Change is often painful.
So it was a good year, 2009, mostly for that is behind us – but also because it pushed us to change.
Yet it is at the end of the first decade of a new millenium and a possible cataclysmic century that we need to re-evaluate our future and our method of getting there.
Even if this decade only taught us to re-evaluate things – Let’s start from how and where we get our news from.
How we invest and spend. Where do we get our energy from? How we choose our leaders? Why?
How do we trod the line between justice and vengeance?
How do we conduct war? Just war? Unjust war?
How do we account for the value of human Life? Is the life of a western soldier any more valuable in the scheme of things than that of a nameless child from Iraq or Afghanistan?
How do we merit justice? And how do we met out punishment for the Demagogues who took us down the slippery path to unjust war? What safeguards do we build for the future to prevent these unjust wars from happening again?
How do we earn our living?
Do we earn it from an economy dependent on nature and balance or from one seemingly independent of it and in disharmony with the world around us?
Many thoughts for many minds….
Are we going for a car crash or a sleigh ride?
Choices.
Yeah we learned about choices this decade too…
We could choose fear or liberation.
Liberation from fear – liberation from it.
Choose hate or love and suddenly the outcome of your life changes completely – based on your simple seemingly romantic choice.
But all in all it was a dark decade that like any tunnel made us change and pushed us to move ahead on many fronts – move towards the inevitable light at the end…
And the last year – well, it began with the world’s economy in free-fall and globalization shuttered. New fences going up all over and none so mighty like the Gaza Strip ghetto fence. And then we made sense of it seeing Gaza being bombed to pieces. The mighty israeli army specialized in shooting fish in a barrel. Only these fish are of the human variety… But even here there is change and now some of the Israeli architects of the war face Crimes against humanity trials in London… and elsewhere. Just trials like the one scheduled for the ‘Sarah Palin’ of Israel. An arrest warrant has been issued in London seeking Mrs Tzip Livni’s arrest next time she shows up for one of her frequent shopping trips to Harrod’s.
We saw the horrible Bashir of Sudan being indicted for Genocide in the international court of human rights in Hague. We will wait to see him being arrested and brought to justice – some day.
We watched the vicious crushing of a democratic uprising in Iran, and a successful far-right coup in Honduras, and the intensification of the disastrous war in Iraq and Afghanistan – all in the same breath.
But the year also brought a new Democrat in the White House and a person of imminent intelligence and promise. A man of Change.
A lot of promise to be realized… from one man.
And it all ended at Brokenhagen, where the world’s leaders greedily decided to carry on cooking the planet. Or to just find a way to do it delicately. Lobster in the pot with the heat turned up slowly – that might explain our ruddy complexion….
But in the midst of all these human folly and climate forcing events – there were extraordinary points of light too. Light, generated by people who have refused to give in to helplessness and despair. Inspiration is what we need right about now – and these folks are the lightning rod for our inspiration.
Meet Liu Xiaobo: A year ago, a petition began to circulate in China demanding that its one billion citizens be allowed to think and speak freely. “We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes,” he said. As if they were the Irony Police, the Chinese authorities promptly arrested the authors and many of its signatories. One of the most articulate and brave – Liu Xiaobo – was sentenced to 11 years in a re-education camp for “subversion”. The Chinese authorities believe human rights are a “plot” to weaken China. If they want to exercise their might by executing pathetic mental retards – like GW Bush did – they are fucking out of their little minds. In fact, I think China will only be a great country when it starts respecting human rights and when it wakes up and makes the forbidden words Democracy, Freedom, Liberty, Civil Disobedience – legal. Break down the internet walls and your clapped out dictionary Mr President. China will be immeasurably stronger when it stops persecuting its citizens when they try to develop their minds and defend each other. China will mature as a nation only when it respects human rights for it is the basis of Law. But Liu and his jailed cohorts aren’t alone… many more make up the largest prison population per capita, than any country on earth. Hu Jia is in prison for warning about China’s hidden Aids crisis. Huang Qi is in jail for warning that the poor construction of school buildings in Sichuan – because the builders bribed the local authorities – meant hundreds of children died unnecessarily in the earthquake. There is a long list, and for every prisoner, thousands more are too frightened to speak. But these dissidents stand as models of the truly great nation China will one day surely be. China will be great only, when it stops persecuting these great leaders of people and starts electing them to lead others boldly into the future.
Let’s travel to Africa. Dead centre of Africa in the green belly of Congo. Come meet Denis Mukwege: The war in the Congo is the worst human carnage since Adolf Hitler walked this earth. Adolf marched across Europe in a death march. Kongo’s warlords and it’s dictators have killed more than 5 million people and still going at it. The war is at a stalemate and now the strong men have their fill of violence and choose to turn it primarily against the country’s women. One favourite army and guerilla tactic is to gang-rape a woman and then shoot her in the vagina. For years these women were simply left to die in the bush. But one man – a soft-spoken Congolese gynaecologist with a gentle smile – decided to do something mad, something impossible. With scarcely any equipment and no funding, he set up a secret clinic for these women. He was told he would be killed by the militias for undoing their “work”. The threats said his own daughters would be murdered if he didn’t stop. Everyone thought he was mad. But he knew it was the right thing to do. He became the Oscar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes, saving the lives of tens of thousands of women. In the midst of a moral Chernobyl, he showed that the best human instincts can survive and, in time, prevail. It is rumoured he was number two in the Nobel Committee’s list for the Peace Prize. He should have won.
Many Americans live insular lives full of consumerism and self doubt. Do they know Amy Goodman? Do You know Amy Goodman?
Have you ever heard the ‘Democracy Now’ News? You can get it over the net too. Absolutely, must try it some time because it’s not hard to despair of the brand USA at the moment - it’s economic collapse or it’s preoccupation with the sex they aren’t getting enough of – or it’s inability to shift and change. Even when the silver tongue of the King of Change seems unable to get real healthcare and cuts in warming gases through his corrupt Senate, and Obama is still ramming harder and harder into that sinkhole of empires, Afghanistan after the Peace prize. Yet it all might seem hopeless and cause for despair. And if you think in FOX or CNN or NBC and corporate scary media mode – then You are surely screwed. Maybe right now is the time to cower under the bed and never come our agin. A bed pan will be provided for you – at least the New health Care bill might cover a plastic one made in China. But in case you want to be ambulatory and maybe alive – You can see the large part of the problem that is the nasty US broadcast media and it’s global reach and lemmings. The TV news is one lengthy blowjob for the powerless corporate nincompoops, seeing everything from the perspective of wealth, and ridiculing arguments for progress. It serves its owners and its advertisers by poisoning every political debate with death-panel distractions and silence for the things that matter. But there is one remarkable exception. Broadcasting from a tiny studio in New York, on a budget raised entirely from its viewers, comes ‘Democracy Now’. Every day, the hour-long broadcast – hosted by Amy Goodman – tells the real news. While the nightly Corporate Media news fills up with junk and gossip, ‘Democracy Now’ calmly and cleverly explain what is really happening. For example, ABC and NBC were fixating on Tiger Woods’ errant and erect genitalia. American news lack of indiscretion and their puritanical fixation with his peccadilloes, his screw tactics and his wife’s redecorating Tiger’s head with a golf club -You must admit is a low point. A sad, daft and a definite empire in decline moment.
At the same woodsy time, ‘Democracy Now’ was in Copenhagen, explaining how the world’s rainforests were being stiffed. They, broadcasted from inside the Bella centre where COP15 took place. Yes, they were the only ones – the tiny outfit did it all in real time from Copenhagen. It is the best single source for making sense of the world that I know – and it is a model of what the American media could be if it treated its viewers with respect as intelligent life forms. It is real public news. Useful but not intrusive. It doesn’t sell you perfumed soap or weapons of Mass destruction under your bed or in the cupboard unlike it’s corporate brethren. Try it sometime… It might change your day.
You could also go south to meet Evo Morales or maybe met him in Copenhagen. When Evo Morales was a child, the indigenous peoples of Bolivia weren’t even allowed to set foot in the capital’s central square, which was reserved for white people. Today, he is the President, and for the first time in his country’s history, he is doing some major good for the people. He is diverting the billions raised from the country’s natural resources away from the pockets of greedy US corporations. He is using the natural borne wealth in building schools and hospitals for people who had nothing, and poverty is being eradicated in a stunning burst of progress. Morales and Bolivia’s meteoric rise is far more surprising than Obama’s rise to power and equally related to our shift, change and inevitable progress towards the light at the end of the tunnel.
On the other end of the world and in another poor and maligned mountainous country stands Malalai Joya. Now, she and Morales – although they were born thousands of miles apart – these two people embody what real democracy means for the people. The people that matter – You know. The citizens – Not the corporate zombies. Malalai Joya is the youngest woman ever to be elected in Afghanistan, and she was swiftly banned from taking her seat because she kept speaking up for the people who elected her – against the violent fundamentalist warlords our governments have put in charge of the country. They keep trying to murder her, but she says: “I don’t fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice … I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring.” She and Morales are authentic democratic leaders, in contrast to the parody of leadership and the fake tears for Democracy offered by Hamid Karzai and – too often – by our own leaders.
Lastly you ought to know of Peter Tatchell. A local man finally. An Englishman of note. An Oxonian who follows a long tradition of espousing unusual causes. Long before it was trendy to support gay equality, there was Peter Tatchell, taking huge risks for what was right. As one of the pioneers of direct action to oppose bigotry against gay people, he was never afraid to put his own body in the path of bigots. In 1999, he performed a citizen’s arrest on the murderous Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and was beaten so badly by his bodyguards he has never recovered. This year, he went to Moscow to defend the gay rights march there from viciously anti-gay police, and was beaten again. This year, he announced he had to withdraw from running as the Green candidate in Oxford East because the damage was so severe. Almost unbelievably, some people who claim to be on the left have attacked Tatchell because he criticises homophobes who happen to be black, Arab or Asian in exactly the same way he criticises people who are white. He tried to arrest Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger for war crimes just as surely as he tried to make a citizen’s arrest on Mugabe. But the real racism would be to hold non-white people to lower standards, as if their bigotries were less real or less deadly. A person who chooses to persecute gay people is monstrous and should be stopped – whatever their skin colour, and whatever their culture. Tatchell has dedicated his life to that cause, and he deserves our endless thanks, not dishonest abuse.
Who are these people and Why they act like this?
When Mukwege built his clinic, they said he’d be dead within a week.
When Tatchell said gay people could be equal, they laughed in his face.
When Morales and Joya ran for office, they said people like them could never win.
Mass Media dismiss Liu and Goodman now – but I feel and know deeply that their arguments will win, in time. Already even the White house dismisses FOX news as Focked news… How long will people who can’t even read buy books like Rogue prompted by the media’s attention on losers and mental basket cases ?
When Obama started out in politics people said it couldn’t be done. But few of us believed and still do and it makes a difference. Bloggers who aren’t allowed to write and share their thoughts in Iran, in China, in Israel and occupied Gaza and Palestine…
These are the leaders we have hope for to keep on giving more of the mojo they’ve got.
Give us more of their light and Love.
The leaders we talk about are real – humble human dignified beings.
They are the proof that intelligent Life forms inhabit this planet.
They show me that when the world gets worse, that’s not a reason to slink away in despair.
On the contrary: it’s the main reason to work harder and aim higher.
You know these people traveling amongst You.
Some days – on a good day – it might be You.
It’s You – not the other – remember that if you need hope.
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you use to break down doors to pull a child out of a burning home. Hope is to be used in any emergency. Hope is our rescue from the tsunamis of Life. Hope is what neighbours do to make Life better for the victims of the New Orleans’ man made disaster.
Hope is the boat that floated down the man made waterway that brought the tsunami to the city, but now it brought brotherhood, succour and shelter from the storm.
Hope should shove you out the door in the morning to do what you need to be ready to rush into a burning building, to rescue your life from the mental junk of Corporate Media and CNN.
Hope is all, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from depression.
Steer clear form endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s resources.
Hope to be strong to fight to preserve the treasures of the earth and protect people from the grinding down of the poor and marginalized folks. Hope to fight for those who have No voice.
Hope to give hope to others.
Hope to give yourself to the future.
And that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Yours,
Pano
