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sublimeobservationarcade · 7 months

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Important Shit They Didn’t Teach Me At School

Education is, as we all know, a vital component in our lives. They do not call them our formative years for nothing. Yet, there are many things, those in charge of teaching, do not include in our learnings. The state or a particular religious organisation are most usually involved in defining the taught curriculum. Somehow, I find, there is always important shit they didn’t teach me at school. Stuff that they left out for reasons unbeknown to me but of which I am now willing to speculate upon. I have extended my research beyond just my own school days to include the experiences of others from different eras.

My School Education About Aboriginal Australia

In Australia, we are currently about to vote in a referendum about changing the Constitution to recognise First Nations people and to give them a voice to parliament in an advisory role. This has proven to be contentious with those unwilling to grant such recognition calling it divisive. These lively debates in the media have caused me to ponder upon my own education about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. I remember some pretty general historical stuff delivered from the colonising European’s perspective. Although, we had stopped calling them ‘savages’ by this time in the 1970’s the view was fairly bleak. Aborigines were painted as the race time forgot and their future, outside of assimilation, seemed questionable.

They Didn’t Teach Me About Genocide & Massacres In Australia

I did not learn at school that many native groups were massacred by both settlers and a native frontier police force. I did not learn that mass poisonings were pretty common, where settlers would add arsenic or strychnine to flour given to Aboriginal groups on their land or a water hole would be poisoned. The local Indigenous children, women, and men would die in agony from these crimes against humanity. Indeed, there was a complete absence of such truth telling in my secondary education at school. I canvassed my daughter on this same topic, as she grew up in Queensland where this behaviour by settlers was more prevalent in 19C Australia. Her secondary schooling was done by a Christian College on the Sunshine Coast in 2017-2021. My daughter has no recollection of such shocking historical facts being imparted to her in Australian history classes. Indeed, Aborigines played little part in this Christian based curriculum at all, according to her very recent recall on the matter. Teaching & Whitewashing In Australia I spoke with several acquaintances and friends from different age groups, some older and some younger, about these matters. I asked them to spend some time reviewing these things and to get back to me when convenient. None of them could recollect being taught about these heinous crimes being committed. Yes, references to massacres by gunfire were sketchily mentioned by a few teachers but these were usually pretty thin on details given. Whitewashing our colonial past would not be a too strong categorisation of this policy enacted by our education departments and those of the independent schools. The upshot is that Australians do not know the true extent of what happened to First Nations people during colonisation in the 18C, 19C, and even into the early 20C.

Killing For Country: A White Agenda David Marr, the respected journalist and writer, has recently published Killing For Country. This is an account of his forebears, who were involved in the Native Frontier Police, an official force tasked with killing native blacks. Marr estimates that they may have conservatively killed some 40, 000 First Nations people. “David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history. This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today's Australia. "This book is more than a personal reckoning with Marr's forebears and their crimes. It is an account of an Australian war fought here in our own country, with names, dates, crimes, body counts and the ghastly, remorseless views of the 'settlers'. Thank you, David."—Marcia Langton” - (https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/killing-country)

What you get in modern Australia is a populace largely unaware of the true extent of the genocide that went on to establish a white Australia in a land that had been Aboriginal for around 70, 000 years. This is a direct result of the important shit they didn’t teach me at school. It spurs one to ponder what else was missing from my state run education? Australia, through its less than honest account of its colonial past, has sought to minimise and normalise its treatment of First Nations people. Former PM, John Howard, would not say sorry, as a strategic position in defence of how Australian governments dealt with their Indigenous population. “It all happened a long time ago,” is the common refrain from those unwilling to acknowledge the sins of the past. Well, actually it was not all that long ago in the time frame of history, more generally. Modern Australia is a very young country. Killings were still happening around a hundred years ago. Aboriginal deaths in custody are still occurring at an alarming rate today. The genocide continues in some form or another. “The frontier wars were a series of violent conflicts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While conflicts and skirmishes continued between European land holders and Traditional Owners, the military instrument of the Queensland Government was the Native Police. The Native Police was a body of Aboriginal troopers that operated under the command of white officers on the Queensland frontier from 1849 to the 1920s. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men were often forcefully recruited from communities—already diminished due to colonisation—that were normally a great distance from the region in which they were to work. They were offered low pay, along with rations, firearms, a uniform and a horse. Many deserted.” - (https://www.qld.gov.au/recreation/arts/heritage/archives/collection/war/frontier-wars) You cannot mass murder a bunch of people and just move on. There are ramifications and consequences of such appalling behaviour long felt. Truth telling is the next stage in the Uluru Statement from the Heart process. If you do not know the real history of your country and community – you do not know yourself.

Was White Australia Born Out Of Biological Warfare? There is credible speculation that the huge volume of mass Aboriginal deaths via disease around Port Jackson in the early years of British colonisation was due to small pox infection and was no accident. The first fleet were carrying vials of small pox in their cargo, according to the journals of Captain Watkin Tench. Plus, this form of biological warfare had been used on American Indians by the British. There were marines aboard who had been involved in those actions. The fleet were heavily outnumbered by the natives, running low on ammunition, and getting desperate for provisions to arrive. The military were, also, unhappy with the overly humanitarian leadership of Governor Arthur Philip in relation to dealing with the natives. “In the 18th century, the use of smallpox by British forces was not unprecedented. This tactic was promoted by Major Robert Donkin and used by General Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, when smallpox-laden blankets and a handkerchief were distributed to Native Americans from Fort Pitt near the Great Lakes. An outbreak of smallpox in Sydney in 1789 killed thousands of Aborigines and weakened resistance to white settlement. Chris Warren argues that the pandemic was no accident, but rather a deliberate act of biological warfare against Australia’s first inhabitants. In April 1789, a sudden, unusual, epidemic of smallpox was reported amongst the Port Jackson Aboriginal tribes who were actively resisting settlers from the First Fleet. This outbreak may have killed over 90 per cent of nearby native families and maybe three quarters or half of those between the Hawkesbury River and Port Hacking. It also killed an unknown number at Jervis Bay and west of the Blue Mountains.” - (https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/ockhamsrazor/was-sydneys-smallpox-outbreak-an-act-of-biological-warfare/5395050)

The denial of these terrible truths about the birth of white Australia is apparent in the loud No Vote campaign. The awful Sky News Australia, with its tabloid style opinion based journalism (if you can call it journalism), bleats its badly informed and racist message across the airwaves. The Murdoch media empire makes its money from exploiting the likes and dislikes of the dominant white cohort. It appeals to their fears by dog whistling up bogus issues like Aboriginals taking their homes and money. Downward envy is their house speciality. This appalling family has been at the epicentre of the Australian media landscape for decades. The descendants of European invaders and in some cases murderers are thin skinned and sensitive to any perceived slights upon their family name or character. Saying sorry is a bridge too far for many of these folk. Modern Australia Must Embrace Truth Telling To Know Itself Modern Australia wants its children and citizens to refer to a particular interpretation of our history. It does not want the populace to consider the brutal realities of its colonial past. Indeed, for much of the brief history of white Australia the thinking was that Aborigines would die out and be assimilated into the larger pool of a national identity. Unfortunately for the social planners and their political masters this has not happened. Stubbornly, First Nations identities have stuck around despite the institutional racism over centuries. Indeed, generations of Indigenous Australians are taking great heart in their particular identities. Now, they want Constitutional recognition and a voice to parliament advising on those issues directly affecting them. The No Vote campaign is running messages of assimilation with bumper stickers saying, “One Voice, One Mob, One Nation.” This is a denial of Aboriginal culture and a call for Australian homogeneity. This is a campaign based on ignorance from a white population which has been cosseted and protected from the truth. If anything solid has come out of this referendum, whatever the result, it has been a refocusing on First Nations people in Australia. Perhaps, learning about what really occurred during the invasion and colonisation of this land. Maybe, deepening the understanding of the situation now and then. Honest relationships are never built on brushing over the past. Truth telling and treaty are coming.

Returning to the theme of this article, the important shit they didn’t teach me at school, a society is controlled by what they know and don’t know. This is why education is so important and why we had the history wars back in the 1990’s. The denial of the dark past is just as important as the abuse and injustice that goes on today. It forms of a framework for current reality. “If you don’t know, vote No.” This sums it up because, most of us don’t know and that has been by design. Yes, I hate to say that it is a conspiracy, because there are so many misguided conspiracists out there in the biosphere, but the manipulation of history is always so. Those in power make every effort to control the version of history promulgated within a nation for very good reasons. Culture is moulded out of those voices emerging from history, which are enhanced and amplified according to the wishes of those in power today. The ANZAC myth is the loudest one playing in modern Australia. This heroic story of gallant defeat has become the foundational myth defining our character. White Australia marching to the rescue of the mother country a long way from home. ANZAC day, since John Howard’s time has been amped up unceasingly to become a state religious festival. The nation unifies around this narrative of courage under fire. Murdering Aborigines fades into an uncertain misty past in comparison to the fine upstanding state sanctioned memories of the ANZACS.

Vote Yes in the referendum on 14th October 2023 for a better, braver future for Australia. Compassion makes for bigger hearts and better human beings. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom. ©WordsForWeb Read the full article

#AborigianlAustralia #Australia #colonialism #DavidMarr #education #FirstNations #genocide #history #IndigenousAustralians #massacres #moralfailure #nativepolice #politics #Voicereferendum

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somelonelywordmonger · 2 years

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Typing on my phone at 4:30 am, please forgive any mistakes.

Trigger Warning for Abuses mention and speaking about those damn Indigenous Boarding Schools.

I'm personally surprised and somewhat glad that Pope Francis is in Canada and made an apology to the tribes affected by the downright heinous cultural genocide and violence by the schools. Mass graves is already a tragic and unacceptable thing when so many people are dying at a given time. Sometimes the situation results in people resorting to such a thing. But these countless (as we don't know exact numbers) indigenous children being discarded into mass graves and hidden is beyond words in the English language. I don't think there is anything the Pope, Catholic Church, or Canadian Government can do to ever fully repair the damage done. These people will still have scars after healing. I hope that this begins a process where the information the tribes seek is honestly given. I hope my fellow white people sit down, shut up and listen, and let the mixed feelings and outright rage that all of these people are experiencing be felt. They have a right to their feelings and anger is a part of healing too. Not to mention it is extremely valid. Native communities appear to be resilient and strong to me and I am sure that they will heal together, but just because someone is tough does not mean that they have to 'grin and bear it' or that they can't have moments of vulnerability and/or pain. This wound is deep. But I hope this begins to staunch the free-flowing blood so that the wound can begin to heal. It is on us white immigrants to be there for any indigenous person who is hurting right now. We can start by listening and not telling them how they should or shouldn't feel. We can start by acknowledging the wretched facts and assisting if we can in their healing. I haven't seen footage of the Pope's apology and it does appear performative, it is my hope that action follows. Otherwise, the whole apology is pointless and he probably just upset many people by simply being there for no good reason. I also felt deeply uncomfortable when I saw him wearing that headdress. I don't know how that came to pass, I just know it didn't look or feel right. But I don't think my opinion matters.

I don't think there is much I can do right now for local indigenous communities as I literally have no money to give to support them financially. I'd have to look and see if there are other ways to get involved and further educated. I will still apologize even if it is meaningless because it is just one white person here saying it. But I mean it most sincerely when I say I see you and hear you. Your feelings and pain are valid, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I'm truly sorry for the multitudinous and inhumane actions wrought upon your communities by white people. And I mean in both Americas (including the islands). This should never have happened and it should never be forgotten by us white people. I pray you know peace and I pray for those lost to the violence of forced assimilation and taking of land. Literally every incident or encounter seems to be a bloody or deceitful moment between white people and indigenous people. And we all know who the victims were in these moments. If anything I said is offensive or not correct, please let me know as I do not wish to cause further harm. 🧡 (is it okay for me to add the orange heart?)

#indigenous people #pope francis #canada #american history #canadian history #indigenous history #trauma #cultural genocide mention #child death mention #current events

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northernindigenousbeautyhailey · 3 years

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TAMRA JEWEL KEEPNESS.

FEW CHILDREN IN CANADA JUST VANISH. Fewer still stay gone for longer than a couple of days. Some are found alive, others are hurt or killed, but rarely does a child simply disappear. The RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains database lists 147 missing children, in a country of more than 35 million people. Of the sixty children under the age of twelve, a quarter are thought to have been abducted by their parents. A large portion of the others were lost to apparent accidents or misadventure, falling through ice or swept away in the pull of wild rivers, their bodies never recovered. The database shows twenty-four children in the past sixty years who have inexplicably disappeared. Because there are so few, we know them. In Edmonton, there is Tania Murrell, six when she vanished while walking home from school for lunch in January 1983. In Toronto, Nicole Morin, eight when she disappeared from a condominium building in July 1985. Michael Dunahee was four years old when he went missing from a playground in Victoria in 1991. In Regina, there is only Tamra Keepness.

THE LAST TIME anyone saw Tamra, she was five years old, with bobbed black hair and soft, round cheeks. In one picture, she wears a T-shirt dotted with flowers, standing against the colourful collage of a classroom wall. Her smile is broad and open, her eyes lively. She was so smart that her mother called her “my little Einstein,” so feisty that when a little boy pushed her once, Tamra shoved him right back, and harder. She liked playing Mario Kart on Nintendo and climbing her favourite tree, down the block from her house.

July 6, 2004, was the first time Sergeant Ron Weir would hear Tamra’s name. He was getting ready to leave on vacation that day when he got an urgent call back to the police station. Weir was a veteran cop with the Regina Police Service and head of emergency services, which included search and rescue. In a meeting, officers from the major crimes unit laid out what they knew: sometime between the night of Monday, July 5, and the morning of Tuesday, July 6, a five-year-old girl had gone missing from her home in central Regina.

Weir had been a police officer for twenty years. He knew that kids often went missing and turned up safe a short time later. Sixty-five percent of missing children and teens are located within the first day, and almost 90 percent within the first week. But Weir also knew that Tamra was too young to get far as a runaway. Patrol officers had already checked the neighbourhood to make sure Tamra hadn’t wandered away or ended up at the house of a playmate or relative, as was often the case with missing children. They’d found nothing. Even in the early hours of the investigation, Weir suspected this case would be different.

TAMRA LIVED with her mother, stepfather, and five siblings at 1834 Ottawa Street, a shabby brown-and-white two-storey with a windowed porch at the front. The house stood between 11th and 12th avenues, just east of downtown Regina. The neighbourhood was a mix of long-time elderly residents, young families drawn by low prices for heritage houses, and ramshackle homes where residents struggled with poverty and addiction. The area was sometimes known as the “low stroll,” a place where women and girls sold their bodies for drugs or booze and men drove around looking to buy them, circling the neighbourhood in trucks and station wagons. Many of the women and girls who lived or worked in the area were First Nations, like Tamra. Long before calls for a federal inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women would dominate the political conversation, women were going missing from those streets. It was from that same area that nineteen-year-old Annette Kelly Peigan disappeared in 1983, followed by eighteen-year-old Patsy Favel in 1984 and Joyce Tillotson in 1993. Two years later, two young white men picked up a woman named Pamela George, sexually assaulted her, and beat her to death.

The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user posted to the website a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.”

Tamra’s house was less than a block from the Oskana Centre, a halfway house for federal parolees, and not far from the Salvation Army’s Waterston House, a residence and shelter inhabited by former inmates and men struggling with drugs, alcohol, and psychiatric issues. Residents of both facilities had been responsible for serious attacks in the past. Just four months earlier, convicted violent sex offender Randy Burgmann had lured a woman into his room at Waterston House with alcohol, before violently sexually assaulting her and leaving her beside a dumpster to die. The Oskana Centre had previously been home to both serial rapist Larry Deckert and Billy John Francis Whitedeer, who began committing violent sexual offences on children when he was ten years old. A few blocks farther was the Ehrle Hotel, one of the worst bars in town, from which patrons spilled soggy and staggering onto the sidewalk, and which appeared regularly in police reports and court testimony.

Police also had serious questions about what was happening at 1834 Ottawa Street. There was a broken window and blood spatter in the porch. Social Services had been involved with the family since not long after the oldest child was born in 1993, and there had been more than fifty reports made to crisis workers, most often about Tamra’s mother’s use of alcohol and drugs, and neglect of the children. Her mother’s boyfriend had a history of violence and domestic assault. In most cases, investigators knew, children are hurt by people closest to them.

POLICE STARTED with a thorough search of the area immediately around the home, then cast their efforts outward in an expanding grid. As the sun rose on the morning of July 7, 2004, the search effort intensified. First, there were ten officers, then twenty, then more. Some officers accompanied trained volunteer search teams; others questioned family members and potential witnesses, going door-to-door gathering leads or chasing down tips. The RCMP training academy provided cadets, and members of the public soon began arriving on their own to help.

Police set up a command-centre bus in the parking lot of a nearby church, from which Weir co-ordinated the search. Though it was an urban environment, the terrain posed serious challenges. The area was filled with overgrown yards, empty houses, piles of garbage. Tamra weighed forty pounds, and stood three foot five. There were so many places a child could hide or get trapped or be held, where a child’s body could be concealed or dumped. Searchers in orange vests worked in grids, knocking on doors, inspecting junked cars and crumbling garages, peering under discarded mattresses and piles of wood, looking down manholes. Police stopped garbage pickups, checking all the bins in the neighbourhood, the trash putrid and reeking in the summer heat. Some bins had already been emptied, so plans were made to search the dump as well.

And what if she had been taken farther? Not far away were industrial areas, large abandoned lots and buildings, Wascana Creek, and beyond that, the vast Prairie. With a thirteen-hour head start, someone in a vehicle could have had Tamra in Vancouver before she was reported missing.

When they were not speaking to police, members of Tamra’s family waited anxiously on the fringes, watching the searchers, eyeing the growing assembly of reporters and news crews holding out microphones and pointing camera lenses. “It’s not like her to go off by herself,” said Tamra’s father, Troy Keepness, sitting on the front steps of his ex-wife’s house, his voice tight with worry. “We’re trying to do our best to get her back.”

Weir worked in the command-centre bus, surrounded by maps and whiteboards. A scribe logged every aspect of the search in real time, recording ideas and progress. No one wanted to break, not for food or rest. Everyone knew the situation grew more serious with every passing hour. As the heat of the day gave way to evening, Weir stood outside and looked up. A strong wind had come in, and storm clouds were spreading, darkening the Prairie sky.

The next day, police strung crime-scene tape around Tamra’s house and the one next door, drawing it through the back alley and across six garages, long slashes of yellow dividing the street. Officers guarded the perimeter while forensic investigators went in and out of the house in boots and masks. “While we don’t have any direct evidence that Tamra has come to any harm, we also don’t know where she is,” police spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich told reporters. “And if, in fact, this comes to a point where we determine that she’s come to some harm and it’s because of a criminal act, this location could potentially be the scene of some evidence.”

THERE WERE three adults in the house that evening: the children’s mother, Lorena Keepness; her boyfriend, Dean McArthur; and a family friend named Russell Sheepskin, who had been staying with the family. All three had come and gone during the night, and investigators were starting to question their movements. There were no signs of forced entry to the house, and there were gaps, inconsistencies in their timelines that didn’t make sense to investigators.

The story the three told publicly, compiled from various interviews, was that Lorena and McArthur got into an argument while watching a movie on Monday evening, and McArthur and Sheepskin left the house around 8:30 p.m. to go drinking. The men returned briefly to drop off a bottle of formula for the baby, then left again. Lorena went out around 11 p.m, kissing Tamra goodbye before she went. The oldest child in the house was ten-year-old Summer, the youngest was Lorena and McArthur’s nine-month-old baby. Lorena returned briefly to check on the children and then left again around midnight. At about 3 a.m., Sheepskin returned home drunk and saw Tamra sleeping on the couch. Not long after, McArthur got back to the house and assaulted Sheepskin on the porch, punching him through a window and then stomping on his head. (Both men later said the fight had nothing to do with Tamra.) Sheepskin walked alone to the hospital to get stitches, and McArthur went to stay at his aunt’s house a few blocks away. Though it should have been a short walk, he said he got lost and kept passing out as he walked there. He didn’t arrive for at least two hours, until 5 or 5:30 a.m. Meanwhile, Lorena got home around 3:15 or 3:30 a.m., climbed in through a window, and passed out on the couch. She said that she got up to undo the latch on the door for her mother around 8 or 9 a.m. and that the two eldest children, Summer and Rayne, left on their own in the morning to attend a summer day-camp. Lorena didn’t realize Tamra wasn’t there until about three hours later, when the five-year-old didn’t come downstairs. At 12:16 p.m., a family member called the police and told them Tamra was missing.

Rayne, who was eight, said he had gone to bed squeezed into the space between the wall and mattresses piled on the floor in an upstairs bedroom. He told his mother he felt Tamra get up at some point, the slight movement of a child’s weight. All he could remember was that it was light outside.

FRIDAY WAS hot again and wet from the previous night’s rain. An odour of decay hung in the air around Ottawa Street. Tamra had been gone three full days and become national news. Her picture seemed to be everywhere, hanging on street poles and store windows. In news stories, she became “missing five-year-old Tamra Keepness,” but more often she was just Tamra, as if we knew her. The front page of the Regina Leader-Post spoke directly to her, asking, “Tamra, Where Did You Go?”

Tips flooded in to police. On the street, there were rumours that Tamra had been seen at a dollar store with an older woman. Business owners in the neighbourhood said detectives had been looking for a middle-aged white man named Roch or Rocky, but police wouldn’t confirm whether that was related to the search. Lorena and McArthur said they gave police the names of five people they thought could be suspects, including a man who had befriended Tamra and later been discovered to be a pedophile. For a while, there was even a theory that Tamra had never existed at all, that she had been a scam to get extra money from Social Services. (Hospital records proved that was not the case.)

Searchers were coming from around the province to volunteer, streaming into the city from towns and First Nations communities, motivated by the faces of their own children or grandchildren to help in whatever way they could. “I’ve got a boy, and he’s twenty-one,” said Jerry Scott, one of the volunteers who joined the search. “And if he left, I’d go nuts, too.” Around the city, people organized vigils and barbecues, brought water and snacks for the searchers, wrapped ribbons around trees to show their support. Some left teddy bears and angels on the steps of Tamra’s house. Days of intensive searches had turned up lots of items that seemed as though they could be connected—clothing, a child’s shoe—but none of it belonged to Tamra. “I’m starting to go on different conclusions, like maybe someone took her, I don’t know,” Troy Keepness said. “I just hope nobody would hurt my daughter.”

WHEN Tamra had been gone a week, police announced they were suspending the ground searches. At a press conference, Regina police chief Cal Johnston announced a $25,000 reward for information and vowed, “We will find Tamra.” Police questioned sex offenders living in the area and obtained surveillance tapes from convenience stores, bars, gas stations, and the Greyhound bus depot nearby. Johnston confirmed that “criminal interference with Tamra is a distinct possibility” and drew attention back to Tamra’s house and family. “There were comings and goings from the house that night that remain not fully explained to our satisfaction, and we continue to ask those questions,” he told reporters. He would not elaborate.

Tamra’s family was growing increasingly angry at the police, and the strain of the situation was starting to show. Lorena told reporters she’d signed consent forms for police to search her house and had given her DNA, but still she felt as if they were focusing too much on her family and not enough on trying to find Tamra. She was angry that police hadn’t closed the highways out of the city and that there was no Amber Alert because police said it didn’t meet the criteria. “I’m fed up,” she told reporters. “They are wasting time. This is my little girl we’re talking about.”

The family was growing frustrated with the media, too. Lorena’s mother yelled obscenities at reporters one day, and on another, members of the family nearly came to blows with a TV reporter doing a live update from the front lawn. They had been watching the news inside the house when they heard the reporter imply what many in the city were already wondering: If not someone in that house, then who?

On July 19, two weeks after Tamra had been reported missing, police charged McArthur with assaulting Sheepskin the night Tamra disappeared. McArthur told reporters he had been interrogated for twenty hours, not about the assault, but about Tamra and about what had gone on inside the house that night. “It was always the same questions, and they were assuming that I knew the answers to those questions, but I didn’t know the answers, and I still don’t know the answers,” he said. “I would never hurt a hair on that little girl’s head.”

Two days later, Tamra’s brothers and sisters were removed from the home by child-protection officers. Tamra’s twin sister wore messy pigtails and clutched a colouring book and a yellow blanket as two women led the children away down the front steps of the house. Neither government officials nor police would say whether the children’s seizure was related to Tamra’s disappearance. When the children were gone, police searched the house again.

One night late that summer, Tamra’s father, Troy, showed up at the house with a baseball bat and confronted her stepfather, McArthur. Troy was charged with assault, though McArthur later said police “got things misunderstood.” “Everybody’s looking for answers,” he said. “We more or less talked.”

LORENA KEEPNESS was fourteen years old when she ran away from her home on the White Bear First Nation, 200 kilometres southeast of Regina. She had been in residential school for about three months, but that wasn’t what did it. For her, it was the same ugly stuff at home. She found her way to Regina. When her mom tried to take her home, Lorena wouldn’t go. She lived on the streets instead.

She had her daughter Summer Wind when she was twenty, her son Rayne Dance not long after. It was after the ultrasound for her third baby that she walked home in a daze and told her husband, Troy, “We’re having twins.” She kept repeating it until it sunk in, and then they just stood together in the kitchen and laughed. Her mother said “Way to go!” but Lorena told her, “They came from God. Not like I planted those in me.”

The babies were born on September 1, 1998. Fraternal twin girls, each weighing more than six pounds, carried almost right to term and curved around one another like pieces of a puzzle. Lorena and Troy split up when the twins were little, and after that, the girls stayed sometimes with their mother, sometimes with their father or with other relatives. Lorena and Troy each struggled with substance abuse, and their lives were sometimes too troubled and unstable to have the children with them. At five, Tamra was bold and courageous, and protective of her twin sister. Once, Lorena heard a soft knock in the middle of the night and opened the door to find the twins standing there. The children had left their father’s house and walked four blocks back to Lorena’s in the middle of the night, Tamra leading her sister by the hand as they found their way through the dark. REGINA POLICE received more than a thousand tips in the first six weeks after Tamra’s disappearance. At one point, a Volkswagen van that had been stolen the night Tamra disappeared was found burned outside the city. A jail guard told police she and a former inmate had stolen it, picked up Tamra, and then dumped the child’s body in a ravine on the Muscowpetung First Nation. Ron Weir led a week-long search on Muscowpetung, draining multiple beaver dams with compressor pumps, while searchers slogged through water up to their hips. The jail guard later confessed she had made up the story. She was charged with mischief and wrote a letter apologizing to the police. In court, her lawyer said she had been trying to get her abusive boyfriend locked up again.

Returning from medical leave to the police department in the fall of 2004, superintendent Troy Hagen could feel how Tamra’s disappearance was weighing on his colleagues. Hagen noticed it in everyone he spoke to, from the police chief down, whether they were involved with the case or not. Sergeant Rod Buckingham, one of the lead investigators, was among those who felt the growing frustration. “It’s a mystery,” he would say. “And I don’t like mysteries.”

Officers had spoken with more than 6,000 people by then, but there had been no arrests, and leads were drying up. Shortly after, a special task force was struck to re-examine the case, to see whether anything had been missed. The name of the project was iskwesis ayishowak e mamayahi, a Cree term meaning “little girl bring people together.”

TWELVE YEARS LATER, Lorena Keepness spends her days doing odd jobs and picking bottles, trading them in at the depot for cash. She is forty-three and lives with her eldest son in a rundown shack of a house on Victoria Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from Ottawa Street. Lorena’s children were never permanently returned to her custody after the disappearance, and the three babies she had after that were all taken by Social Services, too. Tamra’s twin sister is seventeen now. Lorena says she is an athlete, smart and beautiful. Lorena lost her family pictures when someone threw all her stuff in the garbage a few years ago. The only photos she has of Tamra now are the ones on missing-child posters.

Tamra’s twin and her older sister, Summer, don’t want to be interviewed. Neither does Tamra’s father, Troy. McArthur couldn’t be reached. Lorena needs a six-pack of Black Ice beer to talk. She doesn’t really want to be interviewed either. She has never liked reporters or their questions, and it hurts to talk about that time. “But part of me wants to,” she says, as her face crumples. “Part of me needs to share what the fuck happened. Someone stole my child.”

Lorena has heard many theories about what happened to her daughter. Some believe Tamra wandered away and was abducted by a driver cruising the area or that she got lost, then crawled in somewhere so small she has never been found. Other theories focus on the adults in the house that night. Some officers will say off-the-record that they think Tamra is in the dump but that they just couldn’t find her in the mountains of debris. Many in the city believe that Lorena and McArthur sold or traded Tamra to pay off a cocaine debt. Lorena has heard that one the most. One night, she was at a bar and heard some women talking, loud enough so she could hear. “Yeah, she sold her kid for dope. She has a whole bunch of babies. She has kids just to sell them for drugs.” Her friend told her not to listen, but Lorena couldn’t ignore it. She swore at the women, promised she would get them for even thinking she could do that to her child. They met at the same bar again the next day, and that time they fought, a tangle of hair and fists. One of them had a knife and slashed her twice on the back of her arm. More scars to wear for life. It wasn’t the only time. One night, she was attacked in Moose Jaw. Not long ago, a woman shouted “Baby killer!” at her across the street.

Lorena and Dean McArthur are still together, on and off—“more on than off,” she says. Police tried hard to turn them against each other, but she always believed him in the end. He may be all kinds of things, she says, but he’s not a baby killer. “If I thought he did something to my daughter, I would have killed him myself,” she says. “I think the police were just so sure. They figured, ‘These guys are a bunch of nobodies. She did her own child.’ They already had their conclusions drawn before they even tried to look for anything.”

The suggestion she could have had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance still pushes Lorena to the point of violence. You can see her eyes flash, her muscles tighten at the question. But she holds back— it’s not worth going to jail. She’s had enough of the police, has grown used to the accusations. In the past twelve years, she’s repeated her story publicly many times, and it has never really changed.

REGINA POLICE have never released full details about the investigation into Tamra’s disappearance, on the grounds that it remains an open case that they still hope to solve. In an interview, Troy Hagen, now Regina’s police chief, would not speak about any working theories or confirm any specifics of the investigation, including whether one of the people questioned about Tamra’s disappearance had failed a polygraph test. Instead, Hagen echoed what police have said since the beginning: That there remain important unanswered questions about the comings and goings from the house on Ottawa Street that night. That they will continue to investigate every tip. That they won’t stop looking for Tamra until they find her. He pointed to cases in the United States where children have been gone for years, sometimes decades, and then been found alive. In Canada, twelve-year-old Abby Drover was held in an underground bunker in Port Moody, British Columbia, for six months after being abducted by her neighbour in 1976. There was an intensive search of her community—including by her abductor—but she had been only feet away from her house the entire time. She was found alive. It seems impossible, but it happens. “I refuse to lose hope,” Hagen says.

The years since Tamra’s disappearance have exposed the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Suspected serial killers are facing charges in the Prairies, but there has been no public indication that Tamra’s disappearance may be connected to any of those cases. Hagen said police have also explored a possible connection with thirteen-year-old Courtney Struble, who disappeared from Estevan, a city 200 kilometres from Regina, four days after Tamra was last seen. Investigators initially believed that Struble was a runaway, and she had been gone for seven years before RCMP announced that her case had become a homicide investigation. No one has ever been charged, and her remains have never been located. Hagen says it’s strange to have two unsolved missing-children cases linked so closely in time and geographic proximity. He says the possibility of a connection was “very much” explored by police, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation. The police investigation into Tamra’s disappearance is one of the largest and costliest in Regina’s history, but Hagen says it has never been about the money. If there were more leads or work for investigators, the police chief says he would reconvene the task force “in a heartbeat.” But the flood of tips has slowed. The reward for information that leads to finding her, now $50,000, sits unclaimed. The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user with the name MySecretIsOut posted a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.” The person later wrote that the map belonged to their grandmother and had come from a great-aunt who had visited an inmate in Alberta. “We, like many others, haven’t forgotten about you, Tamra, and continue to search and hope you are found,” the person posted. Police searched twenty-one wells around Muscowpetung but found nothing.

Sheepskin died on January 1, 2009, “with his family by his side,” according to his obituary. Many of the police officers who worked on Tamra’s case have retired or moved from the department to other jobs. Hagen says he thinks of Tamra whenever he is walking through the forest, not looking for her but always half expecting to see her there. Sometimes he looks at people he passes on the street, examining their faces and imagining what Tamra might look like now.

THROUGH THE YEARS, Lorena has developed her own theories about what happened to her daughter. These days, she mainly wonders about a drifter who used to stay with them, a woman Lorena knew from when she was a girl. A woman who sometimes told people she was pregnant even though she wasn’t, who Lorena knew by one name but whose medical documents said something else. The woman was around so much that Lorena’s children called her Big Auntie. Big Auntie had been staying at the house before Tamra disappeared, but left after she and Lorena had a falling out. Lorena says it took a long time to realize Big Auntie wasn’t coming around any more. When she did, she put word out on the streets, but no one there had seen her either. Big Auntie didn’t even show up for her own sister’s funeral in Regina a few years back. Lorena says she told the police about Big Auntie many times, but doesn’t know whether they ever found her, or whether they even looked. “She’s just gone now,” Lorena says. “Same time as my child.” Maybe it’s something. Or maybe Big Auntie is missing, too.

When I ask Lorena whether she thinks Tamra will ever be found, she struggles for an answer. “I don’t know,” she says. “But can I tell you about a dream I had?” There are two, both so vivid it’s as if they were real. In one, Tamra is inside a big house in a city Lorena has never seen. There are silk clothes draped around, and broad windows, and Tamra is upstairs, sitting on the edge of a bathtub putting on stockings. She is grown, with dark, shiny hair like her mother’s but cut straight all around. In the other dream, Tamra is still a little girl, running into her mother’s arms. “There you are!” Lorena says. “There you are!” She picks up her child and holds her, until Tamra wriggles free and is lost again.

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revlyncox · 4 years

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Prayers for This Threshold

This homily was given to the UU Church of Silver Spring on June 7, 2020. A video version is available at https://youtu.be/_KXZ0SGpaGk

John O’Donohue (in “To Bless the Space Between Us”) writes that a phase of life that is passing away “intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.” I hope that is true. I hope it is true that the intensity we are now feeling -- the anger at police violence and other forms of white supremacy, the deep grief over lives lost, the disgust at blatant appeals toward fascism -- I hope that intensity means we are heading into a mass awakening of the mind, heart, and soul that will settle for nothing less that collective liberation.

We are, indeed, surrounded by and filled with complex and overwhelming emotion. I don’t know about you, but I can barely contain my rage and sadness. I have a hard time concentrating. And I can only imagine what my beloveds who are Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color are feeling, how being both used to the persistence of white supremacy and yet being traumatized anew by recent events weigh on these friends and family. I am praying with and for you, for your safety, for your families, for you to be held in love. As I said in my pastoral letter last Sunday, A white supremacist system is working through humans to rob our beloveds of the breath of life. It is our moral and spiritual responsibility to respond to the deadly evil of racism.

In the midst of this violence, in the midst of racist rhetoric, in the midst of peaceful medics and clergy being driven away from a church so that the occupant of the White House can pose for a photo that makes a mockery of faith, in the midst of militarized response to people exercising their right to protest, in the midst of our own Governor sending National Guard troops to DC to attack their fellow citizens, we keep moving across other thresholds.

This year’s graduates from high schools, colleges, and other institutions find themselves marking the occasion like no other class in history, and they face challenges that echo but are not quite like any other class in history. I wish those of us who graduated some time ago could have prepared a more hospitable world by now, but I am glad this year’s class is here, ready for the world as it is and will be, already involved in the struggle for a just and sustainable society.

So many among us and around us keep adapting to changes in our calling, our vocation, our ways of paying the bills and getting by. I am thinking of hospital workers - nurses, doctors, techs, custodians, everyone who creates an environment for healing - and how they have patched together personal protective equipment from wherever they can find it, workers who know that they won’t get a raise or a bonus for their heroic work and may even be laid off thanks to our for-profit healthcare system. And then we look at the tax money being fired out of tear gas canisters and rubber bullet launchers, a seemingly endless supply of resources when the purpose is repression rather than health and well-being. The way medical staff go to work has changed. They are on the brink of something new, too. The way we do our jobs has changed for so many people, and has not changed enough for some of the most vulnerable workers. And who has a job has changed a lot in the last five months. These passages deserve noticing. Major thresholds should involve some ritual.

People keep moving, some people many miles away. Veronika spoke about her upcoming move to Florida, and how she will need to find new ways of saying goodbye, new ways of staying connected, new ways of creating a life for herself. She reminds us to keep an eye out for people who might need a friend, to ask “when can I drop off these groceries” instead of “let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Worship services may be online for some time; it is important to consider as a community what it means to welcome the stranger, what it would mean to harbor someone, how to be a place of hope and healing when a new person enters in a new way during this time of doing everything differently. As you prepare to welcome Rev. Kristin in August, the beginning of that relationship is another one that will require new rituals, new ways of marking thresholds.

Through all of this, loved ones are dying. Tanya spoke about the loss of her uncle, a revered elder in her family and in her community. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, we have lost over 110,000 Americans to the virus. That is 110,000 uncles, aunts, parents, children, spouses, people who were loved and valued, people who probably did not get a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones in person before they crossed the threshold. Families are finding ways to mark the passage, finding ways to connect with loved ones around the globe in their grief and to honor the life that has passed. We need these rituals, and we also need national rituals of mourning. We need to commit to each other’s well-being in solidarity with the families who grieve, and to prevent as many future deaths as possible.

Many of us are not covering a lot of distance these days in terms of miles (some of us are), but all of us are travelers. Some of us have rougher terrain than others, especially in this time of blatantly violent white supremacy, this time of undisguised ableism, this time when property gets more respect than people. Our journeys are not equal, yet they have in common the need for our attention.

We are gathered on a threshold. The voice that calls to us will ask something different of each person. We may not have chosen to be at a turning point. We do have some choices about how to understand and act on our response. The voice that is calling us forward asks us to live by our values. Let us engage and awaken our passionate hearts. The time has come to cross.

So be it. Blessed be. Amen.

#uu #Unitarian Universalism #black lives matter

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softcherubhips · 4 years

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I need to vent. I'm aware this will probably cause some controversy. Please know that I am open to any and all interpretation and constructive criticism so please feel free to message me with ANY questions or concerns you have! I mean it when I say that I am here for you, even if you just need a shoulder to cry on or another human to vent to.

Here are some facts that I know to be true. I am white. I am an American citizen. I am a mother. I am a grandmother. I am a person who has lost someone who died from cancer. I am a recovering drug addict. I am a wife. I am bisexual. I am a Christian. I like to think of myself as a realist. I realize that white privilege exists. Do I claim to be knowledgeable of all things controversial? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Do I want to educate myself and try to learn all that I can about said controversies? ABSOLUTLEY YES!

I saw a post earlier that said, "can y'all stop reblogging those “i am not black, but i see you” post like im begging...." I consider myself to be an ally of many people and many causes including Black Lives Matter. As I stated earlier, I am white, which obviously means I'm not black. Does that mean I cannot get behind the Black Lives Matter cause? If this is the case then logically it would make sense for me to say hey you can't support ovarian cancer awareness because your mom didn't die from ovarian cancer. Right?

Listen, I know what it feels like to be in a minority. NOT in the black minority, but a minority nonetheless. I grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation. There were 6 other white people in my high school and 2 of them were my brothers. I don't say this to gain sympathy or in any way compare it to being in a black minority. I am just saying that I had many friends that were kind to me and supported me even though we were of a different race. It's hard to be in a minority. It's very comforting when you are a minority to know that someone else supports you and cares about you despite your differences, your skin color, your customs or beliefs, your heritage and your history.

We all belong to the human race. In my heart of hearts I feel like I would categorize myself as an introvert. I often make up excuses and cancel plans so I don't have to interact with other people. I hate this about myself and it's something I am continually working on. Because I tend to isolate and use various "crutches" to escape and numb out (pills, fan fiction, food, sleep, books, movies/tv shows etc.,), it's nice to know that someone else has your back and sees you and wants to help you. It's comforting to have a cheerleader; someone who cheers you on from the sidelines and believes in you, your dreams, aspirations and potential. It's healthy and normal for us as humans to crave interaction, kindness, attention, validation, support and love.

You don't know if I have two first cousins who are married to black people and have black children who I have personally reached out to by phone and verbally voiced my support. (I do and I have.) You don't know if I have donated money to several different Black Lives Matter causes. (I have.) You don't know if I volunteered my time one Saturday afternoon at The Navajo Nation food bank in Salt Lake City. (I did.) You don't know if I own a hijab that I can wear when I visit the local Muslim Temple with my friend. (I do.) You don't know if I actively vocalize my belief that children DO NOT belong on motorcycle or ATVS; no exceptions. (I do.) *This one gets my blood boiling. I held my best friend in my arms as her 2 year old son lie dead in a little blue coffin because his father thought it would be fun to take him on a ride on his motorcycle around the block. I will not make any exceptions to this. It's not cute. It's not safe. It's not fun. Don't do it.*

You're a Catholic? GREAT! I'll quit eating candy for 40 days with you to make Lent a little less lonely. You're a Muslim? AWESOME! I'll cover your shift while you go do salat. You're a native from India? SUPER! I won't eat beef in front you because I wouldn't want to make you uncomfortable. You're a Jew? FANTASTIC! I'll help you make challah for Rosh Hashanah. You're a Native American? AMAZING! Please let me vocally support Indigenous People's Day instead of Columbus Day. You're a recovering/ active addict? REMARKABLE! Me too! Please tell me if I say or do anything that triggers you.

Do you understand what I am trying to say? We are all members of the human race. No one wants to be alone in this journey called life. It's nice to have someone there in your corner, cheering you on, whether they are quiet about it or choose to shout it from the rooftops. Call me naive, but I believe that we can COEXIST.

It all boils down to the first and great commandment....LOVE ONE ANOTHER. Even if you don't believe in God, I think we can all get behind this mantra. Just be a good human. Treat people with kindness. Choose love. Be nice to nice. Don't stand idly by while a fellow member of the human race is suffering. Do something. Say something. Stand for something. Educate yourself.

In conclusion, I will support you. Unless it is something inherently evil that you actively and vocally support, ie: nazis, white supremacy, homicide, rape, child pornography, domestic violence, etc., I will be there. In whatever capacity is comfortable for you, I will be there.

Take care my fellow humans. In my heart of hearts I choose to believe that Good will ALWAYS conquer Evil.

#i hope i was able to convey my feelings without offending anyone #although deep down i know people will always find offense in many things if it doesn't line up with their core beliefs #i am praying for all the families that have been affected by this ugly preventable tragedy #blm #may god have mercy on us all #george floyd #tpwk #eat the apple #let it burn #speak your truth #validate and accept #show respect #stand and deliver #lead me guide me walk beside me #help me find the way #speak up. speak out. speak your truth.#say my name #coexist #life's a dance #tread lightly #be gentle and humble and aware and polite and selfless and compassionate and kind and respectful and empathetic #just be a good human and do what you can in regards to your own individual situation #thank you for listening to my sincere and heartfelt opinion #✌🤟🙏🥰😘😇#if you are a person who prays i encourage you to pray for a resolution to the tragic and unfortunate circumstances that are affecting us all #i love you. i see you. i stand with you.#i bless it #all the love - liesl/lou/luna 💝#you can make a difference

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orbemnews · 3 years

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A SPECIAL JOURNAL REPORT: Family still seeking justice one year after Macy woman's death Galen and Tillie Aldrich hold a photograph of their daughter, Ashlea Aldrich, whose lifeless body was found in a farm field on the Omaha Indian Reservation. Galen Aldrich speaks at a memorial service for his daughter, Ashlea Aldrich, at the Walthill Fire Hall on Jan. 7. Ashlea Aldrich was found dead a year before on that date. Galen and Tillie Aldrich talk about the death of their daughter, Ashlea Aldrich, during an interview in their rural Walthill, Nebraska, home in January 2020. The naked body of Ashlea Aldrich, a 29-year-old mother of two, was found in a farm field on the Omaha Indian Reservation. The Aldriches say her death was the result of domestic violence. Tillie Aldrich, center, and Galen Aldrich, right, give gifts to family members at a memorial service for their daughter, Ashlea Aldrich. Tillie Aldrich, right, and Galen Aldrich, left, give gifts to family members at a memorial service for their daughter, Ashlea Aldrich, at the Walthill Fire Hall in Walthill, Nebraska, on Jan. 7. Ashlea Aldrich was found dead one year ago on this day. MACY, Neb. — Framed inspirational quotes decorated Galen and Tillie Aldrich’s home on a bitter cold day in January 2020. Photos of their youngest daughter, Ashlea, once hung in their places on the light-beige walls. After the 29-year-old mother’s lifeless body was found lying muddy and naked in a cornfield on the Omaha Indian Reservation two weeks earlier, her photos were packed away and her clothes were bundled up in a gray star quilt. In keeping with tribal tradition, Galen then took the quilt to the old Cook homestead north of Macy, said a prayer and hung it in a tree. “It’s like our mourning process,” he explained. “We keep her for four days and then we send her off to heaven. If we cry too much or keep some of her photographs and clothes, that might stop her from going. Her spirit will just wander around here.” The Aldrich family holds a memorial service at the Walthill Fire Hall for Ashlea Aldrich who was found dead a year ago in January 2020. The Aldriches claim Ashlea lost her life because of domestic violence. But no charges have been filed in federal court against anyone in connection with her death. Since 2013, the Aldriches say they have called tribal police dozens of times after Ashlea’s longtime boyfriend assaulted her. Native American women experience disproportionately high rates of violence, with more than 55 percent reporting that intimate partners have committed physical violence against them, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice-funded study. “The court system and our law enforcement never protected my daughter. I’m going to make sure nobody ever forgets what happened to her,” Galen said. Last month, The Journal obtained a copy of Ashlea’s death certificate from Nebraska’s Office of Vital Records. The document, filed on Jan. 17, 2020, lists the immediate cause of death as “hypothermia complicating acute alcohol toxicity” and the manner of death is listed as an “accident.” Ashlea was “found deceased after she wandered off.” The time of death is unknown, according to the document. The FBI has not made public information about how Ashlea died. When The Journal asked about Ashlea’s cause of death, Amy Adams, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Omaha office responded, “The FBI can neither confirm nor deny an investigation.” After the Douglas County Coroner in Omaha performed an autopsy, Ashlea’s parents said they viewed her body at Munderloh-Smith Funeral Home in Pender. Before the viewing, Galen said he met with an FBI agent who told him there was no evidence that his daughter had been strangled or sexually assaulted and there was no bruising on her body. “She had a black eye, her nose was swollen and there were little welts all over her,” Galen told The Journal in January 2020. After the viewing, Galen said he called an FBI agent and told him about the injuries he observed on his daughter’s body. He said the agent attributed the marks to the way Ashlea’s body was lying on the ground. Galen said he disagreed with that assessment and told the agent so. Ashlea Aldrich is shown in a photograph that was printed on the front of her funeral program. Her mother said she was creative and liked to do hair and makeup. Aldrich family photo During the interview, Tillie said Ashlea was found with no clothing, socks or shoes, less than a quarter mile from where she lived with her boyfriend. Tillie said Ashlea’s sister, Alyssa, who discovered Ashlea lying in the field, observed mud all over Ashlea’s back, which stretched down to her calves. However, Tillie said an FBI agent later told her Ashlea had no soil or abrasions on her feet. “It was hard to even wrap my head around anything,” she said at the time. After receiving Ashlea’s death certificate last month, The Journal contacted Tillie. She said she feels “betrayed and neglected by the FBI.” “The agent who originally investigated was negligent and clearly wanted a quick, closed case. There are too many unanswered questions,” she said. On Jan. 7, 2021, the first anniversary of when Ashlea’s body was found, dozens gathered at the Walthill Fire Hall and a bridge near the site to pray, sing and remember her. “Even we couldn’t protect her,” Tillie said at the fire hall. “The law enforcement can’t protect her. None of our laws can protect her. That’s what we’re fighting for. We’re fighting for justice, so that we’ll never have another Ashlea. I can’t bear any of my tribal members to go through what I went through this last year.” Over the past year, candlelight vigils have been held in Ashlea’s memory on the reservation and in Lincoln, Nebraska. In a display of solidarity, a group of Walthill High School cheerleaders even stood with red handprints painted across their mouths during a basketball game. Red handprints have come to symbolize missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives. Judi gaiashkibos, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs (NCIA), stated in a report published May 21 that the reservation saw a “wave of suicides among teenagers” in the aftermath of Ashlea’s death. “This was a clear sign of the desperation that can rise up during times of tragedy in a profound and dangerous way in communities that feel isolated and hopeless,” she wrote in the report, which was the result of an NCIA and Nebraska State Patrol study on the prevalence of missing Native American women and children in the state. Gwen Porter, a member of the Omaha Tribal Council, acknowledged that the tribe has faced one crisis after another, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, with methamphetamine, suicide and domestic violence. “It hasn’t broken us, but we’ve been dealing with it. Having people and other communities to reach out and support us during our time of need is what has gotten us through,” she said. ‘Fully investigated and prosecuted’ When Ashlea’s body was found on the reservation, the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office said federal authorities were in charge of the investigation. Although the FBI had a team onsite, they would not confirm that they were investigating a death or the location. More than nine months later, when The Journal asked her if the FBI was investigating Ashlea’s death, Adams responded, “The FBI investigates cases in tandem with the Omaha tribal police. The FBI has spoken directly to Ashlea Aldrich’s family with respect to the outcome of our investigation.” According to a background inquiry filed Feb. 10, 2020, in Omaha Tribal Court, three days after Ashlea’s body was found, her boyfriend was charged with criminal homicide, criminal contempt, and duty to give information and render aid. Tillie said he was held at the tribe’s detention facility in Macy, but then, in April, he was released. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Nebraska has jurisdiction over major crimes committed on the Omaha, Winnebago and Santee Sioux reservations. While Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Norris told The Journal he cannot comment on specific cases and investigations, he said his office is “confident” that the homicides that have occurred on Nebraska reservations were “fully investigated and prosecuted.” “We are not aware of any homicides that were not investigated or not prosecuted,” he said. “We can’t ethically file charges when the evidence does not support a charge of homicide.” Porter said she feels “there was due process” concerning Ashlea’s boyfriend, but she said “there’s a lot of unanswered questions.” She said the situation has been difficult for her, since she has close ties to both Ashlea and her boyfriend. “I grew up with Ashlea. She was a niece. Her auntie is my best friend, so I babysat Ashlea. We’ve had outings together. We went to birthday parties and went to the lake,” she said. “For the (boyfriend), I also babysat him, too. He’s my nephew, distantly. We all know each other. We’re all connected in one way or another.” Tillie described Ashlea as shy, but always smiling and happy. “She was just a little scrapper,” Tillie said with a chuckle, as she sat at her kitchen table behind a flickering purple candle on Jan. 21, 2020, just a couple weeks after Ashlea’s death, thinking about Ashlea as a child. “She was just aggressive when it came to her sisters, because she was so tiny. She always fought harder when they wrestled or did anything.” Tillie said her daughter was also very creative and artistic. Ashlea liked to draw and do hair and makeup. After graduating from Omaha Nation High School in 2009, Ashlea studied cosmetology at La James International College in Fremont, Nebraska. She received her diploma from La James in 2010. The following year, Tillie was diagnosed with breast cancer and the Aldriches also lost their home to flooding. They moved to a small three-bedroom apartment in the middle of Macy. “We all struggled through that,” Tillie said. “I think that’s when I started to lose her. When I was busy fighting cancer, she was drifting away and getting into a relationship.” Tillie Aldrich, at home with her husband Galen, said she feels “betrayed and neglected by the FBI.” Tim Hynds, Sioux City Journal Support Local Journalism Your membership makes our reporting possible. featured_button_text Ashlea reconnected with her boyfriend, whom she had dated in high school. They had two sons, but their relationship was marred by violence, according to the Aldriches, who approached the Omaha Tribal Council about the matter. In an email sent June 9, 2017, to council members, Tillie detailed a June 3 incident in which she found Ashlea standing in the shower of the apartment where she lived with her boyfriend fully clothed and covered in blood. Tillie wrote that the couch was also “soaked with blood” and that there were “splatters on the wall and mattress.” According to the background inquiry, Ashlea’s boyfriend was charged in Omaha Tribal Court with domestic disturbance and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child on June 3, 2017. Those charges were dismissed later that August. The document also lists four domestic abuse charges for four separate incidents that occurred in 2013, 2014 and 2016. It is unknown from the document whether any of those cases involved Ashlea. The charges were either dismissed, reduced or, in one instance, the boyfriend was found not guilty. “As many times as we’ve turned him in, nothing has ever happened to him,” Tillie said. Since Ashlea’s death, Porter said roles have changed on the reservation. The tribe has a new attorney general, prosecutor and chief of police. She said the tribe is reviewing its judicial system and providing community training to respond to incidents of domestic violence. “It has our attention. We’ve been taking action,” she said. The Aldriches said they made it clear to Ashlea they would be there for her no matter what and she always had a room in their home. Galen said Ashlea struggled with alcohol use the last two years of her life. He said she was drinking daily and losing a lot of weight. During the summer of 2019, Tillie noticed that when her daughter would leave her boyfriend and come home, each time, she was staying longer. Ashlea laid on the floor and read books with her sons, who have been in the Aldriches’ care since July 2018, or worked on jigsaw puzzles with them. “(Ashlea) was always so content with them,” Tillie said, voice quaking, as tears streamed down her cheeks. “That was her happiness. She didn’t even need anything else.” Tillie Aldrich, right, hugs Aurelia Robinson during a memorial service for Aldrich’s daughter, Ashlea Aldrich. Jesse Brothers That September, Tillie took her daughter to New Town, North Dakota, where her sister lives. During the visit, Ashlea conquered her fear of heights. She sent her mother a photo of her standing on a ledge overlooking a lake. “She was just proud of the picture. ‘I did it, Mom. I faced the fear. I feel so much better,'” Tillie recalled. Before Thanksgiving, Ashlea went to a detox center in Omaha. She stayed four days and then sought a bed at an inpatient treatment facility. But, Galen said she never got into treatment because of the long waiting list. Ashlea returned to the reservation. Not long after Thanksgiving, Tillie heard Ashlea had been hurt. She said she called the tribal police department and was told Ashlea had been taken to Twelve Clans Unity Hospital’s emergency department in Winnebago. When Tillie saw Ashlea at the hospital, she said Ashlea’s fingers were purple and that one of her fingernails was coming off. She said Ashlea told her her hand was slammed in a vehicle’s door. Ashlea stayed at her parents’ home most of December. On Christmas Eve, Ashlea’s boyfriend came by to give her a mobile phone. Tillie told her daughter the gift was his way of keeping track of her. Ashlea was excited about the phone, nonetheless. Another present she really liked was a forest green winter coat with brown fur that her father picked out for her. “She put it on and she fit it just right. She was just happy with it,” Tillie said. Around 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 26, Tillie said Ashlea came into the living room and put on the coat. As Ashlea was about to go outside to smoke a cigarette, Tillie told her daughter, “Ashlea, don’t leave.” Not long after Ashlea walked out the back door, Tillie saw the headlights of a vehicle. Ashlea was gone. Tillie quickly got in her black Kia Sportage and headed to Macy, where she found Ashlea and her boyfriend. She said she told Ashlea she was scared for her safety, but Ashlea reassured her she was OK. Ashlea stood by the front passenger door of Tillie’s vehicle and said through the rolled-down window, “I love you, Mom.” Tillie replied, “I love you, Ash,” and then drove away. The evening of Monday, Jan. 6, Tillie couldn’t stop thinking and worrying about Ashlea on her way to work in West Point, Nebraska. Earlier, she received a text from Alyssa, informing her that someone saw Ashlea “beat-up” in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s SUV on Sunday. As the setting sun painted the sky a blaze of orange, purple and pink, Tillie, who works as a certified nursing assistant, stopped her car, took some sage out of the glove compartment, burned it and said a prayer for her daughter. She asked God to watch over Ashlea and keep her safe. The next day, Galen said he was performing tribal home maintenance work, when he spotted the SUV that Ashlea’s boyfriend drove parked in a cornfield in the area of Main Street and Blackbird Creek, just south of Macy. He said he looked inside the vehicle and walked around it. “I could see her tracks where she got out kind of going around the front of the truck. I could see his tracks, but I really couldn’t tell which way they went,” he said. “Then, I had that feeling – I knew something was wrong.” Galen Aldrich said he is going to make sure that no one forgets what happened to his daughter, Ashlea Aldrich. Jesse Brothers, Sioux City Journal Galen went over to a nearby concrete bridge. He walked underneath the bridge, and, when he came back up, he said he saw Ashlea’s boyfriend pull up in a vehicle. He asked, “Where’s my daughter? When’s the last time you’ve seen her?” Galen said Ashlea’s boyfriend told him he hadn’t seen her since Sunday, when his SUV got stuck in the mud. Ashlea allegedly went to find help, while he stayed in the SUV. After the encounter with Ashlea’s boyfriend, Galen headed to the tribal police department to speak with then-Omaha Nation Police Captain Ed Tyndall. While he was there, he heard a dispatcher call for officers to respond to a female screaming for help south of town. He immediately took off for the site. Just minutes earlier, at roughly 3 p.m., Alyssa was looking for her sister when she spotted the SUV Ashlea’s boyfriend drove parked in the field. Tillie said Alyssa looked around the SUV, but then she began walking toward an opening in the trees. That’s when she saw Ashlea’s long black hair blowing in the wind. Tillie said Alyssa ran to her sister’s naked body, which was lying facedown on the ground more than 100 yards north of the SUV. Alyssa tried to rouse Ashlea, but she was cold and stiff. She took off her coat, placed it over her sister and laid next to her until law enforcement arrived. When Tillie reached Macy, she saw squad cars, the SUV parked in the field and a white cover lying on the ground. She screamed and ran toward the white cover, until Tyndall stopped her. “I said, ‘Is that my baby?’ He said, ‘Tillie, you can’t come here. This is a crime scene,'” Tillie recalled Tyndall telling her. “He kept pushing me back and I kept fighting it.” Tillie said the FBI collected soil from her daughter’s body and the ground she laid on. She said those samples were sent to the FBI’s crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, along with Ashlea’s fingernail clippings. “I voiced my concern to deaf ears,” she said. “If anybody listened then, I believe my daughter would still be here.” A SPECIAL JOURNAL REPORT: Native women face epidemic of violence A SPECIAL JOURNAL REPORT: Questions surrounding death of Omaha Nation woman remain Dialysis unit slated to open in Walthill Twelve Clans Unity Hospital offering inpatient care Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Source link Orbem News #Alyssa #anatomy #ashleaaldrich #Charge #criminallaw #Death #domesticviolence #Family #full-longform #galenaldrich #gwenporter #Journal #Justice #Law #lawenforcement #macy #Medicine #mmiw #omahatribeofnebraska #Report #seeking #special #SUV #suvashlea #tilliealdrich #womans #Year

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bpcparents · 3 years

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INTEGRITY: The imperfect path toward a more perfect union starts at home

In January of 2020, students at Darien High School entered faculty offices on a Saturday and took photos of answers to two sophomore exams, one in English and one in Social Studies. The information was then widely distributed over social media, implicating about 300 students.

In December of 2020, 73 cadets at West Point were accused of cheating on a calculus exam at the US Military Academy, where an honor code requires students to pledge that they “will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The majority of the students involved (55 of them) had actually been enrolled in a program designed to be an “honor code boot camp” as a second chance.

Debates unfolded in both learning communities in the wake of their respective scandals, revealing divided opinion about both the causes and effects of academic dishonesty. While a student in Darien complained that those who had cheated at her school were “not really experiencing any consequences that are substantial enough for their actions," the parents of one of the teenagers involved actually hired an attorney to contest the school district’s handling of the penalties for his client.

Even officials within West Point were at odds over the matter there. Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt, the academy’s public affairs director, said that the rehabilitation program was designed to increase the likelihood that people would report violations, since the penalty could be less severe than expulsion. Despite the 2020 lapse, he defended the Military Academy’s response, arguing that West Point “has slowly transitioned to a developmental model that relies on a combination of punishment and additional development to restore a cadet to good standing after a violation.” Tim Bakken, a West Point law professor took a less rosy view, charging that failure to handle a cheating scandal aggressively and transparently — and to encourage a culture of honesty — could infect the thinking of generals and their approach to informing the public. “The United States has not been successful in its last four wars,” Professor Bakken said. “The failure of the military to tell us the truth is a big part of the reason.”

As a parent and an educator who has taught for more than twenty years at both the secondary and university levels, I can testify that the battle for academic integrity is not a new one. That said, it has been surfacing with unprecedented intensity in the last year. In reaching for reasons, it’s easy to blame online learning, since the pandemic has forced so many students of all ages to connect to their classes from home. As a high school teacher conducting courses remotely since last March, however, I can testify that the online argument is a red herring. The internet has been accessible for decades now, and the exams stolen in the cases detailed above were both in hard copy. The problem isn’t the medium; it’s the context of our current political culture.

After more than 200 years of peaceful transitions of power in the United States, rioters stormed the nation’s Capitol in a violent insurrection that culminated in the death of five Americans, including a US Capitol police officer. The attack was incited by baseless claims of voter fraud from the highest office in the land and intended to interfere with certification of electoral college ballots. But the events of January 6th, 2021 were not isolated incidents; they followed years of falsehoods and misinformation perpetuated by an administration that vilified the free press and perpetuated conspiracy theories by trafficking in “alternative facts.” From climate change to COVID-19, science was denied within policies that saw the US withdraw from international agreements on the environment and has already resulted in the nearly 450,000 American lives lost so far to a virus for which no national defense was undertaken.

What do these developments in the government have to do with dishonesty in the classroom? Everything.

Accountability is learned, and when discourse at the national level takes place within a context that relativizes rather than reveres the truth, we model to the younger generation that integrity has no meaning.

The weeks ahead are critical: the former president has been impeached again and his Senate trial this time puts the entire country on the witness stand. Neither partisan squabbling nor legal loopholes will redeem the damages already done. Whether or not convictions are delivered, there is an opportunity that this country cannot afford to miss: we must categorically condemn acts of violence and stand firmly against forces that erode our very democracy. As a Resolution recently adopted by the Town of Bedford reminds us, “the insurgents carried Confederate flags, displayed antisemitic symbols and slogans, and erected a gallows on Capitol grounds, manifesting bigotry, hatred, and utter disregard for the rule of law.” True justice can only be achieved when leaders commit to political processes that uphold the safety and welfare of all.

Holding people accountable for their actions matters, from high school students to politicians. And there is far too much at stake at this juncture for anybody to give in to self-righteousness. I’ve encountered the most constructive conversations through Civics education courses. More than just grounding people in the basics of governing structures, Civics done well critically begins by backing up well beyond 1776 to reckon with our country’s history before it declared itself an independent republic. The three branches of government after all are rooted not just in political philosophy but in lands stolen from Indigenous populations and labored over by enslaved human beings. The inconsonance of stated values with enacted policies strikes even the youngest students. These foundational hypocrisies require more than polite classroom debate; they merit real and often uncomfortable engagement in the facts in pursuit of truth. Winning a trial or even being “right” can’t alone achieve true justice; that takes genuine understanding forged in brave spaces.

In a recent community event online focused on the documentary True Justice, panelist Dr. Alexander Smith with the New York organization Rehabilitation Through the Arts was asked how he holds people accountable in working for racial justice. He answered by imparting the term “Critical Humility,” which he defined as “the practice of remaining open to the fact that our knowledge is always partial and evolving -- while at the same time remaining committed to speaking up and taking action in a world based on our current knowledge, however imperfect.” The concept has the potential to make confrontations truly transformative. As Dr. Smith exhorted the audience of young people and adults alike, “We need to expose our vulnerabilities; we need to be there and live in that and help others expose their vulnerabilities... that’s how we have change.”

Parents can begin to cultivate critical humility at home by exercising accountability that starts with themselves. Think hatching an excuse to avoid an awkward social situation is just a harmless “little white lie”? There’s no such thing, and the children are watching. Rather than duck a difficulty, we can face it candidly, without manipulation. We can apologize to our kids when we make mistakes. We can trade out “blame and shame” routines of punishment for a growth mindset that builds responsibility and mutual respect instead. Doing so anchors accountability as a shared practice and social standard by which young people can then measure the wider world and their place in it.

This also means letting go of the ego-bound aspirations for our children that are more self-serving as status-boosters for parents. Recent SAT scandals involving celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman brought to light much larger college admissions schemes that pointed to corruption at all levels, including coaches, administrators, test proctors, tutors, and others in pay-to-play agreements that involved millions of dollars.

Is there an antidote to this rampant dishonesty? If so, it may lie in exhortations from Julie Lythcott-Haims, the best-selling author whose books highlight how ego-based parenting stunts the development of children and society at large. Adulting, she argues, is a process of “becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and gaining the knowhow to keep going.” Just as parents need to halt freighting their kids with expectations and micromanaging their lives, we need to embrace the imperfections inherent in any project -- whether childrearing or democracy -- that aspires to self-sufficiency, resilience, and integrity.

Elizabeth Messinger is a former journalist with NPR and The Economist of London. Through her educational consultancy, Mind in Motion, she guides children of all ages to think for themselves, and she teaches Humanities at an independent school in Stamford, CT. She raised her son in Bedford, where together they ran the Toddler Room at the Presbyterian Church for nearly a decade. She continues to parent from NY as he attends college in California.

#ElizabethMessinger #parenting #integrity #accountability #CriticalHumility

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Headlines: Sunday, September 27, 2020

A Baffled World Watches the U.S. (NYT) Myanmar is a poor country struggling with open ethnic warfare and a coronavirus outbreak that could overload its broken hospitals. That hasn’t stopped its politicians from commiserating with a country they think has lost its way. “I feel sorry for Americans,” said U Myint Oo, a member of parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.” The same sentiment prevails in Canada, one of the most developed countries. Two out of three Canadians live within about 60 miles of the American border. “Personally, it’s like watching the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, an industrial city on the border with Michigan, where locals used to venture for lunch. Amid the pandemic and in the run-up to the presidential election, much of the world is watching the United States with a mix of shock, chagrin and, most of all, bafflement. How did a superpower allow itself to be felled by a virus? And after nearly four years during which President Trump has praised authoritarian leaders and obscenely dismissed some other countries as insignificant and crime-ridden, is the United States in danger of exhibiting some of the same traits he has disparaged? Adding to the sense of bewilderment, Mr. Trump has refused to embrace an indispensable principle of democracy, dodging questions about whether he will commit to a peaceful transition of power after the November election should he lose.

Trump caps judiciary remake with choice of Barrett for court (AP) President Donald Trump has nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a dramatic reshaping of the federal judiciary that will resonate for a generation and that he hopes will provide a needed boost to his reelection effort. Barrett, a former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, said Saturday that she was “truly humbled” by the nomination and quickly aligned herself with Scalia’s conservative approach to the law, saying his “judicial philosophy is mine, too.” Barrett, 48, was joined in the Rose Garden by her husband and seven children. If confirmed by the Senate, she would fill the seat vacated by liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It would be the sharpest ideological swing since Clarence Thomas replaced Justice Thurgood Marshall nearly three decades ago.

California braces for power shutoffs and warm, windy weekend (AP) Firefighters and officials at California’s largest utility company braced for hot, dry and windy weather in northern and central areas of the state this weekend that may fan the flames of several major wildfires or ignite new ones. Pacific Gas & Electric warned Friday it may cut power from Sunday morning to Monday, potentially affecting 97,000 customers in 16 counties, during which forecasters said a ridge of high pressure will raise temperatures and generate gusts flowing from the interior to the coast. When heavy winds were predicted earlier this month, PG&E cut power to about 167,000 homes and businesses in central and Northern California in a more targeted approach after being criticized last year for acting too broadly when it blacked out 2 million customers to prevent fires.

US colleges struggle to salvage semester amid outbreaks (AP) Colleges across the country are struggling to salvage the fall semester amid skyrocketing coronavirus cases, entire dorm complexes and frat houses under quarantine, and flaring tensions with local community leaders over the spread of the disease. Many major universities are determined to forge ahead despite warning signs, as evidenced by the expanding slate of college football games occurring Saturday. Institutions across the nation saw spikes of thousands of cases days after opening their doors in the last month, driven by students socializing with little or no social distancing. School and community leaders have tried to rein in the virus by closing bars, suspending students, adding mask requirements, and toggling between in-person and online instruction as case numbers rise and fall. In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, this week blamed outbreaks at two colleges for a surge of virus cases that boosted the state’s infection rate high enough to put it on the list of places whose residents are required to quarantine when traveling to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The University of Wisconsin-Madison had seen more than 2,800 confirmed cases in students as of Friday. The school shut down in-person instruction for two weeks, locked down two of its largest dorms, and imposed quarantines on more than a dozen sorority and fraternity houses. The school lifted the dorm lockdown just this week.

Desk shortage forces people to get creative about workspaces (AP) First it was toilet paper. Disinfectant wipes. Beans. Coins. Computers. Now, desks are in short supply because of the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of kids logging onto virtual school this fall has parents scrambling to find furniture for them. At the same time, some people are realizing they’ll be working from home for the long haul and require new furniture. To find desks, people are scouring stores near and far and even making their own. Online, sales of desks and accessories, such as desk chairs and lamps, were up 283% in August from the year before, according to Rakuten Intelligence, which tracks shopper behavior. People are figuring out other solutions, sharing advice on turning dressers or book shelves into makeshift desks on Pinterest and Facebook.

He’s not running, but Morales looms large in Bolivia vote (AP) Even in exile, Evo Morales looms over Bolivia’s election next month. National rifts that contributed to chaos in Bolivia in 2019 threaten to destabilize the Oct. 18 vote and its aftermath nearly one year after Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president from the Aymara group, was forced to resign following disputed vote results, protests, violence and a military call for him to go. The country is divided mainly along ethnic, regional and socioeconomic lines, and between those who applaud Morales as a voice for the historically poor and disenfranchised and those who say he became increasingly corrupt and authoritarian during 14 years in power. The interim government that replaced him has also been accused of undermining Bolivia’s democratic institutions, including the judiciary. The feud has reverberated outside the landlocked country of 12 million people. In a speech to the virtual U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, interim President Jeanine Áñez accused neighboring Argentina, where Morales is in self-exile, of ″systematic and abusive harassment″ of Bolivia’s institutions and supporting a “violent conspiracy” led by the former president.

Alps surprised by early snowfall, Swiss town sees new record (AP) Parts of Switzerland, Austria and Germany were surprised by unseasonably early snowfall overnight, after a sharp drop in temperatures and heavy precipitation. The Swiss meteorological agency said Saturday that the town of Montana, in the southern canton (state) of Valais, experienced 25 centimeters (almost 10 inches) of snowfall — a new record for this time of year. Authorities were out in force across mountainous regions in the two Alpine nations to clear roads blocked by snow and ice.

Lebanon’s prime minister-designate steps down in blow to French initiative (Reuters) Lebanon’s prime minister-designate quit on Saturday after trying for almost a month to line up a non-partisan cabinet, failing despite French pressure on sectarian leaders to rally together to deal with the worst crisis since a 1975-1990 civil war. Mustapha Adib, former ambassador to Berlin, was picked on Aug. 31 to form a cabinet. He had tried to form a government of specialists in a nation where power is shared between Muslims and Christians and political loyalties tend to follow sectarian lines. But his efforts ran into the sand over cabinet appointments, particularly the post of finance minister, who will have a crucial role in drawing up a programme to lift Lebanon out of a deep economic crisis. Crushed by a mountain of debt, Lebanon’s banks are paralysed and its currency is in freefall. Talks with the International Monetary Fund on a vital bailout package stalled this year. The cabinet’s first task would have been to restart negotiations.

Fleeing chaos and hardship, Lebanese have begun braving perilous seas (Washington Post) For years, Ibrahim Lisheen watched as refugees from neighboring Syria passed through this Mediterranean port city, boarding smugglers’ boats for risky crossings to Europe. For Lebanese like him, it was an act of desperation to be pitied, not copied. Until now. Earlier this month, Lisheen, 22, sold his furniture and paid to board an open fishing boat on a promise of safe passage to Cyprus, just 10 hours away. He was part of a new wave of migrants fleeing Lebanon’s own serial catastrophes: a collapsed economy, political unrest and the devastation wrought by a massive warehouse explosion in Beirut last month. Hardship is nothing new in Lebanon, a country racked by decades of conflict. But even the beleaguered Lebanese are shocked that conditions have become so hopeless that their fellow citizens are joining the treacherous migration across the Mediterranean that is typically associated with refugees from the region’s failed states. Lisheen, who said he hasn’t had a job in five years, is part of an unemployment wave that topped 35 percent in the months since the coronavirus pandemic took hold here. Protests over government corruption have rocked the country for more than a year. And Hezbollah, which is both a militant group and political party, has engaged in military exchanges with Israeli forces across the southern border.

Famine Emerges as U.N. Theme, Crystallized by Yemen Disaster (NYT) The coronavirus scourge is a prevailing theme at this year’s United Nations General Assembly, forcing the gathering to be conducted largely online. But the pandemic is also fueling another crisis preoccupying the organization and humanitarian groups: the strong prospect of famine in some of the world’s most destitute places. Nowhere is famine more likely than in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, ravaged by war for nearly six years between the Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led military coalition defending a weak government that exerts little or no control over most Yemeni territory. Combined with donor fatigue, a collapse in the value of Yemen’s currency, a fuel shortage and the coronavirus, which may be spreading unchecked in the country, famine is again “definitely knocking on the door—it’s looming,” said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, the anti-hunger arm of the United Nations. In an interview, Mr. Beasley said he needed $500 million in the next six months, just to provide food to Yemenis at half the usual ration rate. Moreover, he said, “even if we get the money, we still may have famine” because of delays and obstacles to delivery. Roughly 80 percent of the country’s 30 million people require food aid, yet the United Nations is in the position of having to cut assistance when it is needed more than ever.

#headlines #news

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aleixvidals-blog · 7 years

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Don’t mind me me as I go on a little rant but I don’t get how some people can be so insensitive and support sports teams with such racist names such as the “redskins” or the “indians”. I 👏🏼 am 👏🏼 not 👏🏼 your 👏🏼 mascot 👏🏼. Same goes for names such as the “blackhawks”. Indigenous 👏🏼 people 👏🏼 and 👏🏼 our 👏🏼 culture 👏🏼 are 👏🏼 not 👏🏼 your 👏🏼 mascots 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

How about instead of supporting a team with an offensive and racist name and getting mad I’m calling this out you can educate yourself and try to at least understand how insensitive it is?

Redskin became a word that was used by white people who would go out and hunt down Native American people and kill them. They used to say “just bring back a redskin”. So try to tell me you love you some “redskins”. The word is just as bad as the N word. We are not Indian or from India. Christopher Columbus got lost and was America’s first terrorist.

Also a few other things I want to point out and bring awareness to is the fact that Indigenous people might not being hunted down and murdered like we were before, but we are still struggling and we suffer the most out of all groups here in America and nobody cares!!!! (Side note: I’m not trying to take away from other people’s struggles or anything like that, but yall need to realise and open your eyes about how much we are forgotten about and what we are going through since the media doesn’t show anyone.)

Native American youth have the highest drop out rates. Some of us live in horrible housing situations with no clean water or electricity and yes, sometimes the distance from where your house is on a reservation to where your school is too far and kids just stop going. It used to take me TWO HOURS just to get to school because the roads were so bad. Reservations are not the GOOD land or the BEAUTIFUL land of America, it is the left over land that the white people didn’t want. They thought it was too dirty for them so they just gave it to us. AND WE ARE STILL FIGHTING TO THIS DAY TO KEEP WHAT LITTLE LAND WE DO HAVE. On some reservations, people who commit crimes are more likely to get away with it since there are loop holes.

We suffer from the highest rates of suicide. It is the second-leading cause of death for our youth. 1 out of 4 Native American children suffer from PTSD and to put it simply, we die at a higher rate than any other Americans.

There are A LEAST A THOUSAND First Nations women who are missing an being murdered and nobody cares. Nobody cares about these women in Canada who were taken from their families AND THIS ISN’T A THING THAT IS NOW JUST HAPPENING. IT’S BEEN HAPPENING. Not to mention, the HUNDREDS of children from South Dakota who are being basically kidnapped and put up for adoption.

We are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault and rape than any other group of people in America. Most of the people who commit crimes towards Indigenous people are white. Our women experience the highest amount of assault and 1 out of 3 women will be raped at least once in their life times. We are the at the greatest risk of sexual violence.

On a whole other note, POLICE VIOLENCE. Native Americans are being killed by the police at a higher rate than any other group!!!! Believe it or not!!!! Shocking! Reminder, our population is nothing compared to how many African American’s there are so that’s why it’s such a huge issue for us. We make up roughly 2% of the population at about 5.4 million and we accounted for 2% of the police killings in 2016. 5.4 million people and we’re the group that’s most likely to be killed by police. Is that not alarming in any way at all?

So, I don’t want to hear about someone honouring Native Americans as a reason to keep your disgusting mascots. There are different ways to help us instead of being racist and putting red paint all over your face and saying you deserve to keep a teams name because you think you know what goes on in these communities and THAT IS the way to honour them (news flash: it’s not). Please take time to look at and support organizations that work to battle these issues and please honour and support us in a different way by trying to help resolve the issues we face. Feel free to reblog and add more organizations or anything else that is important and relates to what I already listed.

Just a few notable organizations: Lakota People’s Law Project: help stop violence against Lakota children and help the NODAPL battle and Native Lives Matter. American Indian College Fund: helps Native Americans attend college and finish degrees. Native American Rights Fund: helps protect our rights and resources and promotes Native Americas human rights. Running Strong for American Indian Youth: helps youth with survival needs and creates opportunities for self-sufficiency and helps with building strong self-esteem in our youth. Honor The Earth, Sexual Violence in Extraction Zones: helps fight against not only pipelines, but also sexual violence that goes on in the extractions areas.

#pay attention to this #this took me awhile #ok to rb #ndn tag #ndn #indian #native american #indigineous people #cleveland indians #washington redskins #chicago blackhawks #anyways ill block any ignorant people #important

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suchagiantnerd · 5 years

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54 Books, 1 Year

2018 was my first full year back at work after my mat leave, and thanks to all the time I spend on the subway, my yearly reading total is back up to over 50 books!

2018 was a dark year, and I made a conscious effort to read more books from authors on the margins of society. The more those of us with privilege take the time to listen to and learn from these voices, the better we’ll be as friends, colleagues and citizens.

You’ll also notice a lot of books about witchcraft and witches in this year’s list. What can I say? Dark times call for resorting to ANYTHING that can help dig us out of our current reality, including putting a hex on Donald Trump.

Trigger Warning: Some of the books reviewed below are about mental illness, suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, and violence against people of colour, Indigenous people and people in the LGBTQ community.

Here are this year’s mini reviews:

1. The Lottery and Other Stories / Shirley Jackson

Jackson’s short stories were published in the late forties and fifties, but their slow-burning creep factor holds up today. The stories involve normal people doing normal things until something small gives, and we realize something is really wrong here. As you read through the collection, take note of the mysterious man in blue. He appears in about half of the stories, always in the margins of the action. Who is he? I read him as a bit of a trickster figure, bringing chaos and mayhem with him wherever he goes. Other people have read him as the devil himself. Let me know what you think!

2. The Ship / Antonia Honeywell

I was excited to read this YA novel about a giant cruise ship-turned-ark, designed and captained by the protagonist Lalla’s father in a dystopic near future. The premise of the book is great and brings up lots of juicy questions – where is the ship going? How long can the passengers survive together in a confined space? How did Lalla’s father choose who got to board the ship? But the author’s execution was a disappointment and focused far too much on Lalla’s inner turmoil and immaturity.

3. The Hot One: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex and Murder / Carolyn Murnick

My book club read this true crime memoir detailing the intense, adolescent friendship between Carolyn, the author, and Ashley, who was murdered in her home in her early 20s a few years after the girls’ friendship fizzled. Murnick is understandably destroyed by the murder and obsessed with the killer’s trial. The narrative loops back and forth between the trial and the girls’ paths, which diverged sharply after Ashley moved away in high school. Murnick (the self-proclaimed nerdy one) muses on the intricacies of female friendship, growing up under the microscope of the male gaze, and the last weekend she ever spent with Ashley (the hot one). This is an emotional, detailed account of a woman trying her best to bear witness to her friend’s horrific death and to honour who she was in life.

4. The Break / Katherena Vermette

Somebody is brutally attacked on a cold winter night in Winnipeg, and Stella, a young Métis woman and tired new mother is the only witness – and even she isn’t sure what she saw. The police investigation into the attack puts a series of events in motion that make long-buried emotions bubble to the surface and ripple outwards to touch a number of people in the community, including an Indigenous teenager recently released from a youth detention center, one of the investigating officers (a Métis man walking a fine line between two worlds), and an artist. This is a tough read, especially in the era of #MMIW and #MeToo, but all the more important because of it.

5. So You Want to Talk About Race / Ijeoma Oluo

Probably the most important book I read this year, I will never stop recommending this read to anyone and everyone. This is your Allyship 101 syllabus right here, folks. Do you really want to do better and be better as an ally? Then you need to read every chapter closely and start implementing the lessons learned right away. This book will teach you about tone policing, microaggressions and privilege, and how all of those things are harmful to people of colour and other marginalized communities.

6. The Accusation / Bandi

This is a collection of short stories by a North Korean man (written under a pseudonym for his protection as he still lives there). The stories were actually smuggled out of the country for publication by a family friend. The characters in these stories are regular people living regular lives (as much as that is possible in North Korea). What really comes across is the fine line between laughter and tears while living under the scrutiny of a dangerous regime. There are several scenes where people laugh uncontrollably because they can’t cry, and where people start to cry because they can’t laugh. This book offers a rare perspective into a hidden world.

7. Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen / Jazz Jennings

Some of you will be familiar with Jazz via the TLC show about her and her family, “I Am Jazz”. I’d never seen it but was inspired to read the book to gain a better understanding about what coming out as trans as a child is like. Jazz came out to her family at 5 years old (!) and her parents and siblings have had her back from the beginning. If you are still having a tough time understanding that trans women are women, full stop, this book will help get you there.

8. A Field Guide to Getting Lost / Rebecca Solnit

When it comes to the books that gave me “all the feels”, this one tops the 2018 list. Solnit is everything - historian, writer, philosopher, culture lover, explorer. Her mind is always making connections and as you follow her through her labyrinthine thoughts you start to feel connected too. Her words on loss, nostalgia and missing a person/place/time actually made me cry, they were so true. For me, an agnostic leaning towards atheism, she illuminated the magic in the everyday that made me feel more spiritually rooted to life than I have in a long time.

9. I Found You / Lisa Jewell

Lots of weird and bad things seem to happen in British seaside towns, don’t they? This is another psychological thriller, à la “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl”. One woman finds a man sitting on the beach one morning. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. Miles away, another woman wakes up one morning to find her husband has vanished. Is the mystery man on the beach the missing husband? Dive into this page-turner and find out!

10. The Midnight Sun / Cecilia Ekbäck

This novel is the sequel to a historical Swedish noir book I read a few years ago. Though it’s not so much a sequel, as it is a novel taking place in the same setting – Blackasen Mountain in Lapland. This story actually takes place about a hundred years after the first novel does, so it can be read on its own. Ekbäck’s stories dive into the effect of place on people – whether it’s the isolation of a harsh and long winter or the mental havoc caused by the midnight sun on sleep patterns, the people on Blackasen Mountain are always strained and ready to explode. (Oh, and there’s also a bit of the supernatural happening on this mountain too – but just a bit!)

11. After the Bloom / Leslie Shimotakahara

Strained mother-daughter relationships. The PTSD caused by immigration and then being detained in camps in your new home. Fraught romances. Shimotakahara’s novel tackles all of this and more. Taking place in two times – 1980s Toronto and a WWII Japanese internment camp in the California desert – this story of loss, hardship, betrayal and family is both tragic and hopeful.

12. Company Town / Madeline Ashby

In this Canadian dystopian tale, thousands of people live in little cities built on the oil rigs off the coast of Newfoundland. Hwa works as a bodyguard for the family that owns the rigs and is simultaneously trying to protect the family’s youngest child from threats, find out who is killing her sex-worker friends, mourn her brother (who died in a rig explosion), and work through her own self-esteem issues. Phew! If it sounds like too much, it is. I really did like this book, but I think it needed tighter editing and focus.

13. The Power / Naomi Alderman

In the near-future, women and girls all over the world develop the ability to send electrical shocks out of their hands. With this newfound power, society’s gender power imbalance starts to flip. The U.S. military scrambles to try and work this to their advantage. A new religious movement starts to grow. And Tunde, a Nigerian photographer (and a dude!) travels the world, trying to document it all. This is an exciting novel that seriously asks, “what if?” in which many of the key characters cross paths.

14. Milk and Honey / Rupi Kaur

Everyone’s reading it, so I had to too! Kaur’s poems are refreshing and healing, and definitely accessible. This is poetry for the people, for women, for daughters, mothers and sisters. These are poems about how women make themselves small and quiet, about our inner anger, about sacrifice, longing and love.

15. Tell It to the Trees / Anita Rau Badami

In the dead of winter in small-town B.C., the body of big-city writer Anu is found outside of the Dharmas’ house, frozen to death. Anu had been renting their renovated shed, working on a novel in seclusion. As we get to know the Dharmas – angry and controlling Vikram, his quiet and frightened wife Suman, the two children, and the ghost of Vikram’s first wife, Helen, we feel more and more uneasy. Was Anu’s death just a tragic accident, or something else entirely? There is a touch of “The Good Son” in this novel…

16. You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life / Jen Sincero

This book was huge last year and my curiosity got the better of me. But I can’t, I just can’t subscribe to this advice! All of this stuff about manifesting whatever you want reeks of privilege and is just “The Secret” repackaged for millennials and Gen-Z. Thank u, next!

17. All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness / Sheila Hamilton

Shortly after a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Hamilton’s husband, David, took his own life after years of little signs and indicators that something wasn’t right. Her memoir, in the aftermath of his death, is a reckoning, a tribute, and a warning to others. In it, she details the fairy tale beginning of their relationship (but even then, there were signs), the birth of their only child, and the rocky path that led to his final choice. Hamilton’s story doesn’t feel exploitative to me. It’s an important piece in the global conversation about mental health and includes lots of facts and statistics too.

18. This Is How It Always Is / Laurie Frankel

This is a beautiful novel about loving your family members for who they are and about the tough choices parents have to make when it comes to protecting their children. Rosie and Penn have five boys (that this modern couple has five children is the most unbelievable part of the plot, frankly), but at five years old, their youngest, Claude, tells the family that he is a girl. Claude changes her name to Poppy, and Rosie and Penn decide to move the whole family to more inclusive Seattle to give Poppy a fresh start in life. Of course, the move has consequences on the other four children as well, and we follow everybody’s ups and downs over the years as they adjust and adapt to their new reality.

19. Dumplin’ / Julie Murphy

While I didn’t love the writing or any of the characters, I do need to acknowledge the importance of this YA novel in showing a fat teenager as happy and confident in who she is. Willowdean Dickson has a job, a best friend and a passion for Dolly Parton. She also catches the attention of cute new kid, Bo, and a sweet summer romance develops between the two (with all of the miscommunications and misunderstandings you’d expect in a YA plot). This is an important book in the #RepresentationMatters movement, and is now a Netflix film if you want to skip the read!

20. Kintu / Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

This was touted as “the great Ugandan novel” and it did not disappoint! The first part of the novel takes place in 1754, as Kintu Kidda, leader of a clan, travels to the capital of Buganda (modern day Kampala) with his entourage to pledge allegiance to the new Kabaka. During the journey, tragedy strikes, unleashing a curse on Kintu’s descendants. The rest of the novel follows five modern-day Ugandans who are descended from Kintu’s bloodline and find themselves invited to a massive family reunion. As their paths cross and family histories unfold, will the curse be broken?

21. The Child Finder / Rene Denfeld

I bought this at the airport as a quick and thrilling travel read, and that’s exactly what it was. Naomi is a private investigator with a knack for finding missing and kidnapped children. This is because she was once a kidnapped child herself. The plot moves back and forth in time between Naomi’s current case and her own escape and recovery. There was nothing exceptional about this book, but it’s definitely a page-turner.

22. Difficult Women / Roxane Gay

Are the women in Gay’s short stories actually difficult? Or has a sexist, racist world made things difficult for them? I think you know what my answer is. The stories are at times beautiful - like the fairy tale about a woman made of glass, and at times violent and visceral – like a number of stories about hunting and butchering. Women are everything and more.

23. My Education / Susan Choi

I suggested this novel to my book club and I will always regret it. This was my least favourite read of the year. I thought it was going to be about a sexy and inappropriate threesome or love triangle between a student, her professor, and his wife. Instead it had a few very unsexy sex scenes and hundreds and hundreds of pages about the minutiae of academic life. I can’t see anyone enjoying this book except English professors and grad students.

24. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities / Rebecca Solnit

This series of essays was a balm to my soul after Ford won the provincial election. It reminded me that history is full of steps forward and steps back, and though things look bleak right now, there are millions of us around the world trying to make positive changes in big and little ways as we speak.

25. The Woman in Cabin 10 / Ruth Ware

Another novel in the vein of “The Woman on the Train”, that is, a book featuring a young, female, unreliable narrator. Lo knows what she saw – or does she? There was a woman in the now empty Cabin 10 – or was there? And also, Lo hasn’t been eating or sleeping. But she’s been drinking a lot and not taking her medication. I’m kind of done with this genre – anyone else?

26. My Brilliant Friend / Elena Ferrante

After hearing many intelligent women praise this novel (the first in a four-part series), my book club decided to give it a try. I didn’t fall in love with it, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the intense and passionate friendship between Lila and Lenu, two young girls growing up in post-war Naples, that I will likely read the whole series. Many claim that no writer has managed to capture the intricacy of female friendship the way that Ferrante has.

27. The Turquoise Table: Finding Community and Connection in Your Own Front Yard / Kristin Schell

This is Schell’s non-fiction account of how she started Austin’s turquoise table movement (which has now spread further into other communities). Schell was feeling disconnected from her immediate community, so she painted an old picnic table a bright turquoise, moved it into her front yard, and started sitting out there some mornings, evenings and weekends - sometimes alone, and sometimes with her family. Neighbours started to gather for chats, snacks, card games, and more. People got to know each other on a deeper level and friendships bloomed. This book is a nice reminder that small actions matter. A small warning though – Schell is an evangelical Christian, and I didn’t know this before diving in. There is a focus on Christianity in the book, and though it’s not quite preachy, it’s very in-your-face.

28. Sing, Unburied, Sing / Jesmyn Ward

This was hands-down my favourite novel of the year. It’s a lingering and haunting look at the generational trauma carried by the descendants of those who were enslaved and lived during the Jim Crow era. One part road trip novel, one part ghost story, the plot follows a fractured, multi-racial family as they head into the broken heart of Mississippi to pick up the protagonist’s father, who has just been released from prison.

29. Full Disclosure / Beverley McLachlin

This is the first novel by Canada’s former Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin. As someone who works in the legal industry and has heard her speak, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this. But, with all due respect to one of the queens, the book was very ‘meh’. The plot was a little over the top, the characters weren’t sufficiently fleshed out, and I felt that the backdrop of the Robert Pickton murders was somewhat exploitative and not done respectfully. Am I being more critical of this novel than I might otherwise be because the author is so intelligent? Likely yes, so you can take this review with a grain of salt.

30. The Long Way Home / Louise Penny

This is the 10th novel in Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series. As ever, I fell in love with her descriptions of Quebec’s beauty, the small town of Three Pines, and the delicious food the characters are always eating. Penny’s books are the definition of cozy.

31. In the Skin of a Lion / Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje has the gift of writing novels that read like poetry, and this story is no exception. Taking place in Toronto during construction of the Don Valley bridge and the RC Harris water treatment plant, the plot follows a construction worker, a young nun, an explosives expert, a business magnate and an actress as they maneuver making a life for themselves in the big city and changing ideas about class and gender.

32. The Story of a New Name / Elena Ferrante

This is the second novel in Ferrante’s four-part series about the complicated life-long friendship between Lila and Lenu. In this installment, the women navigate first love, marriage, post-secondary education, first jobs and new motherhood.

33. The Happiness Project / Gretchen Rubin

In this memoir / self-help book, Rubin studies the concept of happiness and implements a new action or practice each month of the year that is designed to increase her happiness levels. Examples include practicing gratitude, going to bed earlier, making time for fun and learning something new. Her journey inspired me to make a few tweaks to my life during a difficult time, and I do think they’ve made me more appreciative of what I have (which I think is a form of happiness?)

34. The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides

I loved the film adaptation of this novel when I was a teenager, but I’d never actually read it until my book club selected it. Eugenides paints a glimmering, ethereal portrait of the five teenaged Lisbon sisters living a suffocating half-life at the hands of their overly protective and religious parents. The story is told through the eyes of the neighbourhood boys who longed for them from a distance and learned about who they were through snatched telephone calls, passed notes and one tragic suburban basement party.

35. Time’s Convert / Deborah Harkness

This is a supernatural fantasy novel that takes place in the same universe of witches, vampires and daemons as Harkness’ All Souls trilogy. The plot follows the romance between centuries-old vampire Marcus, who came of age during the American Civil War, and human Phoebe, who begins her own transformation into a vampire so that she and Marcus can be together forever.

36. The Saturday Night Ghost Club / Craig Davidson

Were you a fan of the TV show “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” If yes, this novel is for you. Davidson explores the blurred line between real-life tragedy and ghost story over the course of one summer in 1980s Niagara Falls. A coming-of-age novel that’s somehow sweet, funny and sad all at once, this story delves into the aftershocks of trauma and the way we heal the cracks in families.

37. Oh Crap! Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do It Once and Do It Right / Jamie Glowacki

I hoped this was the book for us, but I don’t think it was. Some of the tips were great, but others really didn’t work for us. The other issue is that the technique in this book is much better suited to kids staying at home with a caregiver, not kids in daycare.

38. The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One / Amanda Lovelace

This is a collection of poetry about women’s anger, women’s long memories and strength in sisterhood. It’s accessible, emotional and a bit of a feminist rallying cry. As someone who is obsessed with the Salem witch trials, I also loved the historical backdrop to the poems.

39. The Rules of Magic / Alice Hoffman

I love to read seasonally, and this prequel to “Practical Magic” was a perfect October book. Remember Jet and Franny, the old, quirky aunts from the movie? This novel describes their upbringing, along with that of their brother Vincent, as the three siblings discover their powers and try to out-maneuver the Owens family curse.

40. Witch: Unleased. Untamed. Unapologetic. / Lisa Lister

This book has a very sleek, appealing cover. Holding it made me feel magical. Reading it really disappointed me. From Lister’s almost outright transphobia to her unedited, repetitive style, this was a huge disappointment and I don’t recommend it.

41. The Death of Mrs. Westaway / Ruth Ware

I liked this novel a lot more than Ware’s other novel, “The Woman in Cabin 10”. Crumbling English manor homes, long-buried family evils and people trapped together by snowstorms are my jam.

42. Weirdo / Cathi Unsworth

Another British seaside town, another grisly murder. Jumping back and forth between a modern-day private investigation and the parental panic around cults and Satanism in the 1980s, Unsworth unpacks the darkness lurking within a small community and the way society’s outcasts are often used as scapegoats. The creep factor grows as the story unfolds.

43. Mabon: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Autumn Equinox / Diana Rajchel

And so begins my witchy education. I have to admit, I really liked learning about the historical pagan celebrations and superstitions surrounding harvest time. I also liked reading about spells and incantations… ooooOOOOoooo!

44. From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death / Caitlin Doughty

In North America, we are so removed from death that we are unequipped to process it when someone close to us dies. But this doesn’t have to be the case. In this non-fiction account, Doughty, a mortician based in L.A., travels the world learning about the business of death, the cultural customs around mortality, and the rituals of care and compassion for the deceased in ten different places. It seems that the closer we are to death, the less we’ll fear it, and the better-equipped we’ll be to process loss and grief in healthy ways.

45. Samhain: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for Halloween / Diana Rajchel

Did you know that Samhain is actually pronounced “Sow-en”? I didn’t until I read this book, and felt very intelligent indeed, when later, while watching “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” on Netflix, the head witch pronounced the word as “Sam-hain”, destroying the writers’ credibility in one instant. I am a witch now.

46. See What I Have Done / Sarah Schmidt

This novel is a retelling of the Lizzie Borden murders, illuminated through four characters – Lizzie herself, the Borden’s maid Bridget, Lizzie’s sister, and a mysterious man hired the day before the murders by Lizzie’s uncle to intimidate Mr. Borden (one of the murder victims). I knew very little about the murders before reading this book, but this version of the tale strongly suggests that Lizzie really is the murderer. Unhinged, childlike, selfish and manipulative, I hated her so much and felt awful for everyone that had to live in her orbit.

47. The Nature of the Beast / Louise Penny

In the 11th installment of Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series, she sets the story up with a parallel to the boy who cried wolf and introduces us to her first killer without a soul. Crimes of passion and greed abound in Penny’s universe, but a crime of pure, cold evil? This is a first.

48. How Are You Going to Save Yourself? / J.M. Holmes

This is a powerful collection of short stories about what it’s like to be a Black man in America right now. It’s about Black male friendship, fathers and sons, outright racism and dealing with a lifetime of microaggressions. Holmes makes some risky and bold decisions with his characters, even playing into some of the harmful stereotypes about Black men while subverting some of the others. This book really stayed with me. One disturbing story in particular I kept turning around and around in my mind for days afterward.

49. Split Tooth / Tanya Tagaq

This is a beautiful story about a young Inuit girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s, combining gritty anecdotes about bullying, friendship, family and addiction with Inuit myth, legend, and the magic of the Arctic. The most evocative and otherworldly scenes in the novel took place under the Northern Lights and left me kind of mesmerized.

50. Motherhood / Sheila Heti

Heti’s book is a work of fiction styled as a memoir, during which the protagonist, nearing her 40s, weighs the pros and cons of having a baby. I’ve maybe never felt so “seen” by an author before. I agonized over the decision about whether to have a baby for years before finally making a decision. The unsatisfying, but freeing conclusion that both the author and I came to is that for many of us there is no right choice (but no wrong choice either).

51. The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories / P.D. James

This is a short collection of James’ four “Christmas-y” mysteries published over the course of a number of years. It was a perfect cozy read to welcome the holiday season.

52. The Christmas Sisters / Sarah Morgan

Morgan’s story is a Hallmark holiday movie in book form. A family experiencing emotional turmoil at Christmas? Check. Predictable romances, old and new? Check. A beautiful, festive setting? Check. (In this case, it’s a rustic inn nestled in the Scottish Highlands). This novel is fluff, but the most delightful kind.

53. Jonny Appleseed / Joshua Whitehead

Jonny is a Two-Spirit Ojibway-Cree person who leaves the reservation in his early 20s to escape his community’s homophobia and make it in the city. Making ends meet as a cybersex worker, the action begins when he has to scrape together enough cash to make it home to the “rez” (and all the loose ends he left behind there) for a funeral. The emotional heart of the novel are Jonny’s relationships with his kokum (grandmother) and his best friend / part-time lover Tias.

54. Yule: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Winter Solstice / Susan Pesznecker

Do you folks believe that I’m a witch now? I am, okay? I even spoke an incantation to Old Mother Winter while staring into the flame of a candle after reading this book.

55. Half Spent Was the Night: A Witches’ Yuletide / Ami McKay

Old-timey witches? At Christmas time? At an elaborate New Year’s Eve masked ball? Be still my heart. This novella was just what I wanted to read in those lost days between Christmas and New Year’s. You’ll appreciate it even more if you’ve already read Ami McKay’s previous novel “The Witches of New York”, as it features the same characters.

#50BookPledge 50BookChallenge

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chicana-domesticviolence-blog · 7 years

Link

(CNN)For 12 years Adelma Cifuentes felt worthless, frightened and alone, never knowing when her abusive husband would strike.But as a young mother in rural Guatemala with three children and barely a third grade education, she thought there was no way out.

What began as psychological torment, name-calling and humiliation turned into beatings so severe Cifuentes feared for her life. One day, two men sent by her husband showed up at her house armed with a shotgun and orders to kill her. They probably would have succeeded, but after the first bullet was fired, Cifuentes' two sons dragged her inside. Still, in her deeply conservative community, it took neighbors two hours to call for help and Cifuentes lost her arm.But the abuse didn't stop there. When she returned home, Cifuentes' husband continued his attacks and threatened to rape their little girl unless she left. That's when the nightmare finally ended and her search for justice began.

Guatamala's past still haunts

Cifuentes' case is dramatic, but in Guatemala, where nearly 10 out of every 100,000 women are killed, it's hardly unusual.

A 2012 Small Arms Survey says gender-based violence is at epidemic levels in Guatemala and the country ranks third in the killings of women worldwide. According to the United Nations, two women are killed there every day.There are many reasons why, beginning with the legacy of violence left in place after the country's 36-year-old civil war. During the conflict, atrocities were committed against women, who were used as a weapon of war. In 1996, a ceasefire agreement was reached between insurgents and the government. But what followed and what remains is a climate of terror, due to a deeply entrenched culture of impunity and discrimination. Military and paramilitary groups that committed barbaric acts during the war were integrated back into society without any repercussions. Many remain in power, and they have not changed the way they view women.Some 200,000 people were either killed or disappeared during the decades-long conflict, most of them from indigenous Mayan populations. Nearly 20 years later, according to the Security Sector Reform Resource Centre, levels of violent crime are higher in Guatemala than they were during the war. But despite the high homicide rate, the United Nations estimates 98% of cases never make it to court. Women are particularly vulnerable because of a deep-rooted gender bias and culture of misogyny. In many cases, femicide -- the killing of a woman simply because of her gender -- is carried out with shocking brutality with some of the same strategies used during the war, including rape, torture and mutilation.

Explosion in violence

Mexican drug cartels, organized criminal groups and local gangs are contributing to the vicious cycle of violence and lawlessness. Authorities investigating drug-related killings are stretched thin, leaving fewer resources to investigate femicides. In many cases, crime is not reported because of fear of retaliation. Many consider the Guatamalen National Civil Police, or PNC, corrupt, under-resourced and ineffective. Even if a case does get prosecuted, according to Human Rights Watch, the country's weak judicial system has proved incapable of handling the explosion in violence.

Prevailing culture of machismo

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing women in Guatemala is the country's deeply rooted patriarchal society.According to María Machicado Terán, the representative of U.N. women in Guatemala, "80% of men believe that women need permission to leave the house, and 70% of women surveyed agreed." This prevailing culture of machismo and an institutionalized acceptance of brutality against women leads to high rates of violence. Rights groups say machismo not only condones violence, it places the blame on the victim.

The political will to address violence against women is slow to materialize."Politicians don't think women are important," says former Secretary General of the Presidential Secretariat for Women Elizabeth Quiroa. "Political parties use women for elections. They give them a bag of food and people sell their dignity for this because they are poor."Lack of education is a major contributor to this poverty. Many girls, especially in indigenous communities don't go to school because the distance from their house to the classroom is too far.Quiroa says "They are subject to rape, violence and forced participation in the drug trade."

Signs of progress

Although the situation for girls and women in Guatemala is alarming, there are signs the culture of discrimination may be slowly changing. With the help of an organization known as CICAM, or Centro de Investigación, Cifuentes was finally able to escape her husband and get the justice she deserved. He is now spending 27 years behind bars.Cifuentes is using her painful past to provide hope and healing to others through art.Since 2008, she and four other abuse survivors known as La Poderosas, or "The Powerful," have been appearing in a play based on their real life stories.

Five Guatemalan abuse survivors known as La Poderosas or "The Powerful" share their stories and help other women get support.

The show not only empowers other women and discusses the problem of violence openly, but it also offers suggestions for change. And it's having an impact. Women have started breaking their silence and asking where they can get support. Men are reacting, too. One of the main characters, Lesbia Téllez, says during one presentation, a man stood up and started crying when he realized how he had treated his wife and how his mother had been treated. He said he wanted to be different.The taboo topic of gender-based violence is also being acknowledged and recognized in a popular program targeting one of Guatemala's most vulnerable groups, indigenous Mayan girls. In 2004, with help from the United Nations and other organizations, the Population Council launched a community-based club known as Abriendo Oportunidades, or "Opening Opportunities". The goal is to provide girls with a safe place to learn about their rights and reach their full potential.Senior Program Coordinator Alejandra Colom says the issue of violence is discussed and girls are taught how to protect themselves. "They then share this information with their mothers and for the first time, they realize they are entitled to certain rights."Colom adds that mothers then become invested in sending their daughters to the clubs and this keeps them more visible and less prone to violence.The Guatemalan government is also moving in the right direction to address the problem of violence against women. In 2008, the Congress passed a law against femicide. Two years later the attorney general's office created a specialized court to try femicides and other violent crimes against women. In 2012, the government established a joint task force for crimes against women, making it easier for women to access justice by making sure victims receive the assistance they need. The government has also established a special 24-hour court to attend to femicide cases. On the global front, the International Violence Against Women Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress in 2007; it has been pending ever since. But last week the act was reintroduced in both the House and Senate. If approved, it would make reducing levels of gender-based violence a U.S. foreign policy priority.Pehaps the most immediate and effective help is coming from International nongovernmental organizations, which are on the front lines of the fight against gender-based discrimination in Guatemala.

Adelma Cifuentes shares her story to empower women and bring about awareness of Guatemala's history of gender-based violence.

Ben Weingrod, a senior policy advocate at the global poverty fighting group CARE, says, "We work to identify and challenge harmful social norms that perpetuate violence. Our work includes engaging men and boys as champions of change and role models, and facilitating debates to change harmful norms and create space for more equitable relationships between men and women."But the job is far from over. While there is tempered optimism and hope for change, the problem of gender-based violence in Guatemala is one that needs international attention and immediate action.Cifuentes is finding strength through the theater and the support of other abuse survivors, which has allowed her to move forward. But millions of other women trapped in a cycle of violence are facing dangerous and frightening futures. For them, it's a race against time and help cannot come soon enough.

#guatemala #domestic violence

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mydeepestdark · 7 years

Text

Why I don’t do religion.

If you are offended by Atheism you shouldn’t read this.

I respect your right to religious belief and I will defend your right to believe anything that doesn’t hurt other people. But I do not believe in a god and that’s not going to change.

At the age of 9, I started refusing to sing hymns at school. I clearly remember being berated for it, and I also remember my Islamic and Hindu friends singing along because they didn’t want to be told off. This in a country which is supposedly multi-cultural.

At the age of 9 I knew that despite my mothers Protestantism, I would never believe in a deity. In my teens I experimented with Paganism, because my great aunt was a fortune teller and it seemed cool. I grew out of that by my early 20′s. I can still give you a cold reading if you want one, but It’s based on psychology, visual signals and statistical probability, there’s nothing mystical about it.

Religion is pushed on our children and they learn to doubt their ability to make moral decisions for themselves. My younger sister was forced to attend church services in order to remain in the ‘Brownies’ with her friends.

By the time I married at 21 I had no belief in anything. I became briefly reacquainted with Paganism while mentally ill and searching for something to depend on in my early 30′s. After therapy and medication I again lost all belief in anything beyond science. I have remained an Atheist and see no possibility that that will change.

When I die I will cease to exist and how my family and friends choose to deal with that, and which religion or medication they use to cope will be irrelevant. I will no longer exist beyond their memories. That doesn’t depress me, decomposing back into my constituent elements and helping the grass to grow will be the only truly natural thing I ever do.

I know exactly what triggered my Atheism. I was cast in the school nativity, and decided to read the new testament. I was a bookish child, I read far beyond the recommended level for my age, I knew how to use a library and my Grandparents had a full set of old fashioned encyclopedias. I read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then I moved on to a children’s history book, and when I wanted more information I looked in the encyclopedias.

I discovered the Reformation, the Crusades, The inquisition, the destruction of the Mayan and Inca civilizations, and the huge variety of religions that our school system doesn’t mention and I decided that people are disgusting and there is no god.

I have read religious texts from a variety of religions, and I see no reason to follow any of them. The only thing that stands out is that there are always people who will warp the meaning for their own gain.

The Middle East and it’s cultures have been under attack by ‘Christians’ for nearly 2000 years. In fact, greedy men have been invading, pillaging and destroying any culture that had resources they coveted for all of recorded history. It didn’t start with America, It started before ‘Christians’ invaded America and attempted to rob and wipe out the indigenous peoples.

The Crusades of the Middle Ages, led by European kings, were glorified raids to steal religious relics and saleable items from the Middle East, and to annex territory the Papacy wanted for itself. 11th century propaganda told the ‘Christian’ population of Europe that they had to invade the Holy Land because Islam would cause the apocalypse. Every war ever started has done so at the hands of money grabbing, land grabbing and covetous men.

Before the Normans invaded the British Isles, the Danes had invaded and imposed their beliefs and rule. Before the Danes came the Romans. They all wanted land and precious metals, forcing religion on the indigenous population provided control and income from taxes.

So many rich, peaceful cultures have been suppressed and subjugated by violence and greed masquerading as religious superiority.

When trade fails to make greedy men richer, they take an army and invade. They suppress indigenous culture, they steal material wealth. It was happening before the rise of Rome, and it will keep happening, because we are essentially a bunch of greedy, self important apes that provide no ecological benefit to the planet beyond decomposition, and are too wrapped up in out own delusion of importance to stop hurting each other.

There is no god, if there were they’d have put an end to the failed experiment of humanity long ago and let the planet recover from the infestation that is us.

I don’t walk around in a constant fugue of misery. I can appreciate art, beauty, nature, but I can also clearly see that we will always destroy more that we create and you have to grab what joy you can and fight for your right to create as you see fit; Because there will always be a greedy man who wants to take what little you have and add it to the pile of things he doesn’t need.

#atheist #people suck #humans are pointless #enjoy it while you can #greed

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endlessinterior · 7 years

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The Ideology of Isolation By Rebecca Solnit

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. Taken to its conclusion, this worldview dictates that even facts are freestanding items that the self-made man can manufacture for use as he sees fit.

This is the modern ideology we still call conservative, though it is really a sort of loopy libertarianism that inverts some of the milder propositions of earlier conservative thinkers. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in 1987. The rest of her famous remark is less frequently quoted:

There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

Throughout that interview with Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher walked the line between old-school conservatism — we are all connected in a delicate tapestry that too much government meddling might tear — and the newer version: “Too many children and people have been given to understand, ‘I have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.’ ” At some point in the decades since, the balance tipped definitively from “government aid should not replace social connections” to “to hell with others and their problems.” Or as the cowboy sings to the calf, “It’s your misfortune / And none of my own.”

The cowboy is the American embodiment of this ideology of isolation, though the archetype of the self-reliant individual — like the contemporary right-wing obsession with guns — has its roots less in actual American history than in the imagined history of Cold War–era westerns. The American West was indigenous land given to settlers by the U.S. government and cleared for them by the U.S. Army, crisscrossed by government-subsidized railroads and full of water projects and other enormous cooperative enterprises. All this has very little to do with Shane and the sheriff in High Noon and the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western trilogy. But never mind that, because a cowboy silhouetted against a sunset looks so good, whether he’s Ronald Reagan or the Marlboro Man. The loner taketh not, nor does he give; he scorneth the social and relies on himself alone.

Himself. Women, in this mode of thinking, are too interactive, in their tendency to gather and ally rather than fight or flee, and in their fluid boundaries. In fact, what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform — the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular and sexuality in general — is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.

Justice Clarence Thomas’s first public questions after a decade of silence during oral arguments at the Supreme Court came this February, when he took an intense interest in whether barring those convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from owning guns violated their constitutional rights. That there is a constitutional right for individuals to own guns is a gift of Antonin Scalia’s radically revisionist interpretation of the Second Amendment, and it’s propped up on the cowboy ethos in which guns are incredibly useful for defending oneself from bad guys, and one’s right to send out bullets trumps the right of others not to receive them. Pesky facts demonstrate that very few people in this country successfully use guns to defend themselves from bad people — unless you count the nearly two thirds of American gun deaths that are suicides as a sad and peculiar form of self-defense. The ideologues of isolation aren’t interested in those facts, or in the fact that the majority of women murdered by intimate partners in the United States are killed with guns.

But I was talking about cowboys. In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins describes how westerns valued deeds over words, a tight-lipped version of masculinity over communicative femininity, and concludes:

Not speaking demonstrates control not only over feelings but over one’s physical boundaries as well. The male . . . maintains the integrity of the boundary that divides him from the world. (It is fitting that in the Western the ultimate loss of that control takes place when one man puts holes in another man’s body.)

Fear of penetration and the fantasy of impenetrable isolation are central to both homophobia and the xenophobic mania for “sealing the border.” In other words, isolation is good, freedom is disconnection, and good fences, especially on the U.S.–Mexico border, make good neighbors.

Both Mitt Romney and Donald Trump have marketed themselves as self-made men, as lone cowboys out on the prairie of the free market, though both were born rich. Romney, in a clandestinely videotaped talk to his wealthy donors in 2012, disparaged people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

Taxes represent connection: what we each give to the collective good. This particular form of shared interest has been framed as a form of oppression for more than three decades, at least since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, bemoaned a “tax system which penalizes successful achievement.”

The spread of this right-wing hatred of taxes has been helped along by the pretense that taxes go to loafers and welfare queens who offend the conservative idea of independence, rather than to things conservatives like (notably, a military that dwarfs all others) or systems that everyone needs (notably, roads and bridges).

I ran into this hatred for dependency in an online discussion of the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco in April. More than a hundred messages into a fairly civil discourse started by a witness to the shooting, a commenter erupted,

I’m sick of people like you that think homeless people who can’t take care of themselves and their families have left them for us taxpaying citizens to care for think they have freedom. Once you can’t take care of or support yourself, and expect others to carry your burden, you have lost freedom. Wake up.

The same commenter later elaborated, “Have you ever owed money? Freedom lost. You owe someone. It’s called personal responsibility.”

Everyone on that neighborhood forum, including the writer, likely owed rent to a landlord or mortgage payments to a bank, making them more indebted than the homeless in their tents. If you’re housed in any American city, you also benefit from a host of services, such as water and sanitation and the organizations overseeing them, as well as from traffic lights and transit rules and building codes — the kind of stuff taxes pay for. But if you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone.

All this would have made that commenter’s tirade incoherent, if its points weren’t so familiar. This is the rhetoric of modern conservatives: freedom is a luxury that wealth affords you; wealth comes from work; those who don’t work, never mind the cause, are undeserving. If freedom and independence are the ideal, dependence is not merely disdained; it’s furiously loathed. In her novelistic paean to free enterprise Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand called dependents parasites and looters. “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency,” said one of Rand’s admirers, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the man lately charged with saving the soul of conservatism from Trumpist apostasy.

The modern right may wish that every man were an island, entire of himself, but no one is wholly independent. You can’t survive without taking air into your lungs, you didn’t give birth to or raise yourself, you won’t bury yourself, and in between you won’t produce most of the goods and services you depend on to live. Your gut is full of microorganisms, without which you could not digest all the plants and animals, likely grown by other people, on which you rely to survive. We are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.

There is, of course, such a thing as society, and you’re inside it. Beyond that, beneath it and above and around and within it and us, there is such a thing as ecology, the systems within which our social systems exist, and with which it often clashes.

Ecological thinking articulates the interdependence and interconnectedness of all things. This can be a beautiful dream of symbiosis when you’re talking about how, say, a particular species of yucca depends on a particular moth to pollinate it, and how the larvae of that moth depend on the seeds of that yucca for their first meals. Or it can be a nightmare when it comes to how toxic polychlorinated biphenyls found their way to the Arctic, where they concentrated in human breast milk and in top-of-the-food-chain carnivores such as polar bears. John Muir, wandering in the Yosemite in 1869, put it this way: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

This traditional worldview — for a long time, it was called conservative, and stood in contrast to liberal individualism — could be seen as mystical or spiritual, but the accuracy of its description of natural systems within what we now call the biosphere is borne out by modern science. If you kill off the wolves in Yellowstone, elk populations will explode and many other plant and animal species will suffer; if you spray DDT on crops, then the stuff does the job you intended of killing off pests, but it will also, as Rachel Carson told us in 1962, kill the birds who would otherwise keep many insects and rodents in check.

All this causes great trouble for the ideology of isolation. It interferes with the right to maximum individual freedom, a freedom not to be bothered by others’ needs. Which is why modern conservatives so insistently deny the realities of ecological interconnectedness, refusing to recognize that when you add something to or remove an element from an environment, you alter the whole in ways that may come back to bite you. The usual argument in defense of this pesticide or that oil platform is that impact does not spread, that the item in question does not become part of a far-reaching system, and sometimes — often, nowadays — that that far-reaching system does not itself exist.

No problem more clearly demonstrates the folly of individualist thinking — or more clearly calls for a systematic response — than climate change. The ideologues of isolation are doubly challenged by this fact. They reject the proposed solutions to climate change, because they bristle at the need for limits on production and consumption, for regulation, for cooperation between industry and government, and for international partnership. In 2011, Naomi Klein attended a meeting at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank, and produced a landmark essay about why conservatives are so furiously opposed to doing anything about climate change. She quotes a man from the Competitive Enterprise Institute who declared, “No free society would do to itself what this agenda requires. . . . The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.” “Most of all, however,” she reported, “I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.”

On a more fundamental level, the very idea of climate change is offensive to isolationists, because it tells us more powerfully and urgently than anything ever has that everything is connected, that nothing exists in isolation. What comes out of your tailpipe or your smokestack or your leaky fracking site contributes to the changing mix of the atmosphere, where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cause the earth to retain more of the heat that comes from the sun, which doesn’t just result in what we used to call global warming, but will lead to climate chaos.

As the fact of climate change has become more and more difficult to deny, the ideologues of isolation deny instead our responsibility for the problem and the possibility that we are capable of acting collectively to do anything about it. “Climate change occurs no matter what,” Paul Ryan said a few years ago. “The question is, can and should the federal government do something about it? And I would argue the federal government, with all its tax and regulatory schemes, can’t.” Of course it can, but he prefers that it not do so, which is why he denies human impact as a cause and human solutions as a treatment.

What keeps the ideology of isolation going is going to extremes. If you begin by denying social and ecological systems, then you end in denying the reality of facts, which are after all part of a network of systematic relationships between language, physical reality, and the record, regulated by the rules of evidence, truth, grammar, word meaning, and so forth. You deny the relationship between cause and effect, evidence and conclusion, or rather you imagine both as products on the free market, which one can produce and consume according to one’s preferences. You deregulate meaning.

Absolute freedom means you can have any truth that you like, and isolation’s ideologues like truths that keep free-market fundamentalism going. You can be like that unnamed senior adviser (probably Karl Rove), who in a mad moment of Bush-era triumphalism told Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Reality, in this worldview, is a product subject to market rules or military rules, and if you are dominant in the marketplace or rule the empire, your reality can push aside the other options. “Freedom” is just another word for nothing left to limit your options. And this is how the ideology of isolation becomes nihilism, trying to kill the planet and most living things on it with the confidence born of total disconnection.

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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When Syrian painter Aziz Asmar saw the video showing the dying moments of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the violence felt close to home even if it happened 6,000 miles away. To Asmar, the handcuffed, unarmed black man pleading that he couldn’t breathe as a white police officer knelt on his neck, resurfaced painful memories of what he and other Syrians witnessed three years ago after dictator Bashar al Assad attacked civilians with sarin gas in the suburb of Eastern Ghouta.

“In those hospitals, the victims were crying and they were asking to breathe,” Asmar tells TIME via an interpreter, from the town of Binnish in northwest Syria. “I saw George Floyd pleading with the officer to let him breathe and it reminded me of the way they were killed.”

Asmar, who runs art workshops for children in Idlib, Syria’s last rebel-held enclave, expressed his pain the best way he knew. On the remnants of what he says was a family’s kitchen before regime airstrikes ripped through the building, Asmar and two friends painted an eight-foot-high mural to show solidarity with those grieving in the United States. It features Floyd’s face, appended with the words: “I can’t breathe.”

Those words have become a constant refrain at protests across the U.S., where many demonstrators see the killing of Floyd as emblematic of police brutality and systematic racism. At parallel rallies in Paris, London, Berlin and elsewhere, protesters have expressed solidarity with victims of police brutality in America, while calling attention to racism in their own countries. Floyd’s last words have also inspired myriad expressions of art, from the painting by artist Titus Kapher that appears on the cover of this week’s TIME magazine, to the graffiti featuring Floyd’s face on walls as far afield as Kenya, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Northern Ireland. In Syria, where the vivid colors of Asmar’s mural contrast the sun-bleached rubble and twisted rebar of devastated homes, the work seems especially poignant.

“Syrians, especially in Idlib, have a history of showing solidarity with injustices around the world,” says Raja Althaibani, who directs the Middle East and North Africa program at human rights organization Witness. Established after VHS footage of Los Angeles police beating Rodney King alerted many to systemic racism in the U.S., Witness trains citizen journalists in America, Syria and other countries to safely document war crimes and human rights violations. That Syrians like Asmar are raising their voices in support of injustice in the U.S., says Althaibani, “sends a powerful message to a world that has largely neglected Syria.”

A decade ago, Idlib would have seemed a strange place for the Syrian revolution’s last stand. A mainly rural province known for its olive groves and wheat fields, some of Idlib’s towns and villages were among the first to protest against the Assad regime in 2011, But uprisings across the country soon forced the dictator to divert his security forces to major urban centers, leaving Idlib a comparative bastion of freedom.

Today, it is the last major rebel-held territory in Syria. Although increasingly squeezed by jihadist groups and Assad’s Russia-backed advance, Idlib’s relative freedom has fomented a vibrant art and music culture. For Asmar, that culture has been integral to asserting the humanity of the province’s 3 million people and countering Russian and regime propaganda.

“We’re trying to show that despite being bombed and losing people, and then being called terrorists, we still feel empathy. We still feel for people like George Floyd, who are being oppressed in other parts of the world,” he says.

It’s not the first mural he’s painted. An earlier work depicts journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in 2018 by a hit squad inside Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Istanbul. More recent work encourages people in Idlib to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. “As activists, and as artists, we want to make it clear that we’re civilians, we denounce violence and we have a right to live with dignity,” he says.

Space for Syrians to live with dignity has diminished. In March, government forces retook the town of Kafranbel, an Idlib holdout especially associated with revolutionary art. Kafranbel’s protest banners—which displayed angry, witty and often heartbreaking rebukes to the regime—garnered global attention even as they mocked the international community’s silence on Syria. One of the driving forces behind the banners, prominent citizen journalist Raed Fares, was shot dead outside his home in 2018. Kafranbel’s fall to the regime came months after Assad launched an offensive to consolidate control of Syria. It forced up to a million Syrians into makeshift camps near Turkey’s southwestern border and decimated the already threadbare healthcare system in a region human rights groups warn could be devastated by COVID-19.

Since the war began in 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, more than 5 million have fled the country, and more than 6 million have been displaced in the country.

Not all of the artwork referencing Black Lives Matter has garnered an unequivocally positive response from activists. When Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, had city workers paint “Black Lives Matter” in giant yellow letters on one of the main thoroughfares in the nation’s capital, some regarded it as a powerful message of support blocks away from a White House critics say has stoked division in America. But Black Lives Matter’s D.C. chapter, which is calling for police to be defunded, described the street painting as a “performative distraction from real policy changes” designed to “appease white liberals.”

Comparisons between oppression in the U.S. and in other countries, can also draw complex responses. After Floyd’s killing, Jordan-based Palestinian artist Lina Abojaradeh produced a work showing a police officer’s leg inscribed with the words “white supremacy” kneeling on the necks of a black man, an indigenous American woman and a Palestinian. Two days after she shared the drawing on social media, Israeli police shot dead an unarmed Palestinian named Iyad Halak. Halak, who was autistic, was reportedly on his way to a Jerusalem school for students with special needs.

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#TOwardTOmorrow @toward.2030 #SDG10 #SDG16 (This is made for Sdg16) This drawing is my way of calling out against Inequalities, as well as demanding a future that holds Peace, Justice and Strong institutions. I challenge Ahmad, Janna and Bayan to join this art challenge. As an artist and activist, I had to draw something in response to the murder of George Floyd. I stayed up all night to finish this, and couldn't help but think of how connected different forms of oppression are. The black man choked to death, the Palestinian worshipper being imprisoned, the indeginous native women facing violence… It is all rooted in the settler colonialism mentality, and in the deeply systematized belief of the supremacy of one race over another. I wanted this drawing to convey power, and so the fisted hands symbolize our fight for every single lost live in this war against oppression. #BLACKLIVESMATTER #FreePalestine #NativeLivesMatter #PoliceBrutality #Occupation #ICantBreathe #GeorgeFloyd #activism #blacklivesmatter #policebrutality #supremacy #racism

A post shared by Lina Abojaradeh (@linaab244) on May 28, 2020 at 10:30am PDT

In an interview with UAE newspaper The National, Abojaradeh said that although her work had generally been well-received, some had criticized it for drawing parallels they claimed belittle the suffering of Palestinians living under occupation. But in both cases, the oppression is rooted in white supremacy and colonialism, Abojaradeh told The National, and “standing up for one type of injustice is also standing up for every type of injustice.”

Asmar too, says there are important differences between the experience of black people in America and the experience of Syrians in Idlib, but he wants to oppose oppression and show solidarity with the oppressed.

It’s a solidarity that isn’t always reciprocated. Although Russia and Turkey, which backs some of Idlib’s rebel groups, agreed to a fragile ceasefire in March, Asmar says that from his home in Binnish he can see fields on fire after being hit by airstrikes. When those airstrikes target crowded markets or hospitals, “the world is silent and we don’t understand why,” he tells TIME. “What about the futures of our children? Don’t you think they also have rights?”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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cutsliceddiced · 4 years

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New top story from Time: In Solidarity and as a Symbol of Global Injustices, a Syrian Artist Painted a Mural to George Floyd on a Bombed Idlib Building

Since the war began in 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, more than 5 million have fled the country, and more than 6 million have been displaced in the country.

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A post shared by Lina Abojaradeh (@linaab244) on May 28, 2020 at 10:30am PDT

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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