Boiling point

When I started this blog over a year ago, the purpose was to fulfill a goal of mine to write every day for a year. The blog helped me to sustain my momentum and to stay accountable. I have not written any new posts for this blog in a long time, and I feel the desire to recommit myself to the cause of researching current events and writing about them. This is strictly my own opinion, so if you happen to stumble upon this post, please take from it whatever you wish, and feel free to disagree. Rational and respectful discourse is something that is missing from modern society, so I welcome your input if you have the time to provide it!

There are many difficult stories to read in the news, and to comment on them all would be a full-time job. However, the following two stories deserve to be highlighted, due to the injustices that common people are suffering.

• Water has been shut off in thousands of homes in the city of Detroit due to unpaid water bills. So this is how Kevyn Orr is planning on getting Detroit out of the red in the books, by denying people the basic need of water. From the NY Times article mentioned below:

             Tyrone Travis, a former General Motors autoworker who owns his home, said he, too, faced service interruption because of a $700 bill. “I’m on a fixed income like a lot of Detroiters, and by the time I get through buying medicine, gas and a little food, I just don’t have it,” he said.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/us/protesters-picket-detroit-over-move-to-shut-off-water.html?_r=0

• Civilians living in the overcrowded Gaza Strip continue to be bombed by the Israeli military. The following is a story about four boys who were killed by two Israeli bombs while playing futbol on a Gazan beach. If you are in defense of Israel, imagine your child or a child you know and love being killed in a similar attack. You cannot in good conscious defend such a flawed rationale as what Israel is displaying in this time of atrocities.

http://socialistworker.org/2014/07/23/lives-stolen-as-they-played

What causes me to focus on these stories is the plight of the common man. The city of Detroit was once a proud place of residence for nearly two million people (the peak of 1.8 million residents occurring in 1950). In the decades since, the population has plummeted, and some of the causes have been the decline of the U.S. auto industry, urban flight, a rising unemployment rate, and a notorious crime rate. People in Detroit who are lucky enough to have jobs face a similar situation to the aforementioned Tyrone Travis. When Miguel Cabrera makes nearly $50,000 for the Detroit Tigers every time he steps into the batters box, it provides for the most apt juxtaposition of the difference between the common man and the affluent man in the Detroit area. (This is not to say that Cabrera is to be faulted for this. He merely accepted a contract offer.)

The current, but long-withstanding, conflict between Israel and Gaza highlights the ugly side of human nature. There has been constant struggle for cultural supremacy and occupation on this tiny strip of land, and from the looks of it right now, the struggle will continue indefinitely. The current population of Gaza, like Detroit’s peak in 1950, is 1.8 million people, yet there are only 139 square miles in Gaza, making its population per square mile come in at over 13,000 (by comparison, I live in Wyoming, where the population density is under six people per square mile). So, when Israel decides to drop bombs anywhere in the Gaza Strip, there is a potential for a great number of civilians to be killed as a result. The historic fighting between Israel and Gaza puts the common man right in the middle of the skirmish, and as of this sentence being written past 1:00 on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014, 687 Palestinians have died, compared with 35 Israelis. Schools, mosques, and hospitals are some of the targets of Israeli bombs, giving the common man nowhere to turn for a safe haven.

I can sense that around the world, people are reaching their personal boiling point. Wealthy people are prospering at unseen rates, and everyone else is left to fend for themselves. The widespread injustice that is taking place creates an atmosphere of a budding revolution that seeks to take the power back from the hands of the rich and powerful.

Valuing peace

Weapons are the tools of violence;
all decent men detest them.

Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn’t wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?

He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.

This is the thirty-first lesson of the Tao Te Ching. Besides shooting an assortment of NERF guns, I have never used a weapon before, so I can only imagine how I would feel if I had to use one. I have no use for violence, and I cannot imagine that stance changing in my lifetime. Sure, there are unique circumstances in which I might take a weapon in my hand, but it would be with the utmost restraint, like the Tao says.

I tell my students on a regular basis that I do not like anything that relates to real life violence, and in most cases, I don’t like fictional violence either. I see no benefit in pretending to seriously harm or kill someone else. Of course, if kids are pretending to be part of a Star Wars or Harry Potter scene on the playground, and their play causes no harm, then game on. I could do without all real-life depictions of war and graphic violence on video games, like the Call of Duty series, but if the game is like Mario Smash Brothers, where cartoon characters are throwing each other around, then I see no harm there. The former shows what could be a real-life scenario of murder, and the latter is a cartoon scenario that could never happen, and is meant to entertain only.

Violence has no part in my life, which makes me atypical compared to my male brethren all across the world. I like this difference, though, and I am proud of it.

Absolutely nothing!

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all

The lyrics to Edwin Starr’s famous song could have been written by any common man. However, though the lyrics may be simple, they are spot on. Now, if the lyrics are asking what war is bad for, the answer would be ‘absolutely everything.’ Let’s ponder some of those here, shall we?

Note: the following is strictly a monetary discussion of the Iraq war. Please remember that the United States has been at war with Afghanistan for the past 12 years as well. The cost of that war is not included in this post. The true cost of war also needs to look at the human cost of war as well, representing the lives lost in the ordeal. I have previously posted the Iraqi civilian casualties since the beginning of this war as being enough to fill Michigan Stadium. The number of military personnel to have died in the war is staggering as well, though I don’t know the exact total. If you happen to find that info, please send it my way?.

An article came out in 2007 about the daily cost of the Iraq war, and the statistics in that article are startling:

• $720,000,000 per day or $500,000 per minute

One day’s worth of war spending could instead pay for:

1. homes for nearly 6,500 families
2. health care for 423,529 children
3. renewable electricity for 1.27 million families

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102074.html

Again, those are statistics for one day! And that article was written in September of 2007. Around 2,000 days have passed since that article was written. If you add $720,000,000 two thousand times, you arrive at the dollar total of $1,440,000,000,000. The one in that number is in the trillions place. Nearly one and a half trillion dollars just since 2007 to ‘fight’ a war that was unjustifiable from its beginning. The article also goes on to state that the monetary cost from 2003-2006 was $2.2 trillion. Adding up the totals for a decade of war, 2003-2013, the war has cost nearly $4 trillion.

People in Congress, along with the world bank financiers of war, who are the true enemies of humanity, do not pay for the war that they started. It is the common man who pays for the war. Common people are recruited to be part of the United States military, and they are the foot soldiers whose lives are ended in combat. Common people are the ones who pay the monetary cost of the egregious war. Common people are duped by rhetoric for why wars should be fought in the first place.

I am a common man who sees that war is good for nothing and bad for everything. I have no effect on the outcome of the two wars that are being fought by the United States right now. I am baffled that the people who started these wars are not being tried as war criminals. I am ashamed to be a citizen of the United States because our product is war and oppression.

Yet I will be the change that I want to see in this world. Today. Everyday.

War is not a viable solution to any problem.

Explaining war to a ten year old

I explained the Revolutionary War to my students this past week. In terms of war, the Revolutionary War has been the easiest to explain. Britain was making life very difficult for people who broke free of its control and decided to live an ocean away. The people decided that enough was enough, so they acted on their frustrations when British troops sailed the ocean to pacify their expatriates. The Revolutionary War is an open and shut justification of war, at least in comparison to its counterparts.

In three years of teaching, I have found that the most difficult topic to discuss is the reasons for one country going to war with another. I am not a good liar, so I do not give my students any false information, and I toe the line of telling them too much about the true causes of war. I figure that if they are seeking knowledge, the least I can do is be honest with them. My students know how much I disagree violence or hatred of any kind, so they know my stance on war is that it is completely avoidable in most circumstances. I tell them the facts, Howard Zinn style. I do not glorify people who were heroes in the theatre of war. Instead, I convey the ultimate cost of the war: needless killing, bullying, promotion of power, and nation building. If they can understand me, and I am being completely open and honest with them, then I feel like they will gain a perspective on world history that is much more broad than it could be by simply telling them the sugar-coated version of events.

As I was explaining the Revolutionary War to my students, I mentioned to them that wars can last an extremely long time. For instance, I said, the United States has engaged in two separate wars that have each spanned at least a decade. One student asked me a straightforward question: “Why are we fighting two wars?” Trying to answer that simple question in a truthful way made me realize how deceitful both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan truly are. The following is a paraphrased account of my response to the above question. Please take into account that I was trying to give these students the true reasons for why we are in these wars, and I did not want to cover up any of the facts.

The war in Afghanistan is a result of the September 11th events in New York City, and Washington D.C. (I left out Shanksville, PA because flight 93 was nowhere to be found at the ‘crash site.’ See picture below). The tricky part about why we attacked the country of Afghanistan is that the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan did not want to arrest Osama bin Laden for his involvement with the 9/11 attacks, and since he was said to be hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan, the coalition forces decided to go to war with Afghanistan. The war began nearly twelve years ago, which is longer than any of you have been alive. The Afghanistan military never dropped a bomb on the United States, nor did they participate in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.

The war in Iraq is a result of the suspicion of Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and for the supposed ties between al-Qaeda, the group that promoted war with the United States, and Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq. The war began in 2003, when most of you were born, and is still going on today. To date, not a single WMD has been found in Iraq, and Hussein was executed in 2006. The Iraq military never dropped a bomb on the United States, nor did they participate in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.

After summing up the two words using these facts, my students had a collective confusion on their faces. “Why again are we at war with two countries?” one student exasperatedly asked. “That is a good question,” I replied.

War is never a good event, though it is glorified by Hollywood, romanticized by authors, and turned into entertainment by software designers. That is why I tell my students only the facts when they ask about war. They can be brainwashed by these other sources, but if they ask me what war is all about, I will answer them with honesty. Kids deserve to know the truth.