You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2010.
The Oread Hotel, ostentatiously built atop “Mount Oread” next to the campus of the University of Kansas, opened in January. Its location on the top of the largest hill in town (that would be “Mount Oread”), and thereby it’s immediate status as the tallest thing in any direction for miles (some townsfolk non-jokingly call it a “sky scraper”) is controversial. Some people in the community aren’t entirely sure that they’re pleased that wealthy developers erecting a private, for-profit business are able to so drastically change their city’s skyline without community consultation. Others think it looks like a giant medieval prison. Still others think it adds “class” to a neighborhood characterized by cheap, rundown housing and nicknamed the “student ghetto”.
The controversy has only escalated since the appearance of a vandal’s ominous message on it’s highest wall: SHOUT PEACE. Just read the comments section on the local newspaper’s story: The Oread hotel falls victim to vandals.
In a town/city of Lawrence’s size, it’s kind of a “round up the usual suspects” sort of situation. But what I love/hate about this little scenario is how a little bit of optimistic, anti-violence graffiti has rocked the whole community, creating contention, divisions, and sad head shaking about what the world is coming to.
Yes, what must the world be coming to when an activist shouts peace from the rooftops? Vandals! Anarchy! Graffiti! Urban crime!
Now that I reside in New York, my view on the situation is rather different than what I imagine it would have been had I never left Kansas. Really, my only reaction is delight. Wealthy business owners and a “high class” establishment for elites have been angered, an anonymous townsperson spontaneously took back a public-facing wall, and a message of SHOUT PEACE was spread.
Hilarious. And awesome. Typical Kansas.
Every generation seems inclined to feel superior to the previous one. Everyone looks back with nostalgia to the mythical “good old days” because “young people these days” fucked everything up. Of course, we forget that the “good old days” were the days when we were children, and didn’t have any responsibilities. Or that, if we are members of older generations, and if we think the world is fucked up, it’s probably us that did it, seeing as how we’ve been around longer and helped shape the present. Let alone acknowledging that it was our sexual activity that brought about the younger generation we despise so much.
No, it’s so much easier to blame “the kids these days” than accept responsibility for our own fucked up world, and our own difficulty adjusting to its changes. I suppose that’s why magazines and newspapers are wont to publish the occasional hit piece on young generations. In the 80s and 90s they trashed “Generation X”. Well, now they’ve moved on to whining about “millennials” (aka Gen Y).
Here’s a typical youth hit job, grâce à l’Australie: Gen Y too lazy and unfocused to hire – bosses
Here’s some more:
10 surefire ways to rein in millennials
Study Confirms: Millennials Are Apathetic
College students today: overconfident or just assured?
Our Sketchy Future: Millennials
Survey Shows Teens, Young Adults Believe They Are Healthy Despite Bad Habits
Your kids: Dumb, difficult and dispensable
The rise of the Moralistic Therapeutic Deists
Leadership wake-up: The Millennials are coming
The Wall Street Journal piece that really got these stereotypes rolling: The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work
You think the titles are bad? Take a look at the language in the articles. Lotta nasty words. Though I dimly remember similar nastiness as Gen X hit the workforce. So maybe this is simply cyclical. But in the workplace, hatin on and avoiding millennials is something else: ageist, aka discrimination. Just sayin.
So, HALLELUJAH, can you imagine the relief when I read the summary of Pew’s recent study: The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.
Millennials are into social justice! The environment! Ending racism! They’re open minded! Diverse! Highly educated! Less fundamentalist! My god, what am I going to do with all the time I previously spent hating myself for the year of my birth?
Are you a millennial? Regardless that this generation is defined as those born between 1980 and 2001, perhaps you are a millennial at heart. Find out with this helpful quiz! Put together by the Pew Research Center, for some reason.
PS. Per ush, the articles all focus on middle class and affluent millennials. It’s as though the writers believe that all millennials had “helicopter parents”, loads of extracurricular activities, and went to college. Really, these experiences were only common among middle class and affluent families, and working class and poor millennials probably don’t feel very connected with the media portrayal of “their” generation.
Here’s a neat-o website: Muslim Men Against Domestic Abuse.
About MMADA:
Muslim Men Against Domestic Abuse (MMADA) is an organization dedicated to domestic tranquility. By joining our group, you make a commitment never to engage in, support, or remain silent about the physical, psychological, and emotional abuse of Muslim and non-Muslim women and children.
They’re based out of Illinois, of all places. Anyway, sounds cool. Also check out their Call to Action.
Aid orgs, Haitian orgs, academics, celebrities and others got together and sent the U.S. Congress a letter on January 28th, requesting that the U.S. cease military colonization of Haiti post-quake and instead focus on aid. If that’s too much, they simply ask the U.S. to step aside so those who are willing to provide aid without occupation can do so.
While security can help to ensure a better distribution of aid, the actual distribution of aid is most important. While it is true that there have been some supplies lost to looting, this is not nearly so terrible as the loss of life and limb that has occurred due to unnecessary delays. The over-emphasis on security has been costly, and must not be repeated – from now on the top priority must be the delivery and distribution of the basic survival needs of the population. The Administration must publicly reassure the world that this will indeed be the priority going forward.
PaDOW! Read the whole letter here.
What? Don’t believe me? Can’t imagine how reducing discrimination towards a minority will cause body art?
Well talk to my man Saxby Chambliss, the best-named man in all of Georgia, and a Republican Senator to boot.
At the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today on the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) expressed his concern that repealing the rule would pave the way for allowing “alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art”.
Thanks to Jillian Rayfield at TPM for catching that comment.
Politicians in Boulder are tired of looking at poor and homeless people. They came up with a new and innovative solution: make homelessness illegal! You can now get a $100 ticket for not having a roof over your head when you go to sleep. And, who would’ve guessed, since homeless people are homeless because they don’t have any money, they’re going to jail for not paying their fines!
Change.org points out:
To use an example from Miami, a federal court struck down a city ordinance nearly identical to Boulder’s as far back as 1992, holding that “[Miami's] practice of arresting homeless individuals for performing essential, life-sustaining acts in public” violated the homeless plaintiffs’ rights to travel, and due process under the 14th Amendment, and right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
That’s fucked, right? Well, sign a petition to Boulder Mayor Susan Osborne to get the ordinance repealed!
Check out these great photos from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
On January 16th, 200,000 people marched through Phoenix to support immigrant human rights and protest Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Here is some news coverage:
USA TODAY: Arizona is Ground Zero for Immigration Reform
IPS: Arpaio Protest Re-Ignites Pro-Immigrant Movement
AZ Republic: Dancers, Students, Families March
“HIV slips through condoms like rice through a tennis racket.”
-an anti-choice, non-medically staffed “crisis pregnancy center” in Washington State
I am almost too upset about this to even write about it. So I’ll let Jaclyn Friedman do most of the talking via the Nation:
On Sunday, as nearly 100 million Americans gather to watch the New Orleans Saints take on the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV, they’ll be treated to something they’re probably not expecting: an ad speaking out against abortion. The spot, produced by the extreme right-wingers at Focus on the Family, features Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, who claims she was advised by doctors to abort fetal Tim but “chose life” instead.
Let us not forget that last week CBS turned down an ad for ManCrunch, a gay dating site for men. While ManCrunch is simply a product, and CBS traditionally takes ads for whichever products are willing to pay for them, the ad was turned down. On the other hand, CBS has a history of turning down “advocacy ads”, which the FoF ad is. WHAT THE FUCK. Why is CBS using this bully pulpit to indoctrinate men further with dreams of a stronger, better patriarchy?
I hate life right now. Go read the whole Nation article by Jaclyn Friedman, but here are two more of her thoughts from the article.
[T]he Focus on the Family ad [is] thirty seconds of squeaky-clean “family values” that make the astonishing claim that women shouldn’t have abortions because they might be gestating a future male sports star. There’s a lot wrong with this argument, not the least of which is the statistical reality that it’s significantly more likely that women who choose to carry their fetuses to term will give birth to rapists or murderers than to Heisman Trophy winners.
and…
The ad becomes even more disturbing when we consider who it’s trying to reach. Assuming that Focus on the Family operates with the same mindset as most Super Bowl advertisers (and there’s really no evidence to suggest otherwise), it’s also safe to assume that men are one of the primary targets of this spot. So now what we’ve got is an ad telling men that it’s wrong for women to abort their potential children, lest those children not get the chance to grow up to be famous quarterbacks who paint Scripture references into their eyeblack.
I have to file this one under “Things I was going to blog about a month ago but inexplicably put off”.
When the Olympic torch passed through Manitoba, First Nations activists seized the opportunity to stage a protest about Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women.
From Canada.com:
“Our intention, basically, is to drive home this message what’s been happening in Canada and to give information out,” said Roseau River Anishnabe First Nation Chief Terry Nelson. “People need to be reminded that these women were not treated with the same respect. … You look at the response to the death of one white woman on the road. It’s not the same thing.”
The Native Women’s Association of Canada estimates that there are at least 520 missing or murdered Canadian indigenous women. Granting that indigenous women only make up 2% of Canada’s female population, if this missing/murdered rate were the same across Canada’s whole female population, there would be over 18,000 missing or murdered Canadian women. That is not the case, so we are clearly dealing with a racially-targeted crime and state neglect. The NWAC concludes that “55% of the cases of murder and 43% of disappearances occurred during or since 2000.” So this isn’t all ancient history either.
Here’s a decent op-ed about this national disgrace.
Another article on the protest.
Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women blog
And cheers and solidarity to the Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation and Sagkeeng First Nation for going out there in the cold during the torch passing to try and raise the profile on this national crime spree.
For some unknown reason, people who have been searching “newborn walrus” have been landing on my site. But there are no newborn walruses to be found! Imagine their disappointment.
UNTIL NOW…
From the article:
The figure emerged in a Home Office study aimed at helping lawmakers deal with the world’s oldest profession.
Let me revise that for you:
The figure emerged in a Home Office study aimed at reducing men’s criminal exploitation of women for sex.
There, that’s better. It is just so weird that conversations about prostitution never seem to mention men. Prostitution wouldn’t exist without johns.
Nisour Square massacre. 17 unarmed citizens, including 9 year old Ali Kinani, were murdered by Blackwater (Xe) employees. All charges for 5 of the men who self-admitted to being the group responsible for the shooting have been dropped. A sixth plead guilty to manslaughter and informed on the other five. That did not affect the dropping of the charges.
The men whose charged were dropped are: Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nick Slatten and Paul Slough. The man who plead guilty is Jeremy Ridgeway
Below is a beautiful video about Ali Kinani’s father’s quest to find justice.
From the film, Mohammed, Ali’s father, speaks about what happens after the Blackwater employees leave:
I opened the [car] door to see if [Ali] was okay. I opened the door and he started falling out. I stood there in shock, watching him as the door opened, and his brain fell to the ground between my feet.”
A group of Idaho Baptists who are now in Haitian custody are claiming that Jesus told them it would be alright to grab a bunch of Haitian children and traffic them into the United States. Official authorization? Checking to see if the children were really orphans? Working to alleviate Haiti’s poverty instead of just stealing children to give them a “good” American life? Such questions are irrelevant when Jesus has given you direct orders.
Fox News has a creepily sympathetic article about this group, which repeatedly mentions how parents “want” to give up their kids to white Americans, so really, these Baptists who rounded up these non-orphan kids and put them on a bus with little explanation weren’t doing anything so wrong.
The church group’s own mission statement said it planned to spend only hours in the devastated capital, quickly identifying children without immediate families and busing them to a rented hotel in the Dominican Republic without bothering to get permission from the Haitian government.
The idiocy, it burns…
“In this chaos the government is in right now, we were just trying to do the right thing,” the group’s spokeswoman, Laura Silsby, told the AP at Haiti’s judicial police headquarters, where she and others were taken after their arrest Friday night trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic in a bus.
Silsby, 40, admitted she had not obtained the proper Haitian documents for the children, whose names were written on pink tape on their shirts.
Yes, she only had the children’s best interests in mind…
The children, ages 2 months to 12 years old, were taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children’s Villages, where spokesman George Willeit said they arrived “very hungry, very thirsty.”
A 2- to 3-month old baby was dehydrated and had to be hospitalized, he said. An orphanage worker held and caressed another, older baby, who was feverish and looked disoriented.
“One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that,” Willeit said.
Nice work, Central Valley Baptist Church and East Side Baptist Church members. Their pastor, Rev. Clint Henry, who remained in Idaho, has some interesting things to say about this kerfuffle. He asked his congregation to pray to God to “help them as they seek to resist the accusations of Satan and the lies that he would want them to believe and the fears that he would want to plant into their heart.” He also said that the plan to steal children in the wake of a disaster was hatched “because we believe that Christ has asked us to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole world, and that includes children.”
Who do these people think they are? Because they are white, Christian, and American citizens they can flaunt any law, any consideration of decency, any basic sense of morality? The arrogant assumption that their desire to acquire poor brown babies trumps the human rights of the children and families involved is sickening. Their shock that they would be prevented from perpetrating this egregious and cruel crime is vomit-worthy.
Laura Silsby, the ringleader, had the tone-deaf, entitled hubris to say that child trafficking “is exactly what we are trying to combat.” No, child trafficking is what you are doing. Laura Silsby is a would-be child-trafficker who simply got caught. How does she think she is doing anything different than other child traffickers? It doesn’t make me feel any better about the situation that she has set up a special little organization in Idaho: New Life Children’s Refuge. THIS IS WHY TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION AGENCIES HAVE SUCH A BAD NAME.
So now the United Nations, Red Cross and Haitian government have to run around looking for the families of these children and bring them back to health instead of doing whatever totally inconsequential things that they were previously occupied with. Nice work Baptists.
Dear Fox News and Idaho Baptists,
It is not okay to take children from their families, cultures, and homes and bring them to America because the children happen to be poor and of color. A childhood in America is NOT categorically better than a childhood elsewhere. White middle-class American parents are NOT categorically superior to brown or black poor non-American parents. Ideas to the contrary are based on colonial and racist bias. Period. Stealing children because they are poor and non-white has been perpetrated by whites since the moment they arrived in the Americas. It doesn’t matter what the excuse is. IT IS ALWAYS WRONG. Anyone who actually wants to “help” poor children of color would support poor families of color. This would take the form of: boycotting all companies that exploit cheap labor in poor countries, resisting the IMF and World Bank, stop creating unequal and exploitative “free” trade agreements, stop exporting consumerism, stop meddling with their governments, give aid without strings attached, support efforts to improve health clinic and reproduction options, stop supporting the exportation of American-style patriarchy, fight against the pollution American companies create that devastates the environment and the health of people in other countries, and etc. There are dozens of concrete and meaningful ways to support Haiti and Haitian families. Child trafficking in the name of Jesus is not one of them.
Sincerely,
The Czech
PS. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-adoption. There are many people who are transnational adoptees in my life, and they have helped to educate me on these issues. Transnational adoption is fraught with pitfalls whenever there are power inequalities between the countries in question, but I believe there is a right way to do it. The Idaho Baptist method is not the right way.
Perhaps the Central Valley and East Side Baptist Churches share some membership with Concerned Women for America. Penny Young Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, wrote a stunning article in the Washington Times recently. Here are just a few of her words:
Conservatives believe that government is a very limited solution to poverty. So what is our answer?
…It might mean a personal long-term commitment to a child or one of the estimated 377 orphanages in Haiti.
…The first and obvious goal should be to remove red tape both in the U.S. and in Haiti. Of course, the proper investigation to assure that the child or children are matched to a safe home is a must.
But here’s my fave quote:
In Haiti, the U.S. government should use some of its new leverage to ask Haitian officials to cut red tape in that country and follow the same example with immigration authorities here.
By “new leverage” could Nance possibly be referring to the recent US military occupation of Haiti? 100 points to Nance for most hilarious use of a euphemism for neo-colonialism!
But Nance’s response to disaster in Haiti doesn’t just include the siphoning of their children to middle-class Americans. Oh no. She is also adamant that “helping Haiti” include “federal tax incentives of up to $10,000″ to the adoptive parents. I only wish I were joking. But if I understand her correctly, she wants the federal government to spend tens of thousands of dollars on middle-class Americans as a response to a disaster in Haiti?
Genius or idiocy, you decide. I do get the impression that Penny Young Nance and Laura Silsby are probably BFFs. Or at least, if they weren’t before, they are now.
Recent Comments