pigs don't ruminate

and so i don't have to worry about this:



in this god-fearing country. Allah hu akbar.

, originally uploaded by tupbebek.

, originally uploaded by tupbebek.

when speaking english turns you into a celebrity/freak

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where are you from?
what is your name?
where are you from?


Diyarbakır, April 11th

seemed timely for me to pick up and turn to this page

In Plum Village in France, we receive many letters from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It is very painful to read them, but we have to do it , we have to be in contact. We try our best to help, but the suffering is enormous, and sometimes we are discouraged. It is said that half the boat people die in the ocean; only half arrive at the shores in Southeast Asia.

There are many young girls, boat people, who are raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries try to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continue to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who war raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we cannot do that. In my meditation I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I am now the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become the pirate I cannot condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians and others do not do something about the situations, in 25 years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in 25 years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

-Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

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the passage above speaks to another time, in the mid-eighties, and the Thai village would necessarily be different from those in Somalia today, and it is not girls on boats being raped but hostages made out of sailors of international corporations, oil companies, and so on. but when looking at this money-maker story of the entertainment press (CNN, FOX, MSNBC), one in a more thoughtful world could speak of the conditions in Somalia without being scoffed at. the poverty, lawlessness, and violence there competes with Sudan, although forgotten by the press and university student aide groups. the fishing trade has been pirated by unlicensed international fishermen (the UN reports 300 million dollars worth of fish each year), and the corporate shipping industry has destroyed the ecosystem with toxic dumping. none of this justifies violence or hostages, but certainly the answer is not to invade Somalia, as wack-job John Bolton suggested last week. cooler heads certainly will prevail, but probably not to the extent of looking at Somali pirates as a cultural phenomenon, in a context, a product of their situation, one deserving much more than a military solution that "shoots us all."

in the life: teaching the war on terror

i haven't thought about 9/11 for a long time. but today the topic of my american cultural studies class was the war on terror, and i had to spend some time rethinking the events, fumbling with the definitions of terrorism and the strange metaphorical war the U.S.A has been involved in. the U.S. at war with an emotional state.

i had a guest in the class and after discussing definitions of terrorism and the war on terror, we discussed our experience of 9/11. i was sitting in a high school classroom, a senior, waiting to take a bus to work on cars all morning. after my guest told her experience we watched a clip of reactions to the attacks- no scenes of the flying planes, only the faces on the street looking up in teary eyed disbelief. i talked about how everyone knew someone who knew someone who died that day. the trauma was local. and i talked about the saturation of the image. the fact that the act--the plane crashing--was repeated while the country had it's eye on the building--that we watched as two towers crumbled--that this defined terrorism for us because it was so perfectly effective and run on a loop for weeks. the scenario for trauma could not have been greater.

i looked out at my class and saw students with tears in their eyes. i haven't felt emotional about the event since shock and awe, and it dawned on me that the vulgarity of that war, of our military response, the hubris of the Bush admin, the manipulation, has forever erased the feeling of tragedy and trauma i felt that day.

if i had played the events in reverse chronology, like i do when thinking of them normally, the disgust i feel for torture, ongoing secret prison camps abroad, and the self-righteous notion that we can bend history and culture with military force overshadows any of the pain i could feel about 9/11. looking both ways today makes me question how human beings can live through pain and trauma only to multiply it in the following months, even on people who felt sympathy for the attacks and mourned with the United States (as Afghanistan did).

as we moved on the students wiped their eyes and focused on the war, the deceit, the tactics that no one can honestly defend, and they quickly forgot about the faces on the New York street- the tack boards full of missing people signs, the businessmen covered in soot, the firemen looking up astonished. new scenes of tragedy- starving Iraqi children, babies dead on the side of a Bagdhad street, and brain-washed GIs plugging into "let the bodies hit the floor" replace what came before, anti-Americanism peaks, empathy and sadness replaced by hatred.

and i tried my best to explain: a traumatic event like none other witnessed in the U.S.- a vice president paranoid, carrying around a bio-medical suit and living secluded months under the mountains of Vermont, reading the daily security report and convincing himself that the U.S. might not see another day.

explaining the mentality of the Bush administration and how someone could carry out such clearly unethical actions is the same explanation i would use for students in the U.S. except in reverse. in the U.S. i might try to show Bin Laden not as devil incarnate but as a man living in a context, like many others, trampled on by foreign powers, trying to forge his religious, ethnic, and social identity and finding violence as the only outlet. there is no justification for the actions of either. but i want to identify the basis of there actions. what are the conditions that lead to such barbaric violence?

"Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence."
Marshall McLuhan
(thanks stef)

a few students went on to discuss their beliefs that the U.S. plotted, planned, or knew about the attacks and let them happen. i hear the question a lot: did Bush plan the 9/11 attacks? part of the question is specific to Turkey where their Islamic belief is almost always moderate and peaceful. they denounce this violence as not Islamic because the concept is so far from their personal beliefs. but it also enforces a perception of the U.S. as evil. again, a similar stance only in reverse: while i might have to argue with U.S. students to convince them that Islam teaches peace and that maybe poverty and the will to create one's own society (concrete, rational motives) have as much to do with terrorism as religious fundamentalism (or perversion), here i have to explain openness in American government- the leaks no president can stop- the instability of the 9/11 conspiracy claims (not to mention the enormity of such a risk). --my mind slips and i hear both classes at once-- and it all fits a sort of polarization that Robert Fisk talks about:

"It's a strange thing that is happening now. The Americans want the world to know that the killers were Arabs. But they don't want to discuss the tragedy of the region they came from. The Arabs, on the other hand, do want to discuss their tragedy – but wish to deny the Arab identity of the killers. The Americans have created a totally false image of the Arab world, peopling it with beasts and tyrants. The Arabs have adopted an almost equally absurd view of the US."

we might be long past 9/11 now. and anything that will be said probably has been, but the foundations of these problems haven't gone anywhere.

flickr

pics are easier to load and handle on flickr, and while i'll keep posting some here, i'm going to add more there. right now i have some edited pics from Van and some new pics from Diyarbakır should be there soon.

here

Van- March 7&8

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Van (pronounced sort of like "Wan") is a city in southeastern Turkey. it's known for a majority Kurdish population, an Armenian history, a famous castle, a lake monster, and white cats with one blue and one green eye that howl like little dogs.

our little soldier and tour guide for Van Castle:





a shot of Lake Van from an island (we came over on that boat on the far left):



some of the birds down by the shore on Lake Van:




a parade on International Women's Day:



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yea

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in the life: bottles

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so i've got bottles up the wazoo. i'm socialized, like most of us, to never throw a plastic bottle away. where i come from you learn the recycle rap in 4th grade and you can't get it out of your head anymore than you can stop the reoccurring nightmare where your music teacher grins her butter-yellow teeth at you, pounding on a piano with her fists, and you wake up screaming in horror in a cold sweat and complete darkness, turning on the light to brush your teeth once more and vowing to stop drinking so much tea and coffee.

strange. here are some pics of what this has become, seven months of bottled water because the tap water here makes me sick. come on green Erzurum, give these bottles another chance at life. how bout some recycling?

obstructing a pretty view (or improving, depending on your style):



in the office, stashed in a once empty cabinet:



neatly stacked next to the window behind my bed:



crowding my living room windowsill:



overflowing from behind the refrigerator:





footnote: i didn't buy the coke. it was given to me by a friend after a party where no one could finish such a large bottle and it was going to go flat. yes i had some of it. yes i felt guilty. coke kills, we know.