QUALITY VS. QUANTITY OF LIFE
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 30, 2009
Suddenly in retirement, I have time on my hands. Whenever I run into folks who haven’t seen me since retirement, I keep getting asked what I do with my day and what my retirement plans are.
Since a 1987 article on “Violence as Unresponsiveness,” I have postulated that entropy or heat or friction in social relations increases as participants become fixated on achieving substantive goals. I postulate that peacemaking entailing participants’ letting go of attachments to outcome. I have found that as I have managed to let go of goal attachment in my own relations, my life has become enriched. For instance, I have by chance moved in with my wife in the town where my mom still lives in a house I grew up in. That would not have happened had I not been prepared to move wherever Jill worked when I retired, and had she not applied for a job she thought was beyond her reach but applied anyway. I have come to believe that serendipity happens in the spaces where I leave outcomes of my human encounters to chance. That is counter-intuitive especially to those who like me have aimed to become lawyers. Hence, hard as it is for some of my friends to think I really mean it, I am as determined as ever to keep my planning to a minimum. I’m lucky: I am able after 11 years once again able to live with my closest companion, close to my surviving parent, in economic security.
I pick up the concern from friends that with all my free time, I am at risk of dying of drug-enhanced loneliness. I appreciate their concern. I’m sure they are asking me about their worst fears for their own retired futures. I recently saw a guy I had gone to grad school with who is around 70. He told me he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he gave up professing criminal justice. I recognize the fear. For any concerned friend who reads this, know that I’m not lonely and relatively contented and secure as I write.
As I anticipated retirement, I reached the conclusion that a moment in a lifetime can make the meaning of one’s life as one faces death more meaningful than having lived honorably, in and by the service of others, for over a hundred years. I reached this conclusion during roughly a decade from 1991 when my late friend Mable introduced me to singing with her in nursing homes, and in the accompanying funerals she took me to. At the time I made a particular point of telling Jill and our Katy how blessed I felt by my life with them, and that I was prepared to face death already having lived, as I put it to them, many lives in a lifetime. I now respond to pressure to do something by telling myself that I have already accomplished more than enough, and have nothing left to prove. Now I face more lives as long as life continues for me. What do I do with all that freedom? Good question
Over Thanksgiving I spent time with old dear friends, one a psychiatrist and the other a clinical psychologist. Asked to explain my daily planning, I got away unchallenged by them with saying that I am in part accommodating my own autism. For years before retirement let alone now, I have enjoyed the privilege of having just one or two significant social encounters a day with days in between with nothin’ to do where Jill and I can now hang out and take some time out together, our own Sabbath. As an only child of two working parents, I became habituated to alone time. I learned to adapt by playing with parts of myself in fantasy, which I think is why multiple personalities seem so obvious and natural to me. I figure that we all have multiple parts or personalities. Autism is one of mine.
When I have a single event to contemplate as in thinking about--as against planning--an upcoming class, inside my head I keep rolling over ideas about how I might introduce discussion, of what responses I might expect, and about how I might account for why in terms of the rest of the course I ask this question. I allow time to myself after the event to reflect on what has been said there, and to begin thinking about our next single event together. Some years ago by this practice I lost my need to plan what in particular would come out of my mouth, let alone be on powerpoint, until the moment I start each class. Occasionally, something someone says minutes before I start class shifts my direction.
I’m here to tell you that after years of following this practice in all my public speaking, it works for me and audiences, and IT IS INTENSE for me. It is rewarding in retrospect rather than draining, but it takes a lot of energy, and in the encounter, concentration. I can’t wait to get away by myself to let events of the immediate past float through me in a form of meditation, of concentration not on what will happen, but on digesting what has happened, often tremendously meaningful and fulfilling in its own right—inspiration for upcoming encounters of all kinds.
When circumstances make me deal with multiple “important” encounters in daily life, as in monitoring e-mail and texting, I simply become distracted. I am a functioning autistic. I can make decisions readily without much thought. But I can’t concentrate, and I lose time contemplating and concentrating on making any encounter more than routinely meaningful. There comes a point in my encounters when the volume in my head has reached a point where I tune out and go off into my own space if I have a chance. I had the good luck to have a job for more than half my life that allowed me to concentrate and largely do my own things in between significant encounters. I have learned that a single class can become a more meaningful moment in my own understanding of the world than accumulating a lifetime of lectures could possibly have done.
All our life circumstances are unique, my own included. It is against all I believe to offer any else recipes for life. I acknowledge as here that the experience, feelings and beliefs of others sharpens my own understanding of myself and of how to explain myself to others. But I am flat out proposing that one fact about ageing and retirement applies to all of us: As life progresses, memories of moments you have lived will far outweigh the quantity of time and effort you have spent there. I can no longer measure the value of life by the number of years a body survives. I see my own life as a visit with relatives. I’d just as soon leave this body when the visit is going well, rather than concentrating on what it takes to extend my years in my body.
I am of a generation when many of us are trying to manage lives of surviving ninetyish parents. I think the great untalked-about elephant in health care expenditure debate is our fixation on maximizing our own life spans costs more. My worst end-of-life nightmare is spending my last bodily years dedicated to doing whatever it takes to live longer at great expense to others. The biggest contributor to growth in health care expense is our fixation on prolonging human lives, as though time alive equals the value of a life lived.
Since moving to Central Ohio, I have introduced myself in a number of ways to groups or people I might hook up with here. I have been pushy enough to put people here off I’m sure. I imagine myself having become a fisherman throwing out lines and waiting for bites in return. My time is too valuable for me to fill it for filling’s sake. Serendipity will out. I remain blessed. Love and peace--hal
Monday, November 30, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Exam questions on Marx and crime
RE: Ahs-talk Digest, Vol 9, Issue 118
Pepinsky, Harold E.
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 3:52 PM
To: ahs-talk@prismatix.com
Attachments:
How about this Marx question: Marx called the criminal class the "lumpenproletariat." To him, convicts were social scum who had no human rights. Was Marx correct? l&p hal
________________________________________
From: ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com [ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com] On Behalf Of ahs-talk-request@prismatix.com [ahs-talk-request@prismatix.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 11:52 AM
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Subject: Ahs-talk Digest, Vol 9, Issue 118
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Today's Topics:
1. correction re the previous. (QUACK WRAPAQUACK)
2. Marx question contest (GEORGE SNEDEKER)
3. Re: Marx question contest (llevitt)
4. Re: Marx question contest (Dolgon, Corey)
5. Re: Marx question contest (llevitt)
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Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:18:19 +0000
From: QUACK WRAPAQUACK
Subject: [Ahs-talk] correction re the previous.
To:
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Forget it.
Too old a posting, too confused a Pigle ,- greetings to Paula.
P.
_________________________________________________________________
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:51:50 -0500
From: "GEORGE SNEDEKER"
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID: <000601ca6b27$1f6ca1b0$2f01a8c0@dell>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
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Message: 3
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:25:30 -0500
From: "llevitt"
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID: <1672D74772284F45B2473CCBC1644D0F@LLEVITT>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
How about: Why is there a statue of Karl Marx in a park in London?
----- Original Message -----
From: GEORGE SNEDEKER
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2009 10:51 PM
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Message: 4
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:23:21 -0500
From: "Dolgon, Corey"
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID:
<39FF21238D0C26469861A35B37EB9F9D015A987F@exchem3.worcester.local>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
don't know how others feel about this but i like to get at how sociologists can differ greatly on some things and just slightly on others while all the time using similar terminology. for instance. i usually ask students to compare and contrast durkheim and mark on the division of labor and alienation. Then, I ask them to explain how both understand solidarity as a remedy of sorts for alienation, but again, very differently. I find by doing this, they are able to understand the important distinctions in emphasis and theoretical or philosophical difference without getting into simplistic understandings of durkheim as simple functionalist--which as rick eckstein keeps pointing out at ahs meetings--he wasn't/isn't--and marx as a vulger economistic guy.
________________________________
From: ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com on behalf of GEORGE SNEDEKER
Sent: Sat 11/21/2009 10:51 PM
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:52:36 -0500
From: "llevitt"
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
The question is not a gag. To answer requires providing some British and personal history, some digging into why the statue was wanted, by whom, whether there was controversy about it, who the sculptor was, how long it took to actually reach fruition and why . . . etc. etc. Personally, I am tired of abstract comparisons of the theories of famous (white) men; the statue is real and a sociological fact.
----- Original Message -----
From: Dolgon, Corey
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 11:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
don't know how others feel about this but i like to get at how sociologists can differ greatly on some things and just slightly on others while all the time using similar terminology. for instance. i usually ask students to compare and contrast durkheim and mark on the division of labor and alienation. Then, I ask them to explain how both understand solidarity as a remedy of sorts for alienation, but again, very differently. I find by doing this, they are able to understand the important distinctions in emphasis and theoretical or philosophical difference without getting into simplistic understandings of durkheim as simple functionalist--which as rick eckstein keeps pointing out at ahs meetings--he wasn't/isn't--and marx as a vulger economistic guy.
________________________________
From: ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com on behalf of GEORGE SNEDEKER
Sent: Sat 11/21/2009 10:51 PM
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Ahs-talk mailing list
Ahs-talk@prismatix.com
http://prismatix.com/mailman/listinfo/ahs-talk_prismatix.com
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Pepinsky, Harold E.
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 3:52 PM
To: ahs-talk@prismatix.com
Attachments:
How about this Marx question: Marx called the criminal class the "lumpenproletariat." To him, convicts were social scum who had no human rights. Was Marx correct? l&p hal
________________________________________
From: ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com [ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com] On Behalf Of ahs-talk-request@prismatix.com [ahs-talk-request@prismatix.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 11:52 AM
To: ahs-talk@prismatix.com
Subject: Ahs-talk Digest, Vol 9, Issue 118
Send Ahs-talk mailing list submissions to
ahs-talk@prismatix.com
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://prismatix.com/mailman/listinfo/ahs-talk_prismatix.com
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You can reach the person managing the list at
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When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Ahs-talk digest..."
Today's Topics:
1. correction re the previous. (QUACK WRAPAQUACK)
2. Marx question contest (GEORGE SNEDEKER)
3. Re: Marx question contest (llevitt)
4. Re: Marx question contest (Dolgon, Corey)
5. Re: Marx question contest (llevitt)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:18:19 +0000
From: QUACK WRAPAQUACK
Subject: [Ahs-talk] correction re the previous.
To:
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
Forget it.
Too old a posting, too confused a Pigle ,- greetings to Paula.
P.
_________________________________________________________________
Keep your friends updated?even when you?re not signed in.
http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/windows/windowslive/see-it-in-action/social-network-basics.aspx?ocid=PID23461::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-xm:SI_SB_5:092010
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:51:50 -0500
From: "GEORGE SNEDEKER"
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID: <000601ca6b27$1f6ca1b0$2f01a8c0@dell>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
-------------- next part --------------
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Message: 3
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:25:30 -0500
From: "llevitt"
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID: <1672D74772284F45B2473CCBC1644D0F@LLEVITT>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
How about: Why is there a statue of Karl Marx in a park in London?
----- Original Message -----
From: GEORGE SNEDEKER
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2009 10:51 PM
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Ahs-talk mailing list
Ahs-talk@prismatix.com
http://prismatix.com/mailman/listinfo/ahs-talk_prismatix.com
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Message: 4
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:23:21 -0500
From: "Dolgon, Corey"
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID:
<39FF21238D0C26469861A35B37EB9F9D015A987F@exchem3.worcester.local>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
don't know how others feel about this but i like to get at how sociologists can differ greatly on some things and just slightly on others while all the time using similar terminology. for instance. i usually ask students to compare and contrast durkheim and mark on the division of labor and alienation. Then, I ask them to explain how both understand solidarity as a remedy of sorts for alienation, but again, very differently. I find by doing this, they are able to understand the important distinctions in emphasis and theoretical or philosophical difference without getting into simplistic understandings of durkheim as simple functionalist--which as rick eckstein keeps pointing out at ahs meetings--he wasn't/isn't--and marx as a vulger economistic guy.
________________________________
From: ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com on behalf of GEORGE SNEDEKER
Sent: Sat 11/21/2009 10:51 PM
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
-------------- next part --------------
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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:52:36 -0500
From: "llevitt"
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
To: "Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology"
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
The question is not a gag. To answer requires providing some British and personal history, some digging into why the statue was wanted, by whom, whether there was controversy about it, who the sculptor was, how long it took to actually reach fruition and why . . . etc. etc. Personally, I am tired of abstract comparisons of the theories of famous (white) men; the statue is real and a sociological fact.
----- Original Message -----
From: Dolgon, Corey
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 11:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
don't know how others feel about this but i like to get at how sociologists can differ greatly on some things and just slightly on others while all the time using similar terminology. for instance. i usually ask students to compare and contrast durkheim and mark on the division of labor and alienation. Then, I ask them to explain how both understand solidarity as a remedy of sorts for alienation, but again, very differently. I find by doing this, they are able to understand the important distinctions in emphasis and theoretical or philosophical difference without getting into simplistic understandings of durkheim as simple functionalist--which as rick eckstein keeps pointing out at ahs meetings--he wasn't/isn't--and marx as a vulger economistic guy.
________________________________
From: ahs-talk-bounces@prismatix.com on behalf of GEORGE SNEDEKER
Sent: Sat 11/21/2009 10:51 PM
To: Discussion group for the Association for Humanist Sociology
Subject: [Ahs-talk] Marx question contest
I was wondering if anyone has a good essay question or questions on Marx social theory that works well with students. I'm not sure why but I find that my students do better on Durkheim than Marx. I'm not sure if this is because I do a better job of teaching them Durkheim or if it is because Emile is simpler to understand or if it is because Durkheim's approach to society fits more easily into the students' conception of society. No class struggle and all. Solidarity for ever! But for the moment I'm looking for questions on Marx that students can answer. You can send your favorite Marx questions to me offline unless you think they would generate an interest for the list members. We could have a contest to see who can come up with the best Marx question.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Ahs-talk mailing list
Ahs-talk@prismatix.com
http://prismatix.com/mailman/listinfo/ahs-talk_prismatix.com
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Poor President Karzai
POOR PRESIDENT KARZAI
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 20, 2009
Yesterday Hamid Karzai signed on for five more years as Afghani president. I felt for him as I heard NPR and BBC descriptions of the ceremony: in a zone surrounded by armored protection, the bulk of the first three rows in the audience consisting foreign dignitaries led by Hillary Clinton and the rest by warlords of old, the abject pledge of the new president to take apart “corruption” in his own political family to maintain enough Euro-American support to stay alive in the Afghan presidential palace.
I was born months before WWII ended. When I was 16 I moved for a year with my parents to Trondheim, Norway. A neighbor and professional host of my parents, Einar Thorsrud, founder of the Norwegian Institute for Industrial Democracy, had spent years in the mountains as a partisan fighter against German occupation. When Germany surrendered, 50 Norwegian collaborators were sentenced to death, and half of them were executed before Norwegians had had enough. The first hanged was Vidkund Quisling, whom the Germans made Norwegian chief executive after King Olav had fled to England before the invaders could get their hands on him. Einar Thorsrud was a specialist in open grassroots democratization who showed us pictures of his hideouts in the mountains, and who shortly before his death from cancer, took Jill and me to the occupation museum in Oslo, at the foot of the fort that guarded the harbor in times past. I carry this experience of my youth in my viscera as I think about President Karzai’s plight.
President Karzai was a Pashtun war hero. He was also US trained and sponsored into the presidency. Karzai is a logical candidate for being considered a Quisling by Afghanis who suffer US bombardment. I also imagine that he wishes that he had turned down this career opportunity.
How Anglo-American news media scramble to keep hope alive that the war in Afghanistan that must be won (“loss is not an option”) is winnable (as though winning is an option). A visit by my daughter Katy this weekend brings to mind what she said at the age of 7 or so when we sat in the bedroom watching the big battle scene in the movie “Patton”: What a mess! Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 20, 2009
Yesterday Hamid Karzai signed on for five more years as Afghani president. I felt for him as I heard NPR and BBC descriptions of the ceremony: in a zone surrounded by armored protection, the bulk of the first three rows in the audience consisting foreign dignitaries led by Hillary Clinton and the rest by warlords of old, the abject pledge of the new president to take apart “corruption” in his own political family to maintain enough Euro-American support to stay alive in the Afghan presidential palace.
I was born months before WWII ended. When I was 16 I moved for a year with my parents to Trondheim, Norway. A neighbor and professional host of my parents, Einar Thorsrud, founder of the Norwegian Institute for Industrial Democracy, had spent years in the mountains as a partisan fighter against German occupation. When Germany surrendered, 50 Norwegian collaborators were sentenced to death, and half of them were executed before Norwegians had had enough. The first hanged was Vidkund Quisling, whom the Germans made Norwegian chief executive after King Olav had fled to England before the invaders could get their hands on him. Einar Thorsrud was a specialist in open grassroots democratization who showed us pictures of his hideouts in the mountains, and who shortly before his death from cancer, took Jill and me to the occupation museum in Oslo, at the foot of the fort that guarded the harbor in times past. I carry this experience of my youth in my viscera as I think about President Karzai’s plight.
President Karzai was a Pashtun war hero. He was also US trained and sponsored into the presidency. Karzai is a logical candidate for being considered a Quisling by Afghanis who suffer US bombardment. I also imagine that he wishes that he had turned down this career opportunity.
How Anglo-American news media scramble to keep hope alive that the war in Afghanistan that must be won (“loss is not an option”) is winnable (as though winning is an option). A visit by my daughter Katy this weekend brings to mind what she said at the age of 7 or so when we sat in the bedroom watching the big battle scene in the movie “Patton”: What a mess! Love and peace--hal
Monday, November 16, 2009
Dealing with the Tragedy of the Commons
DEALING WITH THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 16, 2009
In retirement I have rejoined a single listserv where I post my blogs and engage in lively discussion on many issues—ahs-talk@prismatix.com. The sponsor is the Association for Humanist Sociology (humanistsoc.org), which met last week in New Orleans.
Olaf Krassnitzky and I have been sending each other a flurry of messages on that listserv. I don’t know Olaf personally, but it is a treat to engage with him online. In his latest message he asked why no one had responded to his question on how to deal with the tragedy of the commons in international relations. I told him I thought that good question deserved a serious response, so here it is, and thank you Olaf. Funny you should ask:
My browsers’ home page is www.iub.edu, Indiana University, Bloomington. There I see a picture of Elinor Ostrom at the university press conference the day she received the Nobel Prize in Economics. I am one among countless people in Bloomington and from around the planet who have been warmly welcomed and embraced as participants in weekly seminars at Lin and Vincent’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. I remember when in her presentations Lin began focusing on the tragedy of the commons. At her press conference Lin said that this had been the focus since her doctoral research under Vincent’s mentorship on control of water resources in the Los Angeles area. Field research under the auspices of the Workshop focused on isolating and documenting exceptions to the tragedy of the commons. In the press conference, Lin summarized these exceptions as social arenas in which people thought in terms of “the next seven generations.”
The research she did on policing, primarily with Roger Parks, found that police performance and community satisfaction were enhanced as police administration became decentralized; the tragedy of the commons abated as police power devolved.
Olaf, I share your focus and Lin’s on how to transcend the tragedy of the commons. I share with her as a would-be educator a quest to discover and share stories of how people actually manage to negotiate and cooperate. It happens all the time. I share Lin’s conclusion that in the long run, human synergy transforms violent confrontation by trickling up rather by being administered from any top down. To use my old buddy Rev. Bill Breeden’s term, mine and Lin’s have become a matter of learning and sharing the art of guerrilla peacefare. Thanks for asking Olaf. Love and peace, Hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 16, 2009
In retirement I have rejoined a single listserv where I post my blogs and engage in lively discussion on many issues—ahs-talk@prismatix.com. The sponsor is the Association for Humanist Sociology (humanistsoc.org), which met last week in New Orleans.
Olaf Krassnitzky and I have been sending each other a flurry of messages on that listserv. I don’t know Olaf personally, but it is a treat to engage with him online. In his latest message he asked why no one had responded to his question on how to deal with the tragedy of the commons in international relations. I told him I thought that good question deserved a serious response, so here it is, and thank you Olaf. Funny you should ask:
My browsers’ home page is www.iub.edu, Indiana University, Bloomington. There I see a picture of Elinor Ostrom at the university press conference the day she received the Nobel Prize in Economics. I am one among countless people in Bloomington and from around the planet who have been warmly welcomed and embraced as participants in weekly seminars at Lin and Vincent’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. I remember when in her presentations Lin began focusing on the tragedy of the commons. At her press conference Lin said that this had been the focus since her doctoral research under Vincent’s mentorship on control of water resources in the Los Angeles area. Field research under the auspices of the Workshop focused on isolating and documenting exceptions to the tragedy of the commons. In the press conference, Lin summarized these exceptions as social arenas in which people thought in terms of “the next seven generations.”
The research she did on policing, primarily with Roger Parks, found that police performance and community satisfaction were enhanced as police administration became decentralized; the tragedy of the commons abated as police power devolved.
Olaf, I share your focus and Lin’s on how to transcend the tragedy of the commons. I share with her as a would-be educator a quest to discover and share stories of how people actually manage to negotiate and cooperate. It happens all the time. I share Lin’s conclusion that in the long run, human synergy transforms violent confrontation by trickling up rather by being administered from any top down. To use my old buddy Rev. Bill Breeden’s term, mine and Lin’s have become a matter of learning and sharing the art of guerrilla peacefare. Thanks for asking Olaf. Love and peace, Hal
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Corruption, Conspiracy, and Solutions
CORRUPTION, CONSPIRACY, SOLUTIONS
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 15, 2009
If I believed that social problems could be solved by law’n’order, I would organize to ban certain concepts from human discourse. Among these would be corruption, conspiracy, and solutions. Like criminality, we use these words to define those whom we blame for our problems. When I was in grad school, my theoretical physicist uncle Ray Pepinsky, the inventor of x-ray chrystallography, taught me to call research findings that have no practical significance “trivial.” And so I say that distinctions between those we identify as corrupt conspirators and ourselves as problem solvers, are trivial. I pick corruption, conspiracy and solutions as examples here of the larger point that whatever categories we apply to separate “them” from “us”-- the harder we try to identify who is really whom--the harder we drive ourselves into mutual destruction.
Categories in mainstream rhetoric like corruption, conspiracy and solutions frame political discourse. As US sociologist W.I. Thomas put it, things that are defined as real are real in their consequences.
Where corruption is framed as why we can’t win a war, I think about people I meet who tell me their parents taught them right from wrong, and who volunteer to go into harm’s way to defend their family and their nation, which is what I was told led to official appointments of relatives in Tanzania for instance. Here in my own country I have never met a contested official decision that depended upon the facts at hand, rather than by considerations of who the person before them was. Is the disproportion of people of color in US cages a tribute to a dispassionate justice process? Is the privatization of prisons and military services worldwide incorruptible? I don’t have to be Hamid Karzai to see US hypocrisy, as the diplomatic euphemism goes at the highest levels. I ask whether people across Afghanistan and into Pakistan aren’t threatened defenseless by terror from air as deadly as the launching of v-rockets on London? How come our president isn’t going to memorial services for innocent women and children killed by US firepower in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq? Who then is the heartless, politically uncorrupted party in these situations?
“Conspiracy” literally means breathing together. It doesn’t matter where political deals are made—at the traffic stop, on the golf course, at an ASEAN meeting, wherever—aren’t they all conspiratorial, meaning: I’ll keep our secret if you keep it too, behind official and business scenes? Beyond the trivial finger-pointing business of who bigger and lesser conspirators are (aka the blame game), the only practical antithesis I can see to corruption is not keeping relations that affect other people secret. In a word, that’s called honesty (these days aka “transparency”).
Pure math problems have solutions, human problems do not. My definition of violence is the force of substantive goal fixation in any human relationship from the personal to the global. I began pepinsky.blogspot.com with a diatribe against fixation on growth. The harder we try to make people come around and do what it takes to accomplish a social goal, the bigger the inertial reaction, aka backlash or in CIA-talk blowback. I just blogged on how death-penalty opponents’ efforts to get state legislatures to offer life without parole as an alternative to a death sentence backfired. Life without parole has proliferated into sentencing teenagers to life without parole for having committed in one instance an armed robbery.
To avoid goal fixation, I pursue a process, peacemaking, rather than an end state, peace. (Like James Jones, I think I know how to achieve peace in short order; we just kill ourselves.) In that process, transformations from violent toward momentary settlement of differences rest, as Roger Fisher put it, on getting to yes! by moving from position to interest. In the victim-offender mediation program I was in back in Bloomington, a basic rule was “no name-calling.” I wish we would cut the name-calling crud when it comes to putting “them” in their place. I keep coming back to Walt Kelly’s swamp possum character Pogo’s routine conclusion: We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
As a criminologist learning from prisoners I early on concluded that for the most part, there but for the grace of god go I. I don’t think calling people corrupt or conspiratorial, or proposing how to solve other people’s problems, helps us get over…and when we do, to avoid becoming complacent and instead remaining open to airing and negotiating our differences rather than trying to stomp them out. L&p hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 15, 2009
If I believed that social problems could be solved by law’n’order, I would organize to ban certain concepts from human discourse. Among these would be corruption, conspiracy, and solutions. Like criminality, we use these words to define those whom we blame for our problems. When I was in grad school, my theoretical physicist uncle Ray Pepinsky, the inventor of x-ray chrystallography, taught me to call research findings that have no practical significance “trivial.” And so I say that distinctions between those we identify as corrupt conspirators and ourselves as problem solvers, are trivial. I pick corruption, conspiracy and solutions as examples here of the larger point that whatever categories we apply to separate “them” from “us”-- the harder we try to identify who is really whom--the harder we drive ourselves into mutual destruction.
Categories in mainstream rhetoric like corruption, conspiracy and solutions frame political discourse. As US sociologist W.I. Thomas put it, things that are defined as real are real in their consequences.
Where corruption is framed as why we can’t win a war, I think about people I meet who tell me their parents taught them right from wrong, and who volunteer to go into harm’s way to defend their family and their nation, which is what I was told led to official appointments of relatives in Tanzania for instance. Here in my own country I have never met a contested official decision that depended upon the facts at hand, rather than by considerations of who the person before them was. Is the disproportion of people of color in US cages a tribute to a dispassionate justice process? Is the privatization of prisons and military services worldwide incorruptible? I don’t have to be Hamid Karzai to see US hypocrisy, as the diplomatic euphemism goes at the highest levels. I ask whether people across Afghanistan and into Pakistan aren’t threatened defenseless by terror from air as deadly as the launching of v-rockets on London? How come our president isn’t going to memorial services for innocent women and children killed by US firepower in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq? Who then is the heartless, politically uncorrupted party in these situations?
“Conspiracy” literally means breathing together. It doesn’t matter where political deals are made—at the traffic stop, on the golf course, at an ASEAN meeting, wherever—aren’t they all conspiratorial, meaning: I’ll keep our secret if you keep it too, behind official and business scenes? Beyond the trivial finger-pointing business of who bigger and lesser conspirators are (aka the blame game), the only practical antithesis I can see to corruption is not keeping relations that affect other people secret. In a word, that’s called honesty (these days aka “transparency”).
Pure math problems have solutions, human problems do not. My definition of violence is the force of substantive goal fixation in any human relationship from the personal to the global. I began pepinsky.blogspot.com with a diatribe against fixation on growth. The harder we try to make people come around and do what it takes to accomplish a social goal, the bigger the inertial reaction, aka backlash or in CIA-talk blowback. I just blogged on how death-penalty opponents’ efforts to get state legislatures to offer life without parole as an alternative to a death sentence backfired. Life without parole has proliferated into sentencing teenagers to life without parole for having committed in one instance an armed robbery.
To avoid goal fixation, I pursue a process, peacemaking, rather than an end state, peace. (Like James Jones, I think I know how to achieve peace in short order; we just kill ourselves.) In that process, transformations from violent toward momentary settlement of differences rest, as Roger Fisher put it, on getting to yes! by moving from position to interest. In the victim-offender mediation program I was in back in Bloomington, a basic rule was “no name-calling.” I wish we would cut the name-calling crud when it comes to putting “them” in their place. I keep coming back to Walt Kelly’s swamp possum character Pogo’s routine conclusion: We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
As a criminologist learning from prisoners I early on concluded that for the most part, there but for the grace of god go I. I don’t think calling people corrupt or conspiratorial, or proposing how to solve other people’s problems, helps us get over…and when we do, to avoid becoming complacent and instead remaining open to airing and negotiating our differences rather than trying to stomp them out. L&p hal
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Corruption in Afghanistan
Corruption in Afghanistan
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 12, 2009
Corruption is the growing excuse for US withdrawal (pardon the sexual allusion) from Afghanistan. The US ambassador to Kabul, formerly a general in charge of US troops there, sent a memo to his president advising against sending more troops to that war, which was leaked today, reportedly saying the Afghan government was hopelessly corrupt. The current general in charge who filed an earlier leaked report had recommended a “surge” of 40,000 troops, and according to BBC sources is furious at the ambassador’s leaked memo.
Corruption is a ten-letter word for what?
There are all kinds of ways to calculate personal gain from official behavior. What is in it for example for the economic future of the Afghan president, the general, the ambassador, and all those who have staked their future and the future of their families on loyalty?
I have come to believe that our passion to point fingers at the criminality/corruption of others is a projection of the corruption we tolerate and support among ourselves. Does it make a difference to those who are harmed and deceived whether government actors benefit in prospective private-sector employment and retirement, in one’s duty to take care of the social security of extended family, or in subsisting day to day? I don’t think so. What hurts about corruption is lying about what we are doing in the name of serving one another. This is a problem I concentrated on when I was in Tanzania in 1990 (Corruption, Bribery and Patriarchy in Tanzania, Crime, Law, and Social Change 17: 25-57, 1992).
For starters, I ask this question about US corruption: What prompted a government to tolerate two violations of federal law, namely the leaking of two classified reports to the president by a general and then by an ambassador? Could it possibly be…corruption? In terms of practical consequences, I’d say these secret games for political gain are more hurtful than the president of Afghanistan could ever accomplish. He can’t order up 40,000 more troops without recruiting people dedicated to blowing away him and those who stand with him. The US government’s power of life and death overwhelms his.
Openness about one’s own motives is the best one has to offer to make peace with one’s antagonists. Let’s be honest here in the US. The historical political juggernaut that drove superpower US forces to invade Afghanistan was a blind capitulation to US political expediency; any president who didn’t lash out at someone after 911 was politically suicidal. I think of all the cluster bomblets that bit of political expediency for private gain laid on children in Afghan family plots. Has US political and media dialogue not gotten corrupted into defending and escalating investment in an indefensible massively homicidal political reflex?
If we in my country were not corrupted, I think it obvious that we would apologize to everyone we occupy militarily worldwide for our Anglo history of colonialism, would withdraw and would negotiate reparations. But of course we are too heavily invested in our own good-old-boy corrupt ways to be different from Afghanis. I’d like us to get off the corruption issue and face whether US attempts to colonize other parts of the planet aren’t doomed to failure, and assume responsibility for the consequences of our own actions. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 12, 2009
Corruption is the growing excuse for US withdrawal (pardon the sexual allusion) from Afghanistan. The US ambassador to Kabul, formerly a general in charge of US troops there, sent a memo to his president advising against sending more troops to that war, which was leaked today, reportedly saying the Afghan government was hopelessly corrupt. The current general in charge who filed an earlier leaked report had recommended a “surge” of 40,000 troops, and according to BBC sources is furious at the ambassador’s leaked memo.
Corruption is a ten-letter word for what?
There are all kinds of ways to calculate personal gain from official behavior. What is in it for example for the economic future of the Afghan president, the general, the ambassador, and all those who have staked their future and the future of their families on loyalty?
I have come to believe that our passion to point fingers at the criminality/corruption of others is a projection of the corruption we tolerate and support among ourselves. Does it make a difference to those who are harmed and deceived whether government actors benefit in prospective private-sector employment and retirement, in one’s duty to take care of the social security of extended family, or in subsisting day to day? I don’t think so. What hurts about corruption is lying about what we are doing in the name of serving one another. This is a problem I concentrated on when I was in Tanzania in 1990 (Corruption, Bribery and Patriarchy in Tanzania, Crime, Law, and Social Change 17: 25-57, 1992).
For starters, I ask this question about US corruption: What prompted a government to tolerate two violations of federal law, namely the leaking of two classified reports to the president by a general and then by an ambassador? Could it possibly be…corruption? In terms of practical consequences, I’d say these secret games for political gain are more hurtful than the president of Afghanistan could ever accomplish. He can’t order up 40,000 more troops without recruiting people dedicated to blowing away him and those who stand with him. The US government’s power of life and death overwhelms his.
Openness about one’s own motives is the best one has to offer to make peace with one’s antagonists. Let’s be honest here in the US. The historical political juggernaut that drove superpower US forces to invade Afghanistan was a blind capitulation to US political expediency; any president who didn’t lash out at someone after 911 was politically suicidal. I think of all the cluster bomblets that bit of political expediency for private gain laid on children in Afghan family plots. Has US political and media dialogue not gotten corrupted into defending and escalating investment in an indefensible massively homicidal political reflex?
If we in my country were not corrupted, I think it obvious that we would apologize to everyone we occupy militarily worldwide for our Anglo history of colonialism, would withdraw and would negotiate reparations. But of course we are too heavily invested in our own good-old-boy corrupt ways to be different from Afghanis. I’d like us to get off the corruption issue and face whether US attempts to colonize other parts of the planet aren’t doomed to failure, and assume responsibility for the consequences of our own actions. Love and peace--hal
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Life Without Parole
Life Without Parole
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
Armistice Day 2009
Two days ago the US supreme court heard oral arguments on whether sentencing juveniles to life without parole for crimes other than murder is cruel and unusual punishment. Since I figure punishment is cruel and unusual in human relations period, I have no arguments to make to the court on this occasion.
I DO note the irony of proliferation of imposition of life without parole. Death penalty abolitionists originally proposed life without parole as a legally cheaper alternative to the death penalty, pointing out that if life without parole were offered US residents in polls as an option to execution, support for the death penalty dropped to a minority. Defense counsel were led to encourage their capital clients to plead to life without parole; those sentences proliferated faster than the decline in death sentences.
Now that life without parole has become established as a “humane” alternative to our basic desires to kill the bastards, legislatures have raised punishment for all manner of offenses to that limit, and have, as in Florida in 77 cases, extended the limit to juveniles.
Punitive excess like leniency is always subject to political reversal. Executive clemency and pardon can end any life sentence, and perhaps as time passes, political pressure will increase resort to this legal option. Meanwhile, life without parole has blown back among its proponents who aspired to lighten sanctions against convicted offenders.
In my recovery as a lawyer, I have learned to beware legal victory. Victory is always subject to reversal. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
Armistice Day 2009
Two days ago the US supreme court heard oral arguments on whether sentencing juveniles to life without parole for crimes other than murder is cruel and unusual punishment. Since I figure punishment is cruel and unusual in human relations period, I have no arguments to make to the court on this occasion.
I DO note the irony of proliferation of imposition of life without parole. Death penalty abolitionists originally proposed life without parole as a legally cheaper alternative to the death penalty, pointing out that if life without parole were offered US residents in polls as an option to execution, support for the death penalty dropped to a minority. Defense counsel were led to encourage their capital clients to plead to life without parole; those sentences proliferated faster than the decline in death sentences.
Now that life without parole has become established as a “humane” alternative to our basic desires to kill the bastards, legislatures have raised punishment for all manner of offenses to that limit, and have, as in Florida in 77 cases, extended the limit to juveniles.
Punitive excess like leniency is always subject to political reversal. Executive clemency and pardon can end any life sentence, and perhaps as time passes, political pressure will increase resort to this legal option. Meanwhile, life without parole has blown back among its proponents who aspired to lighten sanctions against convicted offenders.
In my recovery as a lawyer, I have learned to beware legal victory. Victory is always subject to reversal. Love and peace--hal
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Veteran's Day
11.11.11
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu , pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 10, 2009
I figured it was a good omen when I chose November 11 for a second Ohio chiropractic routine adjustment and the receptionist suggested 11 am appointment. 11.11.11. On November 11, 1918, at 11 am local time, an armistice—a cease fire—took effect. All weapons fire ceased. World War I ended. Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. When I grew up, the holiday was called Armistice Day. That’s the way I think of 11.11.11, as the moment a world war ended.
Then there was August 11, 1945, when the Japanese emperor’s military representatives unconditionally surrendered on a US aircraft carrier.
That national myth of military victory, of ending wars, persists in my country. But it can’t happen. In 1967 I heard Secretary of State Dean Rusk call Vietnam a war to end all wars. Today, wars can only be negotiated, grievance by grievance. There is no end, only acknowledgment that the ending of international wars ended the year I was born. Victory, and the moral arrogance that goes with it, r.i.p. May all our adjustments to today’s military reality work as well as the adjustment my chiropractor makes promises to do for my bodily integrity. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu , pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 10, 2009
I figured it was a good omen when I chose November 11 for a second Ohio chiropractic routine adjustment and the receptionist suggested 11 am appointment. 11.11.11. On November 11, 1918, at 11 am local time, an armistice—a cease fire—took effect. All weapons fire ceased. World War I ended. Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. When I grew up, the holiday was called Armistice Day. That’s the way I think of 11.11.11, as the moment a world war ended.
Then there was August 11, 1945, when the Japanese emperor’s military representatives unconditionally surrendered on a US aircraft carrier.
That national myth of military victory, of ending wars, persists in my country. But it can’t happen. In 1967 I heard Secretary of State Dean Rusk call Vietnam a war to end all wars. Today, wars can only be negotiated, grievance by grievance. There is no end, only acknowledgment that the ending of international wars ended the year I was born. Victory, and the moral arrogance that goes with it, r.i.p. May all our adjustments to today’s military reality work as well as the adjustment my chiropractor makes promises to do for my bodily integrity. Love and peace--hal
Monday, November 2, 2009
Hold your breath
I couldn't help asking this question on the humanist sociology discussion list, something I keep thinking about when I ask myself what I stand for as a human incarnate:
a little help with a question please?
Pepinsky, Harold E.
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 4:31 PM
To: ahs-talk@prismatix.com
Attachments:
Human life on earth's surface has more than tripled in my lifetime. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. What is the contribution of increase of human exhalation to greenhouse emissions? What does carbon accumulation matter for me or you as a human being anyway? So what? l&p hal
a little help with a question please?
Pepinsky, Harold E.
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 4:31 PM
To: ahs-talk@prismatix.com
Attachments:
Human life on earth's surface has more than tripled in my lifetime. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. What is the contribution of increase of human exhalation to greenhouse emissions? What does carbon accumulation matter for me or you as a human being anyway? So what? l&p hal
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Self-Destruction in Pakistan and Afghanistan
SELF-DESTRUCTION IN PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 1, 2009
Pakistani and US military actions endanger themselves and their own people. I do not celebrate that Pakistani/Coalition/Afghani actions escalate the toll we bear for their preoccupation with conquering the enemy.
I think of the first long song I sang with granddaughter a year ago when she was born: “The old lady who swallowed the fly.”
For her: [Mila, sweetie, may you get off the political train toward trying to identify and take out “the bad guys,” and enjoy the love your own mom and dad give you so wholeheartedly. I hope you come to understand that escalating wars to avoid surrender only makes it harder to tell your enemies from those with whom folks like you and me are committed, as in my case with you, from life until one of dies first (almost certainly me long before you, and how wonderful to know you while we are alive together)]…[for mom and dad, please keep this for Mila’s records.]
What is the Pakistani military thinking!? As refugees pour out from in front of your military offensive, how many new “militant” sympathizers can you fail to imagine cross behind your lines? Then they hook up with other earlier angry refugee members and assorted cousins and such, and you have created a new, interconnected but in terms of when and where to strike next, free to act independently or coordinate attacks, fraternal organization and defender of the homeland and its allies.
Up through World War II, you could win a war because your enemy was headed by an emperor or president or chancellor or prime minister or general. Someone was clearly in charge; someone could surrender and all his followers would lay down their arms. The UN Charter reflected the fantasy that henceforth, “the war to end all wars” having concluded, the five biggest national winners of WWII would be empowered to take care of any really serious threat of war. They would tell their colonial or national subordinates to get in line if need be, and the only wars left to fight would be those all five permanent members of the security council agreement to authorize force for. No member nation could otherwise launch an armed attack except in self-defense under Art. 57(under which, as “collective self-defense,” the US government justified its escalating invasion of the former French Indochina). How many times has the US government, by this or that bending of the rules, overtly and covertly, made a lie of the US Constitution’s injunction that “Congress shall declare war” and that as a treaty, the UN Charter ranks beside the Constitution as “the supreme law of the land.”
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No one has to give consequences for bad choices on any side in contemporary struggle; karma is at work. There is no justice in the logic that what goes around comes around. Afghani and Pakistani civilians, predominantly women and children, suffer most in any war I have heard about, including for instance the women and children of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, by which the US achieved victory—celebrating that in major confrontations we killed so many more of “them”---primarily civilian non-combatant women and children—that got killed in return. Now drones are the US ultimate weapon: kill while never risking being killed back. Never mind how many women and children around the national enemies you target in the house your kid on a joystick blows up when he drops the bomb or launches the missile. Equally to the point, what responsibility do we as a nation accept for taking care of people who drop these bombs from rooms in Virginia and Colorado, and can’t talk with anyone when they go home that they have blown up households of people they never knew, day by day? Apparently, US policy is to bar no holds on political assassination by us, while decrying “terrorist” threats against our own leaders. Hey, it’s only a drone, not a terrorist.
These days I’m a little pessimistic. We and our military allies concertedly kill and destroy other peoples “on the ground” and don’t recognize the pleas we hear from people who live in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Please, outsiders, leave us to work out our own feuds and whatever among ourselves; please leave us alone; please leave us in peace. I only wish…
Meanwhile, bombs go off in urban centers in our two countries. The Chinese Communists were the first in the post-WWII era to show that indigenous guerrilla warfare wears down and ultimately outlasts superpower-sponsored attempts at domination. I hear that many urban Pakistanis, like students at the National Islamic University bombed last week, blame the primary foreign patron, us. How many friends and family do they nurture resentment among, behind military lines in Pakistan and my country? Why is our military risking our own lives further by waging offenses that can conquer nothing? I’m not an insider. I don’t know, but I’m discouraged to see how steadfastly my government and others persist in growing resort to military firepower. L&p hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 1, 2009
Pakistani and US military actions endanger themselves and their own people. I do not celebrate that Pakistani/Coalition/Afghani actions escalate the toll we bear for their preoccupation with conquering the enemy.
I think of the first long song I sang with granddaughter a year ago when she was born: “The old lady who swallowed the fly.”
For her: [Mila, sweetie, may you get off the political train toward trying to identify and take out “the bad guys,” and enjoy the love your own mom and dad give you so wholeheartedly. I hope you come to understand that escalating wars to avoid surrender only makes it harder to tell your enemies from those with whom folks like you and me are committed, as in my case with you, from life until one of dies first (almost certainly me long before you, and how wonderful to know you while we are alive together)]…[for mom and dad, please keep this for Mila’s records.]
What is the Pakistani military thinking!? As refugees pour out from in front of your military offensive, how many new “militant” sympathizers can you fail to imagine cross behind your lines? Then they hook up with other earlier angry refugee members and assorted cousins and such, and you have created a new, interconnected but in terms of when and where to strike next, free to act independently or coordinate attacks, fraternal organization and defender of the homeland and its allies.
Up through World War II, you could win a war because your enemy was headed by an emperor or president or chancellor or prime minister or general. Someone was clearly in charge; someone could surrender and all his followers would lay down their arms. The UN Charter reflected the fantasy that henceforth, “the war to end all wars” having concluded, the five biggest national winners of WWII would be empowered to take care of any really serious threat of war. They would tell their colonial or national subordinates to get in line if need be, and the only wars left to fight would be those all five permanent members of the security council agreement to authorize force for. No member nation could otherwise launch an armed attack except in self-defense under Art. 57(under which, as “collective self-defense,” the US government justified its escalating invasion of the former French Indochina). How many times has the US government, by this or that bending of the rules, overtly and covertly, made a lie of the US Constitution’s injunction that “Congress shall declare war” and that as a treaty, the UN Charter ranks beside the Constitution as “the supreme law of the land.”
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No one has to give consequences for bad choices on any side in contemporary struggle; karma is at work. There is no justice in the logic that what goes around comes around. Afghani and Pakistani civilians, predominantly women and children, suffer most in any war I have heard about, including for instance the women and children of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, by which the US achieved victory—celebrating that in major confrontations we killed so many more of “them”---primarily civilian non-combatant women and children—that got killed in return. Now drones are the US ultimate weapon: kill while never risking being killed back. Never mind how many women and children around the national enemies you target in the house your kid on a joystick blows up when he drops the bomb or launches the missile. Equally to the point, what responsibility do we as a nation accept for taking care of people who drop these bombs from rooms in Virginia and Colorado, and can’t talk with anyone when they go home that they have blown up households of people they never knew, day by day? Apparently, US policy is to bar no holds on political assassination by us, while decrying “terrorist” threats against our own leaders. Hey, it’s only a drone, not a terrorist.
These days I’m a little pessimistic. We and our military allies concertedly kill and destroy other peoples “on the ground” and don’t recognize the pleas we hear from people who live in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Please, outsiders, leave us to work out our own feuds and whatever among ourselves; please leave us alone; please leave us in peace. I only wish…
Meanwhile, bombs go off in urban centers in our two countries. The Chinese Communists were the first in the post-WWII era to show that indigenous guerrilla warfare wears down and ultimately outlasts superpower-sponsored attempts at domination. I hear that many urban Pakistanis, like students at the National Islamic University bombed last week, blame the primary foreign patron, us. How many friends and family do they nurture resentment among, behind military lines in Pakistan and my country? Why is our military risking our own lives further by waging offenses that can conquer nothing? I’m not an insider. I don’t know, but I’m discouraged to see how steadfastly my government and others persist in growing resort to military firepower. L&p hal
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