Human Rights Anniversary, Obama, Oslo, Afghanistan to Africa

December 11th, 2009 - by: danny

Ah, but the irony aboundeth.

President Obama, our first black elected leader of the nation, with not an ounce of slave ancestry, accepts an award for peace while committing to “surging” a war and with said commitment, war’s inherent atrocities.

All day long, I have identified with Lili Von Schtupp, the Teutonic Titwillow and Bavarian Bombshell from Blazing Saddles, while humming the infamous song immortalized by the remarkable Madelaine Kahn, “I’m tired, ” but with different lyrics:

I’m tired
Sick and tired of war
I’ve had my fill of war
From our thirst for their oil
Tired, tired of all the quarrel
Tired of war that’s immoral
Let’s face it
I’m tired

Then there is the topic of the economy. Where are the human rights for Main Street? Aren’t the US of A citizens Too Big To Fail?

This license plate is a\A banker’s idea of being funny. Yeah. Record foreclosures? A laugh a minute.

Obama’s Big Sellout – Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside. READ MORE

As part of a celebration observing the anniversary of human rights, last night, William DuBose, one of the up and coming “green” leaders in Atlanta, invited me to attend an event at Spelman College featuring Dr. Joy Degruy Leary, Ph.D. She is a most memorable force to be reckoned with on every level imaginable. During the moving presentation of her book:

“Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome,” verbiage written by the Bard of Avon came to mind from his “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”:

She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.

“Leary, who teaches social work at Portland State University, traces the way that both overt and subtle forms of racism have damaged the collective AfricanAmerican psyche, harm manifested through poor mental and physical health family and relationship dysfunction and self destructive impulses.

Dr. Leary adapts our understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to propose that African Americans, today, suffer from a particular kind of intergenerational trauma Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome aka PTSS.”

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

Dr. Leary’s presentation is beyond powerful and informative and timely while the tears were flowing. She pointed out something I was unaware of while invoking thought.

Where is the national museum, such as the Holocaust Musuem in DC, that teaches people the true horrors and facts pertaining to our history of enslaving free people? Is that not a part of righting an egregious wrong and an aspect of Change We Can Believe In?

How do we, as a people condone what is happening in our name, i.e., the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as who-knows-what in Pakistan while our president accepts a prize for peace on the very day set aside to honor human rights?

How much peace is there in war?

The News Dissector