Stoopid Stuff

Actually, I'd rather talk about football or American Idol

I haven't posted anything in a while. Let's just say that life got in the way. So here's a few random thoughts and dispatches from the the depths of despair and pessimism. A collapsing economy, and a national political conversation in full swing that refuses to allow the participants to address the real problems, root causes, and identify genuine solutions. Hope you've got an exit plan and a decent bunker.

The American Evangelical Christianist Theocrats and the Muslim Fundamentalist Islamists want exactly the same thing. Why is no one allowed to say this? They want to rule their constituents by the laws they glean from their sacred texts, they want to cover their women, they want to discriminate against homosexuals and atheists, they want women to be subservient, they want their religion to be the dominant power. And yet, with all the obvious parallels, you never see anyone with a real role in the national conversation make the comparison, and whenever someone, a blogger or author perhaps, tries to point out the obvious similarities, he or she is accused of moral equivalence. Fascinating response, really. Like when a single payer universal health insurance program is proposed, the response is the plaintive wail "socialized medicine"! As if this is all one must say to dismiss the government's responsibility to take care of it's citizens. It's interesting that at no time do they explain why moral equivalence or socialized medicine are BAD, they just invoke the words like some kind of magic spell that will ward off evil spirits.

I'm fascinated by the clear fact, that judged strictly by his words, George Bush is far more concerned with the Iraqi people than he is the American people. He speaks firmly on their behalf, lobbies intensely for money for them, and puts everything America cares about on the line to try and make their lives a little better - at least according to him. At the same time, he vetoes money for health care for American children, and insists on limiting domestic spending in order to free up money to spend on Iraq. If you were watching from the point of view of a space alien in outer space, you would think George Bush was the president of Iraq, not America. Does anyone mention this, wonder about it, ponder it's significance? I haven't seen it.

Items produced from bits of cloth are nothing. They are bits of colored cloth. Whether they are head scarves, flags or kerchiefs, they are nothing but inanimate bits of colored cloth, imbued only with the significance we award them. They are symbols, nothing more, emblematic of beliefs and ideals, but not sacred containers FOR those beliefs and ideals. No one ever died for a flag. They might have willingly sacrificed their life for the ideas and ideals REPRESENTED by that flag. You might say the flag is a bit of shorthand, a way of summing up and representing a community, a tribe and a way of life. And yeah, sometimes that's worth dying for. A flag? A mere bit of colored cloth? Not so much.

If a woman wants to wear a head scarf, we have to be willing to allow it. We have to find a way to get past the tribal hate and fear and recognize that, as has been said so eloquently before, it is not a zero-sum game. By wearing her desired bit of cloth, she doesn't take anything from the rest of us. Indeed, by empowering her to follow her wishes, we empower us all to do the same. So much of how we view the world is driven by a tribal fear of the other, but the other is only a threat to the extent he feels threatened. By unwinding the tribal nature that might well have served humanity well forty thousand years ago, by getting past the fear and racism and sexism and hatred that drives and informs so much of how we deal with the rest of the world, we have a chance to move into a new kind of culture, and with the challenges of a global interconnected economy, peak oil and global warming, may well be the only chance humanity has for survival.

posted by mikey @ 5:45 PM