From The Half-Red House

The controversy, mentioned in an earlier posting in this blog, over which Laotian flag to display on the web page of our Laotioan co-hosts
was resolved by not using flags on any of the cultural/language group pages. Flags impute allegiance to a national governments, which may be incredibly misleading and divisive.We replaced the flags with graphics that said something about the place this culture arose. For the Laotians, we now show a Buddhist temple, For the Latinos, we now show a map of the Western Hemisphere with the Spanish-speaking countries highlighted, along with a picture of a colonial-era villa in Puerto Rico. For the Cambodian co-hosts, we have a photo of an Ankgor Wat carving. For the Brazilian co-hosts, we have some mardi-gras pictures. And, oddly enough, for the English-language hosts, we have no symbols at all, including, thankfully, the Stars-and-Stripes or Union Jack

The broader question of who qualifies as a US citizen (or an Israeli or Irish or British…) still concerns me. I’m what is known as a territorial citizen, having been born in Alaska before it became a State. Like Barry Goldwater, it would take an act of Congress to allow me to sit as a Senator or (perish the thought) President, if I were elected, but I’m otherwise and “american” man, who can vote in elections, collect social security (if I ever get old or decrepit enough), and generally fit in. More importantly to my political development as a young man, I was subject to conscription, “the draft”. When I was in my late ‘teens and early twenties, I was keenly aware that I had been conceived in Canada, and that if my parents had just hung around a few more months in the Northwest Territories, I might have been a Canadian and exempt from the draft. Recently it occured to me that if the literalist branch of evangelical Christianity takes control in this country, I may yet be relegated to Canadian status… after all, life begins at conception so by that standard I’m an “illegal immigrant”, smuggled into the country in my mother’s womb and subject to immediate deportation. The prospect of being a Canadian actually fills me with joy, because even with Harpur in charge, Canadians still have a robust health care and old age pension system that is the envy of the world.

(For more about what my parents were doing in the Northwest Territories, please see myLiveJournal blog  for March 25,2007)

Just a thought… but all these distinctions that try to separate us into first-worlders who are entitled to the blessings of “development” and Global Southerners who aren’t, are constructed politically in just the same way as the dictates of religions on when life starts and ends.

If you don’t live in the Merrimack Valley and/or if you aren’t a political junkie, you may not find this post enthralling, but if you sort of fit one or the other of those categories, read on…

Marty Meehan, who has served the part of Massachusetts where Lowell is located (Massachusets District 5) will resign from Congress this June to become the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). Meehan is a native of Lowell and a graduate of UML, and just about everybody I know at the University and in the Lowell progressive community think he’s an excellent choice for the job. A Chancellor is essentially the same as a University President at most other universities, but Massachusetts has a loosely-knot “university system”, with only one president and multiple Chancellors.

   His departure has opened up a hot political contest to replace him. Meehan has been a reliable progressive vote in Congress, and he has brought home a lot of bacon (or tofu for us vegetarians) to his home town over the years. Whoever replaces him will not have his seniority or his powerful committee assignments, but everyone in the district has a strong interest in electing somebody with stong roots in the communities of the Merrimack Valley region. The people I know expect a progressive politician to win the seat; those who live in Lowell are concerned that the next congress(wo)man from the district understand how important continued Federal support is to the economy of Lowell in particular. To hear from the nine (and maybe more) candidates running for this office, go to Left in Lowell
Three of the candidates have already been interviewed on Thinking Out Loud’s Friday edition, by host Lynne Lupien, and you can find links to these three audio interviews at this leftinlowell post or by going directly to the WUML Thinking Out Loud Podcast site. Lynne hopes to interview all the candidates at least once before election time.

When I’m not vigiling with my “Risk Peace” sign on Saturdays, I hold a much bigger sign that Says “Let’s Destroy Our Own Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

The US has a huge collection of nuclear, biological, explosive and chemical weapons that could destroy civilization many times over, and it spends a lot of money upgrading and maintaining this insane hoard. Britain is no piker either, though its stockpiles are dwarfed by those of the US, but this week Britons have a chance to really do something about destroying its lethal stockpiles: Parliament will be acting on a proosal to replace or renew the Trident nuclear missile program. If you live in the UK, CND is recommending that you go to Theyworkforyou.com and give your MP some direct input in favor of letting the program die without replacement. In the meantime, it’s up to us USonians to talk our legislators into getting us out of Iraq and NOT into Iran.

The British folk group Seize the Day
(about which I have also written recently on my livejournal blog) has come out with a new song called “Flying“, which they’ve made available free on their website for a short time. This song asks some questions that we all need to be asking about the way we in the developed world now hop on board airplanes and go to faraway places without considering the outsize quantities of damage that flying does to the ozone layer. The issue is being debated more fiercely in the UK than in the US, although one of the recent critiques of Al Gore has been that his flying around promoting his oscar-winning documentary  movie An Inconvenient Truth has done serious damage to the ozone layer. The Seize the Day song is not an attack on the big political flyers, but a thoughtful song about the kind of choices we everyday people have to be making, and there is a hint that every time flying is the solution to an important personal need or problem we will sadly trade a small part of the survival of the planet for an undeniable personal, business or community benefit. There is no personal blame in these choices, but it is very important that we consider the longer-term effects of what we are doing and make the kind of changes in our lives that we really can make. A radio program about Rumi that I recently heard, and which I recommend to you, notes that, as rumi puts it, perplexity is essential to wisdom and spiritual growth. We all need a dose of perplexity on these issues related to climate change.