Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Children's Books about Nature Decline
An alarming study of children's books appears in the Miller-McCune newsletter. The study, carried out by sociologist J. Allen Williams, Jr., at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that "Natural environments have all but disappeared" in children's books. This does not bode well for children's education and is particularly disturbing at a time when the leadership in one political party--Republicans--are anti-science. Without exposure to nature and books about the natural world, children will lack understanding of our ecosystem, humans' place in the animal kingdom, and our responsibility to protect and care for our planet. I view this as a dangerous trend.
Friday, December 30, 2011
2012: Resolved: Stop the Assault on Women’s Health
It’s really very simple: Anybody who opposes reproductive health services for women is unfit to hold public office in this country. Period.
These people—they are mostly Republican men, but some Democrats are also in league with them—will not admit they really hate women, but that is the only way I can read their relentless assault on reproductive choice. By their actions, they reveal a deep-seated hatred of and contempt for women.
Why else would men campaign so fiercely against clinics, such as those of Planned Parenthood, that provide a range of health services, including STD testing for men as well as women, breast cancer screening, birth-control information, pregnancy counseling and abortions?
The precedents for these efforts to control and subjugate women date back to the pre-scientific era when superstition reigned and hysterical mobs burned women who provided birth-control information as witches. Yes, there are present-day precedents, too—most notably the Taliban, whose members forbid girls to go to school and publicly stone women accused of adultery.
In the Republicans’ vicious assault on women’s health, which has been going on since Reagan’s administration, Republicans reveal themselves as right-wing zealots attempting to impose certain religious views on everyone—men as well as women.
Catholic bishops, too, are overstepping our Constitutional separation of church and state by, most recently, lobbying for a loophole in health care that would allow doctors or nurses to refuse, for religious reasons, to perform abortions, even to save a woman’s life. Besides violating separation of church and state, this position is extremely dangerous. The same argument could be made to withhold antibiotics or cancer treatment or any other life-saving medical procedure because of religious belief.
There’s a vast difference between belief and science; the former relies on faith, the latter on evidence. There’s also the gross hypocrisy of the position. The bishops’ vow of celibacy hasn’t precluded sexually abusing children and then covering it up. How dare these men, who know nothing of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing, issue dogmatic proclamations about women’s reproductive choices? This form of theological bullying is unacceptable.
During these past two years, the Republican assault on women’s health has accelerated—bills to prevent women from buying their own private health insurance to cover abortion; attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and close clinics that provide a range of reproductive health services to women; bills that would define a fertilized egg as a “person”; bills to spread ignorance and misinform women about abortion; bills to spread anti-woman poison throughout the world by cutting funds to UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s foremost agency for family planning services.
In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell’s New Year’s gift to women was to sign the Board of Health’s so-called “emergency” regulations for abortion clinics. These medically unnecessary regulations require women’s health clinics to meet the same strict building standards as new hospital construction. Although the governor proclaims the regulations will protect women’s health, they will do just the opposite by making reproductive health services inaccessible to women. Ultimately, McDonnell and his Republican colleagues’ intent is to close abortion clinics, making it impossible for Virginia women to obtain medically safe abortions in the state.
Finally, there is the blatant hypocrisy of the right-wing zealots who decry the intrusion of big government everywhere but a woman’s uterus. It’s okay for women’s bodies to become state commodities, controlled like agricultural crops.
We have seen during these past two years, a Republican party that celebrates ignorance, rejects science, embraces superstition, and wages war against half the U.S. population. Their policies would take women back to the Medieval age before birth control—a time when men as well as women were enslaved by the gonads. Before birth control, the only form of family planning was the cruelest form—infanticide. Do those who lobby so aggressively to deprive women—and men, too--of reproductive choice, really want to undo all the advances of medical science?
Birth-control technology truly sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It gives us the ability to choose how many children we will produce or whether to have any children at all. Contraception frees both sexes from enslavement to their reproductive biology.
“No woman should be a mother against her will,” wrote Margaret Sanger, the pioneering American advocate for woman’s reproductive health services, in 1920. Yet today, on the cusp of 2012, retrogressive politicians and medieval churchmen are trying to turn back the clock and ban birth control.
The meaning of the contraceptive revolution is that births can be limited by rational means, and that sex can be enjoyed without fear of pregnancy. This is not to say that children will be less important, that the miracle of procreation will lose its impact, that marriage and families will be denigrated. Rather, these aspects of life become more precious because they happen by choice and not by chance. With fewer children, women and men have more time to devote to themselves, to each other, to enjoying the wondrous adventure of helping their offspring grow into successful adults. Most of all, real liberation is not just freedom from sexual taboos and discrimination; it is the freedom—for both women and men—to discover and develop all the multifaceted aspects of human nature, not just the reproductive aspect.
Through birth control, women have the option of being freer than females of any other species. And that seems to scare the shit out of the current crop of Republicans and right-wing zealots.
These people—they are mostly Republican men, but some Democrats are also in league with them—will not admit they really hate women, but that is the only way I can read their relentless assault on reproductive choice. By their actions, they reveal a deep-seated hatred of and contempt for women.
Why else would men campaign so fiercely against clinics, such as those of Planned Parenthood, that provide a range of health services, including STD testing for men as well as women, breast cancer screening, birth-control information, pregnancy counseling and abortions?
The precedents for these efforts to control and subjugate women date back to the pre-scientific era when superstition reigned and hysterical mobs burned women who provided birth-control information as witches. Yes, there are present-day precedents, too—most notably the Taliban, whose members forbid girls to go to school and publicly stone women accused of adultery.
In the Republicans’ vicious assault on women’s health, which has been going on since Reagan’s administration, Republicans reveal themselves as right-wing zealots attempting to impose certain religious views on everyone—men as well as women.
Catholic bishops, too, are overstepping our Constitutional separation of church and state by, most recently, lobbying for a loophole in health care that would allow doctors or nurses to refuse, for religious reasons, to perform abortions, even to save a woman’s life. Besides violating separation of church and state, this position is extremely dangerous. The same argument could be made to withhold antibiotics or cancer treatment or any other life-saving medical procedure because of religious belief.
There’s a vast difference between belief and science; the former relies on faith, the latter on evidence. There’s also the gross hypocrisy of the position. The bishops’ vow of celibacy hasn’t precluded sexually abusing children and then covering it up. How dare these men, who know nothing of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing, issue dogmatic proclamations about women’s reproductive choices? This form of theological bullying is unacceptable.
During these past two years, the Republican assault on women’s health has accelerated—bills to prevent women from buying their own private health insurance to cover abortion; attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and close clinics that provide a range of reproductive health services to women; bills that would define a fertilized egg as a “person”; bills to spread ignorance and misinform women about abortion; bills to spread anti-woman poison throughout the world by cutting funds to UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s foremost agency for family planning services.
In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell’s New Year’s gift to women was to sign the Board of Health’s so-called “emergency” regulations for abortion clinics. These medically unnecessary regulations require women’s health clinics to meet the same strict building standards as new hospital construction. Although the governor proclaims the regulations will protect women’s health, they will do just the opposite by making reproductive health services inaccessible to women. Ultimately, McDonnell and his Republican colleagues’ intent is to close abortion clinics, making it impossible for Virginia women to obtain medically safe abortions in the state.
Finally, there is the blatant hypocrisy of the right-wing zealots who decry the intrusion of big government everywhere but a woman’s uterus. It’s okay for women’s bodies to become state commodities, controlled like agricultural crops.
We have seen during these past two years, a Republican party that celebrates ignorance, rejects science, embraces superstition, and wages war against half the U.S. population. Their policies would take women back to the Medieval age before birth control—a time when men as well as women were enslaved by the gonads. Before birth control, the only form of family planning was the cruelest form—infanticide. Do those who lobby so aggressively to deprive women—and men, too--of reproductive choice, really want to undo all the advances of medical science?
Birth-control technology truly sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It gives us the ability to choose how many children we will produce or whether to have any children at all. Contraception frees both sexes from enslavement to their reproductive biology.
“No woman should be a mother against her will,” wrote Margaret Sanger, the pioneering American advocate for woman’s reproductive health services, in 1920. Yet today, on the cusp of 2012, retrogressive politicians and medieval churchmen are trying to turn back the clock and ban birth control.
The meaning of the contraceptive revolution is that births can be limited by rational means, and that sex can be enjoyed without fear of pregnancy. This is not to say that children will be less important, that the miracle of procreation will lose its impact, that marriage and families will be denigrated. Rather, these aspects of life become more precious because they happen by choice and not by chance. With fewer children, women and men have more time to devote to themselves, to each other, to enjoying the wondrous adventure of helping their offspring grow into successful adults. Most of all, real liberation is not just freedom from sexual taboos and discrimination; it is the freedom—for both women and men—to discover and develop all the multifaceted aspects of human nature, not just the reproductive aspect.
Through birth control, women have the option of being freer than females of any other species. And that seems to scare the shit out of the current crop of Republicans and right-wing zealots.
Monday, November 28, 2011
New Kindle Book
I've taken a flying leap into digital publishing with my first Kindle book, "How To Have Sex If You're Not Human: Intimate Journeys in Natural History." It's a collection of a dozen of my articles about animal and plant -- yes plants do it, too -- reproductive strategies. If you've ever wondered how snails or gorillas or lions or any other creature mates and passes along its genes, you can find out in my new book. Amazon Kindle
Friday, February 18, 2011
The War Against Women Heats Up
I am beyond fed-up with right-wing men – mostly Republican men – in Congress leading a crusade against women. Make no mistake – there’s a full-scale war going on in Congress. At stake is a woman’s most basic, most intimate level of citizenship – her right to control her reproductive biology. And the war is being waged by the sex that doesn’t have a uterus and doesn’t get pregnant!
Today’s vote in the House to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood sends a loud and clear message to American women and the men who truly care for them: We don’t give a shit about your health. The anti-choice gang have a vicious agenda: They’re trying to force women back to the Dark Ages, when there was no science or birth control. What’s next – a bill to make menstruation a crime?
Not since Suffragettes were jailed in the last century for demanding their right as American citizens to vote, have we seen such a vicious attack on women. In the past few weeks, the anti-choice gang has introduced bills to redefine rape, confer “personhood” on a newly fertilized egg, and prevent insurers from paying for abortions even if a woman pays for the insurance herself.
While millions of Americans desperately need jobs, the best Republican men in Congress can come up with is an anti-woman campaign.
Ironically, these same anti-choice males are the ones who’ve been screaming the loudest about the intrusion of big government into their private lives. But out of the other side of their hypocritical mouths, they’re pushing bills that would give big government the right to intrude on the most intimate aspect of a woman’s life – her control of her reproductive biology. This should be unacceptable to any sane human being. But there’s the rub – these men are not sane. They are mad, living in the alternate universe of a past century and trying to push women back into it, cut off reproductive health care, deny women this most basic level of citizenship.
Is anybody pushing dick laws? Anybody pushing castration laws for rapists? Anybody trying to make men’s bodies property of the state? Anybody trying to cut off funding for men’s reproductive health? Can you imagine the outcry if women legislators were sponsoring such measures?
This campaign is obscenely offensive to all Americans and to our country. What a backward bunch of yokels we have in Congress. They are not worthy of the people who elected them.
Today’s vote in the House to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood sends a loud and clear message to American women and the men who truly care for them: We don’t give a shit about your health. The anti-choice gang have a vicious agenda: They’re trying to force women back to the Dark Ages, when there was no science or birth control. What’s next – a bill to make menstruation a crime?
Not since Suffragettes were jailed in the last century for demanding their right as American citizens to vote, have we seen such a vicious attack on women. In the past few weeks, the anti-choice gang has introduced bills to redefine rape, confer “personhood” on a newly fertilized egg, and prevent insurers from paying for abortions even if a woman pays for the insurance herself.
While millions of Americans desperately need jobs, the best Republican men in Congress can come up with is an anti-woman campaign.
Ironically, these same anti-choice males are the ones who’ve been screaming the loudest about the intrusion of big government into their private lives. But out of the other side of their hypocritical mouths, they’re pushing bills that would give big government the right to intrude on the most intimate aspect of a woman’s life – her control of her reproductive biology. This should be unacceptable to any sane human being. But there’s the rub – these men are not sane. They are mad, living in the alternate universe of a past century and trying to push women back into it, cut off reproductive health care, deny women this most basic level of citizenship.
Is anybody pushing dick laws? Anybody pushing castration laws for rapists? Anybody trying to make men’s bodies property of the state? Anybody trying to cut off funding for men’s reproductive health? Can you imagine the outcry if women legislators were sponsoring such measures?
This campaign is obscenely offensive to all Americans and to our country. What a backward bunch of yokels we have in Congress. They are not worthy of the people who elected them.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Rappers for the Rich
So the Republican blockade of bills that might actually help the middle class and the poor continues—all held hostage to the party’s demand that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires be extended. You have to hand it to Republicans, they know how to practice togetherness. Not one independent voice among them. Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum, and Tweedle-Dee-Dum—the Boehner, McConnell-Cantor corporate rap trio – lead their faithful lackeys in their continuing assault on government for the American people. It’s nothing new. Ever since President Obama took office, Republicans have turned their backs on the people whom they were elected to represent and have instead refused to participate in governing. President Carter called their behavior “irresponsible” in an interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm on Tuesday, November 30th. Along with raw sewage and flesh-eating microbes, Republicans are right up there with the most toxic elements in public life. Never before in my lifetime – and I’m a senior citizen – have I seen an entire political party work single-mindedly to bring down the country in order to bring down the President.
Congressional Republicans have become the most destructive force in American life. Their efforts to create more economic disaster to gain political advantage in the 2012 election displays disrespect for the Presidency and contempt for the American people, for democracy and for our Constitution. As if their actions hadn’t revealed their seditious strategy right out front, corporate rapper McConnell proclaimed the Republicans’ agenda baldly: “The single more important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he said in an interview with the National Journal’s Major Garrett on October 29, 2010. Note: not a single word about the good of the country or the American people. Now McConnell has sent his ultimatum letter to Senator Harry Reid basically saying, “It’s our way or the highway.” In the ultimate display of arrogance and hypocrisy, the Boehner/McConnell/Cantor trio refused to extend unemployment benefits for the 2 million Americans whose benefits expired midnight December 1st. For the past two years, this gang of naysayers has voiced support for only one thing – tax cuts for the super rich. In case you don’t remember, these are the Bush tax cuts that raided the U.S. Treasury, squandering the budget surplus left by President Clinton and creating the largest redistribution of wealth from the middle class to millionaires in the nation’s history. No matter that extending these tax cuts will add $700 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Well, you know, the country can afford a deficit that goes to “feeding” millionaires but not an $18 billion (the cost of extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed) deficit that goes to put food on the tables of people who’ve lost their jobs. Recall Rhett Butler’s line to Scarlet O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
It’s all so simple really – not all deficits are equal. Although the “party of No” proclaims cutting the deficit is the single most important thing that Congress must do, this deficit addition that will be created if Congress allows itself to be bullied into extending the millionaire tax cuts doesn’t count. Under a Democratic President, Republicans are for reducing the deficit; under a Republican President, they’re for racking it up. And rack it up, they did, creating the largest deficit in the history of all previous administrations put together. But that was THEN, you know, under the Bush/Cheney team of good ol’ corporate boys.
If the Tea Partiers, or anybody else who voted the new crop of Republicans in office, believes Republican propaganda about working for the American people, they should pay close attention to what Republicans have voted against during these past two years. Then decide what people Republicans are working to help. Here’s just a partial list of what Republicans have blocked, stalled and tried to kill altogether:
- No to regulating the big banks and investment houses, the very institutions whose fraudulent manipulations brought the country to the brink of another Great Depression.
- No to equal pay for women.
- No to requiring oil companies to fully pay for oil spill damage.
- No to increasing bank loans to small businesses.
- No to the health reform bill, which will reduce the deficit by $143 billion over the first 10 years and by $2 trillion in the second 10 years.
- No to expanding health coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans.
- No to eliminating pre-existing conditions as insurers’ pretext for dropping coverage.
- No to closing the Medicare prescription “donut hole.”
- No to giving seniors in the gap a 50-percent discount on brand-name drugs in 2011.
- No to allowing children to remain on their parents’ health insurance policies until age 26.
- No to eliminating co-payments for preventive health under Medicare.
- No to prohibiting health insurers from placing lifetime caps on coverage.
- No to banning annual limits on coverage.
- No to reforming student aid.
- No to expanding eligibility for the State Children’s Health Insurance Fund (SCHIP)
- No to increased infrastructure spending for roads, bridges and power plants
- No to consumer financial protections
No. No. No. That’s all Republicans have contributed to government over the past two years. It’s a tribute to President Obama that despite Republican attempts to bring down the government, more legislation has been passed during these first two years of his administration than under any other modern President. Yes, Republican opposition has caused some of this legislation to be weaker than it could have been, but it’s out there. Despite Republicans’ refusal to act in a bipartisan manner even after President Obama offered numerous – perhaps too many – attempts to reach across the political aisle, landmark legislation, such as the Health Care Reform Bill, was passed.
The message of Republicans’ behavior has been loud and clear. Their constituency is not the people who elected them; it is the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the big banks, the investment houses, and the two percent of the wealthiest Americans. Anybody who thinks any differently is in denial. If Republicans have their way and are enabled to carry out their corporate agenda, American’s middle class will sink to the level of the poor in Third-World countries, becoming just a cheap labor pool ripe for exploitation. Maybe China will give them jobs. The Republicans surely aren’t.
Congressional Republicans have become the most destructive force in American life. Their efforts to create more economic disaster to gain political advantage in the 2012 election displays disrespect for the Presidency and contempt for the American people, for democracy and for our Constitution. As if their actions hadn’t revealed their seditious strategy right out front, corporate rapper McConnell proclaimed the Republicans’ agenda baldly: “The single more important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he said in an interview with the National Journal’s Major Garrett on October 29, 2010. Note: not a single word about the good of the country or the American people. Now McConnell has sent his ultimatum letter to Senator Harry Reid basically saying, “It’s our way or the highway.” In the ultimate display of arrogance and hypocrisy, the Boehner/McConnell/Cantor trio refused to extend unemployment benefits for the 2 million Americans whose benefits expired midnight December 1st. For the past two years, this gang of naysayers has voiced support for only one thing – tax cuts for the super rich. In case you don’t remember, these are the Bush tax cuts that raided the U.S. Treasury, squandering the budget surplus left by President Clinton and creating the largest redistribution of wealth from the middle class to millionaires in the nation’s history. No matter that extending these tax cuts will add $700 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Well, you know, the country can afford a deficit that goes to “feeding” millionaires but not an $18 billion (the cost of extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed) deficit that goes to put food on the tables of people who’ve lost their jobs. Recall Rhett Butler’s line to Scarlet O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
It’s all so simple really – not all deficits are equal. Although the “party of No” proclaims cutting the deficit is the single most important thing that Congress must do, this deficit addition that will be created if Congress allows itself to be bullied into extending the millionaire tax cuts doesn’t count. Under a Democratic President, Republicans are for reducing the deficit; under a Republican President, they’re for racking it up. And rack it up, they did, creating the largest deficit in the history of all previous administrations put together. But that was THEN, you know, under the Bush/Cheney team of good ol’ corporate boys.
If the Tea Partiers, or anybody else who voted the new crop of Republicans in office, believes Republican propaganda about working for the American people, they should pay close attention to what Republicans have voted against during these past two years. Then decide what people Republicans are working to help. Here’s just a partial list of what Republicans have blocked, stalled and tried to kill altogether:
- No to regulating the big banks and investment houses, the very institutions whose fraudulent manipulations brought the country to the brink of another Great Depression.
- No to equal pay for women.
- No to requiring oil companies to fully pay for oil spill damage.
- No to increasing bank loans to small businesses.
- No to the health reform bill, which will reduce the deficit by $143 billion over the first 10 years and by $2 trillion in the second 10 years.
- No to expanding health coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans.
- No to eliminating pre-existing conditions as insurers’ pretext for dropping coverage.
- No to closing the Medicare prescription “donut hole.”
- No to giving seniors in the gap a 50-percent discount on brand-name drugs in 2011.
- No to allowing children to remain on their parents’ health insurance policies until age 26.
- No to eliminating co-payments for preventive health under Medicare.
- No to prohibiting health insurers from placing lifetime caps on coverage.
- No to banning annual limits on coverage.
- No to reforming student aid.
- No to expanding eligibility for the State Children’s Health Insurance Fund (SCHIP)
- No to increased infrastructure spending for roads, bridges and power plants
- No to consumer financial protections
No. No. No. That’s all Republicans have contributed to government over the past two years. It’s a tribute to President Obama that despite Republican attempts to bring down the government, more legislation has been passed during these first two years of his administration than under any other modern President. Yes, Republican opposition has caused some of this legislation to be weaker than it could have been, but it’s out there. Despite Republicans’ refusal to act in a bipartisan manner even after President Obama offered numerous – perhaps too many – attempts to reach across the political aisle, landmark legislation, such as the Health Care Reform Bill, was passed.
The message of Republicans’ behavior has been loud and clear. Their constituency is not the people who elected them; it is the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the big banks, the investment houses, and the two percent of the wealthiest Americans. Anybody who thinks any differently is in denial. If Republicans have their way and are enabled to carry out their corporate agenda, American’s middle class will sink to the level of the poor in Third-World countries, becoming just a cheap labor pool ripe for exploitation. Maybe China will give them jobs. The Republicans surely aren’t.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The Ferocious Madness of Hate
When President Obama was elected, I was prouder of my country than I have ever been. I dared to think that Americans had finally grown up and turned a corner on the poisonous hate of racism – and, in truth, half the electorate has. But too many of our citizens made a U-turn back into racist muck.
The hate-mongering began during the presidential campaign. Who can ever forget the McCain/Palin rally where Palin was trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy by demonizing Obama as a terrorist. She succeeded. “Kill him,” a member of the crowd shouted.
Since President Obama took office, racism has continued steaming up like swamp gas from every Republican/Tea Party/right-wing fundamentalist rabble-rousing orifice. So pervasive is the hate-Obama campaign that the entire Republican contingent in Congress turned its back on this nation and set a seditious agenda to bring down Obama’s Presidency by obstructing, blockading, stalling, misrepresenting, lying and saying “No” to whatever this administration wanted to accomplish.
Anyone who has studied history recognizes the bullying scenario: Appeal to the most primitive human fear—fear of the “Other.” Demonize Obama into a fearsome “other”—someone unlike “us.” Enlist a propaganda agency—in this case, the misnamed Fox News—and a few willing hate-mongers who command large audiences to spread the word. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin slide neatly into those slots. Then spread lies about Obama designed to scare people to death. So the lies proliferate about Obama’s birth, his citizenship, his political philosophy, and his religion. In February 2009, Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing tabloid, the New York Post, published a racist cartoon that depicted Obama as a chimpanzee being shot by cops. More recently, Tea Party signs depict him as Hitler and Lenin.
In September 2009, the Rev. Steven L. Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, preached a sermon he titled, “Why I Hate Barack Obama.” During the sermon, Anderson said, “When I go to bed tonight, Steven L. Anderson is going to pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell,” So much for the reverend’s Christian love and peace.
Also in September 2009, during Obama’s address to Congress about health care, South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted, "You lie!" Afterwards, former President Jimmy Carter said Wilson’s disrespectful outburst was "based on racism" and ran "deeper" than mere policy opposition. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president," Carter said.
It’s ugly. More than ugly, there’s madness afoot. As we near the November elections, the exhortations to hate are becoming more frenzied, more dangerous. The most recent ploy is to gain a “twofer”—whip the crowd into anti-Muslim hate and propagandize Obama, a devout Christian, as a Muslim. The trigger for this propaganda is the proposed mosque two blocks from “Ground Zero,” site of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City. Protests and heated opposition seared by hate and fear have dominated the airways. Incredibly only a few politicians or either party have stepped forward to defend our country’s separation of church and state. Have they all been bought?
The most eloquent statement came from New York City’s Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Aug. 3, 2010: “Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another. . . . We would betray our values – and play into our enemies' hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that. For that reason, I believe that this is . . . as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime – and it is critically important that we get it right.”
The only other prominent Republican to come forward and defend our precious Bill of Rights was Congressman Ron Paul of Texas: “The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom? . . . In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.
They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars.”
Not surprisingly, some Republicans are now trying to paint Congressman Paul as a left-wing ally of Democrats.
Where are other voices speaking out against the madness of hate? Where are Republicans who should know better? Where are Senators Olympia Snowe Susan Collins? Where are the Democrats -- Senators Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, John Kerry and Sherrod Brown? Not even Minnesota Senator Al Franken has raised his voice. Why haven’t they rushed to defend the 1st Amendment to our precious Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Does anybody believe in democracy anymore? Did anybody, going back to the founders, ever believe in it? Since the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and accelerated by the Bush/Cheney administration, we have seen our Bill of Rights shredded and the “freedoms” our politicians talk about so piously, curtailed. Al Qaeda can see it, too. We are ripe for the picking. Money has replaced democracy.
Meanwhile, the bloviators haven’t hesitated to spew their racist venom. Hate-rouser-in-chief, Rush Limbaugh, referred to President Obama as “Imam Obana,” and added he’s “the best anti-American President the country’s ever had.”
The campaign of lies is taking hold. According to an August 2010 Pew Research poll, nearly one in five Americans (18 percent) say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009. Roughly one-third (34 percent) of right-wing Republicans say Obama is a Muslim.
The hate madness is dangerous—not only to the President but to our country. One of the extremist Republican Tea Party politicians, Sharron Angle, senate candidate in Nevada, issued a call to armed rebellion. During a radio interview on June 16, 2010, she said, “ I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical... it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies.”
In case anyone has forgotten, our Supreme Court interpreted the second Amendment to mean that individuals have the right to carry guns. We saw footage of men toting guns among groups protesting President Obama’s speeches in Phoenix, Arizona, and New Hampshire. In the state of Virginia, the General Assembly voted to allow concealed weapons permit holders to carry guns in restaurants that serve alcohol as long as the pistol-packing daddies and mamas don’t drink. Good Luck! Frankly, I will avoid Virginia restaurants. I don’t want food seasoned with bullets.
Step-by-deliberate-orchestrated step, the fanatics, the crazies, the hate-baiters are setting up the United States to become a fascist state. So far, the campaign of the corporatists is spreading, persuading tens of thousands of gullible Americans to give up their liberties for “protection” from those “others” who are to blame for our woes. Don’t underestimate the awful power of hate pitting tribe against tribe, religion against religion. When reason is abandoned and hate fueled by fervor, the consequences are genocidal.
History is replete with awful examples: From 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium conducted a reign of terror in Congo Free State. Depending on whose estimate you accept, between eight and 10 million Africans were whipped, raped, tortured, shot or worked to death as slaves. Leopold ruled the Congo as his private fiefdom to extract rubber and ivory.
Between 1915 and 1923, the Muslim Ottoman Turk empire systematically slaughtered some 1.5 million Christian Armenians. During World War II, German Christians embracing Hitler’s Nazi racism slaughtered more than 20 million human beings, including 6 million European Jews, some 10 million Slavs, and millions of Poles, Czechs, French, Dutch, Slovenes and others. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians. The 1990s saw rampaging Hutu extremists slaughter some 800,000 people in Rwanda. The Hutu blamed the Tutsi minority for the country’s increasing social, economic, and political pressure. Sound familiar?
Then there are the murderous policies that lasted for decades: the USSR’s murder of about 41 million citizens from 1917 to 1987; the Chinese government’s slaughter of about 35 million of its citizens from 1949 to 1987; and what the Religious Tolerance.org website calls the “longest lasting genocidal campaign in human history”—the systematic extermination of Native Americans that began with the arrival of Columbus in San Salvador in 1492 and continued as Europeans invaded North America. In the early 18th century, the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey promoted genocide of local Native Americans by imposing a “scalp bounty” on dead Indians. This bounty continued into the 19th century until ended by the public. George Washington compared Indians to wolves, “beasts of prey,” and called for their total destruction.
History is clear: No religion, no ethnic group, no country is immune from hate. We’re all terrorists. It’s what makes us equal.
Hate spreads like a lethal virus unless citizens and politicians assert their better selves, call on our compassion and use our reason to see through the lies and resist the fear and hate manipulators. We do not have to spend our short lifespan killing each other. Our evolutionary history shows we would not have survived without using our nurturing, cooperative capacities. These are the traits that make us truly human—traits we desperately need to summon and exercise. It’s well to remember that no other animal treats members of its species with such murderous ferocity as humans.
In her brilliant book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy warns: “To all the reasons people might have to worry about the future of our species—including the usual depressing litany of nuclear proliferation, global warming, emerging infectious diseases, or crashing meteorites—add one more having to do with just what sort of species our descendants millennia hence might belong to. If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish.”
If the United States goes down in the current environment of fanaticism, ignorance and madness, it will not be due to Al Qaeda, or illegal immigrants, or any religion, or any outside power; it will be because Americans turned on each other, destroying the great promise and hope of our country with hate.
The hate-mongering began during the presidential campaign. Who can ever forget the McCain/Palin rally where Palin was trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy by demonizing Obama as a terrorist. She succeeded. “Kill him,” a member of the crowd shouted.
Since President Obama took office, racism has continued steaming up like swamp gas from every Republican/Tea Party/right-wing fundamentalist rabble-rousing orifice. So pervasive is the hate-Obama campaign that the entire Republican contingent in Congress turned its back on this nation and set a seditious agenda to bring down Obama’s Presidency by obstructing, blockading, stalling, misrepresenting, lying and saying “No” to whatever this administration wanted to accomplish.
Anyone who has studied history recognizes the bullying scenario: Appeal to the most primitive human fear—fear of the “Other.” Demonize Obama into a fearsome “other”—someone unlike “us.” Enlist a propaganda agency—in this case, the misnamed Fox News—and a few willing hate-mongers who command large audiences to spread the word. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin slide neatly into those slots. Then spread lies about Obama designed to scare people to death. So the lies proliferate about Obama’s birth, his citizenship, his political philosophy, and his religion. In February 2009, Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing tabloid, the New York Post, published a racist cartoon that depicted Obama as a chimpanzee being shot by cops. More recently, Tea Party signs depict him as Hitler and Lenin.
In September 2009, the Rev. Steven L. Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, preached a sermon he titled, “Why I Hate Barack Obama.” During the sermon, Anderson said, “When I go to bed tonight, Steven L. Anderson is going to pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell,” So much for the reverend’s Christian love and peace.
Also in September 2009, during Obama’s address to Congress about health care, South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted, "You lie!" Afterwards, former President Jimmy Carter said Wilson’s disrespectful outburst was "based on racism" and ran "deeper" than mere policy opposition. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president," Carter said.
It’s ugly. More than ugly, there’s madness afoot. As we near the November elections, the exhortations to hate are becoming more frenzied, more dangerous. The most recent ploy is to gain a “twofer”—whip the crowd into anti-Muslim hate and propagandize Obama, a devout Christian, as a Muslim. The trigger for this propaganda is the proposed mosque two blocks from “Ground Zero,” site of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City. Protests and heated opposition seared by hate and fear have dominated the airways. Incredibly only a few politicians or either party have stepped forward to defend our country’s separation of church and state. Have they all been bought?
The most eloquent statement came from New York City’s Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Aug. 3, 2010: “Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another. . . . We would betray our values – and play into our enemies' hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that. For that reason, I believe that this is . . . as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime – and it is critically important that we get it right.”
The only other prominent Republican to come forward and defend our precious Bill of Rights was Congressman Ron Paul of Texas: “The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom? . . . In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.
They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars.”
Not surprisingly, some Republicans are now trying to paint Congressman Paul as a left-wing ally of Democrats.
Where are other voices speaking out against the madness of hate? Where are Republicans who should know better? Where are Senators Olympia Snowe Susan Collins? Where are the Democrats -- Senators Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, John Kerry and Sherrod Brown? Not even Minnesota Senator Al Franken has raised his voice. Why haven’t they rushed to defend the 1st Amendment to our precious Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Does anybody believe in democracy anymore? Did anybody, going back to the founders, ever believe in it? Since the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and accelerated by the Bush/Cheney administration, we have seen our Bill of Rights shredded and the “freedoms” our politicians talk about so piously, curtailed. Al Qaeda can see it, too. We are ripe for the picking. Money has replaced democracy.
Meanwhile, the bloviators haven’t hesitated to spew their racist venom. Hate-rouser-in-chief, Rush Limbaugh, referred to President Obama as “Imam Obana,” and added he’s “the best anti-American President the country’s ever had.”
The campaign of lies is taking hold. According to an August 2010 Pew Research poll, nearly one in five Americans (18 percent) say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009. Roughly one-third (34 percent) of right-wing Republicans say Obama is a Muslim.
The hate madness is dangerous—not only to the President but to our country. One of the extremist Republican Tea Party politicians, Sharron Angle, senate candidate in Nevada, issued a call to armed rebellion. During a radio interview on June 16, 2010, she said, “ I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical... it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies.”
In case anyone has forgotten, our Supreme Court interpreted the second Amendment to mean that individuals have the right to carry guns. We saw footage of men toting guns among groups protesting President Obama’s speeches in Phoenix, Arizona, and New Hampshire. In the state of Virginia, the General Assembly voted to allow concealed weapons permit holders to carry guns in restaurants that serve alcohol as long as the pistol-packing daddies and mamas don’t drink. Good Luck! Frankly, I will avoid Virginia restaurants. I don’t want food seasoned with bullets.
Step-by-deliberate-orchestrated step, the fanatics, the crazies, the hate-baiters are setting up the United States to become a fascist state. So far, the campaign of the corporatists is spreading, persuading tens of thousands of gullible Americans to give up their liberties for “protection” from those “others” who are to blame for our woes. Don’t underestimate the awful power of hate pitting tribe against tribe, religion against religion. When reason is abandoned and hate fueled by fervor, the consequences are genocidal.
History is replete with awful examples: From 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium conducted a reign of terror in Congo Free State. Depending on whose estimate you accept, between eight and 10 million Africans were whipped, raped, tortured, shot or worked to death as slaves. Leopold ruled the Congo as his private fiefdom to extract rubber and ivory.
Between 1915 and 1923, the Muslim Ottoman Turk empire systematically slaughtered some 1.5 million Christian Armenians. During World War II, German Christians embracing Hitler’s Nazi racism slaughtered more than 20 million human beings, including 6 million European Jews, some 10 million Slavs, and millions of Poles, Czechs, French, Dutch, Slovenes and others. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians. The 1990s saw rampaging Hutu extremists slaughter some 800,000 people in Rwanda. The Hutu blamed the Tutsi minority for the country’s increasing social, economic, and political pressure. Sound familiar?
Then there are the murderous policies that lasted for decades: the USSR’s murder of about 41 million citizens from 1917 to 1987; the Chinese government’s slaughter of about 35 million of its citizens from 1949 to 1987; and what the Religious Tolerance.org website calls the “longest lasting genocidal campaign in human history”—the systematic extermination of Native Americans that began with the arrival of Columbus in San Salvador in 1492 and continued as Europeans invaded North America. In the early 18th century, the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey promoted genocide of local Native Americans by imposing a “scalp bounty” on dead Indians. This bounty continued into the 19th century until ended by the public. George Washington compared Indians to wolves, “beasts of prey,” and called for their total destruction.
History is clear: No religion, no ethnic group, no country is immune from hate. We’re all terrorists. It’s what makes us equal.
Hate spreads like a lethal virus unless citizens and politicians assert their better selves, call on our compassion and use our reason to see through the lies and resist the fear and hate manipulators. We do not have to spend our short lifespan killing each other. Our evolutionary history shows we would not have survived without using our nurturing, cooperative capacities. These are the traits that make us truly human—traits we desperately need to summon and exercise. It’s well to remember that no other animal treats members of its species with such murderous ferocity as humans.
In her brilliant book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy warns: “To all the reasons people might have to worry about the future of our species—including the usual depressing litany of nuclear proliferation, global warming, emerging infectious diseases, or crashing meteorites—add one more having to do with just what sort of species our descendants millennia hence might belong to. If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish.”
If the United States goes down in the current environment of fanaticism, ignorance and madness, it will not be due to Al Qaeda, or illegal immigrants, or any religion, or any outside power; it will be because Americans turned on each other, destroying the great promise and hope of our country with hate.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Epitaph for a Family Tree
Recently we had to have a great Southern red oak tree in our backyard cut down. It was like losing a member of the family. Thus this epitaph, which was published in our local newspaper, The Smithfield Times.
We are in mourning for a member of the family--a gnarled southern red oak tree that shaded our backyard for more than two centuries. Three generations of my family enjoyed its majestic beauty. Our grandfather tied his mules under that tree when he came to the house for the midday ”dinner” common on farms. My brother, sister and I played beneath its sheltering branches. I collected acorns, placing them on the tiny plates of my tea-set for a pretend meal that would have been a real meal for squirrels.
But we had to take it down. Trees age as people do but in tree time, not human time. Two weeks ago, the tree suffered a fracture as one of its enormous limbs crashed to the ground during the night. After consulting with local tree services, we had to recognize the tree was dying, and we had to put it – and us – out of our misery. The old tree was no longer a protective organism but a danger to life and human limb.
So the tree comes to the end of a life stretching back beyond my family, connecting us to a deeper history with the greater human family and the land. Its acorn may have spouted when Native Americans hunted on this land and paddled their canoes along the “creek,” as we affectionately call the Pagan River that flows along the back of the property. We know Native Americans were here because my nephew has found many projectile points in the fields.
Saying goodbye to this botanical member of our family has been painful and morbidly fascinating. Using ropes, crane and saw with surgical expertise, the highly capable Wade Brothers cut off the tree’s massive limbs one by one until it stood like a giant amputee with bare stubs. Finally, they felled its great trunk with an earthquaking roar as it struck the ground and lay like a wounded prehistoric beast.
It came to my generation to let it go. My brother Vasco Batten will enjoy its warmth as he burns oak logs in his fireplace next winter. We’ll spread oak-chip mulch to nourish our gardens. Now there’s only a gap in the sky where its 100-foot crown once spread its leafy branches. The tree enriched our lives. If not blood kin, it was sap kin. Humans share with trees, and other plants, the same four chemical building blocks that make up our DNA—our legacy of life on Earth. We’ll miss it.
We are in mourning for a member of the family--a gnarled southern red oak tree that shaded our backyard for more than two centuries. Three generations of my family enjoyed its majestic beauty. Our grandfather tied his mules under that tree when he came to the house for the midday ”dinner” common on farms. My brother, sister and I played beneath its sheltering branches. I collected acorns, placing them on the tiny plates of my tea-set for a pretend meal that would have been a real meal for squirrels.
But we had to take it down. Trees age as people do but in tree time, not human time. Two weeks ago, the tree suffered a fracture as one of its enormous limbs crashed to the ground during the night. After consulting with local tree services, we had to recognize the tree was dying, and we had to put it – and us – out of our misery. The old tree was no longer a protective organism but a danger to life and human limb.
So the tree comes to the end of a life stretching back beyond my family, connecting us to a deeper history with the greater human family and the land. Its acorn may have spouted when Native Americans hunted on this land and paddled their canoes along the “creek,” as we affectionately call the Pagan River that flows along the back of the property. We know Native Americans were here because my nephew has found many projectile points in the fields.
Saying goodbye to this botanical member of our family has been painful and morbidly fascinating. Using ropes, crane and saw with surgical expertise, the highly capable Wade Brothers cut off the tree’s massive limbs one by one until it stood like a giant amputee with bare stubs. Finally, they felled its great trunk with an earthquaking roar as it struck the ground and lay like a wounded prehistoric beast.
It came to my generation to let it go. My brother Vasco Batten will enjoy its warmth as he burns oak logs in his fireplace next winter. We’ll spread oak-chip mulch to nourish our gardens. Now there’s only a gap in the sky where its 100-foot crown once spread its leafy branches. The tree enriched our lives. If not blood kin, it was sap kin. Humans share with trees, and other plants, the same four chemical building blocks that make up our DNA—our legacy of life on Earth. We’ll miss it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
