If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity. ~Nelson DeMille
This is not a kind world. This is not a just world. The American people have been threatened. They have been attacked. They have been told that they are of no worth to society and so they might as well go away and die in a corner. They have been murdered.
We can not change these facts. We can only change how we respond to the violence.
I. “Supply Side” Voodoo Economics At Its Finest: The Irish Potato FamineSupply side economists may not realize this, but they are on the same side as the British politicians who engineered the Irish Potato Famine. Indeed, that deadly episode demonstrates where supply side/voodoo economics inevitably leads.
In 1997, 150 years after the fact, Tony Blair of Great Britain issued a formal apology for the Potato Famine.
"The famine was a defining event in the history of Ireland and Britain. It has left deep scars. That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/blair-issues-apology-for-irish-potato-famine-1253790.htmlYour high school history class probably glossed over the deadly (engineered) famine. You may have come away with a vague sense that Irish farmers foolishly planted all their fields with potatoes which fell to a “blight”---leaving the nation short of food.
Here is what most of us did not learn in high school. First, keep in mind that during the British occupation of Ireland, many natives were prohibited from owning land, voting or doing any of the things that folks in England were allowed to do. Farmers became “serfs” to absent landlords. Their labor increased their masters’ bank accounts.
The potato's spread was essential to the development of the cottier system, delivering an extremely cheap workforce, but at the cost of lower living standards. For the labourer it was essentially a potato wage that shaped the expanding agrarian economy.<25> The expansion of tillage led to an inevitable expansion of the potato acreage, and an expansion of the cottier class. By 1841, there were over half a million cottiers, with 1.75 million dependents. The principal beneficiary of this system was the English consumer.<25>
The Celtic grazing lands of... Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonized... the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home... The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of... Ireland... Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival
A supply side economists would say that Ireland had been “realigned”. By feeding all the tenant farmers potatoes, the British were able to maximize the production of beef. Of course, the beef was not meant for domestic consumption. It was shipped to England. The Irish were left to eat their wages—their potatoes---and when those were gone, they were left with nothing to eat.
Cecil Woodham-Smith, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland as "the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation." Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine.<64>
Christine Kinealy, a University of Liverpool fellow and author of two texts on the famine, Irish Famine: This Great Calamity and A Death-Dealing Famine, writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland. However, the poor had no money to buy food and the government then did not ban exports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#cite_note-25
This story proves that it is possible to have zero demand for a product----and still produce that product with a healthy profit for the lucky few. According the supply side theory, the one to one and half million Irish who died are not casualties of economic war. They were simply freed up to become something else----like mulch for the fertile fields of Ireland.
II. We Are All Joe HillJoe Hill was an immigrant, an unskilled laborer and a union organizer for the IWW—the Wobblies—the only group that admitted women and Blacks during the early 20th century. When a retired policeman in Utah was killed, “agitator” Joe Hill was convicted and executed in the face of evidence of his innocence.
Here is what Hill had to say about his own fate:
"Owing to the prominence of Mr Morrison, there had to be a 'goat' and the undersigned being, as they thought, a friendless tramp, a Swede, and worst of all, an IWW, had no right to live anyway, and was therefore duly selected to be 'the goat'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill#cite_note-3“No right to live.” I have heard this sentiment expressed many times in my life, usually, in reference to Black folks, sometimes referring to poor folks. In the early 20th century, Blacks and other “scapegoats” were routinely targeted for lynching. The families who attended these celebrations were proud of themselves and their actions. They often took photos which were turned into postcards and sent to relatives and friends across the country. Here is a link to a site where you can see what was done with your own eyes.
http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.htmlNowadays, the descendents of these people practice the same kinds of scapegoating but on a larger scale. They deny medical treatment to Black men with syphilis in order to study the effects of a disease whose pathology was well documented a century ago---it mains, it cripples, it kills. They lynch with doctored video tapes. What is the death of one poor Black man against the destruction of a whole organization that aims to give minorities fair access to the polls? What is the career of one public servant compared to the political value of proving that the victims are the instigators of violence? What is the life of a (Muslim) boy incarcerated with adult criminals in a U.S. military facility, raped and tortured compared to the needs of Big Oil?
They have murdered Brother Malcolm. They have murdered Dr. King---though first they spied upon him, wiretapped him and slanders him, lots of little murders before the big kill. They turned dogs and fire hoses on school children. They killed student organizers. They killed communists and civil rights advocates:
The Orangeburg massacre<1> was an incident on February 8, 1968, in which local policemen in Orangeburg, South Carolina, fired into a crowd of young people who were protesting local segregation at a bowling alley. They killed three and injured twenty-eight,<2> hitting most of them in their backs. After the shooting stopped, two others were injured by police in the aftermath and one, a pregnant woman, later had a miscarriage due to the beating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeburg_massacre The Greensboro massacre took place on November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States. Five protest marchers were shot and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The protest was the culmination of attempts by the Maoist Communist Workers Party (known as the Workers Viewpoint Organization at the time of the shooting) to organize mostly black industrial workers in the area.<1>
The marchers killed were: Sandi Smith, a nurse and civil rights activist; Dr. James Waller, president of a local textile workers union who had given up his medical practice to organize workers; Bill Sampson, a graduate of the Harvard University School of Divinity; Cesar Cause, an immigrant from Cuba who graduated magna cum laude from Duke University; and Dr. Michael Nathan, chief of pediatrics at Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham, NC, a clinic that helped children from low-income families.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacreThey took their war against humanity overseas and killed Vietnamese because Brown and Root needed more work and oil investors wanted South China Sea oil. They won’t even tell us how many civilians---
civilians!---have been killed in Iraq…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/iraqa country which had the temerity to nationalize its own oil. Good news, by the way. The war in Iraq was won a couple of years ago. The victors? Chevron, BP and the others.
As written, the law would end more than three decades of Iraq's nationalized oil industry. It would give 10-year exploration and development rights to foreign oil companies — at least those willing to start drilling in a country where hundreds of contractors have been killed and pipelines are regularly blow up. Once the exploration deals expire, the companies can negotiate to produce the oil for another 20 years in partnership with the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company. Foreign oil companies would then pay the government 12.5% royalties of the oil's value, and be able to export the rest of whatever oil they find — potentially massive amounts.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1576593,00.htmlDo I sound bitter? You bet I am. Do I sound scared? I try not to be. But the people who control this country have a way of silencing the opposition---even when the opposition is the rich and powerful. Here is
Eliot Spitzer Died For Wall Street’s Sins:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/543If they can do that to the son of a billionaire then who among us is safe? We are denied even the right of self defense. Self defense against the needs of Big Business and Corporate Fascism has now been labeled “ violence”, “socialism”, “Russian style communism.” We are all student protesters in Chicago, 1968, and the power of the world’s corporate elite is being brought down on our heads in full view of the cameras, which click to capture the moment, while crowds of banksters cheer---
If the Revolution in Russia had never happened, the American capitalists would have made it happen. How convenient to be able to claim that starving, raping, plundering, robbing and murdering the innocent is a form of self defense!
III. If The Big Picture Is Too Horrible to Bear, Then Look At Your Neighbor’s FaceYeats was exactly right when he wrote:
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
Yeats, Easter 1916
It is easy to be overwhelmed when looking at the sum total of violence committed out of greed by folks who will never in a thousand years be able to spend all that they have accumulated. I suggest turning your eyes away from the Big Picture (which is bleak, bleak, bleak, like Concentration Camp photos taken by American GI’s at the end of WWWII).
Instead, look at the individual faces of those suffering from corporate fascist violence. Look at your neighbor, the 55 year old high school history teacher who was “downsized” and who is not young enough to start over and not healthy enough to do grueling manual labor. He has been denied his pension. He has been stripped of his dignity. The press accuses him of being the reason our economy is so bad---damned, overpaid under performing teachers!
You may not be able to resurrect the war dead in Iraq, but you can do something for your neighbor, the teacher.
Look at your neighbor, the assembly line worker whose job was “outsourced” to Mexico, so that his company could cut costs and sell their product at a greater profit---presumably to people in Mexico who have all the jobs. He is out on the street now. He and his wife live in their car. When that stops running, they will live in a homeless shelter, waiting for the bad times to end, unaware of the fact that his corporate masters do not consider these “bad times”. No, we have recovered. This is the way it is going to be forever.
You may not be able to undo the Irish Great Famine, but you can help your neighbor, the assembly line worker.
Look at your mother, who waited to get a breast lump biopsy, because she had no insurance. And now that it is metastatic cancer, the government will pay for her chemotherapy and radiation. Weep for the twenty years she will not be alive, twenty years in which she would have gotten to know her grandkids. She is roadkill. Collateral damage. A necessary cost of doing business in this country.
This going to be hard, because we are not talking about a stranger here, we are talking about your mother. You can do a lot for your mom, even though society failed her.
Look at the child next door, whose single mom works two jobs for minimum wage and is seldom home. The girl goes to school hungry and wheezing, because she deserves to be punished for the sins of her mother----her “sins” being that her employer found someone in India to do her job more cheaply. The girl will not be able to learn, not in her poor physical condition. With no access to birth control, she may give birth to an (undernourished) child when she is still a child herself. The government will step in to protect her fetus, but once the baby is born, he will be hungry and wheezing, too. And the powers that be will nod their heads in satisfaction and say “Serves her right” before they toss the rest of their 24 ounce steak to the dog as a treat---
That child really needs your help. Right now. We are talking 911 emergency. Intervene now, and you make a difference for the future---
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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