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January 20, 2003

Peace on Earth

By all accounts, yesterday's protests against war and for peaceful solutions to global problems were a great success. As Michelle Goldberg writes in Salon:

The broad-based antiwar movement many have awaited is here.

This picture taken by one of the marchers in DC gives a good look at the size of the protest—people as far as the eye can see, or as the Washington Post said:

Organizers of the demonstration, the activist coalition International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), said the protest was larger than one they sponsored in Washington in October. District police officials suggested then that about 100,000 attended, and although some organizers agreed, they have since put the number closer to 200,000. This time, they said, the turnout was 500,000. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey would not provide an estimate but said it was bigger than October's. "It's one of the biggest ones we've had, certainly in recent times," he said.

...

Regardless of the exact number, the crowd yesterday on the Mall was the largest antiwar demonstration here since the Vietnam era. For the 11 a.m. rally, much of four long blocks of the Mall was packed, shoulder-to-shoulder in many sections from Third to Seventh streets SW between Madison and Jefferson drives. The first marchers stepped off about 1:30 p.m., and when many had begun reaching the Navy Yard more than two dozen blocks away about an hour later, others were still leaving the rally site.

In addition, the estimated number of people in San Francisco was 50,000, there were local protests of various sizes in towns and cities throughout the country (my local protest had about 60 people in attendance, in a community of about 100,000; there were 20,000 in Portland, OR), and people in cities around the world also called for a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi situation. The U.S. protests were backed by recent polls showing that American support for a war against Iraq is fairly weak and wavering.

(Aside: When I was in D.C. on October 26th last year for the first ANSWER protest, I watched two or three helicopters circling above us almost all day long. I looked forward to getting home and seeing lots of aerial photographs of the event, since only photos from the air would show its true size and allow anyone to make an accurate estimate of the number of attendees. Of course, I have yet to see an aerial photograph of either protest (October's or last weekend's). Why do you think that is?)

Meanwhile, NPR's All Things Considered yesterday (scroll down to "Military Disconnect" link for RealAudio file) reported on research showing that the greatest support for war in America comes from people who feel zero connection to the military—people who don't have family in the armed forces or relatives who are veterans. According to Duke University researchers Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, the likelihood that the U.S. will use military force is also inversely proportional to the percentage of military veterans in the executive and legislative branches of federal government. While findings like this may not be surprising, they remain the most stark and barbaric example of the dire consequences of our country's increasing obsession with the cult of individuality.

The problem of people only caring about themselves or those in their immediate circles of family/friends shows up in nearly every issue of our society—from health care, to education, to welfare and all other social services, to environmental protections and other corporate regulations. At its most crass, the attitude of the cult of individualism is: "I don't give a shit what happens to anyone else so long as things are ok for me; in fact, I don't even care if having things good for me makes them worse for anyone else. My only value and priority is ME (and maybe me family and friends)." So now that our military is completely volunteer and also comprises only a small percentage of the population, it's easier than ever to get a majority to support the use of force. Our rabid selfishness not only encourages us to simply avert our gaze as people die from lack of health care, but now it also enables us to basically sentence hundreds if not thousands of people to their deaths—either through our overt support of war or through our silent acceptance of it.

Bleak as those facts are, they are also why the growing peace movement is so great: It offers hope that an ethic of interdependence can still thrive in our selfish and individualistic society. People who march for peace are people who recognize that there are real and inescapable connections between the pilots in the bombers or the troops on the ground and the people they bomb or otherwise attack. The people who march for peace are people who refuse to accept that the "blowback" and "collateral damage" that inevitably attend violence and force are necessary evils that we just have to learn to live with. The people who march for peace are people who understand that we must recognize our dependence upon and responsibility to each other if we want to live ethically and to advance as a people.

Although nearly everyone agrees that Saddam Hussein is a corrupt and malevolent dictator, and that the people of Iraq deserve better, that doesn't mean we all have to agree that a military invasion of Iraq is the best way to improve current conditions in the world.

(UPDATE: Someone did take aerial photos of the SanFran protest. Impressive.)

Posted 12:02 PM | general politics


Default Affirmative Action?

I keep seeing bits about this whole affirmative action debate that I feel compelled to post; however, my reason for these posts is not that I want to defend affirmative action so much as I'd like to promote debate and discussion and critical thinking about the issues of social inequality and injustice that are woven into affirmative action. With that in mind, take a look at the beginning of this article about the rise of G. W. Bush [link via BuzzFlash]:

Two weeks before he was to graduate from Yale, George Walker Bush stepped into the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Field outside Houston and announced that he wanted to sign up for pilot training.

It was May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bush was 12 days away from losing his student deferment from the draft at a time when Americans were dying in combat at the rate of 350 a week. The unit Bush wanted to join offered him the chance to fulfill his military commitment at a base in Texas. It was seen as an escape route from Vietnam by many men his age, and usually had a long waiting list.

Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.

Bush was sworn in as an airman the same day he applied. His commander, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, was apparently so pleased to have a VIP's son in his unit that he later staged a special ceremony so he could have his picture taken administering the oath, instead of the captain who actually had sworn Bush in. Later, when Bush was commissioned a second lieutenant by another subordinate, Staudt again staged a special ceremony for the cameras, this time with Bush's father the congressman – a supporter of the Vietnam War – standing proudly in the background.

That certainly makes it sound like Bush received some preferential treatment in his appointment to the Texas Guard; however, that preferencial treatment was not based on his race, but on his economic and social class. The article goes on to provide many more details about the story sketched above, but at every turn it's clear that Bush family connections and Bush's own cultural knowledge helped ensure that he always had the best options to choose from. So if this is the kind of system that poor and minority applicants are working with when they apply to things like universities or jobs, do affirmative action programs make any more sense?

In more on the connection between economic class and race in education, a recent study from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found that:

Patterns of segregation by race are strongly linked to segregation by poverty, and poverty concentrations are strongly linked to unequal opportunities and outcomes. Since public schools are the institution intended to create a common preparation for citizens in an increasingly multiracial society, this inequality can have serious consequences. Given that the largest school districts in this country (enrollment greater than 25,000) service one-third of all school-age children, it is important to understand at a district level the ways in which school segregation, race, and poverty are intersecting and how they impact these students' lives. In our analysis we focus on two important components, race and segregation.

The researchers concluded that:

since 1986, in almost every district examined, black and Latino students have become more racially segregated from whites in their schools. The literature suggests that minority schools are highly correlated with high-poverty schools and these schools are also associated with low parental involvement, lack of resources, less experienced and credentialed teachers, and higher teacher turnover—all of which combine to exacerbate educational inequality for minority students. Desegregation puts minority students in schools with better opportunities and higher achieving peer groups.

The growing national support for "school choice" (via vouchers and charter schools, for example) will only exacerbate these trends, which in turn exacerbate the problems with trying to base university admissions solely on academic "merit" (grades, test scores, etc.) as Bush seems to be advocating. I say "seems" to be advocating, because it's pretty hard to tell where Bush actually stands on affirmative action—his speech last week said one thing, his brief in the Michigan case said another, and now his support for greater minority school funding complicates the issue further. Is Bush just trying to please all the people all the time? It seems he's not really pleasing Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice (unless their dissent is another tactic calculated by Karl Rove or someone else to try to mollify potential voters who didn't like Bush's position last week?). Anyway, lots of food for thought.

Posted 10:26 AM | general politics


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