Showing posts with label #RefugeesWelcome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #RefugeesWelcome. Show all posts

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Under Regimes Of White Supremacy And Kleptocracy, Suicide Rates Are Skyrocketing -- Even Among Elites



Follow · June 6 
I don't care how you try to spin it. Children are not criminals. They don't belong in cages. Period.


 When Europeans landed in North America with their heads full of white supremacy and colonialism, it was the beginning of a long demise. For them and for everyone unfortunate enough to be in their path to conquest.








The places where white supremacy and unregulated capitalism have brought us are dismal. 

 Dismal for everyone. This is the part elites don't get: a society ruled by racist kleptocrats is not worth living in. The suicide rate in the U.S. has risen dramatically in the last two decades, and elites are far from immune from this particular disease of despair.

 From the Center for Disease Control:
If you need help for yourself or someone else, please contact the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Talk: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

Emulating my shero Cecile Pineda, here's a rose among thorns from Maureen Ostensen of Maine's Smilin' Trees Disarmament Farm. May it give you hope for the future!
Frances [high school daughter] participated in a forum for Democratic candidates for governor.  Each student wrote questions for one candidate, and Frances wrote the questions for Mark Dion.  She asked him how he voted on the tax break for BIW and why.  He responded that he is one of five Democrats who voted against the tax break calling it corporate ransom.  He said there is no need to take money from the tax payers in Maine to give a tax break to a corporation whose CEO earned in excess of (I think he said $20 million).

With this statement he received almost a standing ovation from a large crowd of pretty affluent Democrats. 

I wanted to share this with you, as I was impressed at how well the crowd understood the issue.  I do not think there would have been that kind of recognition had you [Bruce Gagnon] not made such a valiant effort to publicize the issue.

I have to believe there are pockets of support for a more human approach to weapons and war out there who are beginning to make connections to BIW.

My note: BIW refers to Bath Iron Works which is a subsidiary of super wealthy weapons manufacturer General Dynamics.


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Sunday, January 15, 2017

Troll Bait Hashtag #HereToStay Builds Solidarity On Twitter

I'm a sporadic twitter user mostly because lack of time doing my day job, plus not being glued to my phone which barely works at home in the woods. But I love twitter and it's my best news feed for sure; I joined it after experiencing the floodgates of facebook friending. 

 Why did people who hated what I stood for in high school suddenly want to see my facebook posts? We're old enough now that apoplexy increases the risk of stroke, doesn't it?

So with more careful following I built a more international and, yes, intellectual list of twitter users who bring me news I would never get from corporate sources (which I mostly ignore anyway).

 But if I'm at a live event that seems to have broad significance, and I wasn't an organizer of the event so I can mingle and flirt with babies and take things in, I often tweet about it. Yesterday's attendance in Lewiston, Maine at one of the many January 14 immigration support rallies was such an opportunity for me.

 The event poster and a twitter user I sat next to advised me that #heretostay was the hashtag du jour. Boy, did that turn out to be troll bait!

 Many fine young poets from Maine's extensive Somali immigrant population took to the stage and I tweeted a few clips from their heartfelt words about growing up black and Muslim and, in the case of the women, covered in the whitest state in the U.S. 
One of many fine banners on display in Lewiston courtesy of ARRT!

 Rakiya Mohamed, a student at nearby Bates College, read a message from her 21 year old self to her "fresh off the boat" childhood self. She also gave an interview to a WCSH reporter on the scene where she described a 10 year old girl being harassed and spit on at a 4th of July fireworks display.

 It was often tough to catch the speakers' names or spell them correctly as there was no printed program. This poem entitled "Lazy Boy" spoke poignantly about the struggle to be a high school student and eldest brother of a family of first generation immigrants.
One poet I could identify correctly was Tufts student Muna Mohamed whom I remembered from her days at Lewiston High School. She made the news there as part of a group that put up a Black Lives Matter educational poster only to have the principal take it down. And then, bowing to public pressure, put it back up again. Her poem about being mis-identified by others was one of the best.

Portland's first African-born Muslim city councilor, the recently elected Pious Ali, who hails originally from Ghana, spoke well. He asked for a show of hands about who among us were immigrants, the children of immigrants, or the grand and great grandchildren of immigrants. And who had a neighbor or friend or co-worker from a family of immigrants. Everybody, right?

 About 500 people were in attendance at the (mercifully) indoor venue. We finished off by singing Neil Young's updated version of the classic Woodie Guthrie tune "This Land Is Your Land" together which was a beautiful experience.

This is the tweet that most seemed to anger those who dwell under the social media bridge. An avalanche of nasty replies -- the likes of which my twitter feed seldom sees -- awaited me this morning. I guess I struck a nerve, or maybe it's just that someone paid folks to troll for the #heretostay hashtag and churn out some vitriol in response.

 Are they angry because their beautiful daughters can't afford to go to Tufts? Or because they imagine that refugees who work in nursing homes in Maine are taking jobs away from white people -- who don't want to work in nursing homes?
Not sure, but I do appreciate the traffic on my twitter feed.

 I got many new followers, retweets and likes from being a citizen journalist at yesterday's rally. 👏🏻 👏🏻💞💞💞

 I'll end with my sign of the times, the one I carry in my vehicle and use to show that, as an ACLU lawyer observed, "Before the government can come after any individual in this room they'll have to come through all of us." Amen to that, sister.
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Saturday, December 12, 2015

Islamophobia And Anti-Immigrant Rants Cover Up Real Fear: Not Being Able To Compete


The false dichotomy that says "we" are not "them" has been getting a lot of play via the demagogue with bad hair whom the corporate media have made the front runner for the Republican Party presidential nomination. It feeds into that other false dichotomy: that there is any fundamental difference between the two corporate parties, the only ones that are allowed to field candidates, the ones that fund the endless wars on terror and also fund terrorist groups like ISIL who keep the wars churning. The parties that can't agree to limit their carbon emissions or even to count the emissions of their sacred Pentagon. The parties that fund mass surveillance of me and thee in the name of "security."

 I loved this eloquent rant by British veteran Chris Herbert who lost a leg in Iraq, explaining why it is stupid when people assume he must hate all Muslims:

Getting frustrated by some people expecting racism from me, because I got blown up. Here it is:Yes. A Muslim man blew...
Posted by Chris Herbert on Tuesday, December 8, 2015

I also loved this article in the mainstream regional magazine Down East about an amazing Muslim immigrant in Maine, ZamZam Mohamud. A refugee from war in Somalia, Mohamud settled in Lewiston, an aging mill town that has been revived by decades of receiving immigrants. 

 Our governor is from the old Lewiston and is now infamous for his hate speech aimed at immigrants. As usual, he and other Know Nothings trot out the old trope about not being able to afford to take care of "our own." As in, who needs more welfare recipients? And who want the crime rate to soar due to all those unemployed young men? 

 These same arguments were used against accepting Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, and against accepting Jewish immigrants in the 20th century.

 Facts on the ground in Lewiston show just the opposite. From Jesse Ellison reporting in Down East:
Crime was beginning to decline in Lewiston as its Somalis were first arriving. The state’s second largest city now ranks 26th for crime, well below Bangor, Ogunquit, and Ellsworth, to name a few. Juvenile crime rates — important predictors of future crime statistics — are also on the decline, despite a sizable increase in the number of juveniles. Few will go so far as to credit the city’s new arrivals for its falling crime rate, but many police officials and city administrators have expressed, if delicately, that it’s at least impressive the swelling immigrant population hasn’t caused crime to go up.
ZamZam Mohamud has already served on the Lewiston school board, raised two daughters and sent them to college, served as a translator for the hospital, and formed any number of community groups that bring together, for example, police and Somali immigrants, for dialogue. Clearly she is a highly gifted person, exceptional rather than typical. Or is she?

 I have long believed that claiming to fear crime and welfare loafers as the rationale for opposing immigration is false. (Less so the claim of fearing Islam as a cult of violence. More on that in a minute.) What white, working class people really fear -- and they should -- is competing against the self-selected group of people resourceful and determined enough to make it out of their war-torn country. Very often such people are educated already, though they likely won't be able to work in their field. Nearly always they highly value education for their children, and will make any number of sacrifices to see them through college and graduate school. They will start small businesses. They will take the jobs that actual welfare loafers won't do. They will outcompete the drug addicts and alcoholics currently driving up the mortality rate among white people aged 45-54 with only a high school diploma. 

 From Olga Kazan reporting in The Nation:
The reasons for the increased death rate are not the usual things that kill Americans, like diabetes and heart disease. Rather, it’s suicide, alcohol and drug poisonings, and alcohol-related liver disease. 
The least-educated are worst off: All-cause mortality among middle-aged Americans with a high-school degree or less increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2013, but there was little change in mortality for people with some college. The death rate for the college-educated fell slightly.
Let in Syrian immigrants, and in a generation they may produce another Steve Jobs.
This mural by the artist Banksy depicting Apple's founder as a refugee popped up in a French refugee camp.
Islamophobia though -- what's that all about?

Reference the fear of Catholic immigrants whose Popery was alleged to be a conspiracy to bring down the established WASP order, or of Jewish immigrants, presumed communists.

The masses are easily manipulated by propaganda that says to fear and hate the unfamiliar. Many Israelis, for example (whose government applies the same kind of religious test for immigration as is advocated by the demagogue) say they have never talked with an Arab. Never. Keeping "them" out is a great way to make sure that groups of differing faiths never come together as ZamZam Mohamud would have them do.

What happens when people reach across the divide of religious-based phobias and listen to others tell their stories? Healing occurs. Friendships blossom. And love wins.

For evidence to support my claim, I suggest you watch (or re-watch, as I did this week) Alice Rothchild's documentary Voices Across the Divide. As an American Jew who had visited Israel many times but never met an Arab, Rothchild set out to interview Palestinians of the diaspora about their families' experiences of al-Nakba, the ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and continues today. Some of those interviewed were Arab Christians, but most were Muslim. By the time you finish watching this powerful film, I think you will feel deeply, as I do, that there is no "them" -- there is only "us."

Image of Palestinian kids in a refugee camp in Rafah from the study guide for  Voices Across the Divide.
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Sunday, November 22, 2015

Muslims Kicked Off @SouthwestAir For Being Muslim As France Cancels Climate March Amid Police State Moves

As we descend further into the darkness of state-sanctioned discrimination and xenophobia, reports came that Southwest Airlines had allowed non-Muslim passengers to kick six Muslims off a flight because they refused to fly with them.

Identifying Muslims seems easy to the professional fools who throng our corporate media to audition for the role of celebrity spokesperson for the military-industrial complex. You just look for... a turban?
"Sikh regiment indian army" by Harmanjaspreet singh - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Oops, no, these are Sikhs in the Indian Army. Definitely not Muslims.

Oops, no, those are regular angry white men on what passes for entertainment on U.S. television these days.

People speaking Arabic? 
Nope. Besides, what language do you think that Coptic Christians in Egypt speak -- Christian? (I know, I know, Christian is not a language. But you'd be surprised how many people think American is.)
Shout out to this great young actress!

Oh, I got it: the wrong name!

Because a person named Mohammed who commits an act of public violence must be a terrorist, while a person named John must be a mentally ill loner, right? Oops, except Jihadi John. And some others.

But don't worry, French police are on it. Under their new post-Paris massacre powers, they can detain anyone they want without judicial oversight, block any website they want, and cancel the upcoming international marches for climate justice that have been months in the planning. Because...terror.

Climate chaos threatens our security far more than the elite death squads funded by the Saudis and promoted by U.S. and Israeli complicity. But...look! Another terror attack on a hotel favored by Westerners in Mali! And so it goes.

Let me just finish with this. Laughing through my tears...



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