“A writer’s notebook is not a diary. Writers react. Writers need a place to record these reactions. That’s what a writer’s notebook is for. It gives you a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don’t want to forget. A writer’s notebook gives you a place to live like a writer.” - Ralph Fletcher
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Over and over in the United States, we proclaim our commitment to the rule of law - we are a nation of laws not men. If that were the case, we would turn over to the International Court of Justice high-ranking figures from the Bush administration, which initiated the war; from the Obama administration, which continued the war; from Congress, which enabled the war; and from the military, which prosecuted the war. We would determine the amount of reparations we owe Iraq and begin to make payments. And we would apologize to the Iraqi people and to the world.
Why is that unthinkable in our political culture? Perhaps it is because we worship power rather than respect law. Perhaps it is because we have no intention of acting on the moral principles we routinely impose on others.
Perhaps it is because we are not the people we tell ourselves we are.
Robert Jensen
(Source: truth-out.org)
War is indeed hell, but so, too, is the aftermath of war, especially for those who do not share the same rights as their fellow citizens. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the nation retreated from its fleeting commitment to black freedom and equality, enacting black codes and Jim Crow laws to ensure another hundred years of racial segregation and subordination. In too many ways, the legacy of this betrayal still haunts us all. Women warriors continue to suffer discrimination, harassment and sexual violence within the military itself, even as they struggle—like so many military veterans—to access the support and services they need to heal the visible and invisible wounds these modern wars have wrought. What’s more, they have to contend with the domestic War on Women, which seeks to control their bodies and choices and deny them equal wages and opportunities. And while gay, lesbian and bisexual service members—still only a tiny percentage of both the military and the LGBT community—can finally serve openly in a military culture still well-known for its rampant homophobia and sexism, they still shoulder the burdens of second-class citizenship when it comes to employment, housing, healthcare, marriage, adoption, taxes and the like.
Timothy Patrick McCarthy
(Source: thenation.com)
Nearly nine years passed before American forces reached their first 1,000 dead in the war. The second 1,000 came just 27 months later, a testament to the intensity of fighting prompted by President Obama’s decision to send 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2010, a policy known as the surge.
JAMES DAO and ANDREW W. LEHREN
(Source: The New York Times)
With climate change intensifying weather cataclysms, with the economy still on the verge of collapse and with foreign conflicts showing no sign of slowing down, America faces emergencies of no less than biblical proportions. Literally, biblical — wars,drought, famine and crushing poverty, to name a few. And yet, in the face of this, there’s more often than not total apathy and rampant disdain for the mere idea of political activism.
Except, of course, when it comes to the bizarre nexus of fast food and homophobia.
Then and only then, it seems, do the masses rise up in solidarity to miraculously transform stuffing one’s face with processed junk food into a proud way of opposing equal rights for gay people. Then and only then do people seem willing to drive out of their way and stand on long lines — all to somehow transform gluttonous gorging into a form of anti-gay protest.
David Sirota
(Source: salon.com)
On a planet still overstocked with city-busting, world-ending weaponry, in which almost 67 years have passed since a nuclear weapon was last used, the only nuke that Americans regularly hear about is one that doesn’t exist: Iran’s. The nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons on missiles, planes, and submarines possessed by Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea are barely mentioned in what passes for press coverage of the nuclear issue.
William D. Hartung
(Source: tomdispatch.com)
The ACLU estimates that US drone strikes have killed as many as 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians.
—assassination has been thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president. Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. He is, in other words, if not a king, at least the king of American assassinations. On that score, his power is total and completely unchecked. He can prescribe death for anyone “nominated,” choosing any of the “baseball cards” (PowerPoint bios) on that kill list and then order the drones to take them (or others in the neighborhood) out.
He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn’t enough and that the CIA’s drones can instead strike at suspicious “patterns of behavior” on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan. He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism that can stop him. An American global killing machine (quite literally so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a single, unaccountable individual. This is the nightmare the founding fathers tried to protect us from.
Since 2004, between 2,464 and 3,145 people are reported to have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan, of whom up to 828 were civilians and 175 children. Some Pakistani estimates put the civilian death toll much higher.
Seumas Milne
(Source: todayonline.com)
If we’re going to win our never-ending war against terror, there are bound to be casualties, and one of them just happens to be the Constitution.
Stephen Colbert
(Source: truth-out.org)
The American people are tired of war, particularly the “boots on the ground” kind where Americans are killed. However, they seem content to conduct war by other means, i.e. drones. One poll shows that eight out of ten Americans support the use of lethal drones. That’s because drones have been posed as a cheap alternative for killing our enemies that puts no American lives at risk and only hits the “bad guys.” In reality, they are not all that cheap (especially since they are constantly crashing), they kill lots of innocent people, and while they don’t put pilots at risk, they stir up anti-American sentiment and provoke new attacks against us. Drones may seem like “war made easy,” but that’s precisely the problem. War should not be easy, and drone attacks just guarantee that we will keep making new enemies faster than we can kill them.
Medea Benjamin
(Source: truth-out.org)
