International Landmine Day

http://http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/41375

Blind and Legless Landmine Victim
Originally uploaded by pictim

From AfterDowningStreet.org

4 April: International Day for Landmine Awareness and Assistance
Submitted by danielifearn on Sat, 2009-04-04 08:47. IFPJ

Adopt-A-Minefield

Actiongroupe Landmine-Germany

Albanian Mine Action Executive

Aotearoa New Zealand Cluster Munition Coalition

Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action

Bosnia and Herzegovinia Mine Action Centre

Cambodian Mine Action Centre

Canandian International Demining Corps

Chilean National Demining Commission

Clear Path International

Cluster Munitions Coalition

Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise-Laos

Croatia Without Mines Foundation

Croatian Mine Action Centre

Danish Demining Group

E-MINE Electronic Mine Information Network

European Union in Humanitarian Demining

Geneva International Centre for 
Humanitarian Demining

Golden West Humanitarian Foundation

Humanitarian Demining R&D Program

Humanitarian Demining Training Center

International Campaign to Ban Landmines

Internationa Mine Standards

International Test and Evaluation Program for Humanitarian Demining

International Trust Fund For Demining and Mine Victims Assistance

Iraq Mine Action

Islamic Republic Of Iran Mine Action Center

Japanese Mine Action Service

Jordan National Committee for Demining and Rehabilitation

Landmine Action

Landmine Monitor-International Campaign to Ban Landmines

Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme

Mines Action Canada

Mine Action Coordination Centre in DRC

Mine Action Coordination Centre South Lebanon

Mine Action Information Center

Mine Advisery Group International

Mine Detection Dog Centre-South East Europe

MINE-EX Humanitarian aid by Rotary

Mozambique National Demining Institute

No More Landmines

Nordic Demining Research Forum

Office of Humanitarian Mine Action

Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement

Program of Assistance for Demining in Central America

Regional Center for Divers Training in Underwater EOD-Montenegro

Rotarians for Mine Action

South-Eastern Europe Mine Action Coordination Council

Stop Mines-Republic of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Survey Action Center

Survivor Corps

Swedish EOD and Demining Centre

The Halo Trust

Thailand Mine Action Center

Justice? Truth? Not If The U.S. Can Help It.

The New York Times reported today http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/world/europe/29spain.html?_r=1&th&emc=th that Spanish Justice may fill the void left by a morally bankrupt United States. The case has been forwarded to the office of the prosecutor for review by Baltazar Garzon, the judge who ordered the arrest of the notorious Chilean villain, Augusto Pinochet. Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general appointed by Bush who went down in flames as a result of political scandal is named in the investigation, as are 5 other high ranking Bush appointees. It appears that arrest warrants may follow in time. But as stated in the Times article:
"The United States, however, would be expected to ignore an extradition request for former officials, although other investigations within the United States have been proposed. Calls for the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation have so far been resisted by the Obama administration, but for more than four years, the Justice Department ethics office has been conducting its own investigation into the work of Mr. Yoo and some of his colleagues."

Unfortunately, even though Dick Cheney and G. W. Bush have openly admitted to knowledge and authorization of waterboarding of prisoners, the investigation does not name them. Well, one can always hope.

The Border Trilogy

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. The three books are: The Crossing, All The Pretty Horses and Cities of The Plains. McCarthy is an astonshing writer, poetic, complex and a hell of a story teller. The stories are set in New Mexico, Texas and Mexico between the years 1939(or so) and 1950. The first two involve adolescent boys taking off for parts unknown in Mexico. They involve horses, wolves, cattle and all manner of humans. The boys travel, work, undertake quests, endure grueling hardships and do their best to live up to the standards they have they have chosen. The third book involves two of the boys after they return to the States and work together on a small ranch in Texas. Billy and John Grady have become close friends although they differ in age by some eight years. In fact Billy is now 28 years old. We find out what they have learned, or failed to learn from their earlier oddysies.

McCarthy is known for his grim and graphic violence, and there is violence in these books, to be sure. He does, however, use violence quite judiciously compared to the horrifying Blood Meridian, another novel set in Texas but in the 1840's.
McCarthy uses embedded stories to pursue philisophical speculations and he does a masterful job with these. In The Crossing he has an elderly Mexican give the most intriguing description of blindness I have ever read as he is telling young Billy Parham his story. It is the only thing I have ever read that actually helped me to have some grasp of the experience of blindness. The epilogue in Cities of The Plain is an embedded story told as an extended and fantastically exotic dream.
If you enjoy good stories beautifully told that also stimulate your mind , you would do well to read these books. Start with The Crossing and you will be hard pressed to stop until you have read all three.

The True Gospel

Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, died 29 years ago on March 24, 1980. He was shot in the chest as he raised the host for communion during mass at a hospital chapel in El Salvador. Seconds before he was shot he offered this prayer in consecration of the bread which Catholics believe becomes the body and blood of Jesus,

"May this Body immolated and this Blood sacrificed for Mankind nourish us also, that we may give our body and our blood over to suffering and pain, like Christ -- not for Self, but to give harvests of peace and justice to our People."

Romero is remembered as a hero and martyr and rightly so. I remember him as someone who preached the true gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, someone who lived the true gospel.

"Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down."

"Live simply and justly in solidarity with the poor and marginalized and be a good neighbor. Make no war on them, rather, be one with them in spirit, truth, and love...Hear the truth when it is spoken to you ...and speak truth to power..."


"The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history."

On March 23, 1980, the day before his death, Archbishop Romero appealed directly to the members of the military, calling on them to refuse illegal orders:

"We are your people. The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear the voice of the man commanding you to kill, remember instead the voice of God. Thou Shall Not Kill….In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you, stop the repression."

And his last words:

"May God have mercy on the assassins."

Way to Go, El Salvador!

El Salvador elected Mauricio Funes of the FMLN party as president last week.
In his acceptance speech, Funes dedicated his presidency to martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero vowing to have, as Romero put it, "A preferential option for the poor".
The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front or FMLN, was founded as a revolutionary guerilla organization which fought to overthrow the right-wing government resonsible for the assasination of people who worked to relieve the oppression of the poor, including Archbishop Romero.

The FMLN was named for Farabundo Marti, who ,in 1932, led a worker and peasant uprising against the brutal general Maximiliano Hernandez. With naval support from the US, Hernandez crushed the revolt and slaughtered 30,000 indigenous people and political opponents. It became a legal political party in 1992 after peace agreements were signed.
Funes and the FMLN defeated ARENA, the right wing party which has been in power in El Salvador since 1989 and has been in bed with the United States since its inception in 1981. ARENA was founded by Roberto D'Auboisson who was named in a United Nations report of 1993 to have ordered the assination of Archbishop Romero. ARENA fielded the infamous death squads during the civil war in El Salvador with the aid of the United States, and they were especially championed by Ronald Reagan.
All this has changed. FMLN and Funes have come to power because the people have grown tired of the hollow promises of ARENA. Under the loving care of the right wing, gangs have become so pervasive and powerful that the murder rate in El Salvador is nine times that of the United States, roughly 3,650 deaths a year in a country of seven million. Over 30% of the people live below the poverty level with 20% living on $1.00 a day. Those are numbers from 2006, when times were relatively good world wide.
Funes, a former journalist, is a bright guy who faces huge challenges(sound like anybody we know?). But the Salvadorans are moving left and moving away from the US which has sponsored oppression in Latin America for well over one hundred years. Way to go, El Salvador!

Way to Go Vermont!

It isn't law yet, but on Friday the Vermont state senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to approve a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage. The full senate will likely debate and vote on it next week. This seems an appropriate action for a state that has as its motto, "Freedom and Unity"

I remember discussing my position on interracial dating and marriage with my art teacher when I attended Crown Point High School in Indiana in 1963. Indiana was once the home of the largest KKK organization in the country and to this day has a lively Klan. Fortunately my teacher was a moderate man who listened respectfully to his students and enjoyed discussing issues with them. He said he disagreed with interracial dating and relationships but told me I had a crusading spirit. My positive support for interracial dating and marriage didn't win me a lot of popularity points with the Hoosier classmates, but I didn't fit in anyway so I didn't much care. I have wondered from time to time what the reaction would have been if I had spoken in support of gay marriage back then. Of course it was an unthought of concept back in that era, or at least I had never heard of it and had never thought about it. I know the idea would have been met with a great deal more resistance and revulsion than interracial marriage. I believe this is because in the mind of your average racial bigot the idea of interracial sex is actually quite titillating. It isn't the sex part, especially since they can imagine a white man with a black woman. It is the marriage part and the black man with the white woman that freaks out racists. After all, one only need consider the amount of rape that was perpetrated by white men against black women throughout the years of slavery to realize that white men shtooping black women has never been a problem for the aforementioned palefaced racists. But same gender sex!! Oy vey! The very act is horrifying to your average manly man homophobe although ninety percent of these same stout buckos will blissfully wank off to a sex scene featuring two comely lasses in a porn flick (statistic is my own fictitious creation). To hear some of the kids I have worked with express themselves, and kids tend to not hold back, there is very little that they find more repulsive than two people of the same gender in an intimate relationship. Men are driven to horrifying acts of violence by their fear of homosexuals. Or their latent attraction. or their fear that they might be attracted and therefore 'queer' themselves. I believe with all my heart that this fear and revulsion of the gay sex act and not some obscure verses sprinkled around in an ancient religious text is the basis for all of this. Once again religious beliefs are the cover, the excuse for hatred. As the Bible was once used(and still is so used) to justify racism, it is used as a bulwark to hide homophobia. Tsk, tsk. WWJD?

Way to Go New Mexico!

On Friday March 13th, the senate of New Mexico voted to abolish the death penalty in that state. The house had voted to banish it previously. If the governor signs the legislation, New Mexico will become the fifteenth state to do away with this barbaric practice.

When I was 18 years old, I asked my priest in our religious ed class about capital punishment. I had read the story of the woman taken in adultery(I had also noticed that they didn't drag out the blighter she was with). I knew that Jesus said forgive seventy times seven, and forgive them for they know not what they do, love your enemies, and it seemed to me that the business about "let the one who is without sin cast the first stone" pretty much put the cork in the state sanctioned killing bottle. Our supposedly Christ-following priest told us that it is too expensive for the state to feed and house convicted murderers for the rest of their lives. I was stunned! I expected him to point out some scriptural argument if he was going to support the death penalty, something from canon law perhaps, but to put human life into terms of dollars and sense?

As it turns out, not only was he a cheap jerk lacking in compassion, but he was wrong. While comparisons are fairly complex, all studies agree that the cost of prosecuting a crime which may result in the death penalty is many times more expensive than non-capital offenses. The cost of housing people on death row is also far more costly than a standard maximum security lock up. One example is Texas where it was found that it costs three times as much to impose the death penalty as it does to imprison a person in a single cell for forty years.

Of course this doesn't address my original question to Father Merciful; how can we support the death penalty in light of the teachings of Jesus? Virtually all Christian theological arguments in favor of the death penalty go back to the Torah or Hebrew Testament, 'eye for an eye' lex talionis and all that. They don't usually mention that the first person executed under Mosaic law was stoned to death for picking up firewood(quite the offense then, it would seem) that you are supposed to have your kids put to death for dissin' you. True believers then zip over to Paul who says, "For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. the state has the power of the sword." Romans 13:3-4 Uh, yeah, the Roman authorities cut Paul's head off with the sword. Sort of waters down this passage as a strong argument for the death penalty, I should think. The people I have debated this with, at least the Bible believing bunch, tend to neglect the gospels when it comes to this issue, the very source of Jesus' teaching, nec'st pas?



It would be wrong to neglect the other truths about the death penalty, it is racist, only poor people go to death row, and it is utterly ineffective as a deterrent, but my time and space here are limited, so see http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/FactSheet.pdf for some telling facts and graphs.

So the point of state sponsored killing is?? Revenge, pure and simple. Somehow, I don't think Jesus would approve.