Daily Kossack

Well, I posted my first diary on Daily Kos this evening. I hope I did well and I want to keep a high standard with all my entries, hopefully well recieved. Check it out here at:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/15/214048/082

The Invitation

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living,
I want to know what you ache for,
and if you dare of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are spanning your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow,
if you have been opened by life's betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed from fear of futher pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own;
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful,
be realistic, or to remember the limiations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you're telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be to yourself,
if you can hear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day,
and if you can source your life from God's presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the moon,
'Yes!'
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have
I want to know if you can get up after the night or frief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn't interest me who you are, how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not
shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with who you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
- Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Indian Elder

Thanks Wes

Truth, Tolerance, Justice

"She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to - even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites - but, above all, an inherited belief, derived from both her parents and entrenched by Tessa, that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist." - John Le Carre, "The Constant Gardener"

Greedy bastards

So millions and millions of people are starving to death in Africa, and a whole lot more may die because food aid is running out. American laws say that food aid must be grown in the United States and shipped overseas, a very long and expensive process.

So when its recommended that the law change and food be purchased in developing countries during emergencies rather than grown in the U.S.....

***

But Congress quickly killed the plan in each of the past two years, cautioning that untying food aid from domestic interest groups would weaken the commitment that has made the United States by far the largest food aid donor in a world where 850 million go hungry.

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, warned last year at a food aid conference in Washington that decoupling food aid from American maritime and agribusiness interests was “beyond insane.”

“It is a mistake of gigantic proportions,” he said, “because support for such a program will vanish overnight, overnight.”

***

This man is such a scumbag. How can it be that American "business interests" are more important than potentially saving 50,000 lives? How can it be "beyond insane" to suggest that these people's lives are more important than the pockets of business?

The MORAL thing to do would be to support these people who are dying of starvation. The CRIMINAL thing (in my eyes) would to be to hold back aid that can easily be given to save their lives. Not only to hold it back, but to couple it to American business interests and profits. Truly disgusts me.

Of course these people will probably starve and die. Of course there is probably big agribusiness behind this, lobbying for this law's protection. And of course, more people will make money off these people's misery.

*sigh*

Source: New York Times

Hope

"A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn't kill you, nor did it make you less effective. In fact, it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems - you ceased hoping your problems somehow get solved, through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself - and you just began doing what's necessary to solve your problems yourself...

...What are you going to do about suffering [human and earth]? Are you going to hope this problem somehow goes away? Will you hope someone magically solves it? Will you hope someone - anyone - will stop this from killing us all?

Or will you do something about it?

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that it kills you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that once you're dead they - those in power - cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell - you can still live because you are still alive, in fact more alive than ever before - but those in power no longer have a hold on you. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who depended on and believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think, but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or won't) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or won't) to defend the others you love. The you who will fight (or won't) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depend. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase. Not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.

When you give up on hope - when you are dead in this way, and by being so are really alive - you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the co-optation of rationality and fear that Nazis perpetrated on Jews and others, that abusers perpetrate on their victims, that the dominant culture perpetrates on all of us. Or rather it is the case that the exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to perpetrate this co-optation on themselves. But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like those Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

When you give up on hope, you lose a lot of fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to just protect those you love, you become dangerous indeed to those in power.

In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing." - Derrick Jensen, Endgame