When we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them … so we did it to them.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
The system we have created is what spiritual death looks like: we are all zombies now! Two atomic bombs worth of fatalities each year, but nobody notices and nobody cares because it produces no gripping pictures on the home page.
Tune out of the stupefying pap served up by the corporate media complex.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
URI’s Good Five Cent Cigar, the Student Senate, and the Faculty Senate have all deliberately participated in the URI code of silence. Blessed by the Board of Education and the Governor’s office, the tactic of choice remains loyalty to the corporate Think Big brand. As always, the tactic of choice is saying one thing in public, and doing the opposite behind the scenes.
A perfect example took place when URI was featured in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The university’s CEO wrote in his blog of March 9, 2011 under the heading Another Special Moment for URI:
Many of your [sic] have heard me say that one cannot solve problems while trying to hide them, or by pretending they don’t exist.
Sounds good until you find out that the photojournalist working on this article for The Chronicle was ordered off the URI campus.
Violence makes most of its victims one by one; the vast majority remain nameless. The corporate media complex reports only on the spectacular outliers that produce juicy pictures. Is it surprising that this feeds mass hysteria?
Meanwhile, capitalism keeps alive a health care system run by death panels consisting of criminally overpaid CEOs. The system perpetuates violence and oppression in the workplace, in the streets, in the prisons and a global scale. The alternative strategy that we are looking for has been formulated by Camus:
]]>In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.