Dinner time!!

So we call people in the evenings, 4-9 at night with a 6:30-7 dinner break.  Last night for my break I went flyering for Occupy Town Square IV at Fort Green Park in Brooklyn (Sat, Mar 25th).  We work on the third floor, and underneath us is another politically inclined non-profit.  When I walked into their offices thinking I'd hand some flyers out, I was taken aback by the exact same layout and functionality as ours.  A bunch of cubicles making phone calls surrounded by the obligtor offices with doors.  Wow!!  I bet your saying, that's the way everything always is at businesses.  But more for me it just brought to question many things that run through my head about our political and non-profit world.

It wasn't the layout, it was the purpose and functionality.  Non-profit and political campaigns are simply about asking for money.  They are unfortunately not simply funded as an essential apparatus of the operating of a democratic state.  We do not as a society have an institutionalized funding apparatus for the things that are actually - to me - the most important to a society en large: governance and assistance.  Both of these are corner stones to democratic society.  And when I say governance, I do not mean the functionality of the government or what it does, but its guidance.  While we spend trillions of dollars on governmental programs from war, to social services, to government workers, we have left democracy fully and totally privatized.  There is no funding to amplify those voices being heard in small spaces, nor any funding to assist those not being heard in any spaces get into the public sphere.

No news here, but our democratic process - left unfunded - is left solely to the capitalist system and the free market for regulation.  Everything in the electoral system of any scalable importance is privately funded.  Hence these two organizations I've referred to spending so much time and effort on fundraising.  Why must organizations working so hard to bring to the fore political and socio-economic issues and injustices - so essential to a knowledgeable electorate - be so left upon itself?

Now I know, I am bring up an insurmountable political cauldron, but I am seeking more to just address a question of a principle: political awareness as a human right.  Why not?  The UN's declaration on Human Rights touches on political issues in article 21, but it's of course toothless and offers no substance.  But if anything is of importance, this is the first thing that a society should be promoting and funding: the awareness of our social world in a way that is transparent and builds social and electoral capacity.  Yes, I know, there are a million questions about what gets funded, how, by who, and how it would work in general.  But those are questions beyond the level of the "principle" that popped into my head, and they should be saved for another day.  At its core though, this concept stems from the public financing of elections and runs further into non-profits doing political work, and then even into non-profits doing relief, aid, and empowerment work.

Our society is bleeding.  Look around both America and the world.  Poverty is our greatest threat.  Disparity of means and wealth, health and wellness, human security.  Not some dictator or terrorist far off, but the poverty that keeps people down and allows them to be dictated to - our own Dictorship.  Our lack of transparency, our lack of democratic and social voice all handcuff us at every moment.   We live in a society where political speech is completely regulated on a systemic level in a way that discourages true democratic engagement and disallows true change. 

Fact is, these two organizations are both contingent upon not just money, but money that currently must come from private individuals, private foundations, companies, etc.  All of these entities have one thing in common: individual AGENDAS!  They all come from places not systemically promoting the greater good.  I want a political system that funds the agenda of itself, the free and fair democratic rule by the people - alllllllll the people.  Not just those with money, not just those with direct stakes in issues, but everyone.

How can this be done?  Well in our current context, we have to fund bringing a voice to everyone.  Meaning political pressure groups would need to be transparent and funded by a state-like apparatus.  Empowerment type groups and community organizations would have to be funded by a state-like apparatus.  All political parties would need to be funded by a state-like apparatus based on the common good.  They all could illuminate their issues to and for the greater good, and work towards addressing - or having their issues addressed - to and for the greater good.

Obviously, this is an INCREDIBLY complex and incomplete thought and does not actually fit well into our current socio-economic structure.  But the point I am trying to make is that a privatization of the democratic process - such as exists in America - does not serve the democratic process itself but rather those who privately can control and affect it through their own private individual means.  Again no mystery here, but still, it was tough to walk into a room and see it all so blatantly obvious, so blatantly preposterous.  That so much human capital was being spent on trying to make money to try to simply engage in the political process on such a basic level.  All this while, so much of our country's financial capital is being given to an effort to destroy both humans and their capital in agenda driven wars and policies throughout the world.  Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to make the Pentagon do door-to-door and telephone fundraising for their wars, just like we have to do for the fight against poverty and for a democratic voice.      

Asked again, Why Sierra Leone...

I was asked again last night "why Sierra Leone when there are so many people here in the US that need help?".  Watch the video below...  I feel bad about my disgust with this question as the people that ask it are good intelligent people, but it really bothers me.  We, as a collective whole, have no concept here in the US of what "needing help" really is.  Our education and media systems gloss over the struggles beyond our borders (unless it directly effects our national security or economic goals), and our social focus looks directly past other people and to our own seemingly fragile selves, our own unstable plights in times of economic 'crisis'.  Yet "Crisis" here, still means a MUCH better life than most people in the world.  Has our success made us entitled?  Does it absolve us of our humanity?  Our responsibility and compassion for others?

Life becomes easier when we ignore and push down our physical emotions.  We are mostly taught that it is their fault, that 'we' rose above, and that it is not wholly our concern - despite that it is our 'democratically' run country, and thus its people, that leads a globalized world that benefits us tremendously.

We are human, we have hearts, we have souls, we are made of compassion.  And that compassion does not and should not have a boundary that extends only as far as our national borders, but should extend as far as our hearts will take them - infinitely - to all places and to all people...


    
www.walkinglion.org

Still Reading...

As I continue through a long way gone I can't help but think about where he (Ishmael Beah) was mentally when he wrote it.  I am just about half way through the book and the whole thing up to this point is him running/hiding and expressing his fear and humanity, showing compassion, and the holistic struggle of war that a person goes through within.  The thing that resonates with me is the clarity, and the verbiage that he writes with.  It is an incredibly well written book, but I have a thought - which I am unsure if it is necessarily true.  It is that he is almost overcompensating in showing this sensitive "caring" and "human" side as a way to offset the horrors that he eventually undertakes.  I do not want to belittle the words and feelings he is expressing, it is exactly what one would probably expect from such a situation, it just is an awful lot, and not balanced very much by thoughts of malice, revenge, or anything else of a more negative sort - especially from someone that was self-professed to be 'troublesome'.  There are passing mentions of his crew of boys stealing a pot of food, or something of the sort.  But then there were also these rumors that ran through villages about boys there age doing bad things, and these rumors preceded them to villages and put them in some contentious situations.  It jsut seems to me that there might be parts of the story that are possibly glossed over thus far.

On a psychological level this would make complete sense, I don't want to judge this as a negative thing, but more as a cathartic process.  If you were forced to do horrible things, I would think that you would wholly focus on the most humane and compassionate things that you had done and felt in life just so that you could simply live with yourself.  I do not mean to imply that he is consciously trying to show how nice he was, and then to show how bad he was made to be, and it wasn't his doing, but just that this is perhaps a natural coping mechanism that we as humans may - whether consciously or subconsciously - do just to remain sane.

I could never imagine the horrors that Ishmael and the people of Sierra Leone went through at that time.  Thus far it just strikes me as very telling of the human psyche that in his writing, his remembrance, and his story telling that he is so thorough in illuminating the good in him - which I don't doubt he was/is.  I feel as though in reading this book, less through his specific words, but through the whole picture he is presenting, that I am learning about humans.  About humanity and that by the simple way a person remembers and/or choses to tell their story about such a horrible thing as the brutalities of war, that we all make a bit more sense.  My heart goes out to you Ishmael, and all those who's struggles mirror yours...

Reading...

So I'm thinking in here that it will be worth passing along some of the things that I am reading about the country. Yesterday I sat on the beach and finally was able to start reading a long way gone, memoirs of a boy soldier, by Ishmael Beah.  I read the first couple chapters and was physically appalled.  I looked around and saw all these people, sitting on the beach - umbrellas, chairs, towels, toys, - yet none of them seemed to care Not just about boy soldiers or far away countries, but about anything.  They were on 'vacation', from work, from life, from a moment, from whatever... what else mattered but the serenity of their moment?

"The last casualty that we saw that evening was a women who carried her baby on her back.  Blood was running down her dress and dripping behind her, making a trail.  Her child had been shot dead as she ran for her life.  Luckily for her, the bullet didn't go through the baby's body.  When she stopped at where we stood, she sat on the ground and removed her child.  It was a girl, and her eyes were still open, with an interrupted innocent smile on her face.  The bullets could be sen sticking out just a little bit in the baby's body and she was swelling.  The mother clung to her child and rocked her.  She was in too much pain and shock to shed tears." 

"I am pushing a rusty wheelbarrow in a town where the air smells of blood and burnt flesh.  the breeze brings the faints cries of those whose last breaths are leaving their mangled bodies.  I walk past them.  Their arms and legs are missing;their intestines spill out through the bullet holes in their stomachs;brain matter comes out of their noses and ears.  The flies are so excited and intoxicated that they fall on the pools of blood and die."

The boy that wrote these passages was describing his life at 12 years old.  Do you know how many boys on that beach were around that age?  To many for me to watch - all having fun.  I sat there listening to conversations... nothing, no one cared.  The trappings of our everyday American lives are so simple, so pristine - so much of a paradise.  We don't want to know about these other places.  If we ignore them we don't have to realize that our human instincts actually force us to care about other people.  When people you know are sick or in the hospital you rush to their side, you try to help them, you do what you can.  You know them, they matter to you.  If we never acquaint ourselves with other people and their problems then we don't have to worry about them.  We don't have to stop what we are doing to help them, to care about them.  

People always say America gives the most aid to the developing world of any country (in dollar terms this is true, but not as a percentage).  But what have you done?  What have you given?  And I do not mean this in dollar terms, but what part of your heart, your sole, what emotional bond have you given or created?  Too what extent have you attempted to feel the pain of other people that are simply just not fortunate enough to have been born within a certainly randomly demarcated line of national control such as the US or Europe?  

The at risk and impoverished people of these countries and the world in general are innocent - mostly children.  Yet we don't choose to care, we don't choose to become aware of these 'others', less fortunate than we are.  It is time though.  Time for humanity to start showing its true colors, that deep down inside we do care, we just don't know about the travesties found in the far corners of our world.  Teach us!!  Nothing worth having or doing every came easily...  Strive for more.