A Country Rag--Through the Looking Glass/Responsibility

A Country Rag Through the Looking Glass ~ Responsibility

Consciousness ~ Reality ~ Responsibility ~ Freedom

Midi music file (click on title): Fools Rush In, Jambalaya, You Can't Always Get What You Want

graphic: RoseMarie With Hat, watercolor by Vera A. Jones, Jonesborough TN

"A couple of weeks ago, Bono, the lead singer of U2, visited Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and pressed him to approve the Clinton Administration's budget request, made earlier this year, for four hundred and thirty-five million dollars to help write off debt in poor countries. Bono, who these days seems to spend as much time campaigning for debt relief as he does strutting around the stage with the Edge -- he also popped up in Prague last week, at the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund -- described how, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, up to half of the children are malnourished and one in five dies before the age of five.... For more than two decades, dozens of improverished countries have been forced to spend more money servicing loans outstanding to wealthy foreigners than on hospitals and schools. In many cases, the governments that took out these loans no longer exist, but their successors are shackled by onerous interest payments. Thanks, in part, to Bono and other celebrities who drew attention to the issue, last year the governments of the creditor nations finally came up with a meaningful plan to write off some debts, with the money saved going to poverty-reduction programs.... It is now caught up in the election-year budget haggling. This is a familiar tale. In 1962, roughly three per cent of the federal budget was devoted to development aid. This year, the share going to economic aid for poor countries is less than one percent, which is just twenty-nine dollars per American. (The typical developed country gives about seventy dollars per person.)...." -- They Are The World, The New Yorker, 9/9/2000

"We turn away to face the cold, enduring chill/ As the day begs the night for mercy, love/ The sun so bright it leaves no shadows/ Only scars carved into stone/ On the face of earth/ The moon is up and over One Tree Hill/ We see the sun go down in your eyes/ You run like river, on like a sea/ You run like a river runs to the sea.... I don't believe in painted roses or bleeding hearts/ While bullets rape the night of the merciful/ I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky/ And the moon has turned red over One Tree Hill.... Oh, great ocean/ Oh, great sea/ Run to the ocean/ Run to the sea" -- The Joshua Tree, U2
graphic: ["...that government] of the people, by the people, for the people [shall not perish from this earth." Abraham Lincoln]

"...In the early days of the industrial revolution in the United States, in New England 150 years ago, there was a very lively, independent labor press run by young women from the farms or artisans in the towns. They condemned the 'degradation and subordination' of the newly emerging industrial system which compelled people to rent themselves to survive. It’s worth remembering, and hard to remember, perhaps, that wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery at that time, not only by the workers in the mills, but right through much of the mainstream--for example, Abraham Lincoln, or the Republican Party, even editorials in the New York Times (that they might like to forget). Working people opposed the return to what they called 'monarchical principles' in the industrial system, and they demanded that those who work in the mills should own them--the spirit of republicanism. They denounced what they called the 'new spirit of the age--gain wealth forgetting all but self,' a demeaning and degrading vision of human life that has to be driven into people’s minds by immense effort which, in fact, has been going on over centuries." -- Noam Choamsky in Memory and Concentration Impairment Zdnet

"Testosterone's effects start early -- really early. At conception, every embryo is female and unless hormonally altered will remain so. You need testosterone to turn a fetus with a Y chromosome into a real boy, to masculinize his brain and body. Men experience a flood of testosterone twice in their lives: in the womb about six weeks after conception and at puberty. The first fetal burst primes the brain and the body, endowing male fetuses with the instinctual knowledge of how to respond to later testosterone surges. The second, more familiar adolescent rush -- squeaky voices, facial hair and all -- completes the process. Without testosterone, humans would always revert to the default sex, which is female. The Book of Genesis is therefore exactly wrong. It isn't women who are made out of men. It is men who are made out of women. Testosterone, to stretch the metaphor, is Eve's rib." -- Andrew Sullivan in The He Hormone, New York Times 1/2/2000, reviewing research databases, most notably that of James M. Dabbs and his soon-to-be-published Heroes, Rogues and Lovers

Quotes on the state of the union

Click here for archived Quotes....

"... We should recognize what an enormous potential the Internet has for bridging economic, educational and social divides, Clinton said at the closing of a Berlin conference on retooling government for today's global information society. ... If schools in poor or remote spots had Internet-access, they'd also have the same access to knowledge as the rich world, he said. ... Clinton also suggested a systematic effort to use e-commerce to market native arts and crafts from Latin America and Africa, which he said would increase the income of poor people in villages dramatically. He also described something he saw on his recent trip to India. A new mother was able to get quality up-to-date information on how to care for her baby by going into her village's health office and calling up a Web page. ... Those of us in the wealthier countries should be providing the money and the technical support for countries to do more of this, he said, because it will move more people more quickly out of poverty I think than anything that's ever been out there, if you do it right." Clinton: Internet Can Fight Poverty, Paul Geitner AP

"An entire generation of women is coming of age to find a future less optimistic than our mothers' vision; a future where women are NOT equal and their lives are increasingly filled with obstacles and restrictions. Roe v. Wade, a decision that once ensured us reproductive freedom, has been all but overturned for most women through new restrictions lobbied for and passed by conservatives. But young women's lives are affected in unique ways by these trends of inequality, poverty, discrimination, and violence:

After parental consent laws went into effect in Minnesota, the birthrate for 15-to-17 year olds skyrocketed to 40%.
Racist and homophobic hate crimes specifically directed at young women have increased exponentially. Total victims of hate crimes in 1996 included a greater number of women, people of color, people under 18 years of age, and people over 65 years of age then in 1995.
Eight million girls are sexually abused before they reach the age of eighteen.
One in ten adolescent girls suffers from anorexia or bulimia.
For girls 14 and under, the proportion of late abortions (after 20 weeks) is almost four times the national average.
40,000 teenage girls drop out of high school each year because of pregnancy.
Young women are one quarter of today's homeless population.
Nearly one in four abortions performed on girls below the age of 15 are performed in the second trimester."
-- Third Wave, a grantmaking organization of young women and men

"[Virginia Tech's president] Charles W. Steger takes a brutally Darwinian view of higher education's future: Fifty or so U.S. universities eventually will claw their way to pre-eminence, he says, while many will sink to destruction in the tar pit of mediocrity.
"Thirty years ago, college presidents were public intellectuals who made headlines when they delivered speeches on foreign policy or the economy, he said. Today they are like corporate CEOs. Unwilling or unable to raise tuition and facing state legislatures intent on paring the budget, they are bottom-line managers, constantly turning to another source of funding -- private donations -- to keep their schools competitive." Rex Bowman, Times-Dispatch, Nov 22, 1999

"The best way to prevent the development of dangerous violent criminals is to prevent the brutalization of children. The United States is losing that battle. The number of children killed by abuse has increased by fifty percent in the past decade. A 1998 Gallup poll found that almost five percent of U.S. parents report punishing their children by punching, kicking, throwing them down or hitting them with a belt, hairbrush, stick or some other hard object elsewhere than on the bottom -- a percentage that corresponds to some three million children. Parents also reported that 1.3 million of their children had been sexually abused within the past twelve months. In another study of teenage boys and girls commissioned by Children Now, a child advocacy group, and Kaiser Permanente, a health-care company, forty percent of teenage girls reported having a friend their own age who had been hit or beaten by a boyfriend. More than twenty-five percent of teenage boys reported having a friend who had been a victim of gang violence; almost half had a friend who had been threatened with a weapon." A Conversation with Richard Rhodes, author of Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

"Our permanent enemy is the noted bellicosity of human nature.... The plain truth is that people want war.... It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical blood-payment. We do ill, I fancy, to talk much of universal peace or of a general disarmament. We must go in for preventive medicine not for radical cure. We must cheat our foe, politically circumvent his action, not try to change his nature." --William James, Remarks at the Peace Banquet December 1904

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How did I get here anyway? -- Take me to Appalachia