Recommend/1

Recommending:

Iran Awakening- Shirin Ebadi
Ebadi is an Iranian woman, a human rights advocate-- living for justice and peace, working for change. Her memoir dispels any complacent, apathetic desires-- read this and learn how one person's passion and perseverance brings necessary change. Read this and learn about a country the U.S. is frighteningly flirting with.

Baghdad Burning- Riverbend
Riverbend, a young Iraqi woman blogs life as she knows it to be in Iraq. Painting a painful, beautiful, heart-mind provoking picture of harrowing reality of what war in Iraq means. Please read this book and open yourself to awareness of this reality, this perspective.

The White Man's Burden- William Easterly
Easterly, an economist and professor at NYU discusses the difference between Planners and Searchers and the malignant effects of foreign aid, loans, bureaucracies on impoverished countries. He writes how the West's efforts to improve hunger, poverty, death and devastation have exacerbated countries-- especially how America's involvement with and in countries has in fact dismantled well being and homeostasis and shaken social, political and economic life for the worse. Read this book and learn the ineffectiveness of top down planners and recklessness of corruption. Be a bottom up searcher-- experience injustice, talk to people, learn what needs to be changed and together, organize and work for justice and stability.

George Orwell's Politics of the English Language

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

-- what do you think of this essay? I find it poignant today-- consider media's influence on thought, sway, popularity of wars, people. What gets broadcasted and why? We need to start asking questions and searching for truth of meaning. We need to be honest and detailed, intentional and committed to that which makes us come alive. Live with compassion, humility and conviction that many policies, governments, structures and systems are not just, peaceful, empowering, or good in this world. When living this way consuming (clothes to caffeine) becomes a different experience because you are aware of how your actions are part of a larger picture.


Recommend: Music--

John Barry, Out of Africa soundtrack
Bob Marley and the Wailers, Gold Discs
Miles Davis
Gustavo Santaolla


peace and love