Part of having a podcast/vlog/blog about under reported issues and global concerns, means that the good people around the world send me emails and comments asking that I look into certain issues. It is nothing short of an honor that people look to me for any such work, in many ways saying – I know you’d be good at looking into this – it is quite flattering. When it isn’t overwhelming.
With the most recent case of yet another human on death row in the United States for questionable reasons due to a questionable case, I received emails from concerned world citizens asking me to please talk about the case. Yet Again. Unfortunately with the United States and the state of Texas as they are at present, this seems to happen every few months. It becomes hard to count on both hands how many people were executed who had been convicted on very flimsy evidence and a very flawed case.
Yet even after receiving these emails I didn’t do much. And I wanted to explain that a bit:
I didn’t feel compelled to write much of anything because I didn’t feel the outrage. Rather I feel this stronger sense of routine and acceptance, like somehow I’ve mentally come to accept the truth – that various states in the US routinely murder the wrongly convicted, children, and the mentally disabled. It is their policy, it is their culture, it is their system, and somewhere along the way this became less of an outrage and more of a terrible despicable truth.
Likewise the objective to write about it on the internet in order to mobilize citizens to push the government to stop this practice, also stopped seeming like a productive idea. Despite all the blog posts and all the commenting and everything many concerned people do on the internet in the quest to inform and motivate the public, the government continues to kill, unphased by the benign buzzing we do in this online world. Beyond that, while a small minority on the internet become concerned and take action to oppose these murders, the majority are using the internet for watching pop music videos and chatting to their friends about last night, utterly indifferent to whomever is being wrongly killed in their name.
There are many issues I feel strongly about that I feel deserve more attention and action. The death penalty, while always one of them, has more strongly become routine – a cold shameful reality revealing the truth about the society that allows it to continue. Writing about it, while important, has proven ineffective and simply put – not enough.
PS- Yes as I write this the news came out that Foster will not be killed. An example contrary to what I wrote? PErhaps.. but how many more innocent people will still have to die?
None of them were alive the last time Texas was located outside the borders of the US, but they’re demanding to go back to that status. They’re angry at the Obama administration, frustrated with the United States, and lately – they’ve managed to get a bit of national attention. They are the Texans calling for secession from the United States, and Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer has been looking into who they are, the issues they’re concerned with, and just how far they might get.
Texas is of course famous for being huge, but also for having a highly developed coastline and generally a very polluted environment. And one of the changes that is mentioned in the article is the rising sea level, they quote an article in the journal Science: