Don't Follow Leaders Who Lie to You

This statement, you would think, would be obvious. The kind of advice that moms and dads say to their kids as they grow up and that kids take to heart and follow as a way of being: Don't follow leaders who have to lie to you to get you to follow them.

Such advice can help a person in all sorts of scenarios: ditching a bad boss, leaving a questionable religious leader, walking away from a slimy investment guru.

Faced with everyday circumstances, we likely do exactly that: walk away and tell the guy lying to us to get lost.

Yet, here we are, a nation still following a chief executive of our country and his officials who continue to lie to us.

Has that innate sense of knowing we deserve better than to be lied to -- the very sense that guides us out of a sketchy car-salesman's office -- has that sense of what we accept for ourselves disappeared entirely when it comes to the running of our country?

If there's any office we should be the most wary of following when the holder is known to lie repeatedly, it is this one.

These huge, expensive, life-risking, life-taking, monumental lies -- they are lies that benefit a few elite. The war profiteers all around the world.

We are paying with our blood and the soul of our very country.

Is it that we do we not see the lies? Have we grown so accustomed to them that we cannot tell what is true anymore?

Have we heard or told so many lies in our own lives -- to make a buck, to get some insurance money, to have affair, to get out of a ticket, to get a story published, to make someone else take the fall for something we did -- that we literally have lost our sense of what truth feels like?

If so, then it's no wonder we have the administration we have -- it is an outgrowth of our own state of being.

The other alternative is that we do know exactly, deep down, that we're being lied to -- not just by our chief, but by many, many others all the way up and down the line -- but we feel powerless to do anything about it.

That truth resonates within us and we are so deeply upset by what's happening that we are almost in despair, turning to junk TV to keep us out of the abyss of horror we will know if we turn into it.

It's not so much that we're following this leadership, but that we haven't yet rebelled. We haven't yet found it within ourselves to shout "No" in a loud enough voice that it resonates throughout the universe and vibrates the liars right out of the White House and right out of Congress.

I'm asking you to find that voice now.

This is an inner turning even more than an outer one. Do you feel you deserve the truth from our government?

If you don't feel you deserve the truth, do nothing. You'll get more of the same.

But if you do feel you deserve it, say to yourself, "Enough! I deserve the truth." Just feeling and declaring that you deserve the truth will make worlds shift.

We are approaching the eve of another war, a war that has great potential to cause consequences that will uproot everything we know. If we don't find our voice to demand the truth -- from government, media and ourselves -- we will have to find the strength to face our muteness after the world we believe in collapses around our ankles.

Holding to Account

Yesterday was certainly a day for celebration. We repudiated the sickening lies and corruption. Who wouldn't celebrate the implosion of darkness? Yet already the right is on the attack to tell us to stop right where we are. No. This administration and the corrupt absolutely do need to be held to account. They need to be held to account for their fraud and conspiracy otherwise we will not have our country back. Otherwise they or others will try and do it again.

It's not just the Repubs -- I vote Democratic this time because the lock on power absolutely needed to be smashed and there are more folks of integrity in that camp at the moment. Brave people who stood up to the bullies and spoke up about the lies and fraud. People like Conyers and Waxman and Kucinich and Boxer and Watson and Waters and Winograd. That said, there are many Dems deep in the corruption cesspool and they too need to be held to account. It is our duty to shine light into all this darkness.

This is not from revenge, but from a place of standing for what we deserve and from what we know to be true. To change, we need to see the truth. We cannot move forward without the truth. There are far too many corruptions, far too many criminal activities from the top people running the country -- we need to hold the admin accountable so that the American people broadly and deeply know what was actually done to them. So they won't ever be fooled again.

As the abused, we damn well have a right to investigate and a duty to hold the abusers to account. Forgiveness comes, but you cannot completely forgive if you really have no idea what was done to you / the country / the planet -- the harm and the insult and the rape of you.

If you are drugged and raped and aren't aware of what happens to you, you are still raped. When you come to and see the torn panties and the bruises, you better believe you'd want to get the guy who did it to you off the street and to affirm that that is not what you deserve. That would be your duty as a woman. When you press charges, you stand up for all women and say, "No! You cannot violate me. There are consequences for what you did."

I don't doubt that anyone who suggests to a woman in this situation, "Why prosecute? You really don't know exactly what happened, why bother dredging it up?" could expect a swift one in the teeth. It's insulting and demeaning. It suggests that her humanity isn't important enough to stand up for. That she doesn't need to know exactly how she was degraded. That she doesn't need to understand what twisted cogs allowed someone to think that doing that was okay.

Many people in the country have only a vague sense of what has been done to them -- they have the sickening feeling of seeing those torn panties, but aren't really conscious yet of what actually happened. To those who tell us to stop, No! there are the panties, here are the bruises -- we need to know.

We still need to root out the tentacles of the fraud so we really know who is pulling the stings and how and why. It's our duty and it would help us heal these truly great wounds. Not only that, it also would help demonstrate to the world that, beyond the planes, our country has been hijacked these past years and these arrogant raiders do not and never have represented us.

Every human being should feel vindicated today. It was a stand to shred to pieces the darkness we've had shoved down our throats and it's a grand and happy day for the planet that humans in this part of the world have spoken and acted to do so.

Moral gymnastics

Bush's moral stance on stem cell research surely strikes more folks than me as absurd. For all his Bible thumping, Bush has no grasp of the book. I'm fairly certain when Moses came down with the tablet that said, "You shall not kill" I'm pretty sure it didn't mean just "you shall not kill embryos," but "you shall not kill human beings," first off (probably animals too, come to think of it). Where is Bush's moral outrage at this Iraq war that has killed by some estimates 100,000 HUMAN BEINGS?

Bush launched the war by fraud. A hundred thousand human beings have been killed. Come back to me with true grief and remorse for your role in that, Bush, and I will listen to your "moral argument" over stem cells. Until then, you are bowing down to the false idol of political gain.

An attribute of strength

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
-- Mahatma Gandhi, Indian spiritual leader (1869-1948)

Living in Fear Together or Iraq War Redux

Israel and Lebanon are at war again. The world asks themselves haven't they had enough? The slim Israeli justification for launching real war -- the capture of an Israeli soldier -- now looks as convenient as the White House's claims of WMD in Iraq. Tanya Reinhart, leading Israeli scholar and commentator, reports the Israeli army was preparing for an attack months earlier, with the goal of destroying the Hamas infrastructure and its government.

For its part, Hezbollah is the David, benefiting from the absurdity of foisting primitive rock-ets at military Goliath Israel.

"The military arrogance of Israel, the fact that Israel is bombarding a helpless country like Lebanon, destroying its infrastructure, dismantling the state, is making people more and more angry," [said Labib Kamhawi, political scientist in Amman, the Jordanian capital].

"I feel a sense of pride because of this small group of people who are capable of fighting the state of Israel and all its military power," said Fayez Smet, a criminal defense lawyer. "Whether they win or not, they are heroes." (from LA Times A Divide Deepens in Arab World)

As tragic as all the events are, the entire conflict seems to me the last gasp of macho, without real power -- a desperate flailing about. Both groups are without answers. All that remains are habits. The habit of retaliation, the habit of expanding old wounds with fresh gashes, the habit of war.

John Keegan, one of the world's foremost military historians, says in his masterpiece A History of Warfare To refuse to recognize that politics leading to war are a poisonous intoxication, we do not need to believe, like Margaret Mead, that war is an 'invention'…. All that we need to accept is that, over the course of 4000 years of experiment and repetition, warmaking has become a habit.… Unless we unlearn the habits we have taught ourselves, we shall not survive.

The habit of war prevents both sides from seeing any common ground. Neither can acknowledge that past and present horrors suffered by both sides have given them the common experience of grief, oppression and fear. Recognition that they do have such a fundamental experience in common can lead to sympathy, compassion and eventual trust. These are the conditions that lead to the peace and safety both claim to want. Both groups will wildly flail around until the other recognizes and honors the deeply human desire they share to be safe and free.

The majority of people throughout the region seem as weary of these habits of war as the world is of reading about them. It is the leaders -- without effective answers, feeling impotent to solve the problems, and benefiting from illusions of potency -- who are now resorting to macho indiscriminate demonstrations of power. These displays merely highlight their true impotence -- they don't solve anything and cause more of the grief, oppression and fear they are purportedly trying to end.

"Why should we be the only ones who live in fear?" said Muhammad Abu Oukal, a student at the Islamic University in Gaza City. "With these rockets, the Israelis feel fear, too. We will have to live in peace together, or live in fear together." (from The New York Times Rockets Create a 'Balance of Fear' With Israel, Gaza Residents Say)

I have hope that the truth of this student's last statement is now self evident, that the choice rings clearly inside enough people of the Middle East, indeed inside enough people in the world, that the leaders benefiting from world calamity will find themselves alone, abandonded, defrocked of any illusion that they are making progress.

When enough people see the truth of the manipulation, the flaccid reality of their current leaders, the opening can come to unlearn the habits we have taught ourselves.

She was a GIRL

The horror of the latest revelations from the dark swarm in Iraq: our own US soldiers plotted and carried out a gang rape of a beautiful 14-year old girl and the murder of her and her family.

According to the many reports, four soldiers break into an Iraqi family's home and take aside the beautiful 14-year old GIRL. While she listens, one soldier takes the girl's mother and father and 7-year old sister into the other room and shoots them each in the head, killing them. The soldier returns to where they're holding the girl, he lifts up her dress, gathers it around her young neck, and he and at least one other soldier rape her. When they're finished, they shoot her in the head.

They then attempt to set her body on fire to cover up the evidence.

The AP and other media say the soldiers raped and killed an "Iraqi woman." But she was NOT a woman, she was a GIRL. The military has tried to say her age was 20, but her identity card shows she was only 14 years old. Her name was Abeer Qasim Hamza, born Aug 19,1991.

We must bear responsibility for this. The hatred of our leaders breads hatred down the line. The blatant disdain and dismissal of the law exhibited by the White House gets passed along to soldiers with the MREs. The macho desperation for power and control spouted at the top reaches the rank and file. Some use these poisonous teachings to hold the thought that gang raping a beautiful Iraqi girl, worthless for anything else in their eyes, is within their right.

If it is our right, according to the White House, to defraud America and the world into launching this war that has killed so many -- and We the People allow it to persist even as we know it was a fraud -- how far off are these soldiers in their conclusion? If torture and firing nuclear bombs at will are acceptable to our leaders -- and We the People allow them to stay in power -- how far off are these soldiers?

For a moment just countenance our outrage if a foreign country overthrew our evil government, occupied Los Angeles, destroyed every decent building and infrastructure, ignited huge sectarian unrest, gave power to ultra conservative religious fanatics, and then their soldiers plotted and carried out a gang rape and murder of a beautiful 15-year old girl and her family in Sherman Oaks?

We are not Darfur! We must either identify with this family or we are dead as a country. ALL are created equal.

I must believe that we are not so unconscious. I must believe that the country of integrity that we yearn to be, that we long for, is still within us. I must believe that we will find that country within us and stand together to bring to account -- through hard-won laws that we will now uphold -- those who have perpetrated all these frauds: the elections, the war, and everything in between.


Details Emerge in Alleged Army Rape, Killings
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/02/AR2006070200673.html?referrer=emailarticle

BAGHDAD, July 2 -- Fifteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.

As pretty as she was young, the girl had attracted the unwelcome attention of U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint that the girl had to pass through almost daily in their village in the south-central city of Mahmudiyah, her mother told the neighbor.

Abeer told her mother again and again in her last days that the soldiers had made advances toward her, a neighbor, Omar Janabi, said this weekend, recounting a conversation he said he had with the girl's mother, Fakhriyah, on March 10.

Fakhriyah feared that the Americans might come for her daughter at night, at their home. She asked her neighbor if Abeer might sleep at his house, with the women there.

Janabi said he agreed.

Then, "I tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear," Janabi said. "I told her, the Americans would not do such a thing."

Abeer did not live to take up the offer of shelter.

Instead, attackers came to the girl's house the next day, apparently separating Abeer from her mother, father and young sister.

(more -- follow link above)

The Flag Resurrected

Thank you, immigrant protesters, for giving us our country back.

Thank each of you for grabbing that red white and blue fabric by its balls and yanking it back to its truth.

After the current administration has so prostituted the symbol that my friend blurted, horrified when shown the latest "Liberty" flag stamp, "Do you have anything less patriotic?" to which the post office worker confided, "You have no idea how often we hear that now," -- we feel ashamed to put the flag on a humble piece of mail.

Yesterday, with tears in my eyes and lump in my throat, I watched as, resuscitated by the hands of immigrants, the flag was brought back to its proper life.


Those who are without standing stood to remind us all of the promise. The promise of America.

It takes an outsider to see what we had allowed to be trampled and shot full of holes.

The promise this country had lost thanks to this administration and their complicit lackeys in Congress and the major media: of fair treatment, opportunity for all, justice, blindness to race and class and origins. Our founding principle honors the equality of human beings. This was the noble promise we watched come close to death.

Thank God, Goddess and All There Is that it was remembered by those the country has ignored and abused.

To every person protesting yesterday, I say with all my heart on many levels, "Thank you." We've been waiting in despair, those of us who know, waiting for this.

We did not even know we were waiting. And we could not have predicted it. But now that it is here, we know -- it was what we desperately needed.

Those who are most disenfranchised had to stand up. They had to say, "Enough." They had to stand for what they deserved. They had to lose their fear.

They had to stand en masse to say they deserve honor and dignity. That they deserve it simply because they are human.

What you have done has resonated in our subconscious -- there, we've absorbed your bravery of saying each person deserves honor, that we deserve dignity. We had forgotten.

We had forgotten we were all once immigrants here looking for honor and dignity.

Each one of us now can stand for it again in our own lives with less fear, because you have shown us that it is possible.

The message will reverberate in subtle and overt ways through this country. Indeed through the Earth. I, for one, am most grateful for your gracious lesson and gift. Each step has lifted our country and returned to us its soul.

A greater gift I cannot imagine. We are deeply in your debt.

Describe the World at Peace

Many people say they want peace in the world.

But what exactly are we working toward?

The word "peace," I've come to realize over the years of putting Imagine Festival together, is neither concrete nor active in many people's perceptions.

This is important because vocabulary shapes our impression of the world in which we live.

People have words for the things they need to talk about -- or are in the habit of talking about. The Inuit, for example, famously describe snow in very precise terms most likely because precise descriptions are critical to their survival.

But beyond language reflecting our world, one linguistic theory holds we may be able to perceive only what we have language for and not be aware of things we cannot name.

The words of war in our culture are pervasive and concrete: battalion, flank, troops, skirmish, battle. We use them often in our everyday business & sports metaphors: warrior spirit, battle for supremacy, the most dangerous weapon in the offense, shotgun formations, blitz, sacks, my ideas were shot down, your criticisms were on target....

These war phases are familiar and heavily color our view of and approach to our world.

The words of peace could develop as much richness, concreteness and color, if we choose to give them such attention.

I suggest that describing peace more precisely is critical to our survival.

If the word "peace" is nebulous, it will be all the more difficult to figure out how to get there.

If we describe a location as "North America," do we turn north or south from here?

So what exactly do we mean by "peace"?

For me, the form is not the place to start in creating anything. I find it more useful to describe the experience. What would that world feel like to live in?

With that in mind, in the next blog, I will list what I consider to be the top characteristics of this world at peace.