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IDIOT? No I am better than what people say! |
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Saturday, 04 February 2012 22:41 |
Hello my real name is Mitch.
I live in Canada that evokes a lot of Stereotypes... and even ones that stick with you from Kindergarten to University(never relinquishing the vile nature of the Peel Board of Education stench of Institutional Racism) and our society completely endorses. I was subject to BULLYING far more heinous than merely peers alienating, ostracising, humiliating and making getting an education next to impossible to achieve in their messed up system. The teachers, administrators and others have carefully, ruthlessly, deliberately, systematically eliminated really smart/intelligent souls out of the school system as they simply are not wanted or fit into their schematics. This kind of bullying is far more hideous than some twerp of a student belittling another on Facebook, it is the School itself declaring war on young souls like myself.
I guess I always knew I was different when in Kindergarten that I dressed up as a Witch for Hallowe'en and maintained it throughout the day and night. My mother wasn't sure how to handle her youngest identified himself a feminine character rather than the socially acceptable masculine. I had failed Kindergarten mostly I began to refuse to participate in classroom activities as I was being bullied by everyone in the class. I was told to tell the teacher and they would handle the other child's cruel actions towards me or anyone else. Well... the teacher's(a tall ugly with way too much make up- kinda sleazy) reaction was laughter and she ushered me away with a wave of her large unfemale hands. I became enraged by the dunking into the toilets and fights where the teacher took the tormentor's side and I was subject to more shit than I care to recall. I began to hate school as my own teacher made her position clear to me... "You don't belong in this class or this school" was an unspoken and yet clear message to me. I stopped caring about how 'they' thought of me as my life in suburban Ontario was about to get way worse as I merrily danced through school without a care. I stopped doing all my school work as I was being treated like a RETARD(quite literally), except some rare souls like Mrs. Joyce(older woman in her early 60's) told my mother not to rebuke me for being left handed. In Elementary School I was labelled on my permanent transcripts with these very dark and ominous words "This person is an Idiot and should not be given any help as he is totally incompetent to learn new things." I read this in my own file that was passed along every grade which I was promoted to the next grade(not giving a shit about school or their ongoing politics). I encountered Mrs. Wong in a Scarborough School who showed me a studious discipline and laid the path to teach myself English, Math, Sciences and everything else since I wasn't learning a damn thing in school. She showed that education isn't about speed but understanding/comprehending things with more clarity. I took it on myself to teach myself everything from a rudimentary level to beyond and show these nasty detractors(if given a fair chance) I could exceed all barriers. I entered grade nine in the same lackadaisical way, with new found knowledge that this fool can actually learn things as I slowly taught myself. I wasn't able to get any help from peers, teachers or anyone... as my own mother called me "stupid". I shook my head and refused to accept her ill-informed opinion of me... "I know I have my difficulties in learning, doesn't mean I am stupid. Fuck her if she thinks I am stupid, fuck all the rest of the morons who believe this ignorant opinion." I had encountered a Science Teacher who pretty well summed up the whole problem of schooling for me... I had asked Mr. Steel for extra help in grade nine biology as I was having some trouble understanding and completing the material. His response is typical of the apathy I have encountered throughout my scholastic experience, "You are not ENTITLED to extra help since you are not in the 80-90% range." This is problem with the school model, if you are like me and have a Learning Disability... then you simply don't count in the whole concept of education. The obvious inequities are glaringly apparent especially if you don't understand the ritualistic nature of their system in the first place. One has to realise very quickly that Education(= Competition) as far as anything else is concerned. I fully comprehend the idea of comparing papers, assignments, term papers and other literary mechanisms but to ignore, assimilate, assume, label and subsequently humiliate people into submission is not education... it is fuckin' inhumane. This shit has to stop and be stomped on until it does stop... and this begins by eliminating the bullying of students with Learning Disabilities. The illusion of intelligence is a farce in it's very nature as someone may have an IQ of 159 but the aptitude of a 5 month old child in need of breast milk - dependence. The biggest culprit is the education administration, it's faculty and the rest of governmental bodies who also are part and parcel of this deliberate elimination of us. The testing of us who are unfortunately been ignored by the very system who labels us must come up with the money, apologies and our inclusion into the rest of society. We are not going away and as far as I am concerned, we no longer need to be ashamed of our neurological deficiencies. We are better than the lies that these so-called educators spread about us.
Mitch Yamamoto
Red Deer, AB
Please do not censor me for the vulgarity in the piece as it goes to frustration that so many of us share, understand, experience and feel on a daily basis.
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The American Dream: Rhetoric vs. Reality |
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Monday, 30 January 2012 15:16 |
The heated and frequently tawdry rhetoric of the 2012 presidential campaign offers equal opportunity to average Americans to believe in the reality of the American dream that elevated so many to the middle class, or to conclude that for too many, the dream is increasingly beyond reach. The future was not supposed to look like this.
There is also equal opportunity to be buoyed by the rhetoric of the President’s third State of the Union address or dismayed by the Republican response. Do the two parties occupy different universes?
Once again, our desire in this electoral period is for an aspirational figure to share with us a vision bold enough to inspire us to believe the American dream is still alive. Owning a home, educating your children, and putting a little away for retirement just should not represent the impossible.
The obstacles to rebuild our decimated middle class are formidable but there is still the hope, even now, that the middle class dream is achievable. The President in his State of the Union address last Tuesday did a better job of capturing our attention even though his viewing television audience of 37.8 million was the least watched of the three he had delivered since 2010.
We believe again, albeit cautiously, that President Obama is willing to forge ahead through executive action if the Congress will not act. He gave life to the dream by promising to strengthen the economy through incentives to create more manufacturing jobs, ease the financial burden for college students, and investigate the mortgage and securitization fraud that collapsed the economy in 2008 and the economic future for millions of Americans. Although many people wonder why it took him three years to set up these investigations. Many of us felt President Obama was finally connected to the reality of the wilderness we wander daily. His Republican challengers can only promise a continuation of their famed, but unworkable, trickle-down policies of the past.
Newt Gingrich still claims that “supply-side” economic theories have “worked” when, in fact, they were a catastrophic failure. David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece, “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse”, how his
“GOP destroyed the US economy.” He discussed how “Supply-side” economics created massive federal deficits, devastated the middle class, and offered incentives to “off-shore” millions of good American jobs.
What we have to guard against in 2012 and during the life of the next administration is the expectation that the level of upward mobility the American economy offered past generations will replicate itself both qualitatively and quantitatively for the future. The American economy has undergone fundamental change and with that change, the fortunes of the 99 percent have also changed. It is no longer realistic that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can advance up the ladder of economic, social, and financial mobility. You will get stuck somewhere.
Conservative Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum says, “Movement up into the middle income is actually greater in Europe than it is in America.” Today’s ceiling for success for many in the middle class was the floor, the launch pad in other times for other aspirants to middle class status. For example, we may see an uptick in the number of manufacturing jobs created in the U.S. but salaries and benefits will be very limited. We will continue to struggle with low wage growth in this country. A slower rate of advancement up a lengthier ladder of success only guarantees that the widening income gap between the 1 percent and the rest of us will become permanent. This will only fuel more resentment, perhaps a revitalized, broader, and more coordinated Occupy movement in 2013 and beyond.
It just may be that the semantic differential between all the candidates and the rest of us when discussing solutions to the ills of our society contributes to false hope regarding what we can expect from leadership by either party. For example, polls reflect the principal concerns of most Americans today are “a lack of fairness” and “ income inequality.” Sensitive to this criticism, Republicans say the real issue is class envy, not a lack of mobility. What this means, however, is that our political leaders are not in agreement on the ways in which to create a viable middle class.
If leaders of industry and government cannot agree on this, our economy will have lost its most powerful engine for growth: the American consumer.
Republicans and the 1 percent want to maintain as a cornerstone of American economic policy “supply-side” policies with continued reliance on low taxes on the rich, lax regulation of business, and free trade. This worked exceptionally well for them since the Reagan era but infinitely less so for the rest of society. Moreover, the two Republican frontrunners for their party’s nomination have promised to continue economic and fiscal policies that would maintain the gap between themselves and their party, and the rest of society.
This probable outcome only will come as a surprise to those who buy into the false arguments of “supply-side” economic policies. Many working class Americans in regions experiencing the highest rates of joblessness eagerly applaud this nonsense even though the facts argue to the contrary.
The larger reality for the rest of us is, the 1 percent and their Republican acolytes are organized, well entrenched, extremely well funded, and fearful of change. They are here for the long term. Moreover, they will resist mightily any governmental attempt to use the tax structure to divert dollars from the rich (a millionaire’s tax) into the treasury for investments in infrastructure, education, or anything that may level the playing field for future generations.
We can expect conservatives will advance narratives of hope and optimism but the reality they represent is grounded in the status quo. Unapologetically, they say do not blame capitalism or the system for the inequality that roils American society today. Much more likely a contributor to income inequality is a more regressive tax code and growing capital gains
The Democrats understand the fundamental problem of the times is how to enable people who want to work for a living to do just that. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says, “with regard to the middle class, the issue is not class warfare or envy or about what people earn. It is rather about what people can own.”
The President’s rhetoric notwithstanding, is the Democratic Party committed to bold change? Or, is it more inclined toward incremental steps that ameliorate middle class pain but hold out the promise of something more effective in the future? Unless the Democratic Party is prepared to wage war with the Republicans in the Congress, the resurrection of the middle class is practically impossible.
It may be safe to say that the electorate will bear much of the responsibility for defining the contours of today’s American dream in light of a prime, 21st century political reality: a diminished role for the federal government partnering with the private sector for the betterment of society. Government will play a smaller role circumscribed by conservatives who believe government has no positive role to play in building and nourishing the middle class through strategic investments in our capitalist economy.
Robert Parry, Consortium News, in his article “Selling the ‘Supply-Side’ Myth, says Republicans are pinning their hopes for success this fall on “an ill-informed electorate (especially white men) siding with the 1 percent over their own working- and middle-class interests.”
Hope is the bulwark against despair, and that is what the President offers America’s beleaguered middle class. That said, he cannot accomplish “miracles” (which everything seems to be today) without a constructive partnership with the Congress and corporate leadership.
Our future is at stake and we are going to have to get back into the trenches. If the dream of ever owning a home again, educating your children without incurring an insurmountable mountain of debt, or retiring with a little dignity, is to become reality in our lifetimes, we must vote our interests. This time, we have to be smarter than we have been.
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A New Resolve |
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Thursday, 26 January 2012 02:45 |
The philosopher George Santayana once observed that “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it." As we begin this new year, let us heed Santayana’s admonishment and reflect upon our nation’s present and on its past in the hope that such reflections may suggest lessons to be learned and, most importantly, provide insight into how we may capitalize upon our accomplishments and successes and rectify our mistakes and failures.
Despite a declaration of victory, Iraq is still in turmoil. War rages on in Afghanistan, now America’s longest war, and our relationship with Pakistan is tenuous at best. American combat troops are strategically positioned throughout the world as many of influence and standing in this country are ratcheting up the rhetoric for an impending war with Iran. Despite the economic crisis, U.S. military spending is at an all time high, exceeding the military budgets of the next 15 countries combined, including Russia, China, Britain, etc.
In the face of what can only be described as military fanaticism and the co-opting of American foreign policy by the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex, saner voices have cautioned restraint, sought justice and fairness, and urged peace rather than war, only to be condemned as irresponsible, unpatriotic, even treasonous, and as providing aid, comfort, encouragement and hope to our “enemies.” We are engaged in a global war on terrorism, they tell us, and all patriotic Americans must unite and avoid dissent and criticism of our leaders and of their policies. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” George W. Bush warned us shortly after September 11. Ironically, Osama bin Laden, appealing in turn to the Islamic world, echoed this logic, “the entire world is divided into two regions—one of faith where there is no hypocrisy and another of infidelity.” Both Bush and bin Laden were clear in their distinctions. Each saw the threat posed by the other as real, grave, and imminent and, in response, launched a multi-front and protracted campaign of death and destruction. Bush’s, and now Obama’s world, is bin Laden’s world in some strangely distorted mirror. So we wage war and they jihad. In the process, tens of thousands of innocents are murdered, and both sides rationalize the slaughter by appeals to God and to country, masking their maliciousness beneath the flag of a nation or the tenets of a creed.
We ignore or distort the lessons of the past at our peril. Had we learned from the debacle of Vietnam, for example, and of the anti communist hysteria that provided a “justification” for war, we would have realized that the exaggerated doomsday rhetoric that characterized the buildup to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that we are hearing again with regard to Iran, is intended to incite a frenzy for war and to perpetuate a culture of fear and paranoia by exploiting and exacerbating the anxiety and vulnerability of our citizens regarding threats from enemies foreign and domestic.
Then, as now, we were warned of a real and immanent existential threat, then by Communism now by terrorism, to our freedom, our national security, and way of life. Then as now, our political leaders, not having experienced war themselves, failed to understand and appreciate war’s horror, insanity, futility, and its cost in blood and treasure. Or perhaps they just didn’t care. Tragically, in their arrogance, they saw and continue to see war, even perpetual war, as a viable extension, perhaps even a substitute, for diplomacy, and as integral to implementing their foreign policy agenda of global hegemony.
To make war sustainable, they encourage public support, even enthusiasm, for the slaughter by distorting its reality and by fabricating a mythology that portrays war as antiseptic, glorious, heroic, and honorable. To cultivate this mythology, they have intimidated, manipulated, and controlled the media to discourage complete and accurate reporting and to elicit its cooperation in disseminating lies and misinformation regarding the cause, justification, and necessity for war. Further, by blurring the distinction between the war and the warrior, they have portrayed public opposition, protest, and dissent as denigrating, devaluing, and dishonoring the efforts and sacrifices of those who have fought and those who have died, “in our behalf.”
Had our political leaders paid closer attention to our experiences fighting the Vietnam war, they would have learned that in guerilla/counterinsurgent wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, victory is impossible and quagmire inevitable. They would have realized that a disenfranchised people would endure tremendous sacrifice and struggle heroically and steadfastly against foreign occupiers and aggressors. Tactically, they would have anticipated that the guerilla/insurgent’s hit, run, and disappear tactics not only nullifies the superior weapons technology of the invading/occupying force, but also provides vast war-fighting advantage in concealment, confrontation, intelligence, and communication. They would have foreseen the frustration of fighting an enemy indistinguishable from those we claim to be liberating and protecting, and would have understood that the resultant anxiety and stress precipitates a state of conditioned hyper-vigilance and overreaction in which civilian casualties and deaths become the norm rather than the exception. They would have realized that this inevitable “kill them all, let God sort them out” mentality, often justified as collateral damage or excused under the rubric of the “fog of war,” abrogates the efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people, increases sympathy and support for the guerillas/insurgents, destroys character, and causes serious psychological, emotional, and moral difficulties for the returning warriors laboring to come to grips with the enormity of their experiences in war. Had our political leaders paid closer attention to the lessons of Vietnam, they would understand that to persevere, to stay the course, to pursue some vague notion of victory or to save face in such a situation is futile, a prescription for even greater disaster, and tantamount to condoning aggression and murder.
Had we as a nation heeded the prescient warnings of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the war-savvy Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, we would have been made aware that despite the charade of humanitarian concern and of dire threats to our freedom and national security, all too often wars are fought for economic gain and corporate greed. Although those of wealth, power, and influence choose and profit from war, it is invariably the poor and the working class, who must fight. War brings profit and gain to an elite few at the expense of the pain, suffering, and deaths of the many. Consequently, “war is a racket,” morally abhorrent and prima facie wrong and anyone who would unleash such sacrilege upon humankind bears an onerous burden of justification.
In the new year, let us reflect and learn the lessons of the present and the past. Let us resolve to reject a distortion of “patriotism” that requires blind allegiance and unquestioned support for, or participation in, unjust and immoral war — aggression and murder. Such “patriotism” is inconsistent with human decency and with the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy. Such “patriotism” is an abeyance of human reason, a profound failure, both intellectually and morally. Rather, let us to aspire to a new patriotism, a true love of country, that requires the moral courage to do what is in the best interest of our nation, i.e., to critically and objectively evaluate, legally and ethically, the causes and justifications for war. Patriots should celebrate dissent, and not repress it; speak out against and condemn immoral and illegal war and not support or condone it; seek new ideas and all possible viewpoints regarding peaceful diplomatic resolutions of international crises and disagreements and not rush to war.
In the new year, as citizens of the world’s only superpower, let us resolve to hold our politicians, generals, and corporate executives to the highest moral standards. We can no longer separate ourselves from their actions in the world, and must accept responsibility for the coups they plan, the wars they wage, and the sweatshops they run. Moreover, those of us who fought in war and know its insanity and horror firsthand, have even a greater obligation to ensure that greed, incompetence, and misguided patriotism never again turn our children into killers and squander their lives and well-being in another unnecessary and immoral war.
If we are ever to achieve peace, in the new year we must resolve to choose the side of the victims, no matter their national identity, who inevitably become the innocent casualties of war and corporate greed. We must choose the side of justice and not of vengeance; of the workers and not of those who exploit them; of reason and not of hysteria; of compassion and understanding and not of cruelty and brutality. We must choose the side of peace and not of war.
In this era of globalization, we have become expendable commodities, forced to live in a world increasingly of corporate design, with little concern for justice and fairness, but only profit. Our young people, motivated by economic hardship or enticed by the high powered salesmanship of recruiters to join the military, have become cannon fodder, forced to shed their blood, sacrifice their lives, and to become killers while corporations benefit from the mayhem. The critical lessons of our present and of our past are clear. In the new year, we must resolve to overcome the narrow perspective of corporatism and nationalism, and embrace a universalism. We must reject the bifurcation of Bush, Obama, and bin Laden, and realize that our country’s borders do not separate us from the rest of humankind. Finally, if we claim to know God, we must resolve to respect her creations and treat all of God’s children as our own. Thomas Paine said it best, I think, “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”
Peace Vet · Copyright © 2011 Camillo C. Bica · All Rights Reserved
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Marines and War |
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Thursday, 19 January 2012 01:51 |
We and those Marines live in a culture that glorifies violence and deifies power. From the nut cases of the NRA that insists a citizen has the "right" to own an assault rife to police officers who think they have the "right" to be judge jury and executioner in the performance of their duty to "protect and serve", to those demented and evil young men who willingly and in cold blood shot their fellow classmates and teachers only to be "explained away" as perhaps social outcasts, the entire society wreaks of the havoc of the religion of "the cowboy"! We worship the cult of celebrity and we use monetary value as the only absolute by which we judge worth. We celebrate television programmes that display dysfunctional families and individuals raised to the level of the theater of the absurd and demand more. Our humor is toilet humor and our language toilet language. We demonize those who dare challenge our racism which our right wing politicians use effectively to stir up the blood lust of that racism. We never sin we just make mistakes even in the most "sacred places"! We are "horrified" at the photos of war and yet we do not condemn those who behead journalists and "infidels" for fear of the charge of sectarianism. We have never been honest about who and what we are as a nation nor have we ever accepted the responsibilities for our own genocide and slavery of others. We have had our own wars of conquest and colonialism in the name of America. Until the day comes when we fundamentally change our values peeing on dead enemy soldiers is just Photoshop to many people.
Peace
Bishop Andrew Gerales Gentry
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