Observations & Experiences

Anniversaries

Sept 1, 2006

This year we must endure, in quick succession, the first anniversary of hurricane Katrina, and the fifth of 9/11. I am so glad I’m not in the US to be bombarded by the news coverage, though I can catch enough of the spatter from anywhere in the world.

The politicians who rush to capitalize, claiming they did do or will do or are doing the right thing, and the other guys the wrong thing. The media who, with dreary predictability, actually give airtime to this political drivel, padded out with plenty of their own drivel about “what lessons have we learned?” “how has the world changed?” etc. (Their bathroom conversation is preferable.)

If we haven’t learned our lessons already (and we haven’t), there’s no use in piously trotting out the same old clichés on every anniversary, to sustain the illusion that we have.

Protecting the Children

July 17, 2006

So Zidane "held a high-profile TV interview in which he issued an apology to any children who might have been watching" when he head-butted Materazzi during the World Cup final. (Forbes, and many other sources)

Before he even said it, several opinionists brought up the usual "what about the children?" moan, much as they did over Janet Jackson's nipple exposure a few years ago.

No one, however, is moaning about protecting the children from news broadcasts, which hourly contain enough real shock and horror to send any child into trauma. Or the actual lives of many children, including many in the United States. Years ago several people were killed in random shootings in a housing project, I think it was in Detroit, including a child walking home from school. Civil administrators interviewed on TV spoke of the need for post-trauma counseling for the schoolchildren whose classmate had been killed. All I could think was: "Wouldn't it have been more effective to prevent the shootings in the first place and avoid the cause of the trauma?"

So the world entertains itself wondering what Materazzi said to Zidane, and debates whether Zidane was right to react as he did, and wonders how to explain this great mystery to the poor, innocent children who have been exposed to a sports hero behaving badly.

Uh, people, did you even notice? There's a war on. Or two. Or three. Explain THAT to your children. If you can.

Offensensitivity

Feb 5, 2006

Somewhere in my scrapbooks (don't panic: I only have three, and they mostly contain cartoons, clippings, and cards that appealed to me back in my college days) is buried a "Bloom County" Sunday strip in which Opus the penguin is minding his own business on a park bench when someone comes along and is offended by something or other that he is doing or reading. Along comes another person who is offended by the first, and so on, everybody offended in turn until someone finally realizes: "Oh, my gosh! LIFE is offensive!" - and they all run away screaming. In the final panel, Opus' wry comment is: "Offensensitivity."

...I was going to go off on a long rant here about the stupidity of the fuss currently being made over some cartoons in a Danish newspaper. But a far more qualified person has said it far better than I can.

Note: I found Muslimwakeup.com via an editorial by Magdi Allam in Italy's Il Corriere della Sera. The site looks like a good way to listen to the feelings of articulate Muslims with whom I could actually have a dialog, so I've subscribed to their newsletter (their RSS feed seems to be way out of date).

Waiting for News

Jan 2, 2005

One of the joys of having attended Woodstock School is that I know people all over the world. Which is also one of the sorrows: when something bad happens almost anywhere in the world, it’s likely to affect someone of my extended Woodstock family.

I wrote almost two years ago about an Indian schoolmate who survived both Gulf Wars in Baghdad, with her Iraqi husband. In April of 2004, Shahnaz died of a galloping cancer. Had Iraq not been under embargo for so many years, effectively shutting down medical facilities for ordinary people, she would have had access to decent medical care, and perhaps her cancer could have been diagnosed and treated in time. As it is, she is one of tens of thousands of innocent victims. The difference is that, to me, she is no abstract figure. She’s Shahnaz, and she’s gone.

And now the tsunami. As class secretary, I have sent out email to all my classmates, and am waiting for news from the larger alumni family as well. But it’s too early to know for sure whether we’re all okay; the nosecount could take a long time. So far the classmates who have checked in are all right, though one was awaiting news of her father’s family in Madras.

Eyewitness stories from alumni of our sister school, Kodaikanal, are being published (look for the link “tsunami” on the left).

Hostages

Sep 7, 2004

Twelve Nepali hostages in Iraq were executed, and I had never even heard they'd been taken - and I look at headlines from multiple sources on news.google.com practically every hour. There is no Nepali military presence in Iraq and few Nepalis are Christian or Jewish, so their murderers had to strain to find an 'excuse' for killing them: "We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalis who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians...believing in Buddhah [sic] as their God."

I wish I believed that there was a just god who would eventually punish these evil people for their crimes, should humanity fail to do so. Sadly, I am unable to believe it - as usual, some god or other is conveniently invoked as an excuse for atrocity against fellow human beings.

"Brave" Opinions

October 16, 2001

I started out thinking that this newsletter would be technical, then realized that I am currently (maybe permanently) burned out on writing about my one great area of technical expertise, CD-R. So the thing took a travel-writing sort of turn, but then the events of and following Sept 11 made that seem trivial. My last edition got more serious, and one person wrote that I was "brave" to take on the topics that I did.

Honestly, I didn't think of it as taking a big leap - I feel that I'm simply sharing thoughts with an extended circle of friends, and I hope that you perceive this as a conversation in which you are welcome to take part, even if (so far) I'm doing most of the talking. Calling this a "newsletter" doesn't give me any particular authority, and I don't claim to know all the answers or always to be sure of what I'm saying. One reader took issue with some of my comments in the last issue, but I think we've sorted that out - we've established that we both like a good argument. <grin>

This is different from what I was doing before for the company, and I'm still feeling my way into it. After years of technical and marketing writing, I've moved to the op-ed page. Here I don't have the restrictions of representing a company, and can be candid about my own thoughts and opinions. Where there is opinion, there's always room for dispute, so I don't expect you always to agree with or like what I have to say. But I do hope you'll always feel free to discuss it with me.