All the media ingredients were there: an African American male, a neighbor with stereotypical glasses thinking ‘black equals criminal,’ The African American suspect becomes belligerent towards police found breaking into his own home. Mind you, this was after it was determined that it was the African American’s home.
Louis Gates, well-known scholar, writer, professor at Harvard, gets put into a cop car, I can imagine his head held down so he doesn’t hit the top of vehicle frame; it’s obvious that when Gates is accosted by police at his own home, that he gets angry at the police force’s unpleasant etiquette of arrest on a black man. White law enforcement on black homeowner. There’s your story for the front page.
Some social scientists have called these kinds of daily harassments and biased actions towards people of color ‘microaggressions.’ Each day many people of color are assaulted with these ‘microaggessions,’ and they add up. Their sum is health problems, and emotional consequences. A chiropractor will tell you that all of the countless traumas that have been perpetrated against our bodies finally reach a traumatic place of breakage, finally our pain yells its devilish invectives, so that we take action and go seek a solution.
Louis Gates is probably no exception to the affects of ‘microagressions.’ Whites never have to think of these actions because, for the most part, we are not victims of them. And due to our whiteness, most of us don’t possess the art of empathy to place ourselves in similar dilemmas. Most whites never have to even think of racism or police work gone awry, because we don’t deal with it every day, as do people of color.
In the coverage I read in the New York Times there definitely, in my observation, was a pro law enforcement bias; there were accompanying articles about the courage of police persons every day when they put on their badges and guns, and confront the obnoxious behavior of citizens. I would admit that probably the majority of the time, they do their jobs, do them well, and protect the community. But the story about Louis Gates had little to say about the unprofessional work of the police in checking out first who Gates was, where he lived, and questioning with more specificity the caller who reported this so-called “crime.”
It’s no secret that incidents of police (especially white officers) brutality, negligence and plain old unprofessional police work, have been a consistent problem in communities of color for as long as I can recall. There is a huge credibility gap between those who ‘protect and serve’ and the residents of communities, mostly in the inner cities. Our culture still idealizes law enforcement, because it gives us the illusion that we are safe and secure, when we know we aren’t really. In general, my assessment is we want to give a “bye” to law enforcement departments, systems, and personnel so the white population can bury its head in its own blindness to the problem.
President Obama’s first statement about the Gates’ incident was most likely from his heart. The President said that the police department acted ‘stupidly,’ which it did. Then after the police department organized a formal protest, Obama made another statement which was much more apologetic and conciliatory. This one was from his political know-how and ingenuity. Like myself, many people who are keenly aware of racism in this society hoped for a stronger stand against an infraction by police that has become a regular part of our nation’s social injustices. I can imagine as well, that some African Americans will view Obama’s action as ‘uncle Tomish.’
At some point, with the power, influence and the platform, Obama will need to bring racial issues to the fore, and plant them squarely in the middle of the table. As a European American, I hope this happens. I’m ashamed for the Euro demographic in showing such ignorance and omission about the roots of its own white supremacist history, and how it continues to be perpetuated into our own time, i.e., the Louis Gates incident is just another example of racism with a new pair of clothes. It saddens me to see the incomprehensible gap between knowledge and action that exists as a part of our own social disease today.
© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. July, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
It Is Not Just a Matter of Apples and Oranges
The House is now tangling over a bill that has been purported to be a law of health reform. I’d like to suggest to you that there is a deeper issue which has far more unhealthy consequences. It’s what has held up a national healthcare reform, and and kept it captive as a hostage.
In our nation we have approximately 47 million people without any health insurance at all, and another 100 million people who are insured by their employers, but must use some other form of payment to pay off the balance of their medical bills. As you might guess many of these millions of people are the poor, those who have jobs but still are poor, the elderly, peoples of color, the homeless, etc. There’s something obscene when U.S. Senators have 110% in healthcare insurance coverage and 147 million have next to nothing to help them receive adequate healthcare. The elites and supposed “representatives” don’t give a damn about the lower class rung on the perpetual ladder of oppressive hierarchy.
What is the “bottom line” issue that I wrote about in the first paragraph? In essential terms we have a White Male System (WMS) that holds power, privilege and possession as a class of rulers. The English call them “Lords.” The only ones who fit into the category of this Democracy or Representative Democracy are the ones who took power at the beginning. The U.S. Constitution specifically articulates white males who own land that is worked by 3/5-of-a-person slaves stolen from other lands and brought here in the most despicable conditions. Since then de jeur equality may appear to be a reality, but where the rubber meets the road, it’s an illusion.
It’s always been about a white-designed-and-structured social, political, religious, educational, medical, legal and governmental system that has as its mission statement: never give up what you got so you can keep it and pass it along to your progeny so they can have the same privileges. At the heart of racism, for example, is the across-the-board enrichment of whites by the hands of those who serve them. Just like the Bob Dylan song goes, “You gonna have to serve someone….” This has always been the real motto of racism in our nation.
If the lowest classes of people (Hitler didn’t just persecute Jews, he aimed his Germanic spear at Gypsies, Homosexuals [they used to call “these kinds of people” by this label, right?! Did you know that?], Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, or anyone else that didn’t fit the super strong Aryan person of the Third Reich. A healthcare system like the one we have, divides classes, engenders internalized power struggles, and generally keeps those in this lower class sick, weak, having chronic diseases, fatigued, in financial debt, along with all of the psychological traumas that go with fearing for your life.
It keeps the poorer class dis-empowered, without advocacy, vulnerable, and often there is a transgenerational factor at play as well. Genetic factors and social environmental conditions, over generations, may open up progeny to similar illnesses and diseases. Unless you’ve lived the life of a fourth generation single mother in the projects you have no idea what kind of life this is. Or what living in these circumstances are like. The tension, stress and anxiety must be discharged somehow, then life is supposed to go on, only it’s the white supremacist class that doesn’t have to dirty their hands with this kind of life. After all, most of them are living in the burbs in big, empty houses.
This is why I say that the ruling elites will fight genuine health reform that will help every single human citizen of the U.S., but hurt those who have the most to lose. Threatened with a loss of their control and power in the healthcare arena, they will resist and fight all the way. Sad thing is that you’ll hear Ignorant Igor saying, “You see, I knew it. I knew all those _________________would eventually get all of their healthcare needs met. Now we’ve got universal healthcare for all! The next thing you know, they’ll want all of us taxpayers to pay healthcare costs for the whole freakin’ universe.” This response is the typical, parroting of self-deluded ignorance you hear all the time. President Ronald Reagan fueled the fire in his infamous speech about all black women being welfare queens.
The U.S. plays fast and loose when it comes to picking and choosing which international laws, declarations, covenants, conventions they give legitimacy and assent, and which ones to ignore claiming they don’t exist; and choosing which ones are to our advantage as the Empire dictates. The UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (you remember, don’t you, a body of all the nations of the world?) was ratified in 1948 as a convention to guide relationships between people within and without the nation. In our discussion of universal healthcare, the WMS needs to seriously change their perceptions of who they are, and who the rest of us are as well.
Article 25 of the Univerrsal Declaration of Human Rights,
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
You can’t make it much plainer than that, can you? In the legislation currently in front of our House Lawmakers, I hope there a few brave people. I hope they get the kahunas to speak truth to power. The powers-that-be want to keep on getting, and the best way is to keep a system in place that delivers the goods—to them. And they don’t mind if the poor don’t get what they’re asking for. Yellow is the color of the eyeglasses they’re looking through.©Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.
In our nation we have approximately 47 million people without any health insurance at all, and another 100 million people who are insured by their employers, but must use some other form of payment to pay off the balance of their medical bills. As you might guess many of these millions of people are the poor, those who have jobs but still are poor, the elderly, peoples of color, the homeless, etc. There’s something obscene when U.S. Senators have 110% in healthcare insurance coverage and 147 million have next to nothing to help them receive adequate healthcare. The elites and supposed “representatives” don’t give a damn about the lower class rung on the perpetual ladder of oppressive hierarchy.
What is the “bottom line” issue that I wrote about in the first paragraph? In essential terms we have a White Male System (WMS) that holds power, privilege and possession as a class of rulers. The English call them “Lords.” The only ones who fit into the category of this Democracy or Representative Democracy are the ones who took power at the beginning. The U.S. Constitution specifically articulates white males who own land that is worked by 3/5-of-a-person slaves stolen from other lands and brought here in the most despicable conditions. Since then de jeur equality may appear to be a reality, but where the rubber meets the road, it’s an illusion.
It’s always been about a white-designed-and-structured social, political, religious, educational, medical, legal and governmental system that has as its mission statement: never give up what you got so you can keep it and pass it along to your progeny so they can have the same privileges. At the heart of racism, for example, is the across-the-board enrichment of whites by the hands of those who serve them. Just like the Bob Dylan song goes, “You gonna have to serve someone….” This has always been the real motto of racism in our nation.
If the lowest classes of people (Hitler didn’t just persecute Jews, he aimed his Germanic spear at Gypsies, Homosexuals [they used to call “these kinds of people” by this label, right?! Did you know that?], Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, or anyone else that didn’t fit the super strong Aryan person of the Third Reich. A healthcare system like the one we have, divides classes, engenders internalized power struggles, and generally keeps those in this lower class sick, weak, having chronic diseases, fatigued, in financial debt, along with all of the psychological traumas that go with fearing for your life.
It keeps the poorer class dis-empowered, without advocacy, vulnerable, and often there is a transgenerational factor at play as well. Genetic factors and social environmental conditions, over generations, may open up progeny to similar illnesses and diseases. Unless you’ve lived the life of a fourth generation single mother in the projects you have no idea what kind of life this is. Or what living in these circumstances are like. The tension, stress and anxiety must be discharged somehow, then life is supposed to go on, only it’s the white supremacist class that doesn’t have to dirty their hands with this kind of life. After all, most of them are living in the burbs in big, empty houses.
This is why I say that the ruling elites will fight genuine health reform that will help every single human citizen of the U.S., but hurt those who have the most to lose. Threatened with a loss of their control and power in the healthcare arena, they will resist and fight all the way. Sad thing is that you’ll hear Ignorant Igor saying, “You see, I knew it. I knew all those _________________would eventually get all of their healthcare needs met. Now we’ve got universal healthcare for all! The next thing you know, they’ll want all of us taxpayers to pay healthcare costs for the whole freakin’ universe.” This response is the typical, parroting of self-deluded ignorance you hear all the time. President Ronald Reagan fueled the fire in his infamous speech about all black women being welfare queens.
The U.S. plays fast and loose when it comes to picking and choosing which international laws, declarations, covenants, conventions they give legitimacy and assent, and which ones to ignore claiming they don’t exist; and choosing which ones are to our advantage as the Empire dictates. The UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (you remember, don’t you, a body of all the nations of the world?) was ratified in 1948 as a convention to guide relationships between people within and without the nation. In our discussion of universal healthcare, the WMS needs to seriously change their perceptions of who they are, and who the rest of us are as well.
Article 25 of the Univerrsal Declaration of Human Rights,
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
You can’t make it much plainer than that, can you? In the legislation currently in front of our House Lawmakers, I hope there a few brave people. I hope they get the kahunas to speak truth to power. The powers-that-be want to keep on getting, and the best way is to keep a system in place that delivers the goods—to them. And they don’t mind if the poor don’t get what they’re asking for. Yellow is the color of the eyeglasses they’re looking through.©Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Vets Paradise
I remember the dude\
Met him at McCabe Center
In Austin/the Center composed
Of three groups: Vets, dudes released
From the Feds, and TAIP folks/all
Thrown together/incarcerated/in
rehabilitation
This dude was a Vet, and when
He talked about the Domicile in
Temple, his eyes lit up, passion
Looked like it was flushing his
Soul out his eyes\talking in
Animation, words gyrating,
Pure object language
Talking about how he was so
Close to going to the Vet home,
As if it was a celestial paradise,
And when he arrived there, God,
He’d really arrived\free of all
Terrestrial torments/arrived at
Eden, where all Vets go to
Prepare to die
And I used to cringe at his joyous
Proclamations, hoping that I would
Never end up there, one of them/
I sigh/within myself, at this boring
Pictorial/this possibility/my thoughts
Grew revolutionary/I’ve been in too
Many institutions to call any of them
Home, much less heaven/I hate them\
Their sterility/conformity/clinical bland-
Ness/in my mind/they are more like the far
End of a polar expanse on a continuum/
Something that kills spirit and lifeblood
And dreams—frozen in hypothermia
Somewhere in the Islands
© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. June, 2009
Met him at McCabe Center
In Austin/the Center composed
Of three groups: Vets, dudes released
From the Feds, and TAIP folks/all
Thrown together/incarcerated/in
rehabilitation
This dude was a Vet, and when
He talked about the Domicile in
Temple, his eyes lit up, passion
Looked like it was flushing his
Soul out his eyes\talking in
Animation, words gyrating,
Pure object language
Talking about how he was so
Close to going to the Vet home,
As if it was a celestial paradise,
And when he arrived there, God,
He’d really arrived\free of all
Terrestrial torments/arrived at
Eden, where all Vets go to
Prepare to die
And I used to cringe at his joyous
Proclamations, hoping that I would
Never end up there, one of them/
I sigh/within myself, at this boring
Pictorial/this possibility/my thoughts
Grew revolutionary/I’ve been in too
Many institutions to call any of them
Home, much less heaven/I hate them\
Their sterility/conformity/clinical bland-
Ness/in my mind/they are more like the far
End of a polar expanse on a continuum/
Something that kills spirit and lifeblood
And dreams—frozen in hypothermia
Somewhere in the Islands
© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. June, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Another Contradiction Between U.S. law and the Blind Spot of Self-Aggrandizement
The other night I happened to be listening to the Monitor program on KPFT FM radio out of Houston, Texas. One of the interviewees was Marjorie Cohn, a lawyer and president of the National Lawyer's Guild. Ms. Cohn is also a very enthusiastic activist especially around issues that relate to the military, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and other wars inspired by a system engulfed and consumer by Empire. Marjorie Cohn, along with Kathleen Gilberd, have authored a book entitled Rules of Disengagement. I really enjoyed this interview, and learned some new things.
The book Rules of Disengagement speaks to the issues of people who want to disengage from the military-industrial-digital war machine. One chapter deals with Conscientous Objection. This peeked my interest because I was a CO during the Vietnam Era. Most don't know that that GIs and other military personnel, from the inside, were some of the prime catalysts of resistance to cause the eventually pulling out of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of troops deserted because they knew the system would stand against them. Some fled to Canada, and some went underground. Discussions about the philosophical, moral, economic, and ethical sources of resistance were held in coffeehouses in many cities nearby military installations in this nation and in others across the globe. The rebellion against fighting an illegal war was slowly but surely instigated by many sectors of the anti-war movement until it reached a huge conflagration and the government had to take some kind of responsive action to the voice of the people.
One of the most salient points made by Marjorie Cohn in this Monitor interview is one of the best-kept-by-reason-of-intention-secrets to be hidden from the American people: the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is illegal. It's illegal for two reasons: first of all, to be legal war, and country has to be attacked by an aggressor state. To use 911 as a precursor to the so-called Iraqi Freedom invasion is to continue to be mired in the deception used as a reason for the attack in the first place. The attackers on 911 were mainly Saudis, and disconnected from Iraq, and even Afghanistan. If we are to take the administration's presumption as a bonafide real argument, it wasn't the attack of the Iraqi people on the U.S., but it was the attack of a group of terrorists led by Osama Bin Laden. To invade and occupy a country, setting up a hand-picked government, making it possible to realize huge rewards of oil to U.S. oil companies, by cleverly and deftly getting that set-up government to pass laws that would guarantee this legal theft to fall into the hands of people and systems that can only see profits, the murder and heinous crimes to civilians by military personnel, the continual torture of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, etc. is illegal under international conventions and laws.
The consequence of this, as Cohn has argued in many courts, it that there can be no real military justice if the orders given to those dissenting from the occupation are illegal. It's like habeous corpus. The military is in actuality holding military staff against their will if they don't want to follow the U.S.'s illegal course of action. War is horrible enough, but to try and foist off this kind of deception and seduction onto the American people is a war crime in itself.
The other reason this is an illegal war, and orders to go anywhere to support or fight it are illegal is that treaties created by the U.N. were in place. These treaties have to do with the protection of human rights of all peoples in all countries. No one country has the right to contravene these conventions and ratified treaties by the international organization whose purpose it is to insure the human rights of the world's citizens.
At the heart of U.S. imperialism is the notion that the Empire can make or break international laws and compacts at will. To use the excuse 'we are protecting our national interest' simply won't cut it any more. Neither will any one nation riding roughshod over any other nation's protection of human rights. The U.S. chooses what laws it sees fit to call legitimate or illegitimate is sort of like a bird in a bubble with no air. For awhile it lives in the bubble (with its residual air supply) thinking everything is ok. This bird thinks it has got it made. But eventually the needle of actual legitimacy of all human beings will pop the bubble, and down it will go.
This state of doing business is slowly dying off in that it's obsolete in our new age. When will the U.S. decide to truly come into the company and community of nations who value everyone's human rights, not just those of its own citizens? The resistance given to living the Universal Treaty of Human Rights, first ratified in 1948, at the grass roots level, both in and outside the nation, by the U.S. imperialistic presumption of superior power and cultural racism, has wrapped inside of it its own demise. As the prophet of the Bahai faith (I'm not a Bahai by the way, but I know truth when I see it) once said (parphrasing) 'the nations of the world are like a huge tree. The branches are many and diverse, but they are hooked into one tree.' If I may extemporize on this saying, our root system is the internalization of our oneness as human beings. When we ignore this truth, we live in a world of peril. This is our wake up call.
The book Rules of Disengagement speaks to the issues of people who want to disengage from the military-industrial-digital war machine. One chapter deals with Conscientous Objection. This peeked my interest because I was a CO during the Vietnam Era. Most don't know that that GIs and other military personnel, from the inside, were some of the prime catalysts of resistance to cause the eventually pulling out of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of troops deserted because they knew the system would stand against them. Some fled to Canada, and some went underground. Discussions about the philosophical, moral, economic, and ethical sources of resistance were held in coffeehouses in many cities nearby military installations in this nation and in others across the globe. The rebellion against fighting an illegal war was slowly but surely instigated by many sectors of the anti-war movement until it reached a huge conflagration and the government had to take some kind of responsive action to the voice of the people.
One of the most salient points made by Marjorie Cohn in this Monitor interview is one of the best-kept-by-reason-of-intention-secrets to be hidden from the American people: the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is illegal. It's illegal for two reasons: first of all, to be legal war, and country has to be attacked by an aggressor state. To use 911 as a precursor to the so-called Iraqi Freedom invasion is to continue to be mired in the deception used as a reason for the attack in the first place. The attackers on 911 were mainly Saudis, and disconnected from Iraq, and even Afghanistan. If we are to take the administration's presumption as a bonafide real argument, it wasn't the attack of the Iraqi people on the U.S., but it was the attack of a group of terrorists led by Osama Bin Laden. To invade and occupy a country, setting up a hand-picked government, making it possible to realize huge rewards of oil to U.S. oil companies, by cleverly and deftly getting that set-up government to pass laws that would guarantee this legal theft to fall into the hands of people and systems that can only see profits, the murder and heinous crimes to civilians by military personnel, the continual torture of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, etc. is illegal under international conventions and laws.
The consequence of this, as Cohn has argued in many courts, it that there can be no real military justice if the orders given to those dissenting from the occupation are illegal. It's like habeous corpus. The military is in actuality holding military staff against their will if they don't want to follow the U.S.'s illegal course of action. War is horrible enough, but to try and foist off this kind of deception and seduction onto the American people is a war crime in itself.
The other reason this is an illegal war, and orders to go anywhere to support or fight it are illegal is that treaties created by the U.N. were in place. These treaties have to do with the protection of human rights of all peoples in all countries. No one country has the right to contravene these conventions and ratified treaties by the international organization whose purpose it is to insure the human rights of the world's citizens.
At the heart of U.S. imperialism is the notion that the Empire can make or break international laws and compacts at will. To use the excuse 'we are protecting our national interest' simply won't cut it any more. Neither will any one nation riding roughshod over any other nation's protection of human rights. The U.S. chooses what laws it sees fit to call legitimate or illegitimate is sort of like a bird in a bubble with no air. For awhile it lives in the bubble (with its residual air supply) thinking everything is ok. This bird thinks it has got it made. But eventually the needle of actual legitimacy of all human beings will pop the bubble, and down it will go.
This state of doing business is slowly dying off in that it's obsolete in our new age. When will the U.S. decide to truly come into the company and community of nations who value everyone's human rights, not just those of its own citizens? The resistance given to living the Universal Treaty of Human Rights, first ratified in 1948, at the grass roots level, both in and outside the nation, by the U.S. imperialistic presumption of superior power and cultural racism, has wrapped inside of it its own demise. As the prophet of the Bahai faith (I'm not a Bahai by the way, but I know truth when I see it) once said (parphrasing) 'the nations of the world are like a huge tree. The branches are many and diverse, but they are hooked into one tree.' If I may extemporize on this saying, our root system is the internalization of our oneness as human beings. When we ignore this truth, we live in a world of peril. This is our wake up call.
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