Forgetting To Remember Afghanistan In School

Afghanistan, graveyard of imperial treasuries. No one in the U.S. really wants to talk about it. Reasons include: they are making a huge profit from it, they are making a career from it, it might bring the president's popularity ratings down, it's too painful to face up to how many loved ones have been irreparably harmed or killed there for no good reason, and we are too ashamed of our government's role in the human suffering inflicted on Afghans.

Photo source: DailyMail.UK which ran it with this caption: "Heartbreaking: The tiny body of eighteen-month-old Saiyma Gadazai is carried to her final resting place after she froze to death in a refugee camp in Kabul."

My husband suffers from frustration when he is stonewalled by acquaintances at the local Farmer's Market if he mentions Afghanistan. He's not a teacher, so he hasn't had a lot of practice with waiting for the teachable moment. He thinks everyone who is worried about jobs, or cuts to education funding, or health care, or climate change, or veterans' care should be interested in what's going on in the U.S.'s longest combat mission. Because he sees these things as connected. He think if the U.S. would bring our war dollars home we would be able to fund all these very real needs of human beings.

But keeping things disconnected is the full time job of the mainstream media disinformation corporations.

An uninformed public will swallow official "news" out of Afghanistan without having enough background knowledge to question it. They will believe it when a talking head says we are withdrawing while in actuality we are building the infrastructure for permanent occupation.

A passive, consuming public will lack the critical thinking practice to question what passes for "news" and this is the primary criticism of public schools that I hear all the time in the alternative circles I travel in. Parents say say: I am homeschooling my child because schools kill critical thinking.

I consider myself very lucky to have had an education that was sporadically wonderful, and to have had parents who were readers and who fostered critical thinking around the dinner table. With my own kids I figured I'd send them to the best quality nearby public schools I could get them into, continue educating them at home and on trips during vacations and weekends, and hope that the combination would equal an adequate preparation for the thinking life.

When I became a teacher late in life I was amazed that parents considered homeschooling vs. public schooling as an either/or proposition.

Keep in mind that corporate forces like ALEC want to kill public education even more than Occupy parents do.

Because while you are teaching your children not to forget about Afghanistan (and Mali and etc.), people that get their ideas from listening to right wing radio will be teaching their children stuff like this:

Who remembers the real history of the United States? Howard Zinn did, and his education foundation lives on. Kids in high school in my area literally do not know the word Holocaust or what it means. Never mind the word Nakba and what that means. (Heck, the chair of the history department at Bangor High School told me last year that he didn't know what it means.) My elective on genocides got canceled a few years back without so much as an explanation. And so it goes.

Until the day I leave my body behind I will remember to remember about Afghanistan, and how my government used the 9/11 attacks to justify the invasion and now permanent occupation of that strategic location in the great continent of Eurasia.

I will remember how we went broke doing it, too, long after we as a failed state arrive at austerity, after our creditors have mopped us up and put us in our places. Even then, I will remember the trees I am helping to plant there.

Photo source: AfghanistanSamsortya.org

A few more education notes: a parent at my school threw a fit this year over the geography teacher telling his kid that "state" had more than one meaning. In the geopolitical sense. Another parent threw a fit because her child was asked to do an oral history project choosing an elder person in the community to interview about changes they had seen over their lifetime. She said it was a stupid project, and should be banned.

The brave father of the New Delhi rape victim came forward to release his daughter's name because he wanted people to become educated about the class and gender-related violence that cost Jyoti Singh Pandey her life. Scooter rickshaw drivers would not take the young couple to the woman's neighborhood, thus the two of them boarded the van where their attackers lay in wait.

The father noted that people who described her as engaged to the high caste male friend who was with her on that fateful night are "confused" because those two castes could never marry. He also made this comment from the perspective of an impoverished parent who sacrificed to see his children have the chance to be educated:

"Boys cry when you send them to school," says her father, "but she would cry if you didn't let her go to school."

Finally, lest you accept the official narrative that we are in Afghanistan so that girls can go to school, I'll leave you with the words of Ann Jones who has been remembering to remember Afghanistan all along:

Relying on the military, the U.S. neglected the crucial elements of civil life in Afghanistan that make things bearable -- like education and health care.  Yes, I’ve heard the repeated claims that, thanks to us, millions of children are now attending school.  But for how long?   According to UNICEF, in the years 2005-2010, in the whole of Afghanistan only 18% of boys attended high school, and 6% of girls.  What kind of report card is that?  After 11 years of underfunded work on health care in a country the size of Texas, infant mortality still remains the highest in the world. 

Feminist Values: Making Our Non-Violent Homes

The beautiful faces of people exploring feminist values.

One of the more interesting discussions I've been in lately occurred last Sunday, January 27, 2013 in Augusta at the Pine State Arboretum. It occurs to me now that this was about a month into the beginning of the new great cycle of the Mayan calendar. (For those who say who cares about an ancient calendar I say, check your facts: plenty of Mayan people are still alive today. Also, the ancients who made the calendar had a genius grasp of astronomy.)

A Feminist Values discussion was organized as part of the 19th Changing Maine Gathering which occurs about once a year bringing together progressive dreamers from around the state. This year CODEPINK State of Maine and Portland local groups co-sponsored with ROSC (Resources for Organizing Social Change) and proposed the topic. No, not feminism: feminist values. One participant summed these up as: Respect for the Earth, and for everyone. Amen to that

Someone had suggested we introduce ourselves as descendants of our moms and their moms. About a third of the 40+ people who attended were male; for many, especially the younger people that also made up about one-third of the group, this type of identifying may have been a first.

I chose to be in the breakout session discussing Reclaiming Domesticity: Abundance or Scarcity? We took turns sharing how we live right now, and why we have made the decisions we've made around how to live. It was a diverse group: young parents who live on a land trust and are constantly on the defensive, being criticized for choosing to spend a lot of time with their children (ages 3 months and 4 years) and as little time as possible earning money; a thinker with a degree but no job who sleeps on friends' couches; a single mother of five; a grandmother who lives with her husband in the house he and his friends built on land they cleared; and a bachelor labor organizer who is tired of living alone and tired of society's message that he must "get a woman" in order to live comfortably and correctly.

Much of the discussion during the day centered on commodification: of natural resources, of women's bodies. There was a general consensus that feminist values reject this, and that the era of commodification is coming to an end.

I described how I live on land that was stolen from the indigenous people and turned into a commodity to be bought and sold, along the Kennebec River, within the Penobscot Nation homeland. Some of those people are still neighbors of mine. The large group acknowledged the importance and hope of Idle No More and the earth-defending resolve of initiatives led by First Nations people in Canada and other indigenous communities.

After a lengthy potluck lunch where conversations and new friendships flourished, we re-convened as a large group to hear reports from the breakout groups and continue our discussions. The entire day for me was characterized by deep, respectful listening. One of our group was a woman activist who is over 90, and a special hush fell on the room when she spoke.

In one of the breakout sessions there was some trouble with interrupting, and the vibe felt a little hostile. This caused a 10 year-old girl to leave the discussion and return to the childcare group. After her mom explained why, the participants made a new plan for taking turns speaking, and the facilitator of the group described it as a successful "self-correction."

We all go astray from our ideals many, many times in life. Just look at the formerly (allegedly) idealistic Hillary Clinton, outgoing Secretary of State. Can we find the courage to examine the road we're on, and make a "self-correction" if necessary? We had better be able to if we hope to continue human life on this planet.

THE UGLY FACES OF PATRIARCHY: A screen grab from a video of last week's State Department dinner for Mr.  and Mrs. Hamid Karzai. Hillary Clinton has placed herself firmly in the service of the patriarchal empire that is ruining the Earth and killing children and women and men wantonly every single day,  making "defense" contractors so wealthy they are sometimes referred to as the 0.01%. Afghanistan and its people in particular continue to suffer under this regime.

One breakout session was about violence and the One Billion Rising movement which is spreading globally like wildfire. Here's a great video I watched yesterday of people in the EU Parliament rising up to dance against violence on women. Eve Ensler, a leader of the movement, speaks at the end to explain why one billion women and the men who love them dancing could just be a revolution. Maine events on V-Day will be held in Portland & Belfast. Non-violence is a feminist value.