Blogging Against Environmental Apartheid

Today is some kind of blogging for the environment blog action day. So in that spirit, here are some excerpts from a speech by Van Jones (I've seen him - he is an amazing speaker): "Spiritually Fulfilling, Ecologically Sustainable AND Socially Just?"

I want to suggest that there's a communication problem and there are two things that are happening. Number one: it's just very, very hard for white people to hear the pain of the subjugated people in this country.
[...]
So we live together in these bubbles that touch, and we call that diversity, but we don't know each other. And when that bubble breaks for just a second and we're face to face with each other, it's very, very hard to hear that reality.

But white supremacy, to use the provocative term, will reinterpret that experience for you; and make it not be about your inability to hear, but be about other people's inability to speak. This is one of the most remarkable things: if you can get this, all doors open. There is the assumption - this is deep, this is deep - there is the assumption that when there’s a breakdown in communication between people of color and white people, that there is an deficiency but that the deficiency is not in white listening, that the deficiency is in black speech. "Why are they so angry?" People start critiquing, and then you find somebody who keeps themselves together just for a little bit and it's, "Oh that one's very eloquent, that one’'s very articulate." Right? Always the assumption is that the deficiency lies with the people of color. "Why don't they care about the environment? What wrong with them, don't they see the big picture? ... What's wrong with them? Maybe they are just too poor or busy, because certainly there is nothing wrong with our speech!"
[...]
If it was just that you could show up and be heroic and save the polar bears that would be a boring ass movie. That's not the movie! You show up to be the hero and you discover just like Luke Skywalker, "Wait a minute, the dark side is in me! Wait a minute; my father is the originator of many of the problems that I am now trying to solve. Wait a minute, I can't just fight now the war monger without, the polluter without, the incarcerator without, the clear cutter without - I've got to fight the war monger within. I've got to fight the polluter within."
[...]
People are always talking about their comfort zones, you ever heard that expression: "this is outside of my comfort zone"? Grow your goddamn comfort zone then, okay? 'Cause we are running out of time.
[...]
I've sat with all these people who we think are in charge, and they don't know what to do. Take that in: they don't know what to do! You think you're scared? You think you're terrified? They have the Pentagon's intelligence, they have every major corporation's input; Shell Oil that has done this survey and study around the peak oil problem. You think we've got to get on the Internet and say, "Peak oil!" because the system doesn't know about it? They know, and they don't know what to do. And they are terrified that if they do anything they'll lose their positions. So they keep juggling chickens and chainsaws and hope it works out just like most of us everyday at work.
[...]
There's a pathway back to community that we have to walk. I have to give up something, I have to give up my right to be mad at white folks, 'cause that's not going to make a difference for my child. But white people have to give up something too, which is their right to stay ignorant about all of this. You have a perfect right to be ignorant about all of this and you'll be great people, honestly. You could lead big environmental organizations, you could lead spirituality retreats, you could do all kinds of stuff and you will get cookies and congratulations and people will cry at your funeral. You have a perfect right to not care about any of this. There just won't be any human family left.

Via Gristmill. More on Van Jones and eco-apartheid. You can also watch him speak, short:

or longer.

Update: Burma - It's not good news

Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month’s pro-democracy uprising.

The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime’s soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.

Read all about it here.

Nothing Like Commemorating a Revolutionary Leader by Slapping his Face on a Bikini

Photo from BBC

... 40 years after his death, Che - born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna - is as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon. Which raises the question of what exactly does the sheer proliferation of his image - the distant gaze, the scraggly beard and the beret adorned with a star - mean in a decidedly capitalist world? <Common Dreams>

My Last Conversation With Aung San Suu Kyi

By John Pilger, on Znet:

As the people of Burma rise up again, we have had a rare sighting of Aung San Suu Kyi. There she stood, at the back gate of her lakeside home in Rangoon, where she is under house arrest. She looked very thin. For years, people would brave the roadblocks just to pass by her house and be reassured by the sound of her playing the piano. She told me she would lie awake listening for voices outside and to the thumping of her heart. "I found it difficult to breathe lying on my back after I became ill, she said."

That was a decade ago. Stealing into her house, as I did then, required all the ingenuity of the Burmese underground. My film-making partner David Munro and I were greeted by her assistant, Win Htein, who had spent six years in prison, five of them in solitary confinement. Yet his face was open and his handshake warm. He led us into the house, a stately pile fallen on hard times. The garden with its ragged palms falls down to Inya Lake and to a trip wire, a reminder that this was the prison of a woman elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by generals in ludicrous uniforms.

It's sort of hard to read or listen to an interview with Aung San Suu Kyi and not fall just a little bit in love. She has distinguished herself as one of the great heroic figures of our time, although she is quick to dismiss it:

"People I've spoken to regard you as something of a saint, a miracle worker."

"I'm not a saint and you'd better tell the world that!" "Where are your sinful qualities, then?"

"Er, I've got a short temper."

"What happened to your piano?"

"You mean when the string broke? In this climate pianos do deteriorate and some of the keys were getting stuck, so I broke a string because I was pumping the pedal too hard."

"You lost it ... you exploded?"

"I did."

"It's a very moving scene. Here you are, all alone, and you get so angry you break the piano."

"I told you, I have a hot temper."

I tend to disagree with hero worship, since it discounts the daily struggles of the people. But a hero provides an entry point, an interviewable spokesperson, and 30-second sound bytes that drive today's media. Put simply, a hero gets on TV. And a hero can more easily be emulated. Aung San Suu Kyi may not be a saint, but she is indeed a hero, and so are the monks, the Karen, and other regular people in Burma. Their people power faces the immense military power of the junta; we in the West could certainly learn from them.

... no matter the regime's physical power, in the end they can't stop the people; they can't stop freedom. We shall have our time.

Read the rest of the article here

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

Playing this weekend at The Brunswick Theatre in Toronto, Reel Bad Arabs shows the persistence of negative stereotypes of Arabs in film and the effect it has had in dehumanizing Arabs and Arab culture.



Also a shorter trailer here. Also check out the trailer for Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class

Make Me a Reading List - Open Thread

I've been so busy lately I've been unable to do the rounds and visit all of my favourite blogs. So I invite you to help me prioritize.

Leave a comment with one of your most important recent blog posts with a short description, and, time permitting, I will visit it. Hooray for free links!

Thanks everyone!

In return, here are a couple of comics relating to Bush's veto of the children's health insurance bill:

The end of civilization as we know it!

This funny video comes to us from Vote for MMP. Only 2:16 long. If you like it, rate it 5 stars and favourite it. We've only got a week left 'til the referendum.

Just in case you need more information, here's Ten Reasons to Vote for Mixed Member Proportional (MMP).

Sending Good Vibes for Alabama

I'm thinking of starting a new charity. I think I'll name it Magic Wands for Montgomery. Or maybe
Bunnies for Birmingham.

This is necessary because, sadly for Alabamians, the sale of sex toys has been illegal in Alabama for 9 years (something that is unlikely to change following The United States Supreme Court's recent refusal to hear the case).

An adult-store owner had asked the justices to throw out the law as an unconstitutional intrusion into the privacy of the bedroom. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving intact a lower court ruling that upheld the law.

Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures stores in Huntsville and Decatur, said she was disappointed, but plans to sue again on First Amendment free speech grounds.

"My motto has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up," she said.

Alabama's anti-obscenity law, enacted in 1998, bans the distribution of "any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for anything of pecuniary value."

So this is a call to all women to take pity on the women of Alabama, cruelly denied the pleasure of a pocket rocket. Our sisters need us! Send good vibes for Alabama.

Via Boing Boing.