El Gringoqueño

I was watching CNN this afternoon. Featured was a young Palestinian-American living in Gaza.

"What’s it like?" the CNN reporter asked him. "Are you scared." She furrowed her brow with concern.

"It’s tough sometimes," the young man said with nary an accent, his skateboard dangling limply at his side, shoulders slack. "Yo, my buddy was almost blown up. It was like, messed up an’ stuff. This rocket, like, it came screaming in and almost hit us. Yo." We, the viewer, are treated to a little montage of our youthful ghetto urban kid from the "street" yo doing lame jumps around Gaza on his skateboard.

Then his mother comes on, Shelly "American Name hyphen Palestinian name." "I worry about him. It is dangerous here. But what are you going to do?"

And I’m thinkin’, GET THE HELL OUT OF GAZA, IDIOT! So here we have an American woman married to a Palestinian man, and the best living arrangement they could come up with was Gaza? WTF?

So okay, I’m thinking, benefit of the doubt time. Maybe they are international aid workers. Maybe he is well-educated and has a call to social work and civil justice. He cares about his people and wants to help them.

But then I thought about Chernobyl.

Yeah, Chernobyl.

Would you raise your kids there?

There’s a toxicity in the ground, in the air, in the water that isn’t going to dissipate for hundreds of years. The best thing you can do is leave. Barring that, you die. This is the same scenario for any one of the US Federal Superfund sites, communities laid to waste by greed, incompetence or ignorance. Guess what happens, folks. People pack it in and head for the hills. The ground’s been spoiled. The land isn’t worth having. It sucks, but we’d rather be alive someplace else then die young from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or have our kids born retarded and/or with missing or extra digits.

So it makes perfect sense to leave. You do not want to raise your kids in a toxic environment because it will make them sick and they will suffer and die.

You do not want to raise your children in an environment of violence, hatred, and poverty because it will make them sick and they will suffer and die. Living in such a place will make you just as sick as if it was pesticides, mercury, or uranium.

Why do we have so little insight into societal toxicity? What happens when a culture, region, or neighborhood is so overwhelmed with hatred, violence, crime, and oppression that it becomes impossible to grow up healthy and unaffected by the mutagenic qualities of the environment? Why do we as stubborn idiot humans feel some sort of social responsibility to the land and/or the community? How come the help we feel we need to render is something other than a ride out of the place?

An environmental worker explains, holding an intricate cylindrical device connected to a number of brightly colored tubes, "You see, resident, we just need to filter the water through this special radiological filter - don’t forget to change it every 3 months *nervous laugh*, and make sure that you don’t go outside without your dust mask. And don’t touch the dirt. Oh, yeah, you can’t hunt either. All animal life is carrying alpha emitters. Oh, yeah, make sure you sleep face down with a sheet over your head and put tape over all points in your home where there is air infiltration: door jam, windows, etc."

"Um, miss, we just want to leave. Can we go someplace else?"

"Why would you want to do that. This is YOUR land."

"Yeah, but my, um, urine glows."

"Who’s a mister negative. You just have to make it better. Where’s your sense of responsibility?"

"It left with my hair."

So you see it doesn’t make any sense in Chernobyl, why should it make any more sense in Palestine, the favelas in Brazil, La Perla in Puerto Rico, North St. Louis, or Iraq, or any place else that has been spoiled completely by societal toxicity.

Get out, get far away, let the half life of hate and despair take its toll on the area. Let it return to its placid state. Once the haters have killed each other, you might be able to move back and reclaim the land, but it’s going to be a long time. Don’t expect it in your lifetime. All forms of toxicity take generations to dissipate, hate included.

Well, actually they do want more troops in Iraq, but it’s just that commanders want so many more, that another 30,000 may as well be zero. The problem once again is rhetoric. Military commanders are loudly sounding off that they do not want more troops in Iraq. How does this reconcile with claims by these same military commanders and analysts that we went in with too few troops?

Observe this behind closed doors exchange with the Decider:

Bush: How many more do you boys need to pacify Iraq?  I’m all ears and willing to do what it takes to go forward.

Commander: 300,000 minimum. We coulda done it with less going in, but now we’re going to need to ramp up to 500,000 to get the job done.

Bush: Hmmm, I hear ya.  I hear ya, but I can only spare you 30,000. 30,000 more is all the political capital I have to spend. Politics won’t allow me to send more than 30,000. Ya see, that number 30,000? It’s all I can send.  I’ve decided.

Commander: Well then you can keep ‘em. Don’t send ANY then. 30,000 is like zero - exactly like zero, except that there are going to be more bodies sent home. Casualties will increase with zero increase in effectiveness.

Bush: Son, listen, this is politics. You just be a good soldier and put these boys to good use in the war on terror, guarding Haliburton facilities, etc. We’re going to win, you hear! I’ve decided it!

Commander: Whatever you say, sir. *salutes leaves*

Chris Penningroth’s Weltanschauung » A Short Memorial to Two Fallen Brothers

Chris has a memorial post up about CPT Travis Patriquin.  I didn’t know the guy, but as I read more of the links and got to his now famous powerpoint presentation, I was blown away.  We need to listen to this guy.  Forget the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations and just look at this dead simple document about what needs to be done.  I don’t doubt that CPT Patriquin understood the subject matter.  As one of perhaps the only fluent Arabic speakers on the ground, his recommendations hit home with the simplicity of a subject perfectly understood.

No disrespect there, I assure you.  I just want to set it up properly.  I’m a college educated professional, with a background in Art, Technology, Engineering and ample business and life experience.  

But tonight, I felt insignificant, shamed, and incarcerated as I was within my own limits.

Tonight’s activity in the prison was to design Christmas cards.  We gave the young men paper, crayons, and color pencils and asked them to draw Christmas cards.  I offered that they should draw something they knew or draw something in which they were interested.  "What do you have to say?" I asked.

They busily set forth with religious iconery, scenes of nativity, presents, Christmas cheer, cars, Santa Claus and the like.

I sat with my paper blank with my head in my hands. 

I had nothing to say.  I’m not into blindly recreating religious themes.  As an American Catholic, I more resemble a Protestant, indifferent to the rendering of religious symbols.  Drawing a baby Jesus doesn’t come naturally to me.  Virgin Mary?  You kidding?  Three wise men?  Maybe, but it wasn’t coming.  Could I draw a camel?  I don’t think I’ve ever looked at one closely enough.  I thought about as many different Christmas or Puerto Rico images I could and rejected them - each and every one.

I was afraid what I had to say was not worth saying, that my drawing would suck, or be irrelevant.  I sat paralyzed by indecision and apprehension.  The more I sat, the worse it got.  I’m an artist.  I still look at some of my charcoals and think, "Damn I was good."  But today and recently… I just don’t know.

And these kids, disadvantaged, without the love of their parents or stable communities, and locked up as they were, happily drew whatever their hearts told them.  To quote Satchel Paige  "…dance like no one is watching." 

They did.  I couldn’t.

They seemed freer to me somehow.

Yeah, you heard me right. Oh sure, Picard and his lot are all: "Some people believe in a higher power, but we here in the 24th century believe in the power of our human compassion, will, and nobility."

Bah! I say to you, Jean-Luc Picard. Bah! I say to you, Gene Roddenberry. Bah! I say to you, Rick Berman.

Two words: Prime Directive.

If that’s not belief in God, I don’t know what is. And it’s not just any God, but a Puritanical micromanaging control freak who’s already decided everything that will ever be decided.

Who came up with that Prime Directive shit anyway? Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t help you because it might affect some future event in a way such that it will not transpire in the natural (read: pre-destined) fashion. WTF? Is the future Federation a bunch of cowering Calvinists with their pre-destination crap?

I mean, really people, how did this escape unanswered for so long? Star Trek fans will go long and hard for the Prime Directive, that it’s somehow pure, clean, unencumbered by our messy superstitions, organized religion, God.

Look how advanced we are in the future, they say. That future is something for which to strive.

I suppose we look to that Prime Directive as some sort of ideal simply because we’ve seen how self-interested intervention in the affairs of other nations has ripped them apart and fomented so much suffering. The twentieth century, for example, is littered with meddling gone bad. Vietnam, possibly the crucible in which the Prime Directive was formed, is perhaps the best reason for its creation.

Then there’s the model of Switzerland, the model of, "Well, if you were meant to live, you will live. If you were meant to die, you will die. I cannot interfere." This Prime Directive of neutrality has somehow been held up as the ideal of behavior. We hold inaction as the highest morality. Do nothing, speak nothing, hear nothing, and all will cruise along at His will.

Don’t you see how loony it all is, you bunch of superstitious Calvinist freaks? We were not put here to play our parts in God’s little Broadway production, thank you very much. We were put here for, and only for, to live, to choose, to learn, and to love.

The noblest of all possible courses of action is not to withdraw, back away, and let it all transpire by some unseen hand. No, our best hope is to act in the best way that we know how with the information we have at moment. If a stranger needs a hand, we help him and damn the supposed later consequences. We don’t know much, and we can’t rely on God to push it all along like some divine universal machine.

Life is messy. We make choices. We make mistakes. We fail. We succeed.

What sort of world or universe would accept us into its cradle where we impacted nothing, did nothing, took no stock of our surroundings, and did not act as if we were the masters of our destiny.

No, Star Trek people, the Prime Directive is NOT good and noble. The Prime Directive is at best a "Hope for good but do not interfere" and at worst, a retreat from the universe of flesh and blood.

You may as well have not existed.