Ella Watson (pictured above) made $1081/year and spent 10% of her money on war bonds even though she was taking care of 5 children. Barbara Orbach and Nicholas Natanson write, ” [African Americans] serve[d] as air raid wardens. Their children contribute[d] scrap and purchase[d] war bonds. Residents of an Arlington, Virginia, trailer camp even cultivate[d] victory gardens. And at almost every turn one glimpse[d] African Americans in military uniforms.” (The Mirror Image:Black Washington in WWII-Era Federal Photography.)
So how did we get from such extreme individual sacrifice (even from those the system treated badly) to where we are today—taking on excessive debt and going about business as usual? WW2 wasn’t that long ago was it?
Between 1997 and 2007, [New York City] police arrested and jailed about 205,000 blacks, 122,000 Latinos and 59,000 whites for possessing small amounts of marijuana. Blacks accounted for about 52 percent of the arrests, though they represented only 26 percent of the city’s population over that time span. Latinos accounted for 31 percent of the arrests but 27 percent of the population. Whites represented only 15 percent of those arrested, despite comprising 35 percent of the population. Government surveys of high school seniors and young adults 18 to 25 consistently show that young whites use marijuana more often than young blacks and Latinos. The arrests also are heavily skewed by gender. About 91 percent of people arrested were male.
In response to all the talk about atheism and the two well read nytimes articles “God Talk” (part I and II) I want to post a question.
How can atheists argue that religion is “a device for rationalizing horrible deeds” (nytimes, God Talk)?
Religion must surely satisfy other needs, since we all know very well that the ways to rationalize bad behavior are in fact infinite.
To take a quick example—how about the War in Iraq? Fought in the name of “Democracy” and the “national security” and which we all know it was actually for oil? If you don’t believe me listen to Jon Western, author of American Foreign Policy. He wrote about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Iraq war and said, “American forces secured the oil fields and the oil ministry in Baghdad, but none of them were sites of primary interest to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]—the ones apparently looted in the days following Hussein’s defeat” (p. 115, Jon Western, American Foreign Policy).
The flag of equal marriage was designed by Carl Tashian, you can read about it here on his site http://tashian.com/makeitequal/.
Not allowing same-sex marriage is a violation of basic civil rights (which include protection from discrimination). Under United States law marriage grants couples many rights. Below the jump read up on them and find out what same-sex couples are being excluded from. Then join the facebook group and learn how to take action. Tax Benefits
* Filing joint income tax returns with the IRS and state taxing authorities. * Creating a “family partnership” under federal tax laws, which allows you to divide business income among family members. Estate Planning Benefits
* Inheriting a share of your spouse’s estate. * Receiving an exemption from both estate taxes and gift taxes for all property you give or leave to your spouse. * Creating life estate trusts that are restricted to married couples, including QTIP trusts, QDOT trusts, and marital deduction trusts. * Obtaining priority if a conservator needs to be appointed for your spouse — that is, someone to make financial and/or medical decisions on your spouse’s behalf.
Government Benefits
* Receiving Social Security, Medicare, and disability benefits for spouses. * Receiving veterans’ and military benefits for spouses, such as those for education, medical care, or special loans. * Receiving public assistance benefits.
Employment Benefits
* Obtaining insurance benefits through a spouse’s employer. * Taking family leave to care for your spouse during an illness. * Receiving wages, workers’ compensation, and retirement plan benefits for a deceased spouse. * Taking bereavement leave if your spouse or one of your spouse’s close relatives dies.
Medical Benefits
* Visiting your spouse in a hospital intensive care unit or during restricted visiting hours in other parts of a medical facility. * Making medical decisions for your spouse if he or she becomes incapacitated and unable to express wishes for treatment. Death Benefits
* Consenting to after-death examinations and procedures. * Making burial or other final arrangements.
Family Benefits
* Filing for stepparent or joint adoption. * Applying for joint foster care rights. * Receiving equitable division of property if you divorce. * Receiving spousal or child support, child custody, and visitation rights if you divorce. Housing Benefits
* Living in neighborhoods zoned for “families only.” * Automatically renewing leases signed by your spouse. Consumer Benefits
* Receiving family rates for health, homeowners’, auto, and other types of insurance. * Receiving tuition discounts and permission to use school facilities. * Other consumer discounts and incentives offered only to married couples or families. Other Legal Benefits and Protections
* Suing a third person for wrongful death of your spouse and loss of consortium (loss of intimacy). * Suing a third person for offenses that interfere with the success of your marriage, such as alienation of affection and criminal conversation (these laws are available in only a few states). * Claiming the marital communications privilege, which means a court can’t force you to disclose the contents of confidential communications between you and your spouse during your marriage. * Receiving crime victims’ recovery benefits if your spouse is the victim of a crime. * Obtaining immigration and residency benefits for noncitizen spouse. * Visiting rights in jails and other places where visitors are restricted to immediate family.
My generation (sometimes “Y”, sometimes “Millennial”) has been getting a bad rap. Just look at the Adbusters article that has 4039 comments (adbusters) and declares the hipster movement the “end of Western civilization,” or the Thomas Friedman article in the New York times that dubs us “Generation Q,” for quiet (nytimes). These articles (15 thousand Google hits on “Gen Y apathetic”) usually miss the essential characteristics of our generation because the writers can’t seem to imagine the world from our perspective. Things older people find novel and amazing —the Internet, cell phones, mass media, international culture of consumerism, American hegemony — are second nature to us. While these writers are distracted by the fact that we all dress alike, write daily blogs, and are more educated and privileged than any other generation, they don’t understand that these are relatively unimportant side effects of the phenomena listed above.
We have been called “a lost generation…[not] giving birth to anything new” and “too quiet, too online.” In fact the opposite is true. There is a deafening roar in cyberspace. If a presidential election can be won through the support of an online movement, if articles and ideas can reach tens of millions of people overnight, and create a four thousand person discussion, if youtube can receive 200,000 new videos a day, then being “too quiet” and “too online” is the opinion of someone who doesn’t understand what it means to be online. Not creating anything new and not being loud enough are not our problems. So why the disrespect from the famous 60s generation? Because we aren’t doing what they want us to do.
Most of us were born after the end of the Cold War or were too young to remember it. The political climate we grew up in was one of supreme hypocrisy. One President nearly got impeached for a superficial sex scandal and then another later broke international laws to pre-emptively start a war without UN support and was re-elected to serve 2 full terms without so much as a breath of legal retribution.
The problem my generation faces is inheriting a world that baffles us: a world of hypocrisy and crisis; a world on the brink of collapse yet at the height of human civilization.
Imagine for a moment being one of us. Taught in school that all people are created equal, that all countries are sovereign, that freedom, democracy, and capitalism are embraced by all people and nations because they are ultimate ideals that allow us to prosper and live as we choose in the pursuit of happiness. Old enough to read the New York Times online and blog on Huffington Post, we see a very different world. Equality? Not for the poor, not for LGBT. Capitalism? It appears to have been a house of cards recklessly constructed by greed for the benefit of a few. Sovereignty? Not for resource-poor or oil-rich countries. Ideals? Not for the media or our political and business leaders.
Now we must navigate a world where a concentration of power, wealth, and media often conflicts with every ideal the Western world is supposed to stand for. If you think we are too quiet and too online you should consider that we have two choices. One, to accept the values we were taught to believe in and totally redefine and reconstruct the way our government/economy/society works so that these ideals match reality. Or two, to accept the world we live in and think up a new set of values to justify our lives.
Neither is easy or obvious. Hopefully we pick number one, and figure out how to sort out the hypocrisy. But for now we are faced with nearly insurmountable problems and need the cooperation of the untouchable elite. Friedman says global warming is our problem and we ought to be screaming for our leaders to do something. Perhaps you don’t hear our screams because we gave up long ago on a having a government that listens to citizens, or on the ability of that government to take on big business by kicking it out of the bed. Friedman should be shouting at his own generation. The ones who own Haliburton and run the Whitehouse, the Rupert Murdochs, the Robert Rubins, the Bernard Madoffs, the lawyers and the doctors he wants us to aspire to who haven’t done much to change the 60 million uninsured Americans, the declining rate of high school completion, the 10,000 who die every day in Africa, the much needed CO2 emissions reductions, or publicizing Ban Ki Moon’s 3 year window.
Take global warming, perhaps the biggest issue our generation faces. If worldwide CO2 emissions don’t start coming down in the very near future, my generation will be saddled with the “catastrophic effects” predicted by the IPCC: more starvation and death in Africa and elsewhere, resource wars, mass immigration, mass extinction, and many more unimaginables.
But the example that the generation in power has modeled for us is that it doesn’t matter. Being an American is having the opportunity to buy that huge house and oversized SUV, become an investment banker, and get huge annual bonuses with no basis in value creation. And the consequences for everyone else? Irrelevant. That’s how you defined freedom and success.
The problems and the contradictions being left to us are so big that there are no easy answers. It appears that everything has to be undone, before it can redone. So let us figure out how we want to proceed. Let us “waste” our time like Mark Zuckerburg building a 150 million person online network because it may be the only hope we have. Your generation doesn’t know what it means to be a global citizen the way our generation will have to. And those values you taught us, they seem pretty empty when you don’t act on them yourselves. If you want us to change the world, don’t look at your sixteen-year-old listening to an ipod while writing on Facebook and watching youtube and yell at him that he’s wasting his privileges. Instead, start cleaning up your own messes. Lead by example. End your own hypocrisies. Start caring about the rest of the world and not just yourselves.
Meanwhile, let us figure out how we can use these tools that enable mass distribution and organization of ideas. It’s likely that these will be the tools we need.
One of Funny and Interesting’s readers, Omair, sent me this link to GapMinder . I’ve used the site for a couple of my blog posts but I forgot to share it. So go forth and find out who has the most oil, the best teeth, the fewest children, and the most money! He also directed me to the TED talk given by Hans Rosling. And no matter what you’re interested in there’s a TED talk you should watch!
(Students at CRLS) This isn’t funny but it certainly is interesting. My little sister just told me the Westboro Baptist Church is coming to her public high school in Cambridge to protests gay students. Their website (http://www.godhatesfags.com/) has pictures of kids holding incredibly rude and violent posters. One, for example, reads “Aids cures fags.” I’m all about freedom of speech but isn’t their some legal precedent from stopping angry and hurtful mobs from accosting school children? It is horrifying that children at a public school in the United States, where all are created equal and supposed to be given equal opportunity rights will be bullied by adults and children for doing nothing except for peacefully being themselves. Some internet research also brought me to youtube where “westboro baptist church protests” shows a movie of protestors at a soldier’s funeral. These people are definately crossing some lines but what should the high schoolers do about it?
I have asked Wesley Morgan, sophomore at Princeton, to write us a guest blog entry. Below is a brief interview with him, and then his essay. Why Wesley? Well, he is a generally fascinating kid who spent part of the summer in Iraq with the US military’s top dog General Patraeus.
Cameron: You had a pretty amazing summer. Tell me what you did. Wesley: After my freshman year at Princeton ended in June I went to Iraq for the summer as a reporter. C: That’s very brave of you, or crazy. What inspired you to go? W: I’ve been interested in counterinsurgency for most of my life. C: Not many people can say that, especially not many twenty year olds. W: I’m one of the lucky few then. Anyhow, about a year ago, I interviewed Gen. David Petraeus for my school newspaper, the Daily Princetonian. [Petraeus is an alum.] He liked my questions. And when he found out that I’m also an Army ROTC cadet, he stayed in touch. C: Are we talking about General Petraeus, the guy that the New York Times is always talking about? The guy in charge in Iraq? W: Yeah, that’s the one. Last winter, after he took command of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus suggested that I come to Iraq for the summer, and I of course jumped at the chance. My search for funding for the trip led me to Bill Roggio, a conservative blogger and embed who generously backed my project and helped me get credentialed as an embedded journalist. So, after working at a DC think tank for the first half of the summer, I flew into Kuwait in late July for what ended up being a pretty phenomenal trip. C: And you wrote all about your experience, right? W: I’ve written a lot about the military details and lessons learned from the trip at my own blog. C: Tell me a little about what you learned and the piece you wrote for me. W: Well Iraq is a fascinating place, so completely different from the States or any other country I’ve ever visited that I hardly know where to start – going chronologically or even just describing incidents that happened seems like it wouldn’t convey what the country and the soldiers are like. Since the last few days on my trip I’ve been thinking about how to write about Iraq through a different lens, one that would seem kind of out of place on my own blog maybe, but that would convey a sense of the place. Since you’re so artsy and original I think this blog is the place for it. C: I’m flattered! Thanks for talking to me. W: No problem. Thank you.
Here is the essay Wesley wrote for Funny and Interesting:
How I will remember Iraq
Before I left for Iraq, a soldier I know told me to choose carefully what book I brought along, because I’d always remember that as what I was reading when I first saw a war zone. I reread bits and pieces of Gen. Petraeus’s and Gen. Mattis’s counterinsurgency field manual while I was over there, and I did finish Harry Potter, but there really wasn’t a lot of time for reading (except the endless hours of waiting for flights, which I think are better spent talking to soldiers). There are movies and TV shows playing in every waiting area or lounge and on every forward operating base, but more often than not those just seem jarring and weird – watching episodes of Alias while waiting in a cavernous hanger, for instance, or a pirated copy of Transformers in the basement of a combat outpost between patrols, seemed strange and out of place, and not something that will stick with me as symbolic of the experience. What I will remember is the music I listened to here, and probably always associate a few songs with the experience.
A few months back, Tom Ricks wrote about soldiers’ music in a short piece in the Washington Post, and one the songs he mentioned I actually did hear a bunch of times. You know that song “America, Fuck Yeah!” from Team America: World Police, I’m not sure exactly how many times, but I heard soldiers playing that before or after patrols, either on speakers or once when a soldier gave me one of his iPod’s earbuds. Also, I probably played the “Army Strong” music from Army recruiting ads (yes, I do have it) a hundred times because I listen to it when I need to stay awake and write, which was all the time in Iraq, and it was also the background music to a slideshow that an infantry unit called the Black Lions was working on while I was with them. Those are both very hooah, Army songs, even though the Team America one is obviously tongue-in-cheek, and I heard them a lot, but even they don’t really seem like Iraq to me. They seem superficial somehow, and when I think back over the sounds I associate with the trip, they’re really not the first things that come up. Instead, two other, much more random songs do.
The first is a song called “Older” by Colbie Caillat, some new singer I know nothing about, which I got from the iTunes “new music” thing right before I left and which somehow copied itself into my computer three times, meaning that it is constantly coming up on shuffle. That song is completely un-Iraq-like – as one soldier told me with a combination of disgust and confusion when he saw it playing, “I can’t believe you’re listening to that queer-ass shit again,” which is a fair description, at least in Army vocabulary. But I heard it so many times while writing or updating maps and data that it was stuck in my head for a good week in Baghdad, and sort of still is. That might make for weird memories – associating a sappy, incomprehensible pop song with the sights and smells of Baghdad – but it’s true. I wonder whether that association will stick.
Most of all, though, the music that says “Iraq 2007” to me is “Mad World” by Gary Jules (I had to look up the name). It starts, “All around me are familiar faces, worn out places,” and you might know it from the movie “Donnie Darko.” When I first heard it in Baghdad, it took me a good hour to realize that that’s where I recognized it from. Anyway, sometime in my second week in Iraq, a Spanish journalist named David Beriain showed me a phenomenally powerful slideshow of his time with the 1-4 Cav in Dora, with that song in the background, and it has stuck like epoxy.
I’ve been back for two weeks now, and I still play that song whenever I’m writing about Iraq, because it brings back a vividness to the experiences and recollections like nothing else. I’d probably only heard it once or twice before I got here, but now it won’t go away. In Iraq, it was my brain’s default background noise whenever I spaced out from tiredness or was just trying to piece together everything I’d seen, heard, and smelled on a given day. When my mind went blank staring out the window of a Black Hawk, or sitting in the sweaty hold of a Stryker, I heard that song. When I sat down to write on military computers and didn’t have my own music, I heard it the whole time. It was running through my blank mind the first time my vehicle was ever shot at, and again the last time.
Two weeks ago, on the flight out of Kuwait, as I drifted in and out of consciousness while trying to run through the five weeks in Iraq in my mind, that song was just there, in the background, playing over a fuzzy mental montage of carbine-toting, grey-clad soldiers, crowds of hostile Shia pilgrims, an Iraqi cop with shattered and bloody legs, alert officers at intelligence briefings, frightened prisoners, and colorful reporters. The hundreds of new military and civilian faces I saw in Iraq, the least familiar environment I’ve ever been in, were anything but familiar, but when my mind was drifting sleepily back over all those faces on the plane ride – and now when I try to write about it – that was what I heard.
There’s something about that song. Maybe that’s why David chose it for his tribute to the cav soldiers he knew in Dora. Capt. Grim and the snipers on Haifa Street, the hateful glares of the Sadrist marchers, Gen. Petraeus with his intense energy and endless questions, the eccentric interpreters, the brilliant Lt. Col. Peterson, the journalists I met, the black-robed expressionless women, the quietly weeping sergeants at the Stryker memorial service, Lt. Col. Frank and his infantrymen, the soldiers from Southie in that Manchu infantry platoon, the blindfolded Mahdi Army detainees at a south Baghdad outpost, the eerie green drone feed of insurgents being reduced to chunks of meat by an Apache, the Sadrist intelligence source coldly giving us targeting intel on dozens of his comrades for a stack of cash, the Iraqi policeman washing the blood from his hands at Kalsu, the pride in the eyes of the Black Lions. All of those are, in a way, even if I saw them only once, familiar faces, faces I doubt I’ll completely forget, ever.
The Mad World Video—
Some of Wesley’s Photos— To read more about Wesley’s experiences go to his blog.
