afterSonoma

MUNDO UNO

Hampi, december 2006, originally uploaded by Larsa.

In a spontaneous comment on The Brink of Madness - A familiar place, an article by Victor Davis Hanson for the National Review, I laid out the simple case for ending popular support for violence, anywhere, anytime. The article had condemned liberals for not supporting Israel's response to the recent Hezbollah attacks.
Since I was led to the article by Digg.com, I placed my comment on Digg. Republished here.

"This is a point of view with some historical insight and a big historical blindness. Important to consider the truths stated, but also important to consider the unstated.- the historical truth that Israel's creation is a modern European crusade. This Euro-American Zionist invasion of Arab land, pushing out and killing rightful residents has created an entity that the world cannot afford to accept as a rightful state. Terrorist attacks on anyone by anyone cannot be supported. As we can understand anger, recognize wrong, we cannot condone violent attack by Hezbollah, Israel, US or insurgents anywhere. Differences need to be resolved in courts, violence must be recognized as sociopathic, a threat to all life."

Later today, I was led by Digg to an article asking Why America gives Israel its unconditional support? which prompted me to expound further in a Digg comment.
Republished here.

"It has never been more clear to me that the world, all of us cannot condone or tolerate violent actions, by governments, terrorist group, national liberation movements, insurgents of any type for any reason. Fundamentalists or revolutionaries, religious zealots, patriots or fascists are dangerous to the extent that they use violence or advocate the use of violence. Violent people are sociopathic -- a danger to all life. Leaders who extort, condone, or aid others in violent actions mislead and are harming us all. We can look back at the history of endless violent attack and violent retribution and see that this method of resolving conflicts is useless. All who wage or support war are corrupted by it and are condemned to lives of fear and guilt. It is contrary to the individual and collective's best interest to commit violent action in retribution for violence. What is in our best interest is to arrest, try and imprison perpetrators of violent acts. Our collective interest is best served by effective, fair and forceful containment of sociopaths. We need to use our collective creativity to discover successful police techniques to locate, disarm and imprison those found guilty of committing or causing the commission of violent acts. Killing or injuring anyone, whether by intent or by neglect is always a crime in every situation. We can no longer afford this love affair we have had with war and violence. The world is too small, there are too many of us, any hurt hurts us all. The proper response to a violent act is to isolate and surround the individuals responsible, humanely removing them from society. For the protection of all life and the quality of our own, we must make every effort to disarm and capture those individuals responsible for the violent act and to dismantle the economic, political, industrial system which sustained those actions. There are no right sides or wrong sides to any of the religious, political or historical conflicts plaguing life. There is only those who live and those who kill. We all need to unite to isolate violence. We are all in this life together, all life is precious, we must unite against any and all calls to violent actions or policies."

Looking on Flickr for an illustrative picture, the one above caught my eye. I think it expresses better than limb-less babies or bloody rubble the consequence of war. This picture shows the effects of fear on everyone, not only on those who get crushed or ripped apart by explosions or those who pull the triggers, but the way all of our lives are made into hell on earth.

The photo belongs to a group, named Mundo Uno - One World, One Future, for the Children.

Please, we all need to act now, act smart, act with care, with love to literally save the world. History does matter, grievances must be adjudicated. We all need justice. But there can be no justification for violent attack. We must make war a crime.

Technorati Tags: War Digg Hezbollah Israel America p0ps

Thugs

I'm glad your Canucks are doing well, I haven't heard the Canuck Outsider recently, I'll have to catch another one soon. That guy is a great commenter. Go Canucks!

Re: Beckett, do you think it was a simple matter of depression? Not that depression is simple, but I wonder because, as you recount what you learned from the bio, he got better during WWII, which I conjecture could have helped focus his attention outside his self, then he got attention for his work and gained some hope. Sounds like the world and the love of other people, for his work at least, drew him out of depression. Is that too simplistic?

Who wouldn't be depressed if they were involved with a Christian belief system. (I'm so impatient with any of these mono-theists religious thugs, the way they degrade daily experience, bullying women and children, projecting life's meaning onto a nether world defined by preachers). I'm with your yoga teacher.

Since you say you don't know how I am with Beckett, I can tell that you haven't noticed yet the blog comments, i.e. you haven't read my comment on "Edgy". I'd like us to start using the comments and their replies to branch off specific discussions. Since our readers are not using them yet, we may as well. Twenty years after my High School drama interest in Beckett, I gained a new interest in him in the '80s when I was reading and reading about Joyce. After dipping into "Finnegans Wake" for a couple of years, I read some of a Beckett novel (don't remember the title). It was fun in a dreamy way. When I read things like that, I'm very pleased by the inner images which spring from these seemingly incomprehensible word strings.

The weather here in New York this morning is about as good as it gets anywhere, low 70s, clear sky, slight breeze. All I can say about the weather is that it is way-whacky everywhere. San Fran and Sonoma, like you, have had too much rain, Hawaii, where daughter, Heather and husband Jim may be moving soon, is absolutely washed away with historically unprecedented amounts of rain. Here, we had a mild winter, a record one-day snow fall which melted away in three days and now, a record dry March. Glaciers melting into the oceans, all these port cities are threatened, no telling what's going to happen anywhere. I'm just glad that the global discussion has gotten beyond questioning whether there is climate change and now is pondering whether we've passed a tipping point. When the oil mafia, which controls this country, is defeated, the world can make some progress towards providing future generations with an environment they can live in.

Centre/Center Gets It Right

Centre/Center
Mary Burns

The settings for Centre/Center are West Sonoma County, California of the late '60s; frozen northern British Columbia of the mid '70s; Vancouver, B.C. and the Oregon coast of the mid '80s.

Centre/Center's cast of characters include: a daughter whose cultural, political choices put her at odds with her mainstream suburban family; pot-smoking hippies with anti-science attitudes and neo-pagan rituals; anti-war protesters; a LSD casualty who liberates a motorcycle from an owner who doesn't respect it's need to be ridden; a woman who permanently borrows without permission her friend's truck because she thinks he can get along without it; a drug dealer; an abandoned child searching for her mother and coming to terms with an uncomfortable truth about her father; a disillusioned and angry Vietnam veteran who lives in isolated northern wilderness and fathers a child with a woman stronger than he and another Veteran burn-out lost to a hobo life.

The novel is in three sections, in the first section the omnipotent narrator drifts through the thoughts and histories of a group of young people challenged by the stresses of the Viet Nam War Era. The second section's narration is tensely focused on a couple in a wilderness cabin. The third and final section is the first-person narrative of a determined, capable 20 year old girl.

Of course, I'm not an unbiased reviewer, Mary Burns is a friend of mine, my partner on this blog. I first knew her in Sonoma County, California of the late '60's. Although this book is not strictly auto-biographical, several people we both knew are recognizable, in composite and it is dedicated to the mutual friend who introduced us.

The settings, social attitudes and interactions of the first section are all quite familiar to me, she thoroughly manifests the era and illustrates the way we were. The thoughtfulness, the self-seriousness, the moral dilemmas we tackled, all ring true. The shifting, drifting narration of the section accurately evokes the mood of the hippie life-style we enjoyed.

I'm a stranger to the wilderness setting of the second section, though it is clear from the writing alone that Mary is not. Though Mary and I have been in correspondence for decades, I last saw her in 1970 as she and her young daughter drove away, headed north. They continued until they reached the far northern wilderness. Again, she brings authority to this northern wilderness story of a strong woman and a troubled man.

With intimate knowledge from observation, Mary clearly narrates the third section through the voice of a character of the same generation as Mary's daughter. The character's adventures while on her quest have the truth of fiction and brings the novel to an enlightened completetion.

Mary's my friend. She also wrote a great book that gets it right.