Stumbling in the fog

In the foggy drizzle just past the Blue Angel speakeasy in black North Gulfport, Mississippi, we saw the stumbling figure in the glow of our van headlights. We decided to stop. The young white soldier from Keesler Air Base was spitting blood as he explained through his inebriation fog someone had taken his gun, beaten him, and dumped him out. He didn't know where he was. He said "take me back," but couldn't tell us where. We drove back to the Blue Angel, but he wouldn't get out of the van. In his haze, he thought we knew where he wanted to go and accused us of playing mind games with him. His belligerence rose as some of us laughed at his unintelligible predicament. We ended up stopping to let him out right in the middle of black North Gulfport, as his agitation was rising into violence.

 

That happened one steamy night as I was returning with a group of volunteer reading teachers who had been celebrating their teenage students' accomplishments at their headquarters, the "North Gulfport Good Deeds Association." At that time in the mid 60's, Mississippi was not funding public education for blacks. This is one of the overwhelming needs we volunteers were addressing under the leadership of my father-in-law, The Rev. Orlo Kaufman.

 

I saw no connection at the time between this event and my daytime work as a Bible School teacher in the piney woods just up the highway from North Gulfport.  I had ten teenage black girls who were present every morning on time at a rough-sawn table under a large live oak beside the red dirt road. They were children of pine tappers, blacks who cut V's in the bark of long leaf pines of the national forest for the sap to run, which they sold for a pittance to the mill that processed the sap into the turpentine and wholesaled it to paint retailers across the country.

 

A grandma warned me when I started teaching: "Don't let those girls talk. Make them read the Bible." I couldn't stop their talk. It was about North Gulfport, the Blue Angel and other speakeasies, beatings, escapes, and The Man.  I tried to follow Grandma's direction. The girls were obedient, sort of. But I still didn't get it. My father-in-law did, and he explained: "Those girls' families cannot survive on pine tapper pay. Some of them are sent to the speakeasies of North Gulfport to service soldiers and tourists who come from the north to gamble and drink off the coast and visit the speakeasies across the colored line in North Gulfport. These girls haven't gone yet."

 

I protested, "Isn't that illegal?  Mississippi is a dry state, and prostitution is a crime."  He replied darkly, "That's why the sheriff of Harrison County, Mississippi, has the highest income of any publicly elected official."

 

"Including our president?" I demanded. "Absolutely; way more," he said.

 

At his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Sweden, Barak Obama dismissed the power of Dr. King's dream of peace, only accepting his message of racial tolerance.  Since his Inaugural speech in January 2009, Obama has pursued policies that epitomize King's grim warning in 1967: "When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men." He was concerned we would trust drones more than his dream of trusting the moral foundation of our nation.

 

Our nation is lost in a fog of drone inebriation. We are misguided men stumbling along trying to subdue perceived hatred of us among the world's nations without our moral or scientific moorings. No one has confronted us to disarm us; in fact, we are deathly afraid of being disarmed. While overseas I learned we are now confronted by a worldwide consensus that we are the most dangerous nation on earth, most likely to start or facilitate violent conflict. This happened since we started bombing Iraq.

 

With virtually unanimous support, even from the Tea Party, Obama has acted upon the weakness that is strong only in its power to destroy. He continues our nation's enormous gamble. There are few political risks for Obama's use of drones in our defense against terrorism. But our own amazingly strong moral and scientific heritage says we are stumbling, armed and dangerous, in a fog of confusion, spending trillions facilitating technologies of death and destruction around the world since Hiroshima.

 

Dr. King had the answer, but Obama cannot help us listen to it. We must listen on our own. He knew where we as a nation were headed before he died. He gave his life to urge us on a track to true national strength, founded upon the best democratic and Christian ideals to come out of our 1776 revolution.

 

We as a nation have a right to be proud of our heritage. But we will only find the sorrows of the empires that have expired before us if we continue choosing drones over the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That seems to be President Obama and the nation's consensus stumbling in incoherent inebriation in the fog of perpetual war.

 

David Sirota at Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/actually_obama_does_advocate_perpetual_war/

 

Norman Solomon's blog:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14012-king-i-have-a-dream-obama-i-have-a-drone

"Obama has not ignored King's anti-war legacy. On the contrary, the president has gone out of his way to distort and belittle it.

 

"In his eleventh month as president -- while escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a process that tripled the American troop levels there -- Obama traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech, he cast aspersions on the peace advocacy of another Nobel Peace laureate: Martin Luther King Jr.

 

"The president struck a respectful tone as he whetted the rhetorical knife before twisting. "I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naive -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King," he said, just before swiftly implying that those two advocates of nonviolent direct action were, in fact, passive and naive. "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people," Obama added.

 

"The real foundation of the "Arab Spring" was countless workshops and teach ins across Tunisia and Egypt based prominently on research from the Albert Einstein Center

 

"Moments later, he was straining to justify American warfare: past, present, future. "To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason," Obama said. "I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."

 

"Then came the jingo pitch: "Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms."

 

"Crowing about the moral virtues of making war while accepting a peace prize might seem a bit odd, but Obama's rhetoric was in sync with a key dictum from Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

 

"Laboring to denigrate King's anti-war past while boasting about Uncle Sam's past (albeit acknowledging "mistakes," a classic retrospective euphemism for carnage from the vantage point of perpetrators), Obama marshaled his oratory to foreshadow and justify the killing yet to come under his authority."

 

The Arab Spring did not happen with a sudden spark to ignite the demand for democracy. It was founded with decades of teaching and disciplined drill at university campuses and training camps in nonviolent combat.  Gene Sharp, professor emeritus at Dartmouth, contributed American scientific research and wrote the manual on how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one, with weapons more powerful than those that tear up skin, flesh, grey matter and bone.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dictatorship_to_Democracy.

 

In his 80's, he still is active with the organization he helped start, The Albert Einstein Institute

http://www.aeinstein.org/.

 

This side has many links to research on the power of nonviolent warfare.

 

Harvard University Law School has a large department named Program on Negotiation, with volumes of reliable research into how peace is built in human cultures averting the fog and bloody tragedy of violent conflict.  Many diplomats worldwide have graduated from this program. It is easily accessible online. Their high school/college curriculum for teaching the science of peace building is the same source I used to teach English at XiHua University in China: http://thirdside.org/

 

Much of Dr. King's work reflected his belief that Jesus was far more concerned about proper economics than he was about proper prayers. He felt that the solution to the violence in our nation at that time must include addressing the problems of ungodly economics.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14005-a-mighty-stream-martin-luther-king-jrs-faith-guided-him-to-a-commitment-to-economic-justice

 

A short explanation of Dr. King's nonviolent strategy, its power, and how we as a nation reject his message and his understanding of what makes us a great nation: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14034-dulling-down-dr-kings-message

 

Nearly all of Dr. King's recorded speeches are available online, on youtube and other sources. Just use a search engine with words like "Dr. King nonviolence Vietnam economic justice."

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

guns vs doctors

 

 

-- Doing the math

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT BANDIED ABOUT IN THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IS NOT ENDORSED BY THIS WRITER, AND IS OFFERED ONLY FOR READERS' CONSIDERATION

Doctors

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171

Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

  Now think about this: Guns

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million)

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188

Statistics courtesy of FBI

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT Almost everyone has at least one doctor.

This means you are over 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a doctor than by a gun owner!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat.

We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Out of concern for the public at large, We withheld the statistics on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention.

 

THE WRITER OF THIS BLOG DISCLAIMS ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENT OF THIS OR ANY OTHER LINKS OR IMPORTED MATERIALS

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

2nd language immersion and the bilingual bonus

 

The recent meeting critically examining the $877,000 three-year funding of the Apsaalooke Preschool Language Immersion Program revealed misconceptions (see Big Horn County News January 2).

 

Late spring of 2002 I sat with a Buddhist monk in his tiny bedroom in a Tibetan village in the Eastern Himalayas.  He was proud to write in Tibetan script the name of his family house where we were guests for the night (I still have the page). He explained that houses in this small village had a spiritual life, and that their names were more important than the names of the individuals who lived there.

 

He also explained that his writing had only recently become legal. We had just walked to his bedroom from his tiny temple. It had been the only one in the village for years, since the Communists had destroyed the old temple. Here he had persuaded local Communist authorities for permission to teach children to pray. Inside the round domed hut hardly eight feet across was a brass/gold prayer wheel with a trench worn into the dirt floor where little feet had packed down the dirt while little hands rotated individual small prayer wheels. I imagined, as I spun one of the little wheels, the whole apparatus turning, wheels in a wheel. Undetected by the authorities' periodic inspection were the papers tucked between stones in the walls where children, between prayers, had practiced writing in Tibetan and had hidden their treasured work.

 

Now, he said, the children learn in two languages in school, Tibetan and Hanyu (Chinese). They can pray now at the larger, newer temple. But children still were coming to his tiny temple, and he relished his opportunity to continue teaching them their heritage ways, singing the chants while rotating the prayer wheels, continuing to tread their bare feet in the depressed circle in the dirt.

 

Tibetan language has become generally more acceptable to party bosses in Western China, but they are still prone to crack down, reflecting the worldwide tendency of hegemonic cultures and nations to denigrate minority languages and culture. We in Big Horn County are, with the new immersion program at Crow, forging an exception.

 

But we need a better understanding of the research on 2^nd language acquisition and its benefit for academic success. We need to know that ethnic minorities do access a unique benefit for academic success in the dominant language when their heritage language gains the respect of the dominant culture. It works by promoting 2^nd language immersion instruction for five-year-olds in their minority culture. A most crucial finding is that recovery of a heritage language is a boon, not a distraction, from learning the dominant language.  And such instruction improves chances of successful entry into the larger culture.

 

When we visited Tibetan regions of Western China, ethnic minority language teaching was just being discovered as useful for learning Chinese. Focusing on Tibetan in those tiny dirt-floor huts really did help those children learn how to learn Chinese, contrary to most Chinese Communist Party bosses of the Tibetan region. Needless to say, the battle is not yet won, especially in Tibet proper, where a rebellion against Chinese domination is ongoing.

 

It's not won here in Big Horn County either, where the report in the paper reflected the prevailing error that learning Apsaalooke in head start will somehow interfere with Crow Indian children learning English, and ultimately retard their academic progress. This is also still a battle in Arizona and California, two states where a sizeable and powerful segment tries to control the research information and the debate.

 

Fortunately tribal education officials listen to people like Janine Pease, whose research was crucial to win this grant. Her experience and scholarly background helps promote the primary focus of immersion: so that Apsáalooke five-year-olds are grounded linguistically in their heritage language enough to grow and flourish in English skills beyond their peers by age 12. This is the age where the well-known "bilingual bonus" usually kicks in for children learning in two languages at age 5. She knows that successful bilingual instruction is having high quality models of both languages available to children. Adults speaking with children in immersion programs need fluency in both languages used for instruction. They need instructional materials in both languages to make instruction in all subjects a source of language growth. Teachers well trained in skills of 2^nd language instruction are essential for five-year-olds to reach their bilingual bonus potential when they are twelve.  Even more important is leadership healing from a deprecatory attitude toward Apsáalooke language in our schools, as reflected in the report on this meeting. So yes, we have some real challenges in Big Horn County in achieving the bilingual bonus all our children deserve.

 

Extending the concept further leads me to wish my own grandchildren, now in elementary school, would have had the benefit of head start instruction offered with immersion in Tsestsestáhes (Cheyenne) or Apsáalooke (Crow). Those are the languages that cry out from the soil of this county. This is where we live, and those languages can become the beneficial 2^nd language for children of any ethnic background born and raised here. I'm assuming some parents would join me taking up the offer, but hope no one would promote rigidly mandating a 2^nd language immersion instruction for all children, as is now done in China with English, taught by caring teachers with miniscule English language knowledge.  

 

Further information and hundreds of links to online sources can easily be found by searching online or in a library. Use these search words: L2 language acquisition research bilingual bonus.

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

Useful Panic

Panic is a natural human reaction to danger, whether it is real, imagined, or imposed by the fears of others.   Panic can cause foolish fast choices that are downright dangerous. Panic can also be useful to motivate observation, avert real dangers, and save lives.   We've all experienced plenty of both types in our lives.

An example of useful panic happened to me during a recent hike with my grandkids.  Even though it occurred quickly, the details are etched clearly in my mind.   We could see the sun sinking into the distant Beartooth mountains as the five of us walked along a pine ridge near Hardin. We were soaking in those last warm rays of a beautiful summer afternoon as we walked along a high slippery cliff of sand rocks sloping toward the west. Unbeknownst to us, we weren't the only ones enjoying those warm rays.  There was a young rattler on a flat expanse of rock tilted toward the setting sun directly in our path.    

I was alerted to the "e-eek!" of my daughter mixed with the hiss of panic-activating rattles. It was time for us to respond to the panic with reason, not foolish jumping off the cliff. We retreated a few steps and adjusted to a safer route as the rattler slid off in the opposite direction (see greenwoodback40.blogspot.com). It was done. No one was hurt, and we continued immersed in the setting sunlight along that sand rock cliff east of Hardin.

Through this past election year our media has been pervaded with a different kind of panic—panic designed to cloud our reason and distract us from meaningful action. We watched our usually credible media flooded with wild charges of conspiracy theories and hoaxes, usually attributed to our president, Big Government, environmentalists, the CIA, etc. We are still hearing panic-peddlers proclaiming they're taking away guns, coal plants, jobs in Big Horn County, ranch land, freedoms, our minds via CIA-engineered controls, etc.

 

It's amazing that people are ready and willing to panic over these non-existent threats, while denying the reality of very real changes happening to our planet.  Evidence of serious climate crises continues to mount, with faster than expected changes being reported every day.   Arctic ice is melting at a higher rate than initial projections, while ocean levels continue to rise, and increasing numbers of destructive storms pummel our country's shores.  In 2012, extreme weather and other climate-related events cost the U.S. a billion dollars. Our biggest insurance companies, our defense department, and even our major corporations are already retooling for lower fossil carbon consumption.

Climate change is not a hoax. It's as real as that rattler coiled ready on that rock beneath my granddaughter's footfall. The Bible also calls us to pay attention to our environment. We humans have been placed on this planet and empowered by our Creator to tend it.

 

Jesus commands us to pay attention to our surroundings in the latter days, and have a firm grip on reality as we trust in God and his way. Like false prophets then, today we let our media lull us away from responsible observation of our God-created planet. They give us blinders so we see only false assurances that every little thing is all right, and life will go on fine without changing our path.

 

It's past time for us to experience some useful panic over this issue, while we can still take some action to mitigate the consequences.   There are certainly steps we can take short of leaping off the cliff or denying that change is occurring.   Let's listen to the 97% of scientists who are saying that humans play a role in these observable changes.   While it's hard to hear about the implications, maybe it's time to stop hoping the most devastating consequences will occur after our time on this earth is finished.   Maybe folks of my generation have the luxury of retreating to fatalism, but this won't help my grandchildren or their children.

 

As the new year approaches, let's consider the long term future of our home and the role we should play in preserving it.  For 2013, let's resolve to engage in some useful panic and let the other kind go.

 

A good place to start researching climate crisis is Kivalina, Alaska, a town about the size of Hardin on the NW coast along the Bering Sea:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/13505-engulfed-by-arctic-waters-residents-on-the-frontline-of-climate-change

These American citizens, in spite of struggling to keep their citizenship, are suing the biggest oil companies to force them to pay for their resettlement because their forced removal from their village is because their energy use industry caused the loss of protective sea ice and the rising of waters of the Arctic ocean. Also check out the book by Christine Shearer, Kivalina.

 

Here is the story of Richard Muller, a Koch-funded scientist who has recanted from the hoax of the climate crisis ignorers and now admits global warming is real and human-caused: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/2/climate_skeptic_koch_funded_scientist_richard

After years of denying global warming, physicist Richard Muller now says "global warming is real and humans are almost entirely the cause." The admission by Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, has gained additional attention because some of his research has been funded by Charles Koch of the Koch brothers, the right-wing billionaire known for funding climate skeptic groups like the Heartland Institute. "We could make the scientific case more solidly than had been made in the past," Muller claims. "I think this does say we do need to take action, we do need to do something about it."

 

Here are two more links:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/chasing-ice-time-lapse-cameras-capture-rapidly-melting-17744758
http://guardianlv.com/2012/12/global-warming-10-myths-and-facts-everyone-should-know/

 

Here's some commentary on what we as citizens are up against to address the climate crisis, and what to do about it. http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/01/come-hell-and-high-water

It's the fossil fuel industry itself—not the members of Congress they buy in droves each election season, but the real powers that need to hear our cry of panic, even from Big Horn County, to change their course instead of focusing on the rosy sunset of fossil fuel profits. "Ignoring the damage they've already caused, these people spend hundreds of millions of dollars each day looking for new fossil fuels. And they spend hundreds of millions each year making sure no government stops them. They're like the tobacco industry at this point, except that instead of going after your lungs they're going after the lungs of the planet."

 

http://sojo.net/magazine/2012/11/divest-fossil-fuels-now
"…it's the underlying business model of the fossil-fuel industry that's the problem. They're making more money than any corporations in the planet's history, and they're doing it by altering the chemistry of the atmosphere. They're outlaws—not against the laws of the state (given their financial might they get to write those), but against the laws of physics. You can have a healthy fossil fuel industry or a healthy planet, but you can't have both."

And this from a conservative source only recently coming around to the reality of climate crisis: .

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/its-global-warming-stupid

 

 

 --------

David Graber

graberdb@gmail.com

Hardin, MT