My contribution to "Why Peace" is online today here. I hope it helps to clarify why I am not only against some wars, but against all war.
From the essay:
As I write this, my son is running around the house naked, even though I’ve asked him twice to put his clothes on. I can hear the bathroom sink swooshing on and off as he makes a swimming pool for his zoo animals. I weigh getting up and possibly waking his baby sister, who is sleeping on my chest, against the lesser likelihood that he will catch a cold from running around the house naked and wet. I decide to stay put. The swooshing continues.
I wonder how a man named Scott Oglesby would deal with my son’s exuberance, his lack of "respect for authority," his occasional noisiness. Last December, Oglesby, a police officer, was at Stevenson Elementary School in Bloomington, Illinois, when he heard a seven-year-old special-needs boy having a seizure. Oglesby ran into the room where the boy was being restrained by a school psychologist, shouted "you’re giving me a headache!" and grabbed the boy by the throat, holding him up in the air until he turned red, before throwing him down in a chair. Oglesby is now on "restricted duty," but no criminal charges will be filed against him.
I’d like to think that cases like Oglesby’s are rare exceptions. But every week there seems to be another story about someone being shot with a taser over a traffic violation, or for not responding the way the officer wanted them to. There was the paralyzed man thrown from his wheelchair by an officer in a Florida jail; the New York City cop who stopped a woman from driving her dying daughter to the hospital; the mentally handicapped teenager who was tasered to death after waving a stick around; and, in May of 2010, in another increasingly common militarized raid on a family’s home, the shooting death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones as she lay sleeping next to her grandmother. (There is little doubt as to what happened because the 20 officers who burst into the girl’s home had brought with them a camera crew for a reality-TV show.)
My review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is here.
From the review:
Steve Jobs' formal education and accomplishments challenged nearly every conventional notion of what a path to success should look like. A college dropout who was kicked out of the very company he founded, he valued intuition over analytical thinking and wasn't inclined to follow rules. He produced innovation after innovation while ignoring market analysis, case studies and expert advice, trusting instead to the future as he saw it.
Among the ostensibly foolish things Jobs did was to build high-end computer retail stores in expensive shopping malls. The fact that Gateway's stores had failed badly should have told him this was a bad idea, even if there hadn't been plenty of people warning it made no sense. "I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," declared retail consultant David Goldstein, echoing a chorus of experts.
Three years later, Apple stores were averaging 5,400 visitors per week (the Gateway stores had averaged 250), and by 2010 Jobs was able to boast that the Fifth Avenue store "grosses more per square foot than any store in the world."
We took our daughter to the neurologist’s office today. It was more packed than I’d ever seen it. A bearded father with his daughter of maybe eight, who was hungry and having a hard time doing the ketogenic diet. He looked vaguely latin, his beard was closely trimmed and he looked like someone who hadn’t planned on ever spending so much time in a treatment center for epilepsy. When he was younger, he probably just thought about cars and girls. Maybe he excelled at a sport. He never thought he’d be spending all those hours he used to spend training figuring out what his daughter was going to eat, measuring it out, weighing it precisely and then trying to get her to eat it. This hadn’t been part of his plan. And yet here he is.
Inside, an older woman with worn, leathery skin sagging off her face and hard, still bright eyes like ball bearings, stands in line presumably to pay for her son’s session with the doctor. We hear a tremendous thud and she and all of us turn towards the room it came from.
“It’s OK,” she says, to everyone. “It’ll be alright. Donald’s had a seizure. He fell down.”
People seem confused for a moment. Even though everyone there is intimately familiar with one kind of seizure or another. Someone asks if he’s alright. The mother, still standing at the counter, answers: “He’s just lying there. He’ll be OK. He can’t get up and walk, and I can’t leave my spot here...” Perhaps she then realized how silly her reasoning sounded in the open air, or that nobody there was going to take her spot. She went to the door of the office and said something to her son. A nurse came and checked on him. The head neurologist opened a door and told someone “Donald’s just had an MES.”
The mother came back to the counter and finished settling up. Someone had helped Donald back up to the chair he had been sitting on, but he was arguing with them about something. “You’re not at home now” the person was saying. “You have to sit in this chair now.”
A few minutes later, Donald came out of the office, a huge, lumbering man with glasses strapped to his forehead. He walked toward the room across from the office he’d been in and now his mother did not hesitate to leap after him. “Donald!” She yelled, “go back in there! You need to sit down!” But he kept walking into the other room, the dark room. “The light hurts my eyes in there!” He cried out. Finally, she let him sit in the dark room while she finished up at the desk, and after a while he came out again, stepping into the now narrow hallway where we all stood. I became nervous and got ready to leap out of the way should he have another seizure and fall against me with my baby girl strapped to my chest.
His mother was not tiny, but seemed so next to him. What must it be like for her to care for this lumbering man nearly twice her weight, to go out in public with him never knowing when he might collapse or whether she could help him if he did? To be surrounded by people who couldn’t possibly understand what her life is, and who silently pass judgment on her compassion, on her love for her son, when she behaves in ways they can’t grasp. When she goes through the acts that have become routine to her, and she treats them as routine, those around her gasp and go silent.
Another mother is there, with her husband and their daughter, a young woman who appears to have cerebral palsy. She stands rocking back and forth, her arms up as if preparing to type, her eyes not clearly focused on anything. Yet she speaks clearly and coherently, and I find myself wondering: Will that be my little girl one day? I don’t think so, her issues are different. But the parent of a child with “special needs” can't help comparing, and wondering.
I was working on a pamphlet when I saw the news. At the time, I thought the pamphlet was pretty important. It was to be distributed at the Occupy Wall Street protests. And it still may be. But when I saw the news, I knew my work day was over. It was as if someone had sucked all of the air out of me.
It's not like it was a huge surpirse. We all knew he was ill. But I thought he'd have more time. And in the back of my mind, I was secretly hoping that he would have a miraculous recovery, at least enough of one that he would be able to return to work, return to creating. I just refused to believe that he wouldn't. And it wasn't because I was eagerly awaiting the next Apple product, the next i-whatever. I'm not sure why it was, other than that I appreciated what he did and I love it when people create. He surprised and delighted us. He was a force for creativity in a world where there is much entropy and destruction.
And I feel much as I did in the weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. I feel that the balance of the world has shifted a tiny bit away from creation and toward destruction, and I feel the urge to counter that. One doesn't counter it by fighting the forces of evil, one counters it by being a force for good. I look at his face, and I am reminded of a teacher I once had. He was a man who tolerated no bullshit, who held everyone to the highest standard, and when I looked in his eyes, I saw something like what I see here. I can imagine him saying to me now "what the F*** are you doing with your life?" And when I look at the face in this picture, it is suddenly crystal clear to me that so much of what I do is a collosal waste of time. That I could be doing something much much better.
I will never erase politics from my life. It is a part of who I am, and I do think that I can contribute in that arena in a way that can make things better. But I spend way too much time on it these days, and at the expense of creative projects that are getting dusty on back burners behind back burners. I'm going to print out this picture of Steve Jobs and put it up where I can see it every day, where I can see his eyes boring into me, asking me "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And I'm going to start answering "yes" to that question a lot more than I do now.
So there are a few lists of demands and grievances from the Wall Street protestors floating around the Internet now. Those I've seen pretty much confirm what I've seen in the various clips of protestors that are circulating: That most of the protestors, while rightly outraged, don't have a clue about what caused the problems they are now outraged about, nor about what to do to fix them.
So here's my list. It's a lot shorter than the ones I've posted above, and I don't think it's because I've given the matter less thought than those folks have:
1. End the Federal Reserve and replace it with nothing.
2. Legalize competing currencies.
3. End corporate welfare, including all bailouts and subsidies.
4. Stop violating the First Amendment, and prosecute those officers and police officials who have violated the First Amendment rights of protestors.
Any other ideas? I'd like to include something about reimbursing people who have lost their homes, jobs, businesses, etc. because of the government-orchestrated boom and bust. But how would you even begin to even calculate all of that? And who would be doing the reimbursing? The taxpayers? Random financial institutions? I don't see a just way of doing this, but am open to suggestions.
Any ideas people send me that I like, I'll add to my list. And I encourage others to come up with their own lists.
Progressives who care about fighting such things as war, corporate welfare and assaults on our civil liberties might do well to register GOP for the primaries and help Ron Paul get the nomination. They can still vote for whatever Dem or independent candidate they want in the presidential election.
“Look at the latitude,” Nader says, referring to the potential for cooperation between libertarians and the left. “Military budget, foreign wars, empire, Patriot Act, corporate welfare—for starters. When you add those all up, that’s a foundational convergence. Progressives should do so good.”
This is a response I wrote to a friend's FB post lamenting the money-grubbing nature of the guy in the video below. My friend accused this guy of being part of the problem, so I felt compelled to write this. And then after doing so, I realized it kind of encapsulated what I'd like to say to the rightly outraged folk who are occupying Wall Street, and to everyone who is fed up with being stolen from but, I think, doesn't quite understand how it is they're being stolen from or who is doing the stealing:
Sigh. I wasn't going to post here because I don't want to get embroiled in a whole debate, but it just keeps gnawing at me and it is such a critical distinction to make so I'm going to try: This guy is NOT the problem. Money is NOT the problem. He may be "money grubbing" and greedy and all kinds of things you don't like, but he did not start this mess and no, he is not fueling it. What started it was the bastardization of money through government manipulation of it that allows the govt. to sap the wealth of everyone else for its own ends.
Money is a tool that was developed by human beings to make their lives easier. Just like you’ve noticed that your landlord doesn’t want to take rent in bamboo or bananas, most people would prefer not to have to go around looking for other people who want precisely what they happen to have at the moment, in order to get what they want. Money is the tool that allows people to exchange bamboo and bananas for a place to live, without having to carry around bamboo and bananas all the time. THAT’S PRETTY MUCH IT. To impute some kind of malice or evil to the institution of money is to completely misunderstand it.
This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it weren’t for the fact that so many people aim their rage for the current economic mess we are in at the “greedy money grubbers” or “capitalism” or even money itself. As long as we all keep misunderstanding what caused the problem, we’re going to keep experiencing the same problem over and over and over again.
Here’s what actually happened - starting a long, long time ago: Left to their own devices, people came up with things that could be used as media of exchange and as stores of value. These things ranged from salt to seashells to big-ass rocks under the ocean that no-one could even move. Historically, people have favored precious metals because they are easily transportable, limited in quantity and hard to fake, easily divisible, don’t spoil when you keep them for a long time, etc. etc.
Governments, all over the world and at different times, have taken over the once voluntary and grass-roots institution of money. They have declared themselves the arbiter of what is and is not to be used as money, how much it is worth, and more recently, they have removed money from any link to anything real (like salt or seashells, or gold or silver). Fast-forward to today’s world and what we have is (in the country I live in) a government that monopolizes the issuance of money, and the money it issues is just paper. That’s it. They don’t even pretend that it’s tied to anything else. It is “worth” what they say it’s worth.
Through various means (fractional-reserve banking, central bank interference in the market for money and manipulation of interest rates, etc.) the government is able to inflate the money supply to its own benefit. For a more rigorous and scholarly understanding of how this works, please refer to this Scrooge McDuck cartoon.
Essentially, the folks (and the people they pay - think military contractors, etc.) who create the money are the ones who get to use it at full value. By the time it gets down to the rest of us, it holds only a fraction of its value and we need a lot more of it to buy the things we want and need.
Meanwhile, by pumping extra money into the system, the central banks create artificial booms which later turn into very real busts. People think there is more (real) money than there actually is. The price of money (the interest rate) is lower than it should be, so people believe that it is cheaper to invest than it actually is. All kinds of people (not just “money-grubbing traders) invest in things, thinking the cost of doing so is cheaper than it is, and you’ve got a bubble. This is what caused the dot com bubble and bust, and it’s what caused the housing bubble and bust. And before you dismiss my analysis, please note that the only people who accurately predicted the housing-market bust (Peter Schiff, Ron Paul and a few others) were the people using this same analysis.
You can argue that the banks and bankers are a big part of the problem, and you’d be right. But not for the reasons you think you are. They are not part of the problem because they are “greedy” or because they deal in “money”. They are part of the problem because they are profiting from what is essentially counterfeiting. They are destroying the money supply, and much of the wealth that ordinary people have built up for themselves. They absolutely are profiting at our expense. But unless you understand HOW they are doing that, you’re not going to even come close to addressing the real problem. In fact, you will probably make it worse by calling for “more government regulation of the financial industry.” This would be nonsense. It is government’s involvement in the world of finance, and more centrally, in money itself, that is at the source of the problem.
You are right to be outraged at those who have caused the financial mess the world is in right now. But please please please take a few moments to understand precisely who those people are and how they did it before launching an all-out offensive on anyone who deals in the world of “money.” If you do, you might actually help prevent it from happening again.
UPDATE: Someone posted this great little video which I think explains what I was trying to explain above perhaps more clearly:
Because I think that anyone who supports the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or any act of war for that matter) should be very clear about precisely what it is they support, here are some personal accounts and hand-drawn pictures. These are from "Floating Lantern", a "collection of the notes and memorandums written by the bereaved family members of the A-bombed teachers and students."
"...When those who act on behalf of the state choose to commit a crime like this, they do so with the knowledge that as long as they are successful – that is, as long as their side is victorious and they don’t end up on the wrong end of a war-crimes tribunal – they will face no consequences for their actions.
"Former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara has admitted as much, saying that the firebombing of Japanese cities and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been considered war crimes had the US lost the war. He has asked "(w)hat makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
"There is never only one way to resolve a conflict. Ask yourself, if Truman had declared that the only way to end the war was to nuke Toledo, would you have accepted his reasoning so readily? Those who make these decisions don’t look for other options, because they don’t have to. They do not face the same consequences the rest of us do for our actions. As long as the state has a monopoly on justice, and on determining who gets to use violence and under what circumstances, it cannot be held accountable in any real sense. And it therefore cannot be effectively prevented from inflicting horrors like the rape of Nanjing and the bombing of Hiroshima on the rest of us."
