Bully Mobs in the US

Politics in any country is a rough and tumble business. In the ideal politics is a process of persuasion where individuals called political leaders have the duty to inform the population, to educate the population with the facts in an effort to persuade people to form a common opinion on a topic. The emergence of tough and complex issues like energy and environmental policies aimed at dealing with the adverse affects of climate change, and health reform challenge politicians and the population to engage politics in the ideal sense or to engage in bully mob rule.  The Republican Party in the United States has chosen to engage the tough issues of the day with bully mob rule.

In the presidential election year of 2000 the Republican Party chose to use bully mob rule to intimidate people to oppose efforts carefully recount votes to determine who won the state of Florida. Organized “hooligans” threatened, shouted, and otherwise forced their views to disrupt the recount process. Fear seems to drive the Republican party and its leaders to act hysterically and to threaten and intimidate voters. Reminiscent of fascist and Bolshevik tactics in the 1920s and 1930s, the Republican party seems to have lost its way … giving up on the political process of persuasion.

With the developing debate about health reform in the US, Insurance company and pharmaceutical company supported Republican party activists began in August during the Congressional recess to use town hall meetings with congressmen as venues to engage in “hooliganism,” bully mob intimidation of public officials and ordinary citizens.  This is a corruption of the political system.  This is not politics.  This is not a policy debate.  This is a form of political violence that corrupts democracy.

Republican organized bully mobs in town hall meetings is not politics. This is a betrayal of the political process that denies American citizens the benefits of their own governing process. Republican destructive political behavior must be rejected by the public.  If it isn’t then hooliganism will become increasingly used to force political change favorable to a few corporate interests or other narrow interests upending democracy in the United States.

republic party, political violence, hooliganism, mob rule, climate change, health reform

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One Family, Many Cultures

When the salutation, “All my relations” is spoken or written these days, many people think this quaint and perhaps a little presumptuous. But, the expression has always expressed a deep and timeless connection between people that celebrates relationships between people, places and other beings. “All my relations” also speaks to a collective memory among people that extends back deep into the beginning.

In the western hemisphere including Greenland and the far eastern part of the Eurasian continent that touches Alaska and Japan we recognize a human family spread out, living in different climates and ecosystems.  The differences are responses to the place, plants, animals and view of the sky. The sameness of members of a vast family bespeaks a distant root branched out over the continents. There is one family of native peoples making up the whole, but many cultures with different languages, social practices, economic activities, and ways of praising grandmother and grandfather.

Long told in stories and remembered in numerous ways, the connection between native peoples in the western hemisphere have remained a constant. Origin stories, legends, songs and dances reach into the distant past and give in metaphor the details of the passage into this world.  Now, according to Science News the biological tracers have been identified by deductive science to affirm what has long been known among the original peoples in the western hemisphere: We are all related.

There are many important differences between native peoples throughout the hemisphere and virtually all have to do with culture; though it is often the case the customs, cultural practices are often similar if not always exactly the same.  The use of song, dance, stories, hunting methods, transportation and even sometimes eating habits are the same or very similar.

It is and always has been true that we have connection between peoples in this hemisphere even as it is true for peoples on other continents. With respect and dignity we salute our friends and family with “All my relations.”

relations, science news, culture, Greenland, Eurasia, North America

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Too large for human scale

Complexity is a challenge to the mind and the soul. Bigness combined with complexity is a challenge humans should work to avoid…especially in their institutions and other social organizations. When it is too big and too complex for humans to manage and control, an institution or social organization will collapse or rule human behavior leaving human beings impotent.

Such is the problem with “banks too big to fail,” auto manufacturers “too big to fail,” and a collapsing economy too complex to understand and respond to human intervention.

This is the condition we have overwhelming the world’s financially dependent societies. This is the calamity now destroying individual and family lives.

The cause of this rush to form a global financial system “too large to fail” rests with corporations that have exceeded their role and responsibility in society. The cause is the idea that unlimited growth of anything is desirable. The cause is unfettered greed. “Bigger is better,” so the propaganda resounds in the advertisements for everything from a meal to a car to a house to a company.  The one thing advocates of unlimited growth called for that wasn’t the propaganda line? Regulation and control of government growth…make smaller government…meaning impotent government.

What a sly advertising campaign.  Make the only representative of the people’s voice and interests impotent by demeaning it and describing “government as the problem.”

Since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher rose to power in the two leading English-speaking governments, these notions…this propaganda…has reigned subordinating good sense and human need.

“Too big to fail” is a strange idea.  Indeed, if it is too big it must fail.  Human beings must be able to comprehend what they construct. Failure to do so ensure human impotence.  We must work to maintain our institutions and social bodies at human scale and avoid creating monstrosities that become a threat to life and limb.

The only solution to growth is intentional division, breaking down big things into smaller things. Then will it be possible for humans to maintain human scale institutions that benefit human beings.

bigness, human scale, banks, auto manufacture

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Their Job is to Say No!

Political leaders who commit human rights violations, commit torture or genocide do not admit to committing a crime–they blame their actions on the public they supposedly represent. Ghastly, inhuman acts committed are always justified by the acts of the other or someone else…never the person committing the act. And so it was when American military people committed unspeakable acts of violence and horror against American Indian tribes in the 18th and 19th centuries they justified their acts by describing their victims as uncivilized savages. When Adolph Hitler’s government and companies working for the government committed horribly unspeakable acts against Jews, Slavs, Roma and homosexuals their acts were justified by those committing the crimes by claiming their victims were uncivilized and subhuman.

Now the American government’s President George Bush and his Vice President Richard Cheney justify their authorized acts of torture against individuals only George Bush could identify as combatants and terrorists as being within the law–made so in a series of memorandums written at the request of Bush and Cheney cronies.

Criminal acts are criminal acts and war crimes are war crimes. Political leaders are supposed to have the good sense to say No! when the urge to act against the law arises. Failure to exercise good judgment and act humanely cannot fail to be punished otherwise those who allow and commit acts of genocide, ethnocide, torture, and murder join in a great conspiracy that degrades the human spirit. Representatives in the United States Congress are now discussing ways to investigate and indict those who committed crimes during the eight years of George Bush’s government must be encouraged. Citizens of 145 other countries in the world that signed anti-torture agreements must be vigilant to seek out those who successfully illude trials in the United States.

I only wish that such actions had been taken against those who committed crimes against Indian peoples all over the Americas. Those who authorized and committed the crime of torture must now be punished.

torture, war crimes, George Bush, Cheney, genoide, ethnocide

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Welcome to “My Word Chronicle”

I like the millions of others in the world who now  Blog have decided to add my words to this growing world of self-published and commentary.  As I note at the bottom of the other column, “My Word” is the expression I remember my Mother Ruth saying so often.  She loved writing and the written word.  She longed to be a chronicular and had handwritten script that was so beautiful one would swear she was an artist who paints or draws. She did neither, but she did cherish the word and spent long hours filling in little boxes in Reader’s Digest crossword puzzles. She liked playing word games, wrote letters to family and friends regularly, and she read books to herself and aloud to her eight children.

My mother had an eight grade education, but she would have gone on to high school and college had her learning not been tragiclly interrupted by the violent death of her beloved father John Dement Gilham. He was killed by logs rolling off a railway car not far from where he and his family lived in Thorp, Washington just a little way south of Mount Tahoma…high in the mountains. My mother so loved my Grandfather she always spoke of him to her children. A month before she died she asked to reclaim photographs for her to see him again.

To Ruth A. Gilham-Ryser I dedicate this ongoing kitchen discussion about the events, ideas and memories of culture, politics and critical analysis.