Poems to live by

I thought I'd post these two poems because a) they are two of my favorites, if not my top two favorite, poems and b) I like to read them in times of hardship:

"If" by Rupyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream-and not make dreams your master;
If you can think-and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And-which is more-you'll be a Man, my son!

"Invictus" by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

UCLA UCPD Abuse of Power

I know you all probably have heard about the UCLA student of Iranian descent who was shocked with a taser gun because he forgot his library card, was asked to leave, and was on his way out when these officers decided to use accessive force with him. This video is an audio with subtitles and info about the event.



And this is a video of it. You can't really see much. The cameraman/woman had an obstructed view of what happened, but you can see some of what's going on.



The officers tased the young man. And then they repeatedly demanded that he get up, threatening that they sould tase again if he does not. He didn't because he couldn't, and they tased him again, bringing the total times tased to a nice round 5. I might be wrong here, but isn't the main use of a taser gun immobilization of whoever is tased? I mean, I'm a normal, run of the mill civilian and I knew that. You'd think the officers would know that... unless there was a reason that they chose to tase him.

I wonder what the right course of action is in a situation like that if you're an on-looker. Is it to call some higher authority, if possible? Or is it to jump in and try to fight the rogue cops --to maybe put yourself in harm's way in the off chance that you can save someone from injustice? What is it exactly? Is the answer to stand back, film it, and hope justice is served? I don't know what I would do, but I know I couldn't just stand by. My actions might end up being stupid or get me into trouble, but I wouldn't care. I couldn't stand and watch an innocent human being being tased like and animal getting branded. I just couldn't.

As my mom said upon watching this clip "What kind of society is this?" She's right. This land of the free, home of the brave, the place where the huddled masses are supposed to come for help, we have this going on. Where's the justice?

Freedom does not mean relinquishing moral standard... and then some random rant

So I've been annoyed for years by this Western ideology that freedom means the ability to do the immoral. The piles of Glamour Magazine articles about women being "liberated" from their burqaas, being able to wear miniskirts on the streets of Kabul or Baghdad, or whatever city is next. But I was on the BCC website today, which I'm usually very happy with, and I found this article. I read through it after being annoyed by the first piece:

The law of unintended consequences applies by the case load in Iraq.

I met a man in his home. He was using wireless internet.

They did not have that under Saddam.

As he clicked his mouse to open a document, he inadvertently returned to a website that he had just been visiting - hard core, full frontal, naked, young men.

They did not have access to that under Saddam.

It reminded me of a Baghdad cinema that I visited shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It had faded posters in the lobby of Top Gun with Tom Cruise.

I was compiling a report about entertainment in the new Iraq. I slipped into the auditorium to collect some sound effects for the radio report.

It was not Top Gun. The music was climaxing. So were the naked men and women on the screen.

"Did you show films like this when Saddam was in power?" I asked.

"No, never," he replied.

WHAT THE HELL? So, we all know that Saddam was a wank, but maybe he should've stayed in power if the alternative to him is bodies floating down the Tigris, severed heads in cardboard boxes, little kids getting hit by stray bullets, and a complete unraveling of morals (not saying that Saddam was the most moral of them, with his massacring and murals of sex scenes all over his palaces. However, maybe the fear that he instilled in people kept them close to God and their morality). It's sad and scary that so many people keep saying they would rather have had him stay in power, after all that he's done. But then again, the country is now in shambles. Where do we start to restore it? Infrastructure? Ceasefires? Kicking the Americans out? Revamping of morals by the implementation of a moderate Islamist regime? Je ne sais pas. It seems that most people are helpless in the hands of the conniving, schmuck minority.

Sometimes I wonder how I'm a person and these jackasses who act like animals are people too. Is that (hypothetical) guy who is shooting up heroin while directing a porn movie and trading in illegal arms equal to me? It's sad that legally, he is. Or the guy who's out in Iraq, brainwashed into thinking that he should "drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq" (Borat)? Even sadder, he probably has a better legal standing than I. Ugh. I don't mean to sound like a complete bitch here, but that can't be fair.

I get so depressed sometimes, because it seems to me that I live in a world in which the minority of people are good. Why is that? Everyone cares about themselves, and as Rousseau says, the first impulse of all humans is self-preservation, quickly followed by compassion. He also says that our societies have slowly ebbed away our compassion and forced us to ignore it in favor of self-preservation. Rousseau has a lot of crazy ideas, but this one I can get on board with. As depressing an outlook as it is, it sure as help makes sense. Take this picture that's in my PoliSci book, for instance (the chapter about the north-south gap): a very little black girl, balding from lack of nutrients, her legs and arms are so thin that they look like stalks of sugar cane spray-painted dark brown, her torso bloated from lack of protein in her diet. The girl is crawling along a dirt road, her head and face are on the ground. She is on her way to the local (and by local I mean no less than 14 mile away) feeding center, and she's being stalked by a vulture, who can smell death on her already.

The photographer of that photo won a Pultizer for it, but killed himself a year later, haunted by this picture. The girl lived past that day, but who knows how long afterwards. How do we stop something like this? This scenario could be happening to millions of people, and we're happy here in out little bubble of "when am I going to buy my next iPod, mine's getting old" or "let's eat a $40 steak". Our

Let's contrast that with the common executive or diva who won't eat something if it's not at the right temperature, or there aren't the right number of fat veins in the steak, or something else ridiculous. I think every one of us is guilty of one of these diva moments. I know I am. A time when the food in front of you is not what you feel like eating, or when you're not hungry anymore and you throw away your food.

I don't know how I digressed to this topic, but I have, and I guess my mind always end up at inequality in the end of the day. We can take the Rousseauan idea and say that all men are equal, or we can think like Mandeville and say that society is set up in castes for a reason, but either way, we can agree on the fact that something isn't right when there are people going through something like that in some part of the world.

Anyway... back to my material girl life.

Findings during my research on Israel-Palestine

Hey, everyone, I've been doing research about Israel-Palestine (specifically the Wall) lately because I chose to write a paper about it, which I probably will end up posting on here. I just had to share a couple of things I found while researching.

I was going to do all my research from books. But I thought that the internet may have some clips for me that I could get some solid quotes from. And it did. I found a few of videos on google video that were really great. If you're interested, type israel wall into the google video search bar, but if you wanna save time instead of sifting through the myriad of clips, here are two good ones. They are speeches made earlier this year by a Canadian-Palestinian lawyer and an Israeli Ha'aretz journalist and author.

These two speeches were made at a conference hosted by this foundation in memory of Rachel Corrie. I knew that I had heard that name before, but I couldn't remember where. I checked out the foundation's website and it jarred my memory: she was the American activist who was bulldozed over by an Israeli tank in Spring 2003. I looked through her memorial website and found a lot of stuff, but this is what really stuck with me. This is a collection of her emails to her mother during her stay in Palestine. It's really heart-wrenching and a lot of the stuff she says is ironic when you find out what happened to her. Things about the impossiblity of her getting hurt because of "white privledge" and the US's outcry if anything happened to one of their citizens. I normally am able to see things like this and not let it affect me, but I actually teared up while reading these emails. Her accounts embody this conflict and reflect the goodness and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of slow strangulation.

RIP Rachel Corrie.