Monday, May 12, 2008

Monday Thoughts

Today, I'm thinking so much about the incredible number of suffering people around the world: in Burma (Myanmar) and in China, about how to internationalize rescue efforts, how when a new tragedy occurs, how helpless the rest of us are, how much we need to participate actively somehow, how weak international organizations are who can't immediately get the ball rolling, how Washington let New Orleans down, how the rest of the world wanted to help Louisiana, but what can one do? I still want to put together a website that would enable person to person aide in far-flung regions (the idea is called: Wings...see an earlier post).

And on Huffington Post, I read and insightful Barbara Enrenreich column on the feminist damage that Hillary has done. It's worth the whole read, but here's an excerpt:

"It's important -- even kind of exhilarating -- for women to embrace their inner bitch, but the point should be to expand our sense of human possibility, not to enshrine aggression as a virtue. Women can behave like the warrior queen Boadicea, credited with slaughtering 70,000, many of them civilians, or like Margaret Thatcher, who attempted to dismantle the British welfare state. Men, for their part, are free to take as their role models the pacifist leaders Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Biology conditions us in all kinds of ways we might not even be aware of yet. But virtue is always a choice.

"Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way -- by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn't really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren't wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female -- such as compassion and an aversion to violence -- can be found in either sex, and sometimes it's a man who best upholds them."

My favorite line: "Virtue is always a choice." Sometimes, it's better to let go (or drop out) for the sake of something greater. Washington is under siege from right wing dismantle-ists who are on their way to attaining the Norquist dream of crippling the government so detrimentally that Big Business will be free from all restraint. The real "Mission Accomplished" was making war nothing more than Big Business. This fight is too critical for divisive tactics and the usual liberal hemming and hawing. It's too big for gender and racial divisions. Big Business is one big Goliath, and this is no time to try to make friends or to pander with the monster(s) out there.

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