Yemen Peace Activist Tawakkul Karman: Who is she?

In the past week Tawakkul Karman of Yemen was one of the three women who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism and non-violent mobilization during the continual unrest in the Middle East throughout the year. The other two celebrated voices were President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leyma Gbowee both from Liberia. Highlighting these women to global awareness will strengthen the strides these women have made individually for women’s rights and human rights. Tawakkul Karman is known for her organization Women Journalists Without Chains.  Many people are curious to know who Tawakkul Karman is, how can people separate the often slanted politics of the Nobel Committee with the individual’s life commitment, and how she falls in line within the historic nonviolent tradition?

Throughout the year in numerous Arab nations thousands upon thousands of individuals have gathered together to standup for their human dignity and fight off totalitarianism, secularism, capitalism, fundamentalism, and feudalism. When individuals are being exploited via their own government and outside forces, eventually there is a tipping point to how much suppression they can take. How is it that one particular person can be pointed out as prize worthy, when so many people are involved in such movements?

As a journalist, Tawakkul Karman refused to remain silent and has written about human rights issues continually in the public eye since 2005. In a February 22, 2006 article in The Times of India, entitled 'Controversy Pits Muslim Against Muslim,' Karman is quoted in saying "This has become a game between two sides, the extremists and the government,” and that too often most reactions from either group leaves the bulk of the masses left to violence from both sides: terrorism or state-terrorism.

The Women Journalists Without Chains organization heads the way for women to get involved in the often one-sided masculine monologue of how society should be directed. Having women’s voices in democracy and society building is a necessity in the 21^st Century, and some of the key crisis in the modern world come from limiting the voices of the many to only the voices of an elite few, who far often tend to only be men. As part of the 2011 protests inspired throughout Egypt and Tunisia, the voice of journalists and those on the streets fueled the global attention with reports across the social on-line network community. On the ground level she lead in the organization of spontaneous sit-ins and planned protests.

Though her actions are of the highest courage and nobility, one still can wonder why did this particular activist win the award. The Nobel Peace Prize has throughout its tradition shadowed political motivations for many of the awards granted. Over the years, certain winners of the prize represented an oppositional view to a government that Western nations wanted to reform for multiple reasons. In 2010, the award was given to Liu Xiaobo from China, and the Chinese government was displeased with the committee’s nomination. Shirin Ebadi from Iran was awarded the prize in 2003, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma in 1991, and Wangari Maathai in 2004. These amazing human rights activists who have courage, never committed their life work for any prize but for the greater goal of human dignity. The Nobel Committee, potentially on the negative reflection, uses the lives of great people for an underlining political purpose. Other times, the prize is awarded to individuals who have not yet proven their credibility or have invested heavily in encouraging war and not peace, such as President Obama and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

In a recent Guardian article entitled, “All-Female Nobel Peace Prize Risks Being Seen As A Political Move”, Nesrine Malik makes the point that “the very fact that it was awarded to three women, as opposed to one, suggests that there was a theme established at the outset, that of women's rights and activism, with a nod to the Arab spring, which then dictated the nature and number of recipients” (Malik).

Though the Nobel Peace Prize has political motives, many key activists have utilized the publicity of the award regardless of its politics, to promote their causes and strengthen their dedication to human rights. Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams, and Rigoberta Menchu have pushed human rights initiatives to end oppression continually.

In the spirit of Non-violent civil disobedience, Tawakkul Karman may follow in the tradition of Alice Paul, Mahatma Gandhi, Ghaffar Khan, Mridula Sarabhai, Cesar Chavez, Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King; or will she be led in time to a similar disbelief like Kwame Nkrumah? Kwame Nkrumah led the people of Ghana to overcome British Imperialism. During his leadership, like that of Salvador Allende of Chile, he sought an alternative policy of economic and social development from that of the dominant Western trade system. Because he sought to create a more inclusive system and an independent approach, he was ousted through a military coup that was CIA backed. Unlike Allende who lost his life during the coup, Nkrumah spent the rest of his life in exile. During his exile, he moved from being a supporter of nonviolence, to understanding that the capitalist elite would stop at nothing to control national and international trade and that their greed would not be phased with humility and compassion. Near the end of his life, Kwame Nkrumah felt that the only way to make African nations unite against oppression would be through conflict. He was bitter and disappointed.

Tawakkul Karman, unlike Kwame Nkrumah, has not reflected any political-seat of ambition. She is seeking to stand equal and in solidarity with her fellow protestors in Yemen and throughout the Muslim world.

“Let us be clear,” she states, “the Yemeni revolution has already brought internal stability to a state riddled with war and conflict. I call on the global community to support the peaceful revolution as it did in Tunisia and Egypt. I call on the United States and the European Union to tell Saleh that he must leave now, in response to the demands of his people. They should end all support for his regime, especially that which is used to crush peaceful opposition – tear gas canisters have ‘Made in America’ on them. They should freeze the Saleh family's assets and those of Saleh's henchmen and return them to the people. If the US and Europe genuinely support the people, as they say, they must not betray our peaceful revolution” (Guardian, ‘Our revolution's doing what Saleh can't – uniting Yemen’, April 8, 2011)

Tawakkul Karman, now the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, at 32, has the lifetime ahead of her to continue her message and prove to her people and the globe, whether or not she will remain a voice for human dignity. Regardless of the Nobel Committee’s underlining political motives, the tradition of human rights activists of the nonviolent ambition strengthens the overall definition of humanity and quality of leadership. 

DEVIATE FROM EVASION

Aid as Imperialism is a common phrase in international development outside of the meeting rooms and conferences. The perception that all agencies involved in the development field are better to exist than to not exist at all is a flawed notion. When Occupy Wall Street protests are standing up to the corporate greed throughout the United States, the need to extend to the development field is just as vital a route.

When USAID, the US Agency for International Development, is far in the pockets of corporations like Monsanto and Pfizer, more damage can be done than positive development. The entire occupational field of development from a capitalist perspective is unsustainable, because in order to continue the illusion of development, no true changes can be made, or the workforce of such a field would be proven unnecessary.

On October 4, 2011, CNN and Bloomberg News, as well as other news sources, noted the shocking and ironic fact that HIV Risks in African Nations that have received Depo-Provera injections have doubled. While citizens in low-income areas in the US have avoided the injections and have the available legal outlets to sue if negligence has occurred, developing nations in Africa have been herded into development health projects promising treatment and even potential cures for HIV.

When foreign development policies are too close to the corporate interest, human lives are left as lab-rats. Pfizer and Monsanto are just two of the key US corporations using the US government as tools to dump their products in developing countries.

But this is not the first time we are learning about this. In the past few years, Dambisa Moyo has written a book shocking the popular markets entitled ‘Dead Aid’; however, long before the book was an awakening for passive audiences, writers and activists such as Susan George, Paul Harrison, Nigel Harris and Teresa Hayter have covered this issue from the 1960’s up through today. Many times these writers have been strategically pushed out-of-print to evade their calls.

A short list of books worth finding, if you can, regarding the issues of aid and underdevelopment are: Susan George 1) Another World is Possible If… 2) A Fate Worse Than Debt; Nigel Harris 3) The End of the Third World, 4) Of Bread and Guns; Paul Harrison 5) The Third World Tomorrow, 6) Inside the Third World; Teresa Hayter 7) Aid as Imperialism; and Michael Harrington 8) The Accidental Century.

The newest irresponsible blow to the global community that statistics on Depo-Provera has highlighted may be surprising for those unaware of the nature of the development aid. What appears true is that health experts are apathetic or passive victims of amnesia when it comes to development aid they recommend to civilians already struggling to gain the basic needs in Malawi, Nigeria, Botswana, and across the continent and across the globe. Companies like Monsanto, whose genetically modified corn dumps aid packages in rural areas, are not altruistic. Monsanto, notorious for products such as Agent Orange dumped in Vietnam during the war as a chemical weapon, should never be trusted with feeding the planet.

Already there is a cancer epidemic in the US, why should we be outsourcing our diseases to those who cannot even defend themselves? Like Canada’s Asbestos sales as a productive trade, selling negligent products that spread diseases is a crime against humanity. Now when governments, bowing down to corporate pressure, swindle poorer nations and poorer neighborhoods in our own countries to believe we are aiding them to progress, then we must hold our government regardless of party politics accountable.    

There are development workers whose actions and activities sustain a steady paycheck, and then there are human beings willing to take action for the development of society home and abroad because they are passionate people. Are you a Nelson Mandela, a Wangari Maathai, or a Margaret Sanger, or are you the man in the suit working in the development agency preparing a powerpoint presentation for a room that already knows the same facts that push nothing more but more weightless pages of a report? My advice friend, deviate from evasion!

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.

10 YEARS AFTER 9/11

Magazines and newspapers on sale have begun to cover the upcoming ten-year mark of September 11, 2001. I can only step back and reflect on where I stand today since this was the most significant event in American history to have happened inside the US in my lifetime. There is a solid difference between History and Memory. I won’t delve here into theories and conspiracies or even media propaganda. History regardless of who decides what gets written into textbooks always has a way of coming out as time moves away from the event. Facts always float to the surface.

Personally: How have I lived my own life since then? I certainly moved from one phase in my life to another. I graduated from a liberal arts college several months prior to September. I was no longer a child and no longer naïve. My sheltered knowledge of reality outside the middle-class bubble was clearly not sustainable.

I no longer was required to be in the classroom. A well-standard education was complete. Yet the job market was already slim in 2001. I was in New York, and couldn’t get work. So I decided to go camp out in the Everglades for a month and learn about nature. En route my cousin had an application for the Peace Corps that she was not using, so I filled out the application while I was in the swamp.

Before the year ended, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, Africa. I wanted to meet people that I would never have met otherwise, and I did. My understanding about human nature and life were broadened and awakened. My strongest reason to work in another country was my deep-need to counter-balance the image the US military was spreading of America. While I was primarily a teacher in a remote village, I was the real student.

The real world is harsh. I had always been passionate about human rights due to my grandparents surviving the Holocaust. But my time in Malawi gave me first-hand experience in how the poorest of the poor struggle to live. I saw how many challenges my female and male students had to face on a daily basis, and I became a feminist. I became an advocate, a teacher, and an activist. I saw how most well to do Americans take our opportunities and freedoms for granted.

I couldn’t just look at the world the same way again. I had to ask vigorous questions. I had to learn about history on a much wider and broader margin of understanding. When I was in high school, I did not read much history. Most of my history teachers were football or track coaches, and I always felt that they portrayed history as another sport, a mere game.

After my life-changing experience in Malawi, I remained reflective of 9/11. I was invigorated to do more than just the practical job. I grew very skeptical of my government and the wars. Still today, many of my fellow Americans won’t question the events, or who or why the attack happened, and why should we trust the very Bush-Cheney government investigation to the event, when the two heavily tied to business cronies, had lied to the public on countless occasions to go into false wars and deregulate big business.  

I debated about which Masters program I wanted to go to. I eventually found myself in the Netherlands, in The Hague, the same city as the International Criminal Courts and at the same time Milosevic was on trial for his genocide in the Balkans. I was at a small school studying with people from over fifty different nations. I became a citizen of the world. I became friends with people from all religious, ethnic, and national affiliations and I learned about real people from real places.

I primarily studied International Political Economy and Human Rights. I argued with any professor who only discussed economics but failed to include the social repercussions to economic policy. I not only learned about what the most powerful governments and corporations were doing globally. I began to understand more and more why so many individuals outside the US loved the ideas of democracy and freedom, but that in their very own countries my own government and corporations had been falling short on our ideals through invasion, shifty trade deals, assisting military coups, or dumping our trash in their front yards.  

History became a food for me. Rather than just learning history for trivia or sport, I began to read history in order to not allow others more powerful to manipulate me with propaganda, whether it was George Bush or Barak Obama. I have read history books from the far Left to the far Right, and of course the more I learned the more Left I became. I read history so that I can build new directions of understanding and to make change.

I learned that 9/11 was not a single event that can stand on its own. The US and British oil interests in the Middle-East is a significant part in understanding the attack. My government and corporations have been unjustly exploiting the region throughout the 20^th Century and the British have been there even longer.

In regards to 9/11, we supposedly think we know most of the details. But perhaps in thirty years from now, we will be able to understand more. Yet even the Kennedy and King assassinations are still out of factual acceptance. It may take even longer. But facts always float to the surface over time.

There is no justification for violence, and there is no just war, or right to passage. As Howard Zinn always promoted, just because one country is a democracy and another is not, does not give the democracy more right to inflict suffering on to others through bombs and fear.

Over the past ten years, I have been fortunate to have worked and traveled in countries like Kosovo, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malawi, and more. Rather than fearing people that I don’t understand, I reach out and begin to learn from them, and realize how much we care about the same basic principles of human dignity. I learn that there are good people with good intentions everywhere.   

Currently at this time in 2011, the Martin Luther King Jr, Memorial is completing construction. Some people will think that the timing is ironic for being near to the 10 years since 9/11.  Of course, there will be propaganda. But yesterday, Cornel West mentioned in an interview that Martin Luther King Jr, would not be happy in seeing a monument in his name representing a symbol, rather than actual freedom and liberty.

Tavis Smiley reflects that it is one thing to admire a memorial; it is another thing to address the methodology. The issues of poverty in the US and overseas is clearly connected to the level of capitalistic imbalances and that corporations have been no friend to compassion and freedom; unless that freedom is for everyone being free to be exploited.

I am no longer naïve as I had been before 9/11. I am not fearful nor am I going to resort to stereotyping those who I have never met. I will ask hard questions and remain skeptical until I believe otherwise that violence and injustice is not man’s healthiest friend or best route. It is never justified with revenge, especially if it is used against innocent people during wartime and when we are at so-called peace. As Rousseau once stated: there is a difference between freedom and peace; Peace comes at the expense of other people, Freedom is a constant battle to end exploitation in all its forms.