JRHC Journal Sunday 30 June 2013: Some things do seem to happen for a reason. Yesterday morning my 5 year old laptop running Windows XP crashed showing what I interpret to be “the black screen of death”. I went to Wrens library and notified my facebook friends about what happened and why I would be offline for the foreseeble future. I also paid my pharmacist a visit and learned that my current prescriptions can be filled without my having to visit my health care provider for another 1 year and 3 months. I’m supposed to go every six month for a checkup, but with two daughters in college my scheming is driven by financial necessity. I was rather pleased with that outcome, but my satisfaction was shattered when I passed a dead cat in the road near the crossroads where we live. I stopped the car and was convinced the cat was our beloved Oliver. He seemed to have roamed further from home than I expected. I put him in the car, took him to our animal graveyard, and commended his spirit to the great beyond. I even shed tears because he was so loved by my wife and daugher as well as by me, and they had charged me not to let anything happen to him like it had with another much adored young cat named Ziggy. So I came home emotionally drained with no computer to follow news developments. I decided to take a nap and was about to doze off when the phone rang. It was my facebook friend Jan who said that a group of our facebook friends wanted to get me another computer. I told Jan that I was grateful for their support but certainly there are many other people in truly desperate circumstances that should get help first. We talked for an hour or so. Meantime I read several articles in Smithsonian magazine that a neighbor had loaned me. I had needed to do for a couple of weeks. I also went for a long walk in the woods with our four dogs. Both they and I need the exercise. The walk lasted 1 hour and 10 minutes. I’m trying not to overdo exercise as I have done often in the past and then failed to keep up a daily routine. This walk tired me out completely. I took a shower and layed down to listen to the radio and/or read some more periodicals when the phone rang again. It was another facebook friend Gerard with whom I had never spoken to in person before. He is an engineer on a tugboat in the northeast U.S. We talked for an hour and a half! The positive reinforcement I got from Gerard and Jan made my day! He offered to send me a laptop. I tried to refuse but he insisted. This is real friendship and the beginnings of community. This is happening because we share common concerns and met on facebook. I have no doubt I will see both Jan and Gerard in person during my lifetime. Gerard is involved in making micro loans to school children in Kenya. In addition to our antiwar, pro peace positions, we understand the need to share our bounty. Sometimes you can feel the Spirit from afar even via facebook and certainly in a personal conversation on the phone. Yesterday was a very restorative, invigorating, and promising day. It is important to be optimistic and to work for incremental change. Gerard pointed out that life is a series of compromises. This is a pragmatic but useful observation. After Gerard phone call I fed the cats on the porch. Low and beyond there was Oliver! I wondered why he was so far from home and thought the dead cat might not be him, but they were like identical twins. I’m relieved that I don’t have to break this bad news to my wife and daughter, but I also realise that my grief over the death of a lovely young cat exactly like our Oliver was not wasted emotion. I listened to the news on the radio this morning, cleaned a dusty fan which I had been puttng off, and got this Windows 7 desk top up and running. The sound still isn’t quite right, antivirus software is necessary before getting online, and much needed updates to Windows 7 will be a challenge with dial up, but now I can type my thoughts instread of scrawl them on paper which is tiring and even more disjointed than my usual flight of ideas screed. I am thankful for what I have and take the death of my laptop as a fortuitous happening. Maybe nothing happens by chance. I do grieve over the death of young cat and more so over the dire situations so many human face daily, but all of our fates ultimately rest in the hands of Providence. Not being online gives me an opportunity to reminisce. Hmm? Spell check seems to be on, but I wondered about the spelling of reminisce until I typed “Hmm?”. It seemed spell check was working because a serated green line came on under “Hmm?”. The point I want to make is that sometimes it is better to look the word up manually in a dictionary instead of using spell check or Googling it. I have an old fashioned printed dictionary and a marble topped bedstand near a window with natural light. It’s daylight out, and I am looking up the word reminisce just to make sure I happened to guess the spelling correctly. Yes I guessed the spelling of reminisce correctly which is unusual. Maybe it will stick. BTW, something else I’ve noted about aging. I turn 65 in 9 days. In addition to developing a tendence to reverse numbers when I copy them down after hearing them, for some reason my default spelling of there has become their. I have to go back and edit myself and replace their with there when it’s not possessive which is most of the time. I was born mid 20th century – in 1948 to be exact. The telephone was in common usuage as was radio. Folks had indoor plumbing in cities, and penicillin had been developed. It was an analog not a digital world. Many technological changes have followed and really signficant and much needed social changes have ensued, but in my opinion, people are not smarter, better informed, or necessarily more moral. We had a pretty heavy downfall today with moderate wind and thunder here in east central Georgia, USA. We are being told this is the wettest year since record keeping began over 120 years ago. Oliver the cat came in this afternoon. Of course I can’t help but remember his doppelganger that died yesterday. During the rainstorm I sat on the couch petting our black dog Pecos. He is a survivor as well. He was one of three puppies we found near the dumpsters here in Grange crossroads. His two brothers did not survive. One or both of them may have had distemper. That may explain the physical reason for their demise but not the providential reason. We have to accept it. Our ancestors who lived in more perilous times had to accept their fate which often included premature death as well. Resignation and acceptance is a coping mechanism, but I can’t help but think that the spirits of the departed are still with us. That is a comfort and a blessing if we consider how accepting Providence makes life both mysterious and engaging no matter our circumstances. While offline, I’ve been thinking about the history of human communication. Drumming had to be an early form of communcation, perhaps even before language. Cave painting with ocre and other dyes, hiroglyphs, and cuniform writing on stone and clay tables mark the beginning of passing on art to future generations and, in the case of writing, passing on verbal ideas. After that came papyrus, ink, and paper. There was also written music. (I’m making this up as I go.) Then came the printing press, photography, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, broadcast television, teletype, communications satellites, cable TV, satellite radio, and the internet. The art of letter writing, of corresponding via snail mail, has been largely abandoned. The techtonic effect instantaneous communication has on reflection and deliberation is still evolving. As noted above, smart phones have not made people smarter. These devices are mostly used for entertainment rather than for education. Many of the same problems that we humans have brought on ourselves down through history because of our inability to communicate seem as intractable as ever. Monday 01 July 2013: One international news event in particular seems worth noting. Yesterday, a European Union spokesman said if allegations of U.S. spying on EU members are accurate, there will be serious repercussions. This is a positive development in my opinion. In a separte news feature yesteeday, NPR News compared Obama’s trip to Africa with Teddy Roosevelt’s trip to the Panama Canal which was under construction in 1913. We are told that both trips emphasized trade and put the U.S. on world display. This was certainly true in the case of TR’s visit to the Panama Canal which occurred during the heights of his popularity at home and when U.S. imperial power was rapidly expanding. One the other hand, Obama is visiting Africa and emphasizing trade and American investment because the U.S. is trying to play catch up with Chinese economic investments in Africa which has historically been the preserve of the western powers until recently. NRP noted that Obama left for his trip to Africa at a time when his popularity at home is waning, and his administration is beset with a growing number of issues including the NSA spying scandal. What NPR failed to mention is that the Chinese have signed a long term contract with the government of Nicaragua to build a bigger interoceanic shipping canal across Nicaragua which will dwarf the one United States built in Panama a century ago. The times they are achanging. I listening to NRP news over the weekend, caught a commericial radio network news brief or two, and spoke to two friends on the telephone, but did not learn about a New York Times front page news headline until 10 am EDT Monday when Tom Asbrook said The NY Times reported that Qatar is supplying shoulder fired, heat seeking missiles to the Islamist “rebels” in Syria. This demonstrates how easy it is for Americans to remain uninformed about world events unless they dig for it on the internet. I protested the U.S. war in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970 during my last two years as an undergraduate in college. It took another 3 years and thousands of more U.S. and Vietnamese dead before U.S. combat troops were withdrawn. The government of South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. U.S. militarists immediately went into a funk about the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and claimed that U.S. foreign policy was weakened by “the Vietnam syndrome”. Ronald Reagan campaigned in 1980 in large part on restoring U.S. military prowess. Reagan invaded the tiny Island of Grenada in the early 1980s, but he also funded proxy wars in Central America, Angola, and elsewhere including Afghanistan where Reagan famously met with Mujahadeen fighters. The U.S. backed the Mujahadeen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Reagan met and was photogrpahed with Mujahadeen leaders in The White House. Reagan praised them as “the equivalent of our founding fathers”. When I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska from summer of 1980 until summer of 1981, I saw a documentary at the University of Alaska about El Salvador. It was filmed by a Dutch crew. It showed blindfolded and handcuffed individuals being loaded on a Salvadoran army truck. Their corpses turned up later on the roadside. Now jump ahead to March 2013 when The Guardian newspaper in the UK and the BBC in a joint effort reported that the same U.S. personnel, including Col. James Steele, who trained the Salvadoran soldiers who participated in those death squads in El Salvador also trained Iraqi police units who committed the most henious forms of torture and murder in Iraq after the 2003 invasion of that country. In fact, the program of torturing and killing suspected insurgents in Iraq was referred to as “the Salvador option”. I followed the U.S. backed Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicragua during the 1980s by listening to NPR; watching PBS; monitoring shortwave broadcasts from the VOA, The Voice of Nicaragua, and Radio Havana Cuba; as well as clipping newspapers. I watched the 2003 “shock and awe” U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq on TV, but the internet had arrived by this time. This helped with digging for the facts, but as usual most Americans chose to not pay close attention to sordid details or to anything that questioned U.S. credibility. It has been said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrals. Any single source of news does not give the whole story. Passive consumers are not correctly or fully informed. It takes an accurately informed electorate with the ability to use critical thinking skills for true democracy to flourish. Daily newspapers certainly cannot keep up with fast paced developments. I learned that Edward Snowden had release information on the NSA spying on Americans around 3 pm one afternoon. In the next two and a half to 4 hours, the blogosphere had digested this information. Newspaper coverage was a day late and a dollar short again. Similarly, I remember when the news broke early one mornng that John McCain had picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008. I had never heard of her. It took about 4 hours on the internet for me to determine this woman was a flake. She is still fooling gullible folks, but the public at large has reached a concensus that this woman is unqualified to hold high office. Obama is a smooth operator. I was fully aware during the 2008 campaign that Obama was not a bomb throwing socialist radical but was in fact a mainstream establishment politician. There were informed individuals online who tried to inform us that Obama was a stealth candidate and not what he appeared to be. I had not followed his career closely from its inception nor was I well versed in his voting record in the Senate. I voted for Obama in 2008 as the lesser of two evils. I should have gotten clued in when Obama reapponted Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and quietly announced he was sending 16,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan in April 2009. What finally broke the camel’s back and shattered any remaining trust or respect I had for President Obama came when he announed to the American people in December 2009 that he was sending an additional 32,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. I haven’t believed anything President Obama has said since. His assassination by drone program makes Obama as big a war criminal as George W. Bush. I voted for the Green Party presidential candidate in 2012. I had voted for every Democratic Party presidential nominee from George McGovern in 1972 (still proud of that vote because McGovern was the peace candidate) to Barack Obama in 2008. No mas! I will never against vote for an establishment politician from either political party duopoly in what amounts to fixed elections in United States. Peace was not even on the ballot in 2012. Chris Hedges adamantly asserts that the levers of democracy no longer function in this country. Direct action is called for in order to effect change. As bright a luminary as Bill Moyrers hasadmitted he could not disagree with a British political observer who concluded that United States is a plutocracy. Moyers notes that American voters are not offered any real alternative choices by the two party political system. Tuesday 02 July 2013: At 10:30 pm EDT Monday 01 July 2013 BBC radio news reported that a suicide bomber killed at least 22 people in a Shiite mosque northeast of Baghdad. Ongoing violence in Iraq is horrendous. It is part of a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites spanning the broader Middle East and beyond. The region has been in turmoil now for almost 12 years since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and launched its global war on terror. The illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq launched under known false pretexts in 2003 opened wide Pandora’s Box of Chaos in the region. If this does not mark the beginning of WWIII it most certainly marks the beginning of conflits which will last generations, devaste people living in the region, and consume more resources than even a neocolonial superpower like United States has at its disposal. We learned in the news today that Edward Snowden has withdrawn his petition for asylum in Russia because of stipulations that he must cease releasing U.S. secrets. Wikileaks has helped Snowden apply to as many as 20 countries for asylum. His travel plans are complicated by United States having revoked his passport and leaning hard on countries not to grant Snowden political asylum. This is my 4th day offline. I understand how lost Edward Snowden would be without his computers and his internet connection. He is truly a human rights activist who is being pursued for his political activities which embarasses the U.S. national security apparatus. It is more important than ever for us to assert that “We are Edward Snowden”.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:12:24 +0000
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