bicyclemark

Respect to Stonewall

On June 28th 1969 NYC police raided the Stonewall Inn. That night police arrested and beat numerous people, especially transgendered and gender non-conformist people.? Outraged and tired of the oppression, people from the community gathered outside the Inn while the people inside tried to barricade themselves, and eventually a fire broke out.

But that’s just my summary of an event I wasn’t alive to experience. With this post I encourage you to reflect on, remember, or perhaps learn about the Stonewall Riots, if you haven’t already.? Naturally I also wish to show my solidarity with LGBT friends throughout the world, who to this day have still not had many of their rights recognized and respected, as humans and citizens.? The struggle continues and I hope very much that like those brave people at Stonewall, and well before Stonewall and long after, I too can help advance the cause of equality and justice, regardless of sexual orientation or gender.

Being Pride Month

This is pride month and I realize I’m yet to do anything related to LGBT rights and focus on related situations worldwide.? Actually I’m surprised to not yet have heard reports of violent and disgusting attacks on participants at Gay Pride festivals throughout Eastern Europe. Seems as though every year I’ll catch images of Moscow police beating gay citizens for carrying signs or participating in nonviolent demonstrations. Or I’ll read the reports from Romania of marchers being beaten, or the banning of pride celebrations in Poland.? No, this year I haven’t been talking about the issue all that much, but the month isn’t over yet – so I will.

But to perhaps begin to talk about some of the pride events taking place in the world, and yes, to have a laugh as well, I wanted to recommend the great and potentially insane Tim Can’t Reid’s latest video entry where he recounts his experience at Gay Pride in Spokane, Washington.? I’ve never been to Tim’s corner of the US, but it is almost like being there just by listening to Tim and watching the images.

The Quintessential China-US Debate

I’ll start the week by pointing you to a very excellent edition of On the Media, one of my absolute required-listening podcasts each week – Journalism with Chinese Characteristics. And the subtext of the post reads as follows:

There is real investigative reporting in China, it?s just not done under a free press flag. Instead, practitioners mind an unstated set of rules, keeping themselves safe by employing tactics like using excessive jargon and exploiting government rivalries…

The program itself doesn’t present particularly new facts or opinions about China.? If anything, in the last few years, there is no shortage of Chinese voices in international media talking about how China isn’t what you might remember from the movies or old stereotypes. That the country is modernizing fast and people have alot of new freedoms that are comparable to whatever you have in the west.? That said, OTM provides a nice group of voices who communicate their experiences and opinions in a manner worthy of listening to.

What gets me about the interviewees in this podcast is that they come back to the classic China-US comparison talking point: The freedom criticism.? So they point out how strange it is that there are “free Tibet” protests on the streets of the US, and yet the US occupies Iraq and has guantanamo bay.? To which there are no protests on the streets of China saying “Free Iraq.”? The arguement brushes over the well known hypocracy and goes right for some kind of lack of reciprocity.

My response would simply be as follows, once and for all let it be said, that it is our right and responsibility as human beings on this earth, to protest and engage in some form of acknowledgement whenever and wherever human lives are being destroyed and opressed.? Moreover, that you might be American and on the streets protesting what takes place in Tibet, does not mean you automatically believe your own government is doing just fine and you support the occupation of Iraq.? Hell, you probably attend those demonstrations as well.? But protesting human rights violations in another country does not require that you live in a country where human rights are perfectly respected and it shouldn’t result in silencing dissent anywhere in the world.

Just because you have the capacity to repeat all the terrible mistakes and crimes of the western world, dear China, does not mean you should.

30 Days Animal Rights

Lots of you will remember the documentary film “Supersize Me” directed by Morgan Spurlock.? After seeing that film all those years ago, I became an admirer of Spurlock’s work and a frequent reader of his defunct blog. Some years after Supersize Me, he started production on the show “30 Days” which aired on the FX cable network in the US. Though I wasn’t around to watch it on TV at that time, I remember reading Morgan’s recounting of how production was going and of course, through the magic of the internet, I was able to get my hands on the entire first season.

The show itself is about spending 30 days in someone else’s shoes.? Someone else- usually meaning someone who lives differently or opposite what one person might see as normal or correct.? Or just different somehow.? The higher message in this show seems to have always been to make you see things differently, and understand some of the often misunderstood lifestyles and life circumstances.

Now in its third season, the most recent episode dealt with an avid hunter and meat eater, living 30 days with a Vegan family working as an animal rights activist.

Initially it may seem like this isn’t going to be worth anything or even interesting.? The gentleman is very polite and very candid about his opinions about animals and activists, and seems like the month will be nothing but disagreements and unspoken hatred.? As an audience member it probably all seems a bit forced, cause of course – it is for television.

But the animal rights episode has some very interesting moments, no matter how made for TV it may have been.? Example, riding along with an animal rescuer, who patrols factory farms for sick and abused animals, taking them to a rescue farm where animals are rehabilitated and allowed to live without abuse.? The video footage captured just from outside the fences of factory farms in California was nothing short of shocking, even if you think you have seen animals in some gross situations.? It was also interesting to hear the debates between the family and the gentleman, about diet, about the place of animals on earth and in our lives.? It wasn’t that he was proven wrong or that he was totally converted, what got me was how this man was able to have discussions and both make points and aknowledge points he had not fully considered previously.

I highly recommend 30 days. Not every episode or situation is golden, but when it is good.. it is great.? The kind of programming we should show our high school and grammer school students, to stimulate a more developed understanding and questioning of what is presented to us as reality.

If you use bittorent at all, here’s a link to the Torrent for the latest episode of 30 days.

Evidence to Convict A Murderer

Many visitors to this site and readers of this blog are no doubt listeners or watchers of democracy now, perhaps the most important 60 min of audio one can consult in the average day. Well last friday’s show is one I had to listen to a second time.

People often fall back on slogans like, “the past is the past” and “its time to move on” whenever you bring up an uncomfortable or unresolved conflict. I hear it very often in both the mainstream media and mainstream political conversations when it comes to impeaching the president. Beyond impeachment, even the demand to arrest the current president of the United States and his inner circle on the charge of mass murder and fraud seems to have become some crazy idea, too far fetched to be worthy of discussion.

Why exactly doesn’t anyone want to talk about it? That part isn’t so clear. People are still dying everyday while carrying out his orders. An entire nation is still living under occupation while their national funds are being held hostage by that same administration. The US itself is, even as I write this, being drained of all its resources, wealth, and young minds, again for the whims of that same president. But perhaps like Eddie Izzard used to say, when one murders tens of thousands it is as if people don’t know what to do with you or how to respond.

Last friday’s democracy now featured the man who led the case against Charles Manson, the infamous American serial killer. He’s now laid out the case against George W. Bush, for the crime of murder; mass murder. To learn the details of the case itself is important and worth your time, so give it a listen.

What I found particularly eye opening was the document called “the manning memo”. This memo, written by a Tony Blair advisor, provided details of the conversations that included Bush, Blair, and Condi Rice among others. In those details it is revealed by Manning, that Bush was worried that the case for war in Iraq was too weak, and he discussed a plan to fly a US air force plane low over Iraq, painted with UN colors and insignias. In doing so it would provoke Iraq to fire, and the plane’s destruction would outrage the international community and further garuntee the desire to go to invade the country.

The evidence of the murders and fraud was already significant, but looking at the manning memo and seeing the premeditated, fraudulent, and blantent thirst for blood, this cabal needs to be arrested and kept from comitting anymore murders or other haneous acts. The world cannot wait for the next election, just as you don’t wait 6 months before picking up a serial killer til he is finished with his current job. This is not a time for moving on, or keeping the past in the past… this is the present and there is a series of criminal acts that got us here, and something must be done about it.

Talking about the Killing Fields

Although I’ve arrived back home in Amsterdam, my mind still drifts regularly back to Cambodia. In conversations with friends and day dreams as I ride my bike around town, I think most about the killing fields and that horrible torture prison known as S-21.

It was last friday that Mr. Lee and I set out on the motorscooter for the 25 or so minute ride out to the killing fields of Choeung Ek. Along the way I caught my first long glimpses of the country side, and the boggy farms that dot the landscape. Mr. Lee chimed in “Mr. Mark, you want go firing range and shoot machine gun?” – I tried to control my laughter and calmy replied, no, no, I’m ok, I don’t need shooting range. Noticing my disdain for the question he redirected, “many tourists like, they come and they shoot the guns.”

Eventually we arrive at the killing fields late that morning, on the way in -oddly enough-, greeting someone I met the night before at the Foreign Correspondents Club. Looking past the modest shrine, that I can already see contains many levels of skulls stored behind Plexiglas, I noticed the covered areas of land. Having heard the stories of the mass graves, of the more than 8,000 people that were killed at Choeung Ek, I knew those covered areas where some of the biggest mass graves. Slowly reading and moving past the wooden boards explaining how people were brought to this plot of land from the S-21 prison, to be slaughtered using various types of weapons and methods, I made my way to the covered areas. There in the pit of muddy water and wild grasses, I could see remnants of fabric, the collar of a shirt, perhaps the edge of a pant leg, almost too hard to tell at that point. Eventually I found myself staring at what could only be pieces of bone, somehow still there, sticking up out of the ground. I kept thinking, nooo.. thats not bone. But Iooking again, yes… yes it was; all that was left of some of these thousands of people killed between 1975 and 1979, the year of my birth.

Whether it was walking quietly and slowly through the killing fields, or staring at the floors and walls of the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, my mind would not stop trying to recreate the sounds and smells of these places in those days. Prisoners being tortured, guards torturing prisoners out of fear of their own lives and that of their families. The muffled screams as prisoners would only be further punished for crying out. The requirement of all prisoners to ask before drinking water or even just going to the bathroom right there in their own tiny cells. All this within rooms that had originally been built and served as places of knowledge, a high school, a place of great hope for the future.

It was nothing short of humbling to see these places. They alone merit the long journey of anyone anywhere in the world who can afford to come; to see, to learn and remember, to visualize what it was like and think about how something like that can happen, just 28 years ago…. my lifetime.

It is easy to say, never again. Yet how often have people been rounded up, tortured, and mass murdered since 1979? Right at this moment, it is happening. THAT is perhaps more disturbing and horrifing than any former prison or field of death – that people are unable or unwilling to mobilize to stop history from repeating itself. Sadly there will be more S-21’s and more Choeung Ek’s in this world. The lone silver lining one could point to, after having also seen how the Cambodian nation is dealing with both the past and present to some extent, is that they have resolved to never repeat that part of history again.