tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72826732024-03-21T19:28:50.203-07:00Pegueros' Heart of Sky CafeThe Heart of Sky Café is an idiosyncratic look at the news with special emphasis on issues in the United States and Latin America. In addition to news, there is a poetry column that showcases Latin American poets in translation. "Heart of Sky" is the translation of Kukulkan,the Maya name for the creator. And it's a café because back in the 60s and 70s, we hung out at cafés to write, talk and argue. Join in; just be civil. Thanks. --RosieRosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-66500538275791149762009-09-27T20:27:00.000-07:002009-09-27T20:41:19.777-07:00Kol Nidre Sermon, 5770<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4wCmYpp181-l5dXWKhTkDD1J1YB2T25q6Zr8GiaH16PtluqY86GWgK_rUc5wMvm2-eu-QP7vfgHV4XgryD-J3ICtAXRijVAIE8E66-sAqPxUgO796qGKLvrP6RwRfoaasp8rp/s1600-h/Yom+Kippur+fast.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 350px; height: 350px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4wCmYpp181-l5dXWKhTkDD1J1YB2T25q6Zr8GiaH16PtluqY86GWgK_rUc5wMvm2-eu-QP7vfgHV4XgryD-J3ICtAXRijVAIE8E66-sAqPxUgO796qGKLvrP6RwRfoaasp8rp/s400/Yom+Kippur+fast.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386356396011806898" /></a><br /><div dir="ltr"><div><span style="font-size:78%;">Check out <http://www.cafepress.com/drybonesgifts/1723239> for Dry Bones cartoons and cards</span></div><div><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div>My daughter and her husband came to Kol Nidre services with me tonight; they also brought Ari's best friend from law school, Natalie, a sweet Irish-Catholic girl who had never been to a Jewish service. I was glad Ari was there because I was so nervous. I almost never speak from a text because I have no nerves when talking to undergrads. But tonight, many of my colleagues were there as well as a number of former students. Moreover, I had never done a sermon before and I was uncommonly nervous. I had even tried rehearsing it and had kept stumbling but when I got to the podium and started to speak, the nerves melted away and it all flowed. What a relief that's over! Whew! </div> <div>Ari said that she was surprised that I had done it so Talmudically, meaning that I had really stuck to a commentary on the texts in the Mahzor (the High holyday prayerbook) but that's what I was asked to do, what we call a Drasha. It ran about 12-15 minutes.</div><div></div> <div>If you are interested, here it is. One note of explanation: Alan Shawn Feinstein is a local philanthropist who gives huge amounts of money to almost anything you can think of in Rhode Island. I have often heard him criticized for his conspicuous giving but I admire him because he is so generous and seems to be genuinely kind. He supports the food banks and leads the movement to end hunger in RI.</div><div></div> <div><b>The Drasha: Kol Nidre 5770 (2009-2010)</b><br /></div><div><b></b></div><div>Read together, the scriptural portions for Erev Yom Kippur and the Yom Kippur day services offer complex lessons that flow together but are not identical. Together they emphasize the collective responsibility we have to each other; a lesson that in this age of rebuilding New Orleans, massive American unemployment, and people losing their health care and retirement funds, we must heed and act upon. <br /></div><div></div><div>Kol Nidre begins with a heartrending melody that brings to mind all the exiles of the Jewish people, when we were forced—in order to survive—to hide, to practice our faith underground, and to make false promises. From the forced exile from Jerusalem by the Romans, to the Spanish Inquisition, to the pogroms in Russia and Poland, onward, our people been victims and have justifiably done what we could to survive. But Kol Nidre is only the beginning of this night of remorse and contrition. We ask for forgiveness for acting out of fear; for failing to have perfect faith. But these historical tragedies are at a remove; they didn’t happen to us or our families, though those some of us may still have grandparents who fled Europe or lost relatives in the Holocaust.<br /></div><div></div><div>I have often wondered if all of those who went to their deaths in the gas chambers singing “Ani ma'amin be'emuna shlema,” “I believe with perfect faith in the Messiah's coming, and I will wait even if the Messiah is delayed,” were bound to chant the Ashamnu. Of course, as members of the community, they did. And if they were herded into the gas chambers on Yom Kippur, at Kol Nidre, were they exempt? Whose faith could have been more perfect?<br /></div><div></div><div>The Ashamnu, the alphabetical prayer of confession, does not require us to call out our individual sins. It isn’t like a Quaker meeting where some, individually, express their thoughts into a weightless silence. The confession or Ashamnu names every sin that every Jew in the world might have committed, and we express our remorse as we go through the list alphabetically: We have <u>A</u>cted out of malice; we have <u>B</u>ack-bitten; we have been <u>C</u>ontemptuous; we have <u>D</u>ouble-crossed…and so on. We recite these the way we eat popcorn: done quickly and without much thought. <br /></div><div></div><div>There are other sins that aren’t listed—yet. Let us think back to Michael Milken who, because of his junk bond ventures, left retired people with nothing but social security for their old age. <br /></div> <div>Let us think of Bernard Madoff, who made off with millions of dollars and thus destroyed people’s retirement funds; deprived and destroyed charitable organizations; victimized his own people and the thousands and millions, Jews and Gentiles alike, who depended on those charities. <br /></div><div>Or think of the rabbis, like Rabbi Israel Weingarten of Brooklyn, who have been accused of molesting their or others’ children. <br /></div><div></div><div>Or think of some of the Israeli actions in Gaza during the invasion last year, where members of the IDF have come forward to denounce the killing of innocents who were killed for no reason by their own forces. Will we then recite, we bombed a house where a doctor lived with his daughters, and we killed all of his daughters?<br /></div><div></div><div>In our own backyard, think of the resentful comments I have heard people express of Alan Shawn Feinstein and his noticeable acts of charity. Is it guilt that we do not act as generously as he does, within our means? We judge him: He should be less conspicuous in his generosity for Maimonides teaches us that the highest form of giving is to give anonymously. While that is one of Maimonides teachings, it is not the only level of giving, and it is not even the highest one. There are actually eight levels. Each ascending rung represents a higher degree of virtue:<br /></div><div></div>1. The lowest: Giving begrudgingly and making the recipient feel disgraced or embarrassed.<br />2. Giving cheerfully but giving too little.<br />3. Giving cheerfully and adequately but only after being asked.<br />4. Giving before being asked.<br />5. Giving when you do not know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient knows your identity.<br />6. Giving when you know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient does not knows your identity.<br />7. Giving when neither the donor nor the recipient is aware of the other's identity.<br /><div>8. The Highest: Giving money, a loan, your time or whatever else it takes to enable an individual to be self-reliant.<br /></div><div></div> <div>And who are we to criticize Mr. Feinstein when most of us may make it to level 4, “without being asked”; or even six, “where the recipient does not know your identity,” but we still fall short of perfect charity.<br /></div><div></div>These specific examples are not the distant, recited alphabetical sins of the Ashamnu; these are real and they hit close to home. They can be included in the more detailed Al Cheyt, the Great Confession of the Morning Service for they are not the mere labeling of a catalog of sins but force us to express the deep consciousness of sin. You may ask how can I be responsible for Milken or Madoff’s thievery? Or for what happens in Gaza, so far from me? Or sins of molesting children, so far from most of our lives? We can accept responsibility for the small stuff, for our own lack of charity, for our petty resentments and our falling short of our own ideals, but the conundrum with which we are presented by the Yom Kippur prayers is that we are collectively responsible: we stole; we deprived others; we caused grievous injury. It is a bitter pill to internalize these sins, to take responsibility for them, and ask forgiveness for them. </div><div dir="ltr"></div><div dir="ltr">But Yom Kippur wears us down; we declare our sins again, and again until we accept the responsibility. <br /><div>But the teaching of Yom Kippur doesn’t stop there, for in the morning service, Isaiah calls upon us to care for the poor and the downtrodden, “...to breathe new life into the humble. To renew the heart of those who are crushed.” This is not simply spiritual cleansing but an affirmation of life, of collective responsibility for those less fortunate than ourselves. It is not enough then, to repent, express remorse, and be cleansed over and over. You could do that and leave the synagogue in a purified state without having made your life better. Isaiah is relentless, “Look here; on the day you fasted you were looking for business, Grinding down the toilers who work under you!” <br /></div><div></div><div>“Is not this the fast I ask for: To unlock the shackles of evil, To loosen the thongs of the yoke, To send forth crushed souls to freedom, To tear every yoke in two! To tear up your loaves for the hungry, To bring the poor wanderer home, When you see the naked, clothe them… Your reputation for justice will precede you And the glory of God will follow close behind.”<br /></div><div></div><div>On Yom Kippur afternoon, we are reminded that even complying with those prescriptions isn’t enough. In the afternoon service, we are taught two lessons of perfect faith, of Abraham, asked to sacrifice his only son; and of a virtuous man, Jonah who, told by Adonay to go to the City of Nineveh to warn them to repent or face his wrath, refuses. <br /></div><div></div><div>Adonay chooses him BECAUSE he is virtuous but Jonah is content with his life and he does not want to save them; they are sinful; let them reap the wages of sin. Adonay is relentless, he casts him into the belly of a whale and compels him to go to Nineveh. Jonah rebels; he doesn’t want to do it but Adonay teaches him compassion; explicitly compassion by causing him to endure the discomfort of direct sun; then creating shade and thus, comfort for him, then taking it away, making him so miserable that Jonah wanted to die. (This translation is a bit different from the one in your Mahzors.)<br /></div><div></div><div>“And Adonay said, ‘You have pity on the gourd, for which you have not labored, neither did you make it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six-score thousand persons that cannot distinguish between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?” These are Adonay’s children; Adonay’s creations that she labored over. How can she destroy them willy-nilly? <br /></div><div></div>In essence, Adonay cares enough to want to turn her creations away from sin and save them; she knows that humans are not always aware of or responsive to her, but they cannot ignore we who stand there in our flesh and blood, to turn them towards virtue. <br /><div>This is not the wrathful God that we are told resides in the Bible. This God is a compassionate God. Who are we to judge and withhold help from those we decide are unworthy when Adonay worries over their failings? <br /></div><div></div>In Jonah, we see the fulfillment of Ashamnu and Al Cheyt, of Isaiah. Reciting these prayers, we admit our failings, we express remorse, and we repent of our own failings but it isn’t enough. We reach to help the helpless, but THAT isn’t enough. Our souls may be cleansed and we may feel righteous but Jonah teaches us that we cannot stand passively by, enjoying our own virtuousness. We cannot be passive; we are compelled to act. We must work with others to make the world a better place</div><div dir="ltr"></div><div dir="ltr"></div><div dir="ltr"></div><div dir="ltr"></div>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-78347719613916844602009-08-01T14:44:00.001-07:002009-08-01T15:04:27.999-07:00In Memory of Celeste Sullivan, 1955-2009<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdU3wyJ_0v43ysiwdvuF4kOJAStfnPYFndmBNi5BNkg3Hjg_POkwKT0qhWSxG_2oBddVZ9nE1PdQYhuyfG3EsprQ2EfV9DE9iSa6JKX-nClUzX9jkUbjp2XDkkV-jb7v7k4xz8/s1600-h/Celeste+Sullivan.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 79px; height: 108px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdU3wyJ_0v43ysiwdvuF4kOJAStfnPYFndmBNi5BNkg3Hjg_POkwKT0qhWSxG_2oBddVZ9nE1PdQYhuyfG3EsprQ2EfV9DE9iSa6JKX-nClUzX9jkUbjp2XDkkV-jb7v7k4xz8/s320/Celeste+Sullivan.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365117525340438946" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">My friend Celeste Sullivan was killed when she was run over by a bus. The bus driver, a good and responsible man with a flawless driving record, had a heart attack. His bus jumped the curb, jumped the island and killed her as she waited for another bus. She was 54.<br /><br />This is the remembrance I wrote of her on the day of her memorial service. Below that, you will find the article from the newspaper about her death and her obituary from the Providence Journal. </span><img src="file:///C:/Users/Rosie/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.png" alt="" /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span>I went to the memorial service for Celeste today. It was held at Brown University's Manning Chapel; a nice, plain space. There was an altar and lots of flowers; in the warmth of the summer afternoon, one could really smell the flowers. We were halfway through the service before I realized that the vase in the center of the altar was actually the urn with her ashes.<br /><br />Celeste lived in my house for two years. Yehuda knew her from the neighborhood and so when she lost her lodgings, he asked me if we could let her rent the third floor. She was quiet, small, slender and quick as a little bird. She had converted to Islam so sometimes, when we were eating something she could eat, she'd eat with us. When we celebrated Passover, she came representing the pharoah. It was our little joke.<br /><br />She finished writing her dissertation while she was living with us but I had no sense of her as a scholar. She got her degree in linguistic anthropology and wrote about the relationships between Urdu, Arabic and two other languages spoken in Pakistan. What we studied was so far apart from each other, our interactions were entirely on the daily human level. You know some people are brilliant because they are snobs, or they are self-conscious about their intellects or they are so accustomed to being set apart by their intellects that it shows immediately. Celeste was so humble, so simple in her ways, that you had no sense of her intellect.<br /><br />I found out today that she was brilliant. I knew that she was the daughter of an English professor; she had given us a book he'd written on Emily Dickinson. But we didn't know that she'd gotten her undergraduate degree in Egyptology and could read hieroglyphics. I knew she spoke Urdu because she'd married a Pakistani half her age while she was in Pakistan doing her research, and she spent the next five years trying to get him into this country. Every Sunday morning, she'd stand in my kitchen (where she got the best reception for her phone), shouting into the phone in Urdu. After she got a part-time job teaching at UMass Dartmouth, she moved to New Bedford but kept my address as her permanent address while she dealt with immigration. She finally got her husband into the U.S., He is a handsome fellow--Bollywood movie star handsome. He was younger than her children. Her children were furious at him; they thought he'd married her just to get into the country and get his green card. The irony for me is that his Green card came less than a month ago. I last saw her--and met him for the first time--three weeks ago Tuesday, when they came to get the green card. She used to tell me that they just didn't understand but she told only her oldest son that her husband was now in the states; she figured that she'd tell the rest of them when he had settled in. They couldn't even live together--she'd gotten him a job here in Providence and she was living in New Bedford where she was working. They left his name off of the obituary; she would have been upset by that.<br /><br />She was a bit eccentric but more than that she was just a free spirit and a deeply good and kind person. She'd had four children by three different fathers, only the first of which she'd been married to, and she raised those kids on her own. Her first husband and the lover who followed him were both black men, and her children are gorgeous, and they all exactly look like her. Her black lovers were Rastafarian and the boys both have long dreadlocks. Once when we were talking about her children, she described raising them alone as a single mother. That must have been tough, I said. She replied that it was but she had these three wonderful children to show for it so she didn't mind at all. One of her children, Mary--her older daughter--was by a white man and she is a a blond version of her siblings. Mary married the youngest son of our across-the-street neighbor Lisa; thus they became good friends. Lisa gave Celeste a child's bicycle--one that a 12 year-old could ride. She was so small and slender that it suited her perfectly. I will always think of her riding that little bike.<br /><br />It is so ironic that on that rare occasion that she rode the bus, a bus would jump a curb and and an island to kill her. I still can't get my brain around it.<br /><br />As artist Christopher Marley said, "Success is living your own life in your own way." And the Dalai Lama says that "Happiness is the purpose of life." By any measure, she was a great success.<br /><br />I skipped the reception after the service. The humidity had given me a headache and I just didn't feel like being sociable. I spoke to her children at the service but slipped away right afterwards. Sometimes sociability is too much to ask. <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />-----------------------------------------------------------<br /></span><br /><a href="http://www.heraldnews.com/sports/local_sports/x540126557/Woman-hit-by-bus-was-UMD-professor" target="_blank">http://www.heraldnews.com/<wbr>sports/local_sports/<wbr>x540126557/Woman-hit-by-bus-<wbr>was-UMD-professor</a> <div> <h1>Woman hit by bus was UMD professor</h1></div> <div style="width: 300px;"> <div>By Grant Welker</div></div> <div> <div><b>Herald News Staff Reporter</b></div> <div>Posted Jul 22, 2009 @ 11:52 PM</div> <hr /> <div>Dartmouth — </div> <div> <p>University of Massachusetts Dartmouth colleagues described Celeste Sullivan, the woman struck and killed by a bus in New Bedford Tuesday, as charismatic, charming, dedicated and insightful. Sullivan joined the Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime and Justice Studies program as a part-time faculty last year.<br /><br />“For someone I knew so briefly, she made an extraordinarily strong impression,” said Larry Miller, the acting department chair. She was enthusiastic and a gifted teacher, very popular with students and someone whose thoughts he found himself referring to regularly, he said.<br /><br />Sullivan, a 54-year-old from New Bedford, was hit by an SRTA commuter bus Tuesday morning after 60-year-old driver David Rebello apparently began suffering chest pains. She had been waiting for a bus at the city’s main terminal when the bus crossed a median and hit her. She was pronounced dead at the scene.<br /><br />The District Attorney’s Office was still investigating the incident on Wednesday.<br /><br />Sullivan was not going to return to UMass Dartmouth this fall because of personnel cuts, Miller said, but he was planning on bringing her back for the spring 2010 semester. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Worcester State College and graduated with a doctorate degree in anthropology from Brown University in 2005, he said. She also received a Fulbright Scholarship for research in Pakistan.<br /><br />“It’s a great, great, great loss,” said Ida Almeida, the department secretary and one of few colleagues who got to know her well during her year at the university. “I can’t even put my head around it.”<br /><br />Almeida also described Sullivan as having a “big impact” during her short tenure.<br /><br />Sullivan didn’t have a driver’s license and often walked or rode her bicycle to get around, she said. Almeida believed Sullivan may have been on her way to the University of Rhode Island for an interview when she was hit.<br /><br />“It’s just the saddest thing,” she said. “She was very into her work, very into teaching.”<br />Miller appreciated the opportunity to remember Sullivan and tell a little bit about her. “I cannot say enough about what a wonderful teacher she was. She was a rare talent.”<br /><br />E-mail Grant Welker at <a href="http://gwelker@heraldnews.com./" target="_blank">gwelker@heraldnews.com.</a></p></div></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">-----------------------------------------------------------<br />Obit from the Providence Journal<br /></span>SULLIVAN, DR. CELESTE MARIE, 54, of New Bedford, MA, died Tuesday, July 21st from injuries sustained in a tragic accident. She leaves two sons, Bernard Henson and Obasi Osborne; and two daughters, Maye Osborne and Mary Sullivan Niebles; her sister, Claudia Salloom and her niece Anne Salloom.<br /><br />She was born April 1, 1955 in Boston, the daughter of Dr. William L. and Carol (Saurwein) Sullivan. Celeste was a 1970 graduate of Windsor Mountain High School, earned her BA from Worcester State, her Masters Degree in Egyptology, and in 2005 her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology, with a specialty in Urdu studies, from Brown University. Celeste will be remembered as a unique and gifted person. She had the ability to repair a diesel engine, navigate a yacht or translate the hieroglyphics on Ramses tomb. At the time of her death, she was in the process of turning her doctoral thesis into a book. She was a loving mother, caring friend and a truly amazing woman whose zest for life had no boundaries. The happiest time of her life was assisting her daughter Maye in the planning of her wedding.<br /><br />A Memorial Service will be held, Wednesday, July 29th at 4:00 PM in the Manning Chapel at Brown University. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the charity of the donor's choice. O'CONNOR BROTHERS FUNERAL HOME, 592 Park Avenue, Worcester, is directing arrangements. <a href="http://oconnorbrothers.com/" target="_blank">oconnorbrothers.com</a>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-50036394200371279952009-07-15T17:25:00.000-07:002009-10-31T16:55:51.479-07:00My First Impressions of Rio de JaneiroMiApogeo.com<br />http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/1124/4659/<br /><table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr><td class="contentheading" width="100%"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> My First Impressions of Rio de Janeiro</span> </td><td class="buttonheading" align="right" width="100%"> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1124&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=4659" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1124&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=4659','win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=640,height=480,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" title="Print"> </a> <br /></td><td class="buttonheading" align="right" width="100%"> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=1124&itemid=4659" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=1124&itemid=4659','win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=400,height=250,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" title="E-mail"> </a><a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1124&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=4659" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1124&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=4659','win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=640,height=480,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" title="Print"> </a><a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=1124&itemid=4659" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=1124&itemid=4659','win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=400,height=250,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" title="E-mail"><br /></a> </td></tr></tbody></table> <table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr><td> <span> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/content/blogsection/5/27/">Lifestyle</a> - </span> <span> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/content/blogcategory/19/37/">Travel</a> </span> </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top" width="68%"> <span class="small"> Written by RosaMaria Pegueros </span> </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" valign="top"> <p> </p> <p> I went to Brazil for the first time last month, when my professional conference, the Latin American Studies Association, met in Rio de Janeiro. It was surprisingly different from what I expected. </p> <div>I had my first surprise when I arrived at the hotel. Weary from a long flight we entered our room and the porter explained that our key card had to be in a special slot that connected to the electrical system. If you took the card out, you would have a two minute grace period, and then everything in the room, except the mini-refrigerator would be turned off. Keeping the air conditioning on required the card. The toilets in the hotel were the low-flow type that conserved water, and of course, there was a note in the bathroom asking that we hang up towels that we could use again to save water by only laundering linens that needed to be changed. These people are serious about energy conservation. </div> <div> </div> <div>The worldwide economic crisis seems not to be affecting Brazil. It has a well-managed economy conducted by President “Lula” da Silva, a former union chief and socialist, that does not seem to have tanked, as ours has. When Lula won the election, the American press reflected our government’s usual panic over having a socialist in charge of anything within our sphere of influence. But all of the Brazilians I spoke with expressed support for him and his administration. </div> <div> </div> <div>Much of what I had read about Brazil, as well as the movies I’ve seen, featured the poverty there: favelas or urban shantytowns; street children; violence by police particularly against the street children. The first movie I saw about Brazil was Pixote, a 1981 film about a child’s life on the streets which imprinted itself on my brain; the 2002 film, City of God, simply updated the situation. </div> <div> </div> <div> <img src="http://miapogeo.com/main/images/stories/Travel/RPRio.jpg" alt="RPRio.jpg" title="RPRio.jpg" style="border: 3px solid rgb(222, 184, 135); margin: 5px; float: left; width: 125px; height: 166px;" height="166" width="125" />I had expected to see poor, dirty children selling Chiclets or shining shoes; poor women carrying a baby and trailed by two or three filthy children as one sees in Mexico and Central America. There were no children downtown neither when we went on a walking tour nor when I spent an afternoon poking around Central Rio on my own. I realized after a few days that the only children I had seen in Brazil were well-supervised by their parents. This is not to say that poverty has been eliminated in Brazil. The favelas are still there and visible from the nicest areas. Some of the vendors who approached us on the beach were barefoot. I wondered where the middle class and working class lives. </div> <div>Rio boasts one of the most spectacularly beautiful bays I have ever seen, and I was born in San Francisco. I took a ferry trip in Guanabara Bay to visit Ilha Fiscal, an island which had been used by Portuguese royalty for dances and parties when they maintained a government in exile in Brazil during Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. I found myself to be the sole non-Brazilian on the ferry on a Sunday afternoon with many Brazilian families, some of whom had very small children. I was struck by how well-behaved the children were. I anticipated that some of the young children would be bored during the tour, but they were quiet. </div> <div> </div> <div>Spoken Portuguese is considerably different from Spanish and I had not had the time to brush up on my grad school Portuguese. It has a musical quality and a sensuality that is unique to it. I found that I could communicate with most people with my "portunhol." </div> <div> </div> <div>Rio is the second largest city in Brazil, after Sao Paulo. The amazing thing is how non-commercial it is, much more like Paris or Florence than the big cities in the United States. The hotel did not have a shop; finding toothpaste or other toiletries required a walk of a few blocks to a store. Only in a couple of places did we find the kind of tourist store full of souvenirs one finds in American airports, and tourist spots like San Francisco, where these stores are elbow to elbow in endless ribbons. While our hotel was located in the Beverly Hills of Rio, where there are very pricey and fashionable stores, one did not have the sense that the whole culture is anywhere near as consumerist as ours is. But neither is Brazil a Third World country. </div> <div> </div> <div>I was standing in front of a jewelry store, looking with some confusion up and down the street, for a CD store, when one of the sales people came out to ask me if she could help. I explained what I had been looking for and she went back into her store, looked up CD stores, and wrote down two addresses for me that were within walking distance. It was a generous gesture that I found to be typical of Brazilians during my brief visit there. </div> <div> </div> <div>This is not to say that there are no problems for tourists in Brazil. Everyone warns you to wear no jewelry at all—no rings, no watches—unless you are prepared to part with them. We were told not display our cameras, especially if alone. There are pickpockets everywhere; while I was there, one of the men on our tours had had his camera stolen from his pocket. Another man was crossing a street when he felt a hand in his pocket. He said he slammed his fist down on his leg and the hand withdrew, but it all happened so fast, he never saw who was trying to rob him. The anxiety of being super-vigilant does spoil things a bit, but even the Garden of Eden had a snake. </div> <div> </div> <div>Rio de Janeiro is an incredibly beautiful place. I will remember with pleasure sitting in the shadow of Pao de Acucar (Sugarloaf Mountain) watching the sun set behind Corcovado, where the giant Christ statue stands over the city. It was one of those rare moments when our senses are overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of a place. I plan to go back. </div> <div><br /></div> <div class="ultimatesbplugin_bottom"><hr /></div></td></tr></tbody></table>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-20282884463146238372009-06-23T14:25:00.000-07:002009-10-31T16:56:21.873-07:00Sotomayor: What kind of Latina is she?<table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr><td class="contentheading" width="100%">Sotomayor: What kind of Latina is she? </td><td class="buttonheading" align="right" width="100%"> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1076&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=4609" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1076&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=4609','win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=640,height=480,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" title="Print"> <br /></a> </td><td class="buttonheading" align="right" width="100%"> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=1076&itemid=4609" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=1076&itemid=4609','win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=400,height=250,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" title="E-mail"> <br /></a> </td></tr></tbody></table> <table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr><td> <span> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/content/blogsection/6/28/">Our Voice</a> - </span> <span> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/content/blogcategory/24/42/">Politics</a><br />http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/1076/4609/<br /> </span> </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top" width="68%"><p> <span class="small"> Written by RosaMaria Pegueros </span> </p><p><span class="small"></span></p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" valign="top"> <p> <span class="img-shadow"> </span></p> <p> What kind of Latina is Sotomayor? The answer is both simple and complex. </p> Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been enjoying a wave of felicitations and celebration from Latino communities across the United States. However, Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation, raised the question of which Latino community she actually represents. The answer to this question is both simple and complex.<br /><br />As a <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Newyorican" title="wikilatino: Newyorican" rel="nofollow">Newyorican</a>, Judge Sotomayor represents the children of <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Puerto%20Rican" title="wikilatino: Puerto Rican" rel="nofollow">Puerto Rican</a>s who have made their way to New York. But does she also represent <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Mexican-Americans" title="wikilatino: Mexican-Americans" rel="nofollow">Mexican-Americans</a> whose families have been in Los Angeles since before the Mexican-American war? <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Salvadorans" title="wikilatino: Salvadorans" rel="nofollow">Salvadorans</a> and <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Guatemalans" title="wikilatino: Guatemalans" rel="nofollow">Guatemalans</a> who came in the wake of the civil wars in their countries? <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Chileans" title="wikilatino: Chileans" rel="nofollow">Chileans</a> who fled Pinochet? <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Argentinians" title="wikilatino: Argentinians" rel="nofollow">Argentinians</a> who fled the generals? <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Venezuelans" title="wikilatino: Venezuelans" rel="nofollow">Venezuelans</a> who hate <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Hugo%20Chavez" title="wikilatino: Hugo Chavez" rel="nofollow">Hugo Chavez</a>? <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Cubans" title="wikilatino: Cubans" rel="nofollow">Cubans</a> whose families deserted Cuba when <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Fidel%20Castro" title="wikilatino: Fidel Castro" rel="nofollow">Fidel Castro</a> came to power?<br /><br />Those are all really different populations. It’s not an apple pie, it’s a pie of which each slice is of a different type—mincemeat, apple, cherry, pecan, lemon meringue—every time you cut into the pie you call a Latino pie, you get a different kind of fruit. Not all these populations necessarily like each other or hold the same opinions on important Latino-related issues. Take immigration, for example. Those old Californians, who have accumulated wealth and power in Southern California, are not terribly happy to host the poor <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Mexicans" title="wikilatino: Mexicans" rel="nofollow">Mexicans</a> and Central Americans who brave the desert and swim across the Rio Grande to come here.<br /><br />Many Miami Cubans, now conservative and Republican, who came here as refugees from a Communist regime, look down their noses at all who came here illegally from anywhere in Latin America.<br /><br />And what about the Puerto Ricans? Sure, they might be discriminated against in employment or education, but they didn’t have to sneak into the country. They are born with U.S. citizenship. They already have a leg up.<br /><br />Some of the South Americans, particularly from the Southern Cone, bristle at being lumped together with the Central Americans. Their families immigrated from Italy, Ireland or Spain during the 19th century, they don’t have any indigenous blood. They consider themselves European.<br /><br />And the Central Americans look down their noses at their Caribbean siblings because of the latter's African blood. After all, the islands were settled with Europeans and their African slaves after Columbus and his men killed most of the indigenous people.<br /><br />Then there are the hidden layers of Africans in <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Mexico" title="wikilatino: Mexico" rel="nofollow">Mexico</a>, <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Honduras" title="wikilatino: Honduras" rel="nofollow">Honduras</a>, <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Nicaragua" title="wikilatino: Nicaragua" rel="nofollow">Nicaragua</a> and <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Belize" title="wikilatino: Belize" rel="nofollow">Belize</a>... and so it goes. So who exactly does Judge Sotomayor represent? I hear the echoes of arguments in our communities over the use of “Hispanic,” “Latino,” “Chicano,” to represent us. And where does this leave Brazilians? And they Latinos? Does she represent them as well?<br /><br />Years ago, when my daughter was a child, we drove to visit friends in Arizona. We stopped at a Navajo reservation to have lunch and buy a doll. “Why does the lady [the sales clerk] look like Abuelita?” she asked me. My mother—-her abuelita—-is from <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/El%20Salvador" title="wikilatino: El Salvador" rel="nofollow">El Salvador</a>, and is dark-skinned. She happens to be an amalgam of several European nationalities but she looks Latina. We have no Navajo blood that I know of but she was right; she indeed did look like my mother. So I told her this: “Our ancestors came from many places, and it’s like a stew: There are pieces of carrots, onions, potatoes, and beef, and so every spoonful will be different; but it is the same stew and it all tastes the same.”<br /><br />Judge Sotomayor is a <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Puerto%20Rican" title="wikilatino: Puerto Rican" rel="nofollow">Puerto Rican</a> woman born in New York. But if you dropped her in East L.A., or on 24th Street, in San Francisco, no one would give her a second glance because she is obviously one of us. When she walks into the Capitol rotunda, she will stick out like a sore thumb, because what she is not; one of the rich, privileged, white men who make up the ruling class of this country.<br /><br />When Judge Sotomayor describes her Mamita’s hard work in raising her and her brother to believe that if they became educated and worked hard, they could achieve and succeed, she could be any one of us; her mother could be any one of ours.<br /><br />And do you think that once she is on the court, all those privileged white men will remember that she is Puerto Rican rather than Mexican? Or Central American? I teach Latin American history and I can tell you that there are a lot of people who think “Central America” means Iowa and Indiana; or that <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Brazil" title="wikilatino: Brazil" rel="nofollow">Brazil</a> is an island in the Caribbean.<br /><br />We are defined as much by what we are not as by what we are. Her voice in the court will bring the resonance of one who is not from a dominant culture but is also not exclusively <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Puerto%20Rican" title="wikilatino: Puerto Rican" rel="nofollow">Puerto Rican</a>. She is our Latina, with all that name embodies. </td></tr></tbody></table>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-10818271736940187862009-04-13T13:23:00.000-07:002009-04-13T15:14:34.741-07:00Memento Mori<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilvVdrzV54c96jMxNi8ZHjfLMHw5KfhaVPZ-3rE7lcbBrhi205o0FH5j0L7YAUTXcSitWVJaeHSZYl90Jt0t4CINnCS_6o02gcl7T6cFssvKKZxCWJsMcUnJ2dNjv0hcker3hU/s1600-h/GROUP.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 222px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilvVdrzV54c96jMxNi8ZHjfLMHw5KfhaVPZ-3rE7lcbBrhi205o0FH5j0L7YAUTXcSitWVJaeHSZYl90Jt0t4CINnCS_6o02gcl7T6cFssvKKZxCWJsMcUnJ2dNjv0hcker3hU/s320/GROUP.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324301819725036354" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_kCShvRjsCnAfS4JTnND26ADTmwGfqF0XxdyQ3jHeIRNZGhmpTaE9UwJtfvRBP4qWVg2Wx4ddEzhpaLXxsdxnmP1hxO76qqEaK98S2HiuswFhSo7h0JJY3pyRWLY9ETISyFX/s1600-h/GROUP.JPG"><br /></a><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Last June, my husband Yehuda Lev, 82, collapsed. In the months that followed, he has alternated between several week-long sojourns in hospital and living in a nursing home because the nature of his illness makes it impossible for him to be cared for at home. Traditionally, we had hosted a large Pesach Seder, a ritual Passover meal, for as many as 25 people. This year, my daughter and I struggled with our choices: Should we forego our celebration and go to other people’s homes?<span> </span>Should we go ahead and host it without him? Should we have our Seder and connect to him with Skype, an Internet video connection?<span> </span>Finally we decided to do the Seder at his nursing home. It was small; twelve of us—only our extended family and closest friends.</i></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>The following is the <u>drash</u>, or commentary I wrote to welcome our guests to the Seder.<br /></i></span></p><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size:100%;">For me, Pesach is a holiday laden with memory. I first felt my daughter move within me during my pregnancy on the first night of Passover, 1980. We shared Pesach with Yehuda's mother and stepfather several times, and I have wonderful memories of them on those occasions. Then there all the Seders that we have shared with our friends and family here in Providence as well as the many we shared with friends in California before we moved here: a rich panoply of happy memories. <span> </span><br /><br />It is wonderful that in spite of the difficulties of the last year, we were able to be together here in Yehuda’s home away from home, Summit Commons nursing home.<br /><br />You build a life and you believe that you have some control over it, and then an accident or a sudden illness occurs, and you find that the life you carefully constructed will sweep you along, like a fish in a river, and you have little control over anything. You are left to wonder at the arbitrary nature of life, at the chaos that now rules it, and to pray for the strength to meet the unfamiliar challenges that lurk just out of view. </span> </p> <p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Mathematicians say that the nature of life is chaos. Unlike many things that they assert, this last year has made me understand this concept. And we, ever human, try to impose our small bit of order over the chaos.<br /><br />As Henry David Thoreau, said, in Walden,<br />“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”<br /><br />As I prepared for the Seder this year, I was thinking about the Israelites who had to leave the familiar oppression of life in Egypt for the great unknown of life in the wilderness: Where would they sleep? Where would they get water? Where would they get wheat to make their bread? What flora and fauna would they find to feed themselves and their children? Slavery was horrid but wandering in the wilds for an indefinite time, which ultimately turned out to be forty years –almost two generations—was terrifying. </span> </p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Small wonder that they wept with joy at the magical manna that appeared so they could make their bread, or that, in a rare moment of doubt, Moses struck the rock twice to draw water for his multitudes. In the midst of the wilderness, it is hard to imagine that we will survive our terror and uncertainty.</span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> So here we are, and to the question, “How is this night different from all other nights?” we add this answer to the traditional answers: Tonight, we are acutely aware of the transitory nature of life, in a way we have never been before, and I offer this “Prayer for Embracing Life’s Mysteries” by Rabbi Naomi Levy:</span> <span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /><br />"Teach me to bend with life, how to repair what I can repair, how to live with my questions, how to rejoice in Your wonders. When I am faced with events that baffle and astound me, help me to transform my frustration into humility and awe. Teach me to embrace the mystery, G-d. Remind me to enjoy the ride. Thank you. G-d, for this spectacular life."</span>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-44095909050394826312009-03-30T12:19:00.000-07:002009-10-31T16:57:07.423-07:00from MiApogeo: Too Few Latinos in Baseball's Hall of Fame<table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr><td class="contentheading" width="100%">Too Few Latinos in Baseball's Hall of Fame </td><td class="buttonheading" align="right" width="100%"> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=852&itemid=1453" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://miapogeo.com/main/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=852&itemid=1453','win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=400,height=250,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" title="E-mail"> <img src="http://miapogeo.com/main/images/M_images/emailButton.png" alt="E-mail" name="E-mail" align="middle" border="0" /></a> </td></tr></tbody></table> <table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr><td> <span> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/content/blogsection/6/28/">Our Voice</a> - </span> <span> <a href="http://miapogeo.com/main/content/blogcategory/25/41/">Lo Que Es</a> </span> </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top" width="68%"><p> <span class="small"> Written by RosaMaria Pegueros </span> </p><p><span class="small"></span></p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" valign="top"> <p> <span class="img-shadow"> </span></p> <p> Of the 289 players that have been named to the Baseball Hall of Fame, only ten are Latinos. Rosie Pegueros wants to know why. </p> <p> Spring is coming, and my thoughts turn to spring training. I forget about my winter preoccupations and start reading the baseball gossip. The one thing I really miss about living in Los Angeles is going to opening day at Dodger Stadium. There’s just something about being outside in the sunshine, the sound of radios all around broadcasting the game simultaneously in English and Spanish, and the roar of the crowd with every small victory. </p> <p>I’ve always loved the game. I grew up in San Francisco where, when I was very young, the Seals played until the Giants moved from New York to the City (as we natives call SF) in 1957. The Giants have the distinction of having won more games than any other team in the history of organized sports and of having the greatest number of Hall of Famers. </p> <p>Raised in a house full of brothers and a father who loved it, baseball was all around me. The famed Russ Hodges was always on the radio calling the games. My dad and the boys collected baseball cards and played on the street, in school, and on the local police leagues. I remember listening to the feats of <b>Orlando Cepeda</b> and <b>Matty, Felipe</b> and <b>Jesus Alou</b>, three brothers from the <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Dominican%20Republic" title="wikilatino: Dominican Republic" rel="nofollow">Dominican Republic</a>, and, of course, the great <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Roberto%20Clemente" title="wikilatino: Roberto Clemente" rel="nofollow">Roberto Clemente</a>. Even at a young age, I was proud of the <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Latino" title="wikilatino: Latino" rel="nofollow">Latino</a> players. </p> <p> Later, in the 70s and 80s, part of the delight of going to Dodger games was getting to see <b>Fernando Valenzuela</b>, a young <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Mexican" title="wikilatino: Mexican" rel="nofollow">Mexican</a> whose thrilling pitching won him the Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year Award in his first season with the Dodgers. </p> <p> You can imagine my interest when one of my college seniors asked if he could do his research paper on <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Latinos%20in%20baseball" title="wikilatino: Latinos in baseball" rel="nofollow">Latinos in baseball</a>. This young man, who is not himself Latino, was the warm-up pitcher for our local team, the Pawtucket (Rhode Island) Red Sox (locally known as the Pawsox), the Triple-A farm team for the Boston Red Sox. He admired many of the Latino players so, why not? </p> <p>I was shocked when my student told me that of the 289 players that have been named to the Baseball Hall of Fame, only ten are Latinos. Ten?! That’s not even three percent. He was stunned; I was stunned. Are you SURE? He was. I went home and Googled the Baseball Hall of Fame. How could a game that is truly American a game as could be, that is played all over Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, as well as the United States, and with so many outstanding Latino players on U.S. teams, have only ten Latino players in the Hall of Fame? </p> <p> The best known of the Latino Hall of Famers is the great <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Roberto%20Clemente" title="wikilatino: Roberto Clemente" rel="nofollow">Roberto Clemente</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Puerto%20Rico" title="wikilatino: Puerto Rico" rel="nofollow">Puerto Rico</a>) of the Pittsburg Pirates who died tragically in an airplane crash, trying to bring disaster relief to victims of the 1972 Nicaraguan earthquake. Then there is <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Rod%20Carew" title="wikilatino: Rod Carew" rel="nofollow">Rod Carew</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Panama" title="wikilatino: Panama" rel="nofollow">Panama</a>) who, primarily with the Minnesota Twins, maintained one of the highest hitting averages in history and won ten batting titles. Then, in alphabetical order: shortstop <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Luis%20Aparicio" title="wikilatino: Luis Aparicio" rel="nofollow">Luis Aparicio</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Venezuela" title="wikilatino: Venezuela" rel="nofollow">Venezuela</a>); first baseman <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Orlando%20Cepeda" title="wikilatino: Orlando Cepeda" rel="nofollow">Orlando Cepeda</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Puerto%20Rico" title="wikilatino: Puerto Rico" rel="nofollow">Puerto Rico</a>); pitcher <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Martin%20Dihigo" title="wikilatino: Martin Dihigo" rel="nofollow">Martin Dihigo</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Cuba" title="wikilatino: Cuba" rel="nofollow">Cuba</a>); pitcher <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Alfonso%20Gomez" title="wikilatino: Alfonso Gomez" rel="nofollow">Alfonso Ramon “Lefty” Gomez</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Mexican%20American" title="wikilatino: Mexican American" rel="nofollow">Mexican American</a>, California); pitcher <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Juan%20Marichal" title="wikilatino: Juan Marichal" rel="nofollow">Juan Marichal</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Dominican%20Republic" title="wikilatino: Dominican Republic" rel="nofollow">Dominican Republic</a>), and first baseman <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Tony%20Perez" title="wikilatino: Tony Perez" rel="nofollow">Tony Perez</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Cuba" title="wikilatino: Cuba" rel="nofollow">Cuba</a>). The latest additions, in 2006, include pitcher <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Jose%20Mendez" title="wikilatino: Jose Mendez" rel="nofollow">Jose Mendez</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Cuba" title="wikilatino: Cuba" rel="nofollow">Cuba</a>) and executive/pioneer <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Alex%20Pompez" title="wikilatino: Alex Pompez" rel="nofollow">Alex Pompez</a></b> (<a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Cuban%20American" title="wikilatino: Cuban American" rel="nofollow">Cuban American</a>, Florida). </p> <p> <b>There are few things that are as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie, but racism is one of them.</b> African Americans did not break into the majors until 1947. Until that time, Blacks were kept in the Negro Leagues. When <b>Jackie Robinson</b> was selected to break the color barrier, he was counseled to eschew fighting back when confronted by racism. Playing in the Dodgers' farm team, among the challenges he faced were the objections of his teammates to riding the team bus with him. Cepeda’s road into the major leagues was not a direct one. In those bad old days, he came up through the Cuban and the Negro leagues before getting into the majors. Cepeda was not only <a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Puerto%20Rican" title="wikilatino: Puerto Rican" rel="nofollow">Puerto Rican</a>; he was black. </p> <p> Who elects the members of the Baseball Hall of Fame? Sports writers! One can disparage these shining practitioners of public literacy, but it is the only game in town. An actor can make fun of the Academy Awards, but the fact is that the Golden Globes and the People’s Choice Awards don’t hold a candle to the Oscars. </p> <p>As a humble academic, I can but rarely afford the cost of a ticket to Fenway to see the Red Sox play. But as a historian, and a believer in keeping an accurate record, the numbers bother me: ten Latinos out of 289 Hall of Famers. Today there are 750 players in Major League Baseball; 314 (42%) are Latinos born in Latin America, and 58 U.S.-Latino players: together, 372 players—almost half of the players in MLB. Barely 3% of the game’s retired Latino (both U.S.-born and Latin American) players, managers, and executives have made it into the Hall of Fame. </p> <p> Maybe the sportswriters shouldn’t be the only ones making the choice. After all, how many years do they stay in the profession and vote for the winners? Thirty years? Forty years? The judges change much more slowly than the athletes they judge, dragging their private biases and prejudices into every vote. Racism and ethnic prejudices have changed dramatically in the last forty years. </p> <p> If only there were some way to democratize the choice! But absent the active participation of aggrieved Latino players, it will never happen; the fact that only a quarter of the Latino players are U.S.-born contributes to their invisibility in the Hall of Fame. What I would love to see is a movement of baseball professionals to take the Hall of Fame selection process away from the sportswriters. </p> <p>Luckily for me, the Pawsox play in a stadium that is near me. Nobody knows them now, but they feed new players to “the show,” the big leagues. Who knows? The next <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Juan%20Marichal" title="wikilatino: Juan Marichal" rel="nofollow">Juan Marichal</a></b> or <b><a href="http://wikilatino.com/index.php/Special:Search/Roberto%20Clemente" title="wikilatino: Roberto Clemente" rel="nofollow">Roberto Clemente</a></b> might come from Pawtucket, and I will get to watch him play before he’s rich and famous. Ah, springtime…<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>posted on MiApogeo.com on Monday, March 30, 2009 http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/852/1453/<br /></p></td></tr></tbody></table>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-8554169739219936062008-10-13T09:21:00.000-07:002009-10-31T16:58:17.728-07:00Nuestros Hijos and the Iraq and Afghan WarsNuestros Hijos and the Iraq and Afghan Wars:<table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr></tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top" width="70%"><p><span style="font-size:100%;">What this means to our Latino communities</span><span style="font-size:78%;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size:78%;"><br /></span>Finding a person who knows how to cut curly hair is not easy. Lately, I've been visiting a salon in a Dominican neighborhood of Providence, where I live. I was sitting in the chair, wrapped in the plastic apron, when I spotted a photograph of a young man in uniform on the stylist's mirror.<br /><br />"<i>¿Su hijo?</i>" I asked. "<i>No, un vecino</i>," a neighborhood boy, the stylist replied. Then she told me his bone-chilling story.<br /><br />The young man had been blown up when his jeep hit an IED (improvised explosive device) in Iraq. Now he is in an army hospital in Texas. He lost his limbs, a buttock, his anus, and has severe head injuries that have damaged his ability to think. Given his injuries, I cannot imagine what the quality of his life could be. His mother is now alone in Providence; her husband abandoned her years ago, and her other son was lost to street violence. The salon was raising money to finance the mother's trip to Texas to be near her surviving son.<br /><br />The government does not provide funding for that purpose. In fact, the Veterans Administration has been slow to respond to the need for treatment for vets with post-traumatic stress syndrome, as well as the head traumas and amputations, extreme physical disabilities that are the worst wounds of war. Helping families to travel to distant facilities where their wounded sons and daughters are being treated isn't even broached with Congress. Recently, Jim Webb led the Senate to pass part of an emergency spending bill that revises and upgrades GI benefits. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain voted against it, saying that the benefits would be so attractive as to be a disinvestment for soldiers to reenlist.<br /><br />To our everlasting shame, this nation, which prides itself on having the finest military force in the world, is miserly in the rewards it gives those warriors upon their return.<br /><br />The government has been negligent in the distribution of veterans' health care and permanent disability support. Systemic dysfunction can be seen in the undervaluing of injured veterans' disability ratings, forcing many of the most severely disabled to fight the system by hiring lawyers to intervene on their behalf, and resulting in delays of months in the awarding of benefits to wounded soldiers who deserve them.<br /><br />Last year, <i>Washington Post</i> investigative reporters uncovered severe neglect in the facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The problems included rat- and cockroach-infested quarters; a lack of heat and water, as well as security problems that resulted in injured soldiers having to stand guard duty!<br /><br />When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were mounted, few asked if we could afford them. Honor, revenge, power, and hubris overrode good sense in the rush to take up arms. We put the best interests of our own people at home in jeopardy in order to buy the costly weapons of war. How many school systems would be supported for the cost of one bomber? One helicopter? One load of bombs? How many schools could be built, outfitted and staffed by the money we are spending on Bhagdad's Green Zone? How many job programs and training programs could be funded to put all our unemployed to work? How many gangs could be undermined and prisons emptied if we poured the money we spent in Iraq in one year on education, training, and helping our impoverished citizens to get on their feet?<br /><br />Our bridges and freeways are crumbling while Army engineers build armed fortresses in Iraq. Would it be a violation of government policy to put them to work here, rebuilding the infrastructure that we need?<br /><br />In the run-up to the wars, President Bush insisted that he would not need draftees to conduct the war. As long as unemployed and underemployed people could be enticed by fat signing bonuses and the promise of funding for college, the pool of soldiers would remain large. For the first time in our history, we have a professional, all-volunteer standing army.<br /><br />Many of the members of our armed services signed up because of a lack of job opportunities; they saw the military as a way to develop valuable job skills and experience. Most who signed up for the National Guard trained with the expectation of serving close to home. A weekend a month and a month's training in the summer prepared them for national emergencies at home. Once deployed, they never expected to be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for second and third tours of duty because of Bush's stop-loss policy, his solution to the problem of replenishing the demand for troops and fudging the promise not to reinstate the draft. Instead, we have a backdoor draft that is taking advantage of the aspirations of our economically disadvantaged for better lives.<br /><br />What has that meant for Latino communities?<br /><br />Of the 157,000 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of the surge, 10.5% are Latino/as; 17% of the combat troops are Latino. But there is a hidden layer: Over 8,000 non-citizen Mexicans are fighting for this country in exchange for the promise of citizenship if they survive the ordeal; nor are they the only foreign nationals seeking to earn citizenship in the same way. This has been a traditional way that the United States armed services have filled out their rosters, unbeknownst to many Americans.<br /><br />What happens to a Mexican national when he is gravely injured? Will his family be allowed to come over the border to attend to him in a hospital in Texas? Who will advocate for him in Congress?<br /><br />The military itself is not the only recipient of government monies allotted to war spending. In this war, profiteers have been quietly legitimized by the current administration. Blackwater, and Vice President Cheney's company, Halliburton, among others, have made billions of taxpayer dollars in no-bid contracts. The professional army is "spared" day-to-day tasks and certain protection duties because Blackwater -- which is subject neither to governmental or military control -- has taken them over, for steep fees.<br /><br />No wonder Bush crowed that he did not need to reestablish the draft: By engaging in a shell game, he can boast of the greatest military force in the world, run a parallel universe of mercenaries and contractors, and hoodwink the poorest Americans and immigrants yearning for legitimacy into enlisting.<br /><br />Profiteering is no longer a dishonorable activity. Kleptocracy, ie., a ruling class that guts the public treasury, is now the rule of the day in the US, as is kakistocracy, rule by the worst or most unprincipled leaders.<br /><br />We will be paying for these wars long after the neoconservatives who started them have gone on to their eternal punishment. The Almighty should put government officials who bequeath such extreme debt to one's children and grandchildren in the first circle of hell. War is such a costly venture, it is hard for a reasonable person to understand what would possess a country to go to war. Looking at the bare and shameless profiteering in America's two current wars, there is only one answer: Greed.<br /><br />And that wounded soldier's Mamita, trying to find a way to be by his side? She's on her own, still trying to scrape together her fare to Texas.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">published on Mi Apogeo, September 2008</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/300/932/</span>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-17670462153534457882008-09-11T12:31:00.000-07:002009-10-31T17:01:16.132-07:00Bristol Palin: What a Difference Four Decades Makes<div style="margin: 15px 0pt 0pt; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic;">Published on Thursday, September 4, 2008 by CommonDreams.org</div> <div class="print-title">Bristol Palin: What a Difference Four Decades Makes</div> <div class="print-content"> <div id="node-header"> <p class="author">by Rosa Maria Pegueros</p> </div> <div id="node-body"> <p>It was 1972 in San Francisco, in the era before legalized abortions, when bearing a child out of wedlock was still a scandal. In the closed world of the Catholic university we attended, it was an even bigger shame than in the rushing waters of the outside world, especially with hippies, free love, the pill, the sexual revolution, the women's movement and all the hallmarks of that permissive time. In that time and that place, my friend who I will call Jane, became pregnant by a foreign student with whom marriage was never a possibility.</p><p>Jane came from a huge, devoutly Catholic family; she was the fifth child and second daughter of a dozen siblings raised on a farm near Sacramento. Her father was a retired administrator who taught at one of the state universities. Her parents were very kind, good people. I remember many happy times at the farm between semesters; long summer days in the Central Valley heat; and a houseful of loving siblings during the winter holidays. </p><p>She had never considered using birth control; it was a sin, after all. (So was fornication but I digress...) Furthermore, birth control was legalized only after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1967. It is important to remember that the birth control pill, known simply as "the pill," had only become available in 1960 but until Griswold v. Connecticut, it was accessible mainly to married couples. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973, put an end to the embarrassing practice of begging psychiatrists to write a letter for you arguing that without a therapeutic abortion, you could go off the deep end.</p><p>The Catholic Church and the conservative establishment fought distribution of the pill that they saw as an agent of a sexual revolution which would disrupt all the hierarchical and patriarchal structures through which they exercised their power. They continue to fight pharmaceutical advances like the day after pill, RU 486, as well as legalized abortion. </p><p>When Jane found herself pregnant, everything changed. I drove her to her father's office so she could break the news. I sat in the hallway while she went in. It was an agonizing visit. When she finally emerged, her face stained with tears, she shared her father's verdict: She was to stay away from the family home until after the birth of the child, and she was to give up the child for adoption after which she would be allowed to return. His main concern, he said, was that a bad example not be set for the younger children, several of whom were not yet ten years old. As far as I know, her mother had nothing to say about it; I don't know if she urged him, in private, to change his mind; nor do I recall if she ever called Jane during that period. I have often wondered what that exile cost Jane in her relationship with her parents.</p><p>Jane, then a senior, 20 years old, found herself without a home to return to, without familial support, alone in a way she had never been.</p><p>Close to our college, there was a home for unwed mothers. Women in difficulties like Jane's were allowed to live there, earning their keep by being hired out to upper-middle- class families where they cleaned houses. One would think that the families who hired them would have a measure of compassion for these young girls in trouble. Think again.</p><p>The families who hired them openly regarded them as fallen women. Cleaning those houses was a favor that those well-off people bestowed upon them, a gift given grudgingly and gracelessly. Never was Jane allowed to forget her sin; forcing her to wear a scarlet letter would have been no worse.</p><p>Jane did her time; she cleaned the houses; she had her baby - a girl - and gave her up for adoption. Still in the hospital after giving birth her older sister came to her bedside only to excoriate her for having brought disgrace upon the family. Once it was all over, she could go home, finally. It seemed to me that she never really got over it.</p><p>Jane and I drifted apart and I do not know if she ever looked for her baby or if the child eventually found her way back to her. I hope they found each other.</p><p>I was thinking about Jane as I watched the evolving news from the Republican convention, especially the revelations about Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her pregnant 17 year-old daughter, Bristol. People are such gossip-mongers; of course the news about her daughter was bound to draw attention for a while.</p><p>I am deeply happy that girls who find themselves in trouble (don't you love euphemisms?) will no longer be excoriated and expelled by their communities. That, at least, is one thing for which Gov. Palin should be praised. If one as conservative as she is, with a track record of pushing abstinence as the only birth control, can welcome her errant daughter with open arms, there is some hope that others will follow suit. I don't know if homes for unwed mothers still exist. I hope not but I do hope some supports exist, kinder gentler supports than what we've seen in the past.</p><p>The only reason it is worth discussing at all is that the conservatives have been guiltier than any other group of condemning young women in similar straits. From Hester Prynne to the present, it has been a sin that women have carried alone as if there were an epidemic of parthenogenesis out there. They didn't do it to themselves but they have been treated as such. I am glad that that hypocrisy has finally been discarded, even if it is a result of bald political opportunism.</p><p>Hypocrisy is never far from the surface. The conservatives are demanding support for women who find themselves pregnant and praising Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for his support for alternatives to abortion. Perhaps they can be persuaded to support the children who are already born and living in poverty even as their congressional representatives condemn welfare and try to destroy programs for poor families with dependent children. Poverty: The final frontier.</p> <div class="authorBio">Rosa Maria Pegueros is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island.</div> </div></div> <hr width="75%"> <p>Article printed from <strong>www.CommonDreams.org</strong></p> <div class="print-source_url">URL to article: <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/04-0">http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/04-0</a></div>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-43375095659631342232008-08-02T10:06:00.000-07:002008-10-13T09:21:03.217-07:00Playing Race Cards<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDzEd77vWukMkXiG1ZAonnK4q0SwBzvRfMwz-LDUy7VoxjCxp248i5dqF2kSM7tjVooVA3NlmpyhFYG5f1vuATWqaS2XTl3zch2BHP-VDSc06-vFYmKG2Ub8jY8IyQ4qD0iaE-/s1600-h/McCain-Obama+NYorker.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDzEd77vWukMkXiG1ZAonnK4q0SwBzvRfMwz-LDUy7VoxjCxp248i5dqF2kSM7tjVooVA3NlmpyhFYG5f1vuATWqaS2XTl3zch2BHP-VDSc06-vFYmKG2Ub8jY8IyQ4qD0iaE-/s320/McCain-Obama+NYorker.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5229971179730297746" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>Playing Race Cards<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><br />John McCain is absolutely right: Barak Obama should not play the race card. For things to be equal, we should give the same type of descriptor to each candidate. Obama will be "the first black Democratic presidential nominee." John McCain would be "the (approximately) 40th white Republican male candidate," or to be fair absolutely, Obama would be "the first black major party presidential candidate," and John McCain would be "the 87th white presidential candidate." Works for me.<br /><br />The elephant in the living room better not tell anyone he's an elephant. We don't want the whole elephant-rights movement to get a foot up. Barak Obama better button his lip about being black. White people don't want their delicate consciences strained; Obama is running on a post-civil rights platform, after all.<br /><br />Just think, it would be so great to have a black president in November who doesn't talk about black-people stuff. It's so BET. Why can't we all just be white and get over ourselves. This is the great melting pot. Immigrants coming here–whether they wanted to or not–are here now so they should put up or shut up. If you don't like it here, go back where you came from!<br /><br />Of course, people ripped from the bosoms of their families and the center of their cultures and sold into slavery may not know where they came from. All Oprah has to do is to pay for one of those fancy DNA tests for all of our black citizens so people can ascertain what their true ancestral homes were. It's okay; she can afford it.<br /><br />But Obama hasn't said a word about r-e-p-a-r-a-t-i-o-n-s. We have to be careful of our language here lest my computer program warn me that my "message is the sort of thing that might get your keyboard washed out with soap, if you get my drift..." Most Americans know about slavery but I'd bet that not one in ten knows what Jim Crow laws were, that is, the laws that were passed after Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and the U.S. Congress passed and the states ratified the laws giving African Americans the right to vote, and prohibiting slavery. I bet that they don't know that after those Reconstruction Amendments were ratified, in many communities, blacks were prevented from learning to read and that it wasn't uncommon for those same jurisdictions to have literacy requirements for voters. Or that some communities imposed a poll tax: Prospective voters had to pay to vote. So voters who were poor–many of whom were black–couldn't vote because they couldn't afford it.<br /><br />We all know how the American people venerate Abraham Lincoln; for a while he had his own holiday. The only other President to have his own holiday, George Washington, was a proud Virginian who, at the time of his death, owned 316 slaves. He only inherited 11 slaves from his father; his marriage brought another 20 slaves to Mount Vernon. To his credit, he set them free in his will but that is rather beside the point, isn't it? The growth of Mount Vernon's slave population gives a whole different cast to his title of "Father of our Country." Although, to his credit, unlike his fellow-founder Thomas Jefferson, there are no allegations of his engaging in sexual relations with any of his slaves.)<br /><br />In the United States Constitution, slaves were counted as 3/5's of a person in determining membership in the House of Representatives; that, in part, is what the Reconstruction Amendments changed.<br /><br />Can they tell you that until 1967 with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in <u>Loving v. Virginia</u>, many states prohibited marriage between people of difference races? And if they know that such a law existed in America, even if they have never heard specifically about <u>Loving v. Virginia</u>, are they bothered by it? Or is it merely a curiosity to them?<br /><br />Obama was lucky: Even though he was born in 1961 just a few years before the Loving ruling, he was born in Hawaii--a state whose majority at the time was not white.<br /><br />If you are white and live in the vacuum tube of the twenty-first century, I guess you can be presentist; you can just live in the moment, to hell with the past.<br /><br />Maybe you can if you're white, but if you aren't then the weight of history is on your bathroom scale, and your dark-skinned face, staring back at you, in itself, carries a history that cannot be ignored.<br /><br />We understand that Obama has to tread somewhat delicately so as not to scare off the white folks but like it or not, his African American side is there.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">published on Mi Apogeo.Com</span><br />http://miapogeo.com/main/content/blogsection/6/28/Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-91520226859120501622008-06-11T13:30:00.000-07:002009-10-31T17:10:16.469-07:00“Omigod, Mom; I just voted for the first woman president!”<table class="contentpaneopen"><tbody><tr></tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top" width="70%"> <span class="small"></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p> <p> Voting on Identity: Time for A Change </p> My daughter is 27, married, a career woman and a political activist. On the day of the Massachusetts primaries, I got an early morning call. She was on the other end, sobbing; it took me a moment to figure out who it was. All my mom-emergency alerts went off and I was suddenly completely awake.<br />“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”<br />“Omigod, Mom; I just voted for the first woman president!” Sigh... relief.<br /><br />Lost amidst the reports of the extraordinary rise of Senator Barack Obama is the way women, both young and old, have come out for Senator Hillary Clinton. I have been to a couple of rallies here in the Northeast and I have seen women there in numbers I have never seen since the Equal Rights Amendment campaign. Yes, Obama is drawing an extraordinary number of people but this is also a historic race for women.<br /><br />Is it a clash of identity politics? The Black Man vs. the Middle Aged White Woman?<br /><br />Many voters decry the focus on gender or race. The campaigns should be based on issues; it’s a form of racism, they say, to vote for Obama because he is a black man, or sexism if one votes for Clinton.<br /><br />That’s one way to look at it, but as a Latina who has watched generations of white men making all the decisions, I’m ready for a change because politicians do bring their genders and their races to the legislative table. We should not be lulled unto thinking that white men have anyone else's interests in mind.<br /><br />Who can doubt that Hillary Clinton will have fresh perspectives and ideas about issues that are invisible to the generations of men who preceded her? Women are disproportionately affected by the issues of poverty, Medicare and Social Security. Yes, everybody should have Social Security but women outlive men by a considerable number of years. Women, more than men, nurse elderly husbands and then are left alone. There are many true horror stories about elderly women eating canned cat food or living in impoverished conditions after their husbands’ deaths.<br /><br />I remember lobbying the California legislature for disadvantaged women and their children. We had a very tough time getting a bill passed that mandated pursuit of “deadbeat dads.” We were perplexed by this difficulty until someone explained that there were many divorced men in the legislature who would never agree to it. Even in that setting, the Old Boys stuck together.<br /><br />Senator Clinton has already demonstrated her command of the issues pertaining to medical insurance. President Clinton would finally resolve that problem. Then she’d need to help another group of women disproportionately affected because of their gender: single mothers with dependent children. President Bill Clinton made a muck of welfare; she can set right what he compromised on. And that’s just to start with. It makes perfect sense to me that women, knowing the impact of one’s gender on the issues, would choose her to lead the nation.<br /><br />Senator Obama’s presence in the White House would also make a huge difference. There is no question that recent administrations have <span> </span>had a devastating effect on African Americans. Take, for instance, the Civil Rights Commission. In the last eight years, it has quietly shifted its focus from racial and sex-based discrimination to cases of discrimination on the basis of religion. You can always count on George W. Bush to neutralize or pervert a government agency that was actually doing good for the people of this country.<br /><br />According to Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 9.7% of all black men are unemployed. The rate of unemployment overall is 4.5%. <span> </span>There are three times as many black men languishing in prisons than there are in our nation’s colleges; 40 % of our 2 million prison inmates are black.<span> </span>What kind of sense does it make for the government to spend more to incarcerate than to invest in education and job training? But have our traditional leaders paid any attention to the impact of these things on the black community? No, they just keep appropriating money for prisons and mandatory sentencing laws, spending money on the “War on Drugs” instead of going to the root of the problem.<br /><br />Some 5.4% of Latinos are unemployed; 19% of the prison population is Latino. <i>Una quinta</i>, one-fifth: that is a heavy price to pay. Latinos have the lowest rate of high school graduation and the highest rate of teen pregnancy; more than 3 out of 5 Latina girls become pregnant before age 20. Those traditional politicians in Washington have not paid any attention to this problem except to condemn them and move on.<br /><br />So, as a Latino, who should one choose?<span> </span>I am drawn to Hillary Clinton because her life has been spent trying to fix the problems related to women and poverty and because she has a history of working with Latinos. Barack Obama does not have the history of working for women or Latinos but if he gets the nomination, I will vote for him because even though he does not have a demonstrated history of attention to our issues, he will bring a fresh set of eyes to Washington and a demonstrated capacity for empathy and conciliation.<br /><br />As for John McCain, he may be better than his GOP comrades on immigration but otherwise, he might as well live on a different planet.<br /><br />http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/205/778/<br />published on MiApogeo.com, June 2008Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-75559225919248735862008-06-10T21:03:00.000-07:002008-06-10T21:24:33.346-07:00Prime time to witness culture of waste<div><span class="vitstorybody"><span style="font-size:+2;"><b><h2 class="vitstoryheadline"><span class="vitstoryheadline">Prime time to witness culture of waste</span></h2></b></span><span style="font-size:-1;"></span><span style="font-size:-1;"><b><span class="vitstorybyline"></span></b></span> <span class="vitstorybody"> <p>TO STUDENTS, teachers and parents, during late May and early June everything shifts: Students’ school year ends; teachers limp across the finish line feeling lucky if they don’t teach in a year-round school, and parents arrange summer vacations, day camps, over-night camps, or other forms of keeping the kids occupied and safe.</p><p> But for sidewalk collectors, June is prime time, especially if you live in a city where there is an Ivy League college. I live just a mile from Brown University. Over the years I have collected all sorts of valuable objects left for the trash collectors: Two mini-refrigerators; an ice-cream maker; at least two televisions; a brand-new recliner; books; chairs; software; handmade crochet afghan blankets; tables; desks; bookcases; you name it, I’ve found it. And I wasn’t looking very hard: I was just driving by and they caught my eye.</p><p> It is a feature of our consumerist culture that today’s college students equip their dorm rooms with more furniture than our parents owned when they married: two sets of refrigerators, stereo equipment, televisions, microwave ovens, computers with all their peripherals are squeezed into a space that was designed to hold two beds and two desks. All that stuff has to be moved in and arranged more precisely than a Rubik’s Cube. Then it has to be moved out at the end of the school year, lining the pockets of the owners of public storage facilities. </p><p>When a student graduates, what happens to all that stuff? Some of it is kept by the students; some is passed on to other students or to younger siblings. But some it, worth too little to cart home or to save, ends up at a thrift shop, on the curb or ultimately, in the landfills. In such poor countries as Brazil and Guatemala, people have fashioned makeshift shacks and actually live at the trash dumps, carefully combing through all of their wealthier neighbors’ garbage, culling recyclables to be sold and salvaging things they can keep or sell, and eating the food that looks like it is still edible.</p><p> It is not only people in poor countries who eat out of garbage dumpsters. Some years ago, when I worked as a coordinator of homeless services in West Hollywood, I had the revolting duty of asking the owners of the local market to refrain from pouring chlorine bleach on the food they threw in the dumpsters: The supermarket managers were concerned about being sued if someone got sick from eating from the dumpster. The homeless were hungry: Cheese that had just passed the “sell by” date was still good to eat as far as they were concerned.</p><p>Driving around the East Side, seeing all the discarded, usable objects, I reckon that I am helping reduce my carbon footprint by rescuing an object and putting it to good use. How will our lives change when the petroleum-based plastic that so many of our things are made of becomes prohibitively expensive? Will we turn back to wood-based objects even as our rain forests disappear to accommodate growing populations who want the land to farm? Will we finally learn to live simply? Will the dorm room of 2020 be as spare as that of a student in the 1950s? Will the academic gowns that once kept students warm and now have only ceremonial use once again become the fashion rage as heating classrooms becomes too costly? We will see. </p><p>Rosa Maria Pegueros ( <a href="mailto:pegueros@uri.edu">pegueros@uri.edu</a>) is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island.</p></span></span><br /><br />published in<br />THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL</div> <div>Contributors</div><span class="vitstorybody"><span style="font-size:-1;"><b><h5 class="vitstorydate"><span class="vitstorydate">1:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 10, 2008</span></h5></b></span> <span style="font-size:-1;"><b><span class="vitstorybyline"></span></b></span></span>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-50077180201733687692008-06-10T20:34:00.000-07:002009-10-31T17:13:40.468-07:00A Republican with A Conscience—What A Concept!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKtPiVxE0fBiGhKSYGKIzx-gfjYpU0uHbN8EqiKpHk8d0UdOGhSg8f0-m6IvT79pZBxUA9tEb41ox9s8RCjAP3Yr3FI3yFfz7kq50vVWoecSZ2QOVNd4238B9q8xwLXIl1YRqB/s1600-h/McClellan.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKtPiVxE0fBiGhKSYGKIzx-gfjYpU0uHbN8EqiKpHk8d0UdOGhSg8f0-m6IvT79pZBxUA9tEb41ox9s8RCjAP3Yr3FI3yFfz7kq50vVWoecSZ2QOVNd4238B9q8xwLXIl1YRqB/s200/McClellan.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5210468975274892914" border="0" /></a><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">So Scott McClellan has a conscience. What a concept—a member of the take-no-</span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">prisoners-Republican party has a conscience. It would be refreshing if it wasn’t so pathetic. </span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">McClellan is a Texan.</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">He </span><i><span style="color:#ffffcc;">k</span></i><i><span style="color:#ffffcc;">new</span></i><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> George W. Bush. I don’t buy that “out of the loop,” “I was a poor innocent,” pap. That’s as believable as George Bush, Sr.’s claim he was out of the loop on Iran-Contra, or Ronald Reagan playing dumb on the same scandal. </span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Why do the majority of the American people believe these scoundrels? Or if they don’t, why do they let them get away with it? Why was getting to the “truth” so important to the GOP when the priapic Bill Clinton engaged in an assignation with an intern that resulted in no harm to anyone else, while Bush’s lies which have brought about the deaths of over 4000 American troops, not to mention thousands of Iraqis, have been unquestioned? Where has their pursuit of truth been?</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Some have said that McClellan is to be lauded for showing some human conscience, even at this late date; he could have made much more money on the lecture circuit than publishing a book. Obviously, now he can publish a book, clear his reputation especially since, prompted by a petition drive on Moveon.org he is now giving part of the proceeds to the families of those killed in Iraq, AND still grow rich from a tour on the lecture circuit.</span><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> His former friends are expressing outrage over his betrayal of their administration but none of them are screaming about the betrayal of the American people.</span><span style="color:#ffffcc;"></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;"><br /></span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">George W. Bush frightened me long before he set foot in the White House; long before, in fact, he ran for the White House. When he cheerily stated he never lost any sleep over the people he sent to be executed, his lack of doubt was alarming. Scarier than his vaunted clean conscience was his plain inhumanity. What if he’d made a mistake? What if one over-zealous prosecutor pushed too far; what if one hanging-judge was too willing to disregard exculpatory evidence?</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Who cares? So what if </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Texas</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> has become the charnel house of the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color:#ffffcc;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> and of the industrialized world? He looked tough and that was all that mattered. </span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">When 9-11 changed the course of American history, his demeanor set all my alarms ringing. He likes this, I thought to myself; now he has the perfect excuse to impose his agenda on this country. He has surrounded himself with the conniving Cheney and a collection of sycophants while punishing anyone who opposed him. </span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Bush has a mean streak that will not stop at mere denunciation. Given W’s nasty habit of destroying those who cross him—just ask Valerie Plame—McClellan should watch his back.</span></p><o:p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></o:p><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Who can forget the debate when he was asked to name a mistake he might have made and could not think of a single one?</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Or his obfuscation of his so-called military service? Or his lies about his drunk-driving arrests, and cocaine use before he became president? Now we’re told that he privately weeps over the Americans killed in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color:#ffffcc;">. Give me a break! How stupid do they think we are?</span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></o:p><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Much has been made of Bush and Cheney’s determination to restore powers to the president that had been lost since Nixon’s failure. But no one party keeps the presidency forever: The GOP must know that eventually a Democratic president will come to power and all those imperial powers will then be at the fingertips of that Democrat, unless there is something off-stage that we do not see.</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Will they steal yet another election?</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Will the elderly McCain run with a stealth neo-con; somehow beat the Democrat, and then be disposed of, replaced by his uber-conservative running mate?</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Am I paranoid?</span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">After almost eight years of lies, theft, graft, subterfuge and chicanery, you would have to be Candide not to look over your shoulder and feel the hot breath of the GOP’s menacing presence on your neck. The American people have reason to be alarmed, alert, and even paranoid but they are so easily distracted by all the garbage floating on the airwaves that we could end up with a so-called maverick who swears never to surrender in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> as president. </span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></o:p><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Why do people consider McCain a maverick? Isn’t “conservative maverick” an oxymoron? </span><span style=""><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color:#ffffcc;">The dictionary tells us that the original Maverick was Samuel A. Maverick, an American pioneer who died in 1870 and refused to brand his cattle. In every way that matters, McCain is a true-blue Republican. In most cases where he has broken with the party, including his criticism of Bush’s tax cuts, he has backpedaled: Now he says that he’ll support them. Yet people call him a maverick because he has occasionally crossed party lines. . </span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">In less politically-charged times in our history, senators and representatives routinely crossed the aisle to join with the other party to pass legislation. Ted Kennedy has even joined with George Bush on an educational bill and has worked with many Republicans on any number of issues. Is Kennedy too liberal to be thought a maverick? Or is the Republican range of movement so minuscule that when it occurs, it is thought to be a great aberration: One thing is sure; since George W. Bush came to Washington claiming to be a “uniter,” the functioning of representative democracy has been undermined by his actual “my way or the highway” tactics, for which the prodigal McClellan was a spokesman. </span></p><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">Americans have to take responsibility for the future of our country and the planet. That means reading and thinking, and acting, not just swallowing whole the rhetoric of the presidential campaigns. Words have meanings; politicians have histories. Change, real change, is uncomfortable. </span></span><st1:country-region style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><st1:place><span style="color:#ffffcc;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> is no longer young but neither is it mature politically. </span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span style="color:#ffffcc;"> </span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span style="color:#ffffcc;">It is too late for feckless youth. This time, we must make real change and that means recognizing the consequences of our history, of our irresponsibility, and of our lazy acceptance of the lies fed to us by politicians.</span></span><span style="color:black;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-20874772067623195112008-04-14T16:46:00.000-07:002008-04-14T17:04:37.729-07:00A Latino in the White House -- Cuando, Cuando, Cuando?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrSsWBRQn8YdPeAQa4jm-W8c7NQC0FhxHIxOjTksjBBCL5TJcBMXorFKR5wJAT0zo45PEK7_ajInwk-FMyZ98Xoe7MXXfSxy2ZhJY97BFfZwtiz51ZLvKL9Nhge8ZBg3rRIBFP/s1600-h/alatinowhitehouse_article_02-14-2008.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrSsWBRQn8YdPeAQa4jm-W8c7NQC0FhxHIxOjTksjBBCL5TJcBMXorFKR5wJAT0zo45PEK7_ajInwk-FMyZ98Xoe7MXXfSxy2ZhJY97BFfZwtiz51ZLvKL9Nhge8ZBg3rRIBFP/s320/alatinowhitehouse_article_02-14-2008.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5189255919514998514" border="0" /></a><br />from <span style="font-style: italic;">MiApogeo.com</span> (Check out MiApogeo for Latino news and views!)<br />March 2007<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A Latino in the White House -- Cuando, Cuando, Cuando? </span><br /><br />Why Not This Time Around?<br /><br />Governor Bill Richardson cut an imposing figure at the presidential debates. Currently in his second term as governor of New Mexico, his curriculum vitae is more impressive than that of anyone in the race: He served seven terms in the House of Representatives; represented the United States in negotiations with Saddam Hussein, North Korean generals, and in the Middle East; as well as serving in Bill Clinton’s administration as Secretary of Energy and Ambassador to the United Nations. He has all the skills that would benefit an American president; he presented himself very well in the debates, yet he was flushed out of the Democratic primaries early on. And he has been the first Latino to do many of those things.<br /><br />Why?<br />The answer that former Senator and also-ran John Edwards might give is that the money flowing into the superstar candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, washed everyone else out.<br /><br />A simpler answer might be that getting the attention of Americans is very hard; Senator Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) learned this the hard way in 2000 when he ran in the Republican primaries as the “Proven Principled Common-Sense Conservative.” He thought that his high profile as chair of the Judiciary Committee during the Clinton impeachment hearings would provide the visibility he needed to mount a presidential campaign. He slunk away after his best efforts gave him less than 10% of the vote, an experience that he said he found very humbling.<br /><br />Send Article to a Friend<br /><br />Googling the web for clues to Richardson’s failure, I came upon Big Fat Blog. In one of the debates, Richardson had advocated a government program to end obesity saying that he had started to reverse it in his own state by changing the kinds of food available in school cafeterias and mandating exercise programs, to which one writer responded, “Has he looked in a mirror lately? He's fat!” And another blogger responded, “Yeah, he has awesome double chins!” He certainly is not the tanned, trim Richardson he was back when he was touring for Al Gore’s campaign in 2000. Eight years is a long time for those of us protected by evolution against starvation. Maintaining that slim and trim appearance at 61 is very hard for <span style="font-style: italic;">los gorditos</span> among us.<br /><br />I wonder if Barak Obama had looked like Norbit, Eddie Murphy’s movie character of the same name, Richardson would have had a better chance. One simply doesn’t associate soaring rhetoric with a person who is, as author Daniel Pinkwater would say, “circumferentially challenged.” This anti-fat prejudice has a long history: Part of what makes Shakespeare’s Falstaff funny is his corpulence; in the comedy duos of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, much of the hilarity comes from making fun of the fat one. And we should not forget Garfield the ultimate fat cat. Even if the American people could look past Richardson’s girth or if he were to get back to his fighting weight, he is a policy wonk. Like Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, he radiates intelligence, experience and gravitas but, in his rumpled suit and unruly haircut, he lacks glamor and charisma.<br /><br />It is too bad because he is the first Latino candidate to get this far in a national election. How can it be that estimates say that our population will be the largest minority by 2050, but we cannot get traction on the national stage?<br /><br />Is it simply that charismatic candidates are rare in any season? Or is there something about Latino culture that does not translate into the mainstream culture? Or is it the simple fact that American voters are accustomed to being led by white men, have seen other black male politicians like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton running for president, but Latinos are not yet on the radar?<br /><br />Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is trim, slim and charismatic but he has that wonderful and unpronounceable Hispanic name and therein may lie a problem in the national arena. Any serious Hispanic candidate with a recognizably Spanish name will be burdened with the immigration issue, simply because there is so much raw animus against those who continue to steam across our southern border, all of whom are Latinos. I do not know the numbers but no one seems to be huffing and puffing about the number of immigrants coming in from Asian countries.<br /><br />Immigrants and gays are the only remaining groups Americans feel safe hating outright: One need listen to CNN’s virulently anti-immigrant Lou Dobbs for five minutes to see the hate that he is perpetrating against these groups. Many non-Latinos assume that all Latinos are here illegally. The possible threat posed by a member of Al-Qaeda sneaking across the border is a cover for the long-standing hate for Latinos.<br /><br />Did this affect Richardson’s candidacy? Because his name is not recognizably Hispanic, he might have flown in under the radar. But he made a point of announcing his heritage and that may have been a deciding factor in his poor showing. However, if Senator Clinton wins the nomination and has the good sense to tap him for the vice presidency, he could be a force to be reckoned with in the new administration.<br /><br />Much has been made of some pundits’ comments about racism in the Latino community as well as anti-immigrant anger in the black community. I’ll discuss that next time.Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-84708693065247424202008-04-14T16:39:00.000-07:002008-04-14T17:16:35.040-07:00Latinos -- What’s Race Got to Do With It?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7SQn-ZOvRhPfEkRC8RhvIGxFyN6ainYpNRQEDT75rw9ZgJWn0CngGAlQFw6nFALj7MdQNbtEMcjk7jcWVnQHKuyJlUJtTL7PXVMoe0LhrkfOpndfwRU_zG72sXUg5-dvxBmo0/s1600-h/Clinton-Obama-Miapogeo_03-02-2008.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7SQn-ZOvRhPfEkRC8RhvIGxFyN6ainYpNRQEDT75rw9ZgJWn0CngGAlQFw6nFALj7MdQNbtEMcjk7jcWVnQHKuyJlUJtTL7PXVMoe0LhrkfOpndfwRU_zG72sXUg5-dvxBmo0/s320/Clinton-Obama-Miapogeo_03-02-2008.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5189257165055514370" border="0" /></a>from <span style="font-style: italic;">MiApogeo.com<br />(Check out Miapgeo.com for Latino News and Views!)<br /></span>3/2/2008<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Latinos -- What’s Race Got to Do With It?</span><br /><br />Can there be one unitary Latino vote? Which "Latino strategy" will succeed?<br /><br />If you walked into a room full of Latinos in New York City where there are many people from all over Latin America, and dozens of variations of hyphenated Latino-Americans whose families have been here for several generations, and ask them to paint a mural representing their people, you could not find enough cans of paint: We have many colors, many cultures, many customs, and many variations of the Spanish language.<br /><br />We eat many different foods: Ask for a <span style="font-style: italic;">pupusa</span> in an Argentine restaurant, and you will be met with a blank stare, while in El Salvador, you can buy them from women grilling them on <span style="font-style: italic;">comales</span> on the street, as common as hot dog stands in Manhattan. In Mexico, a quesadilla is a kind of cheese taco made by putting cheese in a tortilla, folding it over, and grilling it. In El Salvador, a <span style="font-style: italic;">quesadilla</span> is a rich cornbread made with parmesan cheese and ten egg yolks. And a turkey sandwich? Depending on the ethnicity of your cook, you would be ask for <span style="font-style: italic;">pavo</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">chumpe</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">guajolote</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">chompipe</span>; if you used the wrong word, again, you would get a blank stare.<br /><br />Now, which presidential candidate do you think “the Latino community” will support in the upcoming election? Which Latinos do you mean?<br /><br />Let’s start with the Cubans. Some 248,070 escaped to the United States in the wake of the Cuban revolution between January 1, 1959 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 22, 1962. They are now in their eighties. They tended to be middle- or upper-class, well-educated, business owners and professionals. Their arrival in the U.S. was eased by a Communist-phobic American government, who placed them in refugee communities in Miami, New Jersey or Indiana, and provided jobs and shelter, thus gaining everlasting loyalty for the most conservative politicians. They repaid the Cubans’ devotion by sustaining the embargo against Castro’s Cuba and engaging in all matter of subterfuge to assassinate Castro.<br /><br />But they are not the only Cubans. A trickle of refugees followed that initial rush, the <span style="font-style: italic;">balseros</span> or rafterers, arriving in the U.S. after perilous sea voyages in rafts, across the 90 miles to Florida, resulting in only a small percentage surviving the trip. Most came for economic reasons. Life in Cuba has been hard for a long time; the American embargo guaranteed that Cuba would remain in a kind of time-bound suspension. Getting the things you need there has been impossible. Since no cars are imported, the cars on the road are from the late fifties and sixties, running with parts that Cuban mechanics have created to replace the parts they cannot import. Most buildings in Cuba are in frightening condition but there is no money for paint, repairs, or reconstruction. Now the Cuban currency has been undermined by an underground economy of American dollars, making it hard for ordinary Cubans to buy the few things that are available.<br /><br />Adding even more confusion to the mix are the 125,000 <span style="font-style: italic;">Marielitos</span>. In 1980, Castro said rancorously, you want refugees? I’ll give you refugees! And he emptied his prisons and sent them to the United States: Political prisoners; common criminals; “sexual outlaws,” that is, gays, lesbians, prostitutes; petty thieves, and residents of mental institutions. Neither President Jimmy Carter, nor the governors of the states where the <span style="font-style: italic;">Marielitos</span> ended up, including the youthful Bill Clinton, at that time, governor of Arkansas, knew what to do.<br /><br />Unable to absorb them at once, fearful of loosing potentially dangerous criminals into our population; and wary of the large number of gays who came, they put them into open-fenced enclosures in detention camps while they processed them. Legal aid attorneys devised a system for the newcomers to prove that they were not dangerous. Nevertheless, in 1987, some <span style="font-style: italic;">Marielitos</span> sparked a prison takeover when they learned that they would be sent back. There was also the question of whether Castro would take them back. For at least a decade, his nasty stunt gummed up the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.<br /><br />So for whom do you think the Cubans will vote?<br /><br />Then there are the Mexicans, who range from those who ancestors have been here since the Spanish colonized Mexico in the 16th century, to those whose families were split when the United States strong-armed Mexico into giving up half of its territory in the mid-1800s, to those whose parents first came fleeing the Mexican Revolution, as my father’s parents did; to migrant workers in a bracero program; or undocumented workers who braved vermin-infested sewer tunnels, cutthroat coyotes, and so-called Minutemen to find a better way to support their families.<br /><br />Mexican communities are rich with several layers of these old Californian, Texan, or New Mexican families; old immigrants; prosperous and successful Republicans; unionists who vote Democratic and recent immigrants who cannot vote either because they are undocumented or have not yet been here long enough to qualify for citizenship. Like upper- and lower-classes everywhere, they tend to vote their pocketbooks, and you’ll find a layer of English-only, comfortable Latinos whose conservative Roman Catholicism draws them to anti-choice conservative politics.<br /><br />That’s just the Cubans and the Mexicans. Then there are the Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Dominicans, Colombians, and others. Most of those populations in the U.S. fled the civil wars of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, and the continuing extreme poverty and street violence of their own countries to come here and take their chances against the anti-immigrant anger led by the likes of CNN Lou Dobbs, not to mention the migrants from our own colony of Puerto Rico. Again, there are several generations here now, with varied priorities and levels of success, who will vote their pocketbooks. Then there is the matter of racism. Latinos, it is said, will not vote for a black man. Immediately, one hears of the Latino support for black politicians like the late Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, proof that Latinos WILL vote for an African American. The truth is, like everything else about this picture, it is much more complex than that.<br /><br />There are different levels of the issue. Some Latinos deny their own black heritage. The African slaves were brought to the New World by the Spanish conquerors from the earlier expeditions and they fathered children with them as well as with the indigenous people. During the colonial period, there appeared a whole vocabulary for these racial mixtures: mulatto for Spanish and Black; mestizo for Spanish and Amerindian; <span style="font-style: italic;">pardo</span> for an African, European, and Amerindian; <span style="font-style: italic;">sambo</span> for an African and Amerindian. But it did not stop there. One could be a “<span style="font-style: italic;">tente en el aire</span>,” somebody who is “up in the air,” that is, not easily classifiable because of their racial mixtures. Perhaps most offensive of all, “<span style="font-style: italic;">salta atrás</span>,” which refers to someone who was “moving up” in society but cast themselves back by marrying an African or mulatto. In the community I grew up in, African-Americans were “<span style="font-style: italic;">chamuscados</span>,” or “burnt ones.” It was a way of talking about Blacks without their recognizing the ordinary word for them, at the time, “Negro.” Moreover, the Caribbean islands whose populations were wiped out primarily by diseases borne by the Europeans, were repopulated with African slaves and Europeans.<br /><br />To this day, there are still many Latinos who simply refuse to acknowledge their African roots; racism, especially of the self-hating variety, runs deep in our communities, both here and in the many countries we came from. Children who are light-skinned and/or have light eyes tend to be favored by their elders.<br /><br />Furthermore, in the U.S., there is hatred between African American and Latino gangs; as well as resentment of Latino immigrations by American blacks who feel that they are losing jobs to the intruders. Even The Nation, a progressive magazine, has run ads from groups advocating tight strictures to limit Latino immigration.<br /><br />So, will they vote for Hillary Clinton; after all she has deep connections in the Latinos communities that reach back to the years just after college when she did voting registration with Latinos in Texas? Or for Barak Obama whose father was himself an African immigrant and whose mother took him to live in Indonesia for a time?<br /><br />Beats me. Like I said, it’s complicated.Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-85049775490648218102008-03-30T11:03:00.001-07:002008-03-30T11:48:51.939-07:00Hillary's Human Side<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn5Cka6pyl9rEIiEWLoLNsLdlMJWdMKAZlqN1SAsvtqJyJSK-wqyHFUoAwzDSy_ibwC2X2mbtG4AlvKUc3gzJ6eg7RwiZVXmj3gQuedsUGtftNIfSfGKw1SnvxucYfG-Uak7ZL/s1600-h/hillary-clinton-posters.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn5Cka6pyl9rEIiEWLoLNsLdlMJWdMKAZlqN1SAsvtqJyJSK-wqyHFUoAwzDSy_ibwC2X2mbtG4AlvKUc3gzJ6eg7RwiZVXmj3gQuedsUGtftNIfSfGKw1SnvxucYfG-Uak7ZL/s320/hillary-clinton-posters.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183608293576470530" /></a><br /><br />New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is the latest to write that everybody wants to see Senator Hillary Clinton’s human side. What DO they think they’ve been looking at?<br /><br /> There is Hillary the wronged spouse who first believed Bill’s protestations that he had not been messing around behind her back and so blamed a broad Right-wing conspiracy for trying to destroy her husband. This was followed closely by Bill’s shamed admission that the rumors were true and her horror at Bill's long overdue admission: <br /><blockquote></blockquote><span style="font-style:italic;">I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, “What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?” . . .I was dumbfounded, heartbroken, and outraged that I’d believed him at all.</span> (Living History, p. 466)<blockquote></blockquote><br /><br />That is about as human a reaction as one can get. <br /><br />Then there is Chelsea: Strong, loving, smart, articulate Chelsea who survived her time in the White House without getting arrested for showing a false I.D. to buy booze or driving drunk; who went on to graduate from Stanford and follow in her daddy’s footsteps studying at Oxford though not as a Rhodes Scholar. How did Hillary’s critics suppose Chelsea got that way? Whose example did this accomplished young woman follow if not that of her strong, smart, determined mother?<br /><br />There’s Hillary who cites her long history of activism—signing up Hispanic voters in Texas, working for children with Marian Wright Edelman; don’t tell me that that’s just evidence of her plot to attain power. Registering voters and working for children are not the most efficient ways to gain power or the world would be filled with politicians who are former social workers and social activists.<br /><br />She is the same hard-hearted, cold, rhymes-with-witch who talks about how beautiful her husband’s hands are. Do you really think that if she loathed him and wanted to stay married only to feed her ambition, she’d be waxing poetic about his hands?<br /><br />Hillary gets a little misty and the media goes crazy. She cried! Somebody showed a little sympathy and she cried on the campaign trail! How manipulating can you get? Except that she did not cry; her eyes misted up for a moment which showed how she was just a weak woman OR it showed that she is such political Sarah Bernhardt she can cry on command for the camera. <br /><br />Last week she was caught in a lie about landing in Bosnia and it is taken as proof-positive that she is a liar!! Human beings slip up; sometimes we lie. It’s one thing to tell a lie about something pretty insignificant and another to lie about hidden WMDs and lead us into a war that so far has cost us 4000 American soldiers but somehow she is the master liar. Does Obama's goof with the real estate deal make him a thief? Or was it a mistake? Good news: he's human. <br /><br />Hillary portrays herself as a fighter and the impression she makes successfully is that she is tough as nails. Were she to project a softer side, how would that benefit her pursuit of the White House? Softness is part of the intimacy normally reserved for family and is better kept in the private realm. Public softness is a Damocles Sword for women politicians. The media and the public are just waiting for the Sword to fall; witness the reaction of the world to the misting of her eyes on that one occasion. The schizoid accusation that she is a monster and the continual search for her soft side while at the same time trying to find a feminine softness that can be used to disqualify her is a measure of the misogyny of our political life.<br /><br />Civilized society, said novelist Dostoevsky, is judged by the way it treats its criminals. I would say civilized society is judged by the respect it gives its women.<br /><blockquote></blockquote><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1G_YRubfByJCDM-THd2Tubeg9hoZATmWmFavwqe0wZbPwiKpr_srMaLMd1-gPrrBLbFW_DWbWZFWL3N3vvFxm7TI1wcG8130meyqLH96PgwkD7su-hNeTHObHVjApeXXlYap2/s1600-h/Clintons-during+Lewinsky+scandal.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1G_YRubfByJCDM-THd2Tubeg9hoZATmWmFavwqe0wZbPwiKpr_srMaLMd1-gPrrBLbFW_DWbWZFWL3N3vvFxm7TI1wcG8130meyqLH96PgwkD7su-hNeTHObHVjApeXXlYap2/s200/Clintons-during+Lewinsky+scandal.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183601606312390610" /></a>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-51641054928767625912008-03-09T10:07:00.000-07:002008-03-10T07:12:10.961-07:00Them Must Be Some CookiesWhen John Kerry, a genuine war hero and anti-war hero, was Swift-boated, he was too stiff and too genteel to win the support of the common American. W defeated him easily, if one accepts the dubious notion that the <st1:state><st1:place>Ohio</st1:place></st1:State> totals were not tainted.<br /><br />During Michael Dukakis's pursuit of the presidency, he appeared popping out of the top of a tank wearing a helmet that made him look as geeky as he really was. He became a national joke; yet some years later, George W. Bush appeared in full fly-boy regalia landing on an aircraft carrier festooned with a banner reading, Mission Accomplished. Only liberals objected. During a 1988 presidential debate, against George H.W. Bush, CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis how he would react if his wife had been raped and murdered. He dispassionately reiterated his opposition to the death penalty. That duck was cooked; he was not tough enough to be president either.<br /><br />Al Gore chose to accept the vote that stole the election from him and from us in the 2000 election. Many liberals would never forgive him for what they considered to be a lack of spine.<br /><br />If there was one lesson for any Democratic candidate pursuing the presidency it is that s/he must not let any insult go unchallenged. Politics is to us what cock-fighting or pit-bull fighting is to others: A blood sport played with a good shield and any weapon that comes to hand.<br /><br />In recent days, I have read or heard, publicly and privately, Senator Hillary Clinton called a bitch, a shrew, and a monster, among other things. One commentator sarcastically asked if we would have voted for Mamie Eisenhower, to pick the sweetest and most oblique of First Ladies in recent history.<br /><br />On Bill Maher's HBO Series Real Time, her own words about her reaction to her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky were played as evidence that she does not have the steel to react calmly to a crisis: "I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?" And that was just because her husband had an affair! What if it was an international crisis, demanded one of the pundits. I guess it shows that she was not the brittle ice queen they like to portray her as. Perhaps a cool, calm fellow, like Senator John "Mad Dog" McCain, or President George W. Bush, or Vice President Dick Cheney would be a better choice. In fact, the last several of Maher's programs have featured public figures who, along with Maher, gleefully rip her apart. I can no longer stomach him.<br /><br />If Barack Obama were pilloried in a comparable way, the screaming would be heard on the moon. Yet Obama himself, in discussing <st1:city><st1:place>Clinton</st1:place></st1:City> said, that she claims to have taken 80 journeys representing our country: What foreign policy experience? What was she doing, he asks, negotiating treaties? No dear, she was comparing chocolate chip cookie recipes with the other First Ladies, except for the last eight years when she traveled as a United States Senator. Now she only compares cookie recipes with other female legislators and heads of state. Them must be some cookies.<br /><br />Then <st1:city><st1:place>Clinton</st1:place></st1:City> says she has foreign policy experience and she is ready to lead; and that McCain also has that experience, and she asks if Obama has. By comparing a GOP opponent favorably to a fellow Democratic rival, she crossed a line some say should not be breached, but what lines should be drawn that the men who oppose her should not cross? Are the kid gloves off because she is a political opponent? Because she is a woman? Or just because she is Hillary Clinton? Even Republicans ignore the eleventh commandment these days: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But I have not yet heard one of the men attack another man by calling him the male equivalent of a bitch. The closest I have heard are references to Senator John McCain as Mad Dog McCain or Senator Hothead that long predate his current presidential run.<br /><br />What's fair and what's dirty pool? <br /><br />Hillary Clinton was first lady for eight years. It is no secret Bill Clinton looked to his brilliant intellectual equal and spouse for counsel. She made it very clear from the beginning that she did not plan to stay in the kitchen and bake cookies. The protests that erupted against her when she said so openly were as hysterical as though she dismembered small animals in her free time. She was accused of putting stay-at-home moms down, and the din continued long past her apology and publication of her cookie recipe <a href="http://allrecipes.com/Recipe-Tools/Print/PrintFull.aspx?RecipeID=9928&servings=42">http://allrecipes.com/Recipe-Tools/Print/PrintFull.aspx?RecipeID=9928&servings=42</a><br /><br />Is that why they call her a bitch? Or is it because she argued that there was a vast Right Wing conspiracy against her husband? Now the Right has her in its sights, and the New York Times reported this week that the Republican National Committee has bought up a large number of domain names to smear her, like calculatingclinton.com, canttrustclinton.com, clintonisbad.com, clintoniscorrupt.com, among dozens of others.<br /><br /><st1:country-region><st1:place>America's</st1:place></st1:country-region> expectations of its First Ladies are almost Victorian. They are supposed to be ladies, first of all, who glide in and out of the background silently. They are supposed to devote themselves to innocuous causes that are not tainted by politics. First Ladies are meant to be eye candy. If they are soft-spoken, declining to talk about politics or appear to influence their husbands in matters of state, they are acceptable. Jackie Kennedy was hailed for her fashion sense and her redecorating of the White House. Betty Ford was considered a firebrand next to her bland husband for speaking out for the Equal Rights Amendment but what really earned her press notices were her battles with substance abuse and her creation of the <st1:place><st1:placename>Betty</st1:PlaceName> <st1:placename>Ford</st1:PlaceName> <st1:placetype>Center</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>. Rosalynn Carter was dubbed a <span style="font-style: italic;">Steel Magnolia</span>, but I do not know why. She never did anything controversial or spoke out of turn, though in retirement she and her husband founded not only the Carter Center that focuses on human rights around the world, but also the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving; the Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Partnership Foundation Inc.; and the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. Steel Magnolia, indeed. Nancy Reagan only had eyes for Ronnie and the most controversial thing she did was to consult astrologers to help schedule important meetings. Most of all, First Ladies sure are not meant to discuss politics, run for the Senate, and then take on the boys. It is not lady-like.<br /><br />Liberals criticize her for staying with Bill after his affair with Monica Lewinsky, saying she did so only out of political opportunism: Is that why the hard-hearted Hillary went into couples' counseling with him for a year following the incident? I suppose the American public prefers its female presidential candidates to be more like former U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder: She used to put little hearts on her autographs. In 1987, she tearfully withdrew from the presidential race saying hat she could not find a way to run. Such a lady.<br /><br />I am not worried about Hillary Clinton despite the viciousness of the attacks on her. She has had everything thrown at her and has had every bit of her personal life exposed and explored. For all the noise, they have never gotten anything on her. Some pundits are saying that McCain would prefer her to Obama as an opponent. If anyone thinks the GOP will go easy on Obama think again. Here are some of the domain names they have bought to smear Obama: amateurobama.com, barackisliberal.com, barackiswrong.com, baracknotready.com, barackobamanotready.com, yeswecandowhat.com, and yeswecanwhat.com <br /><br />Unfortunately, the other hard lesson the Democrats learned, this one from Jimmy Carter's presidency, is that in politics, if you take the high road, the train will pass you by. Whoever wins the nomination wins the chance to face off with the junkyard dog of the Senate. You think the primaries have been nasty? Just you wait.<br /><br /> <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-90879803987730688262008-02-20T10:24:00.000-08:002008-04-14T17:31:28.133-07:00“Blowtorch Bob”: The Duty to Remember<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivyFSpYYB_p65cRdrPEY3KM9ESOV3ZIArSnUjEx0CE2RjThOdNqWF5u9ZGxj6CpFjqNH9mV8wBxt_pzhg33Zih3VrqBP5pFFTKTK9twgUqziVydasjIpOsC5MLKpZ0ghk_ldrr/s1600-h/D%E2%80%99Aubuisson+y+Arrieta_Roberto1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivyFSpYYB_p65cRdrPEY3KM9ESOV3ZIArSnUjEx0CE2RjThOdNqWF5u9ZGxj6CpFjqNH9mV8wBxt_pzhg33Zih3VrqBP5pFFTKTK9twgUqziVydasjIpOsC5MLKpZ0ghk_ldrr/s200/D%E2%80%99Aubuisson+y+Arrieta_Roberto1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5189263100700317458" border="0" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNormal">“Blowtorch Bob”: The Duty to Remember</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><st1:country-region><st1:place>El Salvador</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s Roberto D’Aubuisson (1944-1992) was uniquely malevolent. He would throw babies in the air and shoot them in midair, just for fun. The “Death Squads” of which he was the leader, hunted down and executed insurgents in the slowest, most exquisitely painful ways possible. The Spanish Inquisition could have learned a thing or two about torture from him: His favorite method involved a blow torch, earning him the nickname of “Blowtorch Bob.” I bet no one ever called him that to his face. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">During the Salvadoran Civil War, 75,000 people were killed; 8000 were disappeared, and one million were left homeless, slaughtered by D’Aubuisson and his Death Squads.<span style=""> </span>They killed a group of Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter; and a group of Catholic lay nuns who had just arrived in <st1:country-region><st1:place>El Salvador</st1:place></st1:country-region>. In <span style=""> </span>El Mozote, they killed at least 794 townspeople: They separated the men from the women, locked them in a church, then took them out in small groups. After they raped the women, they murdered each one of them. Then they burned the bodies.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">His crowning achievement was assassinating Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero: On March 24, 1980, one of his gunmen shot him in the heart as he was saying Mass.<span style=""> </span>Romero’s offense?<span style=""> </span>Demanding the end to the killing of innocent men, women, and children in <st1:country-region><st1:place>El Salvador</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s Civil War. What an odd demand from a Catholic priest: Love thy neighbor.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">When throat cancer killed D’Aubuisson on <st1:date year="1992" day="20" month="2">February 20, 1992</st1:date> , sending him, one hopes, to join Satan’s own favorite sons, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Chauchesku in the first circle of hell, I vowed I would remember and celebrate his date of death every year.<span style=""> </span>So today, I remember by telling my students, my friends, and you, my readers, about the fiend of <st1:country-region><st1:place>El Salvador</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Roberto D’Aubuisson.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">D’Aubuisson’s education at the School of the <st1:country-region><st1:place>Americas</st1:place></st1:country-region> is particularly galling. The SOA, chartered by the United States Congress, and sponsored by the United States Army at <st1:place><st1:city>Fort Benning</st1:city>, <st1:country-region>Georgia</st1:country-region></st1:place>, gained its fame by training Latin American military officers in methods of interrogation, torture, kidnapping and executions.<span style=""> </span>These methods were described by former United States Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) as “worthy of the Soviet gulag.” <span style=""> </span>Our government allowed and encouraged this instructional program as part of a perverted foreign policy focused on maintaining stability in the region at any cost rather than in protecting the basic human rights of all of the citizens of the hemisphere. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Today, of course, the U.S.Army claims that it was mistaken when it published manuals on torture and related topics, but that admission has come only as a result of pressure from human rights groups to close the school. Despite years of civil disobedience, protests and intense lobbying, the SOA continues its nefarious work, nowadays touting a new name and a curriculum that includes a seminar on human rights: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The name may be new but we are not deceived: The leopard may have changed its spots but it is still as deadly as ever, turning out military officers who are the heirs to D’Aubuisson and his henchmen. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">People never cease to amaze me. In an Alzheimer’s-like delusion of the past, the Salvadoran government dedicated a statue of D’Aubuisson and has a memorial Mass for him each year. One could argue that if anyone needs prayers for his eternal soul, he does but there is something ignominious about a tribute to a mass murderer who killed with such glee. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><st1:country-region><st1:place>El Salvador</st1:place></st1:country-region> also built a memorial to General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, its dictator from 1931 to 1944, who is best known for the massacre of 32,000 Salvadorans in 1932 in what is now called La Matanza, or massacre, which is the turning point of Salvadoran history. After that, the indigenous people of the country grew fearful of being seen as natives and their culture was virtually obliterated. Is it an indication of the continuing disenfranchisement of the peasants in <st1:country-region><st1:place>El Salvador</st1:place></st1:country-region> that these two monsters would be so honored? </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">A year after the memorial was dedicated, D’Aubuisson’s son and several other state officials were murdered in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Guatemala</st1:place></st1:country-region> on a diplomatic trip: The sins of the father visited once again on his son? A son who was carrying out the same regressive philosophies espoused by his father? <span style=""> </span>Perhaps there is some justice after all. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Nunca mas. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-79919761245478447172008-01-12T13:42:00.000-08:002008-04-14T17:43:40.935-07:00Guantanamo–Six Years of Impunity<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEius1fNcO18VxGfvuYqRa6nPyXUsP2CzpV77POV4j8Hk89m6bYnaZ-eI86kSOvPzhWkCl9yfE2rB6oNYiDtFhd0W_GF7tIx6bLzRTUEGYXpSzIx2CPRcqbO26ws-eDKcZSkCQ1h/s1600-h/Padilla_Jose+-terrorist.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEius1fNcO18VxGfvuYqRa6nPyXUsP2CzpV77POV4j8Hk89m6bYnaZ-eI86kSOvPzhWkCl9yfE2rB6oNYiDtFhd0W_GF7tIx6bLzRTUEGYXpSzIx2CPRcqbO26ws-eDKcZSkCQ1h/s200/Padilla_Jose+-terrorist.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5189266171601934114" border="0" /></a><br />Published on Friday, January 11, 2008 by <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/11/6315/print/">CommonDreams.org</a><br /><br />Guantanamo<span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >–Six Years of Impunity</span><br /><br />by Rosa Maria Pegueros<br /><br />Twenty years ago, when I was the coordinator of a city program for the homeless, I spent an afternoon in jail, with an aching head from being put in a headlock and slammed against a wall by a rogue Los Angeles County Sheriff who hated the homeless and the people who served them. It was a very strange experience for someone who had never been in any kind of trouble before, and who always had a book in hand to ward off boredom.<br /><br />For several hours following my arrest, I sat on a steel bench in a vacant holding cell. There was nothing to look at; nothing to read, not even graffiti. After a little while, I was desperate for anything; even a newspaper sports page would have been welcome. Outside, a city councilman argued with the chief of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs. In the meantime, I had no contact with anyone; they did not let me call anyone; they did not even book me until a couple of long hours later. Charlie, the policeman who booked me, was a nice guy with whom I had gone on a ride-along. Ride-alongs for the city’s social workers were encouraged, in part, to help us understand the role of the police on the street.<br /><o:p> </o:p> <p class="MsoNormal">Charlie looked embarrassed as he took my fingerprints. He didn’t want me there any more than I wanted to be there. I went back to the cell to wait. I started to sing everything I could think of: children’s songs (my daughter was in first grade at that time); synagogue melodies, many of which had no words, just the nonsense syllables: di, dee dee di, dee dee di, di; songs I learned in grade school, “This Land is your land,” “Oh beautiful for spacious skies,” “Amazing Grace.” I don’t know if my singing persuaded them to let me go but after what seemed like an eternity, the city Councilman and the chief of the County Sheriffs finally came to an agreement: I would be released on a warrant—something like a moving violation—but I had to appear in court to answer the misdemeanor charges.<span style=""> </span>The charges were very funny to anyone who knew me: assault on a police officer, interference with an officer in the course of his duties; interfering in an arrest; comic, downright comic: As if _I_, a short, stout, peace-loving middle-aged woman, would have the nerve or the inclination to assault the meanest deputy in the department—my 5’4” vs. his 6’4”. As if.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The jury arrived at a verdict in record time: I was acquitted of all charges. They gathered around me after the trial to tell me that they could tell that the deputy sheriff was a liar. Of course, in accordance with the judicial practice in <st1:city><st1:place>Los Angeles</st1:place></st1:city>, no perjury charges were brought against the deputy. In fact, he was honored with an award by the sheriff’s department for his “work with the homeless.” <span style=""> </span>Even though I continued to suffer for several years from the physical and psychological effects of the beating, I had won the moral victory. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I was thinking about this incident because it has been six years since the first prisoners were taken in orange jump suits, chains, and disorienting hoods pulled over their faces to our prison for enemy combatants at our naval air station in <st1:place><st1:city>Guantanamo</st1:city>, <st1:country-region>Cuba</st1:country-region></st1:place>. Having had that slim sliver of experience of being unjustly jailed, I have a tiny glimmer of understanding of what those prisoners must be experiencing. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Even so, I cannot imagine the mental condition of a prisoner like Jose Padilla, the American citizen and <st1:city><st1:place>Chicago</st1:place></st1:city> gang member imprisoned there. After having been kept in isolation for 3-1/2 years and subjected to “harsh interrogation tactics,” I.E., torture, how can he function? He was not allowed to have a lawyer or to hear charges against him until court rulings turned against the administration.<span style=""> </span>The court came to a verdict against him and two others last August in an amazingly short time. Yet I don’t know how they could have brought him to trial. A prisoner must be competent to stand trial. How could Jose Padilla been sane after that ordeal and isolation? <span style=""> </span>What if he had been found innocent and released?<span style=""> </span>How could he live a productive life after all that has been done to him? Is he sane? Will he ever be able to sleep without night terrors after what our government has done to him? </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky, was a Russian dissident and Soviet Jew who was imprisoned by the Soviets. In his autobiography, <u>Fear No Evil</u> he describes his survival through the isolation and torture by the Soviets in part by falling back on his training as a mathematician, working equations in his head, and playing chess mentally, against himself; his self-discipline enabled him to survive the horror. He must have an extraordinary intellect and self-discipline to have been able to live to tell the tale with his sanity intact. After his release, he emigrated to <st1:country-region><st1:place>Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> and even served in the Knesset, the Israeli legislature. I doubt that Padilla, a barely-educated gang member could do the same; I know I could not have done so. When I left the jail that afternoon, my life was utterly changed; I realized I did not have the grit to face imprisonment as my heroes Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Martin Luther King had. The experience was so traumatic that I could never bring myself to do that kind of work again.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Those of us who oppose the detention center in <st1:city><st1:place>Guantanamo</st1:place></st1:city> consider it to be a disgrace; a blight on the character of the country. But honestly, I think it’s too late for that. We lost our innocence long ago, if we ever had it. The fact is that our country does what it wants; it does not answer to international courts or accept the jurisdiction of a world court or similar body. The power that we have in the world allows us to behave with impunity and we do. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The only way we can right this shameful situation is to repudiate, not only with words but by our actions and policies, our country’s invasions and war-mongering, and the disregard of our own values as they are in our Constitution and its amendments. Some of us have consciences. It’s time for the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> government to act is if it had one. </p>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-26116822280582413352008-01-01T22:32:00.000-08:002008-01-01T22:49:50.551-08:00Therefore, Be It Resolved<div style="text-align: justify;">Therefore, Be It Resolved<br /></div><pre><br /></pre><div style="text-align: left;"><br />As the New Year looms before us, we look forward with excitement<br />and trepidation, resolving to reform our lives.<br /><br />There are different types of resolutions. There are the ones we must<br />carry out lest punishment ensue, like paying overdue parking tickets.<br />There are the ones we should do and resolve to do every year: losing<br />weight, keeping a budget, exercising thrice a week, or grading our<br />students’ papers in a timely manner.<br /><br />There are the ones that would, if kept, remind us to live in the<br />moment so that the sweetness of life is not wasted on our<br />inattention: to listen to the crunch of our boots on new snow; to<br />listen for the lark and the nightingale; to eat cherries and persimmons<br />in season, and pick cherry tomatoes right off the vine; to breathe in<br />deeply the aroma of spring’s first daffodils and late summer<br />grasses, essentially, to stop to appreciate the gift of life.<br /><br />Finally, there are the fanciful ones and those representing our<br />deepest desires like learning to play the guitar; spending less<br />time working and more time with our loved ones; or working<br />for a favorite political candidate. And though I have completed<br />57 years of life, and have resolved to learn to play the guitar for<br />many of those years, I am no closer to strumming my first chord<br />than I am to electing a leader who is not, in some way, a<br />disappointment.<br /><br />Perhaps we expect too much of political candidates. We want them<br />to win cleanly and fairly but we do want them to win no matter what.<br />Only in sports are fouls and violations of the rules punished<br />immediately; this transparency may account for the popularity of<br />sports in general. Cheating in even the smallest way can cost you<br />the game or even the career—take runner Marian Jones or baseball’s<br />Pete Rose or Barry Bonds. Jones was stripped of her Olympic medals<br />while Rose andBonds may never see their careers crowned by<br />admission to the Baseball Hall of Fame.<br /><br />Early this season, when a member of the New England Patriots’<br />coach Bill Belichick’s video staff, was caught taping the signals<br />of the opposing football team, he sullied the sport and may have<br />earned an asterisk in the record books for his team. It was a<br />phenomenal season, I’m told, but at least this football non-fan<br />will always associate it with “Spygate.”<br /><br />Politics are muddier than football in January, sweatier and<br />grimier than baseball in August, and the stakes are much<br />higher than all sports put together but we treat them like<br />sports. We root for our candidates, wear their campaign’s<br />logos, sing their party’s songs, and deify our candidate<br />while demonizing theirs.<br /><br />We want them to win yet are disgusted by their “foul plays,”<br />their “selling out,” or their failure to meet our expectations.<br />Obama is an inspiration, then he’s not black enough. Sez who?<br />Clinton is polarizing? What woman wouldn't be? Clinton is a b----.<br />Why is she a b-----? Because some nervous men are afraid of a<br />woman at the helm of THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN<br />THE WORLD?<br /><br />The late Molly Ivins, a progressive political writer from Texas, used<br />to say, "Politics is the cheapest form of free entertainment ever<br />invented." But the fun has gone out of it since “the Shrub” (her name<br />for George W. Bush) came to power. In his almost seven years in office,<br />his wars have killed almost 4000 American soldiers and demolished<br />our treasury, replacing it with a black hole into which we toss our taxes<br />and IOUs, never expecting to reap the benefits of those taxes—not<br />health care for the poor or the middle classes; not funds to replace our<br />crumbling bridges; not computers or books for our schools. Our cities<br />teem with the homeless who live under freeway on-ramps, and spend<br />their days in public libraries or any other warm public facility that will<br />not throw them out.<br /><br />The wealthiest country in the world is cutting back on early childhood<br />education. We have ceased to fund art and music programs in most of<br />our public schools. By mandating “teaching to the test,” teachers are<br />forced to curtail their teaching of literature so that we are turning out<br />a generation of worker bees who are unfamiliar with our high culture,<br />as well as our folk and ethnic heritage.<br /><br />As the baby boomers become the largest generation of old people this<br />country has ever known, the government claims that the social security<br />fund is in crisis; that there will not be enough money to keep us from<br />dying in penury.<br /><br />Yet stockholders and CEOs need not worry; their profits and bonuses<br />will not be infringed upon.<br /><br />Now is the time for us to carry out those resolutions to work for a better<br />political candidate and bring about a better world. The next president will<br />not be perfect; s/he will certainly be forced to make compromises—it is<br />politics, after all but we must strive to find the best one and work to elect<br />her/him, and to keep him/her accountable to the people.<br /><br />There is so much at stake. </div>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-82186173378756518632007-12-10T10:41:00.000-08:002007-12-10T12:02:10.883-08:00"The wars are long, the peace is frail, the madmen come again."<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq-4qAouT2hbNZzfTDcMn1rOxHtYnc-Bd_7UZHo7fomxQXw_2rjmXQoxrCHPmyvL7I2mXmsLGA9OiuLyASkIUul-tc3__WnhFLhsMhsjthdgc26MI7ofFHYkn0bAlk1vrLymsX/s1600-h/Gore-Nobel-121007.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq-4qAouT2hbNZzfTDcMn1rOxHtYnc-Bd_7UZHo7fomxQXw_2rjmXQoxrCHPmyvL7I2mXmsLGA9OiuLyASkIUul-tc3__WnhFLhsMhsjthdgc26MI7ofFHYkn0bAlk1vrLymsX/s200/Gore-Nobel-121007.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5142417070046020754" border="0" /></a><br />I have been listening to Al Gore's Nobel address at the ceremony for the Nobel Peace Prize: He says, "We are what is wrong and we must make it right." It makes me so sad to think that we could have been reaching the end of HIS second term instead of the rattlesnake who currently resides in the White House. How different the world could have been! Instead we find ourselves praying that Bush doesn't get us blown up or leaves the planet so damaged that no one can fix it. If you want to hear his address:<br />http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/10/gore-nobel-speech/<br /><br />There's an old song by the Weavers, a folk group from the 1940s, that I wanted to share:<br /><br /><strong>WASN'T THAT A TIME (Lyrics)<br /><span style="font-weight: normal;font-size:85%;" >Written by Lee Hays & W. Lowenfels<br /><br /></span></strong> Our fathers bled at Valley Forge, the snow was red with blood<br />Their faith was worn at Valley Forge,<br />Their faith was brotherhood.<br /><br />Wasn't that a time, wasn't that a time?<br />A time to try the soul of men,<br />Wasn't that a terrible time?<br /><br />Brave men who fought at Gettysburg now lie in soldier's graves<br />But there they stemmed the rebel tide<br />And there their faith was saved<br /><br />Wasn't that a time, wasn't that a time?<br />A time to try the soul of men,<br />wasn't that a terrible time?<br /><br />The wars are long, the peace is frail, the madmen come again.<br />There is no freedom in a land where fear and hate prevail.<br /><br />Isn't this a time, isn't this a time?<br />A time to try the soul of men,<br />Isn't this a terrible time?<br /><br />Our fathers bled at Valley Forge, the snow was red with blood<br />Their faith was worn at Valley Forge,<br />Their faith was brotherhood.<br /><br />Wasn't that a time, wasn't that a time?<br />A time to try the soul of men,<br />Wasn't that a terrible time?<br />--------------------------------<br />I just hope we can get through this.Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-41446227304631876002007-11-13T07:41:00.000-08:002007-11-13T07:47:26.226-08:00Faith and War by Cindy Sheehan<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">This commentary by Cindy Sheehan expresses exactly what I feel about the disconnect between conservative Christians and the war in Iraq. </span><br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-size:78%;">Published on Friday, November 9, 2007 by <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/" target="_blank">CommonDreams.org</a> </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"> Faith and War<br /><br /> by Cindy Sheehan<br /></div><br />A friend of mine, who is Chair of the Economics Department, invited me to speak to the students and faculty at the University of Dallas (where the Veterans for Peace convention was that I spoke at the day before I went to Crawford on August 6th, 2005), which is a small, non-culturally or non-racially diverse, Catholic college.<br /><br />Surprisingly, my friend Sam, received little protest over inviting me, but there was a “Support the Troops” rally in the room next to where I spoke. Some Camp Casey friends accidentally went into that room and only heard the speaker call me names like “scum” and he called the rest of the people at my event “peace fairies.”<br /><br />I was heartened to find the first three rows of my speech were filled with young people who were smiling and vigorously nodding their heads at everything I said. Most of the audience clapped or laughed in the right places so I was feeling pretty good. However, I was a little sad when there were some snide snickers when I had the unmitigated gall to call Iraqis “human beings.”<br /><br />During the “Q and A” part, the first question I received amazed me. Now, I was raised Protestant and received an excellent training in the Christian scriptures and I know after being a Catholic for 25 years and a Catholic youth minister for nine of those years, that the average Catholic does not know a great deal about the Bible as most of their religious training is in the tenets of the Catholic faith. Here’s how many Catholics quote scripture: “It’s somewhere in the Bible,” when, in my experience, many times they are actually quoting: “Poor Richard’s Almanac.”<br /><br />An emphasis on the biblical support for the teachings of the church was never used as long as I taught in the church using the approved teaching materials of the church, but the depth of ignorance of Jesus of Nazareth exhibited in the first question still had the ability to astonish me.<br /><br />The question printed neatly on a 3 by 5 index card was: “How do you reconcile your progressive ideals with your faith?” I answered the question that Jesus cared about the poor. He admonished us to “feed the hungry,” “clothe the naked,” “heal the sick,” and “visit those imprisoned.” Jesus performed a stunning feat of civil disobedience by over-turning the tables of the moneychangers in the temple and was subsequently executed by the Empire of his time. Jesus was the ultimate progressive radical. Jesus’ name is exploited by our materialistic society at Christmas time when he changes from the right-wing Christian warmonger to the “Prince of Peace.”<br /><br />Jesus welcomed the “least of these” to his table. He didn’t exclude sinners, lepers or prostitutes who were the pariahs of his day. Today, I am convinced that if Jesus returned he would welcome gays and non-white people (even “illegal” immigrants) to commune with him. The only people I ever heard Jesus speak badly about were the “brood of vipers” (Mt 3:7) that were the Sadduccees (Democrats?) and Pharisees (Republicans?) who in the parable, with hypocritical piety, walked right by the man who had been beaten, robbed and left by the side of the road to die without helping him and they turned his “Father’s” house (the Temple) into a “den of thieves.” (Mt. 21:12).<br /><br />My question for the questioner was: “How do you reconcile your faith with supporting war and killing?”<br /><br />If Jesus came back today and was a politician, I know, because of my faith in the inherent goodness of the Universe, that he would not be a “politician” but a public servant. Jesus would be in favor of single-payer health care, solar and wind energy, unions, free post-secondary education, Social Security, fair trade, free speech, civil rights, and human rights. Jesus would be against the death penalty, torture, extremist religions that exploit His Name for profit, extremist states that exploit His Name to kill innocent people, and the ultimate crime against humanity: war.<br /><br />Whether one is a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or like me now- nothing, Jesus of Nazareth and his story is still worth studying and emulating. At the risk of sounding judgemental, I have a feeling that these reactionary Christian extremists are going to be shocked when they go to meet their maker and find out that Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9). The converse of that saying is: “Cursed are the warmakers for they are not the children of God.” There is a very relevant saying of Jesus in the Bible that these self-proclaimed “Christians” should also pay closer attention to:<br /><br /><i>You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:43)<br /><br /></i>Wise words for everybody to strive to live up to: From presidents to college students and everyone in between.<br /><br /><i>Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of <a href="http://www.gsfp.org/" target="_blank">Gold Star Families for Peace</a> and the author of two books: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977333809/commondreams-20/ref=nosim" target="_blank"> Not One More Mother’s Child</a> and<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872864545?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim" target="_blank"> Dear President Bush</a>.<br /><br /></i>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-30362720136661692272007-04-02T18:21:00.000-07:002007-04-02T18:23:57.186-07:00Cringing at the Stars<div class="post-header"> <span class="post-date">Published on Sunday, April 1, 2007 by <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/" target="_new">CommonDreams.org</a></span> <h2>Cringing at the Stars</h2> <div class="post-credit">by Rosa Maria Pegueros</div> </div> <p>What do Alberto Gonzalez, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Miguel Estrada, Linda Chavez, and Clarence Thomas have in common?</p> <p>If you do not know, then you have not been paying attention.</p> <p>They are high-profile people of color who are highly accomplished; they have reached the highest levels of government service, and their politics fall into line with the most conservative leaders of our country. The uniqueness of their positions is such that they cannot strictly be defined as tokens but when they sit in relation to their colleagues, you cannot miss them: Their black or brown faces are alone in their fields.</p> <p>When you scan the Republican convention, you see black and Latino faces sprinkled lightly throughout the crowd but they do not belong to a latter-day Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, Bayard Rustin or anyone else who would pose a serious challenge to the white leaders of the party. Either you are for the GOP or against it; that is how it maintains its homogeneity.</p> <p>I have some personal experience with this way of thinking. Some years ago, I was drawn into organizing for a peace march. Week after week, they hired more people. It was a youthful, creative group and the experience was very exhilarating except for one thing: Among more than one hundred staffers, only two of us were people of color. Many of the people of color that they approached responded that world peace was not high on their list of priorities nor was it a major concern for people of color in general, and they declined. The leaders of the peace march were completely baffled by this. Doesn’t world peace benefit EVERYBODY?</p> <p>As the hiring continued, the management took to posting a photo of the staff once a week. The only other minority member of the staff, a black woman, and I posted a small note under it: “What’s wrong with this picture?” Then we watched as people stared at the photograph trying to discern the joke. Nobody figured it out. We knew that despite our expertise, our colors mattered but beyond the two of us, they did not know what to do, nor cared. Nor did they understand the priorities of non-white communities.</p> <p>George W. Bush has surrounded himself with talented people of color but what does that say about his relationship with the organizations that represent their interests? When has he deigned to speak at an NAACP convention? Is he pro-affirmative action? Does he provide the funds needed by minority communities for health and education?</p> <p>When he “speaks Spanish”-I’ve heard parrots with better accents-does he do so because he actually knows the language and has a warm connection with our cultures or has he been trained to say just enough to sprinkle in a stump speech?</p> <p>One thing is sure: His appointments send his opponents into a tizzy. How can we reject a black Secretary of State? Two? A Latino attorney general? Take Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Her conservatism makes us cringe. Why, we ask ourselves, is this talented and brilliant woman a conservative? Is it because she has forgotten her roots as child in Birmingham, Alabama during segregation? She was eight when the four little girls were killed in the KKK bombing of a church. In a commencement address at Vanderbilt University in 2004 she said,</p> <p>“I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed.”</p> <p>It was at her father’s church! And she has not forgotten! So why does she ally herself with George W. Bush, a man who tries his best to be the good ol’ boy that he idealizes and whose policies further degrade the already low standard of living for African Americans and other ethnic and racial minorities. Moreover, she is a staunch believer in the Right to Bear Arms. She claims that if gun registration had been required, her father would not have had any defense against the Ku Klux Klan. Yet she has also defended affirmative action to the president as did Colin Powell. She is complex but I still do not understand her conservatism.</p> <p>Many African Americans want more than anything else to forget: To forget slavery, to forget Jim Crow, segregation, the KKK, the murdered civil rights leaders and workers. Does this determined amnesia account for her choices? Or is it the double burden that black and Latino history places on its best and brightest?</p> <p>To be a high achiever requires a very high level of ego and individuality. It can also lead one to delude oneself into thinking that one’s accomplishments were done without help from anyone else. It’s the old bootstrap mentality: I made it on my own; so can you. If “they” think I made it to my high position in life BECAUSE I am black or Latina, it will be tainted. The world will not give me the respect I deserve.</p> <p>The burden of history lies on our shoulders because those who excelled have a duty to our communities, because we did not achieve by ourselves. It is a burden and it cannot be escaped.</p> <p>Then there is Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez whose fascist policies make one think that he got his legal training at the School of the Americas. His strong Roman Catholic upbringing would predispose him to conservative viewpoints. Sad to say, there is little in Latin culture that inculcates liberal ideas. Even the Leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua denied legal abortions to women.</p> <p>Those of us involved in solidarity work have allied ourselves with the Latin American Left for only it has taken on the trial and tribulations of the poor and disenfranchised. In the United States, we can be found working with the poor, with immigrants, or other community concerns. Gonzalez would not have been found among us.</p> <p>A. Leon Higginbotham, a Federal Circuit Court judge who passed away in 1998, was a tireless worker for civil rights. In a now-famous letter to Clarence Thomas when he was nominated to serve on the United States Supreme Court, he wrote:</p> <p>“. . .you have often described yourself as a black conservative. I must confess that, other than their own self advancement, I am at a loss to understand what it is that the so-called black conservatives are so anxious to conserve. Now that you no longer have to be outspoken their behalf, perhaps you will recognize that in the past it was the white “conservatives” who screamed “segregation now, segregation forever!” It was primarily the conservatives. . .who stood in the way of almost every measure to ensure gender and racial advancement.”</p> <p>I wish I could present a solution but I cannot think of one. Just as we cannot force another to love us nor can we force all of our children to care and remember. Some of our prominent Latinos and African Americans will continue to distance themselves from their communities because to them, remembering causes negativity. They are lost to us; in a generation or two, their children will have no memory of our cultures.</p> <p>To me, one who turns away is a member of the real <span style="font-style: italic;">nouveau riche</span>, Jay Gatsbys with shaded pasts, trying to forget from whence they came. As a historian, I believe deeply that memory is life; that our identities are found in the memories of our peoples.</p> <p>Where will our next Judge Higginbotham come from? Our next Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.? Our next Cesar Chavez? Our next Rosa Parks? They will come from our communities and our classrooms for it is our responsibility to teach not only the facts of our peoples but the love of our cultures. Our lives and theirs will be richer in the spirit than those who run away and do not look back.</p> <p><em> Rosa Maria Pegueros (<a href="mailto:pegueros@uri.edu" target="_blank">pegueros@uri.edu</a>) is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island.</em></p>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-82480114472457825762007-03-26T09:52:00.000-07:002007-03-26T09:57:09.178-07:00GUEST: Howard Kurtz, Washington Post: Online Ugliness<span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >My column on General Peter Pace drew the ugliest flaming I have ever experienced; so disgusting, in fact, that I only shared it with a couple of friends. Thus I am very glad to see Howard Kurtz addressing this issue. -Rosie</span><b><br /><br />Online Ugliness<br /><br /></b></span><span style="font-size:85%;">By Howard Kurtz<br />Washington Post Staff Writer<br />Monday, March 26, 2007; 7:36 AM<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">One of the unique qualities of Internet discourse is its freewheeling, no-holds-barred nature, where passionate arguments are often accompanied by some choice expletives and a virtual finger in the eye.<br /><br />But what happens when the talk turns ugly, racist and violent?<br /><br />In recent weeks, some of those who post comments on the conservative blog Little Green Footballs have said they wished that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had succeeded in what the Gitmo prisoner says was a plot to kill Jimmy Carter. And some who posted comments on the liberal Huffington Post have expressed regret that the suicide bomber at a military base in Afghanistan failed to take out the visiting Dick Cheney.<br /><br />No corner of the Net is safe from this bile. The Washington Post's Web site has been grappling with a surge in offensive and incendiary comments.<br /><br />The really gruesome stuff represents a tiny minority of those online. But is there a way of policing the worst stuff without shutting down robust debate?<br /><br />The comments about Cheney at the Huffington Post included: "You can't kill pure evil." "If at first you don't succeed . . . " "Dr. Evil escapes again . . . damn." Founder Arianna Huffington wrote that "no one at HuffPost is defending these comments -- they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed."<br /><br />The comments about Mohammed and Carter at Little Green Footballs included: "Can we furlough him -- just so he can realize the Carter plot? Please?" and "Even this schmuck had some good ideas."<br /><br />The site's founder, Charles Johnson, wrote on Little Green Footballs that such comments "reflect only the opinions of the individuals who posted them" and doubted that they "rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna's readers' Cheney-related comments."<br /><br />Some conservatives and liberals seized on the incidents to denounce the other side, but no conclusions should be drawn from wackjobs on the fringe.<br /><br />Since last summer, washingtonpost.com has allowed registered users to post comments on any news story. A recent report about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who said the slow recovery of his city was part of a plan to change its racial makeup and leadership, led to a number of offensive or inflammatory remarks:<br /><br />"Some Black politicians are [expletive] idiots." "IF a white MAN were to speak as you do, you'd look for a lynching party." One person described Nagin as a racist and a women's sanitary product.<br /><br />Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says he does not have the resources to screen the roughly 2,000 daily comments in advance. He has one staffer deleting offensive comments after the fact, and banning the authors from further feedback, based on complaints from readers. Brady plans to devote more staff to the process and to use new filtering technology.<br /><br />"The medium allows for readers and journalists to engage in conversation, and to say we're not going to take advantage of that doesn't make a lot of sense to me," he says. "I'd rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all."<br /><br />But Post reporter Darryl Fears is among those in the newsroom who believe the comments should be junked if offensive postings can't be filtered out in advance. "If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he says. "You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories."<br /><br />After Post reporter Darragh Johnson wrote in February about a Northeast Washington teenager who was fatally shot while being chased by police, some readers posted comments, including racist comments, criticizing the boy. Johnson says the 17-year-old's father cited the comments in declining to answer most questions about his son.<br /><br />What is spreading this Web pollution is the widespread practice of allowing posters to spew their venom anonymously. If people's full names were required -- even though some might resort to aliases -- it would go a long way toward cleaning up the neighborhood.<br /><br /><br /></span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/26/BL2007032600347_pf.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/26/BL2007032600347_pf.</a><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/26/BL2007032600347_pf.html" eudora="autourl">html</a>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-42285075819225791692007-03-22T16:22:00.000-07:002007-03-22T16:29:16.157-07:00General Peter Pace, Have You Ever Been To a Prostitute?<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Published on </span></i><st1:date month="3" day="19" year="2007"><i><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Monday, March 19, 2007</span></i></st1:date><i><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" > by <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/" target="_new">CommonDreams.org </a></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:17;" >General Peter Pace, Have You Ever Been To a Prostitute? </span></b><span style="font-size:17;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >by Rosa María Pegueros<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >General Peter Pace, have you ever been to a prostitute? </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff makes a pronouncement on what he considers to be a moral question, it naturally brings to mind all of the matters on which the Reverend General could rule. Most people believe that prostitution is immoral, either because it exploits women or because it violates sexual mores, so I was just wondering, have you ever gone to a prostitute?</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >And while we’re at it, have you ever issued a directive that any soldier who patronizes prostitutes will be summarily dismissed from the armed services? Will he get a dishonorable discharge? Lose his pension? </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Were you to issue such an order, would your fellow generals laugh at you as you stride around the Pentagon? Or would it be ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge,’ public morality, private perversion?</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >If there is one tell-tale sign of the presence of American soldiers in a war or occupation it is the trail they leave behind of babies with American fathers. In the past, marrying the mothers of those children was discouraged by the armed services; special permission to marry was required. Most soldiers’ relationships were purely proprietary; money on the table, with no thought for the woman or the illegitimate children that might result. </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Why should Americans care that Koreans, for example, shun mixed-race persons? What about the thousands of American-Vietnamese children? </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Of course, the “fighting men” could not be expected to remain celibate during their tours of duty. In the past, it has even been the policy of the army to issue condoms and treat sexually-transmitted diseases with no questions asked, the assumption being that boys will be boys. Besides, it helps the local economy so everybody’s happy. The girls need the money, right?</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >So I was wondering, have you ever been to a prostitute? Have you turned a blind eye to your troops’ dalliances in town while on leave? </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >You may be a straight-arrow kind of guy who has never and would never visit a whorehouse but if we are talking morality, do you condemn the “johns” in your command with the same animosity that you direct towards gay soldiers? If not, why not? Or is “don’t ask, don’t tell,” your policy in this case? Do you believe that it is moral for soldiers to spend their leaves in brothels but not to seek the love of another man? Or are you a homophobe, plain and simple? </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >The issue of sex and the troops is taboo. Despite its artistic representations from the 19th-century Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly, to the Vietnam War version in Miss Saigon, male sexual behavior in war zones is so taken for granted that nobody talks about it. Consider some other aspects of the problem. The recent rape and murder by an American soldier of a young Iraqi girl and her family may deviate from the usual behavior of American soldiers; it is certainly against the stated ideals of the armed services but it is not as rare as we would hope.</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >What about Tailhook in 1991, where dozens of female members of the Navy were assaulted and sexually molested; where the participation of senior officers in the incident was concealed and the whole thing was covered up to avoid publicity? Finally, two years after the incident, 140 officers—officers!—were being considered for prosecution for public exposure, assault, conduct unbecoming an officer, and lying under oath to the Pentagon investigators. Then the top brass granted immunity to a number of them undermining the prosecution. The only reason that any disciplinary action was taken against the male officers in the Tailhook incident was because of outside pressure. Boys will be boys, eh?</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Tailhook may seem like ancient history but the mistreatment of women in the military has continued to be the norm. Sixteen years later, female soldiers make sure that they go nowhere alone because even in the presence of other soldiers, they can be sexually assaulted and no one will intervene. </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >In 2006, Col. Janis Karpinski who had been the commandant of the prison at Abu Ghraib, reported to the International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq gave the order that the real cause of the deaths of some female soldiers was to be concealed. They had died of dehydration because they were afraid to go out after dark because they were afraid of being assaulted and raped by their own comrades. To avoid the trip to the latrines, they didn’t drink water late in the day. Lacking adequate water in the terrible heat of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >, they died of dehydration. </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >No matter how good female soldiers are in their jobs, no matter how dedicated that they are to our country, to many of the men in the armed services they are little better than whores. They are always at risk for sexual assault or rape, and the brass will do little to protect them; boys will be boys, and the big boys cover for them. If you go out after dark, girls, you’re asking for it. </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Writing on Salon.com in The Private War of Women Soldiers, Helen Benedict quotes Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21 “There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke.” “[Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company] told me, "It's like sending . . . women to live in a frat house."”</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Furthermore, says Benedict, the situation has gotten worse for female soldiers since the armed services have drastically lowered their entrance requirements to induct men with criminal and violent records, women soldiers are at an even greater risk. Add to that the constraints of operating in a Muslim country where there are no prostitutes are available, and women soldiers become even bigger targets. </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Pace should take a leaf from General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s playbook. During the post-World War II occupation in </span><st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >Europe</span></st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >, Eisenhower heard rumors that there were many lesbians in his command, so he called one of his aides, WAC Sergeant Johnnie Phelps, and told her to collect the names of all the lesbians so that he could get rid of them. Estimating that some 95% of the women in the 900 women in the battalion were lesbians, Phelps told him that she would make the list but that it was one of the most decorated companies in the army, with the lowest number of venereal diseases and pregnancies. He would be losing all his top staff, all his clerical help, and furthermore, her name would be at the top of the list. Eisenhower gave up on the idea. </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >So General Pace, if you want to win this war, give the valiant gay and lesbian soldiers the respect they deserve and stay out of their bedrooms. If you want to clean up the sexual morals of your troops, you have your work cut out for you.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" >[This piece appeared in Commondreams.org and was picked up for Smirkingchimp.com. Two small corrections to clerical errors appear in this version.]<br /></span></p>Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7282673.post-82756950905388744962007-01-26T13:11:00.000-08:002007-01-27T14:16:10.759-08:00Hillary Clinton? Barak Obama? Bill Richardson? Time Will TellIts very telling that while President Bill Clinton was self-immolating on national television, telling a barefaced lie about something that was not our business to begin with, a pollster reported that his wife Hillary Clinton's ratings in the polls were very high. Yet when she had put her considerable intellect into creating a health plan for America, she was vilified as thoroughly as if she had committed a sex act in public. What is it about the American electorate that it accepts women into the public area only so long as they keep their places? Only in hindsight does it honor an independent, outspoken former first lady as it did with Betty Ford, the late President Gerald Ford's widow.<br /><br /> So long as First Ladies serve homemade cookies (baked by the White House chef, of course), espouse a non-political cause and stand silently in their husband’s shadow, they are celebrated. Look at any poll about the most admired women in our society and the First Lady is usually in the top five. What outstanding feat did they accomplish to arrive at this exalted standing? They married politicians. While staying married to one of those fellows may be a feat in itself, it certainly does not merit such admiration.<br /><br /> American women have made great strides in the public sphere. The majority of students in colleges and law schools are women. The women in medical schools have reached parity with their male counterparts. The sound of glass ceilings being shattered can be heard all around us but there are significant ways in which women continue to tread water; among those arenas are the highest levels of government and commerce.<br /><br /> Those who reach the ultimate heights of power, the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, represent the most dominant members of our society. We, who are not male, not rich, not white, long for those like us to grace those hallowed halls but because of the way the society is structured, the likelihood of a black president, a Latino president or a woman president is very small.<br /><br /> Consider some of the non-traditional candidates in past presidential elections. The first black woman to run for the presidency was the incomparable Shirley Chisholm, the first African American women to be elected to Congress. In 1972, she ran for the Democratic Party nomination, garnering 152 votes but losing the nomination to Senator George McGovern in spite of her extraordinary, and rhetorical skills. 1972 was a very contentious year: it was during a war, in the wake of the Kennedy-King assassinations, the riots that followed the King assassination, and the tensions of the Civil Rights movement.<br /><br /> Senator Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman to serve in the Senate, put her name forward for the 2004 presidential race but she was forced to withdraw before the Iowa caucuses in the wake of a number of financial scandals and criticism of her by black lawmakers and human rights leaders for meeting with dictator Sani Abacha during a trip to Nigeria in 1996. I was very sorry to see her fall by the wayside.<br /><br /> Other black candidates for president? The Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for the 1984 Democratic Party nomination but failed to get it amidst questions that questioned his handling of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalitions finances and his personal morality. I doubt he could have won it even if his record had been pristine. He was already tarnished with accusations of using his association with the Rev. King to advance his career. And if it had not been that, it would have been something else. The fact is that his race was a barrier to the nomination.<br /><br />The Rev. Al Sharpton ran in 2004 and was painted with the same kinds of calumnies that dogged Jesse Jackson. Its interesting to note that when a black leader speaks up for his people, he is immediately condemned as being self-promoting.<br /><br /> A cursory glance brings other black faces to the fore. Colin Powell? In spite of the pressure brought to bear on him, he was clear that he was not interested. He would have been the most likely African American to get elected precisely because of his "good soldier" persona. That he advocated affirmative action can be explained by his career in the military. Absent the ground-breaking Executive Order by President Harry S Truman desegregating the Armed Forces it is unlikely that Powell would have reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<br /><br /> Oh yes, and then there's Alan Keyes, but I digress.<br /><br /> Latino candidates are even more invisible. New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson has thrown his hat into the ring. Despite his strong foreign policy credentials and his governorship, a traditional springboard to a presidential nomination, I would be surprised if he got half the press that the African American or female candidates will get. Latino leaders have been marginalized in all but a few communities.<br /><br /> A considerable number of American women have run for president since Victoria Claflin Woodhull ran in 1872 on the Equal Rights Party ticket because she wanted to send a message that it was time for a woman in the White House. Few, however, have run on a major party ticket. The one who was considered to be the most likely to get elected in 2000 was Republican Elizabeth Hanford Dole, a former Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Labor under Ronald Reagan. She is also the wife of retired Senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole of Kansas. As formidable as she was perceived to be, her campaign did not reach the Republican convention for lack of funds. I wonder if her husband's shilling for Viagra on television commercials hurt her candidacy. She ran for the Senate from her home state of North Carolina in 2003 and is in her first term.<br /><br /> This brings us back to Senator Hillary Clinton. Her detractors are quick to remind us time and again that she is a polarizing figure. What major politician isn’t? It is a matter of degree; this early on, it is hard to tell the impact of that accusation. The Left is quick to jump on her failure to condemn the Iraq war from the outset. The hard, indigestible fact is that if she had, she would have lost her viability in the minds of many.<br /><br />After all, President Bush and his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, claimed that they had absolute evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Like most people on the Left, I thought he was lying, but I wonder if I would have voted to invade Iraq faced with the purported evidence and the responsibility to protect the nation that a senator holds. Senator Barak Obama was prescient in his opposition to the war but he was not in the Senate yet when the votes were cast.<br /><br /> Conservatives get apoplectic when it comes to the Clintons. The middle of the country regards them as spawn of Satan. I doubt that anyone who is truly progressive can get elected. Now I hear that one of the Rupert Murdoch papers "revealed" that Senator Obama spent four years in a Madraza (Islamic school) in Indonesia. The initial report was that Hillary's campaign had put out that report. The fact is that Senator Obama wrote about his youthful years in<br />Jakarta in one of his books but he was and continues to be a Christian. But the majority of Americans don't read so the lie will continue to make the rounds, and the truth will be overlooked in favor of the perception that he tried to suppress this story and Hillary was the sneaky Pete who leaked it.<br /><br /> Senator Clinton has many things in her favor. She is in her second Senate term from New York having been reelected easily. Having worked with Bill in his two campaigns as well as own two senatorial campaigns, she knows the challenges and pitfalls that are still new to her challengers. She is smart. After two terms of the current resident of the White House, she will restore the sense that the nation is led by the best and brightest. In addition to representing her constituents well, she has won the grudging respect of conservatives in upstate New York as well as those across the aisle in the Senate. She has the support of the organized women’s movement. Finally, she has Bill who loves to campaign, is a formidable fund-raiser, was well-loved despite his peccadilloes and left the White House with the highest approval ratings in our time: 66% compared to Ronald Reagan's 63%.<br /><br /> When countries elect leaders who are not from the dominant class--in our case, white men--they elect conservative leaders whose beliefs and agenda hew closely to those of the most conservative group. So for England, it was arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher. For us to elect a black president it would have to be a Colin Powell; a woman, Elizabeth Dole. For Senator Clinton to get elected, a lot will depend on how conservative she appears to the electorate.<br /><br />I believe that that's why she has been so circumspect about her response to the war and why she has been so successful in the Senate. Ironically, she is perceived as conservative by the Left but ultra-liberal by the conservatives. Bill was solidly a centrist, he wasn't an ultra-liberal. If he hadn't gotten in trouble for the Monica business, the spin on his administration might be very different.<br /><br />Even when a white man runs today, he has to demonstrate his conservative credentials. The charismatic Senator John McCain, a conservative Republican, has had to backpedal to make himself more conservative than he is naturally. George Bush 41 went anti-abortion to get elected as did Ronald Reagan. I'm waiting to see how far to the right Senator McCain will go to get elected, for if anyone wants it, he does.<br /><br />How does the Left achieve its agenda in the White House? Can a Senator Bernie Sanders (the Socialist former governor of Vermont) get elected to the White House? I would like to think that it is possible but it is not likely that it will happen at a time when war and fear dominate the country. The atmosphere of the politics in our country is a complex mix of elements. The politicians tend to rule from the right or the center in fearful times because people want to hold on to the semblance of control that they get from those positions. Advocacy groups must raise their voices, write, campaign, and pressure to force our elected leaders to make our concerns their own. If Hillary were president I doubt that she would ever be as progressive as I'd like but at least she would be a friendly face on Pennsylvania Avenue.<br /><br />Politics is the art of the possible. It is a negotiation. What we in the loyal opposition must do is to represent our ideals to the pragmatists in Congress. By its nature, Congress cannot do what we do. Congressional representatives have to worry about a huge number of issues and constituents. We have to make our voices heard over the din.<br /><br /> The Left, through organizations like Move-On has shown itself to be formidable opponent. We will not get all we want in a presidential candidate but it is better to have a friendly ear in the corridors of power than to be shut out as completely as Bush-Cheney administration has done to us. Furthermore, the mainstream media must also be willing to challenge any administration that comes into office. For too long it has offered deference to those in power instead of acting as the watchdog for the people.<br /><br />It is gratifying to look at the field of Democratic candidates and see the diversity there. That is a big change from when I voted for the first time in 1972. Who knows, in my lifetime we may actually see two black, Latino or female candidates running for president.<br /><br />And the Republicans? Well, they may just have to press Condi into running for president. Planting black faces at the GOP convention just will not be enough.Rosa Maria Pegueroshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02722402162244865814noreply@blogger.com0