Will All Our “Digitalies” Save the World??

It’s been a while since I’ve been on this blog.  But so much hate and terror is currently terrorizing the world that I think it’s important to be part of a thoughtful, healing conversation. 

In April 2012, commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, Avi Benlolo—President/CEO, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center Canada—posted a blog entitled, “Could the Internet Have Stopped the Holocaust?” I googled the question today in the context of my own cynicism about worldwide deadly violence and oppression currently overwhelming online, print, and television/radio news and social media, and I ran across Benlolo’s reflection on the power of 21^st-century “digitalities” in the hands of humans. 

It’s a question I’ve asked my writing/rhetoric students often:  would the holocaust have been able to occur in our current 24-hour/day cable/online news cycles and in the context of instant cellphone images and social media? It’s a question I have myself as a digital communicator

To my mind, the obvious answer is—or should be—of course not!  If the world had just known what was really happening in Germany and Eastern Europe, they absolutely would’ve condemned it and worked to remove Hitler and the Nazis from power.  After all, Benlolo points out about our current digital age, “At no other time in history have ordinary people with minimal resources at their fingertips had the opportunity to shape the course of world events in such a dramatic way”—to create a critical mass of equally ordinary people, from literally around the planet, virtually instantaneously. 

BUT…Benlolo qualifies his celebration of people’s power and reach:  “Had the digital age existed and had enough individuals been encouraged by mass social activism, one hopes the outcome would have been different.”  And that’s the big IF of our age isn’t it?  IF enough individuals become aware and involved, then make sure others became aware and involved…one hopes those individuals would have a transformative, healing impact.  A better outcome remains only a possibility.

And here we are, July 2014. 

• Pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels shoot down a commercial airliner flying from Europe to the Pacific, filled with 298 souls looking for a beach-side vacation, to reunite with loved ones, to enjoy much needed rest and relaxation with the kids before a new school year begins;
• Israel invades Gaza under the guise of stopping terrorist activity by Hamas, with over 1,400 Palestinians killed—80% civilians including children—in what seems to be an ongoing Palestinian genocide on the part of a militant Israel, home to survivors, children, and grandchildren of Hitler’s Jewish genocide;
• 200 young school girls are abducted by Islamic extremists in Nigeria because the young girls had the audacity to seek education—while some have escaped, 3 months later, no one knows where the girls are;
• Islamic extremists burst through the Syrian border into Iraq seeking outright domination, now insisting that all Iraqi females undergo genital mutilation;
• young children flee deadly violence in their Central American home countries, making a perilous trek across Mexico alone to the U.S. southern border in the summer heat, to be greeted by hate-filled, threatening Americans demanding they be return to where they came from. 

And we have all the news, social media, and up-to-the-minute cellphone images showing all the ugliness taking place in living color.  While millions have undertaken what Benlolo envisions, the deadliness, brutality, and domination continue. 

One of Benlolo’s blog respondents argued that surely social media, iPhone images taken from within prisoner train cars, 24-hour cable news, etc. would’ve at the least kept Hitler’s police squads busy and distracted.  But the same respondent celebrates the idea that thanks to our global digital network and media, nothing like the Holocaust will ever be able to happen again.  That respondent must have missed Benlolo’s reference to the Rwandan genocide that killed millions (1990s), the Bosnian genocide that required international military intervention (1990s), and the death and displacement of millions of Western Sudanese in a bloody civil war (2000s).   

Benlolo applauds those using digital technologies to increase awareness, to influence world political and economic leaders, to build advocacy coalitions.  But he adds another call to action: he calls on us to care more and sooner.  Another respondent to Benlolo’s HuffPost blog agrees that certainly our digital connectedness could’ve significantly mitigated the deadliness of the Nazi Final Solution.  But she cautions that ongoing history makes it evident that the human race still has some serious evolving to do before we reach a point of truly caring more and caring sooner, before we “reach that critical mass needed to make a difference” (annwil).

We’re great at immediate, real-time, show-n-tell, like first-graders, eagerly posting for all our “friends” the stories, photos, commentary, “facts,” and interpretation of those facts coming our way in sound bites, heavily-edited news reports, and 140 characters.  And many of us care.  Yet many feel utterly powerless to make any real difference, or we are absolutely overwhelmed by so much hate, violence, destruction, & oppressive power over the many by the few that we shut down, shut off, tune out.  The ubiquity of digital information about our world works against our caring enough to act, against caring soon enough to prevent brutality and slaughter taking place just down the road or across the planet. 

Elie Wiesel believes love’s opposite isn’t hate but indifference…not caring enough, not caring until it’s more convenient or absolutely necessary, not caring at all because it’s none of our business or it doesn’t affect us.  Our digital technologies are evolving much more rapidly than we humans; and surely we’ll continue to increase our effectiveness at using them transformatively, sooner and w/ greater care for our fellow inhabitants of planet Earth.  But in the context of today’s world, I have to answer Benlolo’s question with an unsatisfactory “no.”  No, the Internet, wifi, the latest iPhone, the Twitterverse, would not have stopped the Holocaust…then or now.  What say you?  What can we do now to move our digital and human evolution forward?

Who Are We? Justifying the Unjustifiable II

Not a week after posting my reflections on the latest gross cruelty to helpless chickens being slowly smothered to death so that humans can have cheap meat, sure enough, we moved on to enact cruelty and suffering on a fellow human.  In this particular case, we rationalized our actions in the name of justice.  

Erica Goode, writer for The New York Times reported the following about the Ohio execution of Dennis B. McGuire, which took place Thursday morning, January 16th.

"As the lethal drugs flowed into his veins in the Ohio death chamber, Dennis B. McGuire at first “went unconscious” and his body was still, his daughter, Amber McGuire, said Friday.

But a few minutes later, she said, she was horrified to see her father struggling, his stomach heaving, a fist clenching.

'He started making all these horrible, horrible noises, and at that point, that’s when I covered my eyes and my ears,' said Ms. McGuire, who watched the execution on Thursday at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, near Lucasville. 'He was suffering.'

"Mr. McGuire’s execution, conducted with a new and untested combination of drugs, took about 25 minutes from the time the drugs were started to the time death was declared." 

Dennis McGuire committed the heinous crime of rape and murder, and the woman he attacked was pregnant.  There is no excuse for his brutality.  He should've had to pay for the rest of his life for his unjustifiable choices and actions.  

 The family of Joy Stewart, the woman McGuire probably can relate to the pain and suffering of McGuire's family.  But they don't share their sympathies for McGuire.  Goode paraphrased the Stewart family statement after the execution:  "whatever Mr. McGuire’s suffering, it paled in comparison with what Ms. Stewart went through at the hands of her killer. 'He is being treated far more humanely than he treated her.'"

The family's sentiments are certainly understandable.  But McGuire’s brutality does not justify or sanction our own state-sponsored brutality.  The United States is the only Western nation that practices capital punishment in just under ¾ of the 50 states and Washington D.C.  In the last handful of years, China has executed more individuals, by the thousands, than all of the rest of the world countries that exercise capital punishment put together, as the chart below, from Amnesty International, shows:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/images/2013_executing_countries_high_res.jpg

But please also make note that the United States is one of the top 10 countries in executing criminals, and notice the company we keep besides China:  Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Sudan…world countries we in the United States often criticize for their human rights abuses.  

The cause of McGuire’s suffering during his execution is that Ohio had to scramble to come up with a new poisonous cocktail by which to kill him.  As Goode points out, the European manufacturers of the chemicals that previously had made up our humane “lethal injection” combination have banned their use in state executions.  

So a new combination, never used before, was given to McGuire.  And the result?  Like the chickens subjected to the latest and greatest innovative slaughter technique in the food production industry, slowly smothered in a chemical foam, McGuire was slowly poisoned, apparently unconscious, while his body tried to breathe.  Goode makes the experimental nature of the execution clear: “It has not been established whether Mr. McGuire was conscious of pain or whether the drugs that were used were responsible for his prolonged death.”  

In Ohio alone, according to USA Today, four executions are scheduled in 2014, with one as early as March.  And the state authorities don’t seem to see a problem with McGuire’s death.  Goode reports that one of the state’s assistant attorneys general, in response to the U.S. Constitution’s ban against “cruel and unusual punishment,” insisted that such restrictions don’t mean that executes are “entitled to a pain-free execution.”

I am personally opposed to capital punishment.  Frankly I see sanctioned state murder as much more representative of who we are as a culture, as an organized, supposedly humane, even Christian, collective than it is about the the actions of the convicted criminal.  And this latest effort to ensure justice casts “us” in a dark, blood thirsty light that, in reality, has absolutely nothing to do with true justice in a questionably peace-loving, supposedly civilized society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/us/prolonged-execution-prompts-debate-over-death-penalty-methods.html?_r=1

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/17/ohio-execution-raises-legal-ethical-questions-/4604047/

Who Are We? Justifying the Unjustifiable

OK, so I just posted this horrific story on my Facebook page on the slaughter of "free range" chickens by suffocating them in a chemical foam.  Last Chance for Animals is the source I shared on my FB page, but they posted a link to this agricultural website reporting quite matter-of-factly that the USDA has approved this foam as a "depopulation" process in agri-business.  Last Change for Animals  explains that this process takes 15 minutes for the foam to suffocate the chickens, so they spend 15 long painful minutes trying to breathe and live.
 





https://www.facebook.com/LastChanceForAnimals

The photo was just like the last straw for me.  Another FB friend had posted it to her status and it showed up on my page.  I didn't want to share it.  I didn't want to make my FB friends uncomfortable.  I didn't want to come across like some rabid animal rights extremist.  But at the same time, people need to know the realities of what we humans are complicit in.  My last comment on my long FB rant was I wonder how long it will be until we start using this procedure on humans, justifying it in all kinds of perverse ways.

It just seems we humans are growing more and more perverse and barbaric.

Then I opened my email and saw my daily newsletter from the Christian Vegetarian Association, by Lorena Mucke.  And her report today was equally despair-inducing:

"It’s Time to Evolve
“Slaughtering animals for their meat is a socially-permissible ethical transgression”, says Bob Comis, farmer and writer. Comis raises pigs for food and agrees that he makes a living unethically, and that what he does to pigs is terribly wrong. Please visit The importance of our evolution beyond killing for food
Mr. Comis recognizes that there’s no need to kill animals to survive, and that killing them is unethical and terribly wrong. He tries to cause as little suffering to these creatures by raising them in the least abusive way he knows, but at the end, the pigs encounter a terrifying and painful death.
It’s time to evolve and to see that the practice of eating animals must end. It’s time for more peace, more joy, more health, more unity and more compassion."

Seriously...how human of us:  we know what we're doing is barbaric, indefensible, and unethical. But we do it anyway.  And we try to justify ourselves, and minimize our brutality, and insist we're good people, and at least what we're doing isn't as horrible as so-and-so. 

The callousness toward other beings in these two stories is so all too familiar these days.  And it's not just the animals suffering brutality at the hands of humans; we are pretty damned ugly toward each other as well.  And boy are we humans creative and insistent in our myriad justifications:  "we need meat for protein"; "I have the right to stand my ground!"; "national security"; "I've got to make a living"; "it's just business"; "we must fight the terrorists"; "it's none of your business how I treat my animals or kids or spouse, what I eat, what I wear, if I carry a gun"; "we adhere to the minimum humane laws"; "sorry that there are 'innocent casualties' but we're at war"....

Lorene Mucke says it's time to evolve.  Oprah often quoted Maya Angelou as saying that we (humans, I guess...we who are ethical maybe) always do the best we can, and when we know better, we do better.  Well, we are well beyond time to evolve, and yet we don't seem to be doing so.  And like the pig farmer/slaughterer above, I think far too often we DO know better, but the knowing does NOT change our behavior, or our appetites, or our sense of entitlement, or our greed, or our lust for blood.

There doesn't seem to be any truly effective solution to the problem of us and our behavior on this planet.  Science and education aren't the answer: we just seem to use our education, discoveries, and understandings, and innovative enterprise to find more means of exploitation and destruction.  Religion has only seemed to make us more divided and hateful, and we often commit our brutalities in Gods name if not asking for His/Her blessing on our blood-letting.  Atheism likewise hasn't seemed to make us more tolerant or respectful of others.  The Bible does seem to be right about one thing: the love of money does seem to be rooted in evil, since money seems to only provide the resources to fund our bad behavior.  Even activism and advocacy seem to be too impotent, too badly funded, too extremist, too poorly supported by long-term committed individuals to reach even first base on the journey to transformative critical mass.

And all the positive thinking meditations and gratitude lists can't seem to dispel the hopelessness I feel.  Years ago on Nightline, Ted Koppel asked holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel why he continued to fight the seemingly impossible fight against hate.  Wiesel responded that he had no illusions about making any real inroads against human hate, but that he fought against hate b/c it was the right thing to, that not resisting hate would be a capitulation.  So regardless of progress or no progress he continued b/c he had no choice; it was really the only thing he could do.  

But the new technologies of drone warfare--with it's impact on innocents--and brutality against animals in service to our appetites make it hard to stay the course. 

Surely there's no doubt we can do much better.  But will we?  I'm not so sure.

New Year: Women & Guns in a (Non)Violent Society

January 1st is such a moment of hope and possibility.  It's a time to reflect upon our own lives and consider what we can each/all do to make our lives better in the coming year.

Yet here we are, seemingly more divided than ever, as unkind to each other as ever, living in a “civilized” society as violent as ever. Unless we individually/collaboratively decide to think and act differently, January 1 is just another day.  The hope for change lies within us.

I began this blog a year ago.  It's been virtually unread.  But I still remain hopeful for connection.  And today I seek input from you, answers to questions, new questions, new perspective... 

I’m re-reading Paxton Quigley’s 1989 book, Armed & Female, in anticipation of digging into her revised version of the book, Total Control.  Quigley has become renowned for promoting women’s gun-centered self-defense, identifying gun ownership by women as feminist, as empowering.

Quigley was, in the 1960s, an ardent gun control activist according to her book, working to get the 1968 Handgun Control Act passed.  By the 80s, she’d switched gears and begun her journey as an equally passionate advocate for women owning and using guns for self-defense.  

Quigley sees direct correlation between women’s gun ownership—and training to use guns effectively—and their ability to protect themselves from danger.  The debate here isn’t new:  women are safer from attack w/ guns versus women are more likely to become shooting victims if guns are present.  

I’m not fully settled myself on whether owning a gun would make me safer, as a means of protection when I’m alone.  I live in the rural mid-South, so opportunities to buy guns, get firearms training, and regularly practice my shooting skills are abundant.  Since one of my scholarly areas of interest is gun rhetorics, especially women’s arguments for and against guns, I sorta feel obligated to learn to shoot.  

But Quigley’s arguments both trouble me and prompt deeper thought:  So I’d like to run some passages from her book by y’all for comment. 

Note: Quigley’s exact words are italicized. Capitalized words are my emphasis due to my own questions/alarm/reflection on those words and what they might or are intended by Quigley to mean.  I also add “side bar” comments in brackets.

•  Describing passage of the 1968 Handgun Control Act, Paxton explains:

“if guns were made harder or impossible for EVERYone to acquire, we thought violent crimes would subside….We waited for change….But crime continued to escalate….We bolted doors, installed alarm systems and expanded our police departments. Yet we grew more FRIGHTENED…Had we finally become A NATION OF VICTIMS?”

By the late 1980s, her views had changed:

“It was only last year that I came to realize that our gun control laws did not work…

• In a southern Idaho gun shop w/ a friend:

“Mr Clayton [the gun store owner] wasn’t much of a women’s libber, he said, but he had taught his daughter early on that she shouldn’t ever trust men to do anything she should be able to do herself [he had ensured that his wife & daughter knew how to shoot]….He carefully reminded me that once I had thought about buyng a gun [Clayton had just shown her a gun he thought would be good for her to have for self-defense] was like putting off buying a fire extinguisher for the kitchen….my attitude about guns has changed…my views on the nature of nonviolence do not conflict with defending myself or my family”

• Quigley’s cause & effect logic:

“If this trend [in the 1980s]  of gun ownership by women continues…there seems to be every indication that fewer and fewer people will try to rape or assault women.

“It is apparent…that the arming of American women needs to be brought out into the open, discussed, AND ADVANCED…PERHAPS THE LAST FRONTIER NEEDED TO BE WON BY WOMEN ON THE ROAD TO EQUALITY”   [So women owning guns is feminist, empowering, and puts women on a more equal footing in society w/ men]

• Telling the story of one of her sources for her overall argument in the book, attorney Randi McGinn:

“ ‘I would never have bought a gun of my wn volition…Guns were things men used…GUNS WERE USED FOR VIOLENCE AND DEATH. I HAD EEN RAISED TO BELIEVE THAT I WAS NOT CAPABLE OF VIOLENCE’ [Quigley doesn’t go on to make explicit if McGinn specifically means that she was raised as a female to believe she wasn’t capable of violence—it’s left for the readers to infer; my opinion is that the inference is intentional on Quigley’s or McGinn’s part].

“Years have gone by since then.  Now Randi owns more than one gun….’But if I’m in that situation, I would hate myself for having a gun but having t somewhere else.’”

“Randi has always considered herself a liberal and a feminist, her article [which Quigley explains Randi wrote to explain her gun ownership as a woman] PRESENTED A STRONG FEMINIST VIEWPOINT IN TERMS OF SELF-PROTECTION AND TAKING RESPONSIBILITY”  [This idea of Quigley’s of the responsibility of women to own guns and be capable of defending themselves when they need to is very important to Quigley’s overall argument]

• Quigley’s feminist argument:

“Women can use two types of strategies in response to fear.  They can use restrictive, passive behavior, which limits or restricts their lifestyle…or they can learn RISK-MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES that involve engaging in defensive tactics in the presence of danger….

“We know that women are at a distinct disadvantage in a world that is dominated by men….They are not taught to defend themselves….

“Even though there are many WOMEN WHO REFUSE TO TAKE THE TIME AND PRECAUTIONS TO ENSURE THEIR OWN SAFETY [presumably by owning guns], othes are actively defending our security as members of the police forces of every city in the Western world….IF FOR WHATEVER REASON YOU THINK IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO DO YOUR SHARE TO END THE VICTIM STATUS OF WOMEN…”  

[So the implication is that women’re clearly to blame if they refuse to use guns to defend themselves and end up as victims of violent crime]

• Finally, Quigley makes the “guns are simply a tool” argument:

…being prepared for the statistical long shot of being a victim of violent crime [again, the clear implication is being prepared=owning a gun] is really no more extraordinarily PRUDENT than wearing seat belts in a car or having a fire extinguisher in the kitchen [perhaps returning to Mr. Clayton’s argument]. 

****** References to passages from Quigley’s book end here.

Sooo….

          Guns are simply technically equivalent to seat belts and fire extinguishers. 

         YET they’re the key to women’s equality with men in the world; any woman who refuses gun ownership and use is simply irresponsible.  (There’s almost a sense that women get what they deserve if they’re successfully attacked by an aggressor b/c they didn’t have a gun).

          There’s “no conflict” between espousing nonviolence and gun ownership (the willingness to kill for self-defense).  

QUESTIONS--

•  So then, there’s no conflict between building an atomic arsenal and espousing nonviolence as a nation?  Or no truly “responsible” nation should be without armed drones as a means of national defense against terrorism?? Or are these analogies “apples and oranges” when compared to individual gun ownership??

•  Am I wrong to be bothered by the TOTAL lack of challenge to a violent society,  in such “guns are an absolute necessity in a violent society” arguments like Quigley’s??

          Perhaps addressing our propensity toward violence is inappropriate in a book about 

          guns for self-defense?

          I think it’s essential to consider the cultural history and character of our society  

          together with deciding how best to individually /nationally protect ourselves from very

          real violence. But I could be expecting too much at once.

• Can we build real, lasting peace while holding so tightly onto the right/need to defend ourselves against violence by using violence?  I don’t think so.  But I also recognize that there’re times when, as a last resort, violent deterrence might, in fact, be “prudent.

•  What questions do I still need to ask?