'To the Next Generation of Rebel Voices'

Published at Campus Progress of the Center for American Progress

A small excerpt below:

Too often, the world seems impossible to change. The obstacles too grave,
solutions too hard to come by, apathy and ignorance too prevalent. These moments
of dejection have plagued progressives for generations.

“I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy,” said the
iconic historian Howard Zinn in a 1970
speech. “[T]hat things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and
the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the
wrong people are out of power.” Surely, similar sentiments could be expressed by
any progressive-minded individual at any time in recent history. Such is life in
a world filled with injustice: prospects for
healthcare reform dimming, the Supreme Court handing
democracy over to corporations, young people going bankrupt because
they choose to go to college.

But what made Howard Zinn—the famous historian and activist who died
last week of a heart attack at age 87—so unique was his unceasing faith that
regular people can and should strive to make the world a better place.

"I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played," Zinn wrote
in a 2004 essay, “The
Optimism of Uncertainty.” "The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not
to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at
least a possibility of changing the world."

Human Rights Watch: The Lebanon/Israel War

A new report is out and is worth reading.

More stupidity from Bill O'Reilly

The depth of Bill O'Reilly's ignorance evidently has no bounds. He had Bill Maher on The Factor last week and they discussed the civilian death toll in Iraq. O'Reilly, apparently just making shit up of the top of his head, called the Lancet Study, which estimated that 655,000 Iraqis have died due to the war, a "far left web site."

This is beyond ridiculous.

Let us be clear. Not only is the Lancet Study not "far left," it is also not a "web site." Here is The Washington Post description of the study.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

Is there any statistic or reality that O'Reilly won't blame on a"far left web site?"

The Others

In 2002 Howard Zinn wrote a great piece about the deaths of civilians from the countries on the other end of our guns, and how they were so often ignored by the media, and Americans as a whole.

I do believe that if people could see the consequences of the bombing campaign as vividly as we were all confronted with the horrifying photos in the wake of September 11, if they saw on television night after night the blinded and maimed children, the weeping parents of Afghanistan, they might ask: Is this the way to combat terrorism?

Surely it is time, half a century after Hiroshima, to embrace a universal morality, to think of all children, everywhere, as our own.

In this spirit I link to an article in today's Washington Post which pays humble tribute to a fallen civilian -- one of the "others" -- who has been killed in Iraq.

Unlike the U.S. soldiers who die in this conflict, the names of most Iraqi victims will never be published, consigned to the anonymity that death in the Iraqi capital brings these days