Several minority lawmakers on Monday urged Texas A&M University officials to reverse their
decision to not consider race in admitting students, but university President Robert Gates told them in
a private meeting he opposes using race as a
factor.
Source:
dallasnews.com
http://www.dallasnews.com
/sharedcon
tent/dallas/tsw/stories
/120903dntexa%
26m.977b0.html
By Nick Braune…
I was pleased to see an article in The Monitor — and it was front page in the Sunday Mid-Valley Town Crier — about the Caravan for Peace which stopped in the Valley for a rally last Thursday. The Caravan was founded by a Mexican poet, Javier Sicilia, whose son was murdered by one of the outlaw cartels in Mexico.
Composed of two large busses and a contingent of cars, the caravan crossed the border into California and has been traveling east, holding local rallies and planning for a major rally in Washington, D.C. upcoming. I attended the rally in Alamo, which was spirited and drew about 100 people. (ARISE and other concerned groups in the Valley got out the word and organized a reception for the travelers.
One part of the event was sharing stories of lives lost due to the violence of the cartels and particularly the drug trafficking. Sicilia himself spoke. But another part of the event was an expression of hope: If enough people reach out on both sides of the border and reach out for other solutions, this may inspire change, particularly since current policies have failed so noticeably.
A woman traveling with the caravan explained to me that she represents an inter-religious group in Mexico City, although she made sure to clarify that the caravan had many non-religious participants too. She said that obviously the caravan has goals in mind: for instance, stiffening America’s commitment to stopping gun trafficking into Mexico but also rethinking the total “prohibition” of drugs approach. (The “militarization” approach to the problem, the current Mexico/U.S. “war on drugs” approach, has simply failed.) But the articulate woman was also eager to explain that the goal of the caravan was not a blanket “decriminalization of marijuana” or any other panacea. The caravan simply intends to open dialogue on these issues.
I definitely agree it is time for dialogue on new approaches, and in fact the July Mexican elections were unusual in that all three candidates were for re-conceptualizing the “war on drugs” mentality, which many see as one-dimensional and originating in U.S. military circles.
Military music has never been good music; and military solutions have never been good solutions. Despite its thousands of officers, myriad bases, sophisticated technology, military colleges and massive Pentagon (with its connections to think tanks, big industries and academia), the military mucks things up, repeatedly.
A small example: A young woman just back after serving in Iraq was one of my students three years ago. She was upset about the war, saw no real reason for it, and had seen things she didn’t want to see. When she returned to the Valley, she was still a reservist and the military told her to take “anger management” classes. She told me that she thought that was OK until she learned that the classes were in San Antonio. She got so angry on the regular four hour drive up there that she stewed angrily during the classes, and she was even angrier driving the four hours back.
A larger example: The war in Afghanistan has now seen 2,000 Americans killed. Others have been physically and emotionally injured — news reports say military suicides are up — and the ten-year war is going poorly. Newspapers this last week expressed concern that Afghan soldiers paid by NATO are sometimes targeting NATO soldiers.
More news this week: Blimps, used “successfully” in Afghanistan to monitor large swaths of land, are now being tested for use on the Tex-Mex border to help keep illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants from entering the country. (Glance upward, watch for ballooning military solutions.)
(Update, the Caravan for Peace is arriving this week at Fort Benning Georgia, where it is planning a rally and meeting with leaders of SOA Watch. This organization exposed the School of the Americas, an inter-American military training operation, which was probably lurking in the background when the current Mexican cartels were gaining strength.)
[First appeared in “Reflection and Change,” Mid-Valley Town Crier, 8-26-12]
By Nick Braune…
In the 1790s in the Philadelphia home of Dr. Benjamin Rush, an important discussion took place. This was during that period when Americans were trying to formulate what it would be like to have a democratic republic which could tap the best qualities in everyone. This particular meeting was held to discuss what would be proper punishment (effective punishment, but not vengeful, cruel or inhumane) for those who broke the laws. What sort of penal system should develop in a thoughtful new democratic republic?
A number of Quakers were at the meeting, and also the great statesman and nation-founder Benjamin Franklin. (If I could travel back in history, I would surely visit Franklin.) At the meeting Franklin probably made several comments about the ineffectiveness of locking criminals up with criminals. He probably reminded the group that the purpose should be to reform people who have gone wrong, not to put them in situations that would make them worse.
Perhaps stimulated by Franklin’s practical thinking and also by some insights from Quakers (famous for quiet meditation), the reformers decided that solitary confinement would be a good idea. Their plan sprang from good intentions: Build an institution where criminals could be all alone, could reconsider their attitudes, and could become “penitent,” asking God for forgiveness and turning around their lives. This first “penitentiary” was for solitary penitents. But the plan didn’t work. Solitary confinement did not lead to reformed lives but rather to terrible nervous breakdowns and to worse forms of behavior. The Quakers soon recognized the folly and admitted their error.
I recently learned about that early Philadelphia meeting from a new documentary, “Solitary Confinement: Torture in Your Backyard,” produced by an interreligious coalition which gathers data and tries to bring “light and transparency” to America’s immense prison system. The coalition agrees with international standards which consider solitary confinement a form of torture. For the DVD, google the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. (nrcat.org/backyard)
In the 1890s, a century after the Philadelphia meeting, solitary confinement was almost outlawed in America. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller, who was also a physician, pointed to the terrible psychological consequences of the practice: “Numbers of prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still committed suicide.” Miller’s 1890 description of victims falling into those three conditions — catatonic, raging or suicidal — also confirms research done today. (My source: Washington Post editorial, July 1, 2012. This editorial condemning solitary confinement is part of an immense sea-change on this question over the last few years.)
The Washington Post reports on a “human rights issue we cannot ignore”: the U.S. has a higher number of prisoners in this torturous confinement than any democracy in the world. Right this second there are probably 80,000 people being held in solitary confinement in this country, some for months, years. Interestingly, when the state of Maine began re-conceptualizing its policies recently, it found out that it had more people in solitary confinement than did all of England…even though England has 40 times more people than Maine!
America’s solitary confinement practices, symbolized by the “supermax” prisons heralded during the Clinton years, are too expensive, don’t fix bad behavior, and are increasingly out of sync with the practices of many other countries. More importantly, these cruel practices are immoral, as the National Religious Campaign against Torture rightly insists.
Quick Note: Curious about Texas? According to a Houston Chronicle article by Diane Schiller last year, there are 5,205 in long term isolation, “administrative segregation,” and another 4,000 serving short term stints in isolation in Texas. Also the Texas Observer in 2010 ran an article about children in Texas held in pre-trial solitary (for their own protection, it is said) sometimes for weeks or months.
Another Quick Note: The 20-minute DVD mentioned earlier, http://www.nrcat.org/backyard, is easily available for under ten dollars. It was shown last week during the regular Sunday service at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in San Juan, and the discussion afterward was said to be lively and thoughtful.
[This piece also appears in “Reflection and Change,” Mid-Valley Town Crier, 8-21-12]
By Faddy Mac Mough
Doncha Know
In a editorial that was entitled: “One More Reader on ‘Rednecks’ and
Immigrants, with Reply” there are a couple of things I’d like to respond to on BOTH sides of
the argument.
First off, Redneck seems to be one of those terms that depend heavily on
who is saying it. As a white man, my use of the n-word would set
off a huge debate … with all sorts of recriminations. Likewise
redneck … one uses it at ones own peril … even among fellow
rednecks. I have some cousins with necks so red they could compete with
traffic lights … and they call themselves rednecks with a certain
amount of pride.
But when someone else calls them a redneck, them’s fightin’ words. They even get wound up tight as a spring if I use the word because, since I am somewhat educated, I am not in the same class of people with them. I am, and have always been, an outcast … a black
sheep … in my own family. So, the point is that the word can be used
as a denigrating epithet … or as a self-describing term of pride …
dependent solely on who is using it and the attendant meanings thereby
attached.
Secondly, our anonymous friend does have some decent points (which in
all fairness you were gracious enough to acknowledge in your reply).
Alas, he is a victim of a propaganda machine that has always kept people
divided through scapegoating especially when things start going to hell
in a hand basket!
Growing up it was ‘g**ks’ and ‘commies’ who were the
threat any time there was either economic or political turmoil. Well,
since the ‘commies’ have sort of dissipated and we lost to the ‘g**ks’
in more ways than one … now we are told to fear the ‘immigrants’ and
the ‘terrorists.’ It is the same argument … just different words
being used. And, we fall for it because way down deep inside we can’t
tolerate, and thus can’t believe, that our own government would lie to
us. Well, it does … and it has … and it will.
Third, you tried to turn the words back on the writer of the bit about
your not understanding rednecks. As a redneck, and one with leftist
tendencies, I know we are a complicated lot. Just as people of African
background don’t agree on some issues at all … consider the mild,
milquetoast disagreements between Jamala Rogers and Rice on foreign
policy … and you begin to see how extensive the fault lines are.
Sadly, it is the fault lines that are the root cause of the battles …
and meanwhile we watch the empire collapse under its own weight.
Now, from my angle down here in the slop at the bottom of society it
seems to me this is exactly what the power elite wants us to do: bicker
over all sorts of names and name-calling, real and perceived.
The Texas Civil Rights Review should, of all organizations, realize what is at
stake … but we get so damned caught up in the bickering … that civil
rights of one person being abrogated is civil rights abrogated for all.
Fer gawd’s sake that is exactly what makes my voice worth printing in
the TCRR, in spite of living in New Mexico, in the first place. What
makes me tick is what makes other people tick … despite race or class
or any of that other stuff we are conditioned to worry about.
I’m sure that in the last half of the 19th century when my grandfather
left Scotland for Canada, then walked across the border into the United
States he was an illegal alien … and that there were those who felt he
‘took’ their job, or put a strain on social services.
He became a citizen by default … he never did go through the process of becoming a
citizen … he like so many others worked to get rid of his accent, and
to blend right in. Because he was productive, nobody probably noticed
and if those that did noticed they didn’t care. The question was then,
as now, was he a human being and deserving of all of the rights and
privileges thereby appertaining? Sure the local hospital was stressed
by him during the last few years of his life as he died slowing and
painfully from cancer. But, the hospital was a municipal agency and the
citizens supported it because they needed a hospital.
Toward the end, he was indigent, his wife barely hanging on by taking in boarders, but
there was no hue and cry to export him. Now? Now that corporate
profits are at stake, we get all dandered up because ‘indigents’ and
‘immigrants’ use the corporate, for profit, insurance abusing hospitals
and we’ve all been suckered into wanting to blame someone so the
immigrant becomes the target of our concerns.
Similarly when wages plunge and Americans refuse to do the work, we end
up with a whole system that starts blaming immigrants for low salaries
… but what about the corporate fat cats who continue to make obscenely
huge salaries and compensation for holding down wages in the first
place, and off shoring whatever they can so that stuff is cheap? Worse,
then they get us all riled up because the cheap shit they import makes
us sick, or worse (though maybe being dead is sometimes a lot less
miserable than being sick), and nothing can be done because they’ve
colluded with that ‘wonderful’ government of ours to deregulate as much
as they can?
So, where is the common ground?
I’d argue that it is the civil rights of us all … with the caveat that
using terms to describe each other are the quickest way I know of to
fall into the trap of bickering while our lives are being raped.
Whether a redneck likes it or not, he is in the same pot with the
immigrant. We have far more common issues than we have differences …
The question is, how do we define those issues so we all benefit?
Allowing the process to continue only makes sense if we acknowledge that
the total and complete collapse of the US would benefit all Americans.
I refuse to worry about those who might lose large fortunes … most of
them can not only afford to abandon ship, but have already done so.
MoPress 