Marian's Blog

Life today is more torrent than trickle

It's been another busy ten or so days. Philly, DC, Maryland, NYC, York, PA. I need to catch a breath. Mom has a new email address; & our incredible Aunt Daisy is safely ensconced in her new spot in New England. Life today is more torrent than trickle. I've discovered Sistah Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever; she's really quite a good writer and I almost never read novels/fiction [gasp].

Bernie Mac's (aka Bernard McCullough) hilarious little book is called I Ain't Scared of You: Bernie Mac on How Life Is. Late one night I caught Sis guffawing over Bernard's book. I met Loretta Claiborne and discovered she's a sister of old friends... small world. Loretta's a champion athlete and promoter of the Special Olympics. Yesterday she started signing to me (sign language for the deaf) and made me recall the schools for the deaf & blind I grew up near on the campus of historically Black Southern University (Scotlandville, Baton Rouge, La). These two schools and their students on Southern's campus made a huge, positive difference in awareness of the specialness of all of us as human beings - and the fact that "WE DON'T COME FROM A COOKIE CUTTER." 

I now realise that much of my life up to now I've reaped & taken for granted the benefits of the early exposure I had at Southern to all kinds of people. Yet even today most other U.S. universities offer little or nothing to differently abled people. Southern was and is an exceptional place. Black Americans are exceptional people.

Philly Airport - Is EURO CAFE the defacto info desk??

I'm sitting in Philadelphia International Airport.

For those of you who know Philly airport - or at least the area where you come into the terminal after arriving from overseas and after the immigration and customs and picking up your luggage; you come out in an open lobby area where - right in front - there's a coffee stand, EURO CAFE, along with HUDSON NEWS.

Like many people I stopped at Euro Cafe today - to ask the local time - and learned that scores of people turn to the Euro Cafe stand - mainly because it's centrally located & the first thing you see when you come out of captivity - asking the Euro Cafe/Hudson News STAFF (not airport staff) all kinds of questions having zilch to do with coffee or the price of the Phila. Daily News.

Much of this international human burden has been falling on a nice young man named Marcos who works at Euro Cafe. I was there as several people came up - 2 Italians who didn't speak English followed in rapid succession by a European lady who did - all asking "how do we get out of the airport?" (you have to go down another level, which isn't very clear).

I helped Marcos help them out, and not an airport employee in sight.

Hello, Phila. Airport management... anyone home?! If so, you need a desk with human beings instead of just a big sign reading "Airport Information". You could also put a nice big clock on that beautiful tiled wall in front of the exit coming from the baggage carousels - for the hundreds of dis-oriented arrivals - like me - coming in from overseas who need to know what time it is right now in Philly.

PHILLY AIRPORT... Y'ALL KNOW that people are going over to Euro Cafe asking for info the airport should be giving. Either fix it or PAY Euro Cafe staff for doing it for you!!

Powell Quits: 1st Caribbean Amer Sec of State Joins "CLUB CLIFTON WHARTON"

I guess Alma Powell's message finally sunk in.

Caribbean American Colin Powell says he's quitting as Bush's sec of state. TV news beat everybody to the punch (again) announcing this. Even the BBC World website's only Powell story was about him going to the Mideast next week. You go Alma (who actually IS Black American).

They say Powell wasn't always treated well, but it had to be lightyears better than the way Clifton Wharton was treated.

Dr. Wharton is Black American just like Alma. He's the man who turned TIAA-CREF into a serious $$ pension fund (for univ & college profs). He's a son of the late Clifton Wharton, Sr. - the first Black American to serve as a career foreign service officer.

Cliff Wharton, Jr. made it as far as DEPUTY Sec of State- under poor Warren Christopher who must have been incredibly jealous of Dr. Wharton's grace, intelligence and charm. (And language skills.) Due to the backbiting & undermining ("is it because I'm Black [American]?) Dr. Wharton lasted @ 8 months in that job... then said SEE YA around November 1993.

More on this later. Same time same station.

San Diego: Darfur, Iraq, Ivory Coast, UN Res 1325 - women working for peace & security or typecast victims of conflict?

Darfur, Iraq, Cote d'Ivoire. Ah... our work is cut out.

The Joan Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, with Unifem, the Canadian Committee on Women, Peace and Security and the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, convenes a working conference on advancing implementation of UN Security Council Res 1325. This week - 18-20 Nov - in San Diego, California. Be there or be square.

Appropriate place to discuss the Kampala Resolution on Women, Peace and Conflict, excerpted here, drafted 27 July 2002, by Ancil Adrian-Paul, Eva Dalak, Patrick Mbuthia, Gina Van Schalk and myself, at the 2002 Women's Worlds conference hosted by the Dept of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda where Episcopal priest Rev. Grace Ndyabahika convened the women, peace and conflict track and recruited 'us' drafters.

Sudanese president al-Bashir attends Arafat ceremony in Cairo [which is in Africa]

The Cairo ceremony for Yasser Arafat underscored 2 critical points. Egypt is in Africa regardless of almost endless spin employed to distract people from that reality and to impose a false, "Africa-denying" geo-historical "logic".

Secondly: the sight of the singularly Black - not brown; not tan - face of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan - standing in the front row with other mideast/Arab/African dignitaries - was testimony to a particularly perverse shamelessness. Where were the minds of the people who invited al-Bashir? Even as Arafat embodied Palestine's cause his own record was far from spotless, but if he'd been there at the Cairo ceremony would he have invited and rubbed shoulders with Khartoum's architect of destruction, rape & slaughter of contemporary Sudanese Black Africa? Only God knows ... but I hope not.

I Hate Toshiba Satellite Keyboard

Once again the Toshiba keyboard has lost my work by switching browser images when I hadn't finished and had not "asked" it to go to another view. When I came back to the page - nothing there. What a waste. I'll do replace blogging later.

DC Voted 90% Kerry - But NO Vote in Congress

On Tuesday, 2 November, 2004 the voters of majority-Black Washington, DC gave John Kerry 90 - NINETY - % of their vote. Now I hear investigative journalist Greg Palast has published a piece entitled, "Kerry Won". www.tompaine.com.

On U.S. Election Day I made sure I was home in Washington, DC. I voted, but I also did phone calls for several hours at Democratic National HQ... thanking voters in Ohio who'd voted for Kerry and reminding others to vote for Kerry before Ohio's polls closed at 7:30pm.

I counted the very few "hang-up" and "kiss-off" responses on less than one hand. So I was as surprised as anyone else by some of the election returns that started coming in Tuesday night during Washington's Democratic election night party. Now we're hearing allegations of hundreds of thousands of "spoiled" votes - and mostly in U.S. communities of color. What the heck does this mean?

Is it true, as Palast states, that in different parts of the U.S. last Tuesday, Nov 2nd, some Black, Latino and American Indian voters were (again) blocked from voting or were given a disproportionately large number of something called "provisional" ballots? Allegedly such ballots weren't counted with regular votes in Tuesday's final presidential vote tallies.

Sadly, what Greg Palast claims is plausible. Like the hazards and humiliations of - take your pick - driving/ walking/ shopping - even trying to get a cab - "while Black", in the USA (and elsewhere), "voting while Black" (or Red or Brown) has a far longer history of being impossible or risky at best, and not long ago also deadly.

Today we are still too often subjected to the most bizarre hassles, not infrequently with  consequences that turn horribly tragic - & also tragic for human rights and democracy.

The media are saying almost nothing about it - and many of us don't realize - the capital city of the U.S., Washington, DC, voted 90% for John Kerry. Gee. For some reason DC voters don't seem impressed by the white house's current occupant, George Bush, and this is not even mitigated by the fact that the white house is IN DC.

Ever since the election less than a week ago everyone including mass media keeps saying Massachusetts delivered the most solidly Democratic vote. Massachusetts voted 62% for Kerry.

But the people of Washington, DC - which doesn't even have statehood after all these years - cast 90% of their votes for Kerry! Has anyone bothered to thank the folks of DC or even start to examine WHY they vote this way in such incredible numbers, and to figure out how to encourage the same kind of voting behaviour elsewhere in the USA?

Massachusetts is a *state* but mostly Black Washington and its residents do not have the political status of a state despite more than 30 years of local and national citizen activism to gain support to create our 51st state of New Columbia. Support DC Statehood: www.dcstatehoodgreen.org

"Massa"... oops; I mean "the powers-that-be" in the U.S. Congress have "given" DC voters 3 electoral votes. Wow... thanx for that!  

But unlike every state, Washington, DC has no voting representation in either the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate. Washington is 60% Black. Contrast that with Vermont - a tiny state that is still 98.6, or virtually 100, % White.

So why is DC treated differently? As far as I can tell Washington is still treated pretty much like a colony. I've just read on the Internet that the Republican-controlled House voted in September to REPEAL DC's self-instituted gun control law.

Please sign the online petition to "Uphold Washington, DC Gun Laws" - www.petitiononline.com/s1414/petition.html

In other words, public policy formulated and approved by and for DC and her residents can be overturned by outsiders, while policy that is unrepresentative of, unwanted and unasked for by the people of the District of Columbia can be imposed any time by women and men elected by other people in other parts of the USA to represent the interests of publics in other parts of the country. By and large those elected do not know Washington, don't live there full-time, know almost no one in the local DC community and care even less about the future of Washington, DC's local community.

Such politicians know few or none of DC's people of color and most come from areas far more racially homogenous and racially separated than the DC/suburban Maryland/northern Virginia area. Meanwhile I found the following headline on the Internet. October 3rd, 2004 news headlines: "House votes to repeal District of Columbia's gun-control laws."

Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine (especially the rather sad interview with actor Charlton Heston) points out the anti-gun control positions of the Republican Party and its politicians.

The news item reads: "Voting 250 for and 171 against, the House on Sept. 29 passed a bill (HR 3193) to repeal the District of Columbia's gun-control laws. Now awaiting Senate action, the measure would legalize the possession of handguns, semi-automatic assault weapons and armor-piercing bullets in the federal city. The bill would repeal registration requirements for firearms and ammunition, remove criminal penalties for possessing unregistered weapons and allow residents to have loaded firearms at home.

Zach Wamp [his real name I suppose], R[epub.]-Tenn[essee], called it "fallacious to insinuate to people that somehow they are going to be safer if you ban guns. There are no facts to back that up....The truth is that when we control guns, the bad guys have plenty, and there is a gun culture, and the good guys cannot defend themselves.""

www.reflector.com/news/newsfd/auto/feed/news/2004/10/03/1096777481.18121.8398.3028.html
Oh yeah. I forgot the 'logic' behind all this. GUNS don't kill people; EVIL kills 'em!

The tiny state of Vermont has about 600-thousand people - not that different from Washington, DC. But the U.S. Constitution has ensured Vermont a real congressional delegation - 2 Senators and a Representative - and all of them can vote in Congress, which is their job anyway.

With over 550-thousand people, the District of Columbia is allowed an "honorary Delegate" who can sit in Congress, almost like a member, but with no vote. A few years ago the Republicans moved further to the right and stopped our "non-voting Delegate" (Eleanor Holmes Norton) from being able to cast even her symbolic, uncounted vote.

Meanwhile some people (possibly uncomfortable around any Blacks) have even said Washington is "too Black" (60%). But Vermont is 98.6% white. That's basically statistically 100%. What's worse is that it's obvious these two locales aren't treated anywhere nearly the same.

Below are some stats on Washington, DC. (Source:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/50000.html)

U.S. census info on Washington/the District of Columbia:

2003 Estimated population: 563,384; Persons 65 years old and over, percent, [Year] 2000 12.2% National: 12.4%; Female persons, percent, 2000 52.9% National: 50.9%; White persons, percent, 2000 (a) 30.8% National: 75.1%;
Black or African American persons, percent, 2000 (a) 60.0% National: 12.3%;
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2000 (a) 0.3% National: 0.9%; Asian persons, percent, 2000 (a) 2.7% National: 3.6%; Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2000 (a) 0.1% National: 0.1%; Persons reporting some other race, percent, 2000 (a) 3.8% National: 5.5%;
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2000 2.4% National: 2.4%; Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2000 (b) 7.9% National: 12.5%; White persons, not of Hispanic/Latino origin, percent, 2000 27.8% National: 69.1%.

If it's Sunday, 7 November, what country is this??

I guess Molly Ivins isn't getting vindicated for another 4 years. I hear
some folks are already checking out moving -- to Canada, New Zealand, Italy, Ireland, and elsewhere... And David Letterman claims The Youth Vote seems not to have heard that LAST Tuesday was Election Day!!

Al Franken is bragging that Massachusetts was the bluest (most Democratic) state but only the District of Columbia - Washington, DC - voted 90 - that's NINETY - % for John Kerry.

IT'S ELECTION DAY!!! GO VOTE!

It's ELECTION DAY, folks. Early this morning on CSPAN (TV) I caught a replay of Molly Ivins' "live performance" in early October at the Philly Public Library (16th & Vine branch).

Just before the Election 2000 debacle of 4 years ago Molly and her colleague published that wonderful book, "SHRUB". Now perhaps she will be vindicated.

Are you an American? Are you in the USA? If you're an American and in the USA, get up NOW and GO VOTE!!! I'm now in Washington (DC) and it's 8AM eastern time and I have to do the same -- go vote. In the meantime you can keep posted on today's progress (or otherwise) via www.ZOGBY.com - the political pollster's website.

More of my blogisms (Marian's word) later!!! Peace. GO VOTE!!!!!!!!! And only once, thanks.