One Who Is Lost

Went to the CSU "Take Back the Night" rally and march last night. It was quite the experience. When one of the speaker's asked how many people had, or knew somebody who had been sexually assaulted 95-99% of the 150+ crowd raised their hands (yours truly included).

But what really got to me were all the testimonials. I mean this kind of thing is something I've always known about intellectually, but this really drove it home. And it drove home how very lucky I am that I do only know about it intellectually. But the worst, the absolute worst, was the number of times brothers and uncles and fathers entered into the stories. I just wanted to go home and give my dad a big ol' hug.

In a much improved mood and very much looking forward to the weekend. I think missing out on a restful weekend to paint did not help. This weekend I'm going to catch up on my reading and laze about in the sun and just do as little as possible. It will be ever so nice.
____________________________________

However, on a much less happy note, does Yucca Mountain scare the shit out of you, cause I know it does me? Pretty good point made here:

Enter Yucca Mountain-the mythological solution. If it clears all political, legal and engineering hurdles, the mountain could open for business in 2010. By then we will have more waste, about 63,400 metric tons, on our hands....And what do you know-that's already more than the 63,000 metric tons of civilian nuclear waste Yucca is designed to hold. That's right: The morning Yucca opened, we would already need a whole second Yucca Mountain.

It seems to me the only arguement supporter's have is "look, it's a crappy solution, but it's the best one we have...let's do it." Somehow "nuclear waste" and "crappy solution" just doens' make me all that happy.

So if anybody finds the idea of Bush and Blair being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as laughable as I do, here's a handy dandy site to make your opinion heard:

http://www.eskimo.com/~cwj2/actions/bushblairnobel.html

Well, at least they're not burning books, but why do I feel the need to add "yet."

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=102144

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/101801/news.godfrey.shtml

Saw a bumper sticker "The last time we mixed politics with religion, people got burned at the stake." I'm amused.

Why does this not suprise me?

Was kind of depressed last night and I couldn't figure out why. I should have been very happy as today is my birthday and the first birthday I've been able to celebrate at home in four years. Figured it out though. I knew that just because I was back home, didn't mean things were going to be what they were and this was just going to be one more example of how much I and the people around me have changed in the past four years. It's that whole "You can never go home again." Or some such. But now that I have that all figured out, I'm much happier and am greatly anticipating the birthday party my friend is being good enough to throw me. Let's see she has a huge house she shares with five other college girls and I have...parents. I'm going to like this party :-P

On a less self-focused topic...fun with anthrax (or pudding mix, depending on whether we're talking NYC or CO). So Tom Brokaw's assistant now has anthrax because she opened a letter addressed to him. I don't know, if I was Peter Jennings' assistant I think I'd go on strike, or ask for a BIG raise.

OK, back to me again, I'm getting a nice happy raise (WooHoo!) I started here in mid-August, got a 50 cent raise at the beginning of September and by changing my job title and duties I'll be getting another $1/hour as of this week. I figured it out and the extra I make will exactly cover my school loan which starts up in December (which I was dreading for obvious reason). So until then, more money for savings and then pay for the loan and I won't have to work on re-budgeting everything. One less thing to stress over! Yeah!!

I've noticed that I've been avoiding journaling, both here and in my physical journal. Usually when I have avoided writing in the past it's because there's something I'm trying not to think about and I know that writing will open up the issue to all sorts of analysis and mental poking and prodding.
So what have I been avoiding thinking about...gee let me think about that. I don't like thinking about what's going on and all the implications. Thinking about it...I don't know how to describe it, it feels almost like a black hole opening in my chest and I just want to sink into myself and just leave a gaping hole. Does that make any sense? I've been hiding from the news, taking it in only in small doses. We're going to attack other countries, you say? Oh bliss...what was that article I put in earlier...

"We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: That's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong -- in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean -- but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?" - Tamim Ansary

Oh good. Just what I want to think about. Terrorist attacks, world war and hey...let's add anthrax. Excuse me, I have a blanket I need to go hide under.

Again, ever so much better than I could have put it.

An Afghan-American speaks

You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Tamim Ansary

Sept. 14, 2001 | I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived in the United States for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.


Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: That's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong -- in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean -- but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

salon.com
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writerTamim Ansary is a writer in San Francisco, and the son of a former Afghani politician.

A little something from "The Miami Herald":

Published Wednesday, September 12, 2001


We'll go forward from this moment Leonard Pitts Jr.

It's my job to have something to say.
They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward's attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We're frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae -- a singer's revealing dress, a ball team's misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We're wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though -- peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people -- you, perhaps -- think that any or all of this makes us weak. You're mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.


IN PAIN

Yes, we're in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock. We're still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn't a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn't the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel. Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You've bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.

But there's a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.

I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.

In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We'll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.


THE STEEL IN US

You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don't know us well. On this day, the family's bickering is put on hold.

As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don't know my people. You don't know what we're capable of. You don't know what you just started.

But you're about to learn.