws-mass/Y7CUFEFhGcOHnY6D5GJTmI/story.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/chicago-gun-plan_n_5398340.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/06/chicago-gun-ban_n_4551227.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/joe-the-plumber-guns_n_5397981.html
http://barbwire.com/2014/05/27/open-letter-parents-victims-murdered-elliot-rodger/

USPS under fire by those who want to destroy it
http://www.news.ruralinfo.net/2014/05/committee-passes-controversial-issa-bill-apwu.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/postal-service-communal-mailboxes_n_5366124.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/10/mailing-it-in.html

Update: can you refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance?
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/05/1584-outrage-of-week-atheists-dont.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/05/1585-footnote-freedoms-just-another.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/atheist-student-pledge-of-allegiance_n_5399090.html
http://americanhumanist.org/system/storage/2/82/1/5134/Letter_to_Elmira_City_School_5-27-14_.pdf

A Memorial Day thought
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/26/veterans-for-peace-remember-fallen-soldiers-with-harbor-front-ceremony-advocating-end-war/aylGYUlJt83qIvWyAdBsgL/story.html

Clown Award: Michael Boggs
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/13/michael-boggs-confirmation-hearing_n_5316391.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banner
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/michael-boggs-abortion_n_5398327.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

Outrage of the Week: domestic violence is not like beer
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/bar-domestic-violence-joke_n_5397927.html
http://domesticviolencestatistics.org/domestic-violence-statistics/

Link to Richard Martinez' statement:
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/05/24/nr-california-shooting-victims-father-press-conference.cnn.html

157.5 - Third anniversary: re-introducing myself

Third anniversary: re-introducing myself

This is show number 157 of Left Side of the Aisle, and for those of you who do the quick math, you might realize that this is the first show of year four; it's our third anniversary show.

So knowing that not all of you, in fact I imagine most of you, have not watched the show from the beginning, this seemed an appropriate time to re-introduce myself, so that what I say here can be put into a broader context of ethical, moral, and political convictions.

To do that, I'm going to start out by talking about a socio-psychological concept called "worldview."¹ Your worldview is your way of mentally organizing the world around you so that it makes sense, your way of putting order to what you perceive.

We all have a worldview. And not just individuals, cultures have a worldview. In fact, one of the things that defines a culture is a shared worldview, a generally-shared (but often implicit) understanding of how reality functions. That worldview can be radically different from one culture to another and can vary within a culture over time. For example, the worldview we hold today in this culture is dramatically different from the worldview held by the first wave of European settlers of North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. In fact, that also holds true for Native Americans, whose worldview now is quite different from that of the natives of that earlier time.

The point is, still, that no matter what the particular worldview is, every culture has one; without a shared worldview, a culture will fracture for lack of a bond to hold it together.

The same holds true for individuals: You have a worldview, you need to have a worldview as it is difficult if not impossible to function otherwise. Without a worldview, everything appears as chaos. Even something as seemingly basic and obvious as cause and effect is part of your worldview, a concept of how reality works. Imagine trying to function without any notion of cause and effect. That will give you a sense of trying to function without a worldview.

More important to my immediate purpose is that within your worldview, there is a more limited version of it which applies to political/moral/ethical considerations. That sort of worldview drives your sense of right and wrong, proper and improper; it informs your convictions about what should and shouldn't be.

For most people, forming that personal worldview is part of maturation. Again for most people, that worldview doesn't change much once it is formed. It can, but not usually or even then by very much. Even what appear to be such changes, for example in political beliefs, often enough are not changes in basic concepts that constitute a worldview but in the interpretation of events and experiences in light of that worldview. Your worldview, that is, is part of your basic psychological make-up - and that doesn't change easily once formed.

So having said that, what I want to do is lay out what I think are important elements of how I reached the final, you could say mature, form of my worldview.

Perhaps the most important thing to say is that I am, in many ways, "a child of the '60s," having come to political awareness during that brief (and, some would have it, mythical) interregnum marked at one end by the Sgt. Pepper summer² and at the other by Altamont - or, if you prefer a political description, by Flower Power and the Days of Rage.

For those of you who are less than about 55 and have no idea what those terms mean, you can look them up. For now, it's enough to know that we're talking about the period of say, 1967-1970.

Like most - at least male - members of my generation, it was Vietnam that initially drew me beyond vague "concern" into concrete involvement: Even for those of us "safe" with draft deferments - and again, that's something that folks now maybe can't relate to, the fact that there was a military draft, under which you could be required under pain of lengthy imprisonment to join the Army and go wherever they sent you, even into a war you thought criminal - but even for those of us with deferments, who could feel confident that at least for now you couldn't be drafted, the war was always there. It swirled around us like a mist, a fog, it tugged at us like an undertow, it threaded in and out of our lives, our future, our consciousness, and the only way you could ignore it was by making the conscious effort to do so.

In fact, I think that those of what I'll call the "Vietnam generation" have a greater understanding of the impact that World War II had on our parents than those of the "Iraq generation" have of the impact Vietnam had on us. Because no matter how you measure it, the Vietnam War - which is properly called the Indochina War because it involved Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia - was a much bigger war than Iraq or Afghanistan ever were.

For example, peak US troop strength in Iraq was 168,000 and the peak year for Iraq and Afghanistan troop strength combined was fiscal 2008, at 188,000. Peak US troop strength in Vietnam was over 536,000, nearly three times as many - and by the way, South Vietnam, where the vast majority of those troops were, was about 2/5 the size of Iraq.

US troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, up to May 2 of this year, total 6,800. US troops killed in the Indochina War totaled over well over 58,000 - well over eight times as many. US wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan combined reached just under 50,000; those wounded in Indochina were over 300,000, over six times as many.

So yes, a much bigger war. Significantly more troops, significantly more wounded, significantly more dead. And for those of us who questioned the war, who asked our government about the whens, wherefores, and, most importantly, whys of the war, it seemed that each of the "answers" we got just raised at least two new questions.

I had been to that time what I now call a "right wing liberal," a type that is now commonly called a "liberal war hawk," that species of American political animal that's at least fairly liberal on domestic issues and clearly conservative on foreign policy, a type whose philosophy I later summed up as "hooray for justice, beauty, truth, and Kill Commies."

My personal breaking point came when I heard the man who was then the commander of US forces in the war, I don't remember which one it was, say "We're winning the war, just give us six more months" - and I recalled having heard exactly the same thing six months earlier.

And of course, the war didn't end in six months, it dragged on for years more amid repeated promises that it was, really, already over.

The sort of, the term was and is, increasing alienation that generated plus mounting evidence of what the governments we supported in South Vietnam were really like eventually prompted me to - very shyly - attend a meeting of a local peace group. That was, if memory serves, in the fall of 1968. I still remember walking into this room in a church basement and being greeted by a tall man with a beard and a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. In fact, he later added a mustache because he got tired of the Lincoln jokes.

Okay, you can relax; it's over now. I've no intention of inflicting my autobiography on you. But knowing the roots of my involvement in the movement may help to some degree to explain where I've wound up: I'm an aging hippie, an educator, and a political activist, the terms' order of presentation depending on circumstances and my mood of the moment. I'm also a democratic socialist/green with an anarchist bent and a civil liberties absolutist who has, by both logical conclusion and moral compulsion, a commitment to active nonviolence both as political tactic and way of life. The only isms I wholeheartedly endorse are skepticism and eclecticism.

I have also flippantly described myself at times as a socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclecticist-iconoclast. After people's eyes stop glazing over, I explain:

I'm a capitalist in that I believe in the "Ma and Pa" store, the community-level enterprise, the small factory, the two- or three-store chain.

I'm a communalist in that I believe that cooperative ventures are better than competitive ones.

I'm a socialist in that I believe that beyond a certain size, profit-seeking enterprises cannot be trusted to be responsible to the communities in which they operate and at that point the community as a whole has the right and the responsibility to step in to exercise control and make decisions, up to and including assuming ownership.

I'm an anarchist in that I believe in doing that with as little government as necessary and with individual freedom and civil liberties being at the maximum possible consistent with social justice.

I'm an eclecticist in that I believe you can put this together into a reasonably coherent social philosophy.

And I'm an iconoclast in that - well, you may have heard that the I Ching is based on the notion that "the only thing that doesn't change is the fact that everything else changes." My version of this is that I believe "the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer" and so if we ever did build a society along the lines I envision the first thing I'd do is to try to figure out what was wrong with that one and how it could be improved.

In doing this show, I'm guided by four editorial principles:

1) "To thine own self be true." Which, as I expect you know, is a quote from Shakespeare.

2) "The US isn't the worst - but it is the biggest." That's a quote from Joan Baez.

3) "Sometimes a bit of humor contains more inner truth than the most serious seriousness." That's from a chess grandmaster named Aron Nimzovich.

4) "No one but no one, no matter their ideology, political perspective, or status as 'left' or 'right,' 'revolutionary' or 'counter-revolutionary' can be by that reason exempt from either criticism or praise." That's from me.

The bottom line point is that I have always believed that in any political movement, everyone has some skill they can use, some skill they can contribute to advance the cause. While my list of inadequacies on any compilation of useful skills is quite lengthy, I do have some skill with words. With writing. Talking. Giving speeches. And like that.

So this, ultimately, is just another way I think I can be of use, another way to try to advance the idea of justice, another attempt to maintain the hope that is the only thing that keeps us going. It is, if you will, another candle in the rain³.

Year four started. Let's go.

¹A lot of sources make it two words, "world view," but I think a one-word form is more appropriate because it is a single concept, one that is not "your view of the world" but, if you will, "the world of your view," the world (in the broadest sense) as you view it, as you comprehend it, including the limitations.

²Many sources refer to it as "the summer of love" but I prefer the term "Sgt. Pepper summer" because discussions of "the summer of love" often focus almost exclusively on Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco) without regard to the broader cultural shift of which "Hashbury" was merely the sharpest focus, not the source. With that limitation in mind, here are a couple of sources:
http://www.the60sofficialsite.com/Summer_of_Love.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love
http://summeroflove.org/main.html
http://www.everything2.com/title/summer+of+love

³Little sisters of the sun
Lit candles in the rain
Fed the world on oats and raisins
Candles in the rain
Lit the fire to the soul who never knew it's friend
Meher Baba lives again
Candles in the rain
To be there was to remember
So lay it down again
Oh, lay it down Lay it down, lay it down again
Men can live as brothers
Candles in the rain
- Melanie

Sources cited in links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_power
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/film.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat_es.htm
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40682.pdf
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/Index.aspx
http://www.icasualties.org/oef/
http://www.statisticbrain.com/vietnam-war-statistics/
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/USCasualtiesByState.aspx
http://www.icasualties.org/OEF/USCasualtiesByState.aspx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJp7zbjn7Wo

Left Side of the Aisle #157

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of May 1-7, 2014

This week:

Good News: SCOTUS upholds power of EPA to regulate cross-border pollution
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-scotus-epa-20140430,0,2869822.story

Good News: federal court strikes down Wisconsin voter ID law
http://www.postcrescent.com/viewart/20140429/APC010401/304290492/Federal-ruling-blocks-Wisconsin-voter-identification-law-Brokaw-woman-wants-ID-fight-continue
http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/article/20111204/WDH06/112040373/Voter-ID-becomes-law-unintended-consequences?nclick_check=1

Good News: United Church of Christ sues North Carolina to overturn ban on same-sex marriage
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/04/28/lawsuit-unusual-approach-against-gay-marriage-ban/20877178/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl38%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D469706

Hero Award: Hector Montoya
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/04/23/texas-boy-bought-every-house-in-neighborhood-a-gift-after-traged/20874304/
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/04/texas_boy_gives_up_ps4_money_to_buy_smoke_detectors.html

Third anniversary: re-introducing myself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_power
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/film.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat_es.htm
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40682.pdf
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/Index.aspx
http://www.icasualties.org/oef/
http://www.statisticbrain.com/vietnam-war-statistics/
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/USCasualtiesByState.aspx
http://www.icasualties.org/OEF/USCasualtiesByState.aspx

Third anniversary: thank-yous

149.7 - Outrage of the Week: Woman Denied Citizenship Due to Atheism

Outrage of the Week: Woman Denied Citizenship Due to Atheism

Now to wrap up the week with our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week. This week, it's an outrage sort of connected to what I was just talking about.

If you apply to be a US citizen, you're asked on the form to declare your willingness to bear arms in military defense of the country. Which is pretty odd since the last time it could be reasonably argued that we were using our military forces in actual defense of the country would be World War II, but never mind; that's not relevant here.

What is relevant is that there is a conscientious objector exception for that declaration. Well, Adriana Ramirez is a California woman who applied for American citizenship and, according to the statement from Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency in charge of these matters, she had her application rejected because she identified herself as a “conscientious objector” on secular moral grounds rather than religious ones. Ms. Ramirez, you see, is an atheist. And that got her rejected for citizenship.

Now, this decision is so blatantly illegal, so blatantly unconstitutional, that it very likely will be overturned in short order. What makes this outrageous is that nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court declared that moral and ethical beliefs are the constitutional and legal equivalents of religious beliefs held with equal strength, we still have to keep fighting this battle. That we who are atheists have to keep proving that yes, we have morals and ethics, that yes, we can formulate such beliefs without feeling the need for a god to instruct us in right and wrong, that yes, we are by all rights equal citizens.

I don't claim, I never have claimed and I never will claim, that the discrimination faced by atheists equals that faced by many others of various religions, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual preferences, and so on. I will also say that I have never, at least to my knowledge, personally experienced discrimination due to my atheism - unless you want to count the time I lived in Virginia, where I believed I should (and did) avoid the subject of religion or the lack thereof entirely in order to avoid potential disruptions to my work relationships. The point here is, even though I won't say I personally have experienced discrimination, I do say that discrimination is real.

Or can you name me a single state where it is illegal for someone who professes a belief in a god - any god - where because of that belief it is illegal for them to hold public office?

No, it's not the worst sort of discrimination - but that doesn't mean it's not an outrage.

Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/28/womans_citizenship_application_rejected_because_she_objects_to_war_isnt_religious/
http://americanhumanist.org/news/details/2014-02-us-immigration-services-denies-applicant-based-on-se
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Seeger