Wednesday, November 11, 2009

What's happening while you read this blog post (Part V)


(As RMJ reminded us yesterday: every life is precious)

(Part I here) (Part II here) (Part III here) (Part IV here)

As you read this, I’d like you to contemplate just a tiny sampling of what’s happening elsewhere.

As you process these words, a young girl is being sold into slavery in Thailand. Who’s doing the selling? Her own family. “Over generations of hunger and desperation, selling a child during hard times became an acceptable, though not preferable, practice,” writes Kevin Bales in Disposable People. “As Thailand, particularly in the south, has become more industrialized, the division between rich and poor has become greater. It has also brought an increased array of things to buy. Whereas the poor used to seek after food and shelter, they now covet TVs and cars. Because the culture has grown to accept selling daughters for need, it was a small step for selling daughters for want to be accepted. A survey stated that of the parents in northern provinces who did sell their daughters, two-thirds could have afforded not to, but did in order to buy color televisions and video equipment.” The child being sold right this very minute will be raped and beaten into a life of prostitution for Japanese tourists until she contracts any number of diseases and gets kicked out of the brothel to die on the streets.

Being able to sleep well should be impossible while such depravity continues…

Such posts often provoke questions as to why I focus on the “bad stuff” about America, the “bad stuff” about capitalism, the “bad stuff” about industrial civilization. I’ll let Dick Gregory reply for me.

As James Baldwin sez: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

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Bonus post:

(please vote for it)

Rocky goes green


“It ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”

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Poem: “change we can bereave in"


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Posted by Mickey Z on 11/11 at 10:03 AM
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