Reflexivity

Alas, there is no such thing as moral purity:

“The major problem – one of the major problems, for there are several – one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

“To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Nonetheless, if Clinton-Obama or Obama-Clinton could just manage to put institutional change above personal ambition…!

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There were a few Americans and at least two Dominicans in the crowd, while passersby occasionally chatted with each other. I overheard two middle-aged men (apparently strangers) engage each other:

“Do you know about FARC?”
“I’m learning!”
“They’re a serious bunch. Where are they? In Colombia I think. They had a ceasefire for awhile but just got active again.”
“Nasty dudes, huh?”
“Yeah.”

No local media covered the event; their attention presumably taken up with the upcoming presidential primary tomorrow. In Dade County, FL, however, the local newspaper announced the event this morning. Bloomberg released an article Colombians Stage `Million Voices’ March Against FARC, which interprets this event as a rebuke to Venezuelan President Chavez while not seeming to believe the protest itself will make an actual dent in the FARC’s operations. Here is some news from Bogota, which also mentions a related protest in Paris. This BBC story details some of the history that led to today’s world-wide protest. An article from Reuters describes how the protest has highlighted some political divisions within Colombia, including fear of retribution. Colombians in East Naples, Italy, protest, joining upwards of 200 cities by that reporter’s estimate. Snuffle Square blogged about a demonstration observed near a Colombian Consulate. The Christian Science Monitor has also covered the story, highlighting the Facebook angle.


I also came across a Venezuelan blog with background on Chavez‘ involvement, and another one cautioning against potential unintended consequences. A grim entry on terror compares FARC with other terroristic groups, painting a picture of increasing entrenchment of persistent random violence.
Meanwhile, a relatively random sample of generally typical U.S. undergraduate students explain why they were unable to attend the protest themselves. The page I’m linking is a “category” page: from the titles you can tell which ones relate to the protest and which are on a different subject.

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Mike reached up and patted this sign to remind me to slow down. I’d asked the class why I’d gone off on a particular tangent….it related, but I had to pause for a moment, back up, where did I begin? How did I arrive where I was? What was the point?!
I came across the sign near the hallway trashcans on my way to class and I thought it was too perfect to pass up: not for them, for me! I’ve a good feeling about this group, based on how assertive they were during the first and subsequent activities. We laughed a fair amount. And – they took the material seriously. Minds at work. I like.
At some point, they’ll be designing some webpages. In the meantime, I’m using the space to post lesson plans and track our progress.
Any day now, students will start to post their first self-analyses of a decision-making process. They’ve been asked to make a real decision – to attend or not attend a protest in Boston against the FARC who occupy part of Colombia. (FARC is the organization responsible for the kidnapping of friends of a friend – close enough to touch me. I decided to be affected; I decided to care, to act, to do the little that I can do.)

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from The Spymaster, a report on the US Intelligence Community by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker (January 14, 2008).

Ed Giorgio, a security consultant who worked at the N.S.A. under [current Director of Intellgence Mike] McConnell, and who is the only person to have been the nation’s chief code breaker and its chief code maker, said, “Early on, Mike had what many directors of the N.S.A. have near the end of their tenure — that is, an info-sec epiphany.

Giorgio warned me [reporter at large Lawrence Wright], “We have a saying in this business:

‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’ “

I [Wright] asked McConnell if he believed that Al Qaeda was really the greatest threat America faces.

“No, no, no, not at all,” he said. “Terrorism can kill a lot of people, but it can’t fundamentally challenge the ability of the nation to exist. Fascism could have done that. Communism could have. I think our issue going forward is more engagement with the world in terms of keeping it on a reasonable path, so another ism doesn’t come along and drive it to one extreme or another. And we have to have some balance in terms of equitable distribution of wealth, containment of contagious disease, access to energy supplies, and development of free markets. There are national-security ramifications to global warming.”

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Palestinians burst from the confinement of the Gaza Strip and what’s the first thing those Muslims do?

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I have two images in mind.
One is a poster I came across in Palestine calling for a boycott of Israel. The image is a hand dropping a coin into a helmet that is already full of money.
The other one is a photo of a small boy urinating on the helmet of a soldier.
So, Hamas pissed on Fatah, and Israel pisses on Hamas. Meanwhile, the world watches.

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Guilty as charged. :-/
A friend last night told me that that approximately 80% of what I write makes sense, but there’s 20% when I lose her. That happened somewhere in the middle of reading yesterday’s post. We hypothesized: boring? Lack of transition or context? Possibly, we mused, I wander too deep into my own mind, and simply do not make the links apparent – such writing is then “not a finished product,” which can throw a reader off or away from the communication I attempt.
A few days earlier, another friend caught my systemic misspelling of Colombia and let me know (for which I am grateful, thanks). I was using the US version, Columbia, which refers to a different place and (obviously) invokes a much different context. Less obviously, but nonetheless apparent to a close reader, is what such a basic mistake reveals about me as an outsider. Just now, I’m up for a bit of self-chastising, as a pithy reviewer of television coverage of the US presidential campaign quotes Mark Twain:

…somewhere he said that “only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’”

Dang. The thing is, I invoke “we” deliberately, as an act of membering, an attempt to constitute belonging. I started doing so, consciously and with intention, at last fall’s second Dialogue under Occupation conference, which took place in Abu Dis, Palestine. I want to insist on a base level of togetherness among everyone who has participated in either of the first two conferences as a foundation for a community focused on tangible changes in entrenched institutional systems. There is no reason not to extend the boundary of “we” to include peace activists and change agents in Colombia and elsewhere in the world. The trick, as I was able to articulate a week or so after the conference, is to name violence without doing more.
Did you follow the link? I suspect this could be one place where I lose readers. Yesterday, for instance, I referenced a graduate level communication seminar on Language as Action and Performance. This link is not as straightforward as the one above concerning how we need to stop talking violence into inevitability. You have to notice, in today’s instance, that the link feeds to a whole category of posts that I have related to each other through the label Language. Geez, even as I am explaining this (to myself as well, grin) I can see how much labor I hope you are willing to undertake. :-/ (Sorry!) The thing is, I am trying to work an epistemology, and I am still learning how to convert true beliefs into knowledge. (Another friend informs me that real philosophers limit the object/referent of “epistemology” to propositional knowledge, thereby excluding the how. My exposure to the term via pedagogy (education) and sociology will not allow a separation between the process and the outcome. Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory describes this merger, and his distinction between practical consciousness and discursive consciousness explicates the interaction between “the how” of coming to know and “the what” of knowing.)

Giddens postulates a dynamic interplay between “practical consciousness” (tacit, take-for-granted knowledge) and “discursive consciousness” (knowledge/reasons that can be verbally articulated) as social agents reflexively monitor and rationalize their activities/practices. Practical consciousness is emphasized to a greater extent in this process, however, since it is linked directly with the casual mastery of routines….

In addition to the theoretical precepts which I am actively attempting to put into conscious and deliberate, “performative” action, there is the whole unique history of me as an embodied human being with particular experiences of social life and relationships. As much as I try to think “out from” myself as a person with agency to influence events and meanings, I also attend “inward” to the ways I react and then respond to events and the meanings I make of them. The conditioned dialectical interactions are what I want to shift from the dominant external power of established structure to an internal force of dialogical interaction that both recognizes my freedom to move variably within a range and concentrate my energies on a specific structural feature where I sense possibilities for a turn from one trajectory to another.

As I watched myself (over the past few days) feel and try to articulate some humanity for the other side, for the enemy, I realized that I always do this. I did this two years ago when Israel began bombing Lebanon and many of my friends burst into outrage. Yes yes yes, the bombing was wrong and unconscionable. The reasons for the attack are not justifiable under any ethical rubric. And – to use words that demonize all Israelis by casually conflating the policies of the government with the individual choices of citizens is a language trap. I think the same dynamic applies to Farc. As awful, horrific and devastating as their actions have been on the nearly one thousand individuals kidnapped, and miserable and agonizing as the pain ripples have been, we – not a royal imposition, but a self-selected cadre of compassionate people – have to manage not to throw our resulting pain back into the world, even onto those who elicit it.

I believe we must learn to manage our own pain, because I have been guilty of acting mine out on beloved others and observing the devastating effects. Sometimes, the guilt and depression are overwhelming. In fact, being able to throw myself into a support network on behalf of a friend was a means for surviving a severe bout that struck the same day as I learned of Ana and Alf’s kidnapping. Would I have devoted so much energy if I was not so desperately trying, myself, to survive? I cannot say. What I can say, is that – having done so – my commitment is real.

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I’ve just perused several blogposts about Ana and Alf. They are obviously remarkable people, their cadre of friends a passionate force of spirit.
A professor in the Social Justice Program challenged me, some years ago when I was learning about the range of discrimination and depth of oppression of people with disabilities – in particular, struggling with issues of accessibility. How far do we go, she mused out-loud, to “limit” ourselves in order not to deny access to someone who couldn’t be present (if for instance, someone wears perfume, or there is no ramp, or interpreters are not provided, or an activity requires the use of hands….) Her point was, the list is long, if we do everything to include everyone there will be nothing left to do. The matter of access is much more complicated than that reduction, but the sense of her point in context had something to do with the continual embrace of new struggles. I understood her thoughtful comment as a critique of my willingness to put energy toward “each new thing” and a question of whether shifting focus benefits social justice in the long run.
There is a danger of being overwhelmed by crisis, because there always is one right after another. The challenge is not to drop the previous struggles, rather, their lessons must be carried along into the new situation.
The lessons of previous kidnappings in Colombia are grim. The news headlines alone tell a discouraging story:
Efforts to Release Hostages in Colombia Stalled – an NPR radio commentary from two months ago, refers to an article printed in December: Bungle in the Jungle.
This appears to be a potentially pivotal time, actually, as Venezuelan President Chavez made a proposal just last week on behalf of FARC. Chavez has recently been negotiating the release of some hostages for some time (Fate Uncertain, January 1, 2008). Oliver Stone is even in on the action, upset after being invited to film a handover that did not occur. Just last week (January 10), two hostages were released.
My South American political knowledge is sorely shallow. I know Chavez came to power on a wave of working-class popularity, and has not made many friends among other governments in the region. He may also have lost some of his base … ? Aligning himself with FARC no doubt has all kinds of implications and serves multiple agendas.
:-/
What I have gleaned so far is that hostages are usually held for years. I have not watched the “hostage appeal video” from last summer; I am sure the conditions are lousy and the treatment inhumane. How could it be otherwise?
All struggles that matter take time and involve many, many people. This isn’t going to be easy.

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Friends of my friend were kidnapped in Colombia over the weekend.
Maria Claudia popped up in chat Monday, “Today is a weird day,” she wrote.
“Why?”
“Two of my best friends were kidnapped last night.”
“Oh my god.”
It is real. Violence creeps closer, no matter how hard we try to keep it at bay, no matter how thickly we deny that it could happen to us or those we love.
They were on vacation at a calm, quiet community along the coast of Colombia – their homeland – and took a boat ride with other tourists (a total of six were taken). Maria Claudia sent me a photo of the young couple, they look So Happy Together!



I’ve been keeping their faces in mind, envisioning them safe, imagining processes that will lead to their release. A pastiche of memories and associations float in and out of consciousness. The young man in Qabatiya, Palestine, who argued there is no solution for the Palestinians except to increase the violence until the world forces Israel out; the apparently base “human” instinct of aggression and need for power/control – and how this is exacerbated by constant and unrelenting exposure to the prosperity of others, and how we, the others, persist with our pleasures: intent upon our own islands of happiness amidst great suffering.
FARC. Sure, I know the acronym. Well, I’ve read it. Heard it. The Spanish acronym translates to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The history of the group is complicated – associated with a communist movement and the illegal drug trade. FARC has been around since 1964; they are strong and organized enough to run an internal government (called a secretariat) with large-scale organizational strategy conferences, and have been involved in international peace processes. In other words, they are not just going to go away.
Their tactics are abominable, but their ideological goals are not – at least, if they intend to live what they say they seek, then they are in a weird bedfellow relationship with many contemporary peace activists and anti-neoliberal-capitalists. As I say, IF they are primarily motivated by “fighting against privatization of natural resources [and] multinational corporations,” then these are aims shared widely. That they use paramilitary violence (while ostensibly arguing for its end), is qualitatively – but not necessarily substantively – different from the official uses of military (and other) violence sanctioned by democratic and communist governments worldwide. The “other violence” is less overtly horrific, but the violences done by policy are part of what FARC ostensibly says they are against. I’m hedging, here, for a couple of reasons.

1. I am just learning the blunt outline of the conflict, let alone any of its nuances.
2. If Ana and Alf are to be released, it will be because there are ways to talk with FARC, not only against them.
3. To talk with them means to allow them some benefit of doubt.
4. What kind of doubt? That there is a nobility buried somewhere underneath the deliberate and active use of physical, mental, and emotional terrorizing.
5. On the chance that those honorable intentions can be surfaced and given life in ways that alter the contours of the opposing sides,
6. with the hope that the conflict can actually shift, in order that
7. others may be saved through the prevention of future acts of violence and
8. the aspirations of the FARC community can be legitimately satisfied.

I cannot help but draw parallels to the situation in Palestine. Israel must withdraw. This is the physical and institutional fact. Israelis must move out of the only-always-temporary comfort of The Bubble, must surrender their attachment to the story/history of their own horrific victimization. We in the US must do the same regarding our intent to bolster our status regardless of the fate of others – especially those we know are different; those who think, feel, believe, and perceive the world on other terms than those with which we are most familiar.
We – humanity – must find a way for difference, plurality, and heterogeneity to coexist.

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Posted today in my teaching/student-oriented blog:

Class won’t begin for nearly three weeks, yet, but the mind already whirs…

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