In the New York Times today, the opening of the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. was covered. This article contains the following quotes:

On Monday, hundreds of people already were milling about the museum to get an early peek. “At last we’re getting some kind of recognition as Indian people,” said Lawrence Orcutt, from the Yurok tribe in northern California.

Dave Anderson, who heads the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said the museum will allow Indians to open a new chapter in the United States.

“I look at this whole museum opening as an opportunity for healing, for optimism,” he said.

It’s correct that the Museum reflects a new recognition of Native Americans and that it celebrates the life and culture of many native tribes. However, the idea that this museum opening somehow heralds a “new chapter in the United States” for Native Americans is, to put it bluntly, historically impossible and preposterous. While I, for one, would certainly embrace such a change wholeheartedly, presenting this event as a cataclysm for future changes is stretching the idea of presenting the history of Native American tribes.

Quoting Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States:

In 1969, November 9, there took place a dramatic event which focused attention on Indian grievances as nothing else had. It burst through the invisibility of previous local Indian protests and declared to the entire world that the Indians still lived and would fight for their rights. On that day, before dawn, seventy-eight Indians landed on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and occupied the island . . . They said:

We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian reservation, as determined by the white man’s own standards. By this we mean that this place resembles most Indian reservations in that:

1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.
2. It has no fresh running water.
3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities.
4. There are no oil or mineral rights.
5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great.
6. There are no health care facilities.
7. The soil is rocky and non-productive; and the land does not support game.
8. There are no educational facilities.
9. The population has always exceeded the land base.
10. The population has always been held as prisoners and dependent upon others.

— page 529-530

The United States has continued to deny the rights of Native American tribes in the practice of tribal and religious ceremonies, and has shoehorned them onto reservations and off of what whites consider “our land” since colonial times. This shoehorning has led to a massive loss of rights for Native Americans; in addition to the grievances listed above from the occupation of Alcatraz, the white man has made attempts (admittedly much earlier in history, but it continues today) to re-educate Native Americans into our own way of life.

We cannot declare a new age for Native Americans until we abolish reservations, allow Native Americans as much freedom as whites have continually been entitled to, and issue some form of apology on behalf of the United States for the oppression and subjugation of an entire way of life. Coincidentally, the same probably holds for blacks, and possibly Americans of Japanese descent who were put into concentration camps during World War II.

To quote Mr. William Falk’s article in the New York Times today, “That Wasn’t the Week That Was“:

IN DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE, PART II Representative Edward Schrock, Republican of Virginia, abandoned his bid for re-election, after a Web log claimed he had sought sex with other men through a phone service. Mr. Schrock, who is married, has co-sponsored a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and has advocated barring homosexuals from military service. (Mr. Schrock is a retired Navy officer.) The Web log, Blogactive.com, has vowed to reveal the identities of lawmakers who are gay and support anti-homosexual legislation. An aide said Mr. Schrock was not gay, but that he wouldn’t run because the accusations had called into question his ability to represent his constituents.

While I may not agree with what Mr. Schrock supports, this is downright disappointing when people take it upon themselves to upend the private lives of politicians in order to reveal something as inconsequential as whether they’re gay or straight. Albeit that this would reveal a very basic contradiction in Mr. Schrock’s policies, the mere accusation alone is obviously enough to cripple a political career. If those types of accusations call into question anyone’s ability to represent their constituents, what would happen if the same site started indicting other heterosexual politicians? For that matter, what would happen if politicians were found to be bisexual? Is that somehow less repulsive than homosexuality?

As for the issues that Mr. Schrock supports, I have already stated my opposition to a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I have not, however, stated my opposition to banning homosexuals from military service. Liking your own gender in no way affects your ability to follow orders. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seems to be working just fine, and rules against dating people within your own unit to prevent any potentially disastrous relationships from forming would make a little more sense to me than banning the presence of gays in the military outright. We can support gays in the military without risking possibly dangerous outcomes that sprout from relationships inside a soldier’s own unit.

U.S. forces are being held at bay by Fundamentalists in Western Iraq, and the only thing I can think of saying here is: good! The fact is, active resistance is probably the only chance Iraq has of gaining any freedom from a U.S. agenda that includes and implicates the puppet regime currently in place. The U.S. agenda is the only driving force in Iraq today. That is, of course, why it’s called a puppet regime.

Never mind that this resistance is Fundamentalist, and some are loyal to the Hussein regime of old. At this point, anything works. The U.S. must withdraw, whether forcibly or otherwise, or we risk overextending ourselves (which we have, in fact, already done) and alienating more of the world than we have already. Our cries for assistance in Iraq are being met with deaf ears, and Iraqis have made it inordinately clear that they just wish we (the United States of America) would leave them alone.

While I question their tactics (“question” is really the wrong word here – beheadings are just plain Dark Ages cruel), I still maintain that the spirit, the goal, is correct. Find a less abhorrent way of dealing with it that doesn’t violate every shred of human rights law and invest in a little bit of Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, and this would go much smoother. While I advocate arresting and putting on trial those who would behead our troops and commit violence against U.S. military officers, I say again, the aim is correct, though wrongly implemented through violence towards those that are only following orders.

But then, that was the defense during the Nuremberg Trials.

It seems somewhat appropriate that the 100th entry on this blog deal with everyone’s best friend — Presidential elections and electoral politics! Well, okay, it seemed exciting when I put that exclamation point in there…

In the debate of George W. Bush against John Kerry, let me enumerate several reasons why Bush is not the right choice for me:

1. Bush has repeatedly lied to us in the war on terrorism, and continues his lies today even though he has clearly been proven wrong on matters of weapons of mass destruction and justifications for war. Not only that, they have covered up evidence that proves that Iraq has no WMDs — specifically, the Kay Report, written by David Kay on October 2, 2003. Only parts of this report have been declassified, but he writes:
   

   Information found to date suggests that Iraq’s large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW [chemical weapons] munitions was reduced — if not entirely destroyed — during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections . . . to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.

   — Quoted in Oil, Power, and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda
   ISBN 1-56751-246-1, p289
2. Bush has repeatedly turned down efforts to increase federal MPG standards on all cars in order to promote a cleaner environment. In addition, his most recent transportation package does very little for the environment itself.
3. Bush is responsible for smear campaigns against John Kerry, which, in my mind, is both unprofessional and unethical.

This is somewhat of a short list, but it gives you an idea of my objections. As for Kerry, since I don’t know much about him, it’s hard for me to really say much; however, I can give a list of my concerns for the next administration:

1. Federal environmental standards will continue to plummet and, due to our want for power over the international landscape, we will not take measures to decrease our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and will instead expand that campaign to overthrow countries that are not US-friendly, such as Syria and it’s client state, Lebanon.
2. No accountability will be afforded for the lies told to the American public during the ramp-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The materials that prove that Bush and party lied repeatedly to the public will be buried in favor of bipartisan amity.
3. No attempt will be made to allow a fair trial to Saddam Hussein, and much of the evidence that proves that he may not be as complicit in Iraq’s problems as this administration has suggested will never be released.
4. No effort will be made to recognize the independence of Kurdistan, in the northern regions of Iraq.
5. Efforts to privatize health care will not be made comprehensive enough to ensure that my generation can take advantage of the system. Social security will not be beefed up enough to allow the system to survive.
6. National security will still remain on the back burner; instead of focusing on our own borders, we continue to attempt to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, nations which have made it clear that they do not desire US help in governing their own countries.
7. The No Child Left Behind Act will continue to drag down schools in trying to comply with unreasonable guidelines and standards; rather than truly attempting to reform our educational system to be more sustainable, Americans will continue to accept the status quo.
8. Instead of tightening federal standards for cars — specifically the federal MPG requirements — they will instead be loosened, and no encouragement will be made to switch towards hybrid models or to make existing cars more efficient.

This is all, of course, a very short enumeration of the concerns and reasons driving my decisions in the upcoming primaries (both for the President and for Washington State itself). I invite comment on these — as you will note, comments are open for this post, but will close on September 3.

A good friend of mine wrote a post on gay marriage that seems to beg for reply. Well, he wanted it, here it is. Before I start in, however, I have to state that I am pro gay-marriage and don’t believe in the arguments presented below. These are presented here for clarification only.

The image of God is both male and female and is reflected in a godly union between male and female where the creative power of God, His life-giving, His self-giving and His moral nature are perfectly expressed. This is only possible in a heterosexual union.

When God created a partner for Adam He created Eve – not another Adam. This means that perfect partnership requires some level of difference as well as a level of similarity so great that Adam could cry out loudly, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”. Heterosexuality is the normal method of human bonding and the one for which our bodies and emotions are designed.

The argument here, clearly, is that if God had intended gay marriage to be a reality, He would have made it that way originally. Now, this is a Christian argument from the Bible, and several people take it literally, but it is only really one stance. From the Koran (Islam):

Whoever of you whose wife behaves in a disagreeable manner and he responds by kindness and patience, God will give him rewards as much as Job will be given for his patience.

The language alone would seem to imply an endorsement of male/female marriage.

In specific response to Sean, who writes:

If you answer my question above (“what’s wrong with…”) and you involve your religious convictions, don’t bother. This country, despite its Christian origins, was founded on the separation of Church and State – and that includes Christianity.

You are correct that it was founded on the separation of Church and State, but the fact is that there are some areas where that distinction blurs — marriage being one of them. The separation of Church and State is really more of a political separation to prevent the Church from influencing or interfering in governmental matters, by my understanding. The Church traditionally performs the marriage ceremony, but is given power by the State to make those marriages legal. Sadly, if the State refuses to recognize marriage (a la California), then the Church, while it can still perform said ceremonies (at least in theory), cannot make them valid in the eyes of the law. It’s the State that grants the rights that comes with marriage, not the Church. Thus, marriage licenses.

I would further add to Sean’s list of grievances the fact that Bush is advocating a possible Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (this may not be an addition, depending on what Sean meant when he said “Federal marriage amendment”). This sort of stuff doesn’t belong in the Bill of Rights, precisely because both that document and the Constitution never interfere with religious matters, and, in fact, guarantee religious freedom via the First Amendment. The Bill of Rights mostly concerns itself with matters of State — the right to vote, ending slavery, and assuring due process, to name a few. Gay marriage is not a matter of State, except that some politicians may choose to use it to get some more votes on their side. It is a matter of religion.

I invite rebuttal and comment on this via blogs — just send a trackback ping to this post when you do so.

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has begun a program that will issue discounts to protesters of the Republican Convention if they promise to protest peacefully. Interestingly, it offers discounts from a number of places in New York.

Let me tell you why this might not work.

While a protestor, let’s call her Jane, may buy into the mayor’s program for all the discounts, perhaps she unwittingly gets a little drunk that night, and the next morning when she goes out to protest, she’s a little hammered and forgets about the peaceful protest promise she made. Thus, she starts banging heads around, with no regard to some discount program she could care less about.

Okay, a little unrealistic, but you get the point – mob mentalities are such that you cannot predict whether someone who had previously promised to be peaceful will turn violent. It’s a basic element of psychology and well-documented: people tend to follow the actions of a larger group, and if that larger group is being violent, then the possibility is significantly higher that our dear Jane will be violent as well.

This may recall the Seattle WTO riots a few years ago — pretty much the exact same thing.

So, therefore, good effort, Mr. Bloomberg, but it may not stop violence.

It could be said that late night (or early morning, in this case) blog entries are inherently dangerous because you run the risk of being completely noncoherent. In my current state of wakefulness, I don’t seem to consider this a problem.

For some reason — perhaps because I was just now reading a portion of Orwell’s 1984, I began to think about fate. My belief in fate has always been hinged on a single premise: my own experience with recognizing events that couldn’t have occurred before. I call them “snapshots”. From time to time, I have an intuition that what I am seeing at that exact second is something I have seen before; not because it has happened, but because it has been presented to me. I know from past experience that I get images in my sleep from time to time that are predictive of an exact moment in the future. Back in 6th grade, I had at least one occasion where I knew I had seen a particular moment in a dream under a different context; it was a completely conscious recollection of the event. Since then, though, they have become more and more of a shock (or, perhaps more appropriately, a surprise).

It is from this that I believe that some parts of our lives are inherently predetermined. I don’t, however, believe that our path is rigidly defined; instead, I believe that specific points in time are rigidly defined, and that the space between those points is fluid and unpredictable. For me, these snapshots are always minor images, never major — holding a pencil a certain way while writing a specific word, for instance, or writing a particular e-mail regarding an issue that didn’t come up until minutes before I had the recollection. It’s always a little jarring and disorienting for just a second as the memory from my dream state snaps into place as a sort of overlay. For those proficient in graphics editing, it’s as if a hidden layer had just been rendered visible with unpredicted results. I have to wonder why these are always minor and never major events — a death, perhaps, or some life-defining instance. Perhaps it’s simply because life isn’t predominantly made up of life-defining moments in time; rather, it’s a jumble of events that are seemingly minor on the grand scale of things, composited into a life and making small adjustments in the flow of time.

I suppose that this would all depend on your outlook. Someone who is very literal minded (ironically, someone such as me) might think that you cannot see things before they happen, since each event is constructed out of the outcomes of thousands — millions, billions — of other events. Someone a little more creative might completely agree with me. It’s really more a subject for philosophers, but I like to philosophize on my own from time to time.

Well, you can probably file this under the who-gives-a-rats-patootie department: Bush and Kerry ride two different kinds of bikes, both expensive. Apparently, the New York Times has nothing better to report on.

Then again, nor do I.

The article makes the suggestion that the bikes that these two presidential candidates ride are indicative of some of their political strategies. The article states that “Mr. Bush likes to ride up into the hills of his Texas ranch and then come flying down”. There’s an easy parallel here — Bush was entirely working uphill to get a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting against the United Nations Security Council and others who weren’t in favor of it. When he finally started the war with Iraq, based on claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, he was flying high. His entire campaign for the war took a nose dive, however, when those claims failed to come true to date. This is only one example, which, I’m sure, could be attributed to his tax cuts, environmental policy, and any host of other things.

Note that I haven’t done this for Kerry. This isn’t because I support Kerry one way or another, but because I know nothing about him. Obviously, this makes it hard to draw parallels. Perhaps I should’ve watched his speech to the Democratic Convention in Boston a little more carefully. If someone who knows a lot about Kerry would like to try to draw parallels here, let me know.