ULTIMATELY, who benefits from these well-practiced fables? Who makes gain from the false lessons instilled? Who are the myths of Thanksgiving designed to benefit? What are the truths they are meant to obscure?
WHEN TERROR STRIKES the hearts of Right Wing punditry, the result too often is a demonization of communities of color. Be they Mexican or Arab or Muslim or Chinese or Japanese, it’s an age-old reflex. It’s time to think smarter, broader, and find the root causes of the nation’s troubles.
SENDING LOU DOBBS OFF with all the respect he has earned.
JUST AS A WALL that keeps the poor in place in our own cities and towns and marks the divide where law enforcement begins caring a whole lot more about property and people, so do the borders operate in our world. This entrenched and justified divide is a crime in and of itself. All the rest that follows is fallout.
ONE OF THE THINGS that hit me in a “real” place about bush—aside from my protesting him and getting locked up over it—was watching him gut programs like the one that helped local teenage girls who were pregnant and needed housing. A fire lit in me that day that threatened to eat my heart alive.
HOWARD ZINN: With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question anymore of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once-fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed, embrace of the idea…
THANKSGIVING is probably the most popular and earliest-given justification for invasion, murder, imperialism, occupation, and “othering” that we know of in this country. Even now in Iraq we hear fables fashioned on the same colonizer’s framework and it sickens. But Thanksgiving is Iraq, with its steaming platter of corpses. Iraq is Thanksgiving.
MOYA BAILEY: I don’t feel victorious. I don’t feel like we won. I do think that these sentiments are particularly interesting after the early press spin that asked whether Barack was black enough and black people were ambivalent about the answer. Now he’s one of us, our hero, our modern day Martin and Malcolm….
NEVER FORGET. This is what many people say about September 11th, 2001. I say it, too. Though I’m not sure I mean it in the same way. Herein is a tale, including diary entries made from NYC during the WTC explosions, of the changes that those horrifically violent and altogether terrifying events inspired in me. They changed me forever, and in some ways, I would be unrecognizable to you now, had they not occurred.
House of Nezua
the XOLAGRAFIK theater!
