OK, be forewarned: this is going to be a serious post, and maybe a little preachy. I'm in a very introspective phase of life at the moment (winter tends to do that to me), and have been spending quite a lot of time thinking about systems and how I/we/Americans/an active citizenry/young people fit(s) into them, what we can do to change them. The holiday season, with its connotations of material acquisition and capitalist-promoted nostalgia, seems to be quite a relevant time to situate myself in some of the broader issues being played out all around us. More importantly, it's been a time for me to re-evaluate my own role in perpetuating/ending/opting out of these systems. (For fear of getting "too Pomona," I'll leave that train of thought at that. I don't really have any answers to these problems anyway. They're just on my mind and bear mentioning.)
A few brief thoughts (maybe prompts for conversations to be continued with you, I hope?...):
- Tomorrow (December 5), is the day the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, the next phase of rulings on the status of habeas corpus in this country. They will debate whether the ago-old precept held that people have the right to contest their detentions in court, and to demand the government that holds them imprisoned show at least some evidence of why they are being detained, applies to "enemy combatants," non-US citizens who are for whatever reason swept up in the dragnet of the War on Terror. (For an easy to understand background on why habeas corpus protects every citizen's freedom, check out Habeas Schmabeas , a story from This American Life that prompted me to write my senior thesis on Guantanamo Bay.) Fingers crossed that the Court decides that it JUST ISN'T OK to strip anyone's right to protest their imprisonment, regardless of their nationality or citizenship. While the old system of laws on wartime are certainly going to have to be re-examined in the context of modern terrorist warfare (the blurring of boundaries between war and peace, military and civilian, where "battlefield" can be as far as Afghanistan, or as near as the Chicago airport), this is just not a right that can be waived on command. To relinquish it (the requirement that the government provide evidence for taking away a person's freedom) for anyone -- even potential foreign terrorists -- would be giving the state an enormous degree of power.
- Tomorrow is also the day that the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will present to the United Nations a case against some top officials in the Sudanese government for their involvement in the ongoing genocide in Darfur. The evidence is remarkably clear that the killing janjaweed militias are funded, organized, and supported by the government in Khartoum. Clearly, this is something that needs to be protested, stopped, and punished. I'm not exactly sure how to be involved in this as a citizen so removed from the powers that be, but my first reaction has been to look into the (hopefully not too cliched) letter-writing campaigns that exist, particularly as regards targeted divestment in Sudan.
While frustrated by feeling small and insignificant against massive systems of power, I, like so many others, keep coming back to the idea of an active population of citizens speaking out to correct injustices as a way to keep power in check; indeed, this idea is fundamental to our notion of democratic governance. At the same time, it seems SO INSIGNIFICANT to merely write letters, hold demonstrations, and pass out flyers -- but it seems like it's the only option we've got for the moment. I'll keep searching myself for a better solution to "effect change," but really, as it stands, I'm grateful that others have opened up even these meager channels of protest (kudos to some of my activist friends for doing the dirty work).
I'm challenged by something that Barack Obama said, which I think is both troubling and true: that where we put our "time, energy, and money" is the "true test of what we value... regardless of what we like to tell ourselves." Troubling because I need to continually push myself to live up to that, to fight against an inertia of enjoying the status quo. Praying that I can somehow find a means of leaving (some portion of) the world a better place because I have lived in it.
And on that cheery note... happy December!!
4.12.07
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1 comment:
Ok, ok, you win: you're back in "blogs".
Also, I'm quite disturbed the Guantanamo business, but the fact that we *know* there's a weird American prison camp where hundreds of foreign nationals have been detained for 5+ years is strange in of itself. We even have reports from attorneys about how they're being treated, even though, as Souter noted, they don't have regular access to "counsel as [the Court] understand[s] it."
We ran secret CIA detention centers in Romania for several years before they were shut down (cause the media and host gov't found out), and I have absolutely no doubt that there are other less-visible places we could keep our "enemy combatants"... I mean, we arrested them and then went to the expense of flying them halfway around the world and feeding them semi-regularly for all this time (as opposed to interrogating them in the field or whatever else Jack Bauer does) for SOME reason, right?
Conspiracy theorist in me says that we're using the visible Guantanamo SCOTUS cases to smoke screen the anonymous detainees elsewhere in the world (and, if the bad guys win, to gain legal approval for extra-legal detention).
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