I wonder if there is a medical procedure to drain out excess evil?

The other day, while sitting in my class on Tax Policy, a girl made the following points:

1) Rich people are rich because they work harder than other people, not because they are the lucky beneficiaries of a political system that favors them, genetic factors, or social and educational opportunities not available to others that are unrelated to any active characteristic of their own making.

2) The poor are poor because they are lazy or stupid, and it is largely their own fault.

3) Giving aid to the poor only contributes to their own laziness and actively disincentivizes them from seeking to better themselves.

4) The rich should be paying fewer taxes since they already bear the burden of supporting the nation’s economy and since redistribution of wealth is an impermissible goal for the above-stated reasons.

Here’s the real issue and current existential crisis: while she was saying these things, I wasn’t thinking to myself about the thousands of destitute mothers with children in Kansas who rely on government-funded aid to feed their newborns. I wasn’t thinking of the rich and extravagant wastrels who inherited billions of dollars and who will never have to want for even a tenth mansion. I was thinking to myself, “Wow… She’s hot.”

I’ll admit to the shallowness of my thought, but the really troubling thing was that I was sort of more fascinated by her level of pure 1980’s Republicanism than the rest of her.

(shudder)

I need to do some penance for my recognition of attraction to that level of creepifying horror. Now I feel like I need to go volunteer at a soup kitchen or something to feel clean again. If you don't catch these things right away, the next thing you know, you are advocating massive deregulation of the energy sector (to be more competitive, of course) and massive tax cuts to the rich so that the benefits of their spending trickle down to the poor, and I'm certainly not prepared to give into that level of inhuman darkness.

A table away is too far.

I worry sometimes about etiquette in social situations.

While I like to think of myself as being at least somewhat debonair, and able to rise above the easily spotted gaffes like chewing my food with my mouth open, closing doors behind me when others are following, or staring at a woman’s chest while talking to her. While I am by no means a modern version of Mr. Manners, I think I am at least able to avoid seeming downright uncouth.

But my limited training and observational skills regarding etiquette leave me unable to cope with a current predicament. Some months back, I was friend-dumped by three of my five friends for reasons that still escape me (I have been left to my own devices to figure out what precisely I did wrong, since they have instituted a silent treatment against me). To say that their reactions to whatever it was that I did wrong hurt me would be a fair assessment, but I think that I have moved past some of the confusion and simply written it off as a regrettable end to what had otherwise been a happier chapter in my life. Valued friends cannot stay with me forever, I know. All good things must come to an end, I suppose, and maybe someday they will forgive my fault and the chapter can begin again.

Having been friend-dumped, though, I now face a troubling issue. I have a class with two of the three of these girls, and I simply do not know how to handle it. The class is a small seminar class and is largely driven by student-led discussion and argument, so there is little chance that I can avoid making them uncomfortable by being too intrusive into their lives during that period each week.

I have not yet figured out the appropriate things to do in this situation. Do I avoid looking at them? Do I look at them the same amount as anyone else? Do I look at them more than everyone else? Do I respond to their arguments less than everyone else’s, the same amount as everyone else’s, or more than everyone else’s arguments? Is it too much if I laugh at their jokes or smile at their good arguments? How do I handle the end of class when we all leave? If I leave quickly, does that reinforce their feeling of having been slighted or something?

I can tell that my social phobia is starting to come back, as well. In that class, the two of them were laughing, and even though I have no reason to think so, I have a powerful suspicion that they were laughing at me. It didn’t used to be that way. They have slipped from the people around whom I didn’t have to worry back out into the never-ending sea of people around whom I still feel overly self-conscious.

Sigh. There should be a book about how to handle a situation like this. I mean, I still wish things could be how they used to be, where I did not have to worry about how I conducted myself around them.

I just wish I knew how I was supposed to act around them now.

Got Peace?

For a long time, I have followed events in the Middle East. The area holds an inexplicable interest for me, and even though I have never visited the area, I harbor a deep fascination with its peoples, languages, cultures, and histories. A friend of mine from high school is in the Marines, and during one of his tours in Iraq, he took some photographs of the countryside and sent it back to me with the commentary that what was pictured in the images was the wasteland in which he spent his days.

“Wasteland” is not the word that came to mind when I saw the pictures. Strangely, the word that first entered my mind when I saw the images was ‘home.’

One of the issues which bothers me the most about the current political situation in the Middle East is the continuing and ongoing conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Israel is not a country of which I think highly. I disagree vehemently with a wide array of the political decisions which its leaders make, and I find many of the actions of the state to be manifestly unjust, unjustified, and deeply immoral.

In 1967, the state of Israel invaded its neighbors in a naked land-grab that would have provoked WWIII if done in Europe. The invasion seized lands belonging to several of its neighbors, and the world nearly unanimously censured Israel for the invasion. The land seized was not part of Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and Israel still occupies this land.

The seized land was placed under military rule, and remains under military rule to this day. Checkpoints are set up on all major roads that impede the flow of people and commerce. Individuals cannot get to major hospitals because of the long queues at checkpoints, and people have died in ambulances as the drivers argued with soldiers refusing to allow the vehicle through on the road. Israeli soldiers have committed what much of the world has labeled war-crimes on peoples in the occupied territories. Palestinians in some of the occupied land had legal deeds to land that was owned by their fathers, and by their fathers’ fathers before them, and can only look on helplessly as Israeli tanks prevent them from setting foot on what legally should be theirs. Many villages are placed under curfews and those breaking the curfew can be shot on sight. In some villages, it is not uncommon to be placed under curfew for days at a time and curfews can be set for entire days (such that nobody can leave their homes). Palestinian children are routinely arrested and sent to military prisons where they are beaten and tortured (read the book “Stolen Youth” for a study of this phenomenon), and held for years at a time. Whereas the United States abolished bills of attainder (where you could be punished for the crimes of another due to the taint of their corruption rubbing off on you) constitutionally, it is not uncommon for homes with a dozen occupants of an extended family to be bulldozed with only minutes warning (not enough time to save your possessions and sometimes not pets) when another family member commits a crime.

To suggest that a brutal military occupation that is illegal under nearly universally accepted international law would be met with peaceful compliance is bewildering, yet this is precisely what Israel expects. Understandably, many in the occupied territories are upset, and willing to fight back in what ways they can to free their land from an illegal and brutal occupation by a foreign invading army. How the United States supports Israel in this is beyond me.

If this were the extent of the problem, I wouldn’t be quite so incensed. However, Israel is engaging in a practice that caused Americans to burn the flag on the Capitol steps when it was done in South Africa: apartheid. Israel has built extensive (dozens and dozens) of settlements (towns) in occupied territories, fenced them off, ringed them with soldiers, and moved in Israelis to set up shop. These settlements are for Israelis only, and Palestinians are not allowed to live in them. This segregationist policy is upheld on the grounds of safety, as if Israelis were the ones under attack. In the short term, I suppose they are, but to suggest that the attacks on Israelis were somehow unexpected and unjustified strains common sense.

Many people will disagree with this statement. I ask those people, though, to imagine an alternate history for a moment. Let us suppose that Russia decides that it wants to invade the United States in 1970. Russia seizes all of Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, and part of Nevada. Russia demolishes long-held properties, uproots the existing legal system, and marches hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the area. Russia then sets up a military government over the newly ‘Russian’ lands. Russia then prevents people from going to hospitals, their businesses, shoots people who leave their homes on Tuesdays, kidnaps young children and tortures them into confessing crimes, prevents individuals from attending churches, and prevents people from traveling from city to city, and all while having armed and hostile troops stationed on every street corner. Fast forward to the year 2006. Would the people living in those occupied territories be fighting back? I certainly hope so. But more important is the question: Are they right to fight back? What if they were reduced to abject poverty and couldn’t afford tanks and planes, and in many cases couldn’t afford to buy guns to attack the Russians? What if all they had were stones and bottles and homemade explosives?
This is a very real scenario, and the Palestinian people do not have to imagine a hypothetical. They are living this reality, and behaving exactly as I would expect my fellow Americans to act under such circumstances.

The United States is indirectly responsible for the atrocities being perpetuated on an entire people. We support the illegal occupation with money and weapons. Even though Israel has such a powerful military that it would take an alliance of most of the Middle East to defeat it in a full-scale war, we continue to give phenomenally gigantic ‘gifts’ of money and weapons to the Israeli state every year, further financing their aggressive militaristic expansion and brutal subjugation of people in the occupied territories.

In the United States, people defend our help by saying that we need to strengthen democracy in the Middle East and that (until Iraq comes around) Israel is our only democratic ally in the middle of a sea of dictatorships and corrupt governments. To call Israel a democracy is laughable. Israel is an apartheid state, where a powerful, privileged group holds and maintains power at the expense of a weak, impoverished group. Palestinians are not voting for the Knesset which authorizes military funding to further oppress them. In a state that refuses to allow everyone to vote, seizes land and resources from its weaker neighbors and gives them to the privileged, sets up elite-only cities, and routinely starts wars, democracy is dead. These are not the fruits of democracy. These are the fruits of militant nationalism: fascism.

If we need further proof of the expansionist plans of Israel, we need look no further than their recent invasion of Lebanon. Israel claims that this invasion was provoked by the kidnapping of some of their soldiers, but the soldiers were on occupied land that was originally taken from Lebanon during the 1967 wars. The Lebanese militia that carried out the attack, Hezbollah, was fighting back against an occupying military dictatorship of foreign imposition, not just engaging in random acts of violence against innocent people.

In response to this predictable act of defense of the Lebanese nation, Israel responded by invading Lebanon and occupying a large swath of it. Only under overwhelming international pressure (basically the entire world except for the United States), did Israel cease the invasion. Israel’s stated goal for the invasion of Lebanon was to set up a buffer zone, policed by Israeli troops, that would safeguard northern Israel – in other words, another military occupation.

The eventual ‘peace’ that was brokered by the UN is quite in line with the Israeli interests. The ‘buffer zone’ that will be set up in southern Lebanon will be policed by UN troops (which are largely, though not entirely, without the ability to use force). The UN troops which will be stationed have been authorized to use force to stop Hezbollah from arming and acting in the region, but has no ability to respond if Israel invades again. They simply do not have that mandate.

What the area is left with then, is a profound weakening of Israel’s northern neighbor, on whom Israel has evinced territorial designs, and a military force occupying Lebanon that can weaken Lebanon, but do nothing to stop Israel if it decides to invade again.

That such a decision is vastly pro-Israel should not be surprising, since the United States was the dominant player in the negotiations for the temporary peace. Israel should be happy with the result, but it is a true mark of worry that the Israelis want more concessions. The Israeli people, by a wide margin, viewed the peace treaty brokered by the UN as a defeat in the war. They did not want to end the invasion, but rather continue and extend it.

An interesting, though somewhat dated (it is a few months old, and does not contemplate an invasion into Lebanon) documentary on the subject can be found on Google Video, here.

How the United States can support a nation with so many shockingly anti-democratic tendencies, horrifyingly unjust legal rules, expansionist agendas, and militaristic dreams is bizarre and puzzling. I’m not sure how people in the United States side with Israel by a wide margin over those they are oppressing, but such is the case. The documentary (mentioned previously) makes some claims at understanding this phenomenon, but I am still appalled.

I’m still waiting for a mainstream politician to stand up and say these things, and to point at the 900-pound pink gorilla in the corner. I fear I may have to wait for a long time.

I'm frustrated with incremental changes, but they are better than nothing

About a week ago, a simple case out of New York was decided that made me very, very happy. For a long time, I have been arguing that non-human animals (particularly the most intelligent among them) deserve to have some legal rights for exactly the same reasons that humans have them.

While it is unlikely that non-human animals could ever meaningfully exercise a right to vote or own property, certain rights – like a right to continued existence or to a minimum standard of living – that are currently denied to them could do a lot to ease the suffering of billions of non-human animals just in the United States alone.

So far, the law has largely ignored the rights I feel are vitally important in our shared human quest to become more compassionate and just people. Some laws exist that prohibit cruelty to animals, but frequently are conditioned on common practices, so that if it is common practice in an industry (say farming) to engage in a particularly cruel act, then there isn’t any remedy.

One of the largest recommendations that I’ve been pushing is the idea that things other than humans can have standing. Let us suppose that my neighbor steps out on his front porch one morning after finding a letter on his kitchen table telling him that his wife has left him. He’s angry and wants to hurt something. Unfortunately, his eyes first fall on my hypothetical pet cat. He grabs my cat, beats it senseless, and then twists its neck, killing it. What does the law say?
Well, I probably can push an animal cruelty prosecution, and I’ll likely have a personal action for compensation in tort. But though I’ve suffered a damage, am I the injured party? Isn’t my hypothetical pet cat the real victim in this scenario? Isn’t it the one that was brutalized and then killed? Why can’t the cat bring a suit (or rather, why can’t a guardian for the cat bring a suit on its behalf)?

Well, in New York, a judge has allowed something similar to that to proceed in his court. Bebe, a 5-year old, 14-lb. dog was savagely beaten by a man who was a guest in the apartment of Bebe’s owner (don’t get me started on treating non-human animals as property that can have an owner…). Judge Alex Zigman granted a restraining order in the dog’s name against the guest who beat her.

It’s not much, but it is a step in the right direction.

I think they just want more money...

I’ve been thinking for a little while about an article that I saw on CNN.com some time back. The article was discussing how some artists are resisting selling their songs on popular internet music sources like iTunes. The reason cited by many of the artists was that they didn’t like the idea that people could download and listen to individual tracks from their albums without hearing the track in the context of the full album.

When I initially read that, I was perplexed. I mean, albums were all in vogue during the 60’s and 70’s, but what is so special about an album that warrants that much appreciation? I have spent the better part of the last week listening to dozens of CD’s that I own, and came to the realization that if there is something special about an album that is more than simply a collection of songs, then I’m not getting it.

On any given CD, I could have altered the ordering of tracks randomly and would not have owned an appreciably different CD. It isn’t like the tracks tell a story when in the right order. Frequently, they vary from song to song wildly in tone, tempo, and topic. So what’s the big deal about listening to them in context to each other?

Fuzzy thoughts

I had a nightmare about a squirrel last night.

Well, I shouldn’t really say that I had a nightmare about a squirrel. I had a nightmare about the squirrel. Anyone who knows me comes to the understanding quite quickly that I have a fairly deep empathy with living non-human animals. Squirrels are among some of my favorites for reasons I haven’t really ever figured out.

When I was little, I used to sit in front of our patio glass sliding door, and I would sit very quietly and still, hoping that one of the neighborhood squirrels would come out toward our deck in order to steal some sunflower seeds from the bird feeders. My father always pounded on the glass when he saw them to make them run away (since to him, they were eating seeds intended for the bluejays and starlings). To me, though, watching the little pudgy squirrels with their quickly flicking tails was far more interesting that watching the loud bluejays squawk at each other while fighting for position at the feeder.

The squirrels were one of the reasons I chose my alma mater, actually. KU has a very large squirrel population. I used to take frequent walks around the green areas of campus that didn’t have quite so much foot traffic in order to watch them chasing each other across the grass and through the branches of trees.

During the last year I spent in Lawrence, my father was working about a three miles from my dorm, and whenever a piece of important mail showed up at our house in Topeka, he would just bring it to work with him and e-mail me to let me know to come pick it up. On one of the times when I was walking across town to get a random piece of mail, there was an accident.

There was a squirrel sitting at the base of a tree along the sidewalk next to a busy street. I was coming down the same sidewalk, heading back toward my dorm after picking up an errant piece of mail. I saw the squirrel at the base of the tree but I just thought that as I got close, the squirrel would bolt up the tree. The squirrel instead bolted out into the street.

Thump.

A car ran over the squirrel’s back end as he fled across the street. The squirrel rolled a goodly distance across the pavement and then continued a frenzied hopping roll until it reached the opposite curb. It didn’t seem able to make it up over the curb onto the grass on the other side and just sort of… flopped… around in the gutter’s leaves. By the time I made it across the street to see if the squirrel was okay, it wasn’t moving anymore. I had hoped that maybe I could take it to a vet or something to get it fixed up if maybe just the back legs were broken or something, but the car must have done a lot more internal damage than that.

After that, I bought a small plush squirrel that still hangs in my car to remind me of the life I carelessly took. I named him Mr. Squeaks.

I would have thought that a couple years separating me from that incident would have made me forget, but my dreams last night proved me wrong.