November 17th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
The innocent; the children, the old people, the young policemen lying in their own blood, the relatives made instantly insane with grief.
Seeing/ knowing of these events, I’d like to humbly suggest an exhortation for us all. The exhortation starts with “Never never never never ever ever ever …” then, you please personally fill in the blank with whatever will preserve your sanity whilst allowing you to keep speaking up, acting up, never standing down about egregious matters.
For me, I think mine would go, “Never never never never ever ever ever … let the slaughter of innocents be taken to the cultural desert and buried in an unmarked political grave… and “Please, never never never never ever ever ever …” allow me to become inured, no matter how events in war grab and twist my tripes.
It’s so much easier to be inured, I think. So much easier. Mullen and I talk alot late a night about what a withdrawal from Iraq may presage, what slaughter of even more innocents might occur. We both remember the fall of Saigon intimately, people trying to throw their children over the walls of the embassy to save them, people trying to cling to the sled legs of the American helicopters in a desperate attempt to escape Saigon’s immanent bloodbath, but falling to their deaths instead.
If you would, please join me in praying for this father and mother of this little Iraqi madonna. In the photo, that is the child’s father. Please pray for all of us to be somehow impossibly wise, to be granted unlimited miracles in Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the entire world. I am praying for you too, for your sanity, for your heart, for your endurance. That’s a promise.
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CODA
Thank you Andrew Sullivan for passing this so very sad photograph forward. Many of us have come to believe that we cannot sanitize war’s realities by withholding horrendous images, that we are past being, must be past being careful about people’s visual sensitivities. In Latin, Horrescere, to act, to stand on end, bristle, be rough; to reveal the reality to prompt action. I regret deeply that that’s the exact ticket needed to roll hot at present.
A few days ago I received an e-mail from one of our TMV editors asking me if I would respond to a request from “Survivor Corps” to share news about their organization and about a specific program of that organization, “Operation Survivor.”
As one who has done his best to publicize the plight of our veterans, and especially the sorry treatment they have received from an administration that sent them into harm’s way and that touted “support the troops,” but didn’t, I am glad to do it, and only sorry that it has taken me three days to do so.
If you go to the “Survivor Corps” web site, you’ll learn the following facts:
First, about “Survivor Corps”:
Survivor Corps helps people around the world who have suffered war and violence to rebuild their lives and rejoin their communities. By connecting those affected by conflict through networks of survivors, they help people overcome trauma and injury and regain their place in society. Survivor Corps (formerly Landmine Survivors Network) was born out of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, and recently spearheaded the development of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Over the past ten years, they have established successful peer support programs in eight war affected countries in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Now, to the more recent work by this organization, “Operation Survivor”:
First, some background:
Within the United States there are over one and a half million service members that have served in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over thirty thousand have been physically wounded, but many more have experienced less visible, psychological wounds. Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have emerged as signature injuries of these conflicts, with recent reports suggesting an increase in rates of suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence among returning service members and veterans.
Ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are creating a generation of veterans in the United States from all branches of the armed services and all 50 states who are struggling to overcome physical and psychosocial injuries. Most combat veterans convalescing in military hospitals across the country will survive physically, but getting on with their lives after returning home to their families and communities is proving a significant challenge for hundreds of thousands. Among the 1.6 million who have served since 2001, suicide is on the rise, as is unemployment and incidents of substance abuse and domestic violence
Survivor Corps feels that the successful reintegration of returning service members is “an issue that will have a long-lasting impact on American society, and may become the single defining struggle facing this new generation of veterans.”
Thus, Survivor Corps and its partners are determined to avoid the mistakes made when veterans returned from Vietnam, which resulted in tens of thousands of post-war suicides and over 200,000 men and women living on the streets.
To avoid such mistakes, Survivor Corps will build peer support programs at the community level that will bring service members and veterans together for mutual support and encourage both individual responsibility and collective action to help others in need.
It is offering an alternative “treatment” that can be made readily available in all communities, regardless of proximity to traditional military or government centers of support. Their approach is nimble enough to address the needs of individual survivors, while still broad enough to build a coalition of survivors and service providers working to effect long-term positive change.
To learn more about “Survivor Corps” and about their new program to help the recovery and reintegration of hundreds of thousands of returning U.S. service members at a critical time for them and their country, please go to SurvivorCorps.org. You may even talk yourself into donating to this worthy program
One of the untold stories about the effects of U.S. involvement in the Middle East has been the escalating power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for control of the region. At the height of the insurgency in Iraq, for instance, Saudi Arabia—a supposed U.S. ally—was funneling money and volunteers to the Sunni insurgency to undermine the Maliki government, which it feared could become too susceptible to Iranian influence. The insurgency was prolonged by both countries funding militants in hopes of filling the power vacuum and/or preventing the other from taking control.
It’s also happening in Afghanistan, as Iran and Saudi Arabia have taken opposing stances on whether the Afghan government should negotiate with the Taliban. From the Diplomatic Courier:
The talks, held at the behest of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, took place in Mecca during the final three days of Ramadan, which ended on September 29 … The prospect of some sort of Taliban rehabilitation received a much frostier reception in Tehran. Iran’s Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki urged the U.S. against talks, saying that the Taliban’s extremism could not be confined to the Middle East and West Asia. Iran’s ambassador to the UN said that negotiations would make Afghanistan even less stable. The chairman of Iran’s parliamentary foreign policy and national security committee said the talks would spread terrorism.
Iran despises the Taliban for three reasons. The first is sectarian. Iran is a Shia theocracy, whereas the Taliban are Sunni extremists who view Shias as heretics … Not surprisingly, Iran welcomed and assisted the Taliban’s downfall in 2001.
A second reason for Iran’s posture is the Taliban’s involvement in the production and shipment of Afghan opiates. Iran’s impact on the Taliban’s drugs revenue is one of the untold stories of the war on terror. Even the U.S. has praised Iran’s efforts against narcotics.
A third reason that Iran dislikes the Taliban is because it sees the militia as a tool of Arab influence in West Asia. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were among only three countries, the other being Pakistan, to recognise the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan.
Iran is locked in a battle with the Saudis for influence in Pakistan. Tehran is favorably impressed by Pakistan’s new president Asif Zardari, who hails from a Shia Baluch family. Zardari’s prime minister and foreign minister are both drawn from Pakistan’s majority Barelvi sect, a syncretic form of Sunnism that shares elements with Shiism (such as the worship of saints). Zardari has publicly pledged himself to the war against the Taliban and has also forsworn violence against India, an old Iranian ally. Since he took office in September, Pakistan’s army has waged its most effective campaign against the Pakistan-based Taliban to date, killing as many as 1,000 militants during a summer offensive in the Bajaur tribal agency.
November 14th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
GEORGE WALKER BUSH: THEN AND NOW
I had long planned to post an abridged text of George Bush’s 2000 Republican National Convention acceptance speech closer to Inauguration Day and compare his words with his deeds, but the post-mortems already are flying fast and furious. This includes a lot of revisionist clap-trap from conservative bloggers whose heads remain firmly up their backsides, including drivel to the effect that because Bush “is a kind and decent man” the excesses and failures of the last eight years should be overlooked if not excused.
I happened to be in the hall when Bush accepted the nomination that steamy August night in Philadelphia and was horrified not just by the vacuity of his words but the knowledge that up on the podium was a resume without a man into which every neoconservative and other Republican with a burr in their saddle would pour their pet animosities, causes and policies.
It was going to be rocky four or eight years, but no one could have foreseen the scope and magnitude of the Bush administration’s epic failures, including its inability to confront every major crisis on its watch.
Following are excerpts from the speech in italics and what has transpired:
The word progressive has an interesting and storied history, and according to this article, in Obama’s victory, the word and its meaning have been snatched back by the left, from the right - who had “stolen” it from them.
“The election of Barack Obama has another meaning just as decisive to our fate. Since the 1980s, the progressives of the planet have been on the defensive. The forces of individualism and money confiscated the very idea of progress. Business and finance, combined with technology and free trade, were the engines of a revolution that shook the planet, changed work habits and transformed the relationships between people. The exuberance of the markets and the energy of individual selfishness have pushed humanity forward without it knowing where it was going. Capitalism, according to Marx’ theory, revolutionized life. Suddenly, the words changed and reform, innovation, audacity and creativity moved to the right. Although the term doesn’t have the same meaning in the United States, and even if Barack Obama, somewhat like the Kennedys, is also a proven politician, centrist in many ways, a tough competitor and able to maneuver, these words have now come back to the left. By a huge margin, without question, Americans wanted to say that this society is too hard on people, that inequality is not the ideal for citizens of globalization, that the Earth is not infinite and indestructible, and that the rich must lose at least some of their arrogance. Progressives had the idea of progress stolen from them. Now they have taken it back.”
This is a clip of the opening of the pow wow at The Smithsonian … you will see some of my friends who are Veterans being the honored carriers of the United States flag. The veterans are most often in the front rows of the grand entry.
Then will come the veteran’s honor dance, one of many this night… honor truly, because they carry proudly the American flag under which their own ancestors were murdered and persecuted. Even so: The American flag is given prominence over all the Tribal and State flags. The past not forgotten, but America our country in our own way now, too. Honor.
Honor dancing; you see the opening dance as people file into the dance arena; they are doing a knee-bending dip-step that covers only a tiny amount of ground at a time. This dip-step shuffles forward, almost in place, and it makes everyone’s fringes sway, makes every last feather tremble, makes every metal jingle skirt sound like the wind over mesas, makes every set of rattles worn at knees sound like hard rain. In the storm. Dancing in the storm. Honor.
You see to the lower right in the film, the antelope, the deep, the crows, the eagles, and deer dancers and the bear spirits and more, dancing … beginning to dance, loosen up, returning to their pelts. Honor. To be so fully alive and instinctual. Honor.
November 11th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
The Walking Wounded
What can be done for the literally quarter million homeless vets wandering the highways and byways of our country, those who often walk miles every day and who have feet that look like bleeding lumber?
The issue of homeless vets appears to be similar somehow to poverty in pockets of Appalachia, the poverty in the outback of the Navajo Reservation and up to Rosebud… the abject poverty through much of the tobacco belt in the South.
So much resource is thrown at it all. But, somehow, something is missing. Something, but what? For the issues persist. I don’t pretend to know the fix, but I do know some of the helps.
Us.
One help is vision correction. For, in some regard, we too often develop an accidental but severe case of ’see-through-ish,‘
…that is, we, the watcher-helpers of this poor old world, no longer see what stands right before us; we mentally erase the disheveled, the tattered sign-carrying, the addicted, the ill… as one of those chronic issues that ‘will always be with us.’
I can sometimes feel it coming over me as well, and I resist that idea of “the poor will always be with us,’ if instead of it being a clarion call to action, that phrase is used instead to put us to sleep, for the phrase can sound so peaceful a phrase, so tidy, so wise.
But, it’s not necessarily. That phrase can be, instead, a powerful and poisonous soporific.
Yet, taking on helping whatever stands right before us, within our reach, is the only mighty spell-breaker we have for our spells of see-through-ish.
Thus, four days ago, 60 working women and men veterans, including my husband ( 21 year USAF partially disabled veteran,) did just that– broke through see-through-ish. Again.
They got out their sinew and gut, their bandages and iron thread, revved up their pickup trucks and vans, and helped to mend the part of the world within their reach.
With the help of the VA, Vet’s groups, homeless shelters, churches, they went out into the streets and under the bridges and along the small forests on the Platte River, bringing homeless vets in from the cold, every last one they could find.
Some homeless vets came willingly; some had to be cajoled, some were angry– why now, why not long ago? Many were literally growing moss in their beards, some were loaded, some were mentally compromised, many had infections, some were so sick they had to be dead-man carried. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. Yes.
This is what happened next… It could easily be made to happen where you live, too… mending up the part of the world within our reach…
November 10th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
To be an American (unlike being English or French) is precisely to image a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history. — LESLIE FIEDLER
The tears of joy have dried. The stage in Grant Park has been taken down. The celebrations are history. As the dust settles from Election Day 2008 the biggest message is that the 1960s are now officially over. The Baby Boomers have passed the torch. We are finally moving on.
And not a day too soon.
Born in 1947, I am a card-carrying Boomer and very much a product of the 1960s and the dirty little war and enormous social upheaval that decade brought. I am also aware that having been given the wheel a few elections ago, we have blown it bigtime.
To riff on a familiar campaign phrase, are we better off today than we were in 1968? Of course not.
The gap between rich and poor has become a yawning gulf. Main Street is in crisis and now Wall Street, as well. Nearly one in six Americans have no health insurance and access to decent care is becoming more difficult. There has been an erosion of civil liberties at home and rampant saber rattling abroad. The 9/11 attacks could have been a teaching moment, but instead unleashed deep-seated hatreds.
And the failure of old-style liberalism has been as complete as new-style neoconservatism.
One of the most historic, gut wrenching and globally-important U.S. elections ever is finally drawing to a close, and along with Americans, the world, too, is summing up what it all means. And the one underlying and inescapable narrative is this: That the most powerful nation on earth appears ready to look past the issue of race and - on the merits of character and capability - elect Senator Barack Obama as President.
“Never in its recent history, has America been on the verge of electing a candidate as personally and intellectually exceptional as Barack Obama, a man who would be the most equipped to address the dual challenge of reconciling Americans with themselves - and America with the rest of the world. Never has the American dream been raised as high and embodied so spectacularly by a candidate who is in fact of mixed race, even if he is already improperly described as the future first Black president in the history of the United-States. … Is there another country in the world capable of surpassing prejudice, stereotypes and racism to hand power to the equivalent of what is represented in the United States by Barack Obama?”
