Africa Celebrates U2
Abolition
Yes, we mean real slavery. People held against their will, forced to work and paid nothing. Sometimes the slave holder ‘pays’ a few grains of rice to keep the slaves alive, or uses a bogus payment that the slave holder reclaims at the end of the month. But the end result is what slavery is today and has always been—one person controlling another and then forcing them to work.
Through Free the Slaves’ research, first published in Kevin Bales’ Disposable People, our conservative estimate is that there are 27 million people in slavery today. This means that there are more people in slavery today than at any other time in human history. Slavery has existed for thousands of years, but changes in the world’s economy and societies over the past 50 years have enabled a resurgence of slavery.
I keep thinking and hearing about the world out there, hidden for the last eight years or so by this fog of rhetoric about terrorism, a tactic disguised as a movement. Here’s an awful problem that could be solved in just a few years, as easy as going to the moon, if only we paid attention.
The Normal Neurotic: Stiffs and Stuffeds
I’m not someone who deals well with change. You would have known this by a recent fixture in my dining room: a large glass tank containing a wooden hutch, a water bottle, and rodent bedding — but no rodent. When our final gerbil, Carmella, died, I couldn’t bring myself to take her cage down and left it there for some months, imagining every morning that she was still alive and well, just a little quiet, “napping” the day away inside her cozy hutch. Not wanting to bury her in our back yard for fear the dogs would dig her up, but also not wanting to simply toss her out with the trash, I had placed her curled body in a zip-lock plastic bag and put her “temporarily” in the freezer. There she still lies in cold, stiff “sleep,” next to the Popsicles, the frozen peas, and Nibbles the guinea pig.
Elise Hempel, March 31, The Normal Neurotic
Elise is one of my favorite writers (ok, she’s my partner too) and I have been trying to get her to get her work online for years. She published a great piece here a few years ago, called “S.A.D., TV, and Me,” but since then has been silent, as far as the web goes. Of course, she’s been writing away, collecting pieces until she found the time or the format to get them published.
Now she’s started her own blog, The Normal Neurotic, and has been busily posting her backlog of columns and short essays. She’s a poet too, and there’s some chance that she’ll publish some of that work as well. I picked, “Stiffs and Stuffed,” because I love her humor when it’s most disconcertingly morbid. I think of that every time I open the refrigerator at her house.
A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq
The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. Since then, nearly 4,000 American troops have lost their lives and nearly thirty thousand more have suffered serious injuries, while as many as a million Iraqis may be dead. The financial costs of the war to the U.S. economy will ultimately exceed $3 trillion. More than a year ago, the American public demanded a new direction in Iraq by electing a new Congress, and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (the Baker-Hamilton Commission) presented a set of recommendations for just such a new direction. President Bush rejected the majority of those recommendations and proceeded – largely unchecked by Congress – on a course explicitly contrary to them.