Replenishing Depleted Motivation:

In the last few days Wangari Maathai passed away at age 71 on September 26, 2011. She was an inspiration for millions and has significantly gained a place in history. Maathai was an environmentalist, a human rights activist, a women’s rights activist, and powerful voice in resisting corrupt governments and corporate manipulation.  She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She is one of the twelve women in the hundred years of the prize and the only woman from an African country to receive the prize for peace initiatives.

            As an environmentalist Wangari started the Green Belt Movement. The movement is responsible for planting more than thirty million trees in Kenya. The organization develops not only environmental action and grass root sustainable projects, but brings individuals from diverse tribal backgrounds together to build an inclusive community that each can share with their neighbor. She promotes in her book, Replenishing the Earth, key values of the Green Belt Movement: Love for the Environment, Gratitude and Respect for Earth’s Resources, Self-Empowerment, Self-Reliance, and the Spirit of Volunteerism. 

            Maathai has continually been a strong voice for human rights and women’s rights, and due to her strong stance she has been a target for her government throughout her life. She promotes democracy and anti-corruption, and for those in power she is a threat to the elite establishment. As a Nobel Prize recipient she has made a significant impact in the hearts and lives of those who have seen her voice penetrate society and culture even if she is held back with such cultural norms that try to silence educated women. She refused to be silent. Just because she was a woman, did not mean that she could not change history.

            In comparison to President Barak Obama, who has recently accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, when he has proven in the last several years that he is not as honorable as many Americans want him to be, Wangari has maintained a continual stance on promoting freedom and protecting the innocence. In opposition, Obama’s newest push for additional use of drone weapons in a global market for industrial war has intensified global instability. Rather than activating peace, he has maintained false justifications for military intervention. For every drone flight that bombs the countryside in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or the Horn of Africa, the innocent voices where bombs fall are eliminated and the environment remains depleted for future life due to the material contents of those bombs.

            Wangari Maathai was not a vengeful person. She was a compassionate individual that did not believe her adversaries were inhuman enough that they could not be changed. These mere misguided voices due to greed and power’s corrupted nature need to be opposed with rational ethical conscience. She felt violence in all its forms was unnecessary and was the true enemy of peace.  But she knew that active participation on the ground and in each individual’s life was highly important in changing the current crisis in society.           

            One of Wangari Maathai’s most beloved metaphors is the one about the hummingbird and the forest fire. While the forest was burning down, the hummingbird, who seemed to appear small and insignificant, found the courage to bring water one beak full at a time to the fire until the fire went out. We should all be our own hummingbird and find the courage to overcome the fire that threatens our local and global home.  The lessons that Wangari Maathai have given to the world are ever more important in the 21^st Century, and people will be reading about her life and learning from her long after she is gone. She will be missed.

EVERYONE’S A POTENTIAL CARRIER FOR PLEASURE AND PAIN

In 1779, President George Washington gave the orders to go into the Cayuga territory with the immediate objective: completely destroy and devastate the Iroquois settlement, capture and remove every age and sex possible, ruin entire harvested crops, and prevent further planting of crops (Dave Tobin, George Washington’s Campaign of Terror).

Winona LaDuke captures this image, quoting Tobin, in her book Recovering the Sacred, where she reminds the reader that for over 300 years, the Iroquois survived “a scorched earth policy, the forced relocation of their people, and the creation of a monoculture” of agriculture and “a monoculture of the mind” from colonial and imperial enforcement (Laduke).

In Ziauddin Sardar’s novel Desperately Seeking Paradise, there is a scene in Islamabad where a moderate Muslim character is discussing with the narrator, "What I want is a decent living, proper education for my children, a proper roof over my head,” but what fundamentalists want will only give “public floggings, beheadings, compulsory beards, and lock my poor long-suffering wife and daughter behind purdah” (Sardar).

The theme that keeps coming back to the foremost of conflicts and survival is the constant brutal enforcement of humans inflicting their beliefs and their might onto others. Human Dignity is at the core of both LaDuke and Sardar’s work.

When the media uses the term Arab Spring to define this year’s events in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and the events that followed in Syria, Israel, and more, the use of the seasonal parameters is aiming that the current unrest has a clear beginning and a clear end. This Calm Before The Storm is far from over and the clarity of the historic meaning behind 2011 uprising is far from clear in determined framework.

Reuters News confirmed this week that since 2010 - 46 million people were in poverty in the United States.  When over ten years ago the international community had come together to design Millennium Development Goals, the masterminds behind the goals claimed that the aim was to secure social and economic standards for the poorest countries. Those goals were never within reach, and now it appears the richest countries are nose-diving to impoverished levels faster than expected.

The second richest country fell off the economic map this year with a horrible earthquake and tsunami that along with shattering the nuclear power grid brought Japan to nearly unforeseeable trauma. The London Riots reflected just how imbalanced the gap between have and have-nots in England stand apart. 

In the world of the capital bourgeois property and freedom are many times confused and fused together. Freedom to buy whatever one wants. In the Anarchist ideal, property is a form of theft. In the world where women have been objectified across cultures, a woman owning her own body in an objective sense can be just as painful.  

…Pause…

Enmeshing multiple voices that are shouting in my mind in my Attention Deficit Society, I am trying to bring together too many ideas and voices. But I am going somewhere and I am getting the order of thoughts to reflect the underline theme.

As Grace Lee Boggs emphasizes, before we can have a social revolution we have to have a personal revolution. Yet Individual emancipation is not enough. But while we continue to push society to reach the levels to gain such a revolution, we can spend our time overcoming our own selves.

Julia Kristeva continually focuses on the masquerade of society, but under all the means of dividing ourselves from each other, we see a hybrid culmination for human dignity trying to break away from limited parameters and determined codes of objectification: whether it be male or female, black or white, Native American, Muslim or Christian. Everyone’s a potential carrier for pleasure and pain. Just as ‘women’ can never be defined, ‘men’ can never be defined in limited parameters. Refusal to be determined is Julia Kristeva’s emphasis; her theme that resides in my mind most is “I Revolt, Therefore We Are Still To Come:” the only way to overcome predetermination is to remain against the grain.

The Ukrainian Feminist group, FEMEN, has been making a significant outcry this year. In the past month, FEMEN protested against the trial of the former female Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, which more or less gave the appearance of a political show trial by the current administration to boost political weight, and more recently, the FEMEN group burst into a Ukrainian fashion press conference of the upcoming Miss Ukraine contest. FEMEN’s mission was to highlight the competitions ties to the sex-industry in Ukraine, and the growing rise of prostitution in Ukraine since the country became aligned in capitalist ideology.

Ironically, at the press conference was Paris Hilton, a symbol herself of women as sex-object in the 21^st Century. In Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, the author reflects on how far women still have to go to gain a subjective self beyond the parameters of a chauvinist society. One cannot help reflecting on the young women who in the past few years in the United States that have turned to the porn industry as a means to escape economic hardship. With further insight, one can see that the women do not enjoy the degrading positions or try their best to appear to enjoy the position, but all in all it reflects little in women’s liberation, just the choice to objectify their own bodies for a price.

Simone de Beauvoir in an interview late in her life, when the 70’s liberation movement was in full bloom, stated: “Individual emancipation is not enough… women’s equality cannot be won unless there is a total overthrow of the current system” (1972 with Alice Schwarzer).

In India, one of the key responses to why certain women join the Naxal-Maoist movement is that they are fed up with patriarchy, and want to end the repressive nature of the current system that exploits and dehumanizes men and women.

The continual women’s rights struggle is a human rights struggle. The continual civil rights struggle is a human rights struggle. The exploitation of Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, and Religious minorities is all part of the struggle for human rights and human dignity. The exploitation of homosexuals, transgenders, and all those not mentioned is part of the struggle for humanity.

Catherine Clement discusses the foreseen and unforeseen spectacle, “In every society it is inevitable that a percentage of individuals find themselves placed outside the system or between two or several irreducible systems,” … the current crisis remains enslaved, it “signals and repeats. … A means must be elaborated to unhinge entire panels of ideology; a rigorous activity is needed which for the sake of rigor must think out and measure its relation to social activities as a whole” (Catherine Clement, Enclave Esclave, 1975).

In the 1960’s, the leader of the Italian Turin student and union alliance, Vittorio Rieser, came to a similar conclusion as Clement, and found that “without mass-conflict there is no hope of forming smaller active groups since the number of activists decreases and because there is a lack of concrete political consciousness which is necessary … for practical inertia” (Rieser).

The inertia to move the global society past the current pathology of capital objectification of individuals comes during a time of unrest. The current year has reflected through small and large actions throughout the integrated world system that people are ready to stand up for their humanity. The utter importance of “Not Mistaking the Target” can be vital in deciding actions.

Targeting people, places, and false directives that are not the key instigators of deeper frustration is a dangerous remedy. When the Libyan rebels target black Libyans, they are misunderstanding their rise against dictatorship. When the London Rioters target small businesses on the streets and loot stores for material gain, they are failing to rally together for a cause against greater sources of their exploitation.

Whether it is exploitation of women, of working labor, of unemployed, of racial, or religious persecution, “In the new Millennium, it is time for the settler to end the process of naming that which he has no right to own, and for us collectively to reclaim our humanity” (Winona LaDuke).

There is another world possible, and if you limit your skepticism to accepting the current parameters as the only way, then you have to have your own internal personal revolution first. It should not be diverted down the wrong path through reactionary violence, but less utopian and still realistic in its emancipation of oppression. If the laws are already written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under the United Nations, then it just needs to be implemented and upheld by all those nations that signed and ratified it. Yet if it were only that easy. As Kristeva totes, "I revolt, therefore we are still to come!"

Biodiversity and human diversity return despite the monoculture of colonialism and capitalism (LaDuke). Everyone's a potential carrier of pleasure and pain, let's hope that inclusive pleasure wins out in the end. 

Critical Thinking is a Key Skill:

In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to Accra, Ghana for the independence ceremony of the first British colony in Sub-Saharan Africa granted freedom from its oppressor. Kwame Nkrumah was the first president of the new nation. He sought a policy of Positive Action, where he attempted to free his nation from neocolonialism of corporate interests. Nkrumah’s goal was to overcome post-World War II rhetoric of the Cold War, where in factual reality colonialism was merely altering its face to re-absorb the interest of new nations who were on alternative paths for self-development.

When MLK was at the celebration in Accra, he went up to, at the time, Vice-President Richard Nixon there on democratic promotion of the independent state. King mentioned to Nixon that he should “come to Alabama” if he is in Accra, so that he could promote the same freedoms he came to cheer on in Africa: dignity of human life. When MLK spoke to Nkrumah, he was inspired and told him that Ghana’s freedom “gives impetus to oppressed people all over the world.”

In 1966, President Nkrumah was ousted in a military coup backed by the CIA. As similar to Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 in Chile, because Nkrumah chose to lead a different policy of development for his people, and which was not conducive to the neocolonial and capitalist interests, who eventually found ways to strip him of power.    

One of Kwame Nkrumah’s American friends for several decades happened to be Grace Lee Boggs. They had first met in 1948, when he was on visit to the US.

Grace Lee Boggs in her newest book, The Next American Revolution, critiques the value of healthy education, not the education of machines that the No Child Left Behind has dehumanized the education process with, but the educational emphasis in Paulo Friere’s oeuvre. She reflects, “I find myself recalling his insights, for example, people ‘cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become human beings’ or ‘the future isn’t something hidden in a corner. The future is something we build in the present’” (Boggs).

By being dehumanized objects in a classroom preparing for a standardized test, we have turned our children into undistinguished masses, we cannot ask our children to change the world if we are following education policies that do not allow our children to think, but to merely stare blindly yet ready for a test.

Michael Parenti discusses in his book with the same title the idea of Contrary Notions the media’s limited parameters to not venture beyond permissible opinions. Judith Butler comes to the same conclusion in her criticism of how acceptable public discourse have been regulated, even Noam Chomsky has focused on the importance of differing between consent and manufactured consent.

For the past ten years the government, media and mass public acceptance of discourse consciously or unconsciously embracing in communication raises important questions for public intellectuals like Boggs, Parenti, and Butler. Thinking critically about 9/11 is a significant example of how questioning reactions and making responsible queries is vital to being an individual.

Back to history lessons, how can we direct our building of the future without addressing our past? While we can criticize presidents, the masses cannot mobilize past directing the arguments to facial images. We are rarely allowed to criticize the system, which we live in without being shunned for conspiracy, madness, or unpatriotic, merely because we ask hard questions and want high standards, rather than actions of which Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld claim are the only roads to take.

When yesterday commenced the 10 year memorial ceremony of 9/11, it was hard for me to not debate the issues. I heard others online, in media, and in person state that “now was not the time to discuss politics, but a time to remember those who died.” However, I cannot separate the event from the actions my government followed after the event and leading up to the event. I still have to ask hard questions.

One of my friend’s mentioned, “Rest in Peace the 2,976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan, 60,000 Pakistani and 1,690,903 Iraqi people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit.”

In an interview, September 11, 2011, CNN's Fareed Zakaria talked with Donald Rumsfeld. As in interviews with Dick Cheney the previous week, Rumsfeld put his foot in his mouth, as he double-folds that the act of fighting for freedom comes at the expense of freedom foreign and domestic. He failed to give any remorse of guilt for sacrificing millions to maintain an illusion of acceptability.

Yet for anyone who asks hard questions, one can notice that though Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, cared little to protect freedom when they had also conducted terrorist activities after 9/11, like other CIA activities in previous decades when these men or their father pushed behind Nixon, Ford, and Reagan: in 2002 the CIA pushed a failed coup against the democratically elected Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, and the CIA supported another coup in 2004 of the democratically elected Haitian president Aristide. Not to mention that, the very government outsourced torture to Mubarak's Egypt and according to a new Wikileak document, to Gaddafi's Libya.

Such activities prove that the administration at the time cared little to change the tactics they followed before 9/11. 9/11 merely gave them a blank check and super-patriotic support to do everything they had hoped to accomplish during the first decade of the 21^st Century. 

During a time when we cannot rely on our government to uphold the ideals we claim to thrive on, we have to ask hard questions and hold injustice accountable, not just acts against us, but acts against innocent people globally. Education has to be more than a mere absorption of facts, but a way to overcome manufactured consent to activate our struggle, not as passive objects but as human beings willing to stand true to our ideals (Boggs). As Grace Lee’s husband, James Boggs, always promoted: “coming out of your mothers womb does not make you a human being” alone, one must gain a sense of humanity by engaging in protecting all life from injustice.

9/11: Reconciling with Living Ghosts:

Building on top of words, on top of other’s words, moving around statements to the point that one cannot fully cite and quote, for now the terms have enmeshed from their original intent. But still holding on in someway the mere idea of an essence, of a collective identity, a rolling discourse of common surface for a higher theme of purpose.

Those who assume that everything that takes place in one country in isolation, which is torn by class struggle, does not think past borders. But beyond the oceans and the waves is far more than daily consumption. A great wall cannot work in the 21^st Century as in China centuries prior; especially now with social media networks, nor just the passing influence of computer screens.

There is no such thing as ‘destiny’, ‘nature’ or ‘essence’, but living structures, caught up, sometimes frozen within historic-cultural limits, which intermingle with the historical scene to such a degree that it has long been impossible and is still difficult to think or even imagine something else (Helene Cixous).

“Men and women are caught up in a network of millennial cultural determinations” complex and null, tied up tight in conceptualized yet penetrable routines.

Here is a good question to ask the president, or any representative of the federal government or even the common citizen (an echo from Native Americans such as Wounded Knee), How can people recover or heal themselves without reconciliation, without apology, and without addressing the crime? … the process of allowing those whose pain is not healed to begin a dialogue is critical to building a healthy nation. It is a process still foreign to the United States, but there is always hope for truth, hope for peace” (Winona LaDuke).

For the past hundred years, Muslims were defeated, massacred, robbed of their land and wealth, of their life and hope. They were doubled-crossed, colonized and exploited; proselytized and forcefully or bribefully converted, and they were secularized, westernized and de-Islamized by internal and external agents … and all this happened in every corner of the Muslim world. … Now he is the object of hatred and contempt (Ziauddin Sardar).

If we take steps to reconcile the past, perhaps those who have harmed us, will do the same. Otherwise, western society will never be civil, but only infantile and revenge seeking, unjust rather than just.

A healing process is necessary for forging a better tomorrow. But we are still attacking. As June Jordan discusses in her essays Technical Difficulties, Thank you America for my parents sake, for the immigrant life her parents lived, after seeking refuge in the US, but as an American citizen in the 1960’s, June Jordan wanted something more. She wanted a society that did not have a double standard; she wanted a society that did not burn Vietnamese alive, bomb Japanese, massacre Native Americans. She thanks America for what it had offered her immigrant parents, but she was ready for the next step to true ideals: a democracy that holds itself accountable.

Amilcar Cabral once stated: "Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head." Our ideas and our ideals are great, but our reality is harsh. In order to make a healthy future, we must reconcile our past and our present. If we care for justice, if we care to set things to a level of civility, if we want to understand why violence was the first response rather than the last response, we must create a local, a national and a global dialogue to address the pain and injustice.

Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “Consciencism conceives matter as a plenum of tensions giving rise to dialectical change … and since tension implies incipient change, matter must have power of self-motion … Without self-motion dialectical change would be impossible.” Society will depict itself either as ‘forces of progress’ or as ‘forces of reaction’, and when we think of progress, it must not come at the expense of others.

The need for a paradigm shift in our thinking is necessary. Our debate is confined by narrow parameters. We have the power within us to create the world anew. We need to see that we can solve our problems only by first creating a new concept of citizenship (Grace Lee Boggs). The important thing for us to do is to see ourselves not as oppressed victims, or objects of corporate government schemes, or feeding into media propaganda, but to see ourselves as creative subjects.

Men like Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Dick Cheney have no guilt for the lives that they have destroyed: American or Other. They each have published books to gloat their display of barbaric bravery, like some warrior from the dark ages. And though the current Obama administration sees the route to the future by ignoring the past, even if we ignore it, it will keep coming back to haunt us.