2005: Bad Year for Goliath- How About David?

[Clara T]

2005: Bad Year for Goliath
How About David?
By Rebecca Solnit

To say that it was a bad year for Goliath doesn't mean it was exactly a good one for what George Bailey, in annual holiday It's a Wonderful Life reruns, calls "the little people." U.S. public opinion has almost caught up with the rest of the world in opposing the war, but Iraqis are still being bombed and American soldiers are still dying.

I write this from Buenos Aires, which attracts activists from afar for its progressive social movements, but up close is more compelling for its armies of the poor -- such as the cartoñeros who come out after dark to collect recyclables, families pushing huge loads through the summer night toward whatever pittance a pile of old cardboard brings in. In the same way, you could focus on how Hurricane Katrina damaged the Bush administration's standing, but the suffering of people displaced on roofs, and then in sports stadiums, and now out of view (but in hardly less precarious circumstances around the country) might matter more.

The most compelling images of 2005 are those of war, flood, and riot, but perhaps the most summary one wasn't even of human beings. It was a novelty photograph that appeared in many newspapers in late September of a huge non-native python that choked itself to death trying to swallow an alligator in Florida. It proved a lasting image of overwhelming and unsuccessful greed. All around the world this year, the snake choked and the alligator refused to see itself as lunch -- if you will let "alligator" stand in here for "civil society," for all the groups, organizations, publics, and citizenries who stood up for their rights.

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Thirteen months ago, when Bush was reelected, the despondent around me seemed to think that our future was graven in stone. But in the best and worst of ways, in this wild, wild year that ends so differently than it began, it has turned out to be written in water. Much of the news is grim, but the best of it is being lived out by nurses, immigrant farmworkers, Korean farmers, campers in the grass of Crawford, Texas, marchers in the streets of Washington, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, scribblers on various blogs, volunteers in various crises, and the immeasurable force of people everywhere who won't let the official version go unchallenged anywhere.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=43912

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. When I was twelve . . .

. . . in 1971, I had a brilliant Social Studies teacher. He MADE us read the KC Star everyday. (When that was an independent, Pulitzer Award-winning paper, instead of the corporate rag it is today.)

Between that and Life magazine's riveting black and white coverage of Vietnam/Cambodia, we were forced to see the least, the poorest, the most marginalized peoples . . . and see them being bombed into oblivion. But, at least we saw it--some of us kids understood the magnitude of evil our nation was doling out. Our nation which had "God on its side."

Today, the poor who have been blasted by Katrina are purposefully being hidden from all Americans. No, they aren't being napalmed down there on the Gulf coast. But many are still without shelter and heat, and from what little news coverage I see these days, those people look as frightened and without hope as did the "enemy" in 1971.

And they are Americans.