The Protest - October 2005

See the print edition for a photo essay by Matt Olson on September's Critical Mass bicycle ride.

This is My Activism
Rejecting objectivity in journalism
Sarah Levy (s-levy2@northwestern.edu)

A Peaceful Proposal
Burma could see democracy on its own terms
Marissa Faustini (m-faustini@northwestern.edu)

Dignity and Compromise: Sweatshop Labor in Asia
Much-needed jobs vs. Globalized exploitation
Brad Hirn (b-hirn@northwestern.edu)

Concepción
A poem
Laura Dunn (l-dunn@northwestern.edu)

Exposing America's School of Assassins
A look at the School of the Americas
Sharlyn Grace (s-grace@northwestern.edu)
Matt Olson (m-olson@northwestern.edu)

The United Nations' Occupation of Haiti
"Multilateralism" as media-praised imperialism
Kyle Schafer (k-schafer2@northwestern.edu)

Landfall, or How I Got to Lousiana
Reflections on Hurricane Katrina
Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (theopening@northwestern.edu)

The Value of Inefficiency
Employee concerns trump productivity graphs for one intern
anonymous

The American Dream?
Work and leisure in the United States
Britt Gordon-McKeon (brittgm@gmail.com)

This is My Activism

by Sarah Levy

Since seventh grade, I thought about being a journalist. I always said that I wanted to go to Northwestern, get a journalism degree – with a double major in political science, or something else intellectual, of course– and then move out into the real world of competitive reporting. I'd get shitty assignments at first, perhaps the city crime beat, because The New York Times could only afford to hire me to work on something everyday and murderous. But in time my extraordinary dedication and sympathetic eye would earn me a real story, and a real beat. Soon I'd be covering Capitol Hill or flying overseas to narrate international conflict. By paying the closest attention to detail, I would expose the simple truth and so change the world by changing people's minds, all without a language of bias.

Now I find myself a disillusioned member of the Medill Class of 2008. I remember one particularly heated discussion in my Editing and Writing journalism class freshman year. Many of my contemporaries felt that a journalist should always hide her personal convictions; in fact, she probably shouldn't vote, even if she doesn't reveal for whom she voted, because then people would know she had an opinion.

Right. Because most journalists – good journalists – don't have opinions. I ask journalism students and professors everywhere, is that ideal humanly possible?

At some point in these past eight years, I lost the ideal, the mandate, that journalists everywhere hold so dear to their hearts: I lost the drive to be unbiased. In discerning ethical principle, I replaced the word "objective" with "honest" and "accurate" as I learned that one doesn't necessarily mean the other.

Objectivity is an impossible goal, and in claiming it, journalists lie to themselves and to their readers. In fact, I've developed a certain suspicion toward those who claim to have no opinions, especially on subjects like war and occupation. Either these individuals are concealing their true feelings in striving for the mainstream media ideal, or they really are so removed and consequently incapable of sensing and reporting the "humanness" of story. And what good is truth if other people can't relate to it? How will I ever change my readers' minds if I can't connect them to the events I cover?

It was here, as an activist-slash-journalism major, I began to panic, seeing only two options for my journalistic future: spend my entire career writing 200-word back-page progressive opinion pieces or abandon my opinions all together. I wondered if every hard news source wanted to be a beacon of objectivity. Thankfully, the internet and technology of recent years has allowed alternative media sources to reach more people than ever before. Among those who understand the power of journalism in furthering social movements, there are hard news reporters as well as op-ed contributors. Journalists at The NewStandard (TNS), a democratically run online hard news source, clearly reject the claim of hosting "unbiased" journalism. In contrast to the common, narrow definition of bias, which only emphasizes overtly political language, TNS recognizes that "when reporting and editing a story, there are hundreds of small decisions made, including: who to interview, what documents to consult, how to structure and order information, and which claims and facts to give weight." Journalists at TNS still avoid bias toward "any 'side' or player in a given issue," but when developing their stories, they adhere to a bias of agreed-upon values.

The result is reporting like that of Dahr Jamail, who has observed the U.S. occupation of Iraq for more than eight months since 2003. Frustrated with mainstream coverage of the war, Jamail reported for TNS and witnessed several key U.S. offensives, such as the attack on Fallujah. On April 11, 2004, he wrote in an article for TNS about the makeshift clinics formed within that city. He wrote about the woman and child simultaneously he saw simultaneously enter with gunshots wounds to the neck. And he wrote about the witnesses who claimed a U.S. sniper shot them both.

How does Dahr Jamail feel about the war in Iraq? If you read his articles for TNS, syndicated pieces in The Nation and other magazines, or the blog he updated daily in Iraq, you can get a decent idea. But his beliefs don't augment the destruction he sees there or the death toll he reports.

I find great inspiration journalists who can report facts with a sense of their convictions. They are the ones who helped me remember that "bias" is not my greatest enemy. Rather, my enemies are the same as always: war, hate, inequality, oppression, poverty, disease, and other plagues of humanity. So while Medill professors continue raging a classroom battle against the very human consciousness I'm trying to awaken, I'll forget the drive for objectivity and publish proudly, "this is my activism."

A Peaceful Proposal

by Marissa Faustini

Institutionalized torture. Clashing ethnic groups. Religious oppression. Forced labor. Child soldiers. Rape as a means of warfare.

These abuses all top the familiar list of reasons of “why America was justified in invading Iraq even if there were no weapons of mass destruction.” The designation of human rights abuses as incentive enough for America to go forth and forge stability raises some important questions. Putting aside the issue of creating stability without warfare, the next most significant problem concerns which countries America chooses to help.

Burma is a hotbed for the aforementioned atrocities that Americans typically associate with Hussein’s Iraq. Burma, however, rarely appears in American headlines. While most informed individuals in this country can identify the role and significance of such leaders as Iyad Allawi (Iraq’s prime minister), few even recognize the name Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace prize winner and Burma’s stifled voice for democracy. In fact, a significant percentage of Americans who follow the daily ongoings of Baghdad do not even know exactly where Burma is on a map.

For anyone who is not enrolled in Bush Administration Geography 101 this quarter, Myanmar lies west of the Axis of Evil, in a place Condoleeza Rice has dubbed the Outpost of Tyranny. In propaganda-free geography, this translates into Southeast Asia, bordering Thailand and China on the west and India and Bangladesh on the east. This little nation, which is slightly smaller than Texas, is home to one of the world’s greatest fights for freedom.

The history of Burma’s turmoil is incredibly complex, but the present conflict is essentially rooted in the typical aftermath of colonialism. Following independence from Britain in 1948, the country entered a period of shaky parliamentary democracy until the dictatorship of General Ne Win in 1962. By 1988, Ne Win was overthrown by the junta known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). The SPDC has been in power ever since and Burma has seen unparalleled oppression. Election results are falsified, and the state’s main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) is kept under tight control; to be affiliated with the NLD is to risk one’s life. Democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been imprisoned or under house arrest for the past fifteen years.

So, why is the situation in Burma relevant?

Essentially, Burma is the world’s chance to prove that democracy can be achieved peacefully.

The fifty million Burmese people are the world’s prime candidates for non-violent revolution, and they are ready for change now. A viable plan for peaceful instatement of democracy has already been formulated. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the former Czech prime minister Vaclav Havel have proposed a plan for attaining peace using peaceful means. Tutu and Havel called upon the U.N. Security Council to take a stand against the current Burmese government, a suggestion that was enthusiastically received by the NLD and democratic supporters. Unlike other nations where democracy-building would be forced, Burma, with its already strong democratic voice, would be an ideal recipient of U.N. action.

Although enacting this proposal would present difficulties – foremost the veto power of China, the SPDC’s main ally – the continued strive to bring peace to the Burmese people is not in vain. Gradual improvement of the human rights violations, drug trade and refugee problems within the country will reduce Burma’s reliance on China and weaken the junta’s brutal regime.

Ideally, Burma will find peace and democracy though non-violent avenues of reform. Its stabilization can then act as a model for future democracy-building and peaceful revolution in the many other nations whose people are immersed in civil strife and oppression.

In 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi noted that “free men are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.” By this standard, the Burmese people are ready – maybe more so than any other turbulent nation – to endorse the values and accept the responsibilities demanded of a truly autonomous nation. Burma has a chance to prove to the world that a country can build a valid democracy on its own terms, without ceding cultural values or national sovereignty.

Dignity and Compromise: Sweatshop Labor in Asia

by Brad Hirn

Political conservatives and defenders of capitalist globalization have taken a disturbing position in the debate over sweatshop labor. They speak of compromise and of realistic possibilities for economic improvement. They claim that the sweatshop is the best way to help impoverished workers survive under the global economy. The logic is that as long as people have some kind of work, however dangerous, low-paying, and undignified, we of the U.S. Left should not protest the conditions under which workers labor.

In the first chapter of their book Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn defend this position:

Fourteen years ago, we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops. In time, though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians: that the campaign against sweatshops risks harming the very people it is intended to help. For beneath their grime, sweatshops are a clear sign of the industrial revolution that is beginning to reshape Asia.

Kristof and WuDunn report their conversations with Asian laborers who were happy to work in sweatshops because the $2 per hour wage for a nine-hour shift seven days a week provides an additional mosquito net and sufficient food for their children. It is across Thailand, China, South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia, countries that make up the Sweatshop Belt, that economic growth in Asia is most vibrant. For evidence of improvement, Kristof and WuDunn cite wage increases over the past decade, improved factory conditions, and middle-class amenities such as a private housing market and computer schools for higher-income workers. The industrial revolution is sweeping Asia, and sweatshops are making it possible. Kristof and WuDunn write, "Today these sweatshop countries control about one-quarter of the global economy."

This position is morally abysmal and blatantly privileges the middle and upper classes of the world. I do not blame a Thai worker for taking a sewing job in a t-shirt factory. He is striving to make ends meet, and severe risks – getting stabbed in the hand by the sewing machine, suffering back pain from hunching over the machine, or contracting stomach disease from rancid meat provided by the manager – must be tolerated. The $1 or $2 per hour wage is too important.

Across the Sweatshop Belt, millions of workers, including women and children, match the above description. They are being forced to compromise their safety and submit to the capitalist illusion that wealth will spread throughout the population. The United Nations' 2005 Human Development Report makes clear the failure of capitalist methods of trade and economic growth:

The clash on world poverty centers on the US policy of promoting growth and trade liberalization on the assumption that this will trickle down to the poor … Growth alone will not reduce poverty so long as the poor are denied full access to health, education and other social provisions …
India and China, the UN says, have been very successful in wealth creation but have not enabled the poor to share in the process …
The only way to eradicate poverty, [the report] says, is to target inequalities.

If we are going to speak of compromise, then let us ask these questions: What compromise is made by the CEO of the multinational corporation? What compromise is made by the U.S. consumer who, trained to ignore the production of a given product, only responds to the price tag? To claim that U.S. consumers or corporate CEOs are compromising is ludicrous. This is a heavily one-sided deal in which workers are made complicit in their own poverty and are made powerless to stop it.

That people have jobs is not enough. Work, as a cornerstone of any society, ought to be dignified, safe, and sustaining of the worker. Sweatshops exist for the sole purpose of accumulating profits for the private companies that operate them. We must recognize that as long as profit is the fundamental goal, people will lose.

Concepción

by Laura Dunn

My hands carry smooth wood
Placked, bisecting itself
A symbol I’d never carried before
Nor sung about. But today
Deep in its surface is a name and age,
Concepción Marquez, 75,
and all I know is that you died.

They sing names from the stage
Each one, we sing back,
And I swallow the song,
In hot clumps of air.
Hang a cross on a gate
But does it weigh enough
To unknit the chain
Of events, a circumstance
Traced on my hands
And the tar black road.

America is hungry
Drink the cola from the river Magdalena
Pesticides in putamayo
Our images reflect in the skin of ripe tomatos,
weighing on vines in the southern sun.

names carved on a cross
in my hand. Carved so deep
we stick them in a gate
so they do not sink in to the earth.

I walk barefoot, on the rough surface of
The tire stained road.
Imprinted on my feet is the texture of Georgia.

And the hot mist
Clung to my skin
Looking out on a motel pool
As raindrops punched its surface
And drummed on sun umbrellas.
And here, our clothes in a pile on a decaying lawn chair,
We broke the line between
Night and water.

We took a bus into America
Bisecting a country
To see through a window
Headlights, bright street signs
And the naked body of a road.

You were seventy when you died, Concepción
A soldier learned how to kill you here.
Now I stand on the pavement
In this place singing your name.
Here, under this orange dawn
I swallowed your name and now it grows
And swells in my belly.

Now as the bus sways into the open freeway
I want to remember
every strand of wire at Fort Benning
And how to unlace one coil
With a morning song.

America is fertile
It grows in footprints, tireprints
The poems written in black rubber
As we travel home.

Exposing America's School of Assassins

by Sharlyn Grace and Matt Olson

On November 18, people from across the United States will converge on a small town in Georgia to protest the existence of the School of the Americas (SOA), now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), as they've done for over a decade. This year the demonstration is particularly important because a bill to cease operations at the institute faces a vote in Congress next summer.

Founded in Panama in 1946 as a Latin American military training facility, SOA mainly focuses on teaching potential military leaders how to control civil disobedience in their native countries. Forced out of Panama under the conditions of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1984, SOA took up its new home at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Despite the location change, the school continues to operate completely in Spanish (even though non-Spanish speaking U.S. agents are often assigned to inspect the base).

A SOA training manual unwillingly released in 1996 contains extensive information on identifying and containing an "imminent guerrilla attack," indicators of which included strangers visiting towns and cities – an anomaly also known as tourism. In order to maintain the peace and to support democratic governments, trainees are taught to capture, blindfold, molest, and threaten the families of anyone lobbying against the current government. Students benefit from guest lecturers who teach them which parts of the body are most susceptible to torture.

In true democratic spirit, SOA students learn to view criticism of their administration or any of its programs as threats of covert guerrilla behavior. When guest lecturer and human rights advocate Charles Call spoke to trainees in 1993, he reported that SOA instructors strongly resisted the concept of "increased civilian control." At the time of Call's lecture, only one class was devoted to democratic ideals, while 41 others taught combat skills.

SOA students have gone on to perpetrate some of the most astonishing human rights violations in Latin American history. Some SOA supporters have argued that out of the school's 60,000+ graduates, some "bad apples" are bound to surface. However, the prevalence of their involvement in civilian massacres suggests a more direct involvement. Dictators from across Central America, such as CIA-installed Manuel Noriega in Panama, have graduated from the SOA, and many of the people within their military factions have also been molded by its curriculum. When the United Nations compiled a list of human rights criminals from the civil war in El Salvador during the early 1990's, two-thirds were alumni of the SOA. In Mexico, ten of the twelve people responsible for killing 900 civilians during the El Mozote massacre were graduates.

Graduates of the SOA also conduct specific assassinations. In 1980, the murder of Archbishop Romero, while he was saying mass, built the Catholic lobby against the SOA. After the killing of eight innocents, including six Jesuit priests, on the University of Central America (UCA) campus in El Salvador in 1989, the School of the Americas Watch formed "to speak for those who cannot.”

The annual demonstration outside the SOA's gates takes place on the anniversary of the UCA killings in late November. The SOA finally came under fire in 2001, partially due to increased participation in the protest and lobbying efforts.

Instead of closing the facility, Congress opted to rename it. WHINSEC has tried to distance itself from the established reputation of the SOA by adding a token human rights class to the curriculum and allowing civilian enrollment in order to satisfy critics. However, the name change has not altered WHINSEC's mission. Georgian senator and SOA proponent Paul Coverdell told newspapers that the name change was "basically cosmetic" and would not alter the school's operations. The school's stable $10 million budget ensures brutality will continue in Latin America.

As November 18 nears, Chicagoans ready themselves for the 13-hour drive to Fort Benning to join tens of thousands in condemning an institution, determined once again to speak for those who cannot. Until its gates are locked forever, the existence of WHINSEC fundamentally undermines basic human rights in its construction, teachings and application in Latin America.

The United Nations' Occupation of Haiti

by Kyle Schafer

Haiti's President Jean-Bertrand Aristide made the mistake of trying to oppose business elites and international imposition of neoliberal economic reforms he knew would harm his country's disastrously poor, many of whom supported him. So, countries like the United States cut off aid, citing such things as human rights abuses and electoral fraud (nevermind that the U.S. has continually supported pro-business dictatorships and a repressive army in Haiti). In February 2004, the U.S. helped kidnap Aristide, flying him to Africa and telling everyone he willfully resigned, even though he wasn't told where he was being flown to and wasn't allowed to address the Haitian people. It was a coup.

The United Nations, led by Canadian forces and commanders, has happily occupied the country since. Economic aid has poured in to the U.N.-backed interim government, despite the fact that it isn't constitutionally elected, like Aristide was, and it has a strong record of political killings targeted at supporters of Aristide, labor unions and so on. While the U.N. claims to be in Haiti helping the government curb violence leading up to elections this November (which won't include the still-popular and constitutional president Aristide), it seems to have a different agenda.

In the middle of the night on July 6, 2005, 300 U.N. "peacekeeping" troops in Haiti made a raid on Cité Soleil, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. They came in at about 3 a.m., reportedly using tear gas and machine guns while blocking neighborhood exits with 18 to 20 armored vehicles (with cannons) and flying a gunned helicopter above.

The official U.N. line admits that five people were killed in the raid aimed to curb violence from "pro-Aristide gangs." One of those murdered was Emmanuel "Dread" Wilme, the supposed gang leader specifically targeted in the attack.

The civilian side of the story is a bit different. At least 20 were killed, they say, including many innocents. A Reuters reporter "saw seven bodies in one house alone, including two babies and one older woman in her 60s," while the director of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Haiti confirmed that 27 people came to the MSF clinic with gunshot wounds, 3/4 of them women and children, most claiming to have been shot by peacekeepers. The metal shacks of the neighborhood were ridden with holes from machine-gun bullets, including shots from above, presumably from the helicopter, which the U.N. claimed was only there to observe.

Also, to the residents, Wilme wasn't just some renegade gang leader. He was considered a community leader, someone that helped people and worked against a business-backed anti-Aristide gang (whose leaders have not been targeted by the U.N.). Hundreds turned out for his funeral.

The key to this massacre lies in the fact that Cité Soleil was a poor neighborhood known for supporting elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The killings were political. The U.N. is not a neutral force but an occupying force. Along with the coup-installed interim government and the Haitian police force, the U.N. directly targets Haiti's poor, who support their country's President and live in slums like Cité Soleil. Similar massacres and even much more violent executions than this one have been occurring since Aristide was ousted.

But if you read mainstream American media, you would have no idea that this is the situation in Haiti.

On August 30, The New York Times reported on the July 6 massacre. Not surprisingly, The Times painted an extremely biased image of the U.N. role in Haiti and the Cité Soleil slum, and merely described the massacre as an "incident" and Aristide's kidnapping via coup as a "departure".

The article is biased starting right off with the title, "A Haitian's Slum's Anger Imperils Election Hopes," implying that the slum is an inherently angry place that is hurting itself by putting promising elections in danger. The article continues to explain how dangerous the slum is for the U.N. troops stuck trying to restore order:

Cité Soleil is now so foreboding that the international peacekeepers, who wear flak jackets and drive armored personnel carriers, conduct no regular patrols in its densely populated neighborhoods. In their last operation, about 400 United Nations troops entered the slum on July 6 and ended up in a five-hour gun battle with gangs who control the area.
Numerous residents were wounded in the cross-fire, and the incident has further embittered many Aristide supporters as elections near.

The article goes on to explain how gangs control the slum and that the July 6 raid killed gang leader and prime target Emmanuel Wilmer. Only 14 paragraphs later, after painting a picture that the raid was obviously necessary, does it explain that, "The Fanmi Lavalas [Aristide's party] leaders who showed reporters around said they do not believe in violence and they portrayed Mr. Wilmer as someone who tried to protect neighborhood residents from a gang that threatened them."

The article then explains that leaders of the community showed them pictures of people killed by peacekeepers in the raid. The article notes, "Many victims appeared to have been shot in the head, though who fired the bullets – U.N. troops or gang members – could not be independently verified." This doubt of the leaders is successfully placed, and only seven paragraphs later does the article refer to the independent doctor from the MSF clinic who said that "most patients wounded July 6 said they had been shot by international peacekeepers."

Closer to the end of the article, more accurate glimpses of the situation in Haiti appear but are unexamined. After inundating the reader with images of Cité Soleil as a violent, Aristide-supporting place (and linking the two), the article notes, "According to a report released this year by the University of Miami School of Law, some violence in Cité Soleil had been stoked by Haitian business interests who backed an anti-Aristide gang." It also casually points out that "doctors and human rights groups said in interviews that summary executions with machetes were being carried out in other slums around Port-au-Prince." Although the initial reaction may be to blame gangs, based on the rest of the article, the reports are that the executions are carried out by Haitian police. What must be read between the lines in these statements is that the powerful people in the country – "business interests" and police of the interim government (which is supported by the U.N.) – are targeting and killing poor Aristide supporters.

In addition, the article notes also near the end that "members of [Aristide's] political party, Fanmi Lavalas, have been jailed under the interim government, sometimes without due process, according to the U.N. The most prominent of these prisoners is Yvon Neptune, Mr. Aristide's former prime minister." Although the U.N. recognizes this, it continues to violently support the interim Haitian government.

And so in the words of the article, people of Cité Soleil are "embittered", "skeptical" of the election, and violent toward the U.N. No wonder. The U.N. is an occupying force supporting a government that directly suppresses their political party through executions and jailing without due process. The U.N. is carrying out murderous raids that aim to kill their community leaders (Aristide supporters) and also kill bystanders in the process. The U.N. is pushing elections that will exclude their candidate, the already-elected president of Haiti, and will exclude other members of their party who have been jailed or killed.

Yet The New York Times article wants you to think that the residents of Cité Soleil are solely plagued by gangs and are being agitated into resisting the U.N. and disrupting hopeful elections.

Yes, Cité Soleil is a desperate place, and a currently violent one too. But this is in part the fault of the U.N., the U.S., and the Haitian elite who will kill organized poor people and will topple any leader who may act in the interest of the poor.

The end of the article quotes the U.N. leader in Haiti, saying "Force is not a solution for the security problems in Haiti. You have to provide water, food, support in health, in education." He's right. To The New York Times, this means giving the U.N. money. In reality, it means not killing Haiti's poor when they elect leaders who try to help them and who refuse to follow neoliberal economic reforms.

The actions of the U.N. in Haiti over the past year and a half are important to remember when we call for multilateralism and accept anything carried out by the U.N. The U.N. is a body controlled by imperialists (for example, the only legally binding part of the U.N. is the Security Council, where the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China can single-handedly veto anything). At times, that makes the U.N. an imperialist body, too.

Thus, while we oppose the war against Iraq, we can't lose sight of the more general war the world's rich countries are waging on the world's poor and non-white in countries like Haiti. Despite what we hear in the mainstream media, we can't lose sight of the fact that the hailed U.N. and countries like Canada aren't just arbiters of good and peace but instead are often-violent arbiters of the Washington Consensus.

Landfall, or How I Got to Louisiana

by Ayinde Jean-Baptiste

Monday Aug 29

A group of young people I organize with around power and justice is holding a public meeting at the Thompson Center, downtown Chicago. As we prepare during the day, my man Steve, our lead organizer, remarks: “We’ll be lucky if we get much press coverage, Katrina is supposed to make landfall today.” One reporter shows up, briefly, from the Tribune. Forgive us for being pragmatic – we didn’t know it would be like this either.

>Wednesday Aug 31

I call Steve to remind him that Kanye’s Late Registration dropped Tuesday. I ask which of us is buying it. He says he’ll buy it, which works, cuz he’s the one with the salary.

>>Saturday Sep 3

I meet Steve in the mid-afternoon in Lawndale. We share a chocolate chip cookie sundae at Lou Malnati’s with Amy, like me, one of our leaders. Amy asks me, “Did you hear what Kanye said?” I haven’t but I’ve seen a headline that implied controversy. Steve comes back to the table and does his best Kanye/Mike Myers/ Chris Tucker-at-the-Katrina-telethon impersonation. Later, when I finally get a copy of the video clip, it matches up pretty well. On the way back north, Steve turns to me and says “I’ve been thinking about going down there.” I don’t need to ask where “down there” is. I say I’ve been thinking about it, too. Completely serious, he asks me, “Wanna leave now?” He goes on, piecing together a pitch, “If you drive, I’ll pay for gas. We can be there by tomorrow.” I’m like, “Naw kid, not on the spur like that.” He nods, but I know he is unsatisfied. We stop at his office downtown to pick up that Kanye. The speakers bump on the way home. A reflective line from “Crack Music” asks ‘How could you let this happen?’ It seems prophetic, or at least timely in a way that’s unnerving.

Sunday Sep 4

I sit in the basement watching the news with my father, waiting for my mother to finish getting dressed for a baptism celebration. A Fox commentator and military apologist reported that the eight armed men fired upon from the air by the army corps of engineers were in fact contractors – obviously a magic, even transformative term in our free market capitalist state:
“It’s like the Wild West out there; a lot of people have guns – the good guys and the bad guys.”

My thoughts in that moment:

“It was a fucking hurricane! When did New Orleanians become ‘the bad guys?’”

But muthafuckas got guns drawn ready to blaze.

That finding/scavenging/foraging vs. looting was so blatant that it’s ridiculous; I mean c’mon, from the same news outlets?
At least Kanye talked about it.

Idea: “Thanks Kanye!” = T-shirt

It also occurs to me that Ray Nagin should run for President. (I share this with my father.) Also = T-shirt.
I mean, the brotha got issues, and a national stage, like Obama @ the DNC. The Dems will probably use him, too, especially since Congress was out of session when shit popped off.
This is some generational shit though, even more than 9/11. So many things have happened recently that resonate differently with different people, depending on their politics: Seattle ’99; Election 2K/Decision 2K1; WCAR in Durban, 9/11 the same week; the Wars in Afghanistan and GWII, and the people’s response; for me, the U.S.-backed almost-coup in Venezuela and the U.S.-backed coup in Haiti, Election 2K4, and Katrina.

There is another baptism celebration scheduled tonight at a neighbor’s house. As we drive off, we see one of the members of that family. He tells me his daughter has asked about me. She is a student at Xavier University who has come home. He gives me her number.

Monday Sep 5

In the morning, as I do my self-imposed basketball drills – still scheming on the NBA, I think about Jasmine a lot. In the evening I call her and leave a message that sounds strange to my ears. I can’t really conceive of what she’s dealing with, so my words are hollow.

Tuesday Sep 6

In the evening Jasmine calls me back. We talk about the present and the future and Kanye and everything.
I know those people, she says. She tells me how much she loves Xavier and wants her degree to come from there and that she hopes they will accept her finishing credits from Loyola. She says she talked to Northwestern but they were funny and not really trying to help her out. She tells me that she may have lost everything in her apartment and about how an elevator in her friend’s dorm went out over the weekend and how she’s not sure if anyone she knows died in it.

I tell her about my impotent rage. I critique the federal government.

She tells me she’s about to start classes next week but desperately needs to find a job because she’s been away from home so long that she no longer quite fits into her family’s budget. She tells me about how her friend convinced her to leave the Saturday before Katrina made landfall and how she stayed in Atlanta for 5 days before she was able to get to Chicago.

I, more full of impotent rage, critique the class system and defense spending and deployment. It’s not enough. Now I must go. Steve’s already working on it.

Wednesday Sep 7

Steve calls me in the morning. I still haven’t figured out the car situation. He tells me we have 4 options:

Option A: New Orleans – obvious needs, unclear how we can best help, lots of danger, some health-related and some related to the combination of shoot-to-kill and my own dark skin.

Option B: Baton Rouge – ACORN, a national organization we know and respect, has moved from NO and set up shop there, so we might be able to link with them. The population has also doubled in the last week and a half.

Option C: Dallas – we both have family there, and all it takes to help is to show up at the stadium.

Option D: Houston – major destination for evacuees, the Astrodome needs volunteers, Steve’s friend and a cousin of mine both have places to crash.

I tell him Either B or C. A might be too dangerous, and D, well if we’re going to Texas we might as well see family.

By the time I talk to him in the evening, we’ve both chosen B, independently, cuz while it might be good for him to work with his family, who had already been volunteering, and me to get mine involved. Dallas would still be more pleasure than business, and that’s not on our agenda. I tell him we can’t take the loaner, but that I’m sure we can use my dad’s car. I’m wrong.

Thursday Sep 8

I run a few errands in the morning. I drop my car off at the dealership. On the way there, I get a speeding ticket, and offer up my AAA card as bond. I don’t tell my parents, worried that they’ll try to influence me to stay. My Dad takes me to pick up a rental car. I pack a Maglite, a baseball bat and some food. That’s not all, I’m actually ridiculously prepared. Before I leave my house, I tie my mirror ornament onto the rearview, just to make it my own. I pick up Steven at the Avis in the Loop so we can add his name to the reservation. Once we make it out of the city, we realize we both forgot the Kanye, but maybe never really needed it to do what we’ve set out to do.

>>>Now

My cousin told me recently, “our kids are going to read their history books and be amazed at everything that’s happening now.”

I agree with Kanye, not all the time, but this time. I also think it was hot that he had the TIME cover, dropped his album, and shocked the world within a few days, just when white America thought they had found a new ‘safe Negro’ like Michael Jordan or pre-white-Bronco OJ.

I've been to Lousiana; I got there late, but I beat FEMA to some of the places I visited. I was at one shelter where some young brothers were pounding out beats and freestylin. They had beats boy! But the crazy thing was, they out in the country still on that gangsta shit, talkin bout murkin cats, bout takin over the industry. Nobody said 'fuck Mike Brown.' So here it goes: Fuck Mike Brown, and everything he represents.

A lot of people hoped that hiphop was finally going to stand up. But the cats freestylin in shelters just want radioplay and MTV cribs.

When I get a chance I’ll tell you some more Lousiana stories, about a grape called musky dime, the field peas in my pocket, and a hitchhiker named Jeff…

-A

The Value of Inefficiency

by anonymous

My first day of work, I was out on the factory floor. This was their idea of trial by fire. Their instructions were basic enough: inventory all gauges at the workbench. Search for each gauge in the database stored on the laptop; add it in a separate sheet if it's not there. The Gauge Project, as they called it, was going to be our task for the next three months. Follow the above directions and repeat. Every day. All summer.

I'm an engineer here at NU. I've taken classes in multivariable calculus, stochastic simulations, deterministic models, and all I need to do is type numbers into a spreadsheet? Where's the challenge in that? Where's the educational value? Do you really expect me to take pride in this? To be honest, I felt more than a little miffed.

Back in April when I was offered this job, I felt suddenly redeemed in my decision to pour gobs of money into an exorbitantly priced education here at Northwestern. I thought this job was going to be exactly the kind of opportunity that the lofty pedigree of NU could provide: something educational, something challenging, something worthwhile. Students from across the country fought ferociously for this coveted spot at an aerospace manufacturing company – a position that I received, in many ways, because of the name of my school and the advanced education I have received here. Sitting there on my first day, however, limply holding a chunk of metal used for God-knows-what, I began to wonder whether I'd been duped. I could have done this job with a third-grade education. There was nothing to learn here. There was nothing new. Nothing challenging. This was inane.

I spent my first week dozing off, hunched over a drawer full of gauges and getting lost in the jumbled maze of the factory floor while walking to and from the bathroom. They don't make coffee strong enough for this.

It was week two, however, when I fell head first into the real experience of the plant, a financial and political battle raging right under my nose. There was no challenge in the drawers and databases of my task, but confined within the gargantuan plant, there was more education about people, business, and industry than I'd ever imagined. In this short summer, I would learn to deride, then criticize, then respect, and finally admire in many ways, the powerful union workforce. It was the people, not the gauges, that made the difference.

In week two, my co-worker and I began working at a new bench. Unlike the last places we'd worked, the inspector would not be at his bench to work with us because he worked the night shift. No problem for us; the job was simple enough. We had been inventorying gauges for only a few minutes when a man in a scooter wearing a shirt of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) skidded over to the bench and quickly spat, "Who's your hourly?" We explained to him that the inspector wasn't around, so we didn't have an hourly (union employee) helping us out today.

Bingo.

Within a few minutes, the union had officially filed a grievance against me and my co-worker for violating the union contract. The man called over the nearest two union employees to "supervise" our work. Meanwhile, I sat bewildered at what was going on around me. The grievance was later duly paid by my department, and I never heard of it again, almost as if they'd been waiting for it to happen.

I am a salary worker, unaffiliated with the union. According to the contract, there are certain things I'm not allowed to do on the factory floor, like move a pushcart. I can't pick up any gauges. I can't move any parts. Basically, I can't touch anything that's not white and 8 ½" x 11". One intern was actually yelled at for throwing a piece of trash in a "union" garbage can. Doing any of these things may be seen as an attempt by the company to slowly chisel away at the union, because I will be doing a union job, thereby making a union employee expendable. This is the only way the UAW can protect its employees from being slowly forced out in favor of non-union workers. However, if I can't pick up gauges, I can't do my job. Period. The offered solution to this comes in the form of union "supervisors." These hourly workers will sit beside us and do nothing while we inventory gauges. They want to make sure that the total number of people doing union jobs remains the same, so by taking these supervisors away from their normal tasks, there remains a constant demand for union work.

As an industrial engineer, this made me sick. From the very beginning, they teach you that inefficiency is the greatest evil. Cut out waste. There is an optimal solution. But now I sit with my co-worker, hacking away on the laptop while two fully capable skilled-tradesmen just sit there beside us. Four people doing the work of two. I understand and respect the principle behind the rule, but there's got to be a better way to do this.

However, as I would soon learn, inefficiency is simply the way of life in this plodding facility. The company's hourly employees probably produce more completed crossword puzzles by weight than they do engines. Union power ensures that even the most unproductive workers will be protected from management retribution. Not to claim that all or even a majority of union employees are lazy – some of the most hardworking men I've ever known spend their days on that factory floor – but far too many workers view the steadfast security the union provides not as protection from injustice but as an opportunity to read the newspaper on the company clock. These are the employees that give unions a bad name. Those who work hard do so out of pride, not incentive, and are disconcertingly few in number.

After two days at that bench, we move on to Daryl's area.

We introduce ourselves and chat for a few minutes, then Daryl asks, "You guys been workin' a lot of overtime yet?" We say no. We had been instructed specifically by our superiors to lie and tell the hourly workers that we worked on salary and did not receive pay for overtime work, as this was something guaranteed only to union employees, as per the contract. My overtime pay was nearly $25 per hour. He asks a few more questions about our job: what do we do, who do we work with, etc. Then finally he says, "You know you're taking our jobs, don't you?" I just gave him a puzzled look. Daryl laughs and says, "They don't tell you much about how this place works, do they?" He goes on to say that any lip I received for my position was simply the union trying to protect its employees. He explains that 15 years ago, there was a union position called "gauge follow-up" in charge of maintaining an inventory of all the gauges in the plant. In an effort to streamline the workforce, management eliminated the position and laid off dozens of workers. Now, in an effort to keep that position away from the union, the company hired summer interns to do the work instead. I was being used as leverage.

I'd already seen the idleness and inefficiency the union strength often caused on the floor, but now I was seeing more from the other side of the battle. As I continued working, I learned more and more of the administration's ruthless efforts to streamline, consolidate, and squeeze productivity out of the workforce. The only reason we didn't see low wages, breakneck quotas, and a suppressed labor force was not that management wouldn't stoop so low but that they couldn't. The local chapter of UAW is the archetype for the national organization. Union workers at my company have some of the highest pay, the best benefits, and the most generous work schedules of any in the country. The union has a stranglehold on the company, which is not a minor accomplishment. My company is a household name. It is a force to be reckoned with, and the union is winning. The management is taking massive pay cuts at the same time the union negotiates an even more generous contract.

So which side is right? The union clearly causes incredible barriers to production and allows employees to be paid generously, regardless of their effort or ability. The red tape and complications have brought the company to a production standstill numerous times, and despite management efforts, the contract agreements are becoming less and less in their control. At what point does this inefficiency cause the company to become unprofitable and fail? Where will the employees be then? Its highest volume engine is already being sold at a loss, even while its competitors are turning enormous profits on the same variant. The company is in shambles with outdated machinery, facilities in disrepair, and increasingly smaller research and development budgets. They are falling behind the rest of the industry because they simply can't afford the union employees.

But what's so great about efficiency anyway? (My professor is probably twitching as I type that.) Efficiency means cheaper engines for militaries and cheaper private jets for millionaires, cheaper wars and cheaper gluttony. Does management really deserve another raise? Talk all you want about profit margins and market shares, but right now, 5,000 blue-collar workers depend on generous pay to feed their families, own a home, raise their children, save for college. There comes a time when you have to set your priorities, and despite its faults, the union stands for the right people. That's enough for me.

The American Dream?

by Britt Gordon-McKeon

A few decades ago, all signs pointed to declining work hours for Americans, with no end in sight. Starting at 60 to 70 hours in the 1800s, the average workweek fell to around 40 during the Great Depression and after World War II, largely due to a strong union focus on a shorter workweek; a bill to shorten the workweek to 30 hours even passed the Senate in 1933, before the 40-hour level was agreed to later in the decade. And in the 50s and 60s, as technology continued to develop and mechanization increased, it became clear that the amount of labor needed to accomplish the current level of production was shrinking steadily. It seemed inevitable that the workload of Americans would dwindle. In 1965, a U.S. Senate subcommittee predicted that by 2000 the workweek would be 14 hours long.

Instead, Americans are now among the longest-working in the world. As productivity has increased around the world, other nations have used the opportunity to decrease work hours and increase leisure. France has a 35-hour workweek. Italians average eight weeks of vacation annually. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, countries like France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea have seen a decrease of over 200 work hours annually since 1970. Yet in the U.S., yearly work hours have increased 10 to 20 percent during the same time period.

When we're overworked, our lives suffer in ways large and small. Even for those lucky enough to have jobs they find rewarding and enjoyable, long hours without respite have consequences, from lack of quality time with family and friends, to scarcer opportunities for the leisure activities that excite and sustain us, to health problems as serious as depression, heart attack, or stroke. Overwork not only decreases our free time, but depresses the quality of the time we do have – think collapsing exhaustedly in front of the television. And it affects our work performance, too; studies show that the longer the workday, the lower productivity each hour.

The amount of time we devote to work has a tremendous impact on our quality of life. Yet, for the most part, we have very little control or flexibility in this area due to the way work is structured in America.

For employers, it is beneficial to squeeze as much work possible out of employees who get paid a set salary and costly benefits such as health insurance. On the other hand, many part-time, low-wage employees work for employers who reserve benefits for full-time workers, and attempt to keep as many of their employees as possible below that threshold. Thus, many workers struggle to be assigned 40 or even 30 hours per week; some live with the stresses of financial difficulties, while others create a patchwork of multiple part-time jobs that leaves them as overworked as salaried professionals if not more so. A recent survey found that 38% of Americans work 50 hours a week or more.

But overwork is not merely a matter of hourly workload. In Europe, vacations are commonly much longer than in the United States. Most European countries mandate four or five weeks of vacation for all employees with a year of seniority. Germans average seven weeks of vacation, the French 37 days, and Italians 42 days. Even the notoriously hard-working Japanese, who have invented a word for death by overwork (karoshi), receive an average of 25 days paid vacation each year. Americans average 12 days, and recent surveys suggest that we let an average of two of them go unused. Twenty-eight percent of working women and 37% of women earning less than $40,000 have no paid vacation at all.

Clearly there are structural changes that can significantly improve the situation: shifting the responsibility for benefits like health insurance from employers to the public at large to ease at least some of the pressures towards long days or short weeks; expanding overtime rules to cover salaried professionals; measures like the European Union's mandatory vacation law, which requires employers in EU countries to provide a minimum of four weeks paid vacation; raising the minimum wage so that low-wage workers can afford to live on 40 hours pay or less.

Yet while these strategies are important, they are only a piece of the solution because overwork is ingrained in our culture. Laws may be passed to limit the workweek or increase paid vacation, but while the dedication and commitment of employees is measured by hours worked, they will hesitate to leave their desks at 5 p.m. or take all their vacation days at the risk of their careers.

And what's more, though polls find that Americans would prefer to work an average of 10 fewer hours a week, questions that dig deeper show most people are willing to give up little or none of their income in exchange for those shorter hours. For some, this income is needed for basic necessities, but for many others it is merely a matter of achieving a certain level of consumption. Often, it almost goes without saying that income and consumption should be maximized, and leisure time is first to be sacrificed.

If American society is ever to allow people true freedom to choose the work-life balance that most suits them, the process must include structural changes, collective action, and personal choices. In individual workplaces, employees can build strong unions that demand not only increased paid vacation but also freedom of work hours and non-discrimination against employees who exercise that freedom. But we must also make changes on a personal level by rethinking our priorities and envisioning lifestyles in which we can work less, spend less, and enjoy life more. Not only will this enrich our own lives, but it is one piece of building a culture that values relaxation, rejuvenation, and human relationships over maximizing income and consumption.

The Protest - June 2005

The Force of Nonviolence
Hope for a peaceful future
Laura Dunn (l-dunn@northwestern.edu)
Becky Miller (r-miller7@northwestern.edu)

A Tree Grows in Beirut
Lebanese students model the modern revolution
Matt Cohlmia (m-cohlmia@northwestern.edu)

Remembering Zion: Rastafari and Cultural Rebellion
Case study of Jamaican Rastafarianism
Andre Nickow (a-nickow@northwestern.edu)

Personhood Rights
Defining "person": animals, artificial intelligence, and brain-dead bodies
Ben Hyink (b-hyink@northwestern.edu)

Beneath the Pavement, the Beach!
A brief 20th century genealogy of revolution
Meghan Courtney (m-courtney@northwestern.edu)
Brad Hirn (b-hirn@northwestern.edu)

Mining, Militarism, and Self-Governance
Navajo resistance against uranium subsidies
Caitlin Bruce (c-bruce@northwestern.edu)

Clothed Consciousness
American Apparel: socially conscious or a facade?
Kavitha Chekuru (k-chekuru@northwestern.edu)

Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
New novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
Pat Scharfe (p-scharfe@northwestern.edu)

The Force of Nonviolence

by Laura Dunn and Becky Miller

The term “nonviolence” incorrectly suggests that to engage in nonviolence only requires abstention from violence. Mohandas Gandhi, one of the first leaders of a successful nonviolent movement in colonial India, didn’t even use the term “nonviolence”. Instead, Gandhi referred to his active, nonviolent style of protest as “satyagraha”. Satyagraha entailed principled civil disobedience against injustice and constructive action designed to strengthen community. Satyagraha was heavily based in action performed with the mindset of peaceful interaction. Nonviolence, with its origins in satyagraha, embodies more than just the absence of violence but the presence of principled action, and it is a powerful force to be used in achieving justice.

Nonviolent movements today should strive to include the characteristics of satyagraha and adapt their action to address current injustices. One very pertinent example of effective nonviolence occurred in South Africa in response to apartheid in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Black South Africans boycotted white-owned businesses, purchasing goods and trading only in neighborhood markets. This action was motivated by outrage at South African police brutality and unjust social and economic conditions. It was designed to force all South Africans to recognize the part they played in allowing injustice to continue. As a part of their boycott, community members voluntarily decided to make sure that enough goods were produced, in both quantity and variety, to meet the needs of their community, promoting a sort of constructive action. Their constructive action served to unify the community, resulting in virtually 100% participation by black South Africans. Black non-participation in the white-owned national economy immobilized South African business until whites were forced to negotiate. By combining principled non-participation with constructive action, black South Africans were able to harness the power of nonviolence to uproot injustice in their homeland. Modern day nonviolent movements involve more than just marching and wearing buttons; they are creative forces that actively promote justice.

Nonviolence holds a promise for its practitioners. Victories won through violence can only be retained through violence or the threat of violence. When violence is seen as the only means to implement change or to assume and maintain power, an endless cycle of violence must follow. Because nonviolent victories are won through popular support and participation and because they seek to implement justice, their legacy of peaceful means is reflected in their outcome. Even if external violence follows nonviolent movements, the successes of the immediate goals of the movement will be preserved. The hope for a larger peace exists, but it requires patient, sustained work on the part of practitioners of nonviolence. Nonviolent change usually occurs more slowly that change brought about by violence, but once attained, nonviolent change sustains itself in the long-term.

Some people believe that because nonviolent action exists without the threat of physical harm, it doesn’t have the same authority in the world as violence does. World War II-era Germany and the Nazi agenda are often pointed to as a situation in which nonviolent resistance to the Nazis would not have worked. This is, in fact, untrue. In the few times that nonviolent resistance was attempted, it proved an effective means of combating Hitler’s regime. In early 1943, male Jews married to non-Jews were rounded up in Berlin in one of the later mass deportations to concentration camps. The wives and mothers of these men converged on Rosenstrasse street to demand the release of their relatives. Surprisingly, the spontaneous demonstration proved effective, and the Nazis released all the men.

Historically, nonviolence has worked in a number of situations, including in situations in which nonviolent resistance was considered to be impossible or futile. The complex nature of nonviolence, which incorporates principled action, high community participation, and the ideal of achieving peace and justice, makes it a viable force and an practical alternative for the future. Albert Einstein once said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” In a paradoxical age in which wars can be fought with the goal of instilling democracy or combating terrorism, nonviolence seems to be the only means of achieving peaceful and just ends without simultaneously setting the framework for an endless cycle of future violence. The potential that nonviolence gives to the world is the hope for a peaceful and just future.

A Tree Grows in Beirut

by Matt Cohlmia

This February, Lebanon shocked the world. In a land where civil war is relentless, ethnic tensions keep chaos a pin drop away, and freedom is only a nominal reality, the people of Lebanon united to throw off the oppressive Syrian regime, the puppeteer behind a Lebanese government riddled with corruption. As I write, Lebanon is more democratic, more independent, and more liberated than it has been at any point in the nation’s 62-year history. Perhaps the most surprising reality of the revolution is not the fact that an Arab nation revolted against its oppressors but who’s leading the charge. Like no revolution in history, the Lebanese youth have turned out in massive numbers to emerge as the vanguard of a new populist democratic voice, the first of its kind in the Arab world. This is a revolution led not by soldiers, not by politicians, not by tribal leaders, but by the rebellious student voice of Lebanon.

These revolutionaries stop in at internet cafes to get news updates, duck out of rallies for a few hours to attend classes, and use text messages to spread the word of last-minute changes to planned demonstrations. They have nose rings and tattoos; they sport dreadlocks and Diesel jeans; they have iPods and drink lattes. This is revolution in the 21st century. Some men are dressed in business suits, some in baggy clothes and flip-flops, and girls come in tight skirts and high heels, carrying expensive designer purses. It’s even been called the “Gucci revolution.” Most of the protesters weren’t even alive when Syrian troops swept across Lebanon, killing hundreds of soldiers and citizens, in order to halt the bloody civil wars of the mid-seventies. They come not to avenge the past, but to build a better future: their future.

Tent city has blossomed into an urban Woodstock, hosting poets, musicians, and political speakers, as an estimated 50,000 protesters swarm the capitol. New podiums are erected daily to accommodate the hundreds of vocal revolutionaries; stages overflow with energy, voice, and passion; and the streets are smattered with red, white, and green, the colors of a patriotic Lebanon. “The student organizations run the place,” explained Samir Kassir, a columnist for An-Nahar newspaper. Thanks to Hariri’s Future Television network, this revolution is even televised. Every day, sandwiches and bottled water arrive by the truckloads, courtesy of dozens of different political parties of all different creeds, uniting behind the protest. There are two simple rules in tent city: no alcohol, and no men and women sharing tents alone. “People aren't here to have fun,” said Joe Hakash, a 24-year-old organizer. This is organization. This is voice. This is power.

This kind of revolution is absolutely unheard of throughout the Arab world, a place considered to be among the most volatile, dogmatic, and militaristic parts of the world. The difference, many analysts say, is the progressive international attitude in the capitol city of Beirut. Once known as the “Paris of the Middle East,” Beirut is a haven of rich diversity in the Arab world. It has Arab, French, American, and Lebanese universities, as well as a British high school, an American International College, a secular Lyçée Français, a French Jesuit school, and German, Italian, and other schools. At around 88 percent, its literacy rate is among the highest in the Arab world (compared with 40 percent in Iraq). Education, diversity, and organization have given the power and legitimacy to this revolution that has made it so undeniably effective. It is a non-violent revolution of the mind, not the gun, a rarity in the war-torn region of the Middle East.

These young patriots have even managed to unwittingly do something no politician or military leader has ever accomplished: they have united the Lebanese people behind a common cause. This is a region of the world where factions have fought in bloody civil war for centuries and yet, the Maronite, Orthodox Christian, Druze, Shia Muslim, and Sunni Muslim citizens stand side by side, or, more correctly, tent by tent, united only by their quest for freedom. The wealthy as well as the poor have flocked to the city to unite against the Syrians. The flags that blanket the courtyard in every direction in tent city are not those of individual political parties, radical minority messages, or tribal emblems, but the glorious red and white national flag. This spectacular scene has prompted the title “Cedar Revolution,” in honor of the national emblem emblazoned on the flag: the cedar tree. This isn’t about factions or personal vendettas; this is about Lebanon. Their tent city is clustered below the Martyr’s statue, still riddled with bullet holes as glaring reminders of the civil war that saw these very same factions set against one another.

The Syrian military has had a smothering presence in Lebanon since intervening in civil war in June of 1976, most feared for its widespread military intelligence network of more than 5,000 operatives. According to a former Lebanese intelligence officer who requested anonymity, Syrian spies infiltrated and corrupted both judiciary and security bodies throughout the country. “If you want to remain strong, you ignore your chain of command and work directly for the nearest Syrian military intelligence office,” he said. “By obeying the Syrians, you stay protected.” On top of the hugely influential espionage program, Syria held Lebanon with an iron fist, using “peacekeeping” troops, a force that as late as 1990 still remained overwhelming at 40,000 soldiers. Syrian occupation had crippled Lebanon for almost 15 years, but it was the death of Rafik Hariri that brought Lebanon to revolution.

The former prime minister and entrepreneurial billionaire was the face of a new Lebanon, even nicknamed “Mr. Lebanon” by his supporters. Using his financial clout, he coaxed dozens of foreign investors to Beruit and is often considered solely responsible for Lebanon’s rapid economic recovery after civil war. As a businessman devoid of political family, powerful clan, or military clout, his terms as prime minister marked a new era in government, one based on an entrepreneurial charisma, a rapidly growing economy, and international diplomacy. He resigned in October 2004 in protest of Syria’s pressure to keep their endorsed president, Emile Lahoud, in power. Even after his resignation, however, Hariri was revered as a hero of the Lebanese people. On February 14, 2005, Hariri was assassinated when a car bomb was detonated beside his motorcade as it passed through downtown Beirut. Though no definitive evidence has yet been uncovered as to the party responsible, it was no secret that Hariri’s greatest enemy has always been the occupying Syrians. In September 2004, he used his political connections to help pass the later-ignored United Nations Resolution 1559 calling on Syria to end its occupation of Lebanon.

Now, students who shared Hariri’s dream of a thriving Lebanon are accomplishing what even their revered hero could not. On February 28, the Syrian-backed government fell to the non-violent protests of the Lebanese people as Omar Karimi resigned. After intense pressure from both the Lebanese people and the international community, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad announced that Syria would complete a full withdrawal of both military and intelligence operatives by May 1, and, as promised, all 15,000 remaining Syrian troops left Lebanon on April 26. On May 29, Lebanon will have its first elections without Syrian military presence in over 33 years.

Now they face the toughest challenge yet: the future. They still sit doggedly in one of the most dangerous parts of the world, tenuously awaiting elections while Syria still looms to the east. This youthful rebellion will be given its true test of maturity. In many ways, however, the student patriots of Lebanon have already succeeded in bringing a new fervor and freedom to the Middle East. With a peaceful protest, they have achieved in Lebanon what thousands of cruise missiles and the lives of American soldiers still haven’t achieved in Iraq. Gone are the days of politician-led revolution and the meek uniting behind some powerful savior. The Lebanese youth have flown in the face of history and become the glowing face of freedom in the war-ridden Middle East.

Remembering Zion: Rastafari and Cultural Rebellion

by Andre Nickow

Rastafari is a conception that was born at the moment that Europeans took the first black man out of Africa. They didn't know it then, but they were taking the first Rasta from his homeland.

--Rasta Elder, name unknown

Kingston, Jamaica, April 21, 1966: The air is saturated with stimuli enough to overwhelm each of the senses. Your skin bakes in the searing rays of the sun. You are nearly deafened by the beating of drums, pulsating from every direction, and the roar of thousands chanting “Hail Ras Tafari!” Scanning the horizon, your eyes drown in a sea of dreadlocks, an ocean of fists, punctuated only by tri-colored flags and signs declaring the omnipotence of Jah and the supremacy of the King of Kings. You inhale deeply, overwhelmed by the pungent fragrance of ganja, the herb of wisdom. Licking your lips, you can still taste the salty sweetness of the boiled plantain given to you by the Rasta standing next to you. Billows of smoke pouring from his flared nostrils, he hands you a long wooden pipe, unfurling a banner with his free hand. He holds the banner to the sky, tears streaming from his crimson eyes. The banner reads: “All Hail the King of Kings, the Lion of Judah, the Almighty One, Ye shall break every chain again and again…”

Diaspora is a word rarely used outside of academia, and yet to millions across the world it is a daily reality. The defining feature of the last century was the reaction of the majority of the Earth’s population, the periphery, against an idiosyncratic and yet technologically powerful minority, the core. The core has, for half a millennium, attempted to systematically force the diverse majority into a very specific and standardized sociopolitical/economic/cultural model called liberalism, a model into which much of the periphery often simply does not fit. Centuries of organic traditions usually characterized by territorial dynamism were disregarded as colonizers drew demographically awkward state lines, separating the world from itself. Thousands were dragged from their homes and forced across the world in one of humankind’s most shameful epochs, the slave trade. Only after a period of chaotic self-destruction in the core, that of the World Wars and the Great Depression, was the periphery given an opportunity to seize formal control of its own activities. Despite decades of often turbulent decolonization, the core retained control in indirect, yet fundamental ways. Thus we begin to see the problems to which Jamaica’s Rastafari provides a potential solution.

Generally a decentralized, open-minded, and individualistic group, the Rastafarians worship Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia through the mid-twentieth century. It was he who inspired the event depicted at the outset of this essay with his arrival for a visit in Jamaica. For centuries, colonizers have attempted to suppress indigenous cultures through slavery and oppression. How is it possible that diasporic Africa maintains such a connection with its heritage that people will journey by the thousands from far and wide to greet the emperor of a country they have not inhabited for hundreds of years? The answer to this question can be found in the strategy of cultural resistance exemplified by Rastafari. I will investigate the ideology and institutions that compose this rebellion after a brief contrasting look at more traditional forms of anti-colonial activity.

In fighting for independence, liberation movements have used a wide variety of tactics. Frantz Fanon’s concept of decolonization through violence repelled the French from Algeria. Gandhi’s insistence on decolonization through nonviolence cast the British from India. But as we speak, India, Algeria, and many other nations remain subordinate to the core, even as formally independent nations. The means of control employed by the core lie in the very structure of the world system as the core has developed it, namely a collection of sovereign territorial states acting as atomized competitors in a global market. The core holds a monopoly on market policy control through an assortment of international financial institutions. It also holds an advantage in the military and technological sectors. How can one hold one’s own against such a structure? Some choose to continue with violence as a primary means. The clearest example of this strategy is that of antistatist Islamic fundamentalist groups active in the Middle East, such as Al Qaeda. Others, with little in common other than rejection of imperialism, such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas and different grassroots groups in Argentina attempt to undermine the global capitalist order by dropping out and creating their own diverse and independent communities. The former are creating chaos and destruction, annoying the core but without having any apparent success in instituting a constructive alternative. The latter seem to be achieving important successes, although it is an uphill struggle. Ultimately, it is far too soon to judge success levels for either of these groups.

A third means of resistance is rebellion at the level of culture and identity. While this strategy often overlaps with the others — the Zapatistas make particularly good use of indigenous culture in their activities — we look here at the case of Rastafari. This is because Rastas have employed cultural warfare as their primary strategy.

Originally the Rastas pushed for a return to Zion from Babylon in a very literal sense. Zion referred specifically to Ethiopia and Babylon referred specifically to the host environments of Africans in diaspora. During decolonization efforts in the early and mid-20th century, Ethiopia seemed to be maintaining its de facto as well as formal independence. Thus, return meant a successful evasion of liberalism. However, Haile Selassie died in the 1970s, and the dream of Ethiopia as an empire representing authentically African aspirations collapsed. This was part of a greater trend of globalization that has left virtually no substantial territorial segment free from the market-based world system. The Rastas have adapted to this shift: over the last decades their ideology has grown increasingly symbolic and personal. Babylon has grown to mean more generally the state of dependence and exploitation faced by the African diaspora. Zion has grown to mean independence, freedom, and affirmation of indigenous culture. This characteristic is not a dramatic break, however, with the more traditional beliefs and practices of Rastafari. Concepts have always held symbolic implications in addition to literal meanings. Selassie himself, during his visit to Jamaica, advised that Rastas “should not seek to immigrate to Ethiopia until they had liberated the people of Jamaica.”

Since migration to Ethiopia on its own is not an effective means of rebelling against capitalism for reasons discussed above, Rastas now choose to start from wherever they are and live a lifestyle that maintains cultural integrity despite the core’s greatest efforts to deny them legitimacy. Insofar as Rastas succeed in accomplishing this, they are effectively resisting the hegemony of the capitalist world system. Rastas hold several key beliefs and practices that cultivate a sense of identity separate from that propagated by the system at large. That of “I and I.” A sense of self-centeredness is necessary to compete with others in the rigors of the free market. Rastas reject this human atomization by denying the existence of the other as separate from the self, seeing only one people permeated by Jah. Thus “I and I” instead of “you and I.”

Another important Rastafarian practice is the smoking of ganja during reasonings, informal rituals in which Rastas discuss politics, spirituality, and the state of their movement. Smoking is justified by the following passage from Psalms (104:14): “He causeth the grass for the cattle and herb for the service of man.” It is difficult to argue that ganja is detrimental to the cultivation of the dehumanizing competition that is capitalism, unlike certain other drugs such as caffeine and, arguably, alcohol (both rejected by devoted Rastas as unnatural). Ganja builds a sense of solidarity and cooperation. When used in the context of conscious reflection as it is during reasonings, ganja offers insights into subtle but essential cultural and personal dynamics and helps to initiate the growth of constant spiritual awareness. Ganja comes from the earth and brings those who use it responsibly closer to the earth.

Diet constitutes yet another affirmation of non-capitalist identity. Rastas are taught to eat only I-tal food, meaning food that comes straight from the ground and is as close to its natural state as possible. This is a sharp contrast to the mass produced chemical substances much of the rest of the world consumes.

Dreadlocks are perhaps the most visible symbol of Rastafari, and these, too, are rooted in affirmation of indigenous identity. Dreadlocks are the natural way African hair grows, and wearing dreads thus represents a refusal to conform to white (more specifically Western) culture and fashion. Furthermore, dreadlocks are associated with the Lion of Judah, a biblical symbol Rastas use to represent Haile Selassie, and more generally the power of African anti-imperialism.

Through a variety of symbols, beliefs, and practices, Rastas are able to affirm indigenous identity and successfully fend off the cultural dimension of capitalist imperialism. Their success is proven by the fact that, after centuries of dehumanization and systematic attempts to rid them of indigenous culture, Rastas still recognize the motherland as their own with the primal vigor shown in their reception of Selassie upon his arrival in Jamaica. They fight by living a lifestyle true to their heritage that goes against the grain of political, economic, and cultural oppression. We end with words from His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I himself: “We are anxiously awaiting the day when those Africans in the dependent territories break the shackles of foreign tutelage, and become masters of their own fate.” In some ways, followers of Rastafari already have.

Sources:

"Rastafarianism" <http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/rast.html>

"Rastafari Speaks" http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/Selassie/

"Dread History: The African Diaspora, Ethiopianism, and Rastafari" http://educate.si.edu/migrations/rasta/rasta.html

Personhood Rights

by Ben Hyink

Today the term “person” ascribes certain legal and ethical conditions for an entity. We are confronted by two bioethical choices on personhood: 1) whether or not to extend the status of personhood to non-humans that for all we know have minds at least as capable as those of dependent persons and 2) whether or not to extend personhood status to entities that for all we know are mindless but happen to contain human DNA. I argue “yes” to the first choice and “no” to the second.

Protecting non-human minds as "persons"

The brain structures and behavior of some non-human animals are similar to our own. Some animals are also capable of limited language comprehension, tool use, and other sophisticated behaviors. Certain behaviors have been interpreted as demonstrating abstract self-awareness (such as mirror interaction) and theories about the minds of others (including social strategies).

Two non-human species with the highest development of these traits are chimpanzees and dolphins, though other great apes and cetaceans also approximate their abilities. Their language capacity, when rigorously trained, appears to be equivalent to that of a two-year-old human. Yet, in some regions chimpanzees are still hunted for food (which speaks to unmet human needs), and dolphins have been subject to harmful military research since the 1960s (as have humans). For these animals, might we consider a dependent personhood status, which would offer greater legal protection and exempt them from painful forms of experimentation?

You may have caught the films on “artificial intelligence” called, A.I., (2001) and I, Robot, (2004), which both explored some of the social complexities that conscious androids would create. Perhaps the earliest theory regarding the designation of machines as persons is known as the “Turing test,” created by Alan Turing in 1950. The essential consideration in the test was whether human subjects could be fooled when conversing with the machine in a blind test where the subject could be interacting with either a machine or a human. In an era of “noncognitivist” philosophy and behavioralist psychology, this was an acceptable theory.

However, simple grammar generation programs first developed in the ’60s have already fooled humans in exchanges. Modern online “chatbots” can generate conversation that is convincing for a short while and can even appear clever thanks to sophisticated designs for “grammar parsing” and lexical access, as well as long exposure to human users. But such systems have no design mechanism that would account for conscious awareness of their activities.

What is a mind? An initial requirement would be a capacity for conscious experience. I believe we can more fruitfully differentiate between consciousness based on an analysis of the capacities and mechanisms observed in humans. Enter Immanuel Kant’s representational functionalism. Due to space limits, I can only share an approximate account of some of the things that Kant discovered we need for any moment of conscious experience (at least the normative human form of consciousness).

First, we need basic abilities to access the world spatially and temporally, because one cannot “learn” about time from a temporal series of representations if one has no ability to distinguish a temporal sequence in the first place (likewise for space). An A.I. with identifiable consciousness would need a functional processing system analogous to sensory nerves and forms of declarative memory (which probably could be achieved through functional programs running on a machine that enabled the same kind of processing as observed in humans).

Second, we need some form of judgment in order to interpret anything experienced. Our conscious experience is what Kant called an “apperceptive” judgment of our empirical perception. Apperceptive awareness both interprets a mass of sensation into coherent object representations and unifies those representations in one collective representation. The representations also have to be conceptually meaningful in at least some way to be consciously recognized as representing something. Likewise, a conscious A.I. would need to be able to construct representations from its sensory information, integrate them into a form in which it could receive many particular representations in a unified way (a simultaneous experience of particulars), and conceptually recognize the signals as representing things to it.

We are still learning how humans are able to do these things (not the least of which is the using memory). All theories today involve electrical oscillations in the thalamocortical networks of the brain (including the cerebral cortex and the thalamus). In his “global workspace” model, Bernard J. Baars theorizes that highly active representations in perceptual areas project or are selectively integrated into thalamus circuits, then projected throughout the cortex and central nervous system via oscillations. It may be that some form of network organization is necessary for consciousness.

Still, additional questions arise as to the interests, rights, and even personhood of an A.I. based on the kind of conscious mind it happened to have. Assuming we consider it to have conscious processing approximately like our own, what difference would it make if it had radically different interests from us? What if its affective parameters (presumably necessary at some level for effective environmental navigation) were set to make it enjoy tasks we consider dull, demeaning, or dangerous? Would it make a difference if it were conscious and intelligent beyond the personhood threshold for chimps and dolphins? These questions have hardly been explored.

Designating mindless human bodies as "non-persons"

What is it that makes some people want to rush to declare personhood for all fertilized eggs? As Jack Kessler, the Northwestern Chair of Neurology, has pointed out, those who advance such claims cannot even tell you how many “people” they reference, as splits in early stages of cell division can result in identical twins. The cluster can even split and then recombine. Nerve cells begin to form after two weeks – after any embryo would be harvested for stem cell therapies – but that is far from what is needed to support consciousness. In practice, no one acts consistently on this dubious notion of embryonic personhood. As Ron Regan Jr. pointed out, if President Bush truly thought embryos were persons, he should have sent rescue missions to in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics to rescue the slowly disintegrating (“dying”) embryos in storage and implant them all in the uteruses of willing surrogates. If an IVF clinic were burning down with an eight-year-old girl and thousands of embryos inside, would anyone ignore the girl to save as many embryos (“people”) as possible? Yet, the need many people have for stem cell therapies is no less desperate, and it is being denied.

Functional connections between the thalamus and cortex do not develop until 5.5 to 6.5 months of pregnancy. At least until that time, no conscious mind exists. If one wants to bring up immaterial souls, then we can at least say that no physiological facilitation for consciousness can be observed, through which a soul could – somehow – access the world. It is hard to say what forms of awareness could be integrated at so early a stage, though we know sensory and motor awareness is still very primitive in infants. Most abortions occur before this time. Late term abortions, virtually always justified by serious risks to the mother, could still be argued for on grounds of bodily autonomy; however, although I respect Peter Singer’s efforts to develop a consistent utilitarian ethical system, I don’t see declaring the life of an adult cat worth more than a human infant (since its mind is more capable) as a necessary position to take. Arguments for “potentiality” can have some weight, but not until their physical object of concern has at least facilitated some subjective experience (hence becomes an embodied subject).

If stem cell use and abortions deal with “pre-persons,” certain forms of brain damage that prevent all possibility of regaining consciousness can turn bodies into “post-persons.” Apparently, Terri Schiavo was such a case. The popular coverage of her condition was fraught with lies and distortions. She collapsed in a weakened state from bulimia nervosa because her heart stopped, and received injuries to the side on which she fell. Video footage of her following a balloon was the result of manipulative editing – a balloon was tossed past her head dozens of times until a shot in which her eyes seemed to follow it was captured. Her cortex was necrotized and liquefied; she couldn’t integrate representations into conscious awareness and her memory was destroyed. She couldn’t think or feel anything – her mind was lost fifteen years ago.

Considering speculative souls once again, if Mrs. Schiavo’s mind did exist without thalamocortical facilitation, it would hardly need (nor could it use) the rest of her body. In any event, removing life support functions to allow her body to die could not “kill her” in the same way a person capable of conscious awareness could be killed. More importantly, her wishes to not be kept in a permanently vegetative state were known to her husband – who was after no fortune, only $50,000 was left from a one million dollar malpractice settlement for Terri’s long term care – and her doctor. For the $950,000 that kept her body in an irrecoverable vegetative state for over a decade, I wonder how many lives of sick or starving people could have been saved.

There are other important ideas for us to consider, including such exotic topics as “cryonic preservation” and “uploading.” Hopefully this has been enough to spark your interest in personhood theory. This article precedes a paper that will hopefully be published online this summer called “Cognitive Network as Embodied Self: A Common Frame for Ethical Dialogue”.

Beneath the Pavement, the Beach!

by Meghan Courtney and Brad Hirn

The pedagogical project is created in order to place… lives inside the classroom and to employ knowledge and transformation as weapons to change the world. From the perspective of the social location of the condemned on Earth, it becomes clear that knowledge alone, as intended by the school, does not transform life. Only the conversion of knowledge into action can transform life. This concretely defines the meaning of practice: the dialectic movement between the conversion of transformative action into knowledge and the conversion of knowledge into transformative action.

--Leonardo Boff in his introduction to Peter McLaren’s Life in Schools

The purpose of this article is to de-stigmatize and re-assert the word “revolution” into youth protest methodology. To illustrate the flexibility of “revolution” and why it is the appropriate word to use for youth protest, we have written a spectrum of revolutionary action comprised of four events in 20th century global history: the protests at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City; the May 1968 near-revolution in France; the November 2004 “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine; and the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s. Each event corresponds to a different point on the spectrum, proving that, contrary to popular belief, the possibility does exist to re-signify the word and appropriate it for current American protest goals.

2004 Republican National Convention protests in New York City

Much has been written on the 2004 RNC protests in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of protestors, dozens of organizations and publications, and over 1,500 arrests over the course of a week—and still we are left to confront the issues targeted during that week without acknowledging their deepest causes: the U.S. federal government and American corporate capitalism, among others. While the marches were not revolutionary nor were they intended to be (despite the presence of individual anarchists and such groups as the Revolutionary Communist Party), the only responsible long-term reaction a self-proclaimed Leftist can have towards the protests is one of critical evaluation. If the most widespread goal among the participants was to protest the nomination of George W. Bush, then the RNC protestors succeeded in indulging themselves. (Can a ring of photographers surrounding panty-clad protestors be called anything else?) If a goal was to persuade the American public not to vote for Bush in the election, then the RNC protests failed for three reasons: [1] the popular stigma on protest activity sustained by the mainstream media and by the complacent middle class culture underlying America; [2] the post-Clinton rise of Christian evangelism and grassroots conservatism; and most importantly [3] the repetition of ineffectual protest methods, namely isolated short-term marches characterized by inarticulate energy rather than informative arguments, by the American Left, especially youth.

If there was anything extraordinary about the RNC protests, it was not that hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets. It was that hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets and then left as if a weeklong party had just ended. Did the protestors fully exploit those days of relatively unrestricted marching, or did adolescent indulgence and short-term thinking cripple any possibility for persuasion of the American public? While no one can say for sure whether or not the RNC protests could have provoked a concerted effort against the U.S. federal government or against the corporate media, the fact remains: the events of that week did not significantly persuade anyone outside the protests—the New Yorkers who did not participate and, more importantly, undecided American voters.

May 1968 near-revolution in France

A more potent example can be found in 1968 France. World War II hero Charles de Gaulle personified French traditionalism as president of his country during the late 1960s. To many students and workers, his lingering presence in the French government seemed to be in direct opposition to the liberal, youth-led movements sweeping the continent and the world. The dissatisfaction with de Gaulle’s presidency came to a head in 1968. In March, students occupied buildings at Nanterre University following a series of disagreements over the school’s conservative policies. In an effort to stop the demonstrations, university administrators closed Nanterre, followed by the Sorbonne on May 3. Student protests escalated and hundreds were arrested. Workers groups, with the hesitant support of their unions, prepared a general strike for May 10 to protest the students’ incarceration. Though the students were liberated, the strikes continued. At the end of May, nearly 10 million workers had abandoned their jobs to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the government. Nevertheless, after de Gaulle called for an election to be held on June 23rd, the people re-elected him. Unbelievably, the discontent that had awakened the population in May had nearly dissolved by June. It seems that the prospect of eventual revolution was simply too inconvenient for the relatively affluent French population. Nevertheless, the May 1968 near-revolution stands as one of the most impressive mobilizations of citizens across class lines.

2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine

Following widespread allegations of voting fraud during the November 21 runoff of the country’s fourth presidential election since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Our Ukraine party leader and challenger Viktor Yushchenko urged supporters to protest the Central Electoral Commission’s decision to declare Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych winner. “A path to a compromise through people demonstrating their will is the only path that will help us find a way out of this conflict. Therefore, the committee of national salvation declares a nationwide political strike,” Yushchenko told supporters in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Six days of nonstop peaceful demonstration, labeled an “Orange Revolution” in reference to the dominant color of Yushchenko’s campaign, included a student crowd’s occupation of part of the Ministry of Education building. Following Parliament’s declaration for a rerun because of invalid election results, the Supreme Court set December 26 for the new election, resulting in a victory for Yushchenko.

While the Orange Revolution is part of a recent linguistic trend of democratic “color revolutions” (the others being the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and the Purple Revolution in Iraq), Ukraine’s popular uprising should not be confused with President Bush’s occupation of Iraq, inaccurately termed a “revolution” by conservative weblogs and by Bush himself in a February 24 speech in Bratislava, Slovak Republic. The protests in Ukraine directly led to the rejection of the election’s official results, prompting first Parliament and then the Supreme Court to acknowledge rampant voting fraud and schedule a rerun. While electoral reforms followed Yushchenko’s election, the Orange Revolution did not install a new form of government or a new economic system. It was a limited revolution, which is not to imply that it was insignificant but only to distinguish it from complete revolutions such as Cuba’s.

1953-59 Cuban Revolution

Though several rebel groups rose in opposition to the corrupt, money-soaked, and U.S.-supported Batista regime in mid-century Cuba, the Leftist movement led by Fidel Castro, his brother Raul Castro, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna ultimately took power. It was not until 1961 that Castro publicly announced his intention for Cuba to become a Communist nation, nearly three years after he took power and shortly before the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

The Rebels’ beginning was tumultuous. In 1953, after a failed attack against the Moncada barracks and their subsequent imprisonment, the Castro brothers went into exile in Mexico where they met Guevara and began to rebuild their movement. In 1956, the revolutionaries left Mexico for Cuba and landed their ship, the Granma, on Cuban shores. The few men that survived the landing began to spread their revolutionary message among the peasants and outcasts in Sierra Maestra. By 1958, they had gathered enough of a following to begin a military advance against the capital. On January 1, 1959, with the support of almost 90% of the population, rebel tanks rolled into Havana and Batista fled. Though the government was originally a junta, Castro quickly took sole power and began enacting the reforms promised by the Rebels. Some Cuban conservatives left the country when he reduced rents by up to 50%, but U.S. interests were more upset by the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959. This legislation reduced the allowable size of a plantation to approximately 1000 acres—just 1/10 the size of some U.S. corporations’ landholdings. Some conservatives were also concerned that Afro-Cubans, women, and workers were to be given official legal equality and access to a free education. Though the revolution was successful in that a new form of government was established in 1961, the Cuban Revolution had its failings, including poor economic growth due to the U.S. embargo on trade against Cuba.

Each event represents a different point on the following spectrum of revolutionary action:

Not a revolution --> Defused revolution --> Limited revolution with same economic system --> Complete revolution with a new economic system

The four events, when placed on the spectrum, look like this:

RNC protests --> May 1968 near-revolution --> Orange Revolution --> Cuban Revolution

This is not a ranking of approval or commendation but rather an illustration of the elasticity of “revolution.”

On the word "revolution"

As the above spectrum illustrates, the word “revolution” does not signify one form or method of revolutionary action. Ukrainians achieved what we have called a limited revolution (the overthrow of an official governmental decision but the retention of the government itself) while Fidel Castro’s Rebel Army achieved a complete revolution in Cuba (the installation of a new government and a new economic system). These differences are crucial to asserting a multiplicity of definitions of the word “revolution.” Contrary to the popular perception of “revolution” as Marxist, the word can indicate various revolutionary methods and must not be restricted to any particular one.

Revolution has been criticized for its scope of total and absolute upheaval, but, given our flexible definition of the word, the Orange Revolution disputes that criticism through its display of limited but significant popular uprising. While Ukrainian discontent stemmed from invalid election results, do not a nation’s people have the capacity—indeed, the responsibility—to respond similarly when they disapprove of their leader on grounds of ideology and policy?

A common criticism of revolution and total societal upheaval is that such sweeping action does not allow for inherent human tendencies like power acquisition and abuse of authority, that one absolute ideology is too inflexible to “fit” around human reality. This argument does not allow for a re-signification, a re-definition, of the word “revolution” and a recognition of its own flexibility—for any word has multiple meanings and must be allowed to exist as such. Simply put, the word “revolution” does not necessarily indicate any ideology, for national revolution corresponds to an individual nation, and no one ideology covers every nation on earth.

Current youth protestors will undoubtedly debate the question of whether a revolution is the appropriate word to use and action to take; the current protest model does not even hint at revolution but prescribes a strict course of small organizational meetings followed by modest events such as last November’s post-election rally and large events such as the RNC marches — each of which could support the other but instead isolates itself in its allotted time and space. The result is short-term action that does not push against the most pervasive forces responsible for the conditions youth protestors claim to fight.

The word “revolution” encapsulates the local, national, and international changes which must occur if long-term change is to be achieved. It is not necessarily a bloody overthrow of the federal government, nor is it necessarily a complete overhaul of the economic system, but those options must be considered viable during preliminary discussions to ensure that the revolution does not falter during the most crucial transition from ongoing revolution to post-revolution. While local methods may differ, the end vision must be recognized by all participants. This is the revolutionary consciousness: the acknowledgement, appreciation, and engagement of each other’s dissatisfaction so that it may be translated into productive discontent.

We believe youth protest should recognize the relevance of the word “revolution” and the viability of revolutionary action, in whatever forms it may take. With that said, this article is a provocation of revolutionary dialogue. It is by no means the final judgment of revolution and its place in American youth protest methodology. It is, at its simplest, an urgent plea to start the informed discussion.

Mining, Militarism, and Self-Governance

by Caitlin Bruce

European policymakers met on Tuesday, May 9 to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of World War II’s end. Armistice was a great achievement—a genuine embrace of rationality—and signaled what has become a truly valuable commitment to remembrance of the war. However, it seems that our memories of dehumanization have not prevented its continuous occurrence in a mileu of forms. The legacy of WWII as the initiation of the nuclear threat is one which continues beyond the Yalta conferences and subsequent institutional arrangements for reconstruction. The nuclear industrial complex is intimately linked with a legacy of environmental racism that continues to be inflicted today upon the indigenous people of the fourth world (that is to say, former colonies on the periphery of the world system). During and after WWII, nuclear testing occurred in the Marshall Islands, over the Kwajalein Atoll, with horrific health effects and dire cultural implications. Entire generations of Marshalese were left infertile or subject to painful cancers. Many bore children with little resemblance to basic human body structure—dying upon birth with enlarged heads, mal-developed limbs, subsequently called “jellyfish babies.” Military bases in Guam, Okinawa, and Hawai’i, among others, supposedly for the “protection” of native individuals there and perpetuate an ongoing reality of violence in the form of rape, domestic violence, terror, and engender a racist neo-colonial presence. The effects of this are seen in the prevailing social hierarchies, cultural limitation, and economic subjugation experienced by the Kanaka Maoli and the Okinawans, only to name a few of the victims.

The relationship between racism and ecological degradation is particularly pronounced in Native American issues and environmental justice has emerged as a crucial tenet in sovereignty movements. North American tribes currently experience a diverse set of challenges and respond variously to poverty, militarism, and cultural imperialism. It is important to realize the romanticized view of the “native” is not an inclusive category; rather, experiences as a Native American are varied and cannot be encapsulated in a broad stereotype. However, it is essential to see hope in the fact that indigenous people currently involved in activism and environmental law are experiencing some success in fighting the more insidious aspects of colonialism: nuclear power and fossil fuel consumption. They are using a combination of the elf government and sovereignty doctrines articulated in treaties with the United States Federal Government, along with emphasizing an infusion of traditional ideals which provide cultural and spiritual strength. The debate between activists who seek use of an exclusively “nativist” discourse and those who try to include the “modern” aspects of political organization in movements, such as bureaucratization, hierarchies, and majoritarian decision-making is a heated one.

Prominent activists in the tribal sovereignty movement have espoused a highly critical view of the Anglo-American legal system- with good reason. The culture of litigation and winner-take-all judicial procedures contradicts the building of community and consensus that characterizes many traditional tribal governments. In fact, imposition of a western model of legality causes inter-tribal conflict, and fractures conflict resolution procedures—evidenced when it was imposed at the initiation of the treaty making process between indigenous nations and the American government in the eighteenth century. Robert Porter, director of the Tribal Law and Government Center at the University of Kansas, argues that imposition of American law contributes to the less obvious effects of colonialism, loss of a way of life, because inter-personal conflict prevents native people from choosing to be who they once were, and such dislocation prevents effective self-governance. Instead, Porter suggests a revival in indigenous traditions through drawing on the knowledge of tribal elders. Due to the demand for speed and efficiency, activists cannot question every action to determine if it is truly culturally acceptable, and expediency often wins out. However, the Navajo victory that bans uranium mining demonstrates the power of self governance and the feasibility of Porter’s prescriptions.

Bush’s energy policy poses a substantial challenge to the environmental justice movement. Some of its mandates include subsidies for fossil fuel extraction in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) (which threaten the Inupiat who live there and will most likely destroy the now-pristine habitat) and massive subsidies for uranium mining corporations who operate in the Black Mesa area of Arizona. As mentioned earlier, the utilization of native land for nuclear use is not a new phenomenon. In the late 1990s a mandate was passed to dump spent nuclear waste from military facilities on Yucca mountain. That represents only a small part of a legacy of nuclear war that has been waged on indigenous peoples for decades. Black Mesa extends into the Diné (Navajo) and Hopi reservations in Northeastern Arizona. Since 1965, Peabody Western Coal Company has been operating two strip mines on Black Mesa, pumping over 4,500 acre-feet of Diné and Hopi drinking water from the N-Aquifer to mix with crushed coal (slurry). Coal mining has continued to the present day.

The Navajo Nation Council has recently passed legislation banning uranium mining and processing on Navajo land. Uranium contamination has been occurring since the Cold War. The Navajo are leading an effort to shift to use of renewable technology as a way to both achieve a level of economic subsistence and ecological sustainability, while serving as a lasting replacement to fossil fuel consumption. Tribal councils have asserted their right to lead on issues of land use and have used collective property rights to counteract individuation of the land, claiming that since mining is done on reservation land the Navajo community has a right to terminate mining contracts on that land. Such strategic uses of governance and economic rationality highlight a method of negotiating modernity which offers some lasting solutions.

Tribes are governmental entities, and as such they have the authority to administer environmental regulations such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and mining activities, under the Safe Drinking Water Act, under which Peabody’s action falls. Mining waste is constantly emitted into surface waters, and when mining companies seek a permit regulations include specifications on limitations on pollution discharge.

The Navajo Council has worked intensely for the uranium ban, galvanized by the passage of the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005, and given more urgency by the $30 million in incentives in President Bush’s federal energy bill towards uranium corporations. The Navajo initiative was lauded by Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke. In an interview with Indian Country Today, she said:

People worldwide are eternally grateful to the Navajo Nation for protecting future generations from more nuclear contamination, whether they are communities with nuclear reactors, or Native communities like Skull Valley Goshutes and Western Shoshone where nuclear waste dumps are planned.

It is time for Native people to be part of the next energy era—wind and solar—those sources are in keeping with our relationship to Mother Earth and our responsibilities for future generation.

Eastern Navajo Dineh Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) has urged the Navajo to write to their members of congress, and urge them to oppose the uranium subsidies. They propose an alternative: that capital could be directed towards renewable energy development.

The legacy of uranium mining is a tragic one; in 1979, a liquid uranium tailings dam was breached and 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid spilled into Navajo aquifer systems-just one incident in a history of nuclear torture. Future projects pose a direct threat to the Navajo’s water supply in the Church Rock and Crownpoint regions of New Mexico. As a consequence cancer is a growing health care threat. While there are two programs to address cancer, treatment facilities don’t exist despite the fact that cancer is the third leading cause of death in the Navajo Nation.

Not only uranium mining a biological health concern but it is a cultural and spiritual one. ENDAUM co-founder Mitchell Capitan told the United Nations:

“Water is life” is not just a political slogan—it's a description of some of the fundamental principles we live by every day. Water is used in our religious ceremonies, just like it is used in the ceremonies of the Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim faiths. It is essential to our survival in an arid climate…

Uranium subsidies directly threaten this sacred medium in Navajo life.

Lynnea Smith, a member of ENDAUM, noted that Joe Shirley, president of the Council of the Navajo Nation, had taken a tremendous stride in protecting their people, and that it is one of the first of such advances. However, this action is merely the beginning of initiatives that need to be taken. Chris Shuey, president of the Southwest Research and Information Center and Norman Brown, president of Diné Bidzill, said that thousand of Navajos are still suffering from uranium-caused cancer causing daily death tolls. Open mines still spread radioactive dust into the air and water.

In the most narrow sense, the Navajo initiative is a signal of hope for the environmental justice movement, as well as the resurgence of indigenous sovereignty movement. However, nuclear testing, dumping, and the militaristic structure still exist; fossil fuel extraction, land appropriation, and neo-colonialism are everyday realities for many indigenous people, and they demonstrate the intersections between militarism, racism, and environmental destruction which influence our society in uncountable ways.

Creativity in activism, energy, and attention to the interrelatedness and the saturated nature of oppression is required in confronting such powerful forces. If we as a global community are to confront dehumanization and continue a legacy of “never forget-never again,” we must not become passive because some preventative actions have been initiated. Rather we must constantly struggle to deepen our understanding of such issues and translate a more nuanced consciousness to our tactics of resistance.

Works Cited:

Porter, Robert B. “Strengthening Tribal Sovereignty Through Peacemaking: How the Anglo-American Legal Traditional Destroys Indigenous Societies.” Columbia Human Rights Law Review Vol 28 No. 235. Winter 1997.

Ibid

Ibid

Black Mesa Water Coalition, http://www.blackmesawatercoalition.org/, accessed 5.12.05

Royster, Judith. “Mineral Development In Indian Country: the Evolution of tribal Control Over Mineral Resources,” Tulsa Law Journal No 541. Summer 1994.

Norell, Brenda. “Navajos ban uranium mining, oppose federal subsidies.” Indian Country Today, April 25, 2005

Ibid

Roanhorse, Anslem Jr. Executive Director of the Navajo Division of Health. Congressional Testimony, Senate of Indian Affairs Committee. April 13, 2005.

Ibid

Shirley, Joe Jr. and Frank J. Dayish. “Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr. signs Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005: Press Release.” The Navajo Nation. April 30, 2005.

Ibid

Ibid

Clothed Consciousness

by Kavitha Chekuru

About a decade ago, stories began to surface, first in the alternative media, then in the mainstream media, of the horrific conditions in American textile factories that had been set up across the globe — from small towns in Central America to cities like New York. The word ‘sweatshop’ became a household term as Americans started raising questions about why this was being allowed and how it was being addressed. The people that really began to mobilize were college students, though, as they realized their universities were major components of the sweatshop system by purchasing from and investing in companies that used sweatshops. These students also realized that they had the power to pressure their administrations into responding to the issue. Groups, such as United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), were organized with the goal of having their administrations not only acknowledge that they were complicit, but also that they needed to act against the situation.

The goal, no matter how daunting and grand, was to eradicate the overwhelming and increasing number of sweatshop clothing factories run by American conglomerates like Nike and Kathy Lee Gifford (yes, she counts as an American conglomerate). Further, students and activists were pushing for greater accountability among corporations and recognition of the importance of workers’ rights.

Companies began to respond. Nike and Gap are among some of the most prominent factories that have released what are essentially mea culpas on their past cover-ups of the exploitative measures and dangerous conditions they allowed in their factories. Both companies have launched major press campaigns stating their commitment to social responsibility and have now made the conditions of their factories completely open and available to the public.

It was the pressure from activists and groups like USAS that really led to this response from these corporations. As the momentum was building in the anti-sweatshop movement, the idea of being socially conscious was finding its way into the minds of people and companies across the nations. In fact, in 1999 a company was founded amidst this sweat-free movement with the mission of providing fashionable, sweat-free clothing for the conscious consumer.

Based in the downtown area of Los Angeles, American Apparel is what could be seen as a victory in the sweat-free campaign. Not only do they pay their workers a living wage, but they also offer health care at $8 a week and free English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes, a great bonus for a work force of which more than half are immigrants. The company makes all of its products in its L.A. factory with no off-shore labor, to maintain vertical integration. Also included in the company’s mission is maintaining an awareness to human rights and environmental responsibility.

But while I could sing praises for American Apparel and let it end there, that would be denying some crucial faults of the company. The problem can be stated simply by saying that they do not practice what they preach. The company touts itself as not only a socially responsible institution, but also one ultimately concerned with the rights of their workers. As nice and endearing as that could be, the company falls short of being truly worker-friendly because it lacks a basic yet critical component - a union.

In a recent case settled by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) between the American Apparel and the Union of Needle trades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), the company was forced to answer allegations that they had blocked unionizing by employees. UNITE cited that the L.A.-based company had used tactics such as interrogation, threats of closing down the plant, and forcing employees to attend anti-union rallies to deter workers from organizing. This must not be overlooked. Unions provide a voice and an outlet for political expression, and serve as a form of empowerment for all workers. The necessity and importance goes deeper when a company has a large immigrant-based work force, because as immigrants in the United States, particularly now, fighting for rights and maintaining the voice of a community is more than essential. According to the NLRB, the company is now expected to follow federal law and abstain from their anti-union policy.

Some people, only men (surprise, surprise), have told me that American Apparel is not exploiting the woman's body but simply modeling their products. This would not be as much of an issue as it is if American Apparel's male models were showcased in the same manner and with the same frequency as the female models. But out of the 27 model series on their photo gallery site, only three were men. The male models were fully clothed, while the female models were overwhelmingly featured in underwear or bathing suits, even though the company carries a full range of basic products for men and women. It is really a catch-22 for women in this situation because, on the one hand, we have every right to showcase our bodies if we so choose, but that kind of freedom is only hindered when it is exoticized like in these ads. This advertising style does not reflect the company's claim of revolutionizing and bringing quality to the basic t-shirt, and does not adequately portray the fact that the company additionally sells pants, scarves, skirts, etc.

So, in the end, the question is should people accept the company as a worker-friendly, socially conscious ideal when in reality, they are shirking not only fundamental basics of worker rights but profiting from and promoting basic exploitation? On the other side of this situation is the fact that this company is possibly the best commercial choice in a sea of Urban Outfitters and Gaps. Do the pros outweigh the cons? As tempting as a victory dance is when looking at American Apparel and its advantages over companies like Urban Outfitters - a living wage, health benefits, decent health care - I cannot help but feel that such a celebration would be half-hearted when looking at their misleading advertising and anti-union activities.

What is being “socially conscious”? It is not just being sweat-free; it is respect for all worker rights, respect for women’s rights; American Apparel is not the image of a socially conscious and responsible company for which activists were working. They have capitalized on the energy of the sweat-free campaign, but ultimately have not held true to the core goals. As a friend of mine put it, it is as though they are trying to help us “purchase a conscience.” But if you ignore all the facts, you lose any hope of obtaining a real awareness. By accepting American Apparel as the best, we hold ourselves stationary when we need to push for the authentic ideal.

Looking at the situation, I cannot help but recall a quote from A Tale of Two Cities that seems fully applicable even more than a hundred years after it was first published, when Dickens wrote, "The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance". Like Dickens' quote, we are besieged by a plague of "unrealities" such as American Apparel’s commercial image that could disable the goals that were set out a decade ago, but only if we let people think that American Apparel is what having a social conscience is.

Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Pat Scharfe

Are we too close to September 11 to discuss, write about, or contemplate it? That may seem like a strange question, but many thought so when they first came across Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I can imagine their concern. It is an easy target for callow, pandering writers, and we all heard the few terrible “memorial songs” that unfortunately became radio fixtures soon after the event. But the last thing one should want to do is to discourage real writers and intellectuals from talking about the tragedy. Foer, with his blend of humor and lyricism, is well prepared to engage just such a literary discussion. He burst onto the scene in 2002 with his debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, the story of a young Jewish American who travels to the Ukraine to find a woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The story is written partly from the point of view of the American’s Ukrainian translator, who gloriously mangles the English language. Foer has shown great interest and capacity for exploring tragedy with humor and compassion.

Foer approaches the tragedy without an explicit political bent. The story is narrated from the point of view of a nine-year-old prodigy named Oskar Schell, (whose father died in the World Trade Center) and two of his grandparents. The experience of his grandparents in the firebombing of Dresden by Allied bombers near the end of World War II forms a counterpoint to the tragedy in Manhattan and certainly heads off any fear of jingoism in the novel. Foer sees the September 11 attack as yet another instance of human folly and barbarism, like Dresden and Hiroshima. He concerns himself with the question of how ordinary people, disconnected from political struggles, cope with these forces beyond their control.

The character of Oskar Schell has been criticized for being unrealistic, but that is beside the point. Oskar is unrealistic because he’s much more interesting than a normal nine-year-old. Moreover, while his range of cultural knowledge is unrealistically large, the emotions feel genuine. Oskar has a business card that terms him an “inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur Entomologist, Francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist” and more. He is continually inventing to soothe his childish emotions. Oskar invents subway turnstiles that detect radiation, guns that won’t fire if they detect anger and skyscrapers with moving parts that can open up to let planes fly through. Through this range of interests, he makes his feelings about the world concrete in a way that would be unavailable to the ordinary nine-year-old.

Oskar’s grandparents form an elegantly wistful balance to the boy’s hilarious enthusiasms. His grandfather Thomas stopped speaking shortly after bombers, presumably American, killed his family and pregnant lover in two short bursts of bombings and flames. Thomas communicates only by writing and sums up his predicament when customs in New York asks him what he will be doing in the United States: “to mourn,” he writes, and “to mourn try to live”. Thomas’s writing shows him fighting a losing battle to make sense of his experience, while writing itself is insufficient.

Ultimately, the problem is not that Foer tries to heal a wound too fresh, but rather that he does not engage it sufficiently. The novel ends by emphasizing the simplistic theme that, in the end, everyone loses everyone, and that we’d all like to go back to a time before tragedy and regret. It is done in a way that may be moving, but there is just not much depth to what he has to say on the whole. The real value of the novel lies with the writing along the way, which is lyrical and absorbing. The minor characters Oskar encounters, too, are true originals. Oskar meets scores of Mr. and Ms. Blacks that he seeks throughout New York City, on a quest to find the exact lock meant for the key labeled “Black” by Oskar’s late father.

In a way, Foer may implicitly have assented to the idea that it’s too early to make sense of September 11, because he does address it in any direct way. He only to expresses it alongside the remembrance of past tragedies. His readers are fortunate he finds so much humor and artistic virtuosity along the way.

The Protest - March 2005

Who are you fighting for?
Play about the unofficial casualties of war
by Jacob Juntunen (jjuntunen@northwestern.edu)

Fear and loathing in college America
The drug war gone wrong
by Crystal Nicholson (c-nicholson-1@northwestern.edu)

How not to waste a Northwestern education
Remembering that our privileges aren't universal
by Sharlyn Grace (s-grace@northwestern.edu)

Blind
Race-sensitive alternative to colorblindness
by Kyle Schafer (k-schafer2@northwestern.edu)

Iraq: Making Sense of the Insurgency, Understanding the Elections
Detailed look at the Iraq elections and related insurgency
by Pat Scharfe (p-scharfe@northwestern.edu)

Undisclosed Flying Objects
Exposing the unofficial state
by Brad Hirn (b-hirn@northwestern.edu)

Around Town
Calendar of March events around Northwestern and Chicago

Who Are You Fighting For?

by Jacob Juntunen

(A man and woman in their mid-twenties sit in plastic chairs with coffee cups in front of them. There is a long silence.)

DON
Do you want — more coffee?

JANE
No. I'm already going to be peeing the whole trip.

DON
When does your bus leave?

JANE
Ten minutes.
(pause)

Thanks for driving me to the bus station.

DON
No big deal.

JANE
It's a drive from Gambier to Columbus. Saves me a lot of trouble.

DON
Not much of a man to be driving my own wife to be leaving me.

JANE
Honey.

DON
What?

JANE
Thank you for driving me.

DON
Forget it. Come on. Don't go. Let's just get in the car and drive back home.

JANE
Honey.

DON
It's not like I want to be away, you know. Not like I called up and said, "Hey, send me to Iraq, would ya?"

JANE
I know.
DON
So why are you blaming me?

JANE
I'm not.

DON
Then why are you leaving?

JANE
You're a reservist. You're supposed to be gone six months and you've already been gone more than a year.

DON
I don't have a choice. This is important, bigger than you and me, and whatever reason I'm there, I've got to stay. I don't have a choice. There's no other way to look at it, not if you want me to be able to sit here and talk about it.

JANE
You joined so you could go to school. Where's school now?

DON
I told you, this is bigger than that. Some guys aren't... This is bigger than school. I'm going to school with the money when I get back. You're leaving me because I didn't go to school?

JANE
No.

DON
Why'd you send Julie and Annie to your Mom's house before we'd even talked about it? They're my kids, too.

JANE
You don't want them to see us do this, do you?

DON
How often do I get to see them?

JANE
How much do you see them now?

DON
You think I only want to see them when I get leave? What about all the e-mails, the phone calls?

JANE
You can see them as much as you want.

DON
I'm doing this to protect you, you know. Jack said there's a 24 hour guard at Gambier's water supply now. This world isn't safe anymore, and I'm over there keeping you safe.

JANE
Why can't you protect me here?

DON
Aren't people taking care of you? Didn't Jack fix the car? Isn't Mary helping with the kids?

JANE
Yes.

DON
This is war. No one's wife said, "Stay home," during World War II.

JANE
I just don't understand why you're gone.

DON
We're down range to protect America.

JANE
I know. I know you had to go, but why are you still there? Who planned this? Who's in control?

DON
The President's in control.

JANE
How can he be? More people have… He said, "Mission Accomplished," but it gets worse every day.

DON
There are some schools open in Baghdad. The news only tells you the bad things. There are elections in Iraq next month.

JANE
When you're back there. Down range again.

DON
We have to make sure the Iraqis can vote.

JANE
What's it matter if I'm here or in Indianapolis with my Mom? You won't be here.

DON
It matters to me.

JANE
Why?

DON
IT MATTERS TO ME!
(Pause)

JANE
If you yell at me, I'm going outside and waiting by myself.
(Pause)
How can Bush be in control of things like Abu Ghraib? He wouldn't order that. He's a decent man.

DON
That was an exception. Some bad apples.

JANE
Privates wouldn't do things like that unless they were under orders. Maybe the CIA or who knows? Not privates. Not enlisted men.

DON
We're not like that. I'm there with people getting hurt, losing, like, arms and legs and stuff, getting killed for you, and you sit there and judge me? I didn't torture anybody. How can you say that? I give candy to the kids and they take it and then throw rocks at me, I don't know who's doing what, who's got a gun or something, and every day we go out into Sadr City in full gear in all that heat and clean up the same street and every night they fill it up with trash like animals and I do not torture them. I am there to help them and to help you and you judge me and they throw rocks at me and you think it doesn't matter whether you're home or with your mom or some other guy?

JANE
There's no other—

DON
I am a member of the US Army and I have to support my Commander in Chief and I'm going to, and if you can't see that…
(Pause)

JANE
The other day Annie asked me what "beheaded" means. She heard it on the news. How am I supposed to answer that? And I tell Jim again and again I can't work the night shift but he gives me these late shifts anyway-

DON
Doesn't Mary watch the kids when you work nights?

JANE
Yeah, but she can't watch our kids every night, and Jim says Wal-Mart's got a stack of applications, so if I want to keep my job I better not complain and take what I can get. What am I supposed to do? I need Mom's help.

DON
But you don't have to leave me.

JANE
Maybe I'm not. I don't know.

DON
I'll be home soon.

JANE
When?

DON
I don't know. This isn't the one weekend a month I signed up for. I hate this. I'm not like those guys in the news, stripping them and dogs... No one I know is like that. Sometimes we have to... At checkpoints sometimes you don't know... I've seen mistakes. And I've seen... I've... This isn't what I signed up for. I do my job. I... Please. I want to come home. Why are you doing this?

JANE
Why won't you fight?

DON
I am fighting.

JANE
Why won't you fight for me, to be with me? I heard about a group of reservists suing the government, saying stop loss isn't in their contract or something.

DON
Where'd you hear that crap?

JANE
A girl told me about it.

DON
What girl?

JANE
A Kenyon student.

DON
What were you doing talking to one of them?

JANE
We were in line to vote. We were in line for hours. You have to go back down range to make sure they can vote but there were only two voting machines here in Gambier. I didn't even get to vote because I had to pick up the kids.

DON
It doesn't matter. Ohio went for Bush anyway.

JANE
I wasn't going to vote for Bush.
(pause)

DON
Why not?

JANE
Because you aren't here. Because I work full-time and I can't even take care of the kids, and he hasn't once, not once, been to the funeral of a soldier and he's sending you there when you might…
(pause)

DON
When I might what?

JANE
Just come home. Fight for your home.

DON
I am. My unit's going back to protect my home. I have to go with them. It's my duty.

JANE
You have a duty to me. To Julie and Annie.

DON
You don't know what it's like. To be down range. The filth and the smell and the heat and what we have to do to keep those people under control. You have no idea how hard it is. To go back. But we're protecting you, can't you see that? I am fighting for you, fighting so I can come home. I can't desert my unit. I have to go.

JANE
But you can desert me?

DON
My country was attacked and I had to go to war. I didn't desert you. I have to fight for America. You don't know how hard it is.

JANE
Maybe. But I know how hard it is listening to the radio every night at 3 a.m. to hear the latest casualty count. I know how hard it is to listen again at 7 before I get the kids up when the units are announced. I know how hard it is every time I hear a car pull up to the driveway, and I know how hard it is making sure no one, and I mean no one, is ever walking up my driveway. If anyone comes over, I tell them to go around back, come to the back door. I will not hear a knock at my front door. Not knowing where my husband is, that's hard. Not knowing what to tell my daughters about why their daddy's gone, that's hard. Explaining "beheading" to a 5-year-old, that's hard. Waiting for the grim army officers all clean and shiny telling me my child's father is dead, that's hard. Seeing job after job gone and people hungry and there being nothing I can do about it, that's hard. I am angry, I am willing to fight, and I don't know who to fight. But I'm going to figure it out. And you being over there has taught me one thing: war don't end until the people fighting say it ends. And I say my fight is just beginning.
(Bus announcement from Columbus to Indianapolis)

JANE
That's my bus.

DON
Yeah.

JANE
I have to go.

DON
Don't go.

JANE
I have to. Just like you.
(She gets up)

DON
Are you fighting me?

JANE
No.

DON
Then who?

JANE
I don't know.
(She leaves. Lights fade on Don sitting in the chair.)

-end of play-

Fear and Loathing in College America

by Crystal Nicholson

With one knee guiding the steering wheel of his friend's borrowed car, a University of California—Davis sophomore lights his glass pipe. The flame makes a haphazard journey around the glass bowl, darting orange through the green and then into the 19-year-old's lungs. Never having removed his eyes from the road, Eric (name changed upon request) sits back satisfied and exhales slowly, filling the front of the small car with bitter-sweet-smelling smoke.

"Ain't no chronic like California chronic," he says, bouncing his head to anxious radio beats which resonate on the car window panes. A Sacramento DJ screams his nonsensical interlude and plays a current rap hit, "High." Eric knows the lyrics. "I get high 'cause I'm in the hood/the slums is around/I get high as a kite...in case I'm dying tonight."

The lyrics couldn't be farther from the truth. Eric is driving through the sun-soaked vineyards of Northern California, getting purposefully lost in the miles of mazes and infinite rows of trees that buffer the college from the surrounding world. Although only a 20-minute drive from the state capital, U.C. Davis is affectionately known as "cow country," a name validated by the ubiquitous smell of manure that permeates the air.

It's mid-February, and Eric's in a polo shirt, sandals, and Ray-ban sunglasses. He doesn't realize this is strange — because to him, California is the world. His short, brown, tousled hair, which he only gels on really special occasions, is echoed by the manly dark stubble on his perpetually baby-faced cheeks. He has slightly drooped and often blood-shot eyes, a loud booming voice, and an uncanny ability to work anyone into doing him favors, disarming them with wide smiles, constant eye-contact, and bashful shrugs. He's leaning toward an economics major, the first step in his dream of rubbing shoulders with Southern California banking mafia. His plan is vague on details but vivid in images of power and wealth. He loves quoting Dickens, likes to think he lives by carpe diem, and plays the lottery every week. And he gets stoned. Constantly.

Eric's anytime, anywhere attitude to smoking brought him to the brink of disciplinary action several times his first year at school. His resident adviser (RA) warned him repeatedly about smoking weed in the dorms after smelling it nearly every day. Eric joked his way around the admonishments until one day he found himself face to face with the stern-suited Housing Conduct Supervisor. Sitting in front of the man who held Eric’s fate in his hands, Eric sweated, felt his heart pound and envisioned expulsion or even police involvement. The supervisor watched him squirm and rode him hard with a lecture on university policy. And then let him go.

Eric laughs in astonishment as he recalls the close call. A felony under federal law, possession of marijuana can call for fines and years of imprisonment without chance for parole. Another time, bong rips set off the dorm fire alarm and his friend bloodied his fist shutting it off with punches. And the same year, a resident called the police — but when they arrived to find a locked door and empty room, they were powerless to enter university property and left. Eric has escaped countless close calls and during spring quarter even convinced his hesitant RA to smoke with him on campus.

***

That is, of course, California. But marijuana culture manifests itself on college campuses, in college pop culture, and in dorms throughout the country. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 20.3% of U.S. residents age 18 to 25 have used marijuana in the past month and 28.5% in the last year. The percentages for this age group are drastically higher than both the 12 to 17 age group and those 26 and older. In 2003, more than half of marijuana arrests in California were people between the ages of 18 and 29.

In 2004, the federal government invested almost $12 billion on their drug control budget, not counting spending by state and local governments. Meanwhile, the European Union and Canada moved gradually toward making marijuana possession an extremely minor crime, punishable by tickets. The War on Drugs has been criticized as a war which falls disproportionately on racial minorities and the poor and a war which channels power to violent criminals and results in street violence and dangerously low quality drugs.

When Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was asked what he thought America would look like without the War on Drugs, he said that he envisioned half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer murders a year, and inner cities no longer defined by fear.

The War on Drugs began officially in 1971 when Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one" in America. The Drug Enforcement Agency was created two years later. The Carter administration, however, campaigned for the decriminalization of marijuana, and marijuana was labeled a low priority drug. But the war on Drugs returned with a vengeance in the 80s, with Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign and Ronald Regan's $1.7 billion Anti-Drug Abuse Act, $97 million of which was designated to building new prisons. In 2003, more than 755,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession or use.

But how does the War on Drugs manifest itself on college campuses — or does it? Dealers who rise through the ranks in cities probably do so through organization and violence, while successful pushers at a place like Northwestern are likely to use social skills and the ability to inspire loyalty in customers. These differences in environment dramatically influence penalties enforced. Students such as Eric scramble by, while young arrestees like Jonathan Magbie, who died in jail during his 10-day sentence for possession, and the thousands of others sentenced yearly are not as lucky.

"Someone shooting a gun in the Michigan Upper Peninsula is fine," Northwestern economics professor Mark Witte said. "Someone shooting a gun in Evanston — that's different. The level of harm differs. But with smoking marijuana, it's not clear why you run into police in Chicago, where in Evanston you get caught by the RA."
***

The dorm room smoking scenes across America are in sharp contrast with the grim anti-drug advertisements which invade television. The failure of the War on Drugs to break into the college bubble is due in part to the clash between the generation's perception of drugs and government propaganda. Young public perception laughs off the detrimental effects with pop culture snickers and inside jokes. The media scare tactics of government and anti-drug organizations often only increase the laughter.
A 2003 videotape from the Office of National Drug Control titled "Debunking the Myths of Marijuana" opens with a blurry screen of students shuffling around campus and flashes bold and intimidating facts about marijuana. The video accuses pop culture of trivializing marijuana, pointing a shaming finger at cultural landmarks such as "American Beauty" and albums by Dr. Dre and the Dave Matthews Band. The Deputy Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Mary Ann Solberg solemnly says, "It's something that's a source of humor, that sends a very mixed message."

If humor is something the government is trying to avoid, they have hit wide of the mark. The highly-criticized advertisement series connecting drug use and terrorism funding was laughed off the air. Now, the Partnership for Drugfree America has a series of public messages to parents, community leaders, and the younger generation about marijuana. One of the most discussed ads features two twenty-somethings pulling up through a drive-thru in a smoke-filled, rusty sedan before absentmindedly driving with a painful screech into a young girl on her pink bicycle. Another ad features a toddler waddling dangerously close to the pool edge while a message reads, "Just tell her parents you weren't watching her because you were getting stoned. They'll understand." In a room of high school or college-age students, these images usually cause a stunned, horrified silence which inevitably leads into an explosion of uncomfortable laughter. The audience often cannot reconcile such gruesome depictions with a drug normally associated with peace and munchies.
***

When Matt Attwood found out his father had Huntington's disease, a disease characterized by dementia and muscle contractions, he decided to research possible treatments himself. While a chemistry student at Loyola University, Attwood stumbled upon an article which presented findings by Danish researchers. They had concluded through experiments with mice that the chemicals in cannabis relieved symptoms of Huntington’s. When Attwood brought the idea to his father's neurologist, the doctor didn't cooperate. Attwood decided to start researching the War on Drugs in general and eventually started a chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) at his school.

Attwood is now the chair of the Board of Directors for SSDP, which opens new chapters at universities every month and campaigns for drug education, students’ privacy rights against drug testing, and the repeal of the drug provision of the Higher Education Act. SSDP is less than a decade old and is a quickly-growing student movement.

Several months ago a chapter opened at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago. The group is tight-knit, passionate, and a bit overwhelmed by their new jobs which they work hapharzardly in small offices on the 17th floor of the university building.
"There is no logical argument in favor of the War on Drugs," Christian Delgado de Jesus, a member of the Roosevelt SSDP chapter, wrote in an e-mail. "Time after time, it has proven to be a war against races."

One of SSDP's main goals is the repeal of the drug provision in the Higher Education Act, one of the few aspects of the War on Drugs that jabs a spear specifically at college-age residents.

The Higher Education Act emerged from Capitol Hill in 1998 brimming with good intentions to enable lower income students to go to college on increased federal grants. But a dark-horse rider, known as the "drug provision," has since trampled dreams, inspired countless editorials, and spurred the creation of several organizations working against its implementation.

The drug provision states that "a student who has been convicted of any offense under any federal or state law involving the possession or sale of a controlled substance shall not be eligible to receive any grant, loan, or work assistance" under the Higher Education Act. Federal aid is denied for one year to anyone with one offense involving drug possession, two years for an applicant with two offenses, and three-strikers may be permanently ineligible. The Drug Provision has crippled the Higher Education Act, creating even more hurdles for low-income high school students with sights set on college. Thus while suburban puffers are able to graduate and climb the corporate ladder, those disproportionately penalized by the drug war are stuck doing pull-ups in the pen.

Under current law, released murderers and rapists can go straight to college on federal funding while former drug users must save their own pennies for tuition. Intended as preventative legislation, the drug provision birthed a perpetual double jeopardy. Even the provision's author, Republican representative Mark Souder of Indiana, regrets its harsh enforcement. A self-described "evangelical Christian," he has since spoken ill of the legislation. Released prisoners are more likely to stay out of jail if they earn college degrees, but the provision will shuttle drug offenders back behind bars, only adding more weight to the groaning penal system. To date, tens of thousands of would-be college students have had financial aid snatched from their grasps because of past drug offenses.

However, although many feel passionately about the downfalls of the War on Drugs, some may shy away from public disapproval of the policy. Some fear a public perception that equates drug policy activists with drug users, and drug users with social failure.

Organizations such as SSDP and Ideal Reform are making progress in raising public awareness, but this progress often merely echoes the tangible legislative reforms passing around the world. Like the use of capital punishment, the United States is lagging on drug policy reform. The War on Drugs has only a few degrees of separation from the most important dilemmas of the nation: racism, poverty, and crime. As Keith Richards once said, "I don't have a drug problem. I have a police problem."

How Not to Waste a Northwestern Education

by Sharlyn Grace

Yeah, the cost of attending Northwestern seems like a lot. In fact, the average annual cost of tuition, room and board, personal expenses, etc. as an undergraduate is about equal to the mean household income in the United States ($42,228 in 2001 according to the U.S. census). For students not in the richest 20% of American households which account for 50% of the nation's income, that average is much lower. For those of us not in the top fifth of the income bracket, the cost of attending Northwestern is usually considerably above our means.

But if you think about it, the amount of each of our tuitions is nothing when compared to Northwestern's budget, which totals over $1 billion a year. That money is evident in almost every aspect of campus life; we can't escape it. And no matter what we thought when we first saw campus, we hardly think twice about it anymore, and we never stop to appreciate the glossy new Ford center or the marble floors of Kellogg.

It's easy to get used to the high standards of living around campus (and Evanston) and take our privileges as Northwestern students for granted. We live in a predominantly wealthy area on a campus full of school-sponsored speakers, programs, and events for every night of the week. If there was a little less entertainment we just might wander into the city, even just south into Rogers Park or into the less affluent areas of Evanston, where the realities of minimum wage jobs and poverty dare to show their faces. Students who venture off campus only to shop on Michigan Avenue might not have realized we're really living the high life here on campus. Sure, it's not a picnic; there is a lot of academic work and planning to be done. But there's help there as well, with your freshman adviser, your major adviser, your minor adviser, the study abroad adviser, teaching assistants, free tutors, and the career services office.

I must admit I'm a little squeamish about all this help and advice we're being given. I'm a little worried about the chauffeured education I'm receiving and its impact on me. Is it possible I won't be as resourceful as if I'd had to tough it out on my own and figure out everything myself? Maybe. But I'm even more worried about the impact of the university itself on how we think about the world. Northwestern is a big, expensive place, full of rich, important people trying to teach us how to be as "successful" as they are.

But I don't think I want to be successful like that. Making money in a manner which requires the subjugation of another person isn't success. It's not among my life goals.

Being taught to find the lowest production costs and the highest gross income undeniably has an effect on students. Efficiency isn't always what matters most - there's a reason production costs are low in China. Yes, the stock market will reap benefits through the investment of social security funds. "More investors is good for America; profit will be made." But is it good for the Americans whose average benefits will be reduced and whose long years of paying supposedly reimbursable taxes could turn to nothing in a bear market?

I am not saying that all people of means make their profit by exploitation of others or that every professor or economics student supports it. But I am saying we should be aware of our impact. We shouldn't get caught up in the show of things, even though our culture requires pomp. It demands we get caught up in consuming, and buy even more impressive things, and then put our purchases on exhibition. Our university falls right in line, building bigger and better facilities, organizing more elaborate events to keep us entertained and impressed. They have to in order to compete, and they must be doing something right, because we're all here.

So we see the need to out-consume each other, and we're taught that pleasant superficial qualities go hand in hand with amazing research opportunities and world-renowned professors. Have the beauty of campuses and the numbers of fountains and gardens become not just the icing on the cake, but the whole cake? Every day we're taught to concentrate on these materialistic aspects of our world, and we're swept up in them. We're all active participants. Surely you've noticed the Louis Vuitton bags getting larger and more conspicuous over the years.

So by enrolling at Northwestern and learning how to make money and conspicuously consume, and move up in the world to a place befitting a graduate of a prestigious university, are we just continuing the cycle? Or can we realize what's going on and start working to change the system from within? Obviously, we'll need money to survive, and what better place to receive an incredible education and undergraduate experience complete with a decent job upon graduation than Northwestern? We'll be better educated to face the horrors caused by oversimplification of profit in a selfish economy, and we'll have the contacts to start getting involved right away. Even before graduation, opportunities abound for the student interested in activism or volunteering in Evanston, Chicago, and anywhere else in the United States if you talk to Alternative Student Breaks.

We have several activist groups on campus, and we can't forget about the School of Education and Social Policy right here under our noses. And the Joint Center for Poverty Research we share with the University of Chicago whose office sits along our daily path on Sheridan. There are a ton of opportunities to examine important issues in our world, and being a student here opens up many doors not available at less powerful or less prestigious colleges.

If you express interest in one of these areas, you can easily contact a knowledgeable adviser for more information. They can probably even set you up with an interview of some sort. It's fairly easy to get your foot in the door and get hands-on experience when you care about an issue. And all this experience will only make it easier to find a job after graduation, get involved in bigger organizations and take on higher positions in which you can wield your power for good.

We can't ignore the fact it takes money to get anything accomplished in the world (or even just around campus). Relief and charitable organizations know this, and their budgets show it, just like ours. Yet the World Wildlife Fund has accomplished many of its goals around the globe with an annual budget of only $300 million, less than a third of Northwestern's. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) operates medical relief sites worldwide with a measly $270 million budget. When put into this perspective, Northwestern's budget is even larger than it seems at first glance. Our opportunities are concentrated on a small group of people and they're even more exorbitant than we thought.

Each of our individual college educations is supposed to be worth well over $150,000 by the time we graduate. But too many of us get caught up in chasing the unimportant things, be it the "easy A" schedule or the hot guy in our econ class. We're being offered an incredible educational experience in our years here, and when we spend our days constantly sheltered by our beautiful and opulent campus, we can forget what needs to be done in the world beyond Northwestern. We are given the tools to do whatever it is that moves us, and goodness knows we're paying enough for them. But when it comes right down to it, the responsibility to distribute that expensive knowledge and experience is all ours. As John Naisbitt said, "the new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many."

Blind

by Kyle Schafer

I just took a CTA bus, the 55 line, from the Red Line station to University Avenue in Hyde Park. From gated and dark buildings falling apart to the beautiful gothic buildings of the University of Chicago, its Frat row and its emergency phones. From poverty to a center of conservative economics. From black people to white people.

It is easy for me not to notice my race, because I've never had to. Everyone is equal, regardless of skin color. Or so I could say in my white suburban community. Or so they could tell me in my classrooms with all white teachers. "Be colorblind."

It does feel good to talk about everyone being equal, to talk about colorblindness and a colorblind society. At least, it feels good to do so where it is comfortable for us, where we're the majority, where we don't have to notice racial differences because we don't have to look at any. But step outside of that. Stand in white skin on a corner on the South Side of Chicago and see if you can really feel colorblind, if you can look around and see any semblance of the "American Dream" or racial equality.

I wholeheartedly believe that everyone of every color is equal as a person — race is nothing but a societal construct. But thus when we examine race, we must examine it in terms of society. Through this lens, it is clear that different races are not equal at all.

This society is raced, drawn along color lines, and not coincidentally. Colorblindness might feel good, but it doesn't address that problem. Instead, it hides the problem, even perpetuates it, allows those of us with privilege to ignore our own race and prevents us from recognizing what race means in our society. It leads us to falsely believe that racism is merely something committed by non-colorblind individuals at the expense of other people, leads us to falsely view the problem of racism as one between individuals other than ourselves, as a problem for just a few people. These misconceptions are dangerous because in reality racism is systemic and institutionalized in our society, and is therefore a problem everyone must address. To do so, I feel we must take a color-sensitive viewpoint of both the social issues we work on and of our personal lives.

War is a race issue. We have an easier time justifying bombing and killing people that aren't like us. We have an easier time labeling them terrorists. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist with as many ties to the U.S. government as bin Laden had to the Iraqi government. We didn't start discriminating against whites in 1995; we didn't start a war against Michigan militias. Imperialism and conquest occurs on racial grounds, and we condescendingly set out to correct non-white people and governments to an extent we would never do to white people or countries.

Education is a race issue. Schooling is often ethnocentric, maintaining a predominantly white viewpoint of history and other subjects. Beyond that, segregation of schools in America is actually increasing; for example, in 1991, 19% of black students in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district attended racially identifiable black schools, but by 2002, 48% of black students attended identifiable black schools. Minority students' educations are suffering, and these students are entering adult society in an already unequal position. Indeed, everyone's education is suffering through a lack of diversity. I could not conceivably gain an understanding of race issues in my suburban school district, which employed only one black teacher.

Economic justice is a race issue. Economic segregation in the United States and the world cannot be separated from racial segregation. From the lasting effects of racist economic policies toward formerly colonized nations or enslaved peoples to the neo-liberal business policies carried out today, economic decisions undeniably have affected different races in different ways and have maintained a raced economic gap.

Crime is a race issue. Our justice system is stacked against non-whites from the start, not only through unfair and perhaps self-fulfilling stereotypes held by the many whites in power, but also systematically through the laws which are made and how harshly convicts are punished. This is shown, for example, in the racial disparities in drug-related incarceration rates; in the ten states with the highest racial disparities, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 27 to 57 times the rate of white men.

Environmental destruction is a race issue. Just as we are more likely to attack people unlike those in power, we are also more likely to pollute or steal their land, air, or water. This occurs on a local level and on a global level. "Not in my backyard"-style campaigns may push destruction away from empowered communities, resulting in relocation to less empowered, minority communities.

Identity issues are race issues. We cannot talk about women's rights or the LGBTQ community without considering how varying identities impact the issues. Many have critiqued the feminist movement from a racial standpoint, noting that "women's issues" have traditionally referred to white women's issues, which are not the same as the issues facing minority women. This critique should be kept in mind in any identity-based movement.

Indeed, no social issue can be separated entirely from race. Although race is not the only factor that plays into any of these issues, we need to take the time to analyze any problem with race in mind. And it is just as important, I think, to examine our own lives with race in mind.

I have struggled to begin to notice my own racial identity. I grew up colorblind, in part because of a belief in equality, and in part because there were hardly any colors around for me to see. White seemed nearly universal, with anything else being some sort of aberration from the norm. I was never in a room that made me look at myself and feel out of place or unrepresented. No one stereotyped everyone else of my skin color based on my actions alone. Race didn't seem to matter.

Recently, though, I found myself for the first time surrounded with people for whom race truly was a primary identity, who did have to think about their race in relation to everything they did. I sat up one night talking about "black liberation" until 3 a.m., hearing stories about growing up in the country's poorest black neighborhoods and hearing ideas about where black Americans are going and how they are going to get there. There was a lot of frustration in the people I was talking with, a lot of concern with the condition of blacks in America today, on issues ranging from drug abuse to violence to lack of education. Overall, they felt excluded from power, that their interests were not being looked after in government or elsewhere, and that they were given little chance to get ahead. It was hard for me to understand to an extent, because this society is set up for me. I am represented. I can look to any powerful position in society and see that someone who looks like me is allowed to be there. I sat and thought about that, and, for the first time, I felt white. I began to notice what that means in terms of my life and in terms of the lives of the people around me.

I began to realize how detrimental my generally colorblind viewpoint had been. I recognize now that noticing the daily privileges involved with my race, in addition to the lack of privileges involved with other races, makes it more possible for me to accurately address any social issue.

Our society and our world are drawn along many lines other than that of race and thus a rejection of colorblindness is only one step in beginning to address inequality. Class blindness, for example, is another detrimental problem, as privileged people's desire to believe in the equality of all people can prevent us from examining how class differences function in the social issues we try to address.

It is an immense challenge to couple a true belief in the equality of all people with the social fact that all people are not equal in the world today. Although it feels better to base our actions and thoughts on well-meaning ideas of blindness to race or class or other divisions, we must face the problems of inequality directly. The first step to that is being sensitive instead of blind, recognizing how inequalities across all lines affect our own lives and the movements to which we are dedicated.

Iraq: Making Sense of the Insurgency, Understanding the Elections

by Pat Scharfe

The acclaim for the recent Iraqi election has been very widespread in the Western media. President Bush has repeatedly declared elections to be the solution to Iraq's ills, and there is great hope that he is at last correct. This hope has been what passes for intelligent debate over the last few weeks. This is partly natural, since in Bush's "democracy at gunpoint" strategy, we've seen a lot of gunpoint and not a lot of democracy thus far. Still, thorough thinkers on the left should go beyond the idea that the bad of war is not enough to justify the good of elections. The left's critique of the war has often been incoherent, and hardly anyone has attempted to seriously address the major questions. Why does the U.S. face an insurgency in Iraq? What are the legitimate grievances of the insurgency? There is a new question, too: what effect will the elections have on the insurgency and its causes? To answer these questions, it's best to begin with an overview of the insurgency, which usually gets lost in the violence and fog of war.

Flash back to Iraq in April 2004. The key flashpoint in the conflagration of that month was the American decision to shut down Muqtada Al-Sadr's newspaper, Al-Hawza, for "spreading lies." It was widely condemned by the Iraqi press (which is quite lively, even though we rarely hear about it). It also gave al-Sadr an opportunity to exploit the tyranny of the U.S. for his own advantages. His "Mahdi Army" escalated their demonstrations in parts of Sadr City in Baghdad and Najaf to the point where Sadr's followers had become the de facto police and government. On April 5, 2004, Paul Bremer, the chief American representative in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, declared al-Sadr an outlaw based on a long-secret warrant for his arrest.

At the same time, after four American security contractors were brutally murdered and dragged through the streets of Falluja, the U.S. occupying forces staged "Operation Vigilant Resolve" in early April 2004. More than 470 Iraqi civilians were killed, and at least 1200 were wounded.1 However, it was not enough. A truce was signed allowing a former Ba'ath general, Muhammad Latif, to control the city. It was an insurgent victory. The city was out of the reach of the American military and was able to adopt Islamic law as a basis for city government.

Both of these movements in that key month were able to tap into certain very common forms of discontent, such as the wretchedness of Iraq's public services. The mainstream media has reported extensively on the poor state of water and electricity in Iraq. Congress has allotted billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Iraq, but it has taken a long time to get any of the money to be spent. In August 2004, at the height of another wave of violence from both sides, only $600 million had been spent of the $18.1 billion that had been appropriated in the fall of 2003.2 Public services are below pre-war standards. This is much worse than it sounds; Iraq between the two wars was subject to an economic embargo by every other nation on earth, a kind of total war during peacetime. Thus, even though sanctions are gone and Congress has given massive aid to the Coalition Provisional Authority and its "sovereign" Iraqi successors, Saddam Hussein was still a better public servant. Scandals regarding mismanagement and corruption on the part of Paul Bremer and others have multiplied.3

Other, deeper problems of administration go far beyond public services. De-Ba'athification was a key motivation for the Sunni insurgencies of Falluja, Ramadi, and elsewhere. De-Ba'athification is the Iraqi analogue of de-Nazification, where former Nazis throughout Germany were prosecuted or removed from office after the Second World War. The parallels between reconstruction in Germany then and Iraq now dominate American thinking, just as memories of the Second World War are powerful is shaping American policy all over the world. However, on closer inspection, America's social engineering in Iraq is much more radical than its policies in Germany, and de-Ba'athification has been more far-reaching. In Iraq, tens of thousands of skilled professionals who were members of the Ba'ath party were dismissed from government service.4 In particular, all engineers, teachers, and doctors who had been members were fired; this did not happen in Germany. The U.S. has since tried to backtrack. Perhaps the greatest mistake was the dissolution of the Iraqi military. Nearly 350,000 conscripted soldiers were left without work, and officers were barred from receiving pensions.5 Many of the guns from the old military are circulating throughout Iraq; paradoxically, oil is expensive in Iraq, but not guns. There is no defending Saddam's military, but Bremer's policies toward the military, the bureaucracy, and even hospitals alienated the guilty and innocent alike and gave a powerful impetus to the insurgency.

In place of many competent figures who had not fled Saddam, the victorious American forces placed Iraqi exiles close to the Bush administration in most positions of power. Emblematic of these men is Ahmed Chalabi, who became finance minister after the war, even though he is wanted for bank fraud in Jordan to this day. A protégé of Chalabi, Mithal al-Alusi, was in charge of de-Ba'athification in 2004, and al-Alusi was under the influence of his mentor's radical opposition to all who worked with the former regime.6 Chalabi later lost favor with the Americans when it was discovered that he had been providing intelligence to Iran all along. The American regime in Iraq has often consisted of exiles with no popular base, and American soldiers, bureaucrats, and contractors who do not even speak Arabic. The avenues of communication between the people and the America-backed authorities are thus weak or nonexistent. If an American soldier panics and wounds your innocent son, what recourse do you have? Most exiles who took office had no relationships to the communities they were to rule, and Americans have held the real power in any case. Thus, if one is disenchanted with the authorities, it's natural to look to the institutions of Iraq that were not constructed by the Americans: the remnants of the Ba'ath Party, family or "tribal" connections, and the clergy. It is in these circumstances that the uprisings in Najaf and Falluja took place.

Since April 2004, the picture has improved considerably for the American occupation. Significantly, Muqtada al-Sadr was convinced by Ayatollah Ali Sistani to renounce the revolutionary ambitions of his Mahdi Army, after a bloody confrontation in Najaf in August 2004; he later joined Sistani's electoral alliance. Falluja, on the other hand, is no longer a semi-independent region. The U.S. military re-took the city in November 2004. Pictures of an American soldier killing an apparently wounded soldier captured the world's attention, but, perhaps more revealingly, American leaders had ordered their troops to shoot any males, armed or unarmed, if they seemed threatening.7 Despite the capture of Falluja, the Sunni insurgency is still a powerful force. Violence is a constant threat.

Where do elections come into this picture? One should first remember that Bush tried to avoid elections for a constituent (constitutional) assembly altogether. The election that was held on January 31 will create an assembly that will write Iraq's constitution; however, the U.S. had planned to hold national elections only after a constitution was written. The constitution would have been written by members of appointed municipal and provincial councils.8 Paul Bremer even halted local elections in June 2003, since "rejectionists tend to win in these situations."9 Sistani's pressure on the Americans, including religious fatwas, was crucial in forcing elections.

The Americans were hoping to build an influential bloc of secular politicians around Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister. The powers of incumbency and its propaganda are immense, and Allawi has friends in all the American-backed institutions, such as the new bureaucracies and the courts. After all, American protégés had been able to hold onto power in postwar Germany. However, again, the comparison with Germany is not favorable. The American authorities in Germany had used politicians who had gained elected office in pre-Nazi Germany and pre-existing parties, whose politicians had usually not gone into exile. As usual, the Americans in Iraq tried instead to start from scratch. Secularism in Iraq had been associated with the Ba'ath, so Allawi has not been particularly successful, despite his power of incumbency. His parliamentary list of candidates won only 14% of the vote.

Iraq's new American-backed institutions are not trusted by Iraqis. In addition, there is no nostalgia for any sort of Ba'ath rule, Sunni Arabs aside. There is only one powerful institution left, then, for Shi'a Iraqis: the mosque. Ayatollah Sistani, as everyone recognizes, is the major political mover in Iraq, despite his decision not to become personally involved in government. The Najaf clergy ('ulema) were able to survive Saddam's totalitarian regime because of their religious status, and they were never forced to flee. Thus, the Iranian-born Sistani holds more weight than most Iraqi politicians. Still, it would be untrue to deny the role of the exiled parties altogether. Sistani's "United Iraqi Alliance" includes, among others, the Islamic Daawa Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and allies of al-Sadr. The first two have benefited from Iranian support over the years and Sistani's support now, but they have better organizations than most other post-exile parties; SCIRI's Badr Organization is a 10,000-strong militia, trained by the Iranians.10 It comes as no surprise that the "Sistani List" gained 51% of the parliament in the election.

It looks like a coalition of the Kurdish parties and the "Sistani List" looks like it will dominate the parliament, but how much power will this new configuration have? The power of the new government will certainly be limited. The Americans radically overhauled Iraqi law, staffed the government with those open to American influence, and of course, the occupation continues. Shi'a power, for now, rests on the U.S. military. The "Transitional Administrative Law" of the Coalition Provisional Authority will remain the law of the land until a new constitution is ratified. Two further moves will guarantee American influence. First, the forgiveness of Iraqi debt is conditional upon the acceptance of the IMF "liberalization" plan.11 The IMF will secure the privatization and radical restructuring plans instituted by Bremer which have already caused so much unemployment.12 Second, Bremer installed "inspector-generals" in every Iraqi ministry with terms of five years to ensure "democratization."13 Still, despite these moves, it is difficult to see U.S. policy dominating Shi'a Iraqi governments in the long run. Ayatollah Sistani has completely outmaneuvered Washington electorally and decisively defeated its favored candidate, Iyad Allawi.

The U.S. has ruled by force and driven the Sunni Arabs into rebellion; in time, the Shi'a and the Kurds will have a chance to rule along sectarian and ethnic lines. Saddam ruled along ethnic lines, following the British colonial practice. He had so thoroughly co-opted Sunni society that the American invaders refused to put more than a few Sunnis in positions of real power. Because of this history, there is little chance that Sunni grievances will be addressed.

Sunni Arabs boycotted the recent election, so they are not represented in the parliament. On the eve of the elections, a Zogby poll found that 53% of Sunni Arabs thought that ongoing attacks were "a legitimate form of resistance."14 The U.S. and others will try to involve prominent Sunni Arab organizations in the writing of the constitution, but there is now little chance that it will be seen as legitimate. One of the most important Sunni groups is the Iraqi Islamic Party, an Iraqi form of the Muslim Brotherhood, which literally invented modern political Islam in Egypt in the early 20th century and remains a very popular underground party in Egypt. Another major player is the Association of Muslim Scholars, an organization of Sunni clergy. It often represents the rebels in negotiations between the U.S. military and insurgents and is believed to be the most popular group in Sunni Arab regions of Iraq. The Bush administration is clearly hoping that the high turnout of the election will at least force a group like the Iraqi Islamic party, which has cooperated with the Americans before, to participate in future elections. But this will only happen if the election impressed the party's constituency, rank and file Sunnis. It is hard to see any alteration in the anger and dissatisfaction that Sunnis feel toward the new order in the near future. Unemployment remains high, public services are in disrepair, security is lacking and the community leaders that Sunnis Arabs respect are shut out of the process of trying to solve these problems, because of radical de-Ba'athification and misrule. The election does not change this situation; it legitimizes it. American troops will guarantee America's "vital interests": limited influence of Islam, relations with Iran that are not too friendly and promotion of the economic interests of the U.S.

If nothing else, the legacy of a century of modern sectarian rule will continue to divide a vibrant but deeply troubled country.

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1 "Scale of Falluja Violence Emerges." BBC News: World Edition. 12 April 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3619661.stm
2 "Iraq Reconstruction Fiasco." New York Times. Editorial. 9 August 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/09/opinion/09mon1.html
3 "Iraq Authority 'mismanaged' $9bn." BBC News: World Edition. 31 January 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4224661.stm
4 Krane, Jim. "Bremer Softens Baath Party Ban." Associated Press. April 23, 2004.
5 Ibid.
6 Anderson, Jon Lee. "The United States' de-Baathification program fuelled the insurgency. Is it too late for Bush to change course?" The New Yorker. 15 November 2004.
7 Assault Still Exacting Heavy Toll on Mental Health of U.S. Marines." Agence France-Presse. 19 December 2004. Veteran's Today. http://www.veteranstoday.com/article194.html
8 Negus, Steve. "Iraq: Sistani Stands Firm on Elections." Middle East International: Online Edition. 3 December 2003. http://meionline.com/newsanalysis/170.shtml
9 Booth, William. "Occupation Forces Halt Elections Throughout Iraq." Washington Post. 28 June 2003. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42905-2003Jun27?
10 Cole, Juan. "The Downside of Democracy." L. A. Times. 24 February 2005. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cole24feb24,0,7677211.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
11 Al-Ali, Zaid. "The IMF and the Future of Iraq." Middle East Report Online. 7 December 2005. Middle East Research and Information Project. http://www.merip.org/mero/mero120704.html
12 Klein, Naomi. "Baghdad Year Zero." Harper's Magazine. September 2004.
13 "U.S. Edicts Curb Power of Iraq's Leadership." Washington Post. 27 June 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8665-2004Jun26?
14 "Survey Finds Deep Divisions in Iraq." Zogby International. 28 January 2005. http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=957

Undisclosed Flying Objects: Exposing the Unofficial State

by Brad Hirn

Preface to Secrecy
The UFO phenomenon was not always considered laughable. For 22 years, from 1947 to 1969, the United States Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports under Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio headquartered the programs.

Blue Book and its predecessors are now considered public relations ploys, "official" investigations formed to indoctrinate a public already fascinated by the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial visitation. Yet there are document archives proving the existence of Blue Book. When the project was announced closed by Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans on December 17, 1969, 701 sightings remained unexplained.

It's true many UFO sightings are experimental aircraft, natural phenomena, and simple misidentifications. Given a subject as expansive and intriguing as intelligent extraterrestrial life, citizens are bound to make impulsive reports and hasty claims. Yet UFO sightings are but one component of "UFOlogy," the study of unidentified/undisclosed flying objects, and "exopolitics," the development of policy guidelines for interacting with extraterrestrial beings. The Freedom of Information Act has enriched document evidence and provided legitimate and undeniable proof of governmental interest in UFOs. The following is from a once-classified 1949 FBI memo:
“Army intelligence has recently said that the matter of "Unidentified Aircraft" or "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," otherwise known as "Flying Discs," "Flying Saucers," and "Balls of Fire," is considered top secret by intelligence officers of both the Army and Air Forces.”

For reasons which will hopefully become clear by the end of this article, the U.S. government's interest is actually an agenda, a deliberate policy executed by past presidents, perpetuated within unacknowledged special access projects funded by black budgets, stigmatized by the corporate media, and largely ignored by our emerging generation. It is my sincere hope this article will, if nothing else, provoke serious thought on a subject unduly ridiculed and undeservedly mocked.

The Origins of 20th Century American UFO Secrecy
In the introduction to his book UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up 1941-1973, Richard M. Dolan describes the gap between "official culture" and "unofficial culture." He writes, "Like everywhere else, America has its topics that are too sensitive to discuss openly without distressing some powerful interest. UFOs have always been such a topic… Officially, UFOs do not exist, and are only discussed in public as a kind of joke, or perhaps a piece of cultural kitsch. Yet, some three-quarters of Americans believe in them. Why this disparity?" The following is an attempt at synthesizing the unofficial culture of secrecy engineered by the state to, among other things, delegitimize the UFO phenomenon.

(NOTE: The bulk of this article is informed by Dolan's book, described by Apollo 14 astronaut and UFO proponent Dr. Edgar Mitchell as "…a thorough and monumental undertaking.")

Tracing the UFO phenomenon through 20th century American history necessitates a historical exposure of the U.S. national security apparatus. Secrecy and unidentified (or rather, undisclosed) flying objects have been inextricably intertwined since the American public's first major encounter with the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life in 1947. This is not to say that UFOs were nonexistent prior to that year; in fact, during World War II American fighter pilots encountered unexplained (by conventional wisdom, that is) aerial phenomena known as "foo fighters." Sightings include a B-17 pilot in Austria, November 1944, paced by an amber-colored, disc-shaped object; a member of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, January 1945, trailed by three red and white lit objects capable of matching his evasive maneuvers; and an American pilot, that same month in France, followed by an object at around 360 mph before it "zoomed up into the sky."

Still, foo fighters have never been regarded as the best evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles; reports lack official sanction, and the topic has been overshadowed (understandably so) by more significant events. Prior to the 1947 Roswell Incident and the passage of the National Security Act, American governmental secrecy was epitomized by the Manhattan Project. A key feature of its operation was its secret, or black, budget (eventually climbing to $2.19 billion); money was disguised in two line items in the military budget, and the rest was buried in other appropriations. While this level of secrecy is understandable from a strategic perspective — Axis powers would be unnecessarily alerted to the United States' most important weapon — it established a model to be abused and manipulated during the Cold War.

Prior to the reorganization of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus in 1947, the Office of Strategic Services existed as one of several intelligence agencies competing for political authority. Established by Roosevelt on June 13, 1942, the OSS was headed by General William "Wild Bull" Donovan. Successful resistance movements in France, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere motivated Donovan to propose, in late 1944, an American central intelligence organization headed by himself. However, in January 1945, copies of his memorandum were leaked to a Chicago Tribune reporter, and Donovan's plan came to an end.

At the same time, the state tightened its relationship with professional science. After World War II ended, half of all scientists and technical personnel in America were working for the Defense Department. The Manhattan Project enlisted "power scientists," as did Operation Paperclip, a post-WWII project offering asylum for Nazi scientists in the U.S. Names overlapped between projects, including those concerned with the UFO phenomenon. Those involved include Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development by 1941 which managed the development of the atomic bomb; Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and so-called "father of the hydrogen bomb"; and Dr. H. P. Robertson, whose name indicates the 1953 CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel, a four-day meeting of power scientists to "discuss" (read: debunk) the UFO phenomenon in accordance with a government policy of denial and concealment.

The U.S. national security establishment underwent significant change in September 1945, when Truman disbanded the OSS and dispersed its personnel throughout the Departments of State and War. That same month, Navy Secretary James Forrestal requested a study on various military merger proposals. And only a few months later, in January 1946, Truman formed a National Intelligence Authority (comprised of the Chief of Staff and the Secretaries of State, War, and the Navy) which included a Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the direct precursor to the CIA. Truman appointed his close friend Rear Admiral Sidney Souers as the nation's first director of central intelligence (DCI). While funded secretly with money diverted from the armed forces budgets, the CIG had no spies or legal power.
The CIG quickly expanded its capabilities after Hoyt Vandenberg, the army's former director of intelligence, took command on June 10, 1946. He enlarged the organizational staff, collected intelligence on Latin America, and by the end of 1946 had gained the authority to conduct psychological warfare and covert operations.

Eighteen days after the Associated Press published the headline, "Army reveals it has flying disc found on ranch in New Mexico," the U.S. government passed the 1947 National Security Act. This act is the country's most significant reorganization of its national security apparatus, essentially creating a state within a state. It established a unified National Military Establishment (NME), a National Security Council (NSC), and a Central Intelligence Agency. A separate Air Force was created from the existing United States Army Air Corps. The Departments of War and the Navy were merged into the Department of Defense under a new Secretary of Defense, James Vincent Forrestal.

The Unofficial Legacy: Re-evaluating UFO Relevance
By the time President Eisenhower left office in 1961, an unofficial culture of "need-to-know" access, multi-billion dollar black budgets, and "justified" abuse within the military-industrial complex had evolved. Classified unacknowledged special access projects (USAPs) became increasingly compartmentalized. Funding avenues were manipulated and obscured. Extra-constitutional projects dealing with unusual phenomena, propulsion technologies, and energy systems existed above public law-and above both Congress and the president.

Brigadier General Stephen Lovekin worked with Eisenhower during the last years of his presidency. Lovekin recalls, "[Eisenhower] realized that all of a sudden this matter [the UFO question] is going into the control of corporations that could very well act to the detriment of this country. He realized that he was losing control of the UFO subject. As far as I can remember, that was the expression that was used, 'It is not going to be in the best hands.'"

The UFO phenomenon is still stuck in that unofficial culture of secrecy. It is so deeply embedded as to prevent legitimate disclosure and to discredit the subject as a whole. Currently, a wide generational gap exists between current researchers and pioneers and our emerging generation. Although many argue that intelligent extraterrestrial life and UFOs are irrelevant to the vast majority of society, the "UFO question" demands consideration in this country's security state. It is estimated that $100 billion goes into unacknowledged projects every year-programs escaping the knowledge of Congress and the president. In disclosing the unofficial answer to the UFO question, we will expose the unofficial state and the culture surrounding it.

Around Town: A Calendar of Events in March

Now through March 31: Stephanie Sinclair photography exhibit (Peace Museum, 100 N. Central Park; Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.; Sundays 1 p.m. - 4 p.m.) Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist covering life and death in the Middle East.

Now through May 14: Palestinian Art Exhibit (North Gallery, DePaul University Art Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore) DePaul Students for Justice in Palestine sponsors exhibit featuring 40 pieces by Palestinian artists.

March 19: "Bring the Troops Home Now" March and Rally (March @ Oak Street between Michigan and Rush, 12 p.m.; Rally @ Federal Plaza [Adams and Dearborn], 2 p.m.) On the second anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq, the March 19th Coalition organizes an event to show disapproval of continued U.S. occupation in Iraq.

March 25: Critical Mass (Daley Plaza; last Friday of every month, 5:30 p.m.) A worldwide movement to promote the use of bicycles as a viable means of transportation in response to an overdependence on the private automobile. It is a reclamation of space and a demonstration to show that the city belongs to the people.

Every Monday: Northwestern Opposing War And Racism (NOWAR) meeting (Kresge 2-420, 8 p.m.) Peace activists working to make peace a part of daily life and bring a peace studies adjunct major to Northwestern. [Sister organization of The Protest through NU Peace Project]

Every Tuesday: Students for Economic Justice (SEJ) meeting (Kresge 2-420, 8 p.m.) Working to promote socially-conscious economic and consumption choices. [Sister organization of The Protest through NU Peace Project]

Every Wednesday: “Queer Words and Music in Chicago” (Big Star Cafe, 1439 West Jarvis, 7:30 p.m.) Open mic night centered on LGBT issues and artists.

Every Wednesday and Saturday: Food Not Bombs (Wednesdays @ Loyola El station, 3 p.m.; Saturdays @ 18th and Loomis, 5 p.m.) This group serves meals to the hungry while promoting peace.

Every Thursday: Neighbors For Peace meeting (7:30pm @ St. Nicholas Church, 806 Ridge, three blocks west of the Main St. El station) Evanston community group with a self-explanatory name.

The Protest - February 2005

Conscious Consumerism
From responsibility to awareness in our decisions as consumers
by Britt Gordon-McKeon (brittgm@gmail.com)

Letting History Pass Away
The Chinese government suppresses mourning for former leader Zhao Ziayang
by Connie Kuo (c-kuo-1@northwestern.edu)

Quiet Hero of "Hotel Rwanda"
Review of the new documentary
by Crystal Nicholson (c-nicholson-1@northwestern.edu)

Why Madonna Doesn't Sing for Iraq
How the media controls US outpouring of aid
by Kavitha Chekuru (kchekuru@gmail.com)

Rhetoric as Life
Incorporating our ideals into our lives and a decentralized movement
by Kyle Schafer (k-schafer2@northwestern.edu)

A Night Story
Poem
by Laura Dunn (l-dunn@northwestern.edu)

Untitled
Poem
by "toaster"

Declassified
A look at 20th century American secrecy
by Brad Hirn (b-hirn@northwestern.edu)

Biopolitics: The Third Axis
Considering technology in our politics and activism
by Ben Hyink (ben_hyink9@yahoo.com)

Man Man: 10 lb Moustache
Music review
by Matt Weir (m-weir@northwestern.edu)

Around Town
Calendar of February events around Northwestern and Chicago

Conscious Consumerism: From Responsibility to Awareness

by Britt Gordon-McKeon

Being a socially conscious consumer is something in which I believe passionately. I am dedicated to the idea that I (and others) should consider the way in which our choices fit into the webs of production and consumption in this world. Yet every day, I spend money in ways that support sweatshops, environmental degradation, union-busting, and other things I abhor. Every day, I pass by some opportunities to make things a little better.

There's no one right way to be a socially conscious consumer. It's impossible to be perfect, and "good enough" is difficult to define and even harder to attain. It often requires sacrifices, sometimes steep ones, of both time and money. There are so many dimensions, and sometimes they conflict — do you buy the fair trade coffee at the union-busting store, or go to the unionized grocery that doesn't carry any fair trade products? Sometimes, there are no comfortable options at all, and the best you can hope for is settling for the lesser evil. Too many people make an attempt to be socially conscious consumers but then see themselves failing at it, and others find it too overwhelming to even try. Even for those committed to sticking to it, it can become an endeavor dominated by guilt and an ever-growing list of regrets.

Choosing to think of yourself as a socially responsible consumer versus a socially conscious consumer can be more than just semantics. Look up "responsibility" in the thesaurus and you'll find synonyms like "burden," "duty," "guilt," "obligation," and "task." Yet this is how we often speak and think about that which we strive to do. Look for "conscious," however, and you find words like "attentive," "aware," "informed," "mindful," and "sensitive to."

Being socially conscious isn't something you do; it's something you are. Being a socially conscious consumer is about awareness. It's educating yourself about who and what is involved in bringing products and services into your life, and it's considering that process when you make decisions. It is getting in touch with yourself and your values and priorities — figuring out what is important enough to you not to compromise on and what things you'd like to support or avoid when it's feasible for you. It's developing habits in your consumption choices and not sweating the exceptions to the rule. It's not about taking the easy path every time, but it is about making realistic choices for your life.

If you approach your life and your choices as a consumer in a thoughtful way, and consider the connections your actions have on a larger scale, then you're living a socially conscious lifestyle that is much more than a never-ending series of duties or obligations to make the socially responsible choice in every situation. As a socially conscious consumer, there will always be times when there are no good options to choose, times when you decide not to do the "right thing," and times when you make the necessary sacrifices. And that's fine because being socially conscious isn't about doing the "right thing" every time. It is being the kind of person who cares about doing the "right thing."

You can decide you can't pay two times as much for fair trade coffee on a regular basis or spend hours traveling to the nearest worker cooperative. You can even shop at Wal-Mart and still be a socially conscious consumer. If you can't afford to buy pricey fair trade goods, or haven't got the time to shop at the locally-owned grocery store on the other side of town, that doesn't mean being socially conscious is not for you. As long as you're thinking about the impact of your decisions and are looking for socially conscious choices that are right for you, you're part of the solution.

When it comes down to it, you're choosing to be a socially conscious consumer in order to live your life in a way that makes you feel good about it. While the importance and potential impact of your decisions as part of a greater movement should not be ignored, your real power is in building that movement. Whether it's helping to educate others or working to make socially conscious products more available and accessible, your own efforts are multiplied by spreading the appeal of socially conscious consumption to others — but for all of us, it will be more powerful and attractive when it's understood as mindfulness instead of as a burden.

Letting History Pass Away

by Connie Kuo

When a country's former leader passes away, it is customary and expected that the nation pay tribute to the leader's life, regardless of his or her politics. Last June the American public mourned the death of former President Ronald Reagan, praising his achievements while respectfully dismissing the blemishes associated with his presidency. But on the opposite side of the world, the opposite seems to happen.

After China's former Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang passed away on January 17, the government found itself in a quandary. Zhao was one of China's most prominent and popular leaders. His death should have generated public respect and recognition. It instead summoned silence and suppression of freedom. Coverage of his death was banned on all Chinese radio and TV stations. The official Xinhua News Agency reported a mere four sentences of when and where Zhao passed away but omitted any mention of his political career. Comments expressing condolences on Internet message boards were immediately deleted. My friend from Beijing verified that searching Zhao Ziyang's name on Chinese Web sites resulted in little information or mixed reports, some even claiming he was still alive. I, getting my information from English sources, had to assure my friend that Zhao was undoubtedly dead.
In the few days after his death, policemen prevented people, including Zhao's closest former aide, from paying respect to Zhao. Mourners were arrested, and others who visited his home had their names recorded by authorities. At first, the government wished to forgo a proper memorial service but later reversed its decision after Zhao's subordinates appealed for a public funeral. However, it claimed that the tribute would be far more low-key than past funerals of less illustrious and less well-known Communist Party officials.

Why this absurd disregard of and lack of tribute to one of China's most important political leaders? Because Zhao was a guardian of human rights and a symbol of freedom, democracy, and reform - ideals that the Chinese government is still afraid to embrace.
The government restricted public mourning because it feared it would ignite a protest for change, which is what happened when Zhao's predecessor and reformist leader Hu Yaobang died. Hu's death in April 1989 sparked university students fed up with the corrupt government system to demand political reform. They peacefully marched in the capital's Tiananmen Square. But the government quickly and violently crushed the pro-democracy demonstration, bringing in tanks and troops that eventually killed hundreds or thousands of unarmed demonstrators (the exact numbers still remain unclear).

Zhao's involvement in the Tiananmen events cost him his position as general secretary, the most powerful post in China. He sympathetically supported the students and opposed the use of military force. The day before martial law was declared, Zhao pleaded with the students to go home and tearfully apologized for having "come too late." A few weeks later, the government ousted him and placed him under house arrest, accusing him of "splitting the party." After May 1989, he was rarely seen in public again.
As Communist Party chief, Zhao's other achievements include introducing agricultural reforms, improving industrial production, and encouraging foreign investments in China, which greatly liberalized the suffering economy. There is no doubt that China owes much of its prospering present-day economy to Zhao's service. He also advocated an open foreign policy in the 1980s.

Despite Zhao's groundbreaking contributions to China, today's government refuses to reassess or explain its illegal dismissal of Zhao or its actions at Tiananmen. By trying to erase Zhao and the Tiananmen incident from history, the government hopes to silence the voice of opposition.

But if there's one thing that the Chinese government should keep in mind, it's that forgetting about Zhao and Tiananmen would hurt its efforts of becoming one of the world's leading nations. Unwilling to honor a lost hero of democracy, China cannot expect to gain respect from the international community. Zhao's silenced death is a testimony of what China owes its citizens: the right to express themselves freely.
Within the 15 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre, many observers claim the nation's political climate has cooled. Amidst a growing economy, it's no surprise that many of today's Chinese, especially the youth, are more concerned with making money and less interested in politics. Zhao's passing is an awakening for these people, a chance for them to further improve their nation and lives. Ignoring the need for change should no longer be an option. Thanks to Zhao's work, they have already moved forward economically. Now it's time to finish Zhao's dream and begin moving forward politically.

The death of Zhao does not beckon the death of his vision. As a champion of freedom, justice, and human rights, Zhao was a pioneer of reform; and mourning his death is the first step to preserving his ideals and pursuing democracy. But if democratic reform is too much to ask of China now, the least it could do is give Zhao Ziyang the respect he undeniably deserves, not as a reformer but as a leader who dreamed of a better future for his nation.

The Quiet Hero of "Hotel Rwanda"

by Crystal Nicholson

Every cinematic story has a hero.

"Schindler's List" had Oskar Schindler; "Amistad" had John Quincy Adams; "Glory" had Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. But the director of "Hotel Rwanda" had less glamorous options in the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Surely the hero must be American, a Cowboy Clinton galloping in to clean up yet another international mess. But Clinton's administration was too busy playing linguistic games, creating alternative words for "genocide" to avoid any responsibility.

What about the Tutsi rebels — the force which finally drove the murderous Hutus out of the country into bordering refugee camps? The victory was too-little-too-late for the nearly million innocent murdered.

The U.N. peacekeeping troops — international politics in action? Hardly. In Rwanda the trained blue-hats seemed more like impotent smurfs, crippled by their mandate not to shoot and only able to escort Americans and Europeans to safety.
Director Terry George found his story's hero in a Kigali hotel manager, a Hutu with a Tutsi wife and children. Paul Rusesabagina's story was first told in Philip Gorevitch's novel,"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families." "Hotel Rwanda" is the first movie about the genocide since the fierce 1999 Frontline documentary "The Triumph of Evil" exposed a United Nations frozen in bureaucracy and apathy.

Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, was a savvy but honest Kigali business man who ran the upscale Hotel Des Mille Collines, most of whose guests were Western press, diplomats, and African elite. The movie begins on the day when the U. N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda peace accord is signed between the Tutsi rebels and the Hutu government. That night, President Habyarimana's plane is shot down — an assassination that at the time was blamed on Tutsi rebels.
As the tension grows in the hot Rwandan city, Rusesabagina and the Western world are slow to realize the scale of the violence about to erupt. Drunken Hutus dance in the city in their uniform of brightly colored shirts. Ubiquitous radios shout that the infestation of Tutsi "cockroaches" must be stopped. Only when power-drunk Hutu soldiers attempt to threaten Rusesabagina into shooting his own Tutsi wife and children does he realize the severity of the situation.

Originally only concerned about his family and keeping his job, Rusesabagina gradually shoulders the responsibility of housing, feeding, and protecting 1,268 refugees in his hotel, always with Hutu machetes around the corner.

Rusesabagina maintains professionalism the whole time, in dress, demeanor, and command of the hotel staff with burning houses, angry mobs, and a civil war occurring only blocks away. His only emotional breakdown occurs in a beautifully acted scene of solitude when he realizes he is too distracted to correctly tie his tie. Backed by suspenseful Rwandan music, the director involves the viewers in what becomes a race against time, with the only hope of help from the West, a dream that was repeatedly disappointed.

Meanwhile, the movie portrays U.N. peacekeepers unsympathetically, with only 300 haggard men for the entire country. In the most dramatic scene of the film, U.N. forces separate a terrified crowd, sending whites to the U.N. convoys for safety while directing blacks to the uncertain shelter of Rusesabagina's hotel.

Even with weapons as primitive as the machete, the genocidaires killed at almost three times the speed as the Germans killed during the Holocaust, according to Gourevitch's book. The result was a decimation of a population. In a time when there was no safety in homes, streets, or churches, Tutsis found momentary calm at the Hotel Des Milles Collines, using the pool water to wash their clothes and wounds.

Unfortunately, this cinematic journey comes closer to the heartbreaking truths of those four months than any contemporaneous press coverage. Rwandan coverage was not lacking in frequency, but in in-depth coverage and analysis. Newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times failed to explain the context, highlight the magnitude of the genocide or relate individual stories to demonstrate the raging atrocities.

"Hotel Rwanda" explains the true origins of the two "ethnic groups," while the newspapers simplified the relationship between the Hutus and Tutsis as "tribal bloodletting." The Belgians who colonized Rwanda dubbed the Tutsis a "lost Christian" race, and issued ethnic identity cards in 1933 to separate the elite Tutsis from the majority Hutus. Although a front page article in the Times in October 1997 speaks of an "age old animosity" between the two groups, the seperation of Hutus and Tutsis was a product of 1960s "race science." Times articles repeatedly referred to the Hutus as a "short, stocky, Bantu people" and Tutsis as a "tall, elegant Nilotic people," even though Rwandans themselves have difficulty telling the two groups apart.

Today western inaction plagues the civilians of Sudan, and Africa in the minds of many remains the "dark continent" with vengeance as the only law. Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda" will echo every time you read headlines of horror in the "heart of darkness," bringing humanity to the death count numbers. It is a temptation to utter the words "never again." But perhaps when the inevitable next time comes, there will be more quiet heroes like hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina.

Why Madonna Doesn't Sing for Iraq

by Kavitha Chekuru

It is difficult to imagine living in Sri Lanka or Thailand or any of the countries hit by the tsunami that began off the coast of Indonesia. Watching your life wash away, searching, hoping someone from your family will be found. Alive.

It is also difficult to imagine living in a place where your city is constantly being bombed, living without basic necessities such as water, food, and medicine, knowing death is a possibility any day. Holding your breath every second.

Wait. I meant, it is difficult to imagine living in Iraq.

That is what it was like for an Iraqi civilian during the war, and even to an extent today while the war is not really over, as some would like us to believe. But how would a person who lived in the United States know that?

The media have not been encouraging in that respect. At least not in the way they have been with the tsunami disaster. I don't intend or want to minimize the severity of the situation in South Asia, but I have to wonder how we have let ourselves ignore the daily tragedy of the Iraqi civilians.

The fault lies with the media. Where were the images of the wrecked and ravaged homes and lives of the people dying for a war allegedly being fought for their freedom? Or perhaps interviews on how they felt about the constant presence of U.S. troops in their homeland? Just to know what they think about this situation that is their day: our soldiers razing their homes, killing their friends and family. Maybe that is asking too much.

I suppose press like that does not exactly couple well with talks on our "ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," or discussions on foreign government stating that "success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people," as President Bush said during his inaugural address, Jan. 20. I guess those goals don't require that we treat them decently.

The media brought back daily reports on the valiant efforts of our soldiers abroad as the war advanced, our soldiers defending liberty and freeing Iraq from oppression and tyranny. At times the mainstream press gave wee critical discussions, as it should have, on the war and the policies of the Bush administration, reporting how many American soldiers had died or had been killed by rebel insurgents.

However, you would have to thoroughly search a pile of those articles or Google 'til you drop to find the number of casualties among Iraqi civilians, the people that were being killed for their very own freedom. Destroy a nation to liberate it. Post-mortem freedom. It’s an interesting concept.

More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since we invaded their home in March 2003. In Falluja alone, an estimated 250,000 people have fled to live as refugees in surrounding areas, knowing full well that it is more than a possibility that they will be living without access to food, water, shelter, or medical care, to name a few problems. The options are slim, though. The latter situation, or living under the rubble of your own destroyed home in an occupied city. You probably don't have adequate access to basic necessities due to U.S. military blockades. But that is not the image of Operation Iraqi Freedom! We all must maintain the patriotic spirit, especially those of us in the press!

To some it may seem ridiculous to ask this question, but why did we not mobilize and organize for justice and aid in Iraq like we did for relief in the tsunami countries? It is not because people in our country do not have the capacity to empathize or help those that are in need.

If anything, the tsunami disaster has shown us that people here are more than capable of doing so. Fundraisers and campaigns have been organized across the country on a real grassroots level, from a 10-year-old selling lemonade in Florida to student groups at universities nationwide raising funds to celebrity relief concerts.

I cannot decide if the mainstream media would be more appropriately labeled Scrooges because of lack of sympathy to the Iraqi civilians or scaredy cats for being too afraid to strongly criticize the Bush administration for the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Iraq from an unjust war that took place on their own soil.

The American people are ready to help others in the world. But joint efforts across society have to take place in order for this to be fully realized. When the media inundated us with images of the tragedies across the sea from the tsunami, we mobilized faster than our government did to bring aid and relief.

We were, and still are, more than capable of doing the same for those living in Iraq under the ruins of our government's ideological crusade.

The American people are capable of empathy and emotion, but how can we organize aid and action if we don't even realize it is needed? My question is no longer where the relief campaigns and music concerts for Iraqi civilians were, but when will the media finally take responsibility and show us the truth?

When will they mobilize?

We cannot wait much longer.

Neither can the rest of the world.

Rhetoric As Life

by Kyle Schafer

There is a lot of talk about what is going to happen in the next four years. More war, more profits, more news articles buried in the middle of the front page to make us scream or cry or just shake our heads and laugh dejectedly because we knew it was coming. And we'll respond. We always do. We'll keep moving and chasing whatever it is that we so deeply believe in, whatever it is that keeps us fighting when it isn't easy to do so. Some of us will organize, and some of us will talk. Some of us will be cynical, and some of us will speak of progress. Some of us will place our faith in an upcoming election, and some of us will point out that the system is set up to prevent another election from making a significant difference. We're different. But there is an "us."

There is talk that this "us," and whatever progressive movement we represent, must centralize, that we must determine a single message, full of appropriate sound bytes to counter the Republican ones. There are those among us that say our leftist organizations must reject their tendency toward non-hierarchical structure. There are those among us that say we must learn from the so-called right and do what they've done. Plots. Power plays. Our own spin.

We are scared. We are scared of losing, and we appear willing to do anything. I think that our fear is their strength. By staying on the run, by changing our way of life to adapt to theirs, we lose something, we lose our conviction, we knock ourselves down before we even stand up. We need to stand up. And we need to stay standing.

We don't need centralization to do it. Our diversity is not our weakness, but our strength. We need groups standing up for racial equality, standing up for gender equality, standing up for environmental sustainability, standing up for acceptance of the LGBTQ community, standing up for workers rights, standing up for the separation of church and state, standing up for the separation of corporation and state, standing up for peace and justice in America and around the world. We need to stand together whenever we can, but we also need to evaluate what it means to be standing.

Standing up is more than yelling in the street, more than voting, more than trying to pass one law or fight another. Standing up is more than working against the status quo. Standing up is taking our ideals and making them part of our own lives every single day, no matter what the surrounding political climate.

Standing up therefore takes different forms for all of us. For some of us, it may be choosing what businesses to support based on how they treat their workers. It may be choosing vegetarianism, making sure we turn our lights off when we leave our room, taking a shorter shower, or avoiding using disposable towels or plates. It may be smiling at people on the street, staying calm in arguments, or channeling anger into productive criticism. It may be choosing a life path based on compassion for others instead of a desire for profit. It may be using non-hierarchical models in our groups, choosing to share our knowledge instead of using any exclusiveness for personal advantage, or choosing to see that we are not better than one another and can stand on equal ground. It may be challenging the way we look at others or how we look at ourselves. It may be disagreeing with others when it is hard or dangerous to do so.

No one way of standing up is more important than another. What is important is to hold on to convictions, to take the rhetoric of our individual political thought and make it into action, make it part of our lives.

Standing up in this way is a powerful force to us as individuals, even when it feels like it is nothing but a weak force to the globe. Not everyone will live to the same ideals as everyone else. But if we can do more than just talk about our own ideals, if we can live them, can show that they can be part of life, then maybe someone will look at one of us and be inspired to do the same, maybe one individual will be able to take similar ideals from his or her head and really feel empowered by them. At that point, that individual becomes an inspiration to someone else as well.
That inspiration is where the power of our activism lies, because change lies in the individual. We cannot expect the world to change in ways that we cannot change ourselves — individuals must incorporate change before the world can. And if we spend all of our time fighting a world that on the whole isn't changing, all is not lost if we can know that we have tried, that we have lived according to our own ideals as best as possible, and that maybe, just maybe, we have helped someone else do the same. Indeed, something great is won.

So we should not spend our time sitting and worrying about what we are going to do four years from now. We should spend our time worrying about what we are going to do tomorrow, or what we are going to do today. It isn't easy to turn our complaints about the world or our country onto ourselves. We have to recognize our privileges, recognize how different parts of the very system we despise have ingrained themselves in us. We have to become conscious of ourselves and our actions, and we have to take it into account. This will not result in a centralized message, but it will result in an inspiring message — one of a vibrant, diverse movement that goes beyond any election cycle or campaign, a movement that is assertive and no longer afraid.

A Night Story

by Laura Dunn

My words bake in flecks of wood, as night
folds me in planks of windowsill. Below
the yellow lights of cars stream by, and I
begin to write a story on plates of glass.

* * * *

I slowly trace the face of my grandfather,
young, his hands unlined, he holds a boat's rail
in a season after war.
As yellow lights sew a city into the night
his three comrades sing
away their continent. Tonight I'll make
him a poet, a planet, a clear space
where stories roam like madmen prowl the night
and every closed shopfront pleads to them "wail."
I listen, footsteps pat beneath and shots
echo among Penang's green vines, the clatter
creases the lines of glass. Move with me now,
dual time, back to ship, the seventeen
year old, in green eyes, in grayest fog, craves
a swim. He strips of fatigues and naked,
he jumps into cool water. His splash breaks
the line of soldier's song. He starts to breathe,
to swim toward yellow lights and Singapore.
No longer just a light or sound, beneath
him is the word, nation, a mass of white
particles sticking to his wet skin.

* * * * *

Then lights shut off across the heavy street
and night, it smoothes all wrinkles from pavement
to window glass. The vision lodges
in dents of wood, in drying ink, in rush
of night on his limbs. From air
to water, land to land, my grandfather
quietly plunged his body toward the wood
of vestige. But war found him, and morning
found me, asleep on the windowsill. Day
light maps the outline of my grandfather,
lines of poetry creasing his clear skin.

"Untitled"

by "Toaster"

He says I'm immoral
a slut
a heathen
an elitist
pretentious east coast intellectual
a naive know it all
and nobody likes that in a girl
why can't I bake cookies?
smile big and keep quiet
He says
he wouldn't have to
if he could trust me
but
I read the wrong books
have the wrong friends
frequent the wrong places
so no wonder he's suspicious
he has no choice
and I deserve what I get

And I keep thinking
he's gotta be wrong
but they all say
he knows what's best
and how dare I criticize?
don't I know he's got it hard?
he's doing the best anyone could
when the worlds against him
he needs me to
smile and be supportive
wear make up to cover the bruises
I'm so clumsy and irresponsible
I deserve them
this deficit
failing schools
pointless war
it's my fault
for contributing to immorality
But anyway he's entitled
and who am I to stand up?
they say, he says
sit still and shut up
suffer the wrath of the divinely inspired
anyway, it's only 4 more years

Declassified: A Look at 20th Century American Secrecy

by Brad Hirn

If this so-called "Information Age" was originally characterized by unprecedented access to information, then we all should have seen it coming. Information is a commodity. It is manipulated into disinformation and completely distorted into misinformation. It is cut up and compartmentalized, select parts never to be publicly released. It is in enormous supply, and yet it is rare. It is one of the most important products today.

From where do we get our information? If you identify with liberal social policy, you despise FOX News, that vile perpetuator of right-wing propaganda. Instead, you read The New York Times, a supposedly reliable source, right? What about Carl Bernstein's 1977 Rolling Stone article in which he describes the Times' general policy of providing assistance to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whenever possible? What about The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, New York Herald-Tribune, The Saturday Evening Post, The Miami Herald, Time-Life, CBS News, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, and Reuters, all confirmed by the early 1950s to have snug relationships with the CIA?

These aren't isolated cases of press organizations willingly providing help for the sake of "national interest." These are selectively placed individuals numbering in the 400s working covertly within major press sectors while on the CIA payroll. This is news management.

But then-director of the CIA George Bush, Sr. took care of that in 1976: He issued an order prohibiting the CIA from employing journalists for Agency work — unless the Director of Central Intelligence gave approval. Why did The Washington Post publish an article in February 1996 contradicting that order? Apparently the CIA had been employing American journalists since the 1976 order, just in "extraordinarily rare circumstances."

And what about Gary Webb, author of the August 1996 San Jose Mercury News series entitled "Dark Alliance"? Here's a snippet from the controversial series:
“For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.”

Of course, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all worked to discredit Webb and humiliate him as a raving conspiracy nut. He was accused of trying to sell movie rights through “Dark Alliance.” The Mercury News even printed a retraction and reassigned Webb to a suburban desk. For his "clean-up" of the reportedly fraudulent series, Editor Jerry Ceppos was awarded the 1997 Ethics in Journalism award by the Society of Professional Journalists. Even the CIA's 1998 report confirming Webb's allegations — quoted in a July 17, 1998 New York Times article — didn't sway the paper from publishing this opening sentence in his December 13, 2004 obituary: "Gary Webb, a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited, linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the spread of crack cocaine in Los Angeles, was found dead on Friday at his home in Carmichael, Calif., near Sacramento." Webb's suicide was largely ignored by both the press and the people.

Seven multinational corporations currently own all but one of the U.S. television networks, more than 80 percent of the global music market, a large share of book and commercial magazine publishing, most of the world's commercial cable TV channels, the major U.S. film studios, most satellite broadcasting worldwide, and a good chunk of European television. Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, and Bertelsmann of Germany are those corporations.

Rewind the clock: For more than two years of the Manhattan Project's operation — the modern epitome of governmental secrecy — not one Congressional member knew of its existence, despite its final price tag of $2 billion (a staggering amount for the time).

How about post-World War II: In September 1946, President Harry Truman authorized Operation PAPERCLIP, an endeavor to provide German scientists and engineers asylum in the U.S. in exchange for their scientific knowledge and assistance in monitoring Soviet activity, building advanced weaponry such as the V-2 rocket, and developing operational spacecraft. While Truman ordered ardent Nazis to be strictly prohibited from the program, Bosquet Wev, director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), worked with the U.S. Army to erase incriminating evidence from Nazi dossiers. Arthur Rudolph, for example, was operations director of the Mittelwerk factory at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camps where 20,000 workers died from beatings, hangings, and starvation. However, the JIOA's final report said, "[N]othing in his records indicate[s] that he was a war criminal or ardent Nazi or otherwise objectionable." Rudolph became a U.S. citizen and designed the Saturn 5 rocket, which was essential to the Apollo moon landings.

Wernher von Braun, technical director of the Peenemunde rocket research center from 1937 to 1945, developed the notorious V-2 rocket. An ardent Nazi, his dossier was "corrected" and he was enlisted by the U.S. Army to develop guided missiles. In 1960, he became director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and, by 1970, NASA's associate administrator.

And the early 1960s: On March 13, 1962 the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired by Lyman Lemnitzer, presented a memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The document, "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba," was the key component of Operation NORTHWOODS, a top secret project and public relations ploy developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The now declassified report begins:
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff have considered the attached Memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, which responds to a request of that office for brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.”

“Further, it is assumed that a single agency will be given the primary responsibility for developing military and para-military aspects of the basic plan.”
No doubt the CIA is that "single agency" mentioned. The report goes on to suggest specific acts of deception against both Cuban and American citizens:
“A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms:
a. We could blow up a US ship in
Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
b. We could blow up a drone
(unmanned) vessel anywhere in the
Cuban waters.”
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.”

Also suggested are mock riots and sabotages to be blamed on Cuban forces, the manipulation of astronaut John Glenn's potential death during his launch into space as a fictitious reason to enter war, and the destruction of a fake commercial aircraft supposedly full of "college students off on a holiday."
President John F. Kennedy's fortunate rejection of the proposal landed Lemnitzer without a job, a decision complimenting Kennedy's earlier removals of Deputy Director of Intelligence Allen W. Dulles, Deputy Director of Operations Richard Bissell, and Air Force General Charles Cabell, all CIA officials largely responsible for the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle.

To conclude, a quote from President Dwight Eisenhower, two-term Republican president and five-star Army General:
“In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”

Nothing, especially information.

The Third Axis

by Ben Hyink

"Tech-progressivism: A stance of active support for technological development in general and for human practices of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification in particular. Tech-progressives believe that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments."
- Dale Carrico, Human Rights Fellow, IEET

Consider the following scenario: the "jobless recovery" is not an aberrant event but an advancing condition. Within the next fifty years automation gradually consumes all sectors of the workforce. To remain competitive, corporate boards even use artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems that act as 24-hour CEOs in a faster, more comprehensive, and more reliable manner. As the corporations discover that the most lucrative activities are in servicing each other rather than consumers, the meager "trickle down" that does exist will be shut off entirely. At the very least, the possibility of a jobless future provides a compelling reason to consider basic income proposals, which is precisely what Marshall Brain of http://www.howstuffworks.com/ has provided.

Consider another scenario: due to fears regarding the possible applications of certain technologies, some fears legitimate, others pure hyperbole, blanket bans are instituted. Among the technologies banned are nanotechnology and recursively self-enhancing A.I. Unless a global police state of terrific scale, intrusiveness, and draconian disposition is established to effectively enforce such a ban, black markets will emerge. In black markets, responsible regulation is impossible. In the absence of security provided by international cooperation, the risks of destructive applications (intentional or accidental) rise significantly. Catastrophes such as misuse of genetically engineered biological agents, the release of self-replicating "nanobots" not dependent on a rare feedstock, the instantiation of a badly programmed "superintelligent system," and devastation from unforeseen dangers all become more likely, not less, and the specter of threats to all intelligent life, or “existential risks,” becomes increasingly vivid.

These are the sort of concerns entertained by tech-progressives, particularly Democratic Transhumanists (DTs). In order to better conceptualize the DT agenda, we might consider the political area mapped out by the "Political Compass" website. If the x-axis references cultural politics (Libertarian v. Authoritarian) and the y-axis references economic politics (Left v. Right), then DTs would be in the "Libertarian Left/Social Democrat" quadrant along with progressive Democrats, Greens, etc. But add a third dimension to this picture, a z-axis on biotechnology (bioconservative v. tech-progressive) and DTs are often in sharp contrast with the recent pessimism of some progressives concerning technological advancement.
Why have some representatives of the Libertarian Left sided with proponents for the Authoritarian Right (such as Leon Kass and Francis Fukayama of the President's Council on Bioethics) on biotech matters? The main element seems to be recurrent despair over the application of technology toward destructive ends.

Particularly in the 1990s, the Left seemed to have lost hope of directing technology toward socially beneficial, environmentally responsible ends. Reactionary "deep ecology" also took root with its misanthropic ideology of humanity as a plague on nature. No doubt much skepticism was in order, with Social Darwinist supporters of corporate autocracy loudly proclaiming their enthusiasm. But was it really wise of progressives to abdicate their claim to the future of tech development and take up a position of knee-jerk dissent?

The writings of bioconservatives like Bill McKibben (Environmentalist), George Annas (Health Law/Human Rights), Richard Hayes (Sierra Club) and Wesley J. Smith (former Nader collaborator), provide perfect examples of reactionary positions in the biotech revolution. Their adulation of limits imposed on people by "the natural order" borrows from the very sort of conservative cultural assertions that have historically rationalized the suppression of supposedly unnatural medicines and behaviors (cadaver study, for example).

Yet many in the modern Left are quite supportive of using technology to alter our bodies and improve people's lives: witness support for the transgender community or somatic cell nuclear transfers also known as "therapeutic cloning." DTs maintain that the real issue is safety and equality, followed closely by bodily autonomy, and not if vague conventional conceptions of "humanness" are somehow challenged. Some tech-progressives who also qualify as DTs are James Hughes (health policy/sociology), Donna Haraway (feminist academic), Dale Carrico (rhetorician at Berkeley), Ken MacLeod and Bruce Sterling (science fiction authors), and George Dvorsky (columnist). Hughes and Carrico are both leaders in the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology (IEET).

The problem with the deep ecologist/bioconservative trend is that it is not concerned with human interest. In working to achieve a sustainable future, we should pay more attention to potential public goods like nano-scale engineering, which in thirty years could enable cleaner manufacturing and recycling techniques. Supposing certain technologies, such as effective life-extension therapies or nootropics ("smart-drugs"), will help people to become not just healthy as we happen to know it today but "better than well," why shouldn't we embrace such developments if we can provide equal access in the social interest? The distinction between therapy and augmentation is artificial. Overcoming ancient congenital afflictions through genetic medicine and treating neurological conditions is just a glimpse of the possibilities that lie on the horizon. I, for one, want progressive sensibilities guiding the manner in which they are realized so that they are safely regulated and quickly move beyond the privilege of a select few.

In the current U.S. political climate, the Left has been put in such a defensive position on all fronts that it can be difficult to attract attention to such issues. However, it is precisely now that the Left must reanalyze the ideological frames through which it addresses issues, particularly technological ones, which have the greatest potential to alter economic structures and cultural practices. To offer this positive, empowering political alternative, the Left needs to get off the bioconservative bandwagon and start exploring issues and articulating positions from a broadly tech-progressive stance.

To find out more about Democratic Transhumanism, I recommend reading James Hughes' book, “Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future,” and his papers, columns, radio interviews, and blog, which can be found through his website at http://www.ChangeSurfer.com. In additon, I recommend the columns of Dale Carrico and George Dvorsky, which can be found at the Canadian futurist site, http://betterhumans.com.

Music Review: Man Man "10lb. Moustache"

by Matt Weir


Man Man, a Philadelphia quartet, is one of a handful bands in the past few years capable of creating their own distinctive rock vocabulary. Their debut album, The Man In a Blue Turban With a Face, surprised many rock critics with its almost singular vision of a hideously deformed lounge act out to find love on the high seas. "10lb. Moustache," the first single, crackles with the 'Tom Waits the Pirate' vocal stylings of lead singer Honus Honus up against tin can drumming, a dawdling marimba, and a drunken trumpet. It's a Muppets Tonight cabaret ditty about lost love performed with all of the panache and desperation of a rat-headed sex slave. If Tim Burton were directing Star Wars: Episode III, Man Man would easily be playing this song as the cantina's house band.

Man Man has found a way to make the extremely ugly extremely pleasant and wonderful. "10lb. Moustache" is centered around the image of ripping open a girlfriend's chest to live in her blood and guts like a mouse. It's a disturbing and violent picture to be sure, but with the scattershot drumming, innocent back-up vocals, and accordion farts, it sounds innocent and endearing. That's what you do to your loved one in Man Man's universe; you rip 'em open and look inside to show you care. And the girls Man Man know aren't just wild; they're feral children who "need pornography to help [them] sleep at night." It's a world of dirty alleys, sexually active hobos, and dancing skeletons. One where it rains spit and everyone has a broken umbrella. And somehow, in all the mess, everyone is in love

Around Town: A Calendar of Events in February

Feb 6: “Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: US Media and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” @ Downer's Grove Public Library, 1050 Curtiss St, 2pm
This documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites — oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others — work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.

Feb 9: “Life and Debt” @ Evanston Public Library, 7:30pm
This film dissects the "mechanism of debt" that is destroying local agriculture and industry while substituting sweatshops and cheap imports. Told from the point of view of Jamaican workers, farmers, government and policy officials.

Feb 10 & 24: Anti-Recruitment Demonstration @ Armed Forces Recruitment Center, 2600 W. Addison, 3-5pm

Feb 11 & 12: “Vagina Monologues” @ Tech Auditorium, 8pm on the 11th, 8 and 11pm on the 12th ($5)

Feb 18: The Labor Trail @ Conway Multicultural Center, 1104 S. Wabash Ave, 7-9pm
Public unveiling of The Labor Trail, a map of Chicago's history of working-class life and struggle. It is an effort to showcase the many generations of dramatic struggles and working-class life in the Chicago area's rich and turbulent past.

Feb 18-24: “The Take” @ Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave
In suburban Buenos Aires, 30 unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. All they want is to restart the silent machines. But this simple act — the take — has the power to turn the globalization debate on its head. (Documentary)

Feb 18 & 19: “The Motorcycle Diaries” @ McCormick Auditorium, 7-9pm and 10pm-12am ($3)
Film based on the journals of 23-year-old Che Guevara during his travels through South America.

Feb 25: Critical Mass @ Daley Plaza, 5:30pm (last Friday of every month)

Feb 26: Responsible Endowments Coalition regional workshop @ Northwestern University

Every Wednesday and Saturday: Food Not Bombs (3pm Wednesdays @ Loyola El station; 5pm Saturdays @ 18th and Loomis)

The Protest - December 2004

A Shower of Pity / Well - Being Rock Bottom
poem
Mateo Hinojosa (m-hinojosa@northwestern.edu)

An Attack on Peace and Academic Freedom
U.S. revokes Peace Studies scholar Tariq Ramadan’s visa
Pat Scharfe (p-scharfe@northwestern.edu)

Rejuvenating Resistance
Creating a positive message in protest movements
Rebecca Harris (r-harris-1@northwestern.edu)

Think Out
The importance of radical thought
Kyle Schafer (k-schafer2@northwestern.edu)

Activists in the Country Club
Activism at Northwestern in the 1960’s
Britt Gordon-McKeon (brittgm@gmail.com)

Property, Poverty, and the Color Line
Gentrification in Uptown
Midori Greenwood-Goodwin (mgg@northwestern.edu)

Marginalizing the Major Minority
Recognizing discrimination against Latin Americans
Kate Lawson (k-lawson@northwestern.edu)

Voting for Jesus
Being liberal and Christian in the American electorate
Crystal Nicholson (c-nicholson-1@northwestern.edu)

In a Shower of Pity / Well-Being Rock Bottom

by Mateo Hinojosa

I. In a Shower of Pity

The water in here flows like beer… uh that stuff that poured out my sick mouth, bringing sticking to it (to show me like a drunken-backward seer) what I'd gorged myself on up till too late last night. Now if only I could see clear, name my fear as my own since right now it seems my memories of the night won't stick still and I can't figure out which part is making me sick.. and these slick tile walls have grown (and I never had noticed the too-often moist mildew residue) and here I am curled up as if I'd never emerged from the womb, I feel like I'm in a leaky tomb - it must be raining outside and now my acid pain drains, but though my head's fully dead my belly still throbs with shame. Just as this water will not purify this ache, I don't remember ever fouling myself or any other member of that howling party despite the constant lubrication of tongue and gut with unpaid-for intoxicants… so many gratuitous rants with whatever random stranger had little enough sense to endeavor to endanger entertainment and ignorance (that solidarity in solidity of politesse so necessary to the fluidity and finesse of social superficiality) with a man who by now has lost his etiquette… I hollered, rough at the edges, as the crowd flowed loud about me, the stuff of insubstantial dreams – millions of faces scoffed and stalked off or simply melted into my willingly liquid lack of lucidity… I wish I could join that small part of me that swirls and swooshes insubstantially… together we'd trickle in unpretentious dripping twirls down these pipes, and around this building until boys and girls released and imbibed us (earnestly, without toying jibes)… then we'd be so close and we would sustain.

II. Well-Being Rock Bottom

The rock bottom smoothes the soles of my road-ragged feet with its bald, liquid-polished surface. What once welled up so abundantly as to strip stone of its strict outer bristles now merely traces miniscule rivulets that would not even sustain enough plants for a 2-year-old's survival. Glancing up, my corneas squeeze my pupils to mustard-seed size as the harsh Saharan sun jabs about the silhouettes peering down above me.

"What's blocking the flow?"

Raw and cracked, my wife's voice descends into the damp darkness. I cannot answer, for as I gaze about the stone fissures that surround me while my pupils dilate, I pinpoint no immediate impediment to the previously generous flow that allowed our village to give water to our crops, cattle, children… yet I also lack the courage to inform her that I discern no obstacle between ourselves and dry, scorched mummification.

So many years have strangled themselves since we no longer scrape the bottom of the bucket… actually, ever since the container lost its fundamental reason for being, the children have used it as a basket to hone their rock-throwing skills, a practice I fear for I feel my own hands itching to feel jagged stone weighing against my muscles, ready to be hurled at something, someone. When my hands just barely fit around the kola nut, I learned from my father to skip stream-softened stones, seeking the sleek ovals that would best deny gravity, those that most soar and least sink. Now: the stream cools the dreary machines that operate and extract far north of here and my father has lain dead, dry as dusty stone, since the last drought.

Now I scrape the bottom of the well. If I continue scraping, will the stone just get rough again, or will I reach something of worth? Or if I jump, get as high as I can, away from this lowly position, when I come crashing down will the ground give way and hurtle down with me on top through the liquid core and on to the other side of this world? I also have been worn down — can I deny gravity and not drown?

An Attack on Peace and Academic Freedom

by Pat Scharfe

Tariq Ramadan straddles two worlds. And he isn't alone. Millions of Muslim Europeans in Western Europe live at the intersection of two cultures, and their future is one of great importance for the future of Europe and the Middle East. Many Muslim Europeans look to Tariq Ramadan for vital guidance on how to be both fully Muslim and fully European. Even his opponents refer to him as a superstar, and his works are read widely. He is an academic who has written a dissertation piece on Islam and Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher. In April 2004, Time declared him one of the "100 Innovators" who are "changing the world." He has traveled to the United States to lecture over 30 times in the last five years.1 He came to both Northwestern's French Interdisciplinary Group and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 2002. So it was natural when Notre Dame University invited him to chair its newly expanded and endowed Peace Studies school. But a few weeks before the beginning of the fall semester, the State Department revoked the visa it had granted Ramadan in the spring.

To get an idea of Ramadan's symbolic importance, it is essential to understand his family and background. His grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 20th century. The Muslim Brotherhood nearly single-handedly created modern, mainstream political Islam in the Arab world. It's still banned by the oppressive military dictatorship in Egypt, where the movement is strongest. Not that Tariq Ramadan endorses its ideology. The distinction between grandfather and grandson seems lost on the State Department though.

Tariq Ramadan's work focuses on how to maintain a Muslim identity in Christian-majority societies. Fundamentalists like his grandfather espoused the old concepts of Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam; that is, the domain of war (Europe and other non-Islamic regions) and the domain of submission (Islamic lands). The Muslim Brotherhood looks to transform the Dar al-Islam, but Ramadan considers the whole world a Dar al-Shahada, a place "where we bear testimony." He says, "At the level of universality, 'Islamic' and 'Western' values are converging." True multiculturalism does not mean an uneasy coexistence of cultures, but ideally, a degree of cultural blending along with continuing diversity. Professor Ramadan believes that Islam is influencing Europe. In addition, he thinks that European Muslims should take inspiration from their countries of origin, but that they should also "disengage" from them in order to create a genuinely European Islam. In some ways, this is inevitable. Immigrant cultures necessarily create something organically new from the cultures from which they separate. But it's important to recognize this reality and act accordingly.

When reading his books and articles, Ramadan’s reputation among some conservative groups as a radical can be baffling. However, since few of these ideologues have read his works, the controversies have revolved around media feeding frenzies. Emblematic of this was a television debate between Ramadan and Nicholas Sarkozy, the maverick French finance minister who has ambitions for the French presidency. Sarkozy challenged him to condemn the hijab (Islamic veil) and the stoning of adulterous women. Ramadan refused both, although he called for a moratorium on the latter — an end to the practice until a consensus is created. Although there was no definitive statement in the Qur'an, Mohammad did, after all, once advocate stoning in the case of an adulterous man and woman. In some ways, Sarkozy might as well have challenged Christians to deny St. Paul's statement that wives should "submit" to their husbands. It would be difficult to do so outright without undermining the authority of the New Testament altogether. And after all, Ramadan said, "I won't change any thinking in the Muslim world if I issue a blanket condemnation of stoning to please the French interior minister."

The other media controversy that swirled around Ramadan stemmed from an article he wrote in October 2003 for a French Islamic website, entitled "Critique of the New Communitarian Intellectual." The article concerned a double standard against Muslims, where Muslims are seen as having a special duty to condemn terror and political Islam, although Jewish support for Israel's policies is seen as natural. In the wake of a thousand tragedies, nationalism is no longer a legitimate basis for political and philosophical thought, and yet even the great philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has indicated that simply, since he is a French Jew, he must support Israel. Ramadan wrote, "One can see that their position is communitarian, as Jews, nationalists, and defenders of Israel. The universal principles have disappeared." The backlash that resulted from this article has only confirmed the double standard that Ramadan sought to point out. The article's main shortcoming lies in that he ignores communitarianism and nationalism among other Westerners, which flourishes in America, of course, but in Europe, too. The charge of anti-Semitism, though, is mistaken and particularly ironic, given his history of fighting anti-Semitism. Israel's most respected newspaper, Ha'aretz, wrote a glowing article on his views in May 2002 in the wake of a campaign he ran against anti-Semitism in Europe.2

It is difficult to be a moderate and still fascinating. Most iconic figures who rise to prominence through their intellectual gifts take strong positions with elements of exaggeration. Ramadan's moderation is consistently surprising without employing exaggerated positions to make a point. Despite his status as a religion professor, he came out strongly against a movement to bring Muslim students out of French public schools into a system of private religious schools, saying this would lead to isolation and marginalization of the Muslim community. His lineage gives him credibility and has helped him become particularly popular among young Muslims who read his books despite his philosophical sophistication. Many of his favorite European philosophers critique his claims to the universality of European values, and yet he believes there is a universal unity of certain principles between Europe and Islam. He is an unfathomable and profoundly original moderate.

I don't expect State Department officials to have read his works; it doesn't even necessarily bother me that the only philosopher President Bush is familiar with is Jesus Christ. But Notre Dame's loss reflects something deeper about the Bush administration's policy toward the Arab world. It claims to be establishing democracy while attempting to remake Iraq in America's image through violence. The administration places limits on where democracy can go; thus al-Sadr's newspaper was shut down and the crisis of last April in Najaf was precipitated. The Turkish military, long backed by the US, has served as a "guardian" of Turkish secularism and its pro-American stance, staging coups as in 1996, whenever democracy begins to "stray." The revocation of Tariq Ramadan's visa marks another severe tightening of the administration's idea of democracy within limits — along with a healthy ignorance of who Professor Ramadan is. But incompetence is always the sibling of tyrannical behavior.

Hopefully, this attack on academic freedom will draw attention to the position he was about to assume: Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at the Joan Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Peace Studies is a growing field which has been given new attention in the wake of 9/11. Notre Dame, for example, received a $50 million bequest for the Kroc Institute from Joan B. Kroc, widow of Ray Kroc, the founder of the McDonald's food chain. The amount is the largest Notre Dame has ever received. The Peace Studies school is said to be one of the best in the nation, although recent events have caused a blow to it. The movement has been especially prevalent at Christian universities, but it is strong at scores of other universities across the United States. Ramadan's visa revocation should underline yet more the need for reconciliation between cultures, something that Peace Studies Institutes and Tariq Ramadan can help bring about. Peace Studies programs focus on the important details of solving specific conflicts the world over. But fundamentally, the great hope would be for the acceptance of diversity, where the democracy that we promote would be in no way limited to an imitation of the United States. Democracy is not limited to the ideologies of the Democrats and the Republicans. If there is no place for moderates like Ramadan, "democracy" as we try to propagate it has no future.

Resources:
1. Sontag, Deborah. "Mystery of the Islamic Scholar Who Was Barred by the U.S." The New York Times. 6 October 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. Algazy, Joseph. "My fellow Muslims, We Must Fight Anti-Semitism." Ha'aretz. 28 May 2002

Rejuvenating Resistance

by Rebecca Harris

The media announced on Nov. 7 that American troops in Iraq had stepped up their fighting and attacked Fallujah. I was deeply saddened by the death and destruction this renewed violence would entail. I wanted to express my opposition to Bush's continued abuse of power at the expense of innocent lives. The next evening, I went to downtown Chicago to protest.

I agree with and respect what the protest organizers were trying to do. Protests are one of the most direct ways for people to express dissent. They can be effective when leaders are willing to listen, when people are willing to be convinced. But I have a problem with the peace movement's reliance on conventional protests to get out its message. That night, I don't think our message got through.

When I marched on Nov. 8, I felt as though the apolitical and Republican bystanders saw us as another sort of invading army. Many of them looked simply tired — of politics and of us. I could see our irrelevance in their faces. To them, we were merely a mob. Our ceaseless, mindless shouting appeared uniform, robotic and cultlike — a direct contradiction of the values of critical thinking and diversity we say we espouse. (After all, what did Bush opponents think when they saw groups of people chanting "Four more years"?)

We were trying to be the nation's conscience, but our presentation made us easy to rationalize away. Our manner overshadowed our message. Our loudness steamrolled and goose-stepped over the spirit of empathy we were trying so hard to express.

Yes, Americans have good reason to be angry. Our president started an unjust war with Iraq on false pretenses. Millions of us are uninsured. Millions more work low-paying, unsatisfying jobs. Protests will remain a necessary way for people to express their anger. But we need more.

By spending so much time at the "Fuck Bush" rhetorical level, those who oppose the Iraq war throw away every possibility for those in the center, those undecided, and those who would join (but perhaps see authority differently or don't see any alternatives) to understand us as rational human beings fighting for the rights of innocent people.

In an essay critiquing current protests, Mark Sommer, a progressive radio host and media activist, wrote, "Other than in the most general terms, [protests] have utterly failed to articulate, let alone demonstrate, the many practical alternatives that have been devised to replace them. In the absence of clearly expressed and demonstrated alternatives, the great majority of those who sympathize with the critique of current policies decline to join the protests." Sommer proposes a new model for demonstrations: the “Global Village Gathering”.

"To be driven by fear and anger more than hope and determination is to catch the very illness we seek to combat," he wrote. "Where's the music, the dance, the life-affirming joy that's essential to constructive action? … We need to nurture the embryo of a vibrant and life-affirming society within the dying and death-driven husk of the obsolete existing order."

Sommer envisions gatherings that demonstrate concrete technologies for sustainability and solutions to current world problems, while emphasizing community, solidarity and interconnection. Though the gatherings would "decisively reject current trends and policies," that would not be what defined them. Participants would use music, dance, and stillness to show their unity and "facilitate coequal connections."

What is the goal of protesting? Usually, it's to stand up for one's principles — and send a message to the people in power and the citizens of a country by way of the media. Does that message get through?

People see the peace movement as opposing Bush, but I don't think its reasoning or its bigger criticisms come through, partly due to the limited spectrum of debate that the media imposes. Our ideas are reduced to rhetoric, slogans, a volleying of insults that becomes an irrelevant game. Instead of breaking down stereotypes, the tactics of marching and screaming encourage others to pigeonhole us. We end up reinforcing destructive ways of thinking that divide people into supposedly opposing groups — Democrats versus Republicans, liberal versus conservative, us versus them — instead of constructing something new and meaningful.

Another goal of protesting is to show and celebrate the power that we have as human beings. However, as Sommer wrote, "Paradoxically, to focus our greatest energy on protesting current policies and demanding that those in power change them is to reinforce their authority by conceding to them the sole power of making change."

Claiming space is an important part of the peace movement's expression of its power. Groups that challenge society and build community through the space they occupy don't do so by marching militaristically through an area while shouting. They work in other ways: dancing and setting up sofas in the street to refuse the destructive power of cars (Reclaim the Streets), serving food (Food Not Bombs), and creating artwork (graffiti artists). We need to celebrate the power we say we have. What is the point of gaining access to a street if all we're going to do is march through it yelling slogans?

Furthermore, the peace movement is in danger of losing its hopeful spirit, and its willing activists, if it continues to pour all of its resources into draining, confrontational protests. Yes, we need to speak truth to power and we need to criticize. But we also need a vision. We need a story, something to believe in and work for.

The religious right has its own visions of how beautiful its world would be: families not torn apart by divorce, people supported by close-knit churches and communities, an idyllic world where children respect their parents. The night before Christmas (you can rest assured) free trade proponents are nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of free markets (and their embodiment of the American Dream) dance in their heads. Any successful movement must be tied to a story, whether that story is a literalist interpretation of the Bible, an economics theory or the idea that all people are created equal. Although the left is fraught with disagreement over its "future plans," it could be so much more successful if it explored and put forth publicly a diversity of stories and ideas.

Counterculture author Tom Robbins once wrote that "Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it." We should heed his criticism and orchestrate a vivacious, positive opposition to the systems we see causing so much death and suffering around us — an opposition that is also an affirmation of our values, our hopes, and what we hold to be true.

Think Out

by Kyle Schafer

There is a stigma that comes with being considered a radical. Either you're for armed communist revolution or you're in some other way insane. You don't have any realistic solutions to problems in society, only dreams and ideals that will certainly fade when you are older. You talk about things normal people don't care about. You blame people, hate everyone else's way of life. You are these things, and you are marginalized. You don't matter to society because society writes you off.

Fuck all of that. I am a radical, and I am none of those things. I am a radical because I believe that I should try to think of a world that is in greater accordance with my ideals. I am a radical because I challenge myself to think outside of the boundaries of our current system, to think about where we could go instead of simply where we are. I am a radical because I believe in the importance of radical thought.

To me, radical thought means thinking beyond the next step, beyond tweaking the situation we find ourselves in and instead thinking of how to change the situation entirely. It is proactive instead of reactionary. It is positive instead of "anti-". It is necessarily idealistic because it is based on the idea that we can't get to a better world if we don't have ideas about what a better world looks like.

Radical thought is in itself a social movement, a movement without a narrow definition, without a narrow issue because it is a movement as much about the self as about society. It is not about pushing a particular idea but is instead about creating ideas, alternatives, and hope. It is inspiring people, empowering people and, in doing so, challenging the stigma that radical thought is marginal, unimportant, a waste of time. It is therefore challenging the reformist nature of traditional liberalism.

The reformist approach is adaptive and has allowed for some important changes, but it also has worked to significantly dampen progress and uphold the status quo. With this approach, societal pressure is quantified and change is granted only nominally, leaving mobilization for more significant change to die under the false impression that issues have been resolved. Previously upset citizens trying to address societal problems are thus made complacent, but the underlying structures that created those problems remain firmly intact.

Furthermore, reformist liberalism creates the framework within which we think, and it can stifle us. With its focus on fine-tuning what exists, it leads us to merely examine problems, to allow our thought to be defined by what is wrong instead of what could be right. We don't set our own agenda or lead with our own ideas; instead we react to everything that some mysterious "they" happens to fuck up, and in doing so we let them decide the basis of our discourse. We get frustrated and find ourselves backpedaling instead of moving forward. We are made to feel as if the world we want to see is impossible, and so we stop dreaming about it, stop trying to get there.

Radical thought challenges those trends in encouraging us not to merely complain but to dream and to act on our dreams, a process that does not end with the implementation of any one, given reform. This, however, is not to say that radicalism is the rejection of all reforms or a refusal to settle for anything short of utopia. Reforms are obviously necessary, but we have to be careful in how we frame them. This is where radical thought comes in. We must push for reforms that set the stage for yet more progressive reforms, that build rather than dissipate the movement for change. In order to make that happen, we must consider what kind of society we want to see.

It is easier not to make that consideration. Think about all of the things you are against, about all of the "anti-" movements and causes you might align yourself with: anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-racism, anti-sexism — the list of simplistic, practically meaningless slogans goes on. You can fight against all of these problems, push reform after reform or go to protest after protest, but the world in this view is a negative place. As an activist you are on the run. You are simply reacting instead of proactively strengthening yourself, your ideas, and our movement.

Now challenge yourself to think of all of the things that you are for, of what you would truly like to see. It isn't as easy, and it isn't as simplistic. But whatever you come up with, it is a vision that is likely to go beyond a world merely lacking whatever you oppose. It is more meaningful, more rewarding, more inspiring, more powerful than a complaint. It provides a stronger drive for progress both within you and within society. The world in this view is one of potential. Your work may not yield immediate results, but you know what you are working toward. If one reform is granted but the structure remains similar, you notice. You keep working, keep moving toward something you believe in, toward something that is a part of you. That drive, that inspiration is the power of radical thought — of challenging yourself to think beyond the boundaries of tweaking the system, to imagine a new system, a more beautiful world.

Activists in the Country Club

Political Activism at Northwestern in the 1960's
by Britt Gordon-McKeon

Step out onto Deering Meadow one of these days, close your eyes, and let yourself imagine what it felt like to be standing in that very spot on a day in May nearly 35 years ago. Let yourself feel the bodies pressing in all around you, the whispering and the shouting, the energy in the air. Look around at your fellow students, 5,000 strong, gathering together in this place because all of you feel so strongly about what is happening in your country and your world, and you want to find ways to individually and collectively act on your beliefs. Six days ago, you learned that Richard Nixon, after promising that the country was finally on its way to peace in Vietnam, had ordered American troops to invade Cambodia. Yesterday, you learned that four students at Kent State University were killed by the National Guard during a protest of that invasion. And today, you and 5,000 of your fellow students have come to vote on whether Northwestern University, like hundreds of other schools around the nation, should shut down.

People take their turns at the microphone, making impassioned speeches. People plead for calm, and people demand action. A group of students from Kent State who've traveled to Chicago speak about what happened on their campus. By the end of the night, you've voted on and passed overwhelmingly: the shutdown of Northwestern University indefinitely; the declaration of "The Free State of Northwestern," independent from the United States and repudiating its foreign policy; a call for the university to send a Northwestern delegation to Washington DC to express the views of the University community; and complete disclosure of all the University's investments and the sale of all war-related stocks. Within a few days, students and faculty begin to talk about turning Northwestern into a New University, where classes without grades will be taught collaboratively by students and faculty sharing their experiences, and where courses will attempt "to recognize the relationship between academics and politics in the University."

Over the next week, students spend days going door to door in Evanston talking to residents about the war. They stage demonstrations by standing side by side along Evanston streets by the hundreds. They rip down the heavy fences around the campus and use them to create a barricade across Sheridan Road near the Arch, shutting down the street for days and making it a site for bonfires and a short-lived attempt at a garden. Northwestern students are part of a 150,000-strong protest in Washington DC that leads President Nixon to fear revolution and post soldiers with machine guns around the White House. And when you finally vote to end the strike on May 13, classes and grades become optional, so that students who choose to may continue "working on the strike."

"Wait," you say skeptically, opening your eyes in 2004 and letting the misty visions of the past dissipate. "Why dwell on the past of so many years ago? That was the Sixties! How is it possibly relevant to the quiet, apathetic Northwestern of today? That was a completely different time."

An understandable reaction, but bear with me. Close your eyes one more time, and let yourself slip back to the past again. You stand on that crowded, grassy field as a senior, member of the Class of 1970.

But when you entered Northwestern, in the fall of 1966, if someone had tried to tell you that you'd see activism and protest and dissent come alive at Northwestern before you graduated, you would have laughed.

That sort of thing happened at schools like Berkeley and Michigan, not at Northwestern, the "Country Club of the North Shore." Not at Northwestern, where the wealthiest families in the Midwest sent their daughters and sons. Not at Northwestern, where the sophomore class the year you entered school included just five black students. Not at Northwestern, where half of men were in fraternities and two-thirds of women were in sororities, most of which included no blacks or Jews.

You were entering a school where women would be turned away from the dining halls unless they were wearing a skirt or dress; where women who stayed out past their 10 p.m. curfew could be denied the privilege of going out on weekend evenings or could even be suspended from classes; where it was against the rules for men and women to enter each others' dorm rooms.

Yet things were changing, even during your first year. The admissions department had expanded financial aid and begun aggressively recruiting lower and middle class students and blacks, starting with you, the Class of 1970, and every year the campus would get a little more diverse. Students for a Democratic Society, a small and relatively quiet student group which had drawn little attention from the student body since its founding in 1965, began to grow in size and become more active, and by late spring of 1967, drew 2,000 to their anti-war teach-in, although the event was strongly criticized for being "one-sided." That same spring, a student named Ellis Pines emerged as a candidate for president of the Student Senate on the platform of "Student Power"; a week later, he had defeated the "serious candidates" and won the election. He drew hundreds to his rallies, which he called "bitch-ins," in which he collected student grievances and led marches to the administration buildings. But when at one Student Power rally an American flag was displayed upside-down, the backlash against Pines and his movement was furious, and within a month of its creation, Student Power was disbanded.

When you came back to Evanston in fall 1967 as a sophomore, you learned that University President J. Roscoe Miller had declared the past spring's trial of parietal hours (in which a few hours a week were opened up to allow men and women to spend time together in their dorm rooms) a failure — parents and alumni had complained, and so they were once again forbidden. Students were outraged; several dorms declared themselves "autonomous living units," and the Student Senate issued an ultimatum to Miller, to which he acquiesced in less than a month. By your senior year, nearly all of these restrictive in loco parentis rules would be gone.

Most students were focused on these sorts of issues, but Students for a Democratic Society and other groups continued to grow and to keep issues like civil rights and the Vietnam War in the student body's attention. In February 1968, SDS organized a protest of Dow Chemical, producer of napalm, recruiting on Northwestern's campus. The demonstration drew 500 students, who gathered at the recuitment site and then made an unscheduled detour to the administration buildings.

As the Daily Northwestern reported the next day, "The message, as the leaders of the demonstration put it, was 'We have to look at our own lives and see how we contribute to this system. Then we must organize and redirect the uses of this university.'" Yet after the high-visibility protest was over, most of the students returned to their daily lives, and SDS returned to a largely quiet state.

In the face of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, riots across the country, and increasing black student activism, black students at Northwestern seized the moment in spring 1968, issuing demands and then beginning a sit-in at the bursar's office on May 3.

110 of the 120 black students on campus were involved in the sit-in and won many of their demands, including a University commitment to admit black students in proportion to their percentage of the population (including an emphasis on recruiting poor blacks), the creation of an African American studies program, and the creation of the Black House. It was during this time that an Ohio State student wrote to her friend at Northwestern: "It has completely surprised everyone down here to learn that the most apathetic school in the Big Ten is finally doing something."

But the administration's decision to negotiate with the black students received scathing criticism from alumni, trustees, and the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, and it became clear that it was extremely unlikely that the administration would be so "soft" on protests again.

The summer of 1968 saw Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy's death, violent clashes between demonstrators and police at the Democrats' presidential convention in Chicago, and the Democrats' nomination of sitting Vice-President Hubert Humphrey over anti-war candidates including Eugene McCarthy. That fall, when you returned to campus for your junior year, SDS was drawing more interest than ever — over 100 people showed up at the first meeting of the year — but they did little to capitalize on this committment, at least in terms of reaching out to the larger community. They began to make statements to the Daily Northwestern about their belief that "the system" uses demonstrations as a catharsis and that "probably the days of peaceful demonstrations on college campuses are nearly over." As the elections neared and anti-war protesters met Humphrey at nearly every campaign stop, Northwestern's SDS ran a "Don't Vote" drive, and in November, Richard Nixon was elected President with a slim lead in the popular vote but a more decisive electoral win.

The following spring, when black students entered the Triangle fraternity house in response to a brother's treatment of a black woman, they caused significant property damage. The discipline process for these students became a cause of great concern on campus, culminating in a long hunger strike of black students and white sympathizers. The hunger strikers were barely acknowledged, let alone taken seriously, by the administration.

Soon after, a small-scale non-violent SDS demonstration during ROTC drills on Deering resulted in a harsh disciplinary crackdown which ignored abundant eyewitness testimony and resulted in the suspension of one student from Northwestern for a full year, a punishment that left him vulnerable to the draft and infuriated students. The next week, 600 students were involved in disrupting ROTC classes. Yet finals were beginning and the end of the school year was near, and interest in the issue dissipated over the summer.

The following school year saw burgeoning student interest in a wide variety of issues, from women's liberation, to student and faculty representation on the Board of Trustees, to activism around pollution and the environment (including calls for University divestment from companies for environmental reasons), to a movement to abolish grades at Northwestern — most of these largely separate from the efforts of radical students on campus. SDS, instead, was caught up in internal conflict and was becoming increasingly radical; that summer, the national group had splintered into a number of factions, including the Weather Underground. The main contributions of SDS at Northwestern were a series of ultimatums to the administration in December; these were not taken seriously by most other students, let alone administrators, and a January attack to damage the building where ROTC held classes.

And then, on April 30, President Nixon announced that the US had invaded Cambodia, and students at Northwestern and across the nation protested. And after four students were killed at Kent State Universitiy on May 4, Northwestern — like hundreds of other colleges and universities across the country — shut down. Day after day, thousands of students poured into Deering Meadow to talk and listen and vote on proposals, and then flowed out into the streets of Evanston. 7,000 students trekked up to one rally at the football stadium that week. Formally dressed and genuinely bewildered Trustees sat in dorms and Greek houses to talk with students about their thoughts and feelings. The National Guard was called in by Evanston officials. Suddenly at Northwestern, anything seemed possible.

Yet as you return to the present, you might not want to forget that the stories of Northwestern 35 years ago bring not only hope, but warnings and wisdom. Because for all the sound and fury, for all of the suprising support for a radical restructuring of the university, the reality was that in 1970, not much changed. Much time and focus was channelled into planning a summer bus tour in which students would speak to people nationwide about the strike, which fell through for lack of funds; and a proposal for classes to be cancelled for the two weeks before the November elections each year, which was debated by faculty and administrators well into the summer and eventually rejected.

Sure, grades became optional for Spring Quarter 1970, but in the fall grading and classes had returned to the way they always were. Yes, trustees eventually made the university's stockholdings public, but the listings were simply passed along to the new student Stock Portfolio Advisory Commitee for study, and discussions of divestment faded away. The much heralded transformation of Northwestern into a New University was wished for by most students, but those students lacked the ideology, commitment, and understanding to carry those efforts forward.

And one group which had the potential to help transform that energy and enthusiasm into radical thought and proposals for concrete change, SDS, was largely disconnected from the strike. Their ever-growing radicalization over the past several years had created a gap between the activists and mainstream students. In fall 1969 in their short-lived publication Potempkin, they were writing things like: "Organizing on a college campus such as Northwestern where most of the students are part of the pig anyway doesn't make as much sense as getting things accomplished on that campus in solidarity with the oppressed masses of the world . . . The fear of alienating potential members no longer makes sense at NU where there are no new potential members," and "SDS must be ready for militant action . . . KICK THE ASS OF THE RULING CLASS; ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE WORKER! OFF ROTC AT ALL COST!" Once the strike began, SDS seemed both unwilling and unable to attempt to breach the growing gap between them and mainstream students, instead choosing actions such as ransacking ROTC offices.

The May strike turned out to be, on the whole, a genuinely mainstream endeavor at Northwestern. It was a remarkable opening, in which the majority of students on campus began, practically overnight for most, to see themselves as part of "the movement." But no one seized the moment to suggest new and radical ways of thinking and acting to these thousands of energized students. Most students' feelings and thoughts were never pushed beyond the superficial, and the atmosphere dissipated more quickly than it had come, never again to be recaptured. Just a few months later, with the new school year, most students fell back into the old familiar patterns they were so accustomed to, and the crazy days and weeks of the previous spring felt like a dream. No one seemed to understand how it had ever happened at a place like Northwestern.

Property, Poverty, and the Color Line

by Midori Greenwood-Goodwin

Starbucks, which has long been a symbol of globalization, is also a symbol of gentrification. There is not a Starbucks on every corner; there are only Starbucks in predominately wealthy, and mostly white, neighborhoods. If you, like me, are a suburbanite, then you are probably not aware of the process of gentrification. However, you have seen the results. By definition, gentrification is "the restoration of run-down urban areas by the upper-middle class," resulting in the displacement of lower-income people.

I would like to reverse this definition and state that gentrification is the displacement of lower-income people, predominately minorities, in order to restore run-down urban areas. When a Starbucks pops up on the local corner in an urban neighborhood, it is not a sign of prosperity for the people who have lived there for generations but a sign that the middle class population has grown large enough for a Starbucks to be supported. This is not to say that lower-income urban populations do not want coffee shops, but that they want independent coffee shops. Conversely, this is not to say that the middle-class urban populations are against independent coffee shops. This is merely a statement that if it were not for the middle and upper class populations, Starbucks would not even consider setting up shop on the neighborhood corner. It is important to realize that the growth of an urban area by gentrification does not improve the area for people that already live there; gentrification makes the urban environment "better" by moving in higher-income people.

There is a long history of gentrification in Uptown, easily traced by changing property values. About 15 years ago, many middle class people began to move into Uptown because, as Eric Snyder points out, "where else in the city can [they] make a return of 20 percent?" Everyday Uptown is becoming even more appealing to the middle class. It is an excellent location, with Lakeview condominiums and relatively low crime compared to the greater city of Chicago. With the introduction of every new Starbucks, Borders, and any gym and chain grocery store, Uptown becomes a middle-class neighborhood. It is no longer a predominately poor area; approximately one-third of residents are home owners, one-third renters, and one-third Single Male Occupancies (SMOs) and other low-cost housing. Even this current diversity of residences, both ethnically and socio-economically, is in danger of being lost, as the middle-class buys more condos, the property values rise, and the poorer residents of Uptown can no longer afford to live in their homes. Uptown is on its way to becoming another Lincoln Park.

However, local Uptown residents and organizations, such as Couraj and ONE, are fighting against organizations like the Uptown Chicago Commission (UCC). ONE is the Organization of the NorthEast, whose goal is to build a "successful multiethnic, mixed-economic community in Uptown and neighboring Edgewater."1 Couraj is specifically focused on Uptown issues, like building more low-cost housing for families, along with redistribution of taxes to put more money into schools and alternative policing programs. As Couraj and ONE look to support a more mixed-economic community, UCC is focused on improving the neighborhood fiscally. This is not to say that UCC is for the displacement of lower-income residents, but that their goals to uplift Uptown result in fewer housing options for lower-income families and individuals. The UCC supports the rise of the aforementioned institutions as positive development in the community as evident by the statements made by David Rowe, the Executive Director of the UCC:

"We want residents' money to stay in the community. Residents complain about not having enough retail in their community. We support more opportunities for home ownership in Uptown and preserving and upgrading low-income housing. A big problem is that the Uptown community lacks market-rate home ownership. We want all kinds of housing."

"The reality is the community needs safe places like Starbucks and Borders. In the past, independent coffee shops in the area could not last because of gangs and crime. The city needs to look at the project holistically and gentrify without displacing residents."

At first, I myself did not understand how Starbucks was such a negative development. I figured, "Hey, there will be a few more jobs with health and dental care that pay more than minimum wage." I didn't think about how Starbucks was only moving in along with the middle-class population. To say that Starbucks and Borders are better, because independent coffee shops were ridden with crime, is a blatant lie. Rowe says that he believes in the value of mixed-income housing and strongly believes that all Uptown residents should be able to afford to stay where they already live. Yet he also believes that crime problems will be solved by having more chain businesses, like Target, and herein lays the problem: can you really have larger low-income population and popular chain stores? David Rowe's ideas about how to improve Uptown exemplifies the middle class's perception of gentrification; he sees the redevelopment of the area as an urban improvement and not as the displacement of others.

People such as Jacinda Bullie and Helen Shiller, both of whom work closely with Couraj, understand that development has to provide for all the residents and not simply the middle-class home owners. In the last year, the majority of new housing complexes were comprised of condominiums costing upwards of $400,000. Currently there are plans to convert one of the last SMOs into an apartment complex, which would effectively create about 30 homeless men. Along this poverty line, we can see the direct correlation to the color line; for example, the racial demographic of SMOs in Uptown is almost 90 percent black and the racial demographic of low-cost housing in Uptown is predominately minority. To hear Jacinda Bullie talk about gentrification and the history of Uptown is to understand that the process itself is intertwined with racism. In the late 1970s, property owners would burn down their buildings in order to break their rent-control contracts and sell the land to new developers at a higher cost. In doing so, hundreds of families, again predominately minority families, were forced to move to poorer, less safe areas of Chicago or out of the city altogether. Today, instead of burning down the buildings, property owners report current residents to the police on charges of prostitution, vandalism, drugs, and more. After so many calls are made against a person, they are evicted. Thus the police become an integral part of gentrification, as the physical enforcers of the process. The police are in charge of enforcing eviction calls and, within Uptown, police brutality has become a serious problem, as people have wrongly been evicted or accused of drug crimes. These interrelated problems boil down to one issue: the redevelopment of property as it leads to gentrification is not simply the displacement of poor people, but the displacement of blacks and other minority people of Uptown.

Along with the concerns of race, gentrification also deals with the issues of crime being perceived as a result of low-income residents, even though the crime incidents in Uptown are few. Furthermore, when people speak of low-income housing, a correlation between drugs and low-income populations is often made. When Mark Dupont, a former member of the UCC, shared his first experiences in Uptown with me, he spoke of the apartment complex next door, where one man would sell drugs out of his window, which he said brought about lots of "characters." Mark also spoke about the first time he was mugged, along with another incident where his neighbor was attacked near her car. These crimes are not isolated incidents; to say that Uptown has no crime would be a misstatement. Still, the crime rates in Uptown are some of the lowest crime rates in Chicago, and Uptown is not unsafe because there are poor residents. Nevertheless, the popular media perception of Uptown is one filled with drug addicts and sellers and the crime that comes along with it. Many of the new middle-class families believe the hype; young couples move to Uptown because they can afford it but then leave the city when they want to raise their children, according to Jacinda Bullie. While crime is not a result of low-income residents, it will take a lot of work to convince others that this is true.

These are many of the problems that divide Uptown, but no matter the growing class divide, everyone in Uptown is proud of its diversity and hopes to maintain it both ethnically and economically. Uptown has already begun to unite the community on both sides in efforts to restore the area without gentrifying it as well. There is not one organization for the betterment of Uptown that does not take pride in the community's diversity. Thus, the problem now lies in how to make Uptown better. The district's alderman, Helen Shiller, supports the building of low-cost housing for families and seniors on an empty lot called Wilson Yards in order to "keep people in the community." While the UCC also supports building low-cost housing, they, like Mark Dupont, also support the building of larger retail stores on the lot in order to "keep money in the community." Together, these individuals and aforementioned organizations, along with organizations like Kumba Lynx (a political and artistic organization that paints historical murals and organizes protests), The People's Music School (a free classical music school for all ages) and CAPS (an alternative policing program) are working to foster diversity and prevent the further gentrification of Uptown.

Resources:
1.http://www.globalchicago.org/reports/march/MedillReport/globalization%20comes% 20to%20uptown.pdf
2.http://12.17.79.6/ctznicam/ctznicam.asp
3.http://www.insideonline.com/site/epage/4246_162.htm
4. Jacinda Bullie
5. Helen Shiller
6. Mark Dupont
7. Mark Kaplan

Marginalizing the Major Minority

by Kate Lawson

In the words of South Park counselor Mr. Maki, "Racism is bad, mmmmkay?"

In today’s society, racism is a factor I can link to most disparities, from the economic to the social realms. The worst types of racism are those that are all but silent and seemingly imbued in our culture, such as current racism against Latin Americans in the US. I am speaking as someone from Texas, a state with a large number of Mexican immigrants. We do not have the luxury of ignoring them as is done here. Most Chicago unions don't even have translators, meaning that blue collar workers here are deprived of the same opportunities as their equally hard-working peers. Companies that hire hard-working immigrants (and there are many more of them than we are led to believe) should make accommodations for them to have fair treatment and representation of their interests when negotiating with company management. It is common knowledge that, instead, these companies frequently hire laborers, give them fake social security numbers, deny them of benefits such as health care, and pay them significantly less than their non-immigrant workers.

The discrimination does not stop there. English as a Second Language (ESL) programs are severely underfunded (thank you, Dubya), cheating students whose parents came here in search of a better life through education. We deny them the American dream that we ourselves tout. The stereotype of Mexicans mowing lawns and working on roads is hardly taboo, even in a culture where such stereotypes against African Americans and Arab Americans, Irish Americans, and Jewish Americans are responded to with outrage. I have news for you, America: according to The New York Times of January 12, 2004, Latin Americans are the largest minority group in the US. Why, then, do we not hear from them? Where is the Latino Jesse Jackson? Where is their chapter of the NAACP or the ADL? It's simple: American educational and social systems are centered on the theory that Latin Americans cannot and will not achieve equal status. It starts at an early age when primary schools either underfund or totally eliminate ESL programs for children who speak Spanish at home. As a result, their educational experience does not compare to that of their English speaking classmates. When teachers and parents have conferences and the school administration actually bothers to hire Spanish translators, they often use private services whose translators are either unskilled, underpaid, or have alternative agendas. For example, a special education teacher telling parents that their children need slower classes has been translated as "your children are retarded." I have family members who work in public school systems in Texas, and this problem is not uncommon at all. Furthermore, schools use a middle-class, English measurement of success. The standards for ESL students are all but impossible to reach, and they respond by having the largest dropout rates of any minority in the country. They are further taught that they must conform to "white" behavioral and cultural standards. This is most apparent through the lack of recognition of important holidays in their calendar. How many people are excused from work on Cinco de Mayo? How about Dia De Los Muertos? Hispanic culture is not celebrated here the way most other cultural groups are. In fact, we have a day off to celebrate the colonization and oppression of Native Americans: Columbus Day.

Latin American culture is totally devalued and educational opportunities few and far between. The few that make it into the business world are plagued by stereotypes of the "lazy Mexican" and are, much like African Americans in the same position, expected to talk and behave white. And what can they do about job discrimination? There is no NAACP for Mexican Americans. A report issued by the US Commission on Civil Rights of April 1999 points out that the advocacy groups that do represent Latin Americans are poorly coordinated at the national level and therefore all but unable to enact large scale change. The powerful "minority advocacy groups," such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are not concerned with the plight of Latin Americans because, in Bush America, many other groups have recently become alienated as well. The reason the Patriot Act received such a violent reaction was that it pushed a relatively accepted group, Arab Americans, out of the proverbial fold. Essentially, racism against them was created and/or sanctioned, and groups like the ACLU feel that they can actually change the Patriot Act, do something to stop this racism. Racism against Latin Americans, however, has long been perpetuated. We are used to and comfortable with having Mexicans outside of the fold; however, we are used to not seeing them in our communities. At this juncture, when Latin Americans outnumber African Americans, things can go one of two ways: the Latin American community will organize and begin to fight systemic racism, or it will be pushed further underground. I fear the latter.

In this last election, right wing groups looked up the names of various voters in their districts, found the ones that sounded Hispanic, and forced the counties to hold hearings on the persons' immigration status, challenging the voting status of over 12,000 voters (Arlington Start Telegram, October 28, 2004). If this were to happen to any other ethnic group, there would be a massive outcry, but it was merely buried in single paragraph articles in the "In Short" sections of local newspapers.
As university students, we have a chance to change the world around us. We may very well be the leaders of tomorrow, and we must not ignore such a large community, and in the present, there are things we can do. ESL programs at public schools here need bright volunteers who can speak Spanish. Advocacy groups in Chicago need volunteers. The systemic nature of this racism can seem paralyzing, and that's part of the reason why very little has been done to stop it, but we must not lose hope. African Americans were oppressed for hundreds of years, but now they are closer to equality than ever before. We need to give Latin Americans the same chance.

Voting for Jesus

by Crystal Nicholson

I'm coming out of the closet. As a Christian.

It's a sad state of affairs when Christians are embarrassed to discuss their religion with other voters and living as a religious liberal feels like a carefully constructed lie. Exposure risks scorn and dismissal from both sides of the political spectrum. But yes, I am a "Jesus freak." And I feel that my religion has been misconstrued and misrepresented in the past election.

Both candidates ran campaigns of selective morality and censored scripture. I usually try to keep my faith as far away from politics as possible out of respect for the atheists, Jews, Muslims, and many other religious people who also live under our laws. But if we as a country insist on entangling faith with partisan politics, we might as well examine all issues through the lens of religion instead of invoking it for specific bursts of persecution.

I find it hard to get excited about rhetoric for the rights of the unborn when we are forsaking the living children in Iraq. I find it hard to become indignant about two men loving each other when straight urban couples are losing their jobs, their rent money, and their marriages. And I find it hard to protest stem cell research which would help the living when our tax dollars are funneled into researching new and more efficient ways to kill.

Do our morals have borders? Do our ethics only apply to Americans, and privileged Americans at that?

In this election, many Americans were overwhelmed with the conflicting facts and opinions surrounding foreign, economic and social policy. In such a heated election, the idea that one candidate aligned more closely with Christian ethics served as a security blanket for undecided churchgoers.

Twenty-two percent of voters made their decisions based on "moral issues," according to a poll by CNN. For many of these undecided voters, the choice came down to tangible issues they felt they could understand and take a clear "moral stance" on. These two main "Biblical" issues were gay marriage and abortion.

I'm not writing to argue one side or the other of the moral canyon of opinion that divides Christians on these two issues. What I don't understand is why "Christian" ethics were not applied to all platform issues. What many religious voters have seemed to miss is that all the issues of the past election are "Biblical" issues. They all carry moral undertones, and they all reflect our view of human life and our willingness to act upon the word of love and mercy. Religious voters need to meditate on the moral implications of all the issues, not just the ones receiving media and pulpit attention.

I don't have President Bush's direct line to God, but I do have the Bible's words on issues from protecting the environment to helping the poor. Somehow the conservative Christians have claimed the copyright on abortion and gay issues while brushing the other election issues aside as earthly and partisan. The Bible does, however, give words of inspiration on these topics and devotes much more space to them than the issue of homosexuality. Which candidate's platform was closest to the building blocks of Christianity? In the spirit of copulation of church and state, I'll let the Bible report, and you decide.

The Environment:
"The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." - Genesis 2:15
The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 23:35-40) urges man to be the steward of the earth, and take care of what God gave us.
Many of Jesus' parables in the New Testament involved agricultural allegories concerning sowing and reaping the earth.
"The earth is the Lord's." - Psalms 24:1

The Economy:
"Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble." - Psalms 41:1
"Woe to those who make unjust laws... to deprive the poor of their rights." - Isaiah 10:1-2

Foreign Relations:
"Blessed are the peacemakers." - Matthew 5:9
"As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone."
- Romans 12:18-21

Over the centuries, Christians have acquired the reputation of warring, close-minded bigots. These characteristics couldn't be farther from the teachings of Christ. I can't say that America as a "Christian nation" has been proactive in refuting those charges. But if Christian voters could look past the partisan rhetoric, the self-righteousness, and the political leaders vying for reputation as the most religious candidate — if voters can look past all this into their hearts and into the Bible, perhaps progress is on the horizon. Bob Dylan sings, "You never ask questions when God's on your side." Next time you hear someone in power invoke God's name for a certain issue, challenge it by going to the source and deciding for yourself.