If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The people attacking others and their rights are always the ones awash in power, clinging to it, choking it off for others. Anyone else trying to get their fair share? They are not "waging war." They are doing everything they can, from a place of significantly less power, to stand up for themselves.
Conventional wisdom about the Democratic Republic of Congo make us believe that the trouble with Congo lie in the east of the country alone. That is wrong and dangerous. Like a wrong diagnosis of a disease, it leads to wrong prescription and medicine.
For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Today, I'm horrified to say, rape is being used as more than a sick prize for the victor. In rural villages of the Fizi Territory in the Democratic Republic of Congo, rape has been reinvented as a primary weapon of war.
We can end war. War is not inevitable, no matter how cluelessly enthusiastic the media may be to promote it, no matter how thoroughly it runs the global economy and dominates almost every government.
Militant nationalism is not an exclusively male enterprise. But a principal fuel that keeps the enterprise going is high-octane testosterone.
The movie, the experience, the war, the horrors, the "victory" -- were much on my mind as I made my first trip to Vietnam last week. I -- and I'm sorry for the cliché -- felt like I was making a pilgrimage.
As newspapers and television channels slash budgets and close overseas bureaus, the task of foreign reportage has shifted increasingly into the hands of professional freelance journalists. This is the reality of the evolution of our news environment, and it's not going back.
Perhaps our new national motto should be: When in America, do as the Roman Empire would do. Eat to your fill of food and violence, cheer on the warfighters, and dismiss expressions of doubt or dismay about military interventions and drone killings as "feminine" and "weak."
Class of 1966, it's my feeling that all of us post-post-docs of life need a graduation speech that will usher us back into our world for one last round of action and activity. After all, we have two obvious things going for us.
Something is changing in the relationship between players, coaches and managers on one hand and fans and writers on another. During the last 30 years, better research and technological advances have dramatically reduced the asymmetry of information between baseball insiders and outsiders.
The United States has spent well over $3 trillion on its Iraq War, while suffering and inflicting much mayhem. Yet it is the studiously neutral government of China that has most clearly benefited from George W. Bush's folly.
We need such prayers today, not because prayers "do" anything but because our prayers are given to the God who answers us with something vastly larger and more concrete than we alone could imagine.
When I hear Senator John McCain calling for more arms, air strikes, no-fly zones and the like; when I hear the dangerous pronouncements coming from apologists for the various sides, I want to ask "do you know where are you going, and where is this taking Syria, its people and the region?"
Many of us might feel removed from the Holocaust of 60 years ago and the Rwandan genocide of 19 years ago. But what is not so distant from us, and anyone can still feel, is that terrible hatred continues to surround us.
Not all female veterans returning home have been assaulted or need an abortion or even have an injury. But they're winding up on the streets anyway. Being homeless is a tragedy for anyone, but it seems particularly harrowing for women.
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