OBL DEAD.

I’m not sad he is dead, murdered even, but I’ve written several emails this morning to different friends, friends heading to India and Australia, asking them not to go. My brother is in China. He is due home this weekend. I’ll be relieved when he returns, as will his gf. No one looks more like an American than my brother. I can pass for Persian or Latino — depending, but he might as well wear a sign.

I wonder where this all ends? Do we leave Afghanistan, save us some soldiers and some money?

What of Libya? The whole killing kids in Libya thing is hard to swallow. Though I’d have to be morally lethargic not to have visions of the innocents Gaddafi has been murdering for decades when hearing of “the collateral murder” of the children, I can’t stomach it. I still retain some hope of it not being true.

Now can we work on making health insurance/health care not only available, but affordable — in case you hadn’t noticed the cost of health insurance has tripled in some states over the last three years. You wimped on a national plan, and now more people are on that insidious high deductible plan, the one the insurance companies are making billions from because the small biz owner with two kids and a family plan deductible of $2700.00 can’t always come up with that cash. Consequently, these adults skip going to the doctor for check-ups for those “little things”, things that turn out to be a curable cancer that is no longer treatable because they waited too long. Exactly what the insurance companies knew would happen.

Gas now over four dollars a gallon, amalgamation of communications and the financial industry continue to destroy the middle class and now we need to concern ourselves with shortages (real or fabricated for profit), and price gouging for medicines, as WAPO tells us there are Shortages of key drugs .

Sure, I know they will call you socialist, but they will always call you something. A lot of people can’t wait until after your reelection when don’t give a hoot about the financial powers backing you. The brave thing is to actually do something before you are reelected the second time.

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Brave New Films has partnered with RAWA, to help Afghans displaced by US war, focusing on what is really happening in Afghanistan as a result of US policy. The partnership is to provide direct aid to displaced people living in desperate conditions in suburbs of Kabul. The plight of these people has been covered in a documentary viewable in segments at the Rethink Afghanistan.

There are five segments up at the site currently. Most are quite disturbing. The site itself is worth tooling around. I’ve been following it for some time, as I’ve followed RAWA. The site boasts a blog, and a separate section for Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan.

Unlike Iran Afghanistan is technologically isolated. The people, their way of life, are unfamiliar to most of us. Iran, though isolated via sanctions, is a country whose people we relate to, and proudly twitter about, because they look more like us, are educated like us, have access – even if limited – to advanced technology, and we fear their country. We find it harder to relate to the Afghan people. Consequently we are less bothered by the fact that the women of Afghanistan suffer some of the most horrific circumstances we could ever imagine. We don’t twitter about them, or turn our faces green over them.

There is no logic to how we choose our causes. At times it seems merely a matter of convenience, though we tend to act much quicker, and with more careful consideration, when we can see ourselves in others. The more people seem like us, the more likely we will be bothered by their distress and act, if only symbolically, on it.

We choose our causes based on sameness. Women are going to have to help women. First we have to listen to the women we are hoping to help. The 5th segment of the documentary will help with that. Bombs will kill women in Afghanistan.

We should be aware of what our policy is doing to women around the world, even if it is not as easy for them to communicate this to us and our nightly news is not reporting it.

The site also has a direct link to donate to RAWA. The donations will purchase a variety of things, from ghee and rice, to blankets and tent carpets.

A comments off FYI posting.

peace

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I’m not as well schooled on the Vietnam era as I am on other things, though I know more about it than most people my age, if only because I find it more interesting than shopping for Jim Choo’s — they are out of my price range and my legs look quite fine without heals because they are fairly long.

I gather, from what I’ve read on McNamara’s passing, that people think he owns Vietnam, or he should. So they’ve assigned it to him. Understandable, but I’m not convinced he should be sole owner. It’s as convenient, and right, to blame Vietnam on the likes of McNamara as it is to blame Iraq on Bush and friends (liars), a congress unwilling to listen to the sense of Robert Byrd (cowards), and complicit or incompetent journalism (caught in the middle with you). Next time it will be our fault.

History has changed things. So has the internet. We saw that with the presidential election, we are seeing it in some way now with Iran’s Executives of Construction Party dismissing the vote and siding with the opposition. Next time we will be to blame. As the internet continues to grow, and access to real and substantive sources of information increases, there will be fewer excuses for complicit apathy by way of intentional ignorance. Yes, it is still a free country, and everyone should be free to practice both ignorance and apathy as they see fit. No one should be denied their preferred intent. This is merely a reminder that we should enjoy the scapegoats while we can.

I’ll have to do more reading on Vietnam. Not immediately, as I have my second summer session, work, and Infinite indiJestion, along with My Sister My Love, will consume most of my summer reading time. I’m am up for general or academic reading suggestions on Vietnam though.

Speaking of Infinite Jest. I haven’t been an end note virgin for years, but now I am an end note whore, having given myself up to my first 9 8.4 page end note experience. Isn’t this a rite of passage? Shouldn’t there be gifts and parties, or at least a dinner out, for this?

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