final trip journal-long train home

.maybe it's fitting to post this just before leaving the country to another home, maybe an expression of my lack of home or multiple homes.


12.14.08
sunday, 6pm
-just stepped onto the train and into my seat- happy to know that my body will make its way back from where it came. i'm sitting across from 2 young men- right across- in seats facing each other- two sets of legs for each quantity of leg room- hardly developed for the comfort of international strangers on a 23hr ride. to go with it a strange and maddening frequency is present all around me and my new friends look around curiously for its source. if nothing else, the company proves that i am not the only one. i'm eyeing the seats around me. i need an upgrade in comfort.

630pm
on my way- ripped ticket, some thousand km of crawling transportation behind me. a new friend arrived in the meantime, making this a tight fitting foursome. no seatback table to write on, i'm cramped up- 2 books, a notebook, and a manuscript in my lap, my camcorder around my neck, the only thing i can't bear to lose. the young man in front of me, Mustafa, speaks some English and so our physical situation has become slightly more comfortable in conversation. something hit me in the stomach, the throat, hearing his phone call, hearing the verb for eat, thinking he is talking to his mother at home, in Sivas, some 15hrs away, talking about what he would eat after his travel. and the feeling was the memory of me doing something similar once upon a time, on trips back from Ohio or Southern Illinois. the feeling's amelioration came with a familiar face, the çay man i spent 34 hrs with on the way to Istanbul, strolling through the aisle again, seeing me and sharing a moment of confusion- you, again, you can't be serious.

645pm
w/ the lack of leg room, i'm resigned to let them lay in the aisle and being right next to the bathroom and exit, they interrupt a steady stream of passengers. passengers interrupt my recline. the possibility of sleep or comfort on this trip dims, although i might just walk back to Ray's cafe (that moving diner) throw down something and pass out in that relatively comfortable booth.

810pm
warm after soup and çay in Ray's restaurant car where i'll stay as long as i feel welcome. my nails are longer than they've been in years. my beard overgrown, my hair a mess like always, as i look at myself and the darkness beyond the window. its only been 10 days of travel, but the distance and time spent on the move make it feel like a month.

12.15.08
monday, 515am
i'm growing impatient with this terrible ride.

635am
Sivas all covered in snow, moons and stars fading. the best and worst of a country down the train line.

715am
when i was young- a boy's age- a school day snowed out- i'd think of it all and create my next monster- he carried himself from one white object to another with a small but critical ability to leap. it could lead him anywhere on a snow day- here, especially in my living room, next to the fire- all that snow on the porch, through the window, the porcelain snowman on the mantle, the whiteness of the pages lying in front of me. in me, this skin a whiter shade.

425pm
i'm not sure if that sound is the train car rubbing against the packed snow or a dog being beaten to death in the car ahead of mine. neither would surprise me. almost home.

my last class of the semester

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the key for the computer cabinet is missing again, 5 minutes to class, an hour of presentations with power point to get to. some panicked students, i try my best to stay calm. the key finds itself, probably in a student's bag or pocket from last week. now the projector isn't working again, it flickers out and shows a blue screen, then it's back again. it looks stable, but fusses out, and then back. we start class hoping it stays up.

a student i call the spokesperson because he's a bit older and speaks for the class enters the room, clicks off the light, and presents a candle-lit cake. the class sings happy birthday to a student who sits at the back of the classroom. i can't remember if it was in english or turkish. cake and pastries are passed around. the students are taking pictures. after 5 minutes or so i quiet them down, relatively quiet, and we start.

the same presentations, some good, some could use work. i'm glad it is the last week. this class has been a student-centered experiment that failed in most ways. the 4th presentation of the night, a student brings a friend up to play McCartney's Yesterday, turning down the lights first, a slide show of hippies young and old playing in the background. the spokesperson clicks on his lighter and sways with the music. some students sing along. everyone cheers after the final line. the presentation is about 60's counterculture.

now 2 students in hippie garb come to the front of the class, and when the presenter starts talking about drug culture the spokesperson comes up with a bag of goods. some herb as fake pot, orbitz gum as fake hits of acid. he is the dealer, rolling joints and distributing. later the presenter talks about the symbolism of flower power while handing out flowers to the class. at the end of the night, we take class pictures. and i realize how much i'm going to miss these classes when i'm gone. the element of surprise each class brings, the ability for certain students to rise above the monotony and really get into a topic, and how much my mood can swing in a class.
-

MLK

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

i want to post some bits of his speech "Beyond Vietnam- Time to Break the Silence" for its relevance to our times:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
...
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
...
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
...
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

war scenes

--
For the last 23 days I've come home every night for more news on Israel's war on Gaza and the Palestinian people. Burnt into my memory are the white phosphorus blasts, like upside down fireworks, shot over Gaza households; children and old women, blood streaming down their faces, treated in the hallways of hospitals with no free beds or rooms; Israel's military spoke people and their mechanical chain of responses: "Hamas is a terrorist organization. Hamas fired rockets. Hamas hides under civilians."


The numbers tell part of the story. Since Dec. 27th: at least 1,300 Palestinians killed, at least 850 of them civilians (civilians are women and children in these numbers- every male over 18 is cynically labeled non-civilian), at least 400 Palestinian children killed. While the cease fire is officially called, they continue to pull more bodies from the rubble of Gaza's 4,000 destroyed buildings. In the same amount of time, 13 Israelis have been killed. 3 civilians, 10 military, and of those 10 military 4 were killed by their own tank fire. Hamas rockets accounted for only 4 deaths, 3 civilians and one soldier, meaning Israel's own tank fire has killed as many Israelis as Hamas rockets since Dec. 27th, the start of this so-called war.

Hamas rockets can't justify this death toll, which includes the bombing of hospitals, UN schools, and UN humanitarian storage facilities in Gaza (the later 2 sites both presenting clear evidence that no Palestinian combatants were using them).

The role of the United States in these events has been shameful. In the first week of Israel's campaign, the U.S. blocked security council resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Then on January 8th the U.S. was the only security council member to abstain from the vote. Afterwards, now in clear defiance of the U.N., Israel increased the intensity of its warfare, counting on U.S. approval against international opinion and international law.

On January 11th the U.S. House passed resolutions (390 to 5) supporting Israel's right to defend itself. That is, for the 4th largest military force in the world (Israel) to carry out war in one of the most densly populated areas of the world with a civilian population of 1.5 million, 55% of which is children, in search of homemade rockets. Defense indeed.

Real defense of Israel would mean calling for an immediate ceasefire, one that Hamas had been observing at least as well as Israel before the beginning of Israel's recent campaign. Before the July 2008 ceasfire, Hamas had shot 179 rockets per month into Israel. After the ceasfire, in the four months before Israel sparked agressions again, Hamas was shooting an average of 3 rockets a month.

Both Hamas and Israel deserve our condemnation, not only for their lack of regard against civilian populations (they both are and have been committing war crimes), but also for their short-sighted politics. If the goal of Israel was to weaken Hamas, they've done the opposite. If the goal of Hamas has ever been to represent or protect the Palistinian people, then their tactics have failed and continue to fail.

But the international community and the U.S. (they are distinct here because they have been more seperate than ever on this issue in particular) already agree on the condemnation of Hamas. Meanwhile the list of Israel's atrocities are covered in U.S. media and politics (this seemingly includes Obama) by the words "Hamas, terror, rockets." More than just the civilian death toll, they gloss over the barring of international journalists to the Gaza strip by Israel and Israel threatining the safety of international aide workers on multiple occasions.

Now we have a cease fire. And for peace the U.S. needs to be involved in rational humanitarian dialogue. This includes moving as far as possible from Bush's simple proclamations, like his Jan 15th farewell nod to Israel and Iraq: "Good and Evil exist in this world, and between the two, there can be no compromise."

Against that quote I want to end with Fares Akram, a Palestinain journalist whose father, an unmarked civillian, was killed on January 3rd:

"My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father."
--

pardon

.
sorry for those who check that i haven't posted much new in a while. i changed some of the news stories on the side bar, did you see that?

well, i've been busy, grading papers, dealing with some student problems, sleeping, that sort of thing. and i tried to write something new for a newspaper, but i couldn't get it to come out right, or didn't feel like it was safe for me to publish it. some things are sensitive. oh vague.

on dec. 25th i woke up at 8am to scold students about plagiarism again and then give a test. had to teach another night class too and to scold a student there. but my christmas was saved by 70 students who watched A Christmas Story with me, laughing with me, at the movie and at the other american man T's laughing.

and i'm coming back soon. back home for a short time. i wonder what it will be like, hearing english in public places, eating pork, driving a car, seeing family and friends again.

dahası var

Today's Time

.
there's this article, about a trip to Konya.

it would read better if the Dylan quote were actually there: "From toy guns that spark to flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark, it's easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred."

for some reason that was omitted, copyright?, i don't think so. someone's editing error perhaps. maybe layout/browser problems.

it is supposed to have run in the paper copy too, but i didn't have a chance to pick one up.
.
daha sonra