There are a number of issues raised by this. I’ll attempt to cover them all, but I’m sure I’ll miss some. Such is the nature of something as marvelously multifaceted as this.

Let’s get the visceral emotional response to someone running ads featuring aborted fetuses on prime time television. Yes, it’s going to upset people. Yes, it is a particularly low blow in the war against women. Women who see this who have had abortions and have emotions about that fact  are likely to suffer some psychological damage as a result, and frankly, that’s what people like Terry are aiming for. They don’t think these grisly images actually deter people from having abortions. Instead, they think that they can attack and shame women who have already made that choice. They’re doubtlessly right in some cases. Good for them. So there’s the most obvious issue.

More interesting to me is what this brings up about campaign finance reform. I’ve long maintained that one of the biggest steps to reforming our entire political process is providing free airtime, in equal quantities, to all candidates. Money runs all engines in our political landscape, and a huge portion of the money any candidate raises goes to advertising airtime. Only by removing that element from the equation can we start to see an electoral and political process dominated by ideas. Until then, we’re going to keep hearing wild Mad Lib versions of what the talking heads think will appeal to the money.

Related is the fact that any candidate can air anything they want if they can afford it. On the face of it this statement is absurd enough, but when you think about it for even a moment, it becomes so deeply wrongheaded it actually boggles the mind. That this loophole exists is a naked acknowledgement of the fact that the rules only exist for those without money, and that our process is no more than a joke. All you have to do to broadcast anything, anything you want, during this period of time,  is have money and be technically a candidate for office.

I’m not going to lie. I do find it appalling that there’ll be fetuses broadcast during prime time. I do find it upsetting that this loophole makes uncomfortable statements about our political process. But mostly? I’m really depressed that I’m not wealthy enough to take advantage of it and show Randall Terry what the possibilities really are.

The problem I run into is that there’s so much going on in the world that it seems almost impossible to pick a place to start. I’ll be skipping so much no matter what I do. The other problem I have is that as soon as I start to think of something I want to write about, I realize that the way I think has developed in a way that makes it harder to be as aggressively invested in things as I used to be.

That said, today’s the day, kids.

Neither of them should have died.

Our justice system lets us down in so many ways, so constantly. It’s hard, however, at a moment like this, when Troy Davis has spent the last few hours strapped to a gurney waiting to find out if he’s going to be murdered by his country for a crime he very well may not have committed, to believe that there is a way it lets us down any more greatly than this.

There are those among us who believe that killers deserve to be killed. Ann Coulter tweeted tonight during Davis’ wait “ONE TROY DAVIS FLAME-BROILED, PLEASE”.

It isn’t hard to understand this mentality, but it is hard to get people to shed it. There are those who would have you believe that Lawrence Brewer’s death, because he was guilty, was justice. But justice and revenge are not the same thing, and an eye for an eye is unmistakably the latter. You can’t cancel out brutality with brutality, hatred with hatred, violence with violence. All you can do is continue a cycle that lessens us all.

For those of you who find this argument to be sentimental, impractical nonsense, I’ll offer a few more facts. Since 1973, over 130 people have been released from death row in the United States after varying amounts of time due to having proven their innocence. There are several cases, generally overlooked by the media, of men who are believed to have been innocent and were executed. Girvies Davis is one of them. David Wayne Spence is another.  Cameron Todd Willingham. These are just a few of the men who have been murdered by the state despite being demonstrably innocent of the crimes they were executed for. Tonight Troy Davis joins their ranks.

If that’s not enough for you, and you’re currently shaking your head waiting to talk about how keeping these men in prison costs more than the death penalty, and “why should we pay to feed and house these killers anyway”, hold on. Hold that thought. Recent studies indicate that that’s not the case, at all. Life imprisonment in many, if not most, cases costs the state less. So there goes that argument.

Mind you, I don’t think for an instant that state murder should be a question of cost. I don’t give half a damn if executing a man costs ten cents and imprisoning him costs ten thousand. Life is not, or should not be, a question of money. But if that’s your argument, try again.

Consider, also, the company the US keeps in continuing to practice the death penalty. Here’s a list:

• Afghanistan
• Antigua and Barbuda
• Bahamas
• Bahrain
• Bangladesh
• Barbados
• Belarus
• Belize
• Botswana
• Burundi
• Cameroon
• Chad
• China (People’s Republic)
• Comoros
• Congo (Democratic Republic)
• Cuba
• Dominica
• Egypt
• Equatorial Guinea
• Eritrea
• Ethiopia
• Gabon
• Ghana
• Guatemala
• Guinea
• Guyana
• India
• Indonesia
• Iran
• Iraq
• Jamaica
• Japan
• Jordan
• Korea, North
• Korea, South
• Kuwait

I’ll end this with one thought.

Our government, our system, is reflective. When our system continues to commit murder, and we do nothing, we are complicit in creating and allowing this monstrous system to thrive. It’s well past time to stop standing for this barbaric behavior.

Edit: Now that we know what they were, I”ll close instead with Davis’s last words.

“The incident that took place that night was not my fault. I did not have a gun. [Addressing the victim's family] I did not personally kill your son, father, brother; I am innocent. Look deeper in this case, so you can find the truth. [Addressing the prison staff who were about to take his life] May God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls.”

“Why don’t you just fucking move, then?”

“Are you even a citizen?”

“Just kill yourself.”

“Terrorist.”

These are all things I’ve heard after telling people some truth about how I feel about the government or situation in this country. I’ve heard every single one of them so many times I can’t even count, barring the invitation to kill myself. That one’s only come up once or twice.

Why do I hate America? Well, the simple fact that expressing dissent in anything but a hushed tone softened by surrounding statements results in that question answers the question in a handy fashion.

I’m expected to defend myself by explaining that I don’t hate America. But the simple, unvarnished truth of the matter is that I do. I’ve long since stopped believing that there’s a quality here redeeming enough to justify the softening statements, the hushed tone, the attempt to sugar up my distaste. Fuck it, boys and girls: I think America is a terminal patient, a three-quarters mad rich man with too much time and too little sense, a giant amusement park for insatiable sodomybeasts, all roaming and hunting for the easiest targets, the simplest prey. We are ruled by the rich and we are seemingly content to remain this way. If we were not content to bend over, grease up and take our due, wouldn’t we eventually note that we are the majority and these diseased monsters merely a vocal minority? Wouldn’t we do something about it? Wouldn’t we, say, fight back?

We would, but we don’t, and we’re beyond saving. Unplug us, burn the whole fucking thing to the ground and start again, if ye must. What we have now is condemned.

If you’re looking for an explanation more in depth than the responses simple dissent provokes, I suppose I can provide a couple. I could give many, many more than I will. It turns out that after one or two I’ve worked myself into a foaming rage that can only be cured with large amounts of some chemical solution or an insane dose of unwarranted violence, and I spend enough time avoiding jail cells as it is. No use attempting to explain to the brownshirts that it wasn’t personal, it was only that the sight of a soccer mom piloting a Hummer through my town, oblivious and uncaring as to the damage she does, the cost of her cancerous Chariot to the environment and the world around me, inspired the wolverine in my chest to leap out and beat her into a coma, and it isn’t really my fault, officer, you see? It’s fucking systemic…but I doubt I could remain rational long enough to even form that sentence when confronted by the badge wielded by a representative of the real culprit, anyway. I’d lose my civil tongue before I had it, and they’d have me in their claws. No. Best not to dwell longer than necessary.

Explanations, then. Examples, maybe, more accurately.

How about the woman brutally gang-raped by a group of  Halliburton contractors while working for KBR in Iraq? The criminal courts took no action on the case, and when she sought recourse in the civil courts? Fuck you, sunshine. You signed away your right to sue when you signed your employment contract. Shocked? Don’t be. If you’ve held a job in America in the last ten years or so, you’ve almost certainly signed the same bullshit document, or a similar one. Don’t want to give your employer the right to abuse you however they like and then settle any issue you might raise with it via an arbitration process paid for by them? Okay, no problem…as long as you don’t mind not having a job. Most employers include such an arbitration agreement in your hiring paperwork, and a refusal to sign it will, in almost every instance, result in your offer of employment being revoked. Which makes what happened to this woman, as horrifying as it is, secondary to the real issue. The real issue is that there is no limit to the ways that you are being fucked, every which way up to and including sideways, by corporations and the rich in this country. The fact that it is legal to require a person to sign such an agreement, dismissing their legal rights, in order to garner a job and therefore a way of surviving in this green land, is as fine a sign of how puppetfucked our government as any you can find. The government, is, unless I am grossly mistaken, meant to be by the people and for the people, but instead, it’s by the rich people and for the rich people. Especially now that we’re into that vile gig of treating corporations as people, according them the same (or better…yes, better) rights as people.

In case you didn’t fully process that, we officially live in a land so obscene that the violent kidnap and gang-rape of the woman in the story above isn’t, actually, the most appalling part of the story above. Think about that for awhile and try to keep down your reduced fat blueberry muffin and grande mochafuckingchino. If you succeed, congratulations, you’re an American.

Not feeling ill yet? Not feeling, say, an urge to move, to leave this B-movie conspiracy theory of a country? Let’s see how this suits you.

Accused whistleblower, Bradley Manning, has been subjected to what amounts (to any rightthinking human being with a heart or a soul in place of a flag buried in their chest) to torture under any reasonable definition, in direct and shocking violation of the Eighth Amendment for a ridiculous amount of time, without trial. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, because he hasn’t even been tried. And! Even if he is eventually convicted, the thing he will be convicted for is something for which he actually deserves a medal. He is accused of providing documents to Wikileaks, including the Collateral Murder video. That’s right…for providing evidence that US soldiers were laughingly murdering unarmed human beings, Manning  faces charges of communicating national defense information to unauthorized sources and a host of others, including “aiding the enemy”, which is a capital offense. (Let’s ignore for a moment that we keep such fine company as China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen in our insistence on continuing to employ capital punishment [the US is behind only these countries in number of people executed in 2010. The rest of the list is populated by similar luminary nations.]) So, in addition to filing a host of charges against a man that should be considered a national hero, we’re torturing him. Because we’re just such a progressive, fine, upstanding nation. And if you want to understand my overwhelming desire to vomit at the simple mention of America, consider this: Where is the outrage? Did you know who Manning was prior to reading this? If you walked around your office and asked people about his case, how many do you think would know about it? How many do you think would agree that he deserves what he’s getting, little terrorist? How dare he expose our military, our soldiers, our government, as the murderous, bloodthirsty warthogs they’ve always been? HOW DARE HE? Where’s the fucking anger over a young man simply seeing that there were atrocities being committed, and acting to expose them? It’s out there, sure, but it’s tiny and quiet compared to what it should be.

Swallowing vomit now? No? I guess we ought to talk about abortion, then. We’ve got a host of new laws limiting women’s access to abortions passing in this country, state by state. The laws range from bullshit to so fucking insane as to boggle the mind to “what fucking dimension have we entered now, you mad bastards”. Take, for instance, one of three new laws on the books in Kansas, legislating that women must be presented with a statement reading that an abortion “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”. That is not only not a settled fact and almost certainly inaccurate, but also amounts to psychological torture. Good work, Kansas! We knew you were bugfuck crazy, but we educated folk do like evidence to back up our assumptions and positions. Fellow lunacy lovers, Mississippi, have passed a law banning schools from teaching that abortion can be used to prevent the birth of a baby. That’s right…schools have been banned from teaching something that is inarguably fact. Nicely done, Mississippi! In Texas, already well known for being so far beyond the limits of sanity as to be indescribable, doctors are now required to describe the fetus to a woman before performing the pregnancy, and they have the option of even playing her the heartbeat. Nice lullaby, that.

And these are just a sample. States across the US are passing or seeking to pass laws that limit access to abortions, or psychologically torture women who can get them. It’s okay, though. We just like to talk about liberating women in other countries, and pretend that that’s why we’re bombing the literal living hell out of their homes. We don’t actually have any regard for women, and we certainly can’t trust them to make their own decisions regarding things as complicated as their own bodies.

Alright. I’m foaming and bubbling a bit around the corners of my lips, so these are all the examples I can give you for now. Rest assured that there are many more, including the fact that simply typing and publishing the things I’m typing and publishing means that I live in fear of not being able to find a job. But, I’ve got a bad heart and have been told to avoid stress, which I imagine includes “rage so intense it actually feels as though my head may burst into flame any moment”.

In closing, I guess I can say only this: Fuck America, y’all. And for the love of whatever thing you hold holy, start paying attention. It may be too late, but as long as this stupid land is your land and my land, we’ve an obligation to ourselves and the rest of the world to TRY to change it.

But I understand where she’s coming from. It wasn’t that long ago that I, afraid that I’d be adding to the somewhat unfair rap I’ve got for being tough and unladylike, refused to call myself a feminist. It made me feel something like a coward not to call myself that, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want the people who think the fact that I’m not afraid to throw a punch to defend someone means that I’m not really a girly type to have any extra ammunition. Hell, I wear makeup. I genuinely enjoy pornography, and not that softly lit, romantic, long deep kisses type they market to us gals. I bake delicious things when I’m upset. I love high heels. Surely, I told myself over and over, that’d get me kicked out of the feminism club right off the bat.

It took me longer than I’m proud of to figure out that none of those things meant I wasn’t a feminist, and that none of the things that make me a feminist make me less of a woman, despite some people’s frankly stupid and deeply upsetting thoughts on the subject.

One of the things that took me the most time to muddle through was the idea of equality. I absolutely believe men and women should have equal rights. I believe in equal pay. I believe women should have the choice to do whatever they want to do, not just traditionally female jobs, and I believe that women should be given an equal opportunity to do those things. Here’s where I run into trouble: Where equal can be said to mean the same. If one thing is equal to another, is it the same as the other? In common usage, it can. That’s a problem for me, for anyone, honestly, who is looking at the subject of men and women being treated equally, if equal can be said to mean the same.

 We aren’t the same. It’s that simple. In obvious ways, most of them physical, we are not the same. These physical differences create the situations that are often the hardest for me to deal with on an emotional level, as a woman, as a feminist.

A few months ago, after a Sounders game, I was at the usual bar, having drinks with the usual people. One of the usual people was drunk and hitting on me, which was not all that unusual and was also harmless. A friend of his, not a usual person at all, a person instead that I had never even been introduced to, reached around the usual person, and grabbed ahold of both of my breasts in an incredibly nonchalant fashion. If he’d done this to one of my friends, I’d probably have punched him. Since he did it to me, I froze. I told him that since he was a friend of the usual person and clearly drunk, I’d let it go this one time. He apologized, and about a minute later began rubbing his elbow aggressively into my breast. (Breast, boob, tit. I hate all of the usual words for mammaries. I hate mammary too. There’s no good choice here. It’s not like “dick, penis, cock” – there’s a good choice there. I digress.) I was shocked and walked away to where a small group of my friends, all men, stood. They could tell I was upset and asked what was going on. I told them, and moments later, Captain Fuckwit wandered over, trying to get past them to talk to me. They all told him to have a lovely evening somewhere else. He came back. They repeated themselves. He yelled some incoherent nonsense about trying to talk to me. One of the larger guys pushed him away. He came back. I lost my cool and threw a drink in his face. The bouncer, a usual person, got involved. I said he didn’t need to be kicked out, just kept away from me. He came up to me again inside. Again, two male friends stepped in between. I went ouside. He actually slammed into me, pushing me into the wall. I ran inside. I told the friends I’d promised a ride to that we were leaving. Now.

The next day, I got endless apologies from Captain Fuckwit’s friend, the usual person I’d been talking to when all this started. I got apologies from him on several occasions. I told him I wasn’t mad at him, that it wasn’t his fault. I forgot all about it.

This past Friday, standing outside another usual bar after a Sounders match, with usual people, I saw the original usual person, who had apologized so abjectly. I headed over to say hi to him when I realized that the friend he was chatting with was the same friend. Furious and freaked out, I stormed back into the bar, shaking. A good friend of mine saw me and asked what had happened. Once I explained, he, my brother and a couple of other friends went to go deal with the situation. I’ll admit that everything I know of their conversation with Captain Fuckwit and the person who brought him is secondhand. I wasn’t part of the conversation. With that said, here’s the thing that absolutely blew my mind: The person who brought him was angry at me. Accused me of causing drama. Wanted to know why I was overreacting. Said it was months ago. Why was I still angry? Said it wasn’t a big deal. My brother, a generally very calm person, tried to explain that it was a big deal, that I wasn’t overreacting, that the person who brought Captain Fuckwit couldn’t possibly understand, probably didn’t have to be afraid of being sexually assaulted at a bar full of friends.

 Everything about this situation, from the initial tit-grab to the confusion over my being upset, is at the heart of my confusion over how I feel about feminism and gender roles. When I say that if equal means the same, then we can never be equal, one of the things I am thinking of is physical strength and expectations of physicality and touch. Physically, there is no doubt that this person, the one who grabbed me, elbowed me, pushed me into a wall, and would not fuck off, is stronger than I am. Had he had more sinister intentions than the ones he had in his shitfaced state, I would have a hard time winning that fight. I am one tough lady, but it’s a simple fact: He is stronger and larger than I am, and I was afraid of him. Another difference is the meaning and expectation of physical touch. If I was a man, I would not fear being grabbed in a sexual way by a stranger in public. I would also not have feared being seen as a drama queen for being angry, shaken, and upset about it. And I did fear that. I feared that the night it happened, and I feared it on Friday night. Easily fifty percent of my anger that night was over the fact that I was being accused of being dramatic and over reacting to what my brother was right to call a sexual assault. It isn’t innocent or cute for a stranger to put their hands on you in a sexual or violent way, but for some reason, even the relatively intelligent and enlightened men I like to think my friends are seemed to think that I was making a mountain out of a molehill.

 I guess it’s misleading when I say it took me a long time to be comfortable calling myself a feminist. I still struggle with it, I just struggle with it for different reasons. I was and am really angry about what happened on Friday night. I am pissed right the fuck off that anyone thought I was being dramatic about it. I am intensely angry that he thought I was overreacting. I was, as my brother also pointed out, underreacting. I didn’t punch him then or when it originally happened. I didn’t pitch a screaming fit. I didn’t, actually, do anything. I’m mad at myself for that. I should have just hit him and been done with it. But here’s the thing. I’m a loud woman, a smart girl. I’m a very opinionated, passionate woman. And yes, I can be tough. So, fair or not, when something happens that involves me, the tendency of the people around me is to look at me and think two things: That I can handle it, and that I probably deserved it. Being someone with a history of abuse, that might be the hardest thing of all for me to deal with. I’m so terrified that people will think that I caused whatever the problem was, or that I’m being a drama queen, that I try way too hard to avoid making a big deal out of things like this. Beyond that, it’s also not at all always true that I can handle whatever situation comes up. When the initial incident happened, I was scared. Especially when I was outside, alone, having a cigarette and he came up and pushed me into the wall. I was terrified, and I wanted someone to help me.

 Here’s where the feminism thing gets really muddled for me. I wanted a man to help protect me. I know that that’s not what I am supposed to want, but that is exactly what I did want, and I felt stupid for wanting it. I always feel stupid for wanting it. On the flip side of that coin, though, is the fact that I feel that the simple fact that Captain Fuckwit thought this was even remotely acceptable behavior, blind drunk or not, means that feminism is obviously not past relevance. It’s tough for me to reconcile my feminism with my desire to feel small and girly next to the men I date, with my wanting men to step in and protect me when another man is threatening my safety and wellbeing.

Being a woman is hard. Being a man is hard, too, for a host of reasons. Only some of them can I even claim to begin to understand, just like a man could never really understand all the ways that being a woman is hard.

 If you’re wondering how Friday night ended up, nothing happened. I was angry, and I tried to move on from it. He and the person who brought him stayed in the bar, but away from me. I tried to stop being pissed off and upset about it, but as you can probably tell by my writing this, it didn’t exactly work. It’s not really the incident itself that I can’t stop being upset about. It’s the attitudes around it, both the personal attitudes in this situation and the broader societal attitudes behind it. Driving home, I thought back to the linguistics debate my friend and I had engaged in earlier that day. I had told her I thought she was a feminist, and shouldn’t be embarassed to say that, or try to distance herself from the label. Thinking about all of the above, though, I have to say that I think it’s all terribly complicated, and that blithely telling her to claim her feminism was denying the complications.

So, life is hard, sometimes, I guess. But then you go for a run, bake some cookies, and it’s just a tiny bit better.

Or, I guess, you could live in solitary confinement for the last ten months, like Bradley Manning. Maybe then you’d react to mentions of Wikileaks with the same blank stare that I often see when I talk about Bradley Manning.

For those of you staring blankly at the page right now, Bradley Manning is the US soldier accused of being the single source of much of Wikileaks recent flood of US government cables, as well as other documents like the collateral murder video.

He’s spent the last ten months in solitary confinement, a situation which many human rights organizations have criticized as clearly inhumane, and there’s no end in sight for him. When there is a light at the end of his tunnel, it’s going to be a sick grey light with a likely short life.

22 new charges have been added to those he already faces, including a charge of aiding the enemy, which carries with it the potential for a death sentence.

For those of you who’ve swallowed the American supremacy tribalism flavored kool-aid, there’s likely nothing wrong with this. For any right minded human being, however, there is no way to describe this beyond foully fucked and ill-conceived.

Assume with me that Manning was, in fact, the source that handed over all of this information. In order to accept even the initial charges, (including, I believe, treason)  as valid, one would have to accept that the United States government has an inherent right to keep their actions and activities, in wartime and otherwise, concealed from their citizens as well as the rest of the world. I don’t, of course, accept that. I firmly believe that if you don’t want to be ashamed and embarrassed by people finding out about something you’ve done, you probably shouldn’t do it. This goes for governments as well as individuals. I refuse to believe that my government cannot live up to the standard I would hold a child to.

Bradley Manning’s story hasn’t been as loud as the story of Wikileaks, but it’s every bit as important. We are, as David House put it, treating whistleblowers as enemies of the state. The sad and sick part of this is that we as a nation are so used to the idea that all information is rightly controlled by the state that we seem to accept this as just and correct when it is anything but. We are a nation full of Stockholm syndrome suffering simpletons, crouched in the corner licking the rapist’s hand once he pulls the nipple clamps off and the baseball out of the orifice.

Information is not for the government to control. Information is not for the government to conceal. It is not a crime to make public facts. It is not a crime to tell people what their government is doing. It is not a crime to tell the world what the United States is up to.

Bradley Manning is not a criminal. Our government’s treatment of him is criminal, and our ignorance of his situation is criminal. That someone, anyone, can be detained in solitary confinement for ten months without significant public outcry is sickening. That he may now face the death penalty is absolutely mindblowing. Keep in mind that the charges he faces are just charges at the moment – he’s been kept in solitary confinement for ten months  before he’s even been found guilty. That alone should have people spending a lot more attention and rage on this than they have.

Eyes on this space, as I’ll no doubt have updates as I find them.

There are people who think this a bad thing, somehow a flaw. I can’t see it that way. I am instead deeply confused by people who don’t have to restrain themselves from throwing their laptops across the room when they read that the US has placed sanctions on Libya, as though that were going to harm Gaddafi (I’m going with that spelling. Who’s to say what’s right?) and not just the Libyan people, who have been and are being harmed enough already. There are a number of infuriating things about our response to the wholesale slaughter of Libyan citizens by their own government and military being sanctions. We can start with the fact that sanctions have been shown time and again to be absolutely ineffective at persuading leaders of sanctioned nations to do anything that they don’t want to do. Then we’ll jump to the fact that it’s a weak response, and it’s also more than a little irritating to note that the US was still doing business with Libya long after other, more responsible nations had stopped, because we found Gaddafi and his oil useful. (I’ll note here that I do see the contradiction in lamenting sanctions as essentially being harmful to the people of the sanctioned country while also complaining that we continued to do business with a country known for it’s human rights violations. I only want to highlight the US’s willingness to be pals with anyone from whom we can get oil up until the moment that it becomes a public relations problem to continue. This is only one of many instances of that behavior, and if it isn’t a compelling argument for lessening our dependence on foreign oil, I don’t know what is.)

Then there’s the issue of the US dragging their feet on the draft UN resolution, which would qualify what is happening in Libya as crimes against humanity, and refer the case to the ICC. The American government has to tread lightly here in order to maintain their delicate relationship with that loveliest of human rights abusing nations, China. We’re so far in China’s pocket and up their ass at this point that we can’t act on any United Nations resolution without considering how mad Mama China might get. If we can ignore the fact that that’s actually kind of hilarious given your average Joe Amurikkka’s ideas about American supremacy and the great evil of the Red Menace, it’s also dangerous, given that China’s position on issues is rarely if ever the one that values human life over profit. Oh, wait. That leaves their position pretty handily in line with ours. That said, there’s only been one case referred to the ICC by this council in the past, which was the Sudanese conflict, and while it’s a strong statement, I can’t see where it’s made a practical difference. Maybe there’s something in the UN resolution that will make an immediate, practical impact on the situation on the ground for Libyans, but I’m skeptical.

There are a lot of things that differentiate the Libyan protests and reactions from Egypt’s recent protests. One of the biggest ones has to be the apparent presence of large numbers of foreign fighters and mercenaries in Libya. The Egyptian army didn’t want to fire on their own citizens. With foreign fighters, that concern all but evaporates. It’s also worth examining the relationship between the Egyptian army and their people. The army in Egypt runs several businesses, selling bottled water, household appliances and more. In essence, they’d have been murdering their customer base if they’d followed orders to shoot. In Libya, the army has no such obligation – most of the money in Libya comes from oil exports, over which the people have no control.

One thing is clear when you look at the two countries and their respective situations – this has become a time for revolution. The Egyptians showed people how possible a victory was, and there’s clearly a domino effect going on. While it’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening as a result of the protests in Libya, I hope that the protesters keep it up. Tragic as it is, there will always be losses in the course of a revolution, which in many cases only highlights how desperate the need for revolution is.

Still, as inevitable as some losses may be, there’s no reason for the violence to continue unabated. I can’t advocate military action. We’ve seen too clearly how that plays out, and besides, if the US doesn’t have a significant monetary or strategic interest in an area, it will never happen. I can, however, urge our government to drop sanctions, which again, only ever serve to harm the citizenry and slightly annoy the intended targets. I can hope that they quickly sign the UN resolution. I can hope that they intervene in some meaningful fashion.

And as always, I can remind people that if there’s nothing else you can do, raising awareness of the depth, complexity, and urgency of an issue is something, which is better than nothing. Now I’m going to go break some glass.

Before I say anything else, I’d like to make a couple of things very clear. I think it is incredibly tragic that these people lost their lives. I absolutely do not think that they should have died, or that the pirates did the right thing in killing them. There should be no way to read what I write following this as being supportive of these murders.

Some time last year, there were protesters outside my work. They were waving signs indicating that they were on one side or the other of the Israel/Palestine debate, and I wanted to join them, holding a sign reading “This Issue Is Not As Simple As Your Sign Makes It Out To Be”. This is like that.

The issue of Somalia has long been a complex one, and to dismiss the Somali pirates as somehow evil, or completely in the wrong misses so many facets of the situation. I heard someone claiming that the couples were killed because they had bibles in their boats, and the pirates were muslim extremists. Apparently, this person heard that this was a possible reason on CNN, and that made it (ha) gospel. There’s a few things wrong with this. The first thing is that to believe anything simply because you heard it from one news source is inane these days. The second thing is that “possible reason” =/= “the reason they were killed”. But the fact that people are looking for a reason raises a point some seem to miss: It is exceedingly unusual for the pirates to actually kill the people they take hostage. They’re not doing this for the murder.

Which should have people asking the most important question of all. Why? Not why did they kill the couples – there’ve already been so many conflicting stories about the chronology of the killings that it’s hard to believe we’ll ever know exactly what happened there, and besides, as awful as it sounds, that why is not as important or as constructive as the why I want people to examine. I want the question and the conversation to be about why the pirates are taking hostages and stealing ships in the first place.

There are clear reasons, clear answers. They may not be comfortable answers, especially not for Americans and the American mindset. If you’ve got the US cast as a benevolent force in the world in your mind, then you won’t like talking about the fall of 1993, when the US pulled out of all humanitarian action in Somalia and shut down the successful UN hunger aid, all due to a botched US military action that should never have taken place. That’s right: The US led a humanitarian effort in the early 90s to help the starving Somalis, but following an attack gone wrong on a warlord there that should have gone through the UN in the first place, we pulled out not only our aid but the UN’s as well. 18 US lives were lost, which we apparently thought to be worth more than not only the hundreds of Somalians that died that day, but also than the many, many lives taken by hunger following the end of the previously successful campaign there.

And before you say that we didn’t have an obligation to solve their hunger problem, do a touch of studying on the history between the US and Somalia. We’ve been their bestest friends when it’s strategically convenient, and left them to rot in anarchy and poverty when they’re no longer essential to our military plans.

What I’m saying is that the answer to why the pirates do what they do is stunningly clear. Their country has been used like a chess piece and then tossed aside. They’ve been left with nothing, no functioning government, no consistent source of food and other essentials for their people, and then Western countries parade their wealth in front of them in the form of oil tankers and the like on a regular basis. Sorry, but I have a really hard time judging them too harshly for taking what they can get.

Back to the couples for a moment. I have a hard time believing that they were casually killed. What I’ve read that comes the closest to what, looking at how the pirates have historically behaved, I think makes the most sense is that they issued a warning that if their boats were boarded by military, they would kill the hostages. The boats were boarded, and so they did. Is this tragic and awful? Absolutely. Is it worse than what we’ve done as a nation by leaving this country in such incredible turmoil without a second thought? No. How incredibly arrogant we all are to believe that our actions are without consequence.

It is absolutely terrible that these people died. But I propose that a better way to mourn them would be to start looking at ways to help the situation in Somalia, rather than looking at ways to rid the seas of those scourge pirates. If Somalia were not a nation in constant crisis, my money’s on the idea that the pirates would soon enough be a problem taken care of all on it’s own.

I’ve been having my ass fairly well kicked by the universe since I got back into town. I’ve run through the small settlement I got. I quickly found a job, but it turns out that crazy Scientologist Cassanova types and I aren’t a perfect match, workwise. Who’d have thought that would be the case? I’m sick again. I had some slight personal drama. I’m desperately seeking work while watching my bank balance dwindle.

But enough about what’s terrible. As a friend said to me long, long ago, I’m like a cockroach. While I recoiled and glared at him, he quickly explained that all he meant was that I could survive nuclear holocaust, and he wasn’t wrong. I always manage to get things put back together in some way that makes sense, and hell – at least I’m never bored.

The world is doing some insane shit right now, so I’ve decided to revive the good old Enemy Combatant site so I can rant in my customary profane and furious fashion. I’ll be posting primarily to there for the time being, given that that’s always existed as more of a general catch all than this was meant to be.