#Porte Ouverte: the French Spirit Will Never be Conquered by Violence

French solidarity, generosity and courage is a miracle that leaves me in awe. Parisians tweeting #PorteOuverte with their address for people in need. Some were afraid. But mostly courage and defiance reigned.

People who had nowhere to go also used it. And their tweets got retweeted virally. Taxis switched off their meters. It was a massive surge of love, care, protectiveness and courage.

As somebody pointed out in a tweet, the kindness towards strangers even though they’d all been attacked by strangers is incredible. They could have given in to paranoia but they haven’t. They could have been cowed but they weren’t. They could have stayed indoors and their fear would have been completely understandable but they didn’t. I saw long lines of people waiting to give blood.

The French showed indomitable courage with the Resistance against Hitler and the Nazi Occupation. And they showed it after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. They’re showing it again. I saw a man sitting in his local cafe talking about the horror of the attacks, weeping with raw grief that was difficult to watch and that made me wish I could be there to try and comfort him.


He turned away from the camera. Amidst the tears he couldn't contain he said “We can’t let them succeed. We won’t.” It's easy to say that in the abstract. It's incredibly difficult to say when violence has blown up in your face and you're threatened with worse. 

Around the world people have been burning candles in their windows and sharing images and messages of support on social media. Public buildings have been lit up with colors of the French flag. Facebook created a tricolor filter for your images. Desmond Tutu sent a tweet that said "Hope is being able to see the light despite all of the darkness" with an image of Paris in darkness but the Eiffel Tower lit up. Hope and courage. #Pray for Paris, yes.

But I learned a lot from Paris, too, and I’m grateful to Parisians and the French in general for their open hearts, spiritedness, courage and refusal to be controlled and conquered by fear and violence. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. 

The Cowardice of Distorted and Twisted Perspectives about Barack Obama

I’ve come across a lot of writers who say they don’t care if they never get published or achieve fame; that they write because they love it. There’s no right or wrong about it, but one thing is for sure: if you keep the product of your creativity private you also never expose yourself to sticks and stones. You never have to grapple with the ugliest and most persecuting of rejections.

But if you’re driven, for whatever reason, to be visible you have to gird your loins. Because some of the people who see you will be filled with repressed rage and just looking for a target to hurl their ugly missiles at.

Oddly, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing. Even if you’re an exceptional human being it doesn’t make you less of a target. Take Barack Obama, an unusually balanced man; he wouldn’t have been able to keep his focus if he wasn’t, given the rotting garbage (and let’s face, repressed rage is rotting garbage) that’s thrown at him and the conservative wall of resistance that showed its ugly face as soon as he was elected. Resistance that had and has nothing to do with him as a person and everything to do with the color of his skin. It’s not just passionate resistance, it’s ugly,  underhanded and explosive. I had a tiny, tiny taste of it aimed at me the other day with a comment on my last post.

"YOU pay for a third US war in the Mid East, bitch. You have some sort of moronic hero worship of Obama, who wants to throw seniors in the US out to die, using the US budget deficit to justify his particular form of genocide. You live in a rich country. There are many rich countries in the world. The US is now a poor country, full of poor and unemployed people. It is selfish and greedy of you to want the US and its people who will never see as much money as you live on in a month, to sacrifice even more when the rest of you sacrifice NOTHING."

Nothing balanced about that comment. I’m not sure which country this person thinks I live in, or what my income is, or how they came to their conclusions, that I’m moronic and super-wealthy. I know that nothing about any of it is factual.

It wasn’t pleasant to get that bit of emotional acid thrown at my face, although it didn’t hurt as much as, possibly, the author hoped it would. I was more unsettled by the twisted and distorted perspective of Barack Obama - genocide? - and the state that the US was in when he was elected. But that’s par for the course with his detractors; ignoring the truth and one aspect about life that nobody has any power at all to change: cause and effect. A president who comes into power when a country is sliding towards another Great Depression didn’t cause it. He inherited it.

Barack Obama has rescued the US from a fate that everybody thought was cast in stone. Whether he gets acknowledgement for it or not doesn’t alter the truth of that.

I haven’t enabled the comment on the post, because I wanted the author of it to have their very own spotlighted page. Unfortunately I can’t congratulate them personally on their brilliant mind and balanced perspective or thank them for their contribution to World Truth because, of course, they posted as ‘anonymous’. 

MugabeGod

Long ago I was warm, charming and generous. Passionate about justice. I led my country to freedom from the worst kind of tyrany. Everybody believed I was the good guy. Time and time again you voted me in. We had the world at our feet and everything going for us.

Over time I surrounded myself with friends who wouldn’t challenge me. I do it even more now. I pay their bills, I buy them nice things, I give them land and important positions. I institute new laws which give me total control. I do what I want. I have the power. I can make up laws and I can break them as I want. If you challenge me I can kill you, throw you in jail, destroy your life. I can hurt you as much as I want, until you learn your lesson. Don't challenge Me. I am MugabeGod.

I can lie, cheat and steal, blame the consequences of my own stupidity on others; I can meddle with lives, destroy property, destroy an economy, create starvation, empty shelves in stores. Then deny that I did it. What are you going to do? Nothing. You have no power. I have it all.

I can do whatever I want with your money and your property. I can do what I want with this whole country. What’s anybody going to do about it? Nobody can touch me. Of course I could step down and let somebody else fix the mess I’ve made but why should I? I like pushing people around. I like the power, it makes me feel big. What are you going to do? Tell me I can't? Start a new party? Write indignant articles in the press? I will just shut you down.

I know how to intimidate you. I know how to kick up so much dust that reality is obscured. I know how to make your life a nightmare. I can do whatever I want. To those who are blind to my evil ways I'm charming, and disarming. They believe me. Because I have power over them. I capitalize on their innate decency. Because I can. I don't give a damn about the truth. I lie when I feel like it. I break the law if I feel like it. If you break my law I’ll break your neck. What are you going to do about it? I'm MugabeGod. I can do what I want. I always have. You can't stop me. I'm the one with the power. You want some of this power? How’re you going to get it? I can rig elections.

But in the dark hours before dawn, I live in terror. Terror that I'm hated, that my enemies are growing in number, that my control is slipping away from me, that my power and money can't keep my soul-consuming paranoia at bay. 

I loathe the sycophants who live like parasites off me and compromise themselves despicably so that I'll keep them in power. Disgusting slugs. Even though they're doing what I demand of them I hate them. I'm fully aware that if they had  any courage they'd admit that they despise me. They might even kill me. They think I don’t know that but I do. 

I see everything. Every glance between conspirators, every whispered conversation. I know they encourage me in my evil ways to increase my dependency on them. I know they are waiting for their chance.

I withdraw further and further into myself, trusting nobody, afraid of everybody, my body being eaten up by cancer, my mind slipping away from me into darkness, as my paranoia grows like a rank tumor in my brain. In the dark hours before dawn I can't keep my terrors at bay. Because no matter what I say to the contrary I know I am a murderer and a thief. I know that I’m evil. I know that I have betrayed and cruelly destroyed innocent people. I know I have single handedly ravaged my beautiful country, the country I so passionately fought to free from injustice. I know that my enemies are getting stronger. And I am getting weaker.

In the dark hours before dawn I know I am condemned and that my punishment is coming and all the power in the world cannot save me. No place to run. No place to hide.

I am a hunted man.

The Sad Truth about Edward Snowden - Nobody Really Wants Him

Edward Snowden continues to elude capture as a story unveils that has all the makings of a fascinating political thriller/personal drama. A lot of his support comes from people who believe he’s a hero and that he sacrificed himself for a worthy cause. Others, myself included, are a little more sceptical, mostly because of the countries he turned to for asylum. To proclaim yourself an activist for human rights – in this case privacy and freedom of speech – and then ask help from countries whose governments are notorious for violating those rights doesn’t make sense.

Snowden must be very naïve if he believes these countries would want to harbour an activist who has shown himself willing to break laws and expose and betray his own country. And he's downright deluded if he thinks they care more about human rights than about international relationships. They’ve already proved that they don’t. They’ll use him if they can and spit him out if they can’t.

Who is Edward Snowden, anyway? What’s his background? There’s not much information to be found about him. I guess he values his privacy. He doesn’t mind exposing a government but he doesn’t want anybody to expose him. He’s possibly also a little paranoid. NBC News reported that he covers himself and his laptop with a red hood when entering his passwords. I can’t say whether that information is true or not.

According to The Guardian, he comes from a middle class family. He was born in 1983 in Wilmington, N.C., his father is a former Coast Guard Officer and his mother is the chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology at Baltimore federal court. He has one sister, an attorney, who is older than him. He didn’t complete high school, but he’s mum on why. He studied at a community college and got a general equivalency degree. The Guardian learned that a student with his name and date of birth took classes at the Anne Arundel Community College from 1999 to 2001 and in 2004 and 2005.

In 2004 he was recruited into the Army Reserves special forces for a 14 week training course which he didn’t complete. Nor did he get any awards. Snowden told The Guardian he broke both his legs in an accident and that’s why he was discharged. 

He then worked as a security guard with the NSA, from where he moved onto doing IT for the CIA. He worked there from 2007-2009, when he left to work for private contractors. He had been working for Booz Allen for about 3 months when he let the cat out the bag. He had been making about $200 000 a year. By self admission he has been a spy almost all his life. Which doesn’t quite fit with the facts. It’s very Hollywood, though. 

Snowden told the Guardian that he was diagnosed with epilepsy last year and used that as his excuse to take leave from Booz Allen. He didn’t tell his girlfriend or his family where he was going or what he was going to do. Nor did he apparently stop to think about how his actions might impact on them. I guess big noble causes require people to be sacrificed, whether they want it or not.

What I wonder is, why did he leave school? No kid does that unless there’s provocation. And the accident with 2 broken legs? What happened there? Snowden did say that he wanted to go to Iraq to protect the Iraqi people but got disillusioned when he realized the special services were more about killing Arabs. 

Which is very understandable and commendable. But what did that do to him, I wonder? As for his home life, how successful was his older sister and what was his relationship with her and with his parents? And I’d be very interested to know when he first started communicating with Julian Assange, or at the least how much he was influenced by that man’s PR. I have the sense that, like poor Bradley Manning, who had lousy self esteem and was lonely and easy prey, Snowden is now just so much fodder for Assange and his personal quest to stay in the spotlight no matter what the cost to anybody.

Same-Sex Marriage - Bigotry Is Alive and Kicking, from Popes to Justices

What is it with the World and Gay marriage? The unfettered bigotry of the resistance to it, from Popes to American Justices, makes it hard to believe we live in the 21st century. As for the rationalisations, and often from seemingly intelligent people, they boggle the mind.

The New York Times published some valuable quotes on the subject. Our esteemed new Pope Francis I wrote in a 2010 letter to Buenos Aires monasteries, “Let’s not be naive: this isn’t a simple political fight, it’s an attempt to destroy God’s plan.”  

His predecessor, Benedict XVI, said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, “Above all, we must have great respect for these people who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living.” Which sounded great until he added “On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people.”  

He was just carrying on a tradition. John Paul II wrote, in Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium, “It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this [gay marriage] is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.” 

In the Ironton Tribune Michael Reagan, son of Ronald, made a call to arms of all the sanctified people in the US – sanctimonious more like in reality – whether they be Protestants, Jews or Catholics (he doesn’t mention Muslims or Bhuddists). He castigated them for having no moral outrage. “Why aren’t thousands of our pastors, priests and rabbis shouting from their pulpits? Why aren’t they leading their congregations through the streets in mass protest?” He commanded them to unify and rise up against gay marriage which in his opinion will create a dangerous precedent, “a very slippery slope leading to other alternative relationships and the unconstitutionality of any law based on morality. Think about polygamy, bestiality, and perhaps even murder.”

Two same-sex marriage cases before the US the Supreme Court have the Justices hemming and hawing and generally dithering, grumbling over having to make a decision about the constitutionality of Proposition 8 which banned same-sex marriage in California in 2008, and the Defence of Marriage Act which forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Chief Justice Roberts even went so far as to wish that President Obama had just refused to enforce a law he didn’t believe in. Great advice coming from the Supreme Court. 

Of the dumbest arguments I’ve read against same-sex marriage the first is that the purpose of marriage is procreation - which means nobody who’s sterile or simply doesn’t want to have children, or is too old for it to happen, should be able to marry. The second is that it can’t be allowed because of the gays who will then get married just for the tax breaks. I’m not even going to get started on the Bible.

But the strangest part of all this is how heterosexual marriage is placed on a pedestal as if it’s the foundation of all that’s healthy in western society. In reality, the marriages that work are the ones where both partners have love and respect for each other, are committed, and are accountable for themselves. Hardly the domain of heterosexuals.

Fear, the Great Social Lubricator

Isn't it a great culture we have, built on rules that keep everybody separated from their natural joy? And the great lubricator of the system of rules is fear. Keeps everybody worrying, keeps everybody down.

Fear of not working hard enough, fear of not being clever enough, fear of not making enough money, fear of getting old, fear of doing something wrong, fear of anyone seeing what you're really feeling, fear of really feeling what you're really feeling, fear of looking like a fool, fear of actually being a fool, fear of - right, I'm going to stop now.

No, one last one. Fear of not being cool, and fear of letting your washing be seen hanging on the line. The latter is a big taboo here in South Africa, amongst a certain group. Who coincidentally revere the Italians. They build villa-like houses with Italian marble everything, take Italian lessons, go to Italy for their expensive holidays. Most of all they love Italian fashion, and buy their clothes in Milan, which makes all their friends think so much the more of them.

Who could doubt it? When those clothes are dry, and on their bodies, they are the ultimate status statement. When they're wet, and on the washing line, though, omigod. Fear of not being cool gives way to terror of Letting Your Washing Be Seen. Even though we idolise Italians who hang their washing out to dry all over the place.

I wonder who made the rule up, who first decided it wasn't cool for your neighbours to see your wet clothes. It must have been one person, no? Or could a whole nation one day have woken up, sat up in bed in a fright, and said in unison:

'' NO WET CLOTHES IN PUBLIC!”

Of course wetness doesn't apply to bathing costumes. Which is a relief. So they all sat up in bed and said their unison thing, paused when it struck them that bathing suits are made to be exhibited wet, and all said once again in unison "EXCEPT FOR BATHING SUITS!" Then they paused again as they thought that one through: "EXCEPT WHEN THEY'RE NOT ON OUR BODIES!"

Foolishness aside, some of the rules we live our lives by here are so often absurd and meaningless. More often than not. We take them so seriously, though, even though they rob us blind of all our joy, our capacity to be creative, to experience the new, to be happy and love each other, to spread our wings and fly. And all the while we're following them we're dreaming about the good life, the free life, the untramelled life, the life we're going to have when we've made enough money.

Until one day we die in our rule-bound prisons. Oops. That didn't go so well, did it?