Where Am I Going?
Sun, 12/05/2010 - 00:34 — admin1
I started out early. My voicemail had a message. Since I do not get many calls, there's a always a good chance that something happened to Mother. She is 95, I am 65, and my son is 35 (that's how I remember it).
This time it was just an automated phone survey from my insurance provider.
Mother said my cousin P. had visited her in the nursing home. Apparently, he has a job interviewing residents. Mother and P. conducted a ten-minute formal interview. Although they recognized each other, they stayed in character throughout the interview, until P. left. Mother wasn't sure what it was about. Nevertheless, it is good that she was amused.
Back in Time
M. was not going to have time to make dinner, so I was supposed to bring takeout home. She wanted her hamburger well-done. I put the order in, -- M. was supposed to have the hamburger with bacon, mine with all the normal toppings. There was something else she wanted but it didn't make sense, so I ... forgot about it.
A change in kitchen staff caused the order to be lost.
I reordered. After about ten minutes, it seemed as though the order was lost again. I tried to ask the worker, who was busy tackling some other problem. Eventually, another cook came back and said, "Let's see...You had this hamburger, right? " handing me a small bun with a tiny greasy hamburger in it, that looked like it had been returned by another customer.
Frightened that it was getting late, I abandoned this order, jumped back into the car and decided to call an order in ahead to the next food stop. I still had another hour on the road, so this made sense, regardless of any other disharmonic circumstances.
Ride into the Thicket
Thu, 09/02/2010 - 00:50 — admin1Ever get tired of worrying about endless wars, economic decline, and the rise of demagogues in the United States?
Take a trip to Blueberry Park, in Tacoma, WA, where anyone can pick free blueberries.
It was an overcast morning, nice cool weather for picking when I took a bike ride there today. There are a few hundred blueberry bushes -- many the size of trees --, as well as wild blackberry sources nearby, and probably other things I don't know about.
This place is probably as cosmopolitan as Niagara Falls, Canada: I could hear multiple languages, including Russian, German, Spanish, and some others I couldn't make out. Not being much of a conversationalist myself, I stayed pretty much out of people's way and just minded my own business.
That's easy to do when you've got bushes to hide in. I did talk to one stranger briefly, but then we drifted out of sight, and I just enjoyed the company of my own thoughts as I looked for the bluer specimens. A man passed by pushing a baby carriage, and the rider peered out at me curiously.
Sometimes it's hard to see whether a particular berry is really blue until it's too late and I've picked it off the bush. But if I throw it away, Nature is probably going to make use of it somehow anyway.
On the ride back, I noticed on someone's front yard a beautiful bush that had probably benefited from last night's generous rainfall.
Seattle Sightseeing: Vendita Anche a Rate Cataloghi Gratis
Sat, 08/28/2010 - 17:57 — admin1Someone said a while ago that he visited my "blog", and there was "nothing there ". Actually, I think the question is, does this blog exist if no one comes here.
While walking about Seattle, we passed a store with beautiful vintage artprints for sale. On the back wall, our guest spotted a poster that resembled the one I have pictured here. No one in our group could translate the words at the top.
Our guest said he believed they were in a Catalonian dialect of Spain. This was apparently because the spelling of the word "Cataloghi" looked to him like "Catalonian" (??).
Having had one semester of Italian, I thought the words looked Italian even if I could not remember what they meant. As it turns out, the language is Italian, and the phrase roughly translates to "Sold Also in Installments Catalogs Free"
They say that "art is the silent music." Is this an example?
Diary of a Crazy Person
Thu, 06/17/2010 - 06:54 — admin1|
I. Craziness Defined I was reading the syndicated column of Pulitzer-prize winner Leonard Pitts, recently on the topic of the notorious slip-up that ended her career. Pitts had been an admirer of Ms. Thomas, but he could not give her a pass on this remark. Also, he realized that his past admiration has been less than critical: "Besides, we are told by Thomas' peers in the White House press corps that there is nothing new about the anti-Semitism she displayed. To the contrary, it was apparently very well known to her colleagues. As Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online told Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, ``She's always said crazy stuff.' ' " 
Jonah Goldberg, who wrote and published a bizarro history book called "Liberal Fascism", with a funny Hitler mustache on it??? A good judge of craziness? He might be familiar with it. |
II. Reflections on July 4th
The Gulf disaster is "free enterprise." Corporate types know how to set up a profit center, often with the help of heavy government subsidies (even as they argue against entitlements for "people".) But ecological disaster is outside of their focus.
The same negligence, if repeated by the nuclear power industry, will be exponentially worse, -- if that can be fathomed. Right now, corporations and their pocketed politicians are moving to loosen safety restrictions on nuclear power development, with the fawning media dutifully following down this non-garden path. Only recently, an economist interviewed by NPR stated that the damage in Chernobyl amounted to nothing more than the loss of a few fire engines. Where does NPR find these people?
In discussions of nuclear power issues, scientists seem to be under-represented. Maybe that's a carry-over from the Bush years. Most assuredly, once the new generation of "fail-safe" nuclear installations are built, and the unthinkable happens, the developers, investors, and their handmaiden economists will then prove as powerless as British Petroleum.
The shadow government of corporate influence reaches its tentacles into the military sphere. Bloated military budgets, rationalized by "national security", are music to a politician's ear. Here, the highest cost will be paid by civilians. This is borne out by any statistic since the Civil War.
As we struggle in a quagmire of never-ending war, military scientists and contractors will design greater and greater havoc. And who will help us?
Am I crazy? Yes, because I believed America had ideals.
A Very Good Day for a Wedding
Sun, 06/06/2010 - 03:28 — admin1It was a beautiful day and Mary and I set out in the sparkling sun for Fox Island, where some pipers and I helped to celebrate a wedding in a place called the "Chapel on Echo Bay". The pipes could not have found a more lovely setting than at this ceremony here on the water's edge.
These pipers were very skillful, and one of them played the pennywhistle as well.
I told them that my daughter had used bagpipes at her wedding, -- that she originally had wanted drums also, but that the piper had not been comfortable using a drummer.
Hiring a drummer, they agreed, can be problematic. A drummer who keeps time, and stays out of the way, would be a good drummer.
I was given a shady spot by the wall which shielded me from the sun. There was no breeze, but I felt comfortable.
The pipers played until all guests were seated, and the groom and officiant were in their places. Then I played "Over the Rainbow" on solo violin for the procession of the wedding party.
For recessional music, I chose Charpentier, and Rejouissance (Handel). After a few more baroque violin solos, it was time to turn it back over to the pipers, who were now setting up in the parking lot.
Everyone seemed pleased with the ceremony, -- especially the bride.
Further Experiments in Drawing
Thu, 04/29/2010 - 04:32 — admin1
I wanted to get into a more artistic frame of mind, and drawing exercises often help to lead me in that direction.
These drawings were a reprise of previous efforts to draw from photographs. It's a lot different from actual life, and one reason I think is that I see with both eyes, whereas the camera sees with only one. But that is a real simplistic analysis and I'm sure others are available.
The ink drawing was made with a typical office rolling ball pen. The pen was not as responsive as I had hoped. Anyway, illustrating in ink was a very rigid experience for me, as I had to get everything right the first time and there were no second chances.
I had the first drawing around and displayed on the wall a couple of weeks before I undertook to try the next one. I have to admit that even though the picture does not do justice to the subject, I found it somehow comforting and reassuring to have this image on display. Maybe it has some art value beyond mere illustration. Or maybe it's just a facet of my relationship to the subject. Or both. Or neither.
I am fairly happy with what I have accomplished in a relatively short time. And thanks to a relative's framing request, I am learning to mat things using free equipment in the community art studio. And yes, this drawing exercise has helped me to see more esthetically. The weather's getting nicer too.
The second drawing is in charcoal. Whatever you may say about these drawings, you have to admit that it is obvious who the subject is.
My next step may be to attend local painting classes, as long as I don't have to pay a huge tuition.
So I welcome any comments. After all, you are here at this website staring at this blog, so why not tell me what's on your mind?
Going Rogue
Fri, 03/05/2010 - 17:24 — admin1Winter in America: Democracy Gone Rogue
by: Henry A. Giroux,
t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
March 4, 2010
The absolute ... spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm.- Hannah Arendt [1]
Democracy in the United States is experiencing both a crisis of meaning and a legitimation crisis. As the promise of an aspiring democracy is sacrificed more and more to corporate and military interests, democratic spheres have largely been commercialized and democratic practices have been reduced to market relations, stripped of their worth and subject to the narrow logics of commodification and profit making. Empowerment has little to do with providing people with the knowledge, skills, and power to shape the forces and institutions that bear down on their lives and is now largely defined as under the rubric of being a savvy consumer. When not equated with the free market capitalism, democracy is reduced to the empty rituals of elections largely shaped by corporate money and indifferent to relations of power that make a mockery out of equality, democratic participation and collective deliberation.The undoing of democracy as a substantive ideal is most visible in the illegal legalities perpetuated by the Bush-Cheney regime and reproduced under the presidency of Barack Obama that extend from the use of military commissions, the policy of indefinite detention, suppressing evidence of torture, maintaining secret and illegal prisons in Afghanistan to the refusal to prosecute former high-level government officials who sanctioned acts of torture and other violations of human rights. As part of the crisis of legitimation, democracy's undoing can be seen in the anti-democratic nature of governance that has increasingly shaped domestic and foreign policy in the United States, policies that have been well documented by a number of writers extending from Noam Chomsky to Chris Hedges. What is often missed is how such anti-democratic forces work at home in ways that are less visible and when they are visible seem to become easily normalized, removed from any criticism as they settle into that ideological fog called common sense.
If the first rule of politics is to make power invisible, the second rule is to devalue critical thought by relieving people of the necessity to think critically and hold power accountable. And always in the name of common sense. Under the rubric of common sense, democracy is now used to invoke rationalizations for invading other countries, bailing out the rich and sanctioning the emergence of a national security state that increasingly criminalizes the social relations and behaviors that characterize those most excluded from what might be called the consumer- and celebrity-laden dreamworlds of a market-driven society. As democracy is removed from relations of equality, justice and freedom, it undergoes a legitimation crisis as it is transformed from a mode of politics that subverts authoritarian tendencies to one that reproduces them. Used to gift wrap the interests and values of an authoritarian culture, the rhetoric of democracy is now invoked to legitimate its opposite, a discourse of security and a culture of fear enlisted by pundits and other anti-public intellectuals as all-embracing registers for mobilizing a rampant nationalism, hatred of immigrants and a bunker politics organized around an "us" versus "them" mentality. When tied to the discourse of democracy, such practices seem beyond criticism, part of a center-right mentality that views such policies as natural and God-given - beyond ethical and political reproach.
As the country undermines its own democratic values, violence and anti-democratic practices become institutionalized throughout American culture, their aftershocks barely noticed, testifying to how normalized they have become. For instance, one major report indicated recently that more "than 60 percent of children were exposed to violence within the past year ... [with] nearly half of adolescents surveyed ... assaulted at least once in the previous year [and] one-quarter had witnessed an act of violence."[2] In one week, the media reported on a 12-year-old student who was arrested for doodling on her desk at school. Her teacher thought it was a criminal act and called the New York City police who promptly handcuffed her and took her to the local police station.[3] In Montgomery, Maryland, a 13-year-old student at Roberto Clement Middle Schools was taken out of class by security officers after she refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[4] The mainstream media provide glimpses of such assaults, but rarely are they analyzed within a broader political and social context that highlights the political and economic conditions that make them possible. For instance, such assaults say nothing about the increasing militarization of public schools, the right-wing attempts to defund them so they can be privatized, the rampant inequality that approximates a form of class warfare, or the racism often at the heart of such practices.[5]
Such actions are now normalized within the discourse of a bunker politics fueled by both the increasing militarization of all levels of society and legitimated further through a harsh and cruel notion of economic Darwinism. There are no shades of gray in this militarized discourse, no room for uncertainty, thoughtfulness or dialogue, since this view of engagement is modeled on notions of war, battle, winning at all costs and eliminating the enemy. Complex understanding is banished under the call for thoughtless, one-size-fits-all zero-tolerance policies in schools, intelligence is now quantified using formulas that may be useful for measuring the heights of trees but little else, and teachers are deskilled through the widespread adoption of both a governing-through-crime pedagogy and an equally debilitating pedagogy of high-stakes testing. Resentment builds as social services either collapse or are stretched to the limit at a time when over 17 million people are unemployed and over "91.6 million people - more than 30 percent of the entire population - fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line.".[6] Emerging out of this void and shaping a more militaristic anti-politics are the anti-public intellectuals and their corporate sponsors, eager to fill the air with populist anger by supporting right-wing groups, Sarah Palin types, Glenn Beck clones and self-styled patriots that bear an eerie resemblance to the beliefs and violent politics of the late Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995.[7]
This emerging conglomerate and diverse group of anti-public intellectuals, political pundits, populist agitators expresses a deep-seated hatred for government (often labeled as either socialist or fascist), progressive politics, and the notion that everyone should have access to a quality education, decent health care, employment and other public services. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that Sarah Palin in addressing the recent National Tea Party Convention stated "I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help." Surely, these words leave little ambiguity for members of the John Birch Society, right-wing militia groups, Oath Keepers white supremacists, and other armed anti-government groups that appear to be growing in numbers and influence under the Obama presidency. But while these lines received much attention from the dominant media, the more telling comment took place when Palin offered the Tea Party audience lines she lifted from one of the more fascistic films released by Hollywood in the last decade, "Fight Club."
Inhabiting the character of a self-styled, pathologically violent maverick, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), whose misogyny is matched by his willingness to engage in acts of militia-inspired terrorism, Palin unabashedly mimics one of Tyler's now famous wisecracks in attacking Obama's clever rhetoric with the line, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for ya?"[8] Going rogue in this context suggests more than a compensatory quip for any kind of sustained analysis; instead it offers a seductive populist reference to lawless violence.
This somewhat confused but reckless appropriation of the discourse of glamorized violence suggests the not-so-subtle ways in which violence has become the framing mechanism for engaging in almost any mode of politics. Under such circumstances, politics shares an ignoble connection to a kind of soft terrorism, a kind of symbolic violence blatantly tied to the pathologies of corporate corruption, state-sanctioned brutality and authoritarian modes of engagement.
As violence and politics merge, the militarization, disciplining and oppressive regulation of American society continue, often legitimated by a popular culture in which the spectacles of celebrity idiocy and violence become the only stimuli left to shock people out of their boredom or offer them an outlet for their anger. But they continue in ways that seem incidental rather than connected, diffused of its real meaning and abstracted from the politics that informs it - hence, it slips into a kind of invisibility, wrapped in the logic of common sense. Under its common-sense rubric, homelessness and poverty are now criminalized, schools are dominated by zero-tolerance policies that turn public schools into a low-intensity war zone, school lockdowns are the new fire drills, the welfare state morphs into the warfare state, and university research is increasingly funded by the military and designed for military and surveillance purposes.
In one of the more frightening examples of the militarization of American society, David Price has brilliantly documented how government intelligence agencies are now placing "unidentified students with undisclosed links to intelligence agencies into university classrooms ... and has gone further ... than any previous intelligence initiative since World War Two. Yet, the program spreads with little public notice, media coverage or coordinated multicampus resistance."[9]
Is it any wonder that when intellectuals in the social sciences and medical fields assist in the illegal torture of "enemy combatants" or embed themselves in military-sponsored counter-insurgency campaigns, such practices rarely get the critical attention they deserve. All too often, the blathering disciples of common sense tell us that politics is rooted in natural laws, unhampered by critical thought. Such appeals to common sense suggest that thinking is at odds with politics, and its hidden order of politics is hateful of those public spaces where speaking and acting human beings actually engage in critical dialogue, exercise discriminating judgments, and address important social problems.
Common sense is in effect an anti-politics because it removes questions of agency, governance and critical thought from politics itself. As part of the logic of common sense, scapegoating rhetoric replaces the civic imagination, and a brutalizing, calculating culture of fear, demonization and criminalization replaces judgment, emptying politics of all substantive meaning. In this discourse, there are no social problems, only individual failings. Poverty, inadequate health care, soaring public debt, the bailout of corrupt financial institutions, the prison binge, the destruction of public and higher education cannot be addressed by the logic of common sense, because such issues point to broad, complex considerations that demand a certain amount of understanding, literacy and a sense of political and moral responsibility - all enemies of the anti-public intellectuals who wrap themselves in the populist appeal to a know-nothing common sense.
Common sense makes human beings superfluous, depoliticizes politics and transforms human beings into the living dead, unable to recognize "that politics requires judgment, artful diplomacy, and judicious discrimination."[10] Common sense occupies the antithesis of Hannah Arendt's insistence that debate constitutes the very essence of political life."[11] This is the central message of Fox News, Glenn Beck and other right fundamentalists who live in circles of certainty and reject any real attempt at debate, persuasion and deliberation as the essence of politics. Their populist appeal to common sense to justify their various views of the world rejects enlarged ways of thinking, thoughtfulness and the exercise of critical judgment. Such a discourse creates a zombie politics in which deliberation is blocked and the ethos of democracy is stripped of any meaning.
A zombie politics enmeshed in the production of organized violence, surveillance, market-driven corruption and control, buttressed by an appeal to common sense, blocks the path to open inquiry. War not only becomes normalized under such circumstances, it becomes a defining force in shaping all aspects of society, including its use of science and technology. Put differently, as warlike values become more prevalent in American society, science and technology are increasingly being harnessed in the interest of militarized and commercialized values and applications. For example, the defense industries are developing drone aircraft that can be used to deliver high-tech violence not only abroad but also at home. Unmanned drones fitted with surveillance cameras will soon be used to monitor demonstrations.
As the technology becomes more advanced, the drones will be mounted with taser guns, rubber bullets and other non-lethal weaponry in order to contain allegedly unruly individuals and crowds.[12] High-tech weapons have already been used on American protests and as the state relies more and more on military values, money and influence to shape its most basic institutions, the use of organized violence against civilians will become more commonplace. For instance, at the 2009 G20 summit of world leaders, democracy took a hit as the Pittsburgh police used sonic canons against protesters.[13] These high-tech weapons were used previously by the US military against Somali pirates and Iraqi insurgents and create sounds loud enough to damage eardrums and potentially produce fatal aneurysms. In public schools, surveillance has become so widespread that one school in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, issued over 1,800 laptops to high school students and then used the Webcams fitted on the computers to spy on students. The mainstream media hardly blinked and the public yawned.Common sense may be good or bad in terms of its value, but in all cases it is unreflective sense and as such shortcuts the types of critical inquiry fundamental to an engaged public and an aspiring society. Surely, common sense is of little help in explaining the existence of brain research that is now being used to understand and influence how people respond to diverse sales and political pitches. Nor does it explain why there is not a huge public outcry over the emergence of a field such as neuromarketing, designed by politicians and corporations, who are "using MRIs, EEGs, and other brain-scan and medical technology to craft irresistible media messages designed to shift buying habits, political beliefs and voting patterns."[14] Nor does it explain the politics or the lack of public resistance to food industries using the new media to market junk food to children. Zombie politics loves to depoliticize any vestige of individual agency and will. How else to explain a story by New York Times writer Nicholas D. Kristof, who incredulously legitimates the notion that political judgments are primarily the result of how our brains are hard-wired. This is the ultimate expression of anti-politics, in which matters of agency are now removed from any sense of responsibility, relegated to the brave new world of genetic determinism.
Under such circumstances, memory is lost, history is erased, knowledge becomes militarized and education becomes more of a tool of domination rather than empowerment. One result is not merely a collective ignorance over the meaning, nature and possibilities of politics, but a disdain for democracy itself that provides the condition for a lethal combination of political apathy and cynicism on the one hand and a populist anger and an ethical hardening of the culture on the other. Symbolic and real violence are now the defining features of American society. Instead of appealing to the principles of social justice, moral responsibility and civic courage, the anti-public intellectuals and the market-driven institutions that support them laud common sense. What they don't mention is that underlying such appeals is a hatred not merely for government, but for democracy itself. The rage will continue and the flirtations with violence will mount. Going rogue is now a metaphor for the death of democratic values and support for modes of symbolic and potentially real violence in which all vestiges of thought, self-reflection and dialogue are destroyed. Hopefully, the voices of reason and justice will recognize how serious this threat to democracy really is and when they do, they will surely understand what Gil Scott-Heron meant when he talked about winter in America.
Notes:
[1] Hannah Arendt, "On Revolution" (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 79.
[2] Editorial, "Violence in the Lives of Children and Youth," The Child Indicator, 10: 1 (Winter 2010), p. 1.
[3] Jenna Johnson, "Pledge of Allegiance dispute results in Md. teacher having to apologize," The Washington Post, (February 24, 2010), p. B01.
[4] Liliana Segura, "Arrested for Doodling on a Desk? "Zero Tolerance" at Schools Is Going Way Too Far," AlterNet, (February 27, 2010).
[5] I have taken this issue up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
[6] Bob Herbert, "They Still Don't Get It," New York Times (January 23, 2010), p. A21.
[7] Frank Rich, "The Axis of the Obsessed and the Deranged," The New York Times, (February, 28, 2010), p. WK10.
[8] Cited in Kathleen Hennessy, "Sarah Palin to Tea Party Convention: 'This is about the people.'" Los Angeles Times (February 7, 2010).
[9] David Price, "How the CIA is Welcoming Itself Back Onto American University Campuses," CounterPunch 17:2 (January 16-21, 2010), p. 1.
[10] Richard J. Bernstein, "The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11," (Polity Press, 2005) pp. 1-124.
[11] Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, Penguin Books, 1977), p. 72.
[12] Paul Joseph Watson, "Surveillance Drones to Zap Protesters Into Submission," Prison Planet (February 12, 2010). For an excellent source on how the robotic revolution is being used to transform the nature of war, see P.W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotic Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).
[13] News Blog, "G20 Protesters Blasted by Sonic Cannon," The Guardian (September 25, 2009).
[14] (See, for example, Rinaldo Brutoco and Madeleine Austin, "'Spellcasters': The Hunt for the 'Buy Button' in Your Brain", TruthOut, (January 10, 2010).
Source:
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Small speck of something
Fri, 02/19/2010 - 07:55 — admin1A little while ago, I was drinking from a glass of water, and noticed a small speck of something floating in it that looked much as a piece of cracker would look if it were that small.
Sts. Peter and Paul in Tacoma, WA
Wed, 02/17/2010 - 20:54 — admin1
Sts. Peter and Paul is a Polish parish in Tacoma, WA. I went to a mass last Sunday. I am not catholic, or Polish, or even religious, but I did want to check out the cultural values and traditions at this site, and see the insides of the church.
The English mass is at 9:00 and the Polish mass is at 11:00. I went to the Polish mass, because I want to practice hearing Polish. I studied Polish in the Army Language School back in the 60's, to become a language "specialist", even though I never became a super-linguist. I can read a Polish newspaper or simple book, and I can pronounce pretty well, but understanding spoken Polish on the spot is more challenging for me.
This church is well cared for. Once inside, the first thing I admired were the stained-glass windows. I'm guessing that maybe these windows predate the existing building, and were originally in some other structure, e.g., the old building nearby which apparently serves as a church-hall. (That building still has the original cornerstones, proving that this is a long-standing Polish community.)
It seemed like the mass was very traditional. It proceeded very formally and no-nonsense, though, predictably, I could not understand much of what was said. Only a couple of times I heard the words "na wieki", and a few numbers that were apparently dates that the priest was citing in announcements. Other than that, you could have told me it was English spoken backwards and I would have believed you. I'm so gullible.
There were no books in the pews to follow the liturgy, but there were hymnals provided, with the words only, so I did my best to sing along with the hymns. My vocal powers in this scenario are pretty weak. I have played in Polish masses and concerts back in Buffalo, and I have especially good memories of playing concerts of Polish and other European choral music under the baton of Tom Witakowski, a professor of music at Buffalo State College. So it's embarrassing that I can't sing very well.
Once the parishioners departed I was able to take some pictures as mementos. It was serendipitous that the weather brightened up just as the mass ended. In fact, it was a balmy 56 degrees outside and when the sun is shining in Tacoma this feels warm.
The hills in Tacoma are high, like San Francisco. Outside the church and up a short block, the street ends, and there is a old cement staircase rising up a high hill, which looks to me like it should lead to some outdoor shrine. But once at the top, there is only an abandoned school building.
A Digression
Although I am not religious, I am aware that the Polish Catholic church played a significant role in ending Communist domination in Poland. And I remember also that Catholic priests and nuns in Latin America gave their lives for the cause of social justice.
That is why I am particularly disturbed by the spread of right-wing extremism in the Catholic church.
For decades, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has worked to empower people in low-income communities. Despite CCHD's successes, the Catholic Right is now trying to discredit the program and take away its funding. Just last week, a coalition of anti-social justice groups launched a petition campaign calling on the U.S. Catholic Bishops to suspend all national CCHD grants.
Right-wing propaganda is spreading lies at an alarming rate, and not just within the Catholic Church. Recently, I learned of an upcoming "History Channel" show on the Kennedys that grossly distorts history with the intent of trashing the Kennedys and their Catholic faith.
Words matter, and so does history. It is this type of media hate-mongering that lead to the slaughter in Rwanda, and it can happen in this country too.
