Silent Lucidity

Message from Al Gore, the almost-President:

When I emailed you last Friday, 294,374 people had signed our message to Congress demanding immediate action to solve the climate crisis. In that email, I asked you to help meet the goal of delivering 350,000 messages when I testify at Congressional hearings on Wednesday.

Your response was amazing. By Saturday morning – because of you – we exceeded our goal! In fact, as I write this email, our total has risen to 405,758. Thank you!

What that means is that we are now within striking distance of collecting over 500,000 messages – and have less than 48 hours to get it done in time for the Congressional hearings.

Now is the time to reach out to as many people as possible. Ask any friend who wants to end the climate crisis to sign our message to Congress now by visiting:

http://www.algore.com/cards.html

By the way, maybe this goes without saying, but please reach out to Republican and Independent, as well as Democratic friends. One of our goals must be to make this issue one that transcends partisanship. While many of the solutions to the climate crisis will be found within the political system, there should be bipartisan and transpartisan agreement on the basic nature of the crisis and the sense of urgency that is appropriate for us to solve it.

That point was brought home to me again last week when I visited London and met with the leaders of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. In the UK, both major political parties are completely committed to taking real action to solve the climate crisis. They openly acknowledge this is an unprecedented moral issue and are competing vigorously to see who can propose the most creative and effective solutions to solve this crisis.

Here at home, our objective must be to create a similar sense of urgency in both political parties. That is why your activism leading up to these hearings is so important. We are so close to our new goal of 500,000 messages to Congress. You can help put us over the top.

Sign it and pass the link around. Thanks.

Ohhhh… do I ever empathize with this guy… and after spending days looking for just that perfect xmas gift, and fighting the crowds in the stores, you will too…

Customer Confidential
By David Pelfrey

Here’s a scenario that is familiar to anyone who has ever set foot in Wal-Mart, CVS, Rite-Aid, or any of a dozen other major retailers. After you have made a purchase, collected your bags, or packed everything into a shopping cart, you head for the exit. Just as you approach freedom an alarm sounds (usually a sequence of ugly, electronic grunts) and a robotic voice (always female) announces: “Please return to the checkout.” Other customers immediately look in your direction, and an employee begins to approach you. What’s your next move?

If you possess an ounce of personal pride or perhaps two ounces of fortitude, then the 100 percent correct move is to proceed immediately out the door. Why? There are many reasons, chief among them being that rational adults should not instantly obey mechanical voices (unless that voice instructs us to exit a burning aircraft). Also, if you haven’t stolen anything and therefore do not require interrogation, there is absolutely nothing that should compel you to linger post-transaction. It’s depressing enough simply being there in the first place. Another good reason to make a quick exit is that you aren’t being paid to assist some giant retailer with its security measures. You aren’t part of the team, and you didn’t clock in. The clearest reason for leaving the store, however, is that there exists absolutely no legal obligation to remain there, and the store has no right to detain you.

Because all of the above constitute my position on the matter, I have established a mildly adversarial relationship with many retail establishments with whom I continue to do business. I don’t mind too much, because so far I have won all the battles in this long and silly war. What does trouble me is that retailers who, as a matter of policy, routinely treat customers like criminals have not changed their attitude about the issue. In fact, some vehemently defend their policies. I began closely paying attention to this phenomenon several years ago. My story begins at Wal-Mart during the Christmas shopping season of 2000.

[...continued...]

From a recent publication, “Women in an Insecure World – Violence Against Women: Facts, Figures, & Analysis” (.pdf file, alternate site .pdf file) by the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), we learn that at least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in her lifetime.

At least 700,000 women a year are sold into prostitution. Violence against women ranks as the fourth leading cause of premature death in the world, ranking behind only disease, hunger and war.

One United Nations’ estimate says that between 113 million and 200 million women around the world are “missing.” Every year, between 1.5 million and 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect. As the Economist, which reported on the policy paper, put it last November, “Every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler’s Holocaust.” – [Source, based on the above linked report.]

You might want to read that again. And I urge everyone to download and read that entire .pdf file, as well.

We are clearly not living in a society that respects women and girls. And this actually has little to do with whether our societies and cultures are religious or secular. But we don’t talk about it, we don’t see it on the evening news, we aren’t assembling armies and weapons of mass destruction to liberate women and girls from their predators, and there are no angry mobs protesting in the streets about human trafficking or the millions of ‘disappeared’ throughout the world.

Violent relationships, poverty and insecure housing affect many working class women; wealthy women can always fly out of town or out of the country for their abortions with no one the wiser.

Rape victims can often only see all men as the enemy… or feel shame and blame themselves. The result is severe psychological damage. Religious ideas, especially the characteristic cult of virginity (and you know which religions push this as well as I do, so no need to name names), encourages intense self-loathing, rather than compassion and help for the victims.

Rhetoric by pundits on television or the Internet about exposing women who make ‘false accusations’ is obscene, considering…

Few like to look at them, but the statistics on rape convictions are unbearably bleak: reported rape has trebled in the past decade; less than 6% of reported rapes result in a conviction; less than 20% of rapes are reported to the police. There is more rape, and it is easier to get away with. [Source]

Those figures are for 2004 in the UK, but the situation is similar world-wide, and not limited to ‘undeveloped’ countries.

Violence against women in conflict situations assumes many forms; rape is often only one of the ways in which women are targeted. But while other abuses, such as murder and other forms of torture have long been denounced as war crimes, rape has been downplayed as an unfortunate but inevitable side effect of sending men to war. Although men also are raped, efforts to document wartime rape reveal that women overwhelmingly are its most frequent targets. It is thus ignored as a human rights abuse.

The use of rape as a tool of war has garnered relatively insignificant international or mainstream religious attention. Provisions protecting women from rape have existed in international humanitarian law only since about the mid-20th century.

By looking at rape as a crime against Honor, as many religions do, it also becomes a crime against the community or her husband and family, instead of a crime against the physical integrity of the victim herself… it establishes the victim as responsible for the loss of community honor rather than focusing on the attacker as responsible for the violation of the victim’s physical integrity. It’s bad enough that rape victims may come to hate all men, but it’s worse when they not only feel their own shame, but also blame themselves… and then those who are supposed to be concerned, supportive, and compassionate also take that ‘blame the victim’ stance.

The above was posted as a comment in “The dirty little secret of fundamentalism” by Djehuty at Newsvine.