peacefile

Thanks for seeing that there is something else to write about regarding Chicago than Obama and the Reverend Wright.

I seem to be reading a lot about women in the early twentieth century this week, just by chance. First, Ida Tarbell in a new book on her muckracking classic about Standard Oil, then Jeanette Rankin in a book called “Human Smoke” by Nicholson Baker, and now Jane Addams in your piece. And they did all this without a whole lot of power (in western civ terms, naturally). And we can’t seem to get anywhere near their principles and successes a century later.

Also can’t believe it’s been 40 years since we lost Dr. King.

Best to you.

Catherine Podojil
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

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You should get this piece into every newspaper in the UK (including the tabloid) and the right wing press in France , the disregard for the need of children there is so extreme that it is frightening. I grew up with freedom and spaces to play with my friends and I can easily understand that children without space for play just become crazy ! Putting them in jail as a result is just adding insult to injury but nobody seems to care, they are more concerned about getting their kids in the right schools so they will be able to get the best of life!

Best regards,
A Reader from Finland

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Yeah. Sad to say how true your comments. But this seems to be part of a larger effort - conspiratorial or not - to break down the common connections between people and the idea of a common good. Now, everything is privatized and segregated. Where once kids played in open fields and unclaimed land, now ever atom seemed owned by somebody and play areas are deliniated by entrance fees, security guards and fences.

The line between tyranny and revolution is a fine one. You want people working so hard they don’t have time to think and, in case they do, they are given circuses to distract them, ideas are dumbed down, words go missing. But if too many people are hungry and not working, that’s the tinderbox. The time when TV loses its matrix magic. The economic horizon seems to indicate the possibility of that state of affairs is coming. But then again, maybe not. Maybe this is just a new, slumming dark age, what the ancient Indian scriptures, the Vedas, call Kali Yuga, the age of darkness, confusion and declining spirituality.

What we don’t understand is that on the 7th day, God didn’t just rest, He played.

(Well, God plays all the time but it made a good line, don’t you think?)

Regards,

A Reader from Toronto Canada

Recalling Jane Addams’ lost classic, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch

Chicago is bleeding, and the Mayor has called the citizens to action: “I don’t want people to wait for Mayor Daley to call a meeting. I want you to call a meeting in your home with your children and loved ones. I want you to go next door and talk to those children next door. I want the parents of the block to say ‘This block will be free of violence.’ Suddenly, all voices converge upon the insight that if nobody else actually provides time or space for youthful thrills, the gun industry will.

Ninety nine years ago Jane Addams wrote about “the stupid experiment” of American life that she saw all around her in Chicago. The adult world had thrown together a city based on round-the-clock work. Impressive piles of cash were daily stacked and sorted. In the hustle-built streets meanwhile stood all the children dropped and stranded by a colossal shift of economic priorities. Stranded youth were symptom to a deeper cause, argued Addams. In modern life the whole spirit of youth has been exiled and detained.

“This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge,” wrote Addams in 1909, pre-dating by a full decade the better known thesis of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Adults were damming up their own “sweet fountains” of pleasure, “but almost worse than the restrictive measures is our apparent belief that the city has no obligation in the matter, an assumption upon which the modern city turns over to commercialism practically all the provisions for public recreation.”

Public recreation? “Only in the modern city have men concluded that it is no longer necessary for the municipality to provide for the insatiable desire for play.” SWAT teams and jobs programs are what headlines call for today; more “restrictive measures” and “organizing work.” According to the Addams formula, these can only add up to another “fine revenge.”

Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship stripped communal life of adornment and joy, recalls Addams. Then the liquor stores stepped in. As a result, people in the modern Anglo city work to make money, then spend their money buying liquor.

Young women in this new economy could be turned into one of two things: working hands by day or working bodies by night. Bitches or hos. Missing everywhere now was joy. And the young men under this new regime? Well, there was one sanctioned public endeavor that would guarantee them some hope of adventure. Didn’t Addams virtually predict a century of war?

As the pleasure intensity of adult play grew, so did the distance between adult society and children. Is the Playboy mansion the kind of place one brings actual boys? Communal festivals used to be different, argues Addams, where adults and children could dance together. If children obviously get lost in this new industrialized strandedness, adults also fail to find refreshment from an authentic “spirit of youth.”

Everyone fails to listen to the one voice capable of instructing Socrates. It was Diotima, recalls Addams, who said that love is an attempt to give birth to beauty. There is an essential lesson here for any republic that wants to be something besides ugly. When we have come to a crisis where men chase killer kids with SWAT teams and jobs, it may be time to follow the example of Socrates. There is a woman here talking about city-centered love and joy. Shut up and learn.

SubPriming the Pump

by Greg Moses

CounterPunch

Now that bankers of the world have been knocked sideways by American workers in pain – a phenomenon that goes by the name of the “subprime lending crisis” — will the bankers try to fix living conditions for people who make up the subprime base of the global economy? The answer of course is fat chance.

Having once again subprimed the pump of the global economy upon the backs of the most marginalized classes, the banker-driven conversation these days would have us forget the people whose feet are sliding and focus instead on questions of monetary policy. This is globalization as ideology, a mind-framing game that squeezes all it can from flesh and blood workers while denying their basic human value.

Asia Times economist Chan Akya, for example, admits that globalization has allowed bankers from Beijing, Geneva, and Los Angeles to simultaneously milk the labor of Mexican migrant workers in the USA. And he concurs with global consensus that hard times among subprime workers in the USA is the effective trigger for global market tremors. But with a cynical conclusion, he isolates the real pain of “subprime” humanity as a costly political problem to be laid at the feet of the USA administration, and encourages Asian-sphere financiers to turn their investments inward.

Akya’s conclusion is cynical because what remains untouched is the presumption that globalization should continue with top-down arrogance. He gives us no reason to believe, for example, that the increased bargaining power of newly withdrawn Asian financiers will be put to work on anyone’s behalf but bankers who are now able to throw pretty lights upon Tiananmen Square.

And Akya fails to make plain how much Asian bankers owe to American subprime workers who this past decade have been trading with China on a daily basis at Wal-Mart. In sum, Akya’s economics is seedling to the next world war, which is what happens when financiers draw lines between each other on a map.

A lot can be learned about the “subprime” crisis by browsing the abstracts of the Fannie Mae Foundation’s Housing Policy Debates (HPD). There we learn that subprime lending is shorthand for new racism in banking. Instead of “redlining” neighborhoods filled with struggling workers of color, bankers have for the past decade “subprimed” them — giving credit to these working poor at predatory rates (cf: Wyly HPD 15.3).

At the turn of the century, 16.8 percent of households in the USA lived in “housing induced poverty” – the kind of poverty that can be caused by predatory mortgage rates (Kutty HPD 16.1). At any point in time, social investment into these households could have slightly relieved the pain of inequality through housing-allowance entitlements, job improvements, or human rights (cf: Priemus HPD 16.3,4).

In fact, affordable housing helps to grow healthier children (Newman HPD 16.2), which is another way of saying that today’s predatory lending is already replicating tomorrow’s fukked-over class. Is it any wonder therefore that subprime borrowers tend to be disenchanted with the home-owning experience?

The global lesson to be drawn from the subprime crisis is that bankers should be made to take interest in human development, not simply be allowed to extract interest from it, as they build their houses of cards. Or to put it another way, in a globalized world, banking policy is public policy. And public policy has no business taking lessons from predatory economic theories.

Bank bailouts, says Akya, can only damage the image of government. But bank bailouts in the form of mortgage vouchers given to “subprime” working peoples would surely bring us one step closer to globalization with a human heart.

Issuing housing allowances as entitlements has been tried in the Netherlands, and apparently it works well there (Priemus HPD 16.3,4). People who are secure in their housing are people who can afford to dream of better days to come, and such hope does good things for workers, their children, and — do we have to say it? — their employers, too.

Whether you belong to a Party that calls itself Republican, Democrat, or Communist, you could find some way to honestly repay subprime workers for carrying your whole world on their backs these past few years.

By Buddy Spell

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.*

And there you go…. Yet another action full of hope and anticipation ending in status quo unresolved expectations of meaningful returns. It happened. It was important for the moment. It was quickly forgotten and even more quickly dismissed. File it away in the “ ‘A’ for effort drawer”.

All that’s left now is to finish unpacking those last few supplemental and always unnecessary travel items, to haul the suitcases back to the attic, and to look forward to yet another year of war and the further destruction of America’s soul. The therapeutic effect of hellraising has always, for me, had a short shelf life.

I went to DC last week on an invitation to act as legal counsel to a group encamped on the National Mall seeking to protest the continued funding of the national nightmare which has become of America’s patently false minded invasion of Iraq four years ago.

I went to DC last week armed with the Constitution and a resolve to do whatever I could to protect our right to petition the government with grievances. I went to DC last week with hope that, finally, the planets were properly aligned and that substantial impact could be achieved by well meaning citizens calling attention to the insanity intrinsic to the road now traveled.

I observed and attended to the predictable results of peaceful civil disobedience. I spent many hours getting Americans out of jail for the crime of speaking truth to power. I marched on the Pentagon with thousands of others who share my sense of urgency and impatience. I came home and nothing had changed.

I was cursed and spat upon by so-called “patriots” who would dissolve democracy in favor of corporate monarchy as I exercised those very rights the republic’s founding fathers described as “God given”. I watched a Navy veteran cuffed and led away by armed government agents from Senate offices for expressing his own true love of country and personal courage. I saw privilege override patriotism. And I noticed that nobody noticed.

When elections are rigged and dissent is suppressed, the options of a people wishing to be better than their government become limited and restricted. All power is finite. It’s that whole action and reaction thing. It can’t go on indefinitely.

I return from Washington less hopeful than ever. And yet, for now, I intend to tilt at windmills because the options otherwise afforded remain unacceptable.

The power elite will either hear the people or fail to do so at their own peril. I hope for all of us that our voices will soon be heard.

See you on the fifth anniversary…..

*In a village in La Mancha (whose name I do not care to recall) there lived, not very long ago, one of those gentlemen who keep a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound.

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Buddy Spell is a Louisiana attorney known to practice law in Texas bar ditches.

By Susan Van Haitsma

CounterPunch / CommonDreams

My favorite photograph of Mark Wilkerson shows him smiling, looking relaxed. He is standing in a grove of trees whose trunks radiate outward from his image as though they are drawing life from him. One side of his face glows with reflected sunshine. He wears a black “Iraq Veterans Against the War” T-shirt with a small star over his heart.

I first met Mark on the grounds of the Texas Capitol during a peace demonstration on Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, 2004. Mark was stationed at Ft. Hood, and he and his wife had driven down to attend their first anti-war demonstration in Austin. I didn’t know then the extent of Mark’s experience in Iraq, but he looked stressed, his eyes circled with dark shadows. He exuded nervous energy.

He looked at the materials on our Nonmilitary Options for Youth table and described how he had been recruited through the JROTC program in high school with assurances that he would receive training to become a peacekeeper. At the demonstration, Mark met local members of Veterans for Peace, who understood more profoundly than I the internal and external battles he was facing.

Mark had served one tour of duty in Iraq, during which he had begun to question both the morality and the practicality of the invasion and occupation. Assigned to the military police, he participated in house raids and arrests of Iraqi citizens. He witnessed the effects of the occupation on Iraqi civilians and the change in attitude toward US soldiers. He began suffering serious post-traumatic stress and underwent a crisis of conscience about his participation in the army.

He filed for a discharge as a conscientious objector in March 2004. When his claim was denied 8 months later, he appealed the decision, but soon learned that his unit was about to be deployed to Iraq for a second tour. Stuck between honoring his conscience and obeying orders to deploy, he went AWOL in January 2005.

Mark was AWOL for about 18 months. During that time, he said the nightmares didn’t stop. He also felt at sea, as though he could not move forward with his life. He worked long hours, trying to save for a future that might include prison. Just before he turned himself in at Ft. Hood in August 2006, he held a press conference at Camp Casey in Crawford, TX.

Flanked by other GI resisters and supportive members of Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace, Mark confidently and eloquently expressed his reasons for having left the military and his reasons for returning to the base to accept the consequences.

When I saw Mark Wilkerson last on February 22, 2007, he was embracing his family shortly before being handcuffed and walked to a van outside the Major General Lawrence H. Williams Judicial Center at Fort Hood, Texas following his sentencing by a military judge to seven months of confinement, demotion in rank and a bad conduct discharge for desertion and missing movement.

During the court-martial proceedings, several family members and officers in Mark’s chain of command were called as character witnesses. Mark’s wife described how, several months into his tour, his letters began to include doubts about his mission. During his first 2-week leave, she saw that Mark had changed. He was restless, bothered and “set off by little things. There was an edge to him that hadn’t been there before.” When he returned to Iraq, Mark felt increasing hopelessness about his mission, yet he performed his duties admirably, as his commanding officers testified.

After his tour, Mark had emotional battles, nightmares, and one night, a breakdown. “My body and my mind had never felt that way before,” he said. He explained that when he was home, family and friends “were treating me like some sort of hero,” but he felt nothing like a hero inside. He hesitated to ask for help in the military “because an unsaid rule is that we’re not supposed to rock the boat.” Even after he filed his conscientious objector claim, he was advised to refrain from seeking PTSD counseling while the case was pending.

In Mark’s court-martial, the fact that his conscientious objector claim had been denied prior to a looming second deployment could not be used as a defense to the charges of desertion and missing movement to which he pleaded guilty. However, it is important to note that the conscientious objector approval process in the military is considered by many to be a broken system.

By law, the military must allow soldiers to apply for discharge as conscientious objectors when they have experienced, after enlisting, a “crystallization” of their moral, ethical or religious beliefs about participating in war. However, J.E. McNeil, director of the Center on Conscience & War, says that, according to military figures, only about 50 percent of CO claims are being approved, and anecdotal evidence suggests the percentage may be even lower.

“They throw as many roadblocks in your way as they possibly can,” she says. “The process takes incredibly long, and it really doesn’t have to. They don’t really follow their own regulations. They treat it as an annoyance.”

Unlike the case of First Lt. Ehren Watada, the illegality of the Iraq war was not used as a point of defense in Mark’s court-martial. However, at one point, the military judge asked if there wasn’t an inconsistency inherent in Mark’s guilty plea. Was his intent to “shirk a duty,” or to resist an unjust war? If he was saying he was wrong to desert, was he also saying he was wrong to act on his conscience? Both defense and prosecuting attorneys stated that they saw no inconsistency, and the judge laid aside the concern.

The brief interchange touched on what may be the crux of the dilemma faced by soldiers in all wars. What is a soldier’s duty? The prosecuting attorneys in Mark’s case stressed that he “shirked his important service” when he was “absent by design.” He was told that he “abandoned the Army family that would embrace him.” Soldiers commonly say that when they are on the battlefield, they are not fighting to protect liberty or democracy; they are fighting for the soldiers on their right and left. If they are compelled by conscience to embrace a larger human family that extends to their adversary, it’s no wonder that their expanded sense of duty presents a problem for the military and themselves.

One of the prosecuting attorneys distinguished between being a good soldier and a good public citizen. “This dichotomy must be maintained,” he said.

But, human beings simply cannot divide themselves into two separate beings with two separate moral codes and two separate sets of behaviors. Attempts to do so are injurious, and soldiers who suffer from PTSD know this.

Part of Mark Wilkerson’s defense centered on his achievements in high school as a teenager with a keen interest in peacemaking. Following a serious family violence crisis when he was 12 years old that was described in detail during his court-martial, Mark adopted a strong leadership role in his family, his school and community. He used the tragedy to become more determined to prevent violence. He wanted above all to help people, to be a healer and a reconciler.

Mark wanted to help his country, but his country betrayed him. His country capitalized on his honorable intentions, gave him false promises, fed him misinformation, used him to carry out inhumane missions, caused him psychological injury and then punished him by making him an object lesson for his fellow GI’s.

In fact, Mark is an example of the best kind, for all of us. In the same courtroom where soldiers were sentenced for harming Abu Ghraib prisoners, Mark was sentenced for refusing to harm. In his final testimony, Mark’s plainspoken optimism rose above the contradictions of his surroundings.

“I’m ready to live the life I know I can live,” he said. “I still want to help people, to be useful. I always lived by a certain moral code. I know whatever I do, I’ll do it well. I look forward to being able to do it.”

Mark Wilkerson’s blog is www.markwilkerson.wordpress.com. Susan Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth in Austin, Texas and can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net

By Susan Van Haitsma

DissidentVoice / CommonDreams

The young woman and I talked into the night as we headed south on a Greyhound bus. Each minute of conversation carried us physically farther from but perhaps emotionally closer to the enlisted man she had married just three days prior. The wedding she had arranged and paid for in their home town had to be canceled because his leave was revoked at the last minute, so she had traveled across the country for a visit with him that included a quick civil ceremony at the courthouse nearest his base.

She described in almost comical terms their attempt at a honeymoon, braving subzero temperatures with bodies unused to a northern climate, with his close-shaven head and light sailor hat and her thin jeans, to walk downtown to see the sights. When she couldn’t feel her legs anymore, she told him, “Baby, I’m sure this is a nice place. Send me some pictures. But, for now, get me out of here!”

She said that they ate at the McDonald’s on base, “where their logo has a little anchor hanging on it – it’s kind of cute.” She didn’t expect the food prices to be so high there, nor had she or her husband counted on other expenses of military life when they had decided jointly on his enlistment several months ago. This hadn’t been her first trip to see him, and she hoped that she could go again by train in the coming weeks, bringing along her two children. But, she wondered if she could afford the travel, or even the purchase of winter clothing for her children. There were also the added costs of keeping up two households, as she put it – “his and ours.”

She said that they had decided he should enlist in order to help support their family, but now she realized that the support they really needed was his presence at home.

Although I was a stranger, my seat-mate expressed her concerns with a frankness that had not yet been altered by the ‘culture of silence’ that often engulfs military family members. With surprise rather than self-pity, she noted the ways her husband had already changed since basic training.

She described his new obsession with order, his habit of lining up his shoes and even his toothbrush and toothpaste in precise, parallel fashion. She said that he suggested she do the same. He was more acutely aware of the time, of the number of minutes necessary to accomplish daily tasks. He walked in front of her instead of by her side. In his sleep, he called out as though he was responding to orders. She explained that he used to show his affection for her liberally in public and private ways, but now he was aloof, turning away from her in bed even during their honeymoon weekend.

Another unexpected consequence of being a military spouse was the paper work she had been required to sign in the case of her husband’s death. She described feeling physically sick as she and her husband listened to an official explain the necessary procedures: the personal effects that would be sent to her, the body, the funeral. Because he was in the Navy rather than the Army, she hadn’t foreseen such a discussion taking place in the first hours of their marriage. The death talk compounded her worry because he told her rumors had been circulating that his unit might soon be shipped to the Middle East.

I asked my seat-mate what reasons, beyond the financial security they had hoped for but that so far had proven illusory, had guided their decision about her husband’s enlistment. She said that he “had a problem with authority” and had been fired from a series of jobs, so he felt that the military would help him achieve the discipline he needed.

I confided to my seat-mate that the “I need more discipline” motivation is one of the most perplexing reasons for enlistment that I hear, and I hear it frequently. Self-discipline and coercion are opposites. But, I didn’t really need to explain that paradox to my seatmate, who already had described how the brand of discipline her husband was learning was leading to family separation rather than the family protection they were promised.

My heart aches when I think of the significant challenges this young couple faces, but I also am heartened by the fact that they are asking questions and discussing the discrepancies between what they know and what they are told. My valentine to them reads, “Question authority always.”

That jealous lover, Uncle Sam, pointed his long finger and shot an arrow into the joined hearts of this couple and said, “I want you to be mine.” But, they had pledged their hearts to one another, not to him.

By Greg Moses

Failure is an f-word obscenity that we need to stop using when it comes to the USA-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. How can something be a failure when it has no purpose to begin with? In fact, the Iraq war is endless, because it seeks a purpose still.

Incredible is the claim that the USA made some “mistake” about “weapons of mass destruction.” That so-called purpose for going to war was a deliberate lie, cooked up and spoon fed from the kitchens of Washington, DC.

Astonishing is the claim that the USA sought to restore sovereignty to the Iraqi people, because immediately upon arrival the USA-led administration not only toppled a dictator, but also abolished the rights of the Iraqi people to sovereign ownership of their land.

Atrocious is the justification that connects the invasion of Iraq to a war on terrorism, because this is only a way of admitting that the war on terrorism is a race war.

So if not for self defense or Iraqi sovereignty, what is the purpose of the war? To re-make the Middle East? This seems to be the most honest answer to date. But if this is the purpose that the USA occupation is trying to win, then how dare we speak about victory or defeat, success or failure? How dare we?

Morally, one cannot pose the problem of “remaking the Middle East” and then ask if the USA is “winning” such a thing through war.

If the so-called purpose of the occupation is to remake a region, then the question is, who are the war criminals responsible for launching this occupation and how do we bring them to justice?

At some deep level, where language is too conflicted to say, the American people have come to understand the wrong we’re doing in Iraq, and no f-words will help us figure things out.

Wrong is not an f-word. A wrong war cannot be made right by winning.

By Greg Moses

Naw buddy don’t go shakin yer head bout them Dixie Chicks no more, cause I seen it with my own eyes up close. Them girls’z hot, got hot lix, hot dam pipes, and a bramble of fans so thick y’d only get yourself scratched up tryin to part em from each other and their grrrls.

But before I tell you about how they punked the prez, and threw in a Dylan tune at the encore, let’s get onto that city bus in A-Town, ATX, Austin, Live Music Capital of the World where tonight we’re smelling some off-regulation popcorn (cuz tecknickally speaking the buses don’t allow no food or drink) and singing out loud, some “Shut Up” song (still off regulation, because the rules say no such noise) and talkin about how we’re going to get this act together in the studio tomorrow morning, spin a hit, and share the money with the driver. But then, ding dang, the lead singer has to get off the bus, leaving the rest of the new-formed duo headed down to Sixth Street or East Twelfth for two hours of musical intoxication.

Inside the Frank Erwin Center shortly after 8pm, Pete Yorn has had the courtesy and good sense to take a bow after eight songs, leaving the hometown welcome party of ten thousand folks buzzing it up during a preview trailer of “Shut Up and Sing” the new documentary about the Chicks and recent world history. Here is a clip of the president walking on some tarmac saying out loud that he doesn’t see why the Chicks’d get their feelings hurt if people stop buying their records, cut to front-Chick Natalie Maines reading about that quip, shaking her head, and saying out loud, dumfuk!

The buzzing Chick fest is actually paying attention to the film, you can tell, because up from the lower bowl of the Erwin Center, and down from the upper seats collides a crash of clapping and hollering. As in, you tell it Natalie! And we’re right here for you. Yes ma’am, dumfuk’s a pretty good word for what you’re aiming at.

This kind of thing is going to go on for nearly another hour before the Chicks finally get their boots on stage, but who cares if they’re another minute late? Let em take their time. Still somewhere in the back of your mind you know the Chicks are tuned into baby sitter schedules on this Monday night. And if it’s not until about nine o’clock that they come out, that still leaves plenty of time to get our eighty dollars worth of musical festivity and get the baby sitters home before midnight.

But not everyone has left their kids at home. Chicks themselves have brought some kids, say the bloggers. And I see a handful of really young ones, definitely elementary school. Also some grrrls in soccer oufits ready to kick some you know what. Wildcats, could be from Elgin, which is not exactly next door.

But speaking of Chicks and grrrls, let me count some heads. Along the row in front of me (mighty, mighty Section 39) there’s one extra large white fellow with well-trimmed gray hair in embroidered, starched shirt who should be mentioned for his singlular status in a row with a chick to cock ratio of 19 to 1. Then, counting down the aisle seats we find three cock heads for a chick to cock ratio of 13-3. If the count is not scientific is is satisfactory nevertheless and enough of a statistical challenge for me tonight.

Sniffing at the light bouquet of cotton candy, light beer, and wine, I am delighted at the longitudinal arrays of white folk demographics that chat it up all around. Spectacles on faces of gray-beards suggest alphabet street intellectuals. Starched and creased Wranglers hint of Spring Rodeo attire. A long haired stoner in Stones-jacket denim goes way down the aisle, tongue out the whole time. Of course whole book clubs or whatever of women have come together. And here’s a guy in starched red shirt waving with his cell phone pressed to an ear. Can you see me now?

Up the aisle comes a woman who studies the steps the way I sometimes used to study center stripes on Saturday nights. Behind her an angel in well presented cleavage and pointy pink shoes. Out in the concourse those soccer girls we talked about, studying the prices on t-shirts (up to $85 dollars). And a tiny woman in wheel chair coming out of the powder room, as if “the day” wants you to see everything once before you return to your seat.

Stage lights down. House lights dimmed. “Hail to the Chief” cranked up. And this can mean only one thing. Here they come. The moral leaders of our Southern fried culture launch into “Lubbock or Leave It.” And the audience is on our feet!

Singing to the soul of Buddy Holly, “I hear they hate me now / Just like they hated you / Maybe when I’m dead and gone / I’m gonna get a statue too.” Oh, the audience loves that line! Applause rises to the top like cream.

The fierce red color of the video screens (six of them towering in back of the stage, two per Chick) now turns purple, the tempo slows, the drawls extend, the harmonies part wider, and now we’re in the middle of “Truth No. 2” in which the heroine and her sweet backup singers strike a deal with you: “Swing me way down south / Sing me something brave from your mouth / And I’ll bring you / Pearls of water on my hips / And the love in my lips / All the love from my lips.” Just so you know that the wages of courage ain’t all pain.

When the house lights brighten, well-prepared fans hold up signs, which I can’t read, but if you go to Junichi’s blog you can find some likelihood of the kinds of signs there were: The Only Bush I Trust is My Own. Natalie UR My Heroes. To Think without Speaking is to Aim without Shooting: Thanks for Speaking.

And now, with the sisters who founded the Dixie Chicks flanking the far corners of the stage–Emily Erwin Robinson and Martie Erwin McGuire–it’s time once again to kill ol’ Earl. Look if you don’t know the story I can’t be responsible for your complete education, but you should know that when they get to the line, “Earl had to die”, the whole place pitches in, fists punching the air three times hard.

“Hello Austin,” says Natalie. And yes, we’re ready for that. “Thank you,” she says once to the standing ovation. Then “thank you” again. And finally, “thank you very much for your warm welcome.” Well, we do love being here is the bottom line. This could be Kant’s Summum Bonum where duty to the truth lives right in the moment of ecstasy. So I have to put down my pen to form a proper four-finger whistle. Can you believe we’re making all this out of a Monday night?

Now I’m a back-bencher myself when it comes to these sorts of things, so I don’t see the woman that Natalie Maines is talking to next. But San Antonio reporter Hector Saldaña writes that it was a “female fan toward the front of the stage” and I take his word for it.

“I see you’re not wearing panties until the war is over,” says Maines, “At least Britney Spears isn’t.” At this point my handwriting goes into spastic scrawl, and I think I must be going deaf. I resist the well-intentioned urge to lean over to the seat in front of me and whisper into the ear of the married woman wearing big diamond and the tour t-shirt: “did she say ‘panties’?” So thanks Hector for being in the middle of the action up there and reporting on this anti-Lysistrata presence with an unflinching hand.

“Just don’t make Paris Hilton your chaperone,” says Maines as she promises to sing more songs between her jokes. Thanks to the multi-camera video screen high above Natalie’s head, we can see how her face goes all devilish in a good way. Chick can act funny. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Natalie Maines. Yes, they do belong in the same breath tonight, flanked by the Erwin grrrls here at what is for this brief moment aptly named The Erwin Center.

“This next song we wrote because we were getting calls from the White House asking, ‘how is it you make these fantastic career decision you make’,” jokes Maines as the band digs into “Taking the Long Way.” Here’s a little autobiography for you about paths taken and paths not. “I met the queen of whatever / Drank with the Irish and smoked with the hippies / Moved with the shakers / Wouldn’t kiss all the asses that they told me to.” It’s another of the night’s top applause lines.

As the Chicks harmonize into memories of the top of the world come crashing down, I’m counting the back-up band. From left to right a pedal steel, keyboard, electric guitar, drum, bass, acoustic guitar, another electric guitar, and later, a violin. Damn, it’s practically a Bob Wills orchestra! (Of course if you go to Jovita’s any Thursday night you can catch the Cornell Hurd band playing up to a dozen pieces from different parts of the room! But that’s another story.)

Next song begins with an Erwin sister picking on the mandolin in that style that says we love you, Lindsey Buckingham, and can only mean it’s time for Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” which is Chick music to the bone, fellas, and a longing for freedom along dimensions that don’t often get discussed on the AP wire.

Then the Chicks sing Trisha Yearwood’s “Standing Out in a Crowd” from a stage where Trisha Yearwood has played. Three guys down front go for more beer, which is bad vibe for the cocks, because right now they’re standing out in a bad way as we watch their asses block our views. Could’ve waited for a stand up song, you know, or a break. But what break?

Anyway this next song was written with Pete Yorn after they had all viewed the rough cut of the documentary, “Shut Up and Sing,” and it’s about “that annoying blonde neighbor that won’t go away.” Of course the song was welcomed into the documentary soundtrack right away. Sister Emily hits some hot licks on a lap steel and we’re into “The Neighbor” which according to chickaholic at the tripod henhouse hasn’t come out yet on CD.

Violins introduce “Cowboy Take Me Away,” colors turn purple, cell phones go up as lights, and the audience sings along with the chorus: “Set me free oh I pray.”

“Just in case anyone was wondering whether I was too cool for school,” says Natalie, “let me introduce you to my omnichord.” Well it does seem like a toy, and she’s joking about the silliness of it, but the omnichord listing at wikipedia lists some impressive musicians who have toyed with it. Still, in order not to confuse our sense of sophistication, Maines announces that the song will be played in the key of C and her son Slade (one of seven children of the band, four of whom were born here in Austin) has requested cell lights throughout the house.

Well, of course, the cell lights go up. And we are now in heaven, there are so many stars, listening to “Lullaby” with easy going accompaniment, unplugged like. “How long do you want to be loved / Is forever enough, ‘cause I’m never never / Givin’ you up.” At which point the audience is cheering in delightful affirmation for their own little ones.

And speaking of family love, Natalie returns to the theme of Britney Spears in order to explain why she has been totally thrown off her game with regard to her allegiances in the whole Britney-Kevin custody feud. I have just done the internet research that Maines suggested as a follow up, to find a photo mercifully “censored” in just the right place. So I can “see” why Maines is asking if “this is describable or even worth discussing? I mean she knows there are photographers around. Oh, my Gawd. I didn’t know she had stretch marks!” At which point really it is time to dedicate this next song to Kevin Federline and shut up and sing.

“I can’t afford no ring / I can’t afford no ring / You shouldn’t be wearing white and I can’t afford no ring.” It’s the opening stanza for “White Trash Wedding” and we are out here laughing as the Chicks do this in hard-fast mountain style, you know, like they was singing from a porch in that movie Deliverance, and here comes Kevin and Britney walkin’ up a dirt trail barefoot. Which they follow up with some instrumental bluegrass as if reading our minds.

But if you think this is the high point of the evening, well you don’t quite understand white trash art, because seriousness is about to happen. Several days before the Grammy nominations were announced, the audience was already treating the next song like something very special.

With the opening chords of “Not Ready to Make Nice” there is a kind of tremor that breaks open all around. Up from the lower steps comes rushing a woman at top speed, leaping like an Impala. Red pants, black shirt, coming right up at you in a blur of tip top desire.

“Come on!” she hollers to friends who have just returned from a break in the concourse. “I’m coming to get your ass!” And back down the aisle she leads them, quickly as that. Meanwhile, the house lights come up, and the crowd is on its feet, hollering and whistling. This is what a hit feels like in the round. No question this is top of the night, and the Chicks know how to play it precisely. They are going to win this Grammy, because you can see all around you that the song is a national treasure. Not a hurt feeling left in the house.

Although the next song–“Long Time Gone”–begins with a banjo riff, Opry style, the unplugged part of the concert has passed and the hot guitar licks start pumping things up. The drummer is back in action, and Natalie is encouraging the audience to clap along, which we do, just as the keyboards kick in with some Al Kooper coolness.

Somewhere in this swirl we’ve transitioned into another song with its striking (even for the Dixie Chicks striking) vocal punctuations of “I Hope.” And when the three singers converge on the word lovingly, well, how can you not hope to highest heavens that we can actually work it out that way? In fine Willie Nelson fashion we are closing up this concert with a Gospel revival, and you do feel like you could fly away.

Which makes “Songbird” such a fine choice as Natalie and company sing us to the top of the world, and when we get there, Natalie takes a seat on the drum stand, listening with us to the string instrumentals that swirl around up up here in heaven.

“We’d like to thank everybody for coming out to the show tonight,” says Maines. “This is still our favorite song from the first album.” And with the opening notes of “Wide Open Spaces” we’re on our feet again.

But what’s this, one more song? “Sin Wagon” with the devil and Martie keeping tempo on the violin, Charlie Daniels style.

“Thank you so much! Good night”

To which we can only reply, fat chance!

Thunderous, yes, we are. Stomping, hollering, whistling, clapping, and taking breath to do it all over again. We ain’t moving one inch. We ain’t shuttin up. We’re trying to shake it all the way out to the freeway where drivers will wonder if the Balcones Fault has suddenly given way, looking in their rear-views for some of that St. Elmo’s Fire.

Which all this noize, after a while, the Dixie Chicks have to respond to, even though we do hope they enjoyed seeing how long this would go on and for how loud. So they come back out, just the three of them, guitar, Dobro, and violin, and they stand close together and sing “Travelin’ Soldier.” No time for dry eyes, this song, these days.

“We only know one song by ourselves,” jokes Natalie, helping us up out of that war casualty mood, “so we’ll bring the band back out.” Maines is introducing the band and telling a story about how right before the show, but later than they were supposed to be, the Chicks asked to see “Pete” and instead of Pete Yorn being returned to them, they got their own band member back, the wrong “Pete.” Okay, at least she doesn’t go for the Peter joke, it’s so rude to make fun of people’s names that way.

Then Maines announces that they’re going to do some Bob Dylan. I should have known this was possible, but I didn’t, which made it even better. They put a bounce in the tempo and Maines fired the lyrics in semi-automatic bursts: “The emptiness is endless, gold is gray / You can always go back, but you can’t go back all the way / Well there’s only one thing that I did wrong / I stayed in Mississippi a day too long.”

And finally, of course, the Dixie Chicks were, “Ready to Run.” They sang it, then they did it, and it was perfect time to think about baby sitters and Tuesday morning, so the crowd broke quickly this time. But we just want y’all to know, things would have gone on differently had it been a Friday or Saturday night.

“Thank you so much Austin, we’ll see you next time.” Yes ma’am you sure will. On that Grammy victory lap, perhaps.

But one more thing before we find a bus home. Outside in the chilly air is an organizer, and this brilliant young white man is handing out little flyers for the Barak Obama campaign for President. You pundits who have written off the white vote in the South? Go back and read the beginning of this article. There’s a word up there for you.

By Susan Van Haitsma

If politicians and pundits are discussing, in retrospect, a universal draft as a war deterrent, it would behoove them to check in with today’s prospective draftees to ask what they think about it. In the process, the draft debate might be replaced with a larger question. Instead of older adults arguing about how and which young persons should be used for national defense purposes, the question would be whether adults can figure out how to get along in the world without making the unnatural sacrifice of their young.

The volunteer organization with which I work, Nonmilitary Options for Youth, does regular literature tabling in Austin’s public high schools. While we are there, we ask students what they think about the draft issue, the Iraq war and military recruitment on campus. Last year, we conducted an informal, anonymous written survey on these issues, with approximately 600 students participating across 12 schools. Responses indicated a variety of strong, reasoned opinions, and students seemed to appreciate being asked.

Overwhelmingly, students expressed firm opposition to reinstatement of a military draft. Young people on all sides of the war question stressed the importance of individual freedom of choice. “Someone shouldn’t be forced to die or kill for something they don’t think is right or something they don’t believe in,” was a response that echoed the common sentiment.

Wrote another, “Why reinstate the draft? Because young adults are beginning to realize that they’re not willing to fight for our country anymore. We are sick of hopeless, doomed crusades into all corners of the world.” One student drew a logical conclusion shared by others. “If you must force thousands of people to leave their families and kill for a reason they do not agree with or even understand, that is wrong and a war obviously not worth fighting.”

Whether most high school students know that there are soldiers who likewise are resisting a war they do not agree with or understand, they tend to understand that there are different ways to be drafted. Many students realize that recruiters are targeting them, or they mention a brother, a cousin or an uncle who was recruited. “A poor school is always an opportunity for the military,” wrote one student. Stated another, “I think it’s unfair that they ‘prey’ on minority students like myself because they know we don’t have the money to pay for college.”

Students also notice contradictions in allowing the military onto school campuses. “People complain about violence in school and they let people come in and encourage it. I just don’t get it,” wrote one. Another student added, “I think it’s wrong to try and impress kids with BIG GUNS and SHINY BADGES. Why would anyone want to get respect for murder?”

If most young people are adamantly opposed to universal military conscription, and if some understand the unfairness of the de facto draft we have now, what is the solution?

Students suggest that answers may be found in what schools have taught all along: “I think we should handle things in a nonviolent grown-up way.” “We should be big enough to reach an agreement with our enemies and settle it like civilized human beings.” “I think that people who think war is the best option are completely lazy; there are so many more options!” One student concluded simply, “I believe that the best way to make peace is with peace.”

We older adults could match our fierce devotion to our young with an equally fierce commitment to resolving conflict without using young lives. Creating peace with peace does not include training any young adults to kill. Instead, effective and respectful methods of communication remain key to peacemaking. Students are taught to “use words, not weapons,” and they do so with straightforward eloquence. It wouldn’t be difficult for grown-ups in government to learn to do the same.

Susan Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth in Austin, Texas and can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net

By Greg Moses

IndyMedia Austin / CounterPunch

With the storefront door opened to crisp air and curious people, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo is for now seated near friends who ask for an autograph of her 2001 book, ‘Histories and Stories from Chiapas.’ Turning back the cover, she points to a full-page photo of a white stelae, explaining how borders are marked the traditional way, not with walls.

“It’s a symbolic border,” she smiles, showing how the marker sits upon an island in the middle of a lake. From her position not quite in the center of a gathering crowd at MonkeyWrench Books in Austin, Texas, the legendary anthropologist is glowing with words, ideas, projects, and stories. It is time, says an organizer, to get the program started.

In her latest collaboration, ‘Dissident Women,’ published the week before Thanksgiving, Hernández is one of several editors and writers who offer fresh studies about the ongoing indigenous women’s revolutions of Southern Mexico, including a first-time-in-English publication of the 1994 Mayan document, ‘Women’s Rights in our Traditions and Customs.’

As co-editor Shannon Speed explains to Monday night’s tightly-packed audience, the women of Southern Mexico are working out terms of struggle that allow them to organize within “cultural spaces” connected to indigenous traditions, even as they assert their rights to reform those traditions.

“It is better that we women put down on paper that there are some customs that do not respect us and we want them changed,” reads the Mayan document of 1994. “Violence—battering and rape—is not right. We don’t want to be traded for money.”

Yet, as Mayan women make frank complaints against patriarchy at home, they insist equally that “we don’t want a paternalistic state coming in to handle this for us,” says Speed. The words provoke memories of rapes and beatings committed by police this past May, in an assault upon indigenous flower merchants; an attack that Hernández has described as “some of the saddest and most violent days in the modern history of San Salvador Atenco, on the outskirts of the Mexico City megalopolis.”

Hearing these words from the Mexican states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, or Tlaxcala, my mind leaps to Afghanistan and Iraq, where steel-tipped outbursts of masculine temper have been propagandized as women’s liberation. Compared to the knowledge that Hernández and Speed bring from Southern Mexico, what do we yet know about all those women who now live under our bombs?

Against the deafening violence of gluttonous states, indigenous women of the Americas continue their 500-year struggle for cultural sovereignty. The gathering of Mayan women who produced ‘Women’s Rights in our Traditions and Customs’ was prompted in part by a government official who one day informed Hernández that indigenous women are not interested in politics. Likewise, among academic officials, prevailing attitudes assume that indigenous women don’t really think.

“We are tired of seeing indigenous women reserved for the appendix of scholarly books,” explains Hernández, to an audience that sits at the margins of the University of Texas community. “Indigenous women also struggle with theoretical issues.” Although scholars will use narratives of ‘native peoples’ for source materials, any ‘theory’ to be heard from those voices will likely be dis-credited. And to tell the truth about it, attitudes about ‘women’s knowledge’ can infect the women themselves.

Doctoral candidate Melissa M Forbis, tonight’s third and last speaker, has been working for a decade in Southern Mexico, “because what I was reading about Chiapas didn’t match what I was experiencing.” She helps us to remember that health care was one issue that provoked the Zapatista uprising. The indigenous peoples of Chiapas were dying in high numbers from curable diseases, and women were dying at high rates from childbirth. So one of the first tasks facing the indigenous movement was recovery of their own health. That recovery required theory and knowledge.

On the road to their own definition of health, the women of Chiapas worked collectively to recover their knowledge of indigenous herbs, and to remember themselves as the healers who had given care to their communities for tens of thousands of years. To do this, they shook off 500 years of persecution as ‘brujos’ or witches. And against proximate threats of violence, they traveled in pairs. Yet again, they re-became ‘promotoras de salud’–promoters of health.

“Health is the well-being of the people and the individual, who have the capacity and motivation for all types of activities whether social or political,” declared the Zapatista community Moisés Gandhi in 1997. “Health is living without humiliation; being able to develop ourselves as women and men; it is being able to struggle for a new country where the poor and particularly the indigenous peoples can make decisions autonomously. Poverty, militarization and war destroy health.”

Surely on Thanksgiving Day, these are words any true pilgrim would be thankful to digest.

Note: Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. Edited by Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and Lynn M. Stephen. Book Fourteen in the Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series: Books about women and families, and their changing role in society. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / DissidentVoice / FFFEmailUpdate

The principle of habeas corpus is a demand that free people make toward state power. If free people are going to respect a state’s power to lock people up, then that state must respect a free people’s demand to see the causes and the evidence for any arrest.

So it is chilling to read the section on Habeas Corpus Matters included in the recently passed Military Commissions Act of 2006:

“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

What this section says is that in the eyes of the United States, aliens are not to be granted the rights of a free people. And this makes the United States a threat to free people everywhere.

There are so-called conservatives who say that the United States does not owe the right of habeas corpus to aliens. They argue that habeas corpus is a Constitutional Right and therefore a right that belongs exclusively to the people of the United States.

But the right of habeas corpus was not invented by the United States Constitution, and it cannot be trademarked as territorial property, made by, or exclusively for citizens of the USA. The Right of habeas corpus was written into the United States Constitution because it was already in the 18^th Century a time-honored principle for free people anywhere.

A state that revokes its own obligations to habeas corpus is a state that declares itself infallible. And an infallible state is either exceptionally wise or exceptionally dangerous. But if the American people believe that their leadership is exceptionally wise, shouldn’t they revoke habeas corpus for themselves, first?

It’s scandalous enough that Congress would revoke habeas corpus, but when Congress does it just a month before it goes up for re-election, the timing suggests that we have become a nation of vicious people who would cheer the unfreedom of others in the name of freedom for ourselves.

In the Military Commissions Act of 2006 we find a mirror to show us what we have become in the name of the twin towers massacre of Sept. 11. Just a little ways down the page from the sentence that revokes habeas corpus for alien enemy combatants is another sentence that makes the new rules retroactive to Sept. 11, 2001.

But I hear some listeners asking: what’s wrong with locking up a terrorist and throwing away the key? To which I answer, maybe nothing. But when a state gets to declare in advance who the terrorist is and never is obliged to respect that person’s rights to due process, then we have made a state which can declare its own infallibility. And what free people can applaud the idea of an infallible state that can lock people up and throw away the key.

In our coming electoral response to the Congress of the United States we will choose between those who voted for an infallible state and those who voted against it. And in our choices at the ballot box, we will tell the rest of the world whether the people of the United States stand with them or against them when it comes to supporting the traditions of free people wherever they happen to be born.

[Written for Touchstone Radio - scheduled air date Oct. 12]

By Susan Van Haitsma 

On Friday, September 15, the film, “The Ground Truth,” opened in selected cities around the country, including Austin. The riveting documentary directed by Patricia Foulkrod is scheduled to run for one week at the Dobie Theatre. The film gives voice to young veterans of the Iraq war, who speak candidly about the successive phases of their military experience: recruitment, basic training, combat, re-entry into civilian society, physical and psychological war injuries and the consequent realization that their country is unprepared for the levels of support they really need. Yellow car magnets and heroes’ welcomes don’t cut it.

“The Ground Truth” is rated “R for disturbing violent content, and language,” according to its listing in the Austin American-Statesman. Most of the disturbing violent content and language is contained in footage from basic training and from the Iraq war. Drill instructors are shown dehumanizing recruits as part of the process of training them to dehumanize the adversary. Rare video footage from Iraq, accompanied by first-hand accounts from soldiers featured in the film, reveal the ways their training to “Kill, kill” leads them to target Iraqi civilians.

A film review of “The Ground Truth” in the Austin Chronicle includes the reviewer’s suggestion, “It would be a good idea to show Foulkrod’s movie nationwide on high school career days.” As it happened, I attended a local high school career fair the evening before the film opened. Counseling staff at the school had invited Nonmilitary Options for Youth to participate with a literature table along with the many college and occupational trade representatives who were present. My colleague and I set up our table near the Army and Marine recruiters who came with their chin-up bar and give-away items.

One of the points made by the veterans interviewed in “The Ground Truth” (including a former Marine recruiter) is that recruiters do not tend to use the word “kill” when they talk to young people about enlistment. The military recruiters I observed at the career fair encouraged students under age 18 to display their physical strength on the chin-up bar and to fill out cards with their contact information. The students weren’t told that the primary purpose of the military is to harness their youthful energy for killing.

Materials at our Nonmilitary Options table did address killing and the human costs of war. We invited students to consider signing cards that read in bold letters, “I Will Not Kill.” The postcards are part of a youth-organized campaign sponsored by the international organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation. The ‘I Will Not Kill’ campaign (www.iwillnotkill.org) gives young people a way to document their beliefs about killing in war, not only in case of a draft, but to encourage them to explore their own moral values as they enter adulthood.

If “The Ground Truth” could have been shown as part of that high school career night, the truths offered by the young veterans in the film would have done much more than we could at our table to inform and enlighten both students and recruiters about the realities of enlistment. Unfortunately, the film is not likely to be shown in the school, partly because of its ‘R’ rating, which is due precisely to the film’s candid revelation of the disturbing violence and language that is required to make students into soldiers.

Included in AISD school regulations is the following statement: “Students shall be informed that physical violence and threats of physical violence as a means of addressing interpersonal conflict and discipline or control are inappropriate and destructive.” At the same time, military recruitment in schools means that students are sought to join an institution that relies on physical violence and threats of violence as a means of addressing conflict, discipline and control. If military training and combat is described accurately, those descriptions may be considered too violent for minors to access, yet access to minors is what military recruitment is all about. Such layers of cognitive dissonance become part of the soldier’s psychological burden described so honestly by the young veterans in the film.

Students are deceived if ground truths about military training, war and inadequate veteran care are withheld from them. And if images of real war are inappropriate to display to young people, then it is inappropriate to recruit young people to fight. The veterans who speak in “The Ground Truth,” several of whom are only a few years out of high school themselves, have undertaken a truth-telling mission. Supporting the troops means listening to what they have to say.

Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth and can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net

By Susan Van Haitsma

Austin American-Statesman / DissidentVoice / CommonDreams

Freedom. It’s the word used over and over by George W. Bush to defend military offensives initiated by his administration. Freedom, he says, is being protected and expanded through the sacrifices of US soldiers ordered into Iraq and Afghanistan.

First Amendment rights to speak, assemble, publish, practice religion and petition the government are essential freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution soldiers swear to defend. But are soldiers themselves accorded the rights they are ordered to protect? Is it possible for First Amendment freedoms to be advanced by an institution that suppresses those freedoms?

On June 7, 2006, 3-year Army officer, Lt. Ehren Watada, stationed at Ft. Lewis, WA spoke publicly in opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and declared his intent to refuse orders to deploy. After careful study of the events leading to the invasion and reports of the ways the occupation has been conducted in light of US Constitutional and international law, Lt. Watada reached a conclusion shared by many, perhaps most of his fellow Americans.

Lt. Watada stated, “The war in Iraq violates our democratic system of checks and balances. It usurps international treaties and conventions that by virtue of the Constitution become American law. The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people with only limited accountability is not only a terrible moral injustice, but a contradiction to the Army’s own Law of Land Warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes… My oath of office is to protect and defend America’s laws and its people. By refusing unlawful orders for an illegal war, I fulfill that oath today.”

On June 22, Lt. Watada refused orders to deploy with his unit to Iraq. On July 5, he was formally charged with three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), including charges of missing movement and of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” and using “contemptuous words” toward officials, specifically President Bush. The words used by Watada, “our government led us into war based on misrepresentations and lies,” echo the sentiments of millions of people in the US. The charges against Watada represent the first known prosecution since 1965 of UCMJ Article 88 regarding contempt of superior officers. Lt. Watada’s lawyer, Eric Seitz, said, “We expected the missing movement charge, but we are somewhat astounded by the ‘contempt’ and ‘conduct unbecoming’ charges. These additional charges open up the substance of Lt. Watada’s statements for review and raise important First Amendment issues.”

A pre-trial hearing of Lt. Watada’s case is scheduled for August 17. Watada does not consider himself a Conscientious Objector to all war, but he takes seriously his obligation to abide by the Nuremberg Principles, international law ratified by the US following WWII.

The fourth article of the Nuremberg Principles states, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” Punishable as crimes under international law are the following:

Crimes Against Peace, including “waging a war of aggression.”

War Crimes, including “ill treatment of prisoners of war, plunder of public or private property and wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”

Crimes Against Humanity, including “murder and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population.”

Do we want soldiers to follow orders without question, or do we want them to think critically about their actions? Why are some soldiers punished for committing atrocities during war at the same time that other soldiers are punished for resisting orders to participate in a war known for its atrocities? Lt. Watada joins a growing number of soldiers whose moral convictions are leading to punitive convictions in military courts. Many soldiers who have sought Conscientious Objector status have been denied. Thousands of soldiers have gone AWOL as a result of the formidable legal blocks to establishing moral objections to the Iraq war. Many have sought refuge in Canada, though political asylum for US military war resisters is not official there.

Freedoms are protected and expanded, not through war, as President Bush would have us believe, but through the courageous moral choices being made by young war resisters like Lt. Ehren Watada. By practicing First Amendment freedoms of speech, press and conscience, they are shouldering the responsibilities being shirked by their elders to bring international and US law to bear on the war in Iraq.

Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth in Austin, Texas. She can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net

It was not until Robert Rubin became special economic assistant to president Clinton that the US would figure out its strategy of dollar hegemony through the promotion of unregulated globalization of financial markets. Rubin, a consummate international bond trader at Goldman Sachs who earned $60 million the year he left to join the White House, figured out how the US was able to have its cake and eat it too, by controlling domestic inflation with cheap imports bought with a strong dollar, and having its trade deficit financed by a capital account surplus made possible by the same strong dollar. Thus dollar hegemony was born.

–Henry CK Liu

By Greg Moses

DissidentVoice / InfoShopNews / UrukNet

As Islamic states and communities caucus over the crisis in Lebanon, non-Islamic populations in the West also desire some quick way to peacefully deter the hyper-violence of the reigning Washington-London-Jerusalem machine. Ahmed Amr calls our attention to currency activism, a grassroots dollar boycott, suggested by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. By withdrawing economic activity as much as possible from the production and circulation of USA dollars, billions of people all over the world might collectively compel substantial and lasting concessions from our steel-tipped oligarchs, if not turn them out naked overnight.

The power of currency activism can be dramatically envisioned upon premises of dollar hegemony worked out in the pages of Asia Times by economist Henry CK Liu. In dialectics marvelous to read, Liu argues that Clinton’s place in economic history was secured by consolidating dollar hegemony as the monetary structure for globalization, a.k.a. neo-liberalism. The care and feeding required by this system explains odd collaborations between Republicans and Democrats, Texans and Saudis, or think about this one: Wal-Mart shoppers and the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Liu’s dollar-hegemony theory explains how Wal-Mart shoppers have the CPC more on the leash than the other way around, because when Lee and Sandy Heartland drop their dollars into the big-box stores crammed with things made in China, what happens is that Chinese money managers have little choice but to preserve their dollar holdings in the form of US Treasury Bonds. The more Wal-Mart shoppers buy, therefore, the more the CPC comes to hold T-bills, and the tighter together we are drawn into the world of dollar hegemony.

To seriously disrupt the productive systems that reproduce dollar hegemony would risk write-downs of all savings dependent on T-bill repayments. So if China is an emerging economic competitor, as everyone can see, Liu stresses that the CPC has more importantly become an embedded financial partner in the dollar’s monetary regime.

Or recall the stashes of cash found and lost in Iraq during the USA-led invasion. Doesn’t a pile of loose dollars count for a most transparent motive anywhere in the world? From the point of view of dollar hegemony, CENTCOM is securing a final frontier with distinct financial topographies.

So an important frontier of dissent has been suggested by Minister Mohamad’s call for oil producing countries to denominate their trade in some currency other than petro-dollars. Indeed this might inscribe a limit to the hyper-violence that dollar hegemony today enables. However, as Ahmed Amr replies, Minister Mohamad’s suggestion will be hard to follow for OPEC managers who would face the same predicament as the CPC in terms of savage losses to their own wealth if the dollar were to suffer. In fact, dollar hegemony helps to explain why the patriarchs if not the people of the Middle East consider Hezbollah retrograde.

As a matter of global economic democracy, Liu has been touting the virtues of currency pluralism while trying to deflate campaigns for belligerent exchange policies. And last week’s refusal by top Western leaders to pronounce cease fire over South Lebanon accelerates the urgency of finding a global activism that can wage simple peace with peaceful tools. Currency pluralism might help. Otherwise, we have been shown a future where we all get sucked into blood games that we can neither begin nor end on our own terms.

If grassroots peace movements could express themselves in currency choices, then we would find new voice in numbers. How many percentage points of monetary withdrawal could make George Bush look up the word magnanimous? It’s a big word, I know, but there are good reasons why people with fleets of F-16s should be compelled to pronounce ethical vocabularies. Those who do not place limits on their own ability to kill are virtually begging grassroots peacemakers to craft real limits for them. In the flashy grins of Western leaders last week we found the promise that we could all be punished some day. The world, including the vast majority of the West, must find some way to grin back.

By Susan Van Haitsma

Among the pieces of good advice delivered to University of Texas graduates by US Ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza Jr. during his recent commencement address in Austin was to pay attention to “the voice of your own conscience.”

In the same issue of the Austin American-Statesman that related this excerpt from Ambassador Garza’s presentation was a paragraph in the Central Texas Digest section reporting the court martial of UT student and Army National Guard Specialist, Katherine Jashinski, who was sentenced to jail after her conscientious objector claim was denied at Fort Benning, GA.

Jashinski, age 23, is the first woman conscientious objector known to be jailed in the current war. In November 2005, when her conscientious objector claim had been pending for 18 months, Jashinski publicly declared her refusal to participate in weapons training at Ft. Benning in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan.

In her statement, she explained, “At age 19 I enlisted in the guard as a cook because I wanted to experience military life. When I enlisted I believed that killing was immoral, but also that war was an inevitable part of life and, therefore, an exception to the rule. After enlisting, I began the slow transformation into adulthood. Like many teenagers who leave their home for the first time, I went through a period of growth and soul searching. I encountered many new people and ideas that broadly expanded my narrow experiences. . I began to see a bigger picture of the world and I started to reevaluate everything that I had been taught about war as a child. I developed the belief that taking human life was wrong and war was no exception. I was then able to clarify who I am and what it is that I stand for.”

Jashinski concluded, “I am determined to be discharged as a conscientious objector, and while undergoing the appeals process, I will continue to follow orders that do not conflict with my conscience until my status has been resolved. I am prepared to accept the consequences of adhering to my beliefs. What characterizes a conscientious objector is their willingness to face adversity and uphold their values at any cost. We do this not because it is easy or popular, but because we are unable to do otherwise.”

A motion to reconsider Jashinski’s conscientious objector claim was denied in federal district court. At her court martial on May 23, she was sentenced to 120 days confinement after pleading guilty to a charge of “refusing to obey a legal order.” Having already served about half her sentence, she is scheduled to be released in July.

Before she was ordered to Ft. Benning, Jashinski became involved with a local affiliate of the GI Rights Hotline, a national network of people trained to answer calls from GIs seeking counsel about such issues as harassment, medical problems and discharge options. The local group has been holding regular study sessions since October 2005, and is set to begin taking calls soon. Jashinski says she plans to continue her involvement with the GI Rights Hotline when she returns to Austin.

One of her colleagues in the group says of Jashinski’s tenacity, “She refused to take the easy way out.she chose to follow the process the Army has for conscientious objectors. This long, long journey has been very hard and so few pursue this difficult route. I think it testifies to Katherine’s commitment to nonviolence and her steadfast convictions.”

In his commencement address, Ambassador Garza said, “It is people - the real, human connections we make - that matter most.” The sentiment echoes a statement made by Iraq war veteran and conscientious objector, Camilo Mejia, who, like Jashinski, was incarcerated when his CO claim was denied. “I am confined to a prison, but I feel, today more than ever, connected to all humanity,” Mejia wrote in 2005. “Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience.”

To prepare for and fight wars, most of the world’s societies continue to recruit teenagers, whose belief systems are still in the formation process. Students hear a lot about freedom, yet conscience is a concept that is not usually found in school curriculum. Training our young people to follow orders rather than explore and develop morally and ethically is, I believe, harmful to our society and at its root, un-American.

Young people like Katherine Jashinski and Camilo Mejia, who have listened to the voice of conscience over the orders of the most intimidating institution in the world, have demonstrated what freedom really means.

By Greg Moses

Maybe it’s a symptom, like seeing water on a blacktop road, but something hopeful is emerging from the culture mix of Da Vinci Code and Dixie Chicks. Something related to the value of truth.

In the Da Vinci Code — at the high point in Dan Brown’s plot to uncover the profound secret of a real woman — our heroine depends upon a scholar, who has nothing but a clue, to protect her life against an imperial patriarch, who, armed with a gun and clueless, is about to kill the living truth in the name of the man-made clue.

Since the scholar cannot talk the robber into disarming, he offers up the clue in such a way that in order to grasp it, the imperial patriarch must drop the gun. As the plot literally rises to its pinnacle on this gambit, the scholar demonstrates how disarming a real clue can be.

And in fact it’s not a far toss from this London scene in kilometers or years, that we find the spot where Natalie Maines tossed a real clue into the air when she said: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Only this time, the imperial patriarchs didn’t drop their guns. Instead they raised their guns to shoot at the clue and at the woman.

So it’s a fortunate stroke of luck that the Dixie Chicks return to public life the week after the Da Vinci Code hits the big screen as if to ask, what are we going to do this time with the clue, the woman, and the gun?

I like this quote from Jacques Lacan, the feisty French philosopher whose one-volume selection of essays has been finally translated into English after 40 years. I’ve made my way half through it so far. Anyway, here’s the quote:

“We cannot confine ourselves to giving a new truth its rightful place, for the point is to take up our place in it. The truth requires us to go out of our way. We cannot do so by simply getting used to it. We get used to reality. The truth we repress.”

Of course, you’d have to be from Texas in the first place to understand the shame that Natalie Maines does not repress in the fact that the President is from Texas. You’d have to grow up with Dallas and learn it from inside in order to experience it as something besides the Dallas that everyone else knows.

Ditto with Dixie. You’d have to be a Dixie Chick in order to expect something better from Dixie and take up your place within it. And this is why Natalie Maines had to say what she said when and where she said it. Otherwise we’d have a right to wonder if its the new Dixie or the old where the Chicks take up their place.

As for the rest of the F-U-T-K country music crowd, it’s too bad they got caught the second time around with their guns still in their hands, their bullets still whistlin Dixie the old fashioned way. Because we have to ask, how long has country music been nothing but the tunes we play as we pick up the gun of imperial patriarchy and get used to its reality all over again.

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / CounterPunch / UrukNet / BellaCiao / DissidentVoice

On the stock-market channel Friday afternoon, just before commercial time, comes news that the Senate of the USA has declared Inglés the “national language” of state. Then comes the commercial, cutting to a Chinese couple standing in a busy airport, somewhat startled by a youngish white man who rushes up to them and says “welcome to America” in Chinese. “I practiced all morning,” says the gleamy-eyed realtor. “I hope you understand. Welcome to America!” The Century 21 realty company calls this new series of ads, “Agents of Change.” But if it’s true that the bi-lingual aspirations of the eager realtor qualify him as a change agent, where does that leave the Senate?

When the term “national language” was inserted into immigration legislation this week, it both revealed and escalated power attached to English proficiency. On the one hand, the language of the so-called compromise immigration bill already would require English proficiency as a condition of citizenship. Or as one Senator put it: “If you fail to pass the English proficiency exam, you will be deported.”

To this clear and distinct requirement was added another warning: “Unless otherwise offered or provided by law, no person has a right, entitlement, or claim to have the Government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English” (SAMDT4064). The timing and placement of that language says watch out, when it comes to communicating in languages other than English, the USA is fed up trying.

And so another pander-to-fascists week came to an end in Washington, with little remembrance of the fact that the Senate had declared 2005 “The Year of Foreign Language Study” (SR28); or that legislation is pending “to construct a language arts facility at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico” (S2274); or that the 911 Commission said, even according to compromise co-author Sen. Kennedy, “we ought to give emphasis to other languages and that that was in our national security interest.”

The pander-to-fascist context seemed to relieve many observers from worrying overmuch that anything serious or long lasting will come from the President’s call to send National Guard troops to the Mexican border. As in: “isn’t he just pandering to fascists? Isn’t that what this troop thing is really about?” And then moving on to the next issue, as if it matters not at all that based on this week’s fascist pandering soon enough the troops will actually start moving into place.

When the President announced plans for troop deployment, his so-called target audience was only half satisfied. A “Minuteman” spokesman called it a “stop-gap” measure, which again seemed to help observers take comfort that the President was being only a little fascist. More progressive voices picked up the “stop-gap” language and therefore contributed to the impression that the President was being mostly insufficient, stupid, or crazy; when in fact sending thousands of troops to the Mexican border follows the same logic of radical excess that has motivated pre-emptive war, global strike, and torture camps. If this logic has to stop sometime, why not now? In solidarity with a rising immigrant rights movement, the Quakers seemed to get it. So did the ANSWER coalition. This time, these likely suspects are joined by enough insiders that maybe we can quietly snuff this troop deployment before it starts.

Refuting the charge that the troop deployment was merely a pandering insufficiency was none other than the Vice President himself, who came out of his bunker long enough to record an interview on a right-wing radio show that was promptly published at the White House web site. In the interview, the number two leader of the free world explained that good troops can make good fences, and of course good fences are what good neighbors are made of.

Most stunning was the sudden relevance of the New York press, headlining in a timely manner the crucial context to keep in mind: that this is the month when billion dollar bids will be submitted for a megamammoth border contract called SBInet (the Secure Border Initiative Network). Bidders will include such military-industrial behemoths as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Most interesting is the last-minute entry of the European-based Ericsson company, because they provide surveillance along the Russia-Finland border, matching up nicely with the ideological model of the USA-Mexico border pushed by the fascist crowd’s cold-war compulsions.

On the question of ideological models, it would be prudent to consider that the Vice President’s description of the next Mexican border sounded a lot like the Israeli border with Palestine. In this context, the Bush-Cheney troop deployment will provide free of charge to the winning bidder of border security services a cadre of perma-temp employees who are already trained, dressed for photo-ops, and security-cleared (in case you missed the simultaneous news this week that the agency in charge of security clearances was shutting down because of poor budgeting).

Sad to say during election year in the USA, it still helps to be a little fascist. Everyone seems to comprende.

By Susan Van Haitsma

CommonDreams

My neighbor, who is almost five, is one of my greatest teachers. For most of his life, we’ve shared weekly play dates, and I cherish this window he gives me into the fascinating, focused mind of a child living in the very present moment.

Lately, my little neighbor has been exploring the realm of weapons and combat. Following the lead of his parents, whose wisdom I trust and admire without reservation, I tend to go with the flow when he sets the stage for our imaginary battle scenarios.

Our war play provides interesting opportunities to experiment with various responses to violence. Generally, when my young friend asks me or the ‘bad guy’ Lego or Playmobile characters I represent to take up weapons against his ‘good guy’ characters, I suggest alternative means of engagement.

Are his guys hungry? Would they join my guys for lunch? Gradually, we find that the weapons and armor we or the characters are toting around impede doing things like eating imaginary lunches, and often by the time we are done playing, the weapons have been discarded due to impracticality.

Sometimes, however, his characters simply kill my characters. During our most recent play session, my surviving character said that he wanted to be alone for a minute because he was sad that his friends were dead. My young neighbor, who of course is wise to my motives, replied, “Susan, there’s no sad in this game.”

Soldiers themselves, those who have “skin in the game,” often use the same metaphor for war, according to my veteran friends. “Just play the game,” they tell each other - a game in which sadness and stress are supposed to be denied.

When my preschool friend disengaged from the imaginary world for a moment to clarify the rules, he indicated his ability to distinguish between real and pretend. Real soldiers must live in the real world, however, and when they make a game of it out of emotional necessity or peer pressure, they suffer. When politicians make a game of war, the soldier suffers further.

Because real war is not a game, the revelation of war’s costs and consequences cannot be declared against the rules. Yet US government leaders disregard or deny even the most basic human consequence as sadness, as though they have the power to will it into non-existence. In the meantime, the excruciating painfulness of war has found powerful expression through soldiers’ family members, military veterans and many allied international witnesses to war such as Women in Black and CodePink.

Recently, several members of Military Families Speak Out visited Austin following an Easter vigil at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas. Cindy Sheehan mentioned the loneliness and pain she continues to feel even while surrounded by friends and supporters. I could see the evidence in her eyes when we spoke briefly following her presentation.

I also met Carlos Arredondo, a native of Costa Rica whose harrowing story concerning the death of his eldest son was not shared entirely from the stage, but in a few words he shared with people afterward as they were leaving.

“Look here, at my scars, where I was burned,” he said, lifting his shirt to show where, in a panic of distress, he had set himself on fire after climbing into the Marine van that had just arrived carrying the news about his 20 year-old son, Alex. It had been Carlos’ birthday, and his initial thought when the van pulled up was that Alex was making a surprise visit home from Iraq to help him celebrate.

Later, in an article by Eugene Richards in The Nation, I learned more of Arredondo’s story. As parents of dead soldiers often report, the pain and sorrow usually is felt long before the moment they are informed of their child’s death. “I see all the sadness, see how they kill, see how the Marines move through dark alleyways, kick doors, blindfold people, while afraid most of the time for snipers and bombs,” Arredondo said, referring to his distress when Alex was deployed to the Middle East over a year before his death. “It was too much, too much, too much for parents.”

For parents like Cindy Sheehan, Carlos Arredondo, and other members of Gold Star Families for Peace, sorrow has propelled them to action. When Arredondo spoke in Austin, he carried a poster-sized photograph of his uniformed son lying in his casket. As one of only a few Gold Star parents who have been able to arrange for open caskets, he felt it was important to share the image, which he held aloft when he and other members of MFSO spoke to the press and the public.

A warm, intense man who, like Sheehan, was quick to thank and embrace those who attended their presentation, Arredondo has channeled his sorrow into an outward expression of care for others, so that they will not have to endure what he has. As Sheehan often has noted, grief also can increase fearlessness. “I know how to say ‘Impeach’ in two languages,” said Arredondo, firmly.

Sorrow is the natural response to death, and, as my young neighbor seems to know instinctively, the full expression of sadness may be war’s most natural and effective deterrent. As Gandhi demonstrated by fasting and taking on suffering as a response to killing, sorrow is a truth force that says, “This is what war feels like.” To a populace whose national directive stresses the pursuit of happiness, sorrow is an important obstacle to business as usual.

On Mother’s Day weekend, many events are planned to express the acute sadness caused by invasion, war and occupation, with a special emphasis on the huge human cost to families of the dead. In the large scheme of things, we are all family, and the cost has been too much, too much, too much.

A Gringo’s Grito

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews

Call them immigrantes, if that’s your word for someone who would walk a frozen bridge from Beijing to Buenos Aires. Or call them immigrantes, if that’s your word for those who live under shadows of macroeconomic policy exclusion. And call them immigrantes, if you’re pointing to the cheapest of “cheap labor” who send their savings to loved ones far and wide.

Call us immigrantes, if that’s your word for us who swallow heartache and keep a dream or two hidden from your stabbing gaze. Or call us immigrantes, while you lie about your law-abiding nature and your love of state certification.

And call us immigrantes, even if we qualify under your all-American regime as so-called native born, because we don’t like the way you use the word like a wanted poster, as if in your high-and-mighty tradition anyone ever cared about who was actually native born or what rights exist on other people’s ground.

Call yourselves immigrantes when you sign up to work for some overseas company because that’s where the money is. Or call yourselves immigrantes when you never cease moving in search of the better way. And call yourselves immigrantes when you say, “live free or die.”

Call us all immigrantes who are set loose on this new world market. Or call us all immigrantes who would be free under any part of the sky. And call us all immigrantes, the people of this shrinking earth who would sometimes roll along some glorious open road, just to see what’s on the other side.

Go ahead and say it. We are immigrantes all.

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / Dissident Voice

Be careful what you say, the children are listening. For the past year, children of immigrants have been hearing the worst things about their parents. Finally, across the country from Los Angeles, California, to Bastop, Texas, teenagers agreed all at once that it was time to talk back.

“Another day, another walkout” said a recent headline. This time the news was from Tyler, Texas, where students marched from Tyler High to the Smith County Courthouse carrying Mexican flags. Across the country, similar stories played.

I was eating lunch in downtown Austin, cleaning up a tasty plate of enchiladas mole, thinking about a fantastic exhibit of Mexican art that I’d just visited, when students filled the restaurant window with bodies marching north to the capitol.

“We’re here to work, we’re not criminals,” said one sign written in black marker on white posterboard. The young woman held the sign at the main gate to the Texas state capitol, surrounded by excited students. They chanted “Me-xi-co, Me-xi-co, Me-xi-co” and then cheered themselves on. They shouted “Si, Se Puede” the famous slogan of Cesar Chavez. In English it means, “yes - we can!” On this day, Chavez would have turned 79.

“We Pay Taxes,” said a slogan written in black marker on the back of a white t-shirt. “Without us Mexicans, the US is Nothing,” said a poster-board sign. A few young women wore petite-sized flags tucked into the fronts of their shirts.

It was a warm afternoon with temperatures climbing to 84 degrees and a South wind blowing up from the Colorado River. Bottles of water, eagerly grabbed up by students who had walked miles to get here, were poured into mouths and onto heads, sometimes accompanied by those little sounds you make when a cold splash catches you by surprise.

From passing cars, the students were treated to honks of support, which they often answered with cheers. Some of the cars were themselves filled with students and more flags of Mexico rippling from the windows.

“Who made this country?” asked one student waving a good sized flag. He drew cheers talking about beans and tortillas. “We’re a whole new diverse group that this country needs,” he said. “And we’re not going anywhere. We built this country. Even if they stop us, we’re going to come back. They’re not going to stop us. We’ve been here too long.”

In the shade of the small trees, the tone was jubilant and lighthearted, like a pep rally, but there was a serious message. These teenagers were confident in their heritage of hard work, determination, and life that keeps growing.

Political consultants are saying it would be better if students would carry American flags, but these teenagers haven’t been given very good examples lately of how the American flag can be carried with their kind of pride. The red, white, and blue has been used against them this past year. Who can blame them for unfurling the red, white, and green?

I’ve seen stories that listen to these teenagers and I’ve seen stories that listen mostly to adults who think they have something more important to say. Things like: they should be more pro-American, or they should be punished for leaving school. But that’s just the problem these days, that pro-American pretty much means pro-punishment, along with the self-proclaimed entitlement to talk right over others as if they deserve to never come from places they call their own.

I’m no political consultant, but as I was standing in the South wind that blew through the capitol gates among the splashing voices and fresh water, I was feeling that this is what America is supposed to be like. And I haven’t felt that way in years.