two feet in.

Priorities

I'm so glad this was at the top of the Google News page, and there are 663 more news articles on the same subject.  Thank god we've got our priorities straight.

I am wearing green today.

Please read this information about the Jena Six especially if you are not familiar with this case of modern-day lynching.  Today is the National Day of Action:

Last fall in Jena, Louisiana, the day after two Black high school students sat beneath the "white tree" on their campus, nooses were hung from the tree. When the superintendent dismissed the nooses as a "prank," more Black students sat under the tree in protest. The District Attorney then came to the school accompanied by the town's police and demanded that the students end their protest, telling them, "I can be your best friend or your worst enemy... I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen."¹
   
A series of white-on-black incidents of violence followed, and the DA did nothing. But when a white student was beaten up in a schoolyard fight, the DA responded by charging six black students with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

It's a story that reads like one from the Jim Crow era, when judges, lawyers and all-white juries used the justice system to keep blacks in "their place"--but it's happening today. The families of these young men are fighting back, but the odds are stacked against them. Together, we can make sure their story is told, that this becomes an issue for the Governor of Louisiana, and that justice is provided for the Jena 6. It starts now. Please add your voice Here.

Some more info:

The noose-hanging incident and the DA's visit to the school set the stage for everything that followed. Racial tension escalated over the next couple of months, and on November 30, the main academic building of Jena High School was burned down in an unsolved fire. Later the same weekend, a black student was beaten up by white students at a party. The next day, black students at a convenience store were threatened by a young white man with a shotgun. They wrestled the gun from him and ran away. While no charges were filed against the white man, the students were arrested for the theft of the gun.²

That Monday at school, a white student, who had been a vocal supporter of the students who hung the nooses, taunted the black student who was beaten up at the off-campus party and allegedly called several black students "nigger." After lunch, he was knocked down, punched and kicked by black students. He was taken to the hospital but was released and was well enough to go to a social event that evening.³

Six Black Jena High students, Robert Bailey (17), Theo Shaw (17), Carwin Jones (18), Bryant Purvis (17), Mychal Bell (16) and an unidentified minor, were expelled from school, arrested and charged with second-degree attempted murder. Bail was set so high -- between $70,000 and $138,000 -- that the boys were left in prison for months as families went deep into debt to release them.⁴

The first trial ended last month, and Mychal Bell, who has been in prison since December, was convicted of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery (both felonies) by an all-white jury in a trial where his public defender called no witnesses. During his trial, Mychal's parents were ordered not to speak to the media and the court prohibited protests from taking place near the courtroom or where the judge could see them.

Wearing Green today:
ON SEPTEMBER 20, 2007 MYCHAEL BELL WILL BE SENTENCED. RAW TALENT IS ASKING YOU TO JOIN US AS WE WEAR THE COLOR GREEN THIS DAY TO PROTEST THE INJUSTICE OF THIS DECISION. WE BELIEVE THROUGH WEARING THE COLOR GREEN WE AS A PEOPLE ARE SYMBOLIZING GROWTH AND THE SURPASSING OF HATE.

GREEN= GROWTH & SURPASSING HATE!!!!!

And it is all well and good that I'm sitting in my comfy office wearing green.  The symbol is important, but I also recognize that working to understand and change the oppressive mechanisms of individual and institutional racism is more so, and a hell of a lot harder than digging my green shirt out of the dresser this morning.

You can download an excellent teaching guide about the Jena 6 and its historical context of American racism here.  Well worth your time even if you aren't a teacher.

A Love Supreme: Music is Spiritual #12

 

After many years of resisting it, I finally succumbed to the inevitable iPod ownership.  Now, having once been one to turn her nose up to the masses who wander the earth with wires hanging out of their ears, I find myself spending large chunks of my walking time with wires hanging out of my ears, and, god forbid, enjoying it.

Even more than enjoying it.  On a recent walk in the hills above my home I listened to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme from beginning to end (something that I have not done in years and years), and found the experience of hearing it while moving out amongst the world to be transcendently beautiful.  At the time I considered writing something about it and reviving the music is spiritual category on this here blog, but felt too limited in my explanatory powers to be able to say much of note.  Today, in Dragoncave (one of my favorite new blog discoveries), Art Durkee did what I had imagined, but in a far more knowledgeable and articulate way:

Do you think it odd to call a musical master a saint? I don't. In A Love Supreme, Coltrane speaks of the unity and necessity of God. Near the end of his life, I remember reading years ago in a biography of Trane, he was asked what he wanted to do next. He replied, I want to become a saint. That's a good ambition for any artist.

Don't get it wrong: Trane wasn't speaking from ego or spiritual ambition; he was speaking from humility, and the desire to transcend ego. His late musical works, including A Love Supreme and Ascension, among others, all speak of that yearning, and that straining towards the Divine. This is what artists who are also mystics do: strain towards Union.

Yes, I think the music is rising, in my estimation, it's rising into something else, and so will have to find this kind of place to be played in. —John Coltrane

Durkee goes on to write, "Creativity is a spiritual practice, even a religious one. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart say that when we create, we are participating in the Creation, both the original Creation, and its continuous, ongoing process of growth and change. Music is one of the most authentic forms of worship, I believe."  I agree. 

Read the whole piece here, preferably while listening to the Branford Marsalis Quartet performing Acknowledgment, the first of the four-part Love Supreme suite.
 

Google Finance and Me

When I posted the piece by Kathy Kelly the other day, I made it on to the Google Finance page!  That's right, Two Feet In was featured prominently among the stock quotes and latest market predictions.  Apparently, it was the presence of this sentence that did it:

"Yet by obediently funding the war machine, most of [the democratic candidates] play predictable, scripted roles in a dull and murderous war without end. The victors are always the same, the bloated and menacing producers of weapons,--General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, General Electric,--the fat cats whose menacing force always wins. The losers can watch their children become crippled, starved, maimed or dead. Period."

I discovered this particularly ironic and highly amusing aberration of the status quo because I checked the blog's stats and saw that I had a few hundred hits from there, a place that does not generally link to my little anti-war, anti-capitalist corner of the web.

You've just gotta love these internets sometimes.

(oooh, and I especially like the particular juxtapostion of headlines/titles up there...)

Sometimes We All Lose

Kathy Kelly (who I had the opportunity to meet and spend an afternoon with a few months ago) is back in Amman, Jordan.  She's got a piece out today that tells the story of a family of Iraqi refugees though a lens of Tom and Jerry cartoons:

This week, the U.S. government will continue deliberating over how much money to earmark for particular defense expenditures. They will serve the insatiable demands of the largest lobby on Capitol Hill, the defense lobby, which is asking for a total of $648.8 billion dollars.       

Even Senator Kennedy, one of the few Senators advocating measures to benefit Iraqi refugees, recommends allotting $100 million in the 2008 defense budget for a new General Electric fighter engine. (The Boston Globe recently reported that the Air Force said it didn't even need the item.)

Democratic candidates claim they are interested in ending the Iraq war. They claim concern      for Iraqi victims. I believe these claims. Yet by obediently funding the war machine, most of them play predictable, scripted roles in a dull and murderous war without end. The victors are   always the same, the bloated and menacing producers of weapons,--General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, General Electric,--the fat cats whose menacing force always wins. The losers can watch their children become crippled, starved, maimed or dead. Period.

Tom and Jerry is much loved in Amman because "sometimes Tom wins and sometimes Jerry, and sometimes they both win... you love them both."  As Kelly so eloquently writes, this particular show isn't quite like that.  However, my feeling is that when the victors are always the same bloated and menacing producers of weapons then we all lose, albeit some of us more comfortably than others.  We who can so easily ignore families like Umm Daoud's may have lost our humanity but at least we can still drive our SUV's.

Obama & Occupation

Perhaps you will forgive me if I don’t necessarily tow the line when it comes the Obama-Mania that is currently sweeping my neighborhood -- the number of bumper stickers within a three block radius is incalculable.  I’m not saying that Obama wouldn’t be an improvement over Bush in significant ways, but just that I’ve yet to see how he is distinguished from main-stream, corporate Democratic line, especially as related to foreign policy. 

And, when it comes to foreign policy, I'm still looking for the difference between that line and the Republican line.  Even, Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s conservative editorial page editor points out some of the parallels between Obama and Mitt Romney:

FRED HIATT, WASHINGTON POST - [Barack Obama and Mitt Romney] have laid out their foreign policy visions in parallel articles, released prior to publication in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. And after you cut through some of their campaign rhetoric, here's what you find:

(1) The two candidates' programs are strikingly similar to each other.

(2) Both are strikingly similar to Bush administration policy.

(3) And both, far from retreating to isolationism in the face of Iraq and other challenges, set forth their own wildly ambitious calls for American leadership and the promotion of American values. "Boldness" is an operative word for both of them.

You can read more about how the “similarities dwarf the differences” here.

There’s a good interview with Anthony Arnove up on ZNet, “Why Bush Won’t Admit Failure in Iraq,” where, among other things, Arnove speaks to what it will take to end the occupation (no, not electing Barack Obama):

I THINK it will take much more pressure at home and also within the rank and file of the U.S. military in Iraq.

We have to take advantage of the cracks that are opening within the establishment to campaign vocally and publicly against the war, involving greater numbers of the people and communities affected by the war at home--which has gone hand in hand with the war against the Iraqi people.

We need to put pressure on both the Democrats and Republicans, and not simply collapse into a lobbying wing for the Democratic Party.

There will be immense pressure on the antiwar movement to give up its independence and get behind whatever candidate the Democrats put forward in 2008, no matter what their limitations. People will tell us this is how we can be relevant.

I think the antiwar movement would be irrelevant, though, if we did this. We’ll be much more effective if we articulate our own principles and demands--including immediate withdrawal--and fight for them.

And we also need to defend and support those soldiers who in greater numbers are speaking out, refusing service, declaring conscientious objection and, at great personal risk, organizing against the war.

In particular, I think we all need to help build Iraq Veterans Against the War, which is playing a vital role in building a movement of Iraq vets and also active-duty troops who can bring an end to this occupation.

Arnove ends the interview with this thought -- "So there are grounds for optimism, but it will take a lot more than hoping for the best to end the occupation--and also to avert other disasters in Iran and elsewhere."  So, forgive me dear neighborhood, but it's not likely there will be an Obama bumper-sticker on my car in 2008.  When he demonstrates that the differences dwarf the similarities I'll consider it.

Tattoo Identity

A father plants an olive tree when his son is born. 

Years later, that son, now a father himself, has the following words tattooed onto his arm:  "My age is the same as the olive tree."

"My age is the same as the olive tree," reads the blue tattoo on Qaisar Tariq al-Essawi's left shoulder. Al-Eassawi, 36, got the tattoo so his family and close friends could recognize his remains if he ended up in a morgue. "I selected this wording because only my family and close friends know about our olive tree which was planted by my father when I was born," al-Essawi, a father of two boys, told IRIN in Baghdad. One response to sudden and violent death which has become commonplace in Iraq's turmoil, is the emergence of a new subculture - the etching of tattoo identities on people who fear becoming an unclaimed body in a packed morgue. It is more than just another grim footnote in a nation brimming with sad stories. It points to how deeply war and sectarian bloodshed have transformed the way Iraqis live today and confront the constant possibility of death.

This is the world that we create.