Read my latest blog post on the WPSU.org website in which I respond to a letter I received from Representative Thompson. He wrote me a letter after I called his office to encourage him to support a strong public health insurance option. His position is misguided. To read about how, click here.
June 2009 Archives
Yesterday we were all at the State College Summer Music Festival doing some listening and dancing. The Centre Daily Times was there to cover it. Front page, above the fold, pretty impressive:
As his wife, Martha, lay dying at the age of 34, Thomas Jefferson and she took turns copying out by hand this passage from the Laurence Sterne novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Martha wrote:
"Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen, the days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return more--everything presses on--
Thomas completed the passage:
"--and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.
* * *
Today, Chloe drew this picture of our family:
And the rapidity of Hannah's pen made this:
On this Father's Day, I felt compelled to see a project to completion. Much of my academic life involves projects that take a long time to complete. Last week I spent an entire day trying to get one short paragraph of an essay to say what I wanted it to say. So, I don't often have a chance to see a whole project come to a completion in a single stroke.
Although I don't much like yard work, the one thing I do like about it is that there is a project to be done, you spend a little time doing it and you can see the results immediately. I needed that today.
I mowed the lawn, which was fine. But I also wanted to complete a larger project that had been hanging over my head for a while: the herb garden off our kitchen.
Val has taken her cooking to another level, using mostly local products and being very mindful of where our food comes from and how it to prepare it in the most nourishing way. We are members of the Howard's End CSA, which has been providing us with excellent local produce and fruit.
So an herb garden was the next logical step. Above is a picture of the garden finally ready for plants. Over the past month or so, with the help of a generous neighbor, Neil, and two excellent diggers (Chloe and Hannah), we cleared out old roots, tree stumps, weeds and moved a few rhododendrons to achieve that herb-ready landscape.
Today we added excellent free local compost from one of the State College Borough parks and headed off to Tait Farm for the herbs.
There we bought Sweet Basil, Oregano, Italian Parsley, Curly Parsley, Sage, Vietnamese Coriander, English Thyme, Chives, Dill. We also have a beautiful Rosemary plant that was given to us by our neighbors, Neil and Julia.
We also planted seeds for some Mesclun Lettuce and Swiss Chard. Finally, we tried to add a little color to the garden with some California Poppies and Cosmos.
My favorite two things about the garden right now is that it is finished and there are no weeds. I hope that we will be able to keep up with it this year as we try to connect in new ways to the earth, the seasons and the place we inhabit.
Today saddens me. 
Although it is not clear what the ultimate outcome of the events that have unfolded in Iran over the last week will be, still, today's violent response by the Iranian government to protesters contesting the election are tragic in the most ancient sense.
The tragedy is rooted in a fundamental blindness to the powerlessness of violence. Humans seem unable to recognize this blindness, despite its absolute obviousness. It is not that violence is not effective in repressing the spirit of a people for a time. It certainly is, and we may be bearing witness yet again today to this effectiveness.
But effective violence is not power; it is mere force. Power comes when communities gather together around a common purpose, for a common good. Power is organic, it grows and can be cultivated. Force is coercive, it destroys and cultivates only despair.
Today as I watched the violence unfold in Iran, I felt at once intimately connected to it and remotely distant from it. The desire to be heard, to press for what one believes, to risk something for justice, this resonates with the human spirit that connects us. Yet the very real horror of looking violence in the face, of having one's person, one's very life at stake, that I can barely fathom. All I can do is admire the courage of those who are standing for what they believe is right and the vision of those who refuse to succumb to violence in the process.
True power lies with them, whatever the immediate outcome of today's events in Iran.
Over the past few days, I have been powerfully moved by the voices from Iranians struggling to be heard that have been delivered to me through Twitter as I monitored the feed from #iranelection. In one recent post by the Mousavi1388 feed, which is one of the only ways the candidate who seems to have won the most votes in Iran can communicate, it is written:
We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi's message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection
A more poignant articulation of the political power of the social web can hardly be imagined.
I am relieved to see that Twitter itself has recognized the important role their service is playing in Iran. They have accordingly rescheduled a service maintenance that would have brought their servers offline during a 90 minute period at 9:45pm Pacific time, which would have been around 9:15am in Iran. If the plan to have a nationwide strike tomorrow is to succeed, communication via Twitter is critical for its organization. I am impressed by Twitter's sensitivity to the political significance of what is happening and by its ability to alter what was surely a logistically complex undertaking even in normal circumstances.
I am impressed also by all the people around the world who have published addresses to proxy servers that allow the tweets from Iran to bypass the government filters seeking to suppress grassroots communication.
Whatever the ultimate outcome of this struggle is, and my hopes and thoughts are with those in the streets trying to be heard--may they be untouched by violence, the manner in which this political process has unfolded has transformed my understanding of Iran, of the power of social media and of the possibilities that open when communities of communication emerge committed to a noble purpose.
As mentioned early this week, I have been anticipating the election in Iran to see the extent to which the new possibilities for peace emerge as the structure of global politics shifts in the face of the economic crisis and the election of President Obama.
So, this morning I was disappointed to learn that Ahmadinejad had been declared the winner in a supposed landslide. Since then, I have been following the story in a very interesting way: directly through Twitter and YouTube, I am being exposed to the views and experiences of individuals, unfiltered by the media, either here or in Iran.
Here are some of the links I have been following:
Twitter.com
- Search on the #iranelection tag people are using to send tweets about the aftermath of the election.
- Follow individuals like @mohamadreza, who are participating in protests in Iran.
- Follow Moussavi's feed itself; see his flickr feed too.
YouTube
Check out the protests themselves from grassroots video like these:
- From Mashhad
- From Shiraz
- From Tehran, I think.
- Mousavi's YouTube page has a lot of videos as well.
Blogs
Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic is doing a very nice job of keeping up on the story with these direct, social web resources:
- See his posts: "The Revolution Will be Twittered" and "This is Just the Beginning," for example.
It is very powerful to be this directly connected to events happening half a world away to people with whom I have no real direct experience. Yet these media offer a more direct glimpse into the event. They cannot replace solid investigative journalism, but in the immediacy of the moment, they can give a real sense of what is happening.
I admire the White House's strategy to press forward on substantive health care reform now and I hope Washington is able to resist the temptation to water down the public option in such a way that the medical-industrial complex can manipulate it for its own obsession with profits.
I share Robert Reich's opinion that the public option must be national in scale and able to combine with Medicare so as to be able to force the Pharma, Insurance and medical practitioners to bring costs down.
In his recent New Yorker article, Atul Gawande shows the degree to which the practices of physicians and other medical professionals in certain areas drive the costs of healthcare up by prescribing unnecessary procedures and otherwise over treating patients in order to maximize profits. This report shows the extent to which the medical profession, to say nothing of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, "took profit growth to be a legitimate ethic in the practice of medicine."
It has become increasingly clear that whatever fears people have about a government run healthcare option, it will at least have the benefit of not being at its very core driven by the ethic of profit maximization. Joe Conason has nicely shown the benefits of a strong publicly funded option, emphasizing the fact that a government program would cut costs right off the top by eliminating price increases associated with maximizing profits for shareholders.
Patients should profit from the healthcare system by receiving better care, not the medical-industrial complex by generating more money. Aside from a strong belief that everyone has the right to basic health care, the main reason I support a strong public option is to undermine the ethic of profit maximization that has perverted the healthcare system in the United States for too long.
I have been asked to continue to blog for WPSU on local politics, so periodically I will be draw your attention here to my posts there.
My latest post concerns the manner in which policy decisions are made in Harrisburg with reference specifically to the question of how to monetize drilling for gas on the Marcellus shale that runs underneath much of the state. In the post I criticized policy makers for focusing exclusively on economic concerns and failing to frame the question of drilling as a broader, ethical decision.
To read the post and comment, see: The Ethics of Drilling on WPSU.org.
Today is the anniversary of the death of Mohammed in 632 CE. The schism that opened in the Muslim world after his death continues to play out in the contemporary political tensions between Sunni Muslims who believe that the first four caliphs where the rightful successors to Mohammed and Shi'ite Muslims who believe that the heirs of the fourth caliph, Mohammed's cousin, Ali, are the only legitimate successors to Mohammed.
On this anniversary of Mohammed's death, three stories suggest the shifting ground of global politics in the Middle East and beyond:
Let us hope that on this anniversary of the death of the prophet Mohammed, something of the schism between Sunni and Shi'a, between Israel and Palestine, between West and East, can be healed.
On this anniversary of Mohammed's death, three stories suggest the shifting ground of global politics in the Middle East and beyond:
All of these stories suggest that the ground of global politics is shifting in a remarkable and decisive way, a way that opens new possibilities for peace and, of course, violence. It will be interesting to see how the elections in Iran to take place at the end of the week will turn out. That too could prove decisive for the ultimate success of Obama's foreign policy initiatives.
- Hezbollah, a Shi'ite group backed by Iran and Syria, lost the election in Lebannon this weekend. This an important defeat because it eases the tensions between Lebannon and Isreal and opens the possibility of talks between the US and Syria, which were put off until after the elections in Lebannon. Some are even crediting an "Obama effect" for the election results.
- Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to make a major policy speech about the principles of peace and security for Israel. It seems that he is feeling the pressure from Obama's strategy to hold the Israeli government accountable for continuing settlements.
- All over Europe, there seems to be a political shifting to the right in the face of the global economic crisis. This unfortunate development, which could have easily been predicted insofar as tacking rightward is a standard, and disturbing, european response to uncertainty. Happily, the American response to such uncertainties seems, if FDR and Obama are any indication, to be precise opposite.
Let us hope that on this anniversary of the death of the prophet Mohammed, something of the schism between Sunni and Shi'a, between Israel and Palestine, between West and East, can be healed.
Something more than "mere words" is at stake when the President of the United States, Barack Obama, goes to Cairo, Egypt and makes a speech offering a new beginning to the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world in which he says, among other things, that the responsibility we have to one another as human beings is difficult:"For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes and yes, religious subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; our progress must be shared."
I have written here often of the power of words, and again it must be said that words are themselves actions. When Obama insists upon a stop to Israeli settlements, the words have the power to shift the constellation of forces that have been locked in violent struggle for generations. When Obama says that subjugation in the pursuit of self-interest is self-defeating, that the attempt to elevate one group by repressing another will inevitably fail, he opens up the possibility that another logic might prevail upon the world, one that thinks more responsibly about the responsibilities we have to one another, and to ourselves as interconnected co-habitants of an earth that cannot long sustain our violent ways of relating to one another.
To say that words are actions, of course, is not to say that actions other than illocutionary are superfluous; but those sorts of actions will only be effective if animated by words oriented toward the question of what is just and best for the whole of humanity. Such an orientation has never guided US foreign policy. My hope is that now, with a President with the courage to allow his words to articulate a more global conception of "self-interest," it might.
I think something like this is heard in the passages from the Koran, the Talmud and the Bible Obama evoked at the end of the speech:
Koran: "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."
Talmud: "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace."
Bible: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."
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