Rough Draft Valedictorian Commencement Address Vers. 2.3

I was wondering if I could come up with some remarks that managed to avoid the platitudes and cliches that these speeches are invariably peppered with. Things such as, "not only does this mark the end of a long journey, but the beginning of a whole new one." While most cliches are true, they are only shallowly so, and don't bear repeating, though I guess that I've already done that. Being valedictorian is an honor, it truly is, but in a graduating class of only 22, it's not the absolute grandest of accomplishments. Most of the 21 other graduates here tonight have accomplish much more, and worked far harder than I. Many of them have juggled raising a child, working a job, often full time, dealing with problems such as gangs and or drugs, and going to school five days a week, thirty-six weeks a year, and, for most of them, four years. I have developed a tremendous respect for all of them, for getting so far, and overcoming so many hurdles, ones that I myself, for the most part, haven't been faced with. Through four years of going to this school, a rarity given its nature, and the fluid, transient aspects of its student body, there are many wonderful teachers and staff members that I've become indebted to. I'd like to recognize and thank, in no particular order, Sue Ann Dobbyn, David Hutchison, Shelly Hangen, Brandy Snyder, Doug Bickel, Bruce Marks, Jack Bonham, Linda Kincaid, Ken Schaeffer, Amy Carpenter, Ignacio Tebas, Mrs. Barber, Polly Staski, and many others. I must apologize for I know that I must have left a few people out that deserve my gratitude, and I did so only due to the frailties of my memory, and not through any desire to slight. I can honestly say that in my four years at this school, I have not had one teacher that I absolutely could not stand. I'd also like to thank my family, my mom and dad, brother and sister, and my grandparents and uncles. I'm extremely lucky to have so many people willing and dedicated to help me along in any way that I might need. I also want to thank all of my friends through the years, there are too many for a list, you guys were awesome, even you Bob, you raving lunatic. In all honesty, I probably could've done it without you guys, but it wouldn't nearly of been so fun. I'd especially like to thank Yeny, my absolute favorite and best friend, you've done more for me than you can know. In my time at this school, not everyone's that been involved in it has been nearly so benevolent and helpful as those I've mentioned. Two people in particular spring to mind. People who have been at this school long enough will know who I'm talking about, and those of you who don't, I'm sure those that do would be more than willing to tell you all about it. Two years ago, from the beginning of the 2005 school year, this disastrous duo began a seemingly systematic campaign that appeared to be aimed at dismantling and destroying the fundamental character of this school. I know not whether that campaign was of their own conception, or if they were merely implementing the wishes of someone or ones higher along on the food chain. Even if it wasn't their brainchild, they displayed in their administration an unnecessary, counterproductive, tyrannical, totalitarian, oppressive and vindictive attitude of general contempt not only for the students, but for the staff as well. One incident stands out above all the others, and there were many, that best encapsulates the zeitgeist of those times. A few weeks into the '05 school year, the then principal got into a disagreement with a teacher, David Hutchison, over a matter of discipline. In what can only be described as a blatant attempt to punish dissent, regardless of the negative impact on dozens of students' educations, would be for Hutch to switch the classes that he taught with Ken Schaeffer; Ken would take his, and he would take Ken's. With them being two of the most loved teachers at the school, this decision didn't sit well with their students. The very next day, a student managed to organize a way for the school to express their disgruntlement, and there was a school-wide student walkout to protest the unjustness of the whole affair. This caused the principal to review her actions, but also institute a regime of collective punishment, mainly against the students, but that also had a strong effect on the staff as well. The administration managed to create such an oppressive environment that they effectively forced numerous teachers to transfer to other schools, and caused quite a few students to drop out, who otherwise might have been here tonight alongside us. This lasted for the entire year, and was perpetuated for the first half of this year by her folically challenged successor. Their combined year and a half reign fundamentally altered and effectively destroyed the place that this school was. Much of the damage done is most likely irreparable. However, this semester, I've begun to see the beginning of mending happening. Most likely, this is due to the departure of the aforementioned administrators, and the arrival of new ones dedicated to more than just their ego. Our principal, Dr. Hobbs, as well as our assistant principal, Mrs. Staski, have managed to very quickly begin to turn this place around. I have an amazing amount of respect and gratitude for the both of them. They have replaced the former dictatorial, heavy handed management policy in favor of one that's more open minded, balanced, even handed, and dedicated to serving the needs of the students. They have given the teachers the proper professional freedom and latitude to perform the jobs they're tasked with effectively, and that is something that this school had been sorely lacking for the longest time.

We are all a product of our times; my time has been ominously overshadowed by one issue above most others. Almost half a year before I started my first day of High School, and throughout my entire time there, our country has been involved in war on a scale like no other it's been in since the days of The Beatles, LBJ and Tricky Dick Nixon, Woodstock, and the Apollo moon landings. Since we started this war, over 3,300 of our soldiers have been killed; that is a number that surpasses the toll that 9/11 took on this country. There have also been nearly 300 fatalities of soldiers from other countries, mainly the United Kingdom, but also Bulgaria, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, and the Ukraine. Besides uniformed soldiers, at least 400 civilian military contractors have been killed, the preponderance hailing from the states, but also citizens of dozens of other countries. This war has been the most deadly of any for journalists since WWII, with not less than 167 of them being killed. By far though, the population that has born the brunt and suffered the most is, ironically, the one that it was supposed to liberate. The people of Iraq have suffered 70,000 reported deaths, a bare minimum number, with 30,000 of them coming in the last year alone. The real number may be closer to 650,000. In a nation with the population one-twelfth that of the US, that's the equivalent of them suffering a terrorist attack equaling 9/11 somewhere in between two months and every week. Taken as a proportion of the population, that would be like the US suffering such an attack from as rarely as every five days four hours, to as frequently as twice every twenty-eight hours. Try to imagine the effect, if you can, that that would have on the core fabric of our society, the equivalent of 850,000 through 7,800,000 people dead. For the two or three soldiers we lose every day, they lose from 50 to 500 civilians, ordinary people going about their daily lives, trying to survive in a war-zone that we had the courtesy to create for them. They suffer several massacres every day rivaling and surpassing our most recent national tragedy, the Virginia Tech shooting. As of today, we have been inside of Iraq for 1,521 days; it has been 1,479 days since George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations; of every US fatality, all but 140 of them have taken place after that declaration of his. It took us 174 fewer days to defeat the Axis nations during WWII, from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day. The example that the students of San Andres showed a year and a half ago is one that should serve as a template for a response to this war. A year and a half ago, we not only saw an injustice, because we see them every day, but we saw one that affected each of us personally, and we decided to try and do something about it. Even if in the end we didn't succeed, the point is that we still tried. What each of us must realize, not only those of us graduating, or you guys out in the audience, but us collectively as a nation, we must realize that even if we don't enlist, or have someone we care about sent overseas, it is still an issue that affects each and every one of us personally. Actions such as this are carried out in our name, and when they happen and very few people stand up and say, "This is not right", we give it our tacit support and approval. The nearly half a trillion dollar price tag that this war comes with is taken directly out of your paycheck, and, at the rate we're spending, that of your child's as well. Every bullet that's fired, every bomb that's dropped is paid for by you; it is the fruits of your labor that has allowed this war to happen. It has been clear since almost right after the fall of Baghdad that the Casus Belli for initiating this war was false, and the preponderance of evidence indicates, deliberately so. This war is the most massive mistake, the worst crime that this country has been in the middle of for my lifetime, and probably most of yours. Unfortunately, it's reached a point where it's developed into a civil war, with 150,000 of our soldiers caught in the crossfire. Effectively, the course of the war is now largely out of our hands, and the killing will continue no matter what we do, whether we listen to that wise sage of a man, George W. Bush, and "stay the course", or we admit our grievous mistake and bring the boys back home. We failed to contain this war when we had the chance, or better yet, before it even started. Many of us take comfort in the mythos of a mighty America, with liberty and justice for all; if we seek to be able to continue to honestly claim that mantle, there is something that we, as a country, must do, and that personally includes all of us here tonight. Each of us needs to demand accountability from the people who were the architects of this war.Such people as George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley, George Tenet, and others unknown, must be impeached, censured, indicted, incarcerated, fined, whatever may be appropriate given their responsibility for what has happened, and the extent of their role in it. You should call you congressman, your senators, write them, write letters to the editor, occupy the offices of congressman and recruitment center, take to the streets and lie down in them; the situation is so dire, the stakes are so high, that no action of dissent, protest, or civil disobedience can be considered too drastic. I'd like to end with a passage from the Nuremberg Judgment of the Nuremberg Trials that encapsulates the massivity of what I am speaking. "The charges in the indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, but the Supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes that it contains within its self the accumulated evil of the whole." A war of aggression is a crime in and of its self that leads to all other war crimes, which are bound to occur in any war. The leaders of this nation are undoubtedly guilty of such a crime.

I'd like to thank everyone her, and, if I managed to make it this far, I'd like to thank whoever decided not to cut my microphone for, admittedly, straying outside the bounds of my prerogative. The only reason I did that was because the opportunity to speak before such a large crowd gave me the chance to change possibly even just one person's mind, and I had to take advantage of it. I'd just like to say again how much I admire and respect these men and women that I am here with tonight, thank you.

Limbo

Pope Benedict’s removal of limbo from the Catholic Church’s doctrines raises an important and interesting point. It is reasonably safe to assume that there exists a specific way that reality actually is. There are different models that people subscribe to that attempt to explain the way things are. The current most popular scientific theory states that approximately 13,703,987,124 years, three months, and fifteen days ago, the universe exploded into existence from an infinitely dense, infinitely small singularity. The matter that we see all around us condensed out of a soup of energy into quarks, leptons, protons, neutrons, electrons, x-tons, and hundreds of other different particles; ever since that world creating explosion the universe has been expanding outwards faster and faster. The scientific explanation has a simplicity that theological ones lack. The Catholic Church’s model includes a heaven, hell, purgatory, and until recently, a limbo for the unbaptized children to go into. Those kids wouldn’t be let into heaven, because of something stupid the first man did 6,000, 50,000, or two million years ago. (hardly seems fair, doesn’t it?) Two thousand years ago, they believe God screwed a virgin, who gave birth to a person named Jesus, who was actually God, and who was tortured 33 years later and killed so that someone would be punished for our sins, because apparently God can’t forgive someone without somebody getting hurt. Their model of reality also includes a slew of saints that can help you out when God has his hands full. The excision of limbo was made in order to make the Church more appealing in places with high infant mortality rates, because apparently people don’t like the idea of their children not getting into heaven. Whether or not we can ever know for sure the true nature of reality, we can rest with the assurances with the knowledge that there was actually one specific way that things happened. Nobody knows for sure the identity of Jack the Ripper, and at this point, we can probably never know for sure. There are many different theories, one of them might be right, or none of them, but not more than one of them can be. We can be sure that there was one specific person, a man who had a name, and maybe a job, that was responsible for that string of dead and mutilated prostitutes over a hundred years ago in England. That is why it is interesting that the model of reality that up to a billion people believe in can be changed by executive fiat, ostensibly for marketing reasons. Either there is a limbo, or there isn’t one, and it is supremely odd to think that any humanly decision can in any way affect its existence or non-existence. If they say it doesn’t exist now, then it has never existed, and they were wrong for hundreds, over a thousand years, but if they were wrong once for all that time, what gives that institution any credibility now?

They Care.

In Douglas Adams’ work of genius, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a trilogy in five parts, in one of the books, I think maybe it could be The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I do remember it was the one about Krikkit, a character, probably Ford Prefect, makes a comment. Referring to the killer white krikkiter robots, he says something along the lines of they care, they care more, we don’t, not quite as much, they win; apathy will always lose out against fanaticism, there’s no reason to believe that that isn’t the case. In the abortion debate there are pro-life/anti-choicers, pro-choice/pro-death/anti-lifers, and those such as I who don’t really give much of a fuck one way or the other. While a pro-choice proponent might hold that a women’s right to control what goes on inside of her own body as a very deep and fundamental right, the ones opposing abortion believe it to be a matter of life and death, they equate abortion with murder. They care more than the other side does, they win. It’s as simple as that. No pro-choicer feels so strongly about their cause that they’d go out and shoot priests and bomb churches, but some pro-lifers, for example Eric Rudolph, who do feel so strongly that they will, and they have, gone out and shot doctors and nurses, and blown up clinics where abortion’s were performed. They feel so strongly about it that they feel the murder of someone who they consider guilty is necessary to save the life of an innocent. Not all feel that way, and many do condemn such acts of terrorism, but their faction contains that segment, while the pro-choice side doesn’t. There’s no way to compete against such rabid fanaticism, ultimately, they will win.

Of Iraq and Virginia

Though it certainly is truly extraordinarily tragic, the only thing about the Virginia Tech shootings that makes it shocking or unthinkable is that it happened in Middle America, and not the Middle East, Africa, or almost any conceivable place in the world besides a narrow band where such things are relatively rare. The murder of more than a score and a half people is something that occurs on a regular, steady basis. If instead of a headline reading “Thirty-Three Dead after Deranged Gunman Rampages at Virginia University” it had instead said “Gunmen Massacre Thirty-Three Students at Baghdad University”, absolutely no one would bat an eye, yet the worth of the lives lost is exactly the same. Such headlines can be found multiple times every day. It’s always worthwhile to maintain a sense of proportion and perspective. What is the worst spree shooting in United States history is what we have caused Iraq to suffer daily, many times over. That is a point that one shouldn’t forget. We, through our allowance of George Bush and his associates, have caused thousands of tragedies on a scale that equals and surpasses that which happened April 16 in Virginia. The day after the assault, George Bush even traveled to speak at the University, yet he refuses to acknowledge his culpability in a much larger number of equally tragic, barbaric events. Independent of the Casus Belli for the war, the fact remains, unassailable, that this is what we have done; this is what we are responsible for. Whether or not the war was “justified”, there have been, again and again, actions that taken cumulatively, dwarf the tragedies that people in this country mourn: Virginia Tech, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Jonesboro, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and others.

Inhuman Events

In the course of inhuman events, sometimes a people are faced with an imposing dilemma, or dilemmas, and the way in which they choose to react to that trying test determines the way in which history will remember them. The baby boomer generation was faced with twin problems, the Vietnam war, and the application of civil rights to everyone equally. Looking back on that time with the benefit of hindsight, despite a few shortcomings, many people met the burden that the circumstance of the day forced them to bear. In our time, we have many problems, and many threats that are all to real and grave, some of them from forces abroad, and others by people right here in the USA. Unfortunately, no swath of the population is willing to stand up and put themselves in the way of these unholy juggernauts. Look at just a few of today’s crises. We have let yet another African genocide continue on unimpeded. We have the US in a disastrous war of aggression in Iraq. This country’s other war, in Afghanistan, is now facing the very real possibility that the Taliban may eventually triumph. The calls to do something about catastrophic global climate change remain unheeded. A country that literally enslaves its citizens, and puts them in concentration camps for mere suspicion of sedition, has been allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and repeatedly threaten a litany of other countries. The guarantees of liberty that define this country are being eaten away from within by people overreacting to a perceived terroristic threat. I do not understand why people are so apathetic to such senseless perversion of the human condition.

Conservatism and Liberalism

Conservatism is by definition the preservation, maintenance, and protection of the status quo. It’s right there in the name CONSERVATism, the conservation of the way things are, keeping them the same way, it places tradition over progress, stagnantation over growth. Opposed to conservatism is liberalism, or more accurately, given the semantic subtlety of our current lexicon, progressivism. That political ethos strives for progress, the making of things better, as opposed to keeping them the same for the sake of sameness. It preaches improvement over dogma, growth over ritual. People are conservatives because they see change, any thusly, progress, as a negative, something to be protected against. They see any change as degradation. Governments and theological institutions rely on conservatism to maintain their hegemony. They are threatened by change; they feel it’s incompatible and contradictory to the corporations that give them meaning, the ones that they devote their lives to. All advancements in human history was brought about by liberals/progressives, and resisted and impeded by conservatives. Conservatives were on the side of the red coats during the revolutionary war; conservatives defended the genocidal institution of slavery, they supported segregation. Liberalism or progressivism is named because it wants to make things better, to improve society. The term liberal comes from the Latin “liber”, and doesn’t come from anything relating to wasteful. Liber means liberty or freedom, and liberalism has always been about bringing liberty to as wide a group as possible. What sounds more appealing, Liberalism or Conservatism?

North Korea

By scale, perhaps the most egregious thing going on in the world today is the situation going on in North Korea. North Korea is in a very real way 1984, and in some aspects, surpasses the heights of paranoid totalitarianism that was Orwell’s nightmare. It brings to mind Stalinist Russia, with its gulags for those that don’t precisely toe the party line, Nazi Germany, with its assembly line concentration camps, and takes tyranny to a level that those countries only dreamed of. That something like that would be allowed to exist in this world of today is absolutely shocking to me. Concentration camps were, I thought, a nightmarish anomaly that only existed on the pages of history books. There are camps covering the area of Washington DC, or Los Angeles, with 50,000 people who committed, or were suspected of committing, crimes injurious to the state along with their parents and children. Not only will the son pay for the sins of the father, but the father will also pay for his son’s sins. Human experimentation, public executions, mass famines, gas chambers for whole families, forced labor; it really is at least as bad as the world the George Orwell feared. It is absolutely frightening. In North Korea, you have no rights at all; you are the property of the state. You do absolutely nothing unless you are told to. You don’t get food to eat, a place to sleep, you get nothing unless the state grants it to you. Every single aspect of your life is beyond your control. Not one minutiae of freedom is allowed. And the leader, Kim Jong-Il is deified, worshipped as God incarnate. If you don’t follow and fall into lockstep with the party’s ideology, you are as good as dead. The leadership of the country has a messiah-complex, and partakes in the fine products of western culture, while nurturing his delusions of being a benevolent patron of the arts. While sipping champagne, spraying on hairspray, and watching the latest that Hollywood has to offer, thousands are starving while working 12 hour days, to support Kim Jong-Il’s expensive tastes, and to provide him with the most destructive weapon on earth. It is truly bizarre, nearly unbelievable, and nauseatingly barbaric; there is no lack of adjectives that would be apropos. The dark fantasies of the most cynical, misanthropic of novelists could be based on that country, with no need of exaggeration or artistic license. It is a country of slaves, with almost an insect like mentality reminiscent of the fanatical loyalty exhibited by honey bees, termites, and ants. That suicidal, blind obedience that they impart on people is quite simply terrifying. North Korea is so demarcated, separated from the rest of the world that the people there are clueless. They have been brainwashed into believing that their’s is a utopia, a paradise on earth. They believe that anything good happens because of the supreme ruler, Kim Jong-Il. Everything comes from him. That there is this type of society in existence while the rest of the world goes about things obliviously is incomprehensible.

Yet More Words and Thoughts on the War

Each generation must face down its own unique conflicts, and must come to task to them in their own personal, peculiar way, and some generations do that more effectively than others. Others shirk their responsibility, and misdirect that burden on to others to bear. It is too soon to tell how the naught generation will be judged, but I suspect that it will be seen as one that largely failed to meet all of the things that could reasonably be expected of it, one that wasn’t up to the task of its time. Some generations face more problems than others. As things go, the nineties weren’t all that bad. The baby boomers faced a total war in Southeast Asia, and the fight for people to enjoy equality here at home. Today, we’re facing a war of attrition in southwest Asia, a worldwide guerilla war being fought from the shadows, and an inept regime of rabid ideologues at home doing their best to undue everything that comprises this nation’s soul, everything that has given it the reputation for justice and greatness that they are now jeopardizing. What we do now is how we will be viewed for the rest of history. How shall we be judged? Will it be as the generation that backed down from the set of the biggest crises in this nation’s history, or will we rise up to meet the challenge? Our choices now will determine what our legacy will be, whether one of cowardice and capitulation, or one deserving of a country as righteous as we like to believe ours is.

Mr. President, how long will you allow this to go on? How many more families will be sent home their sons, brothers, fathers, daughters, sisters, and mothers in flag draped coffins? How many more will be made to lose their sight, their hearing, how many will you allow to be maimed and brutalized? How many more must lose their lives because you can’t live with the thought that somewhere along the line, you made a mistake? How many will you force a life of nightmares, PSTD, and guilt upon? How many will it take for you to finally admit that you were wrong? Do you believe that whatever you thought necessitated this war, is worth the price that’s been paid, the one that continues to be paid, and will continue to be paid for as long as you allow it to? Is it worth the half of a trillion dollars, and the almost four thousand Americans? Was getting Saddam at the end of a rope worth the lives of half a million Iraqis? I bet daddy’s proud now, isn’t he? He couldn’t be happier with the legacy you’ve made, the one thing that will forever be attached to your family’s name, could he? Are you that base, that vain that you would let this tragedy, this catastrophe continue, so as not force upon you the difficulty, the shame of saying: “I was wrong.” Three little words that are such an affront to your pride that you would let hundreds of thousands die to save you from the humility required to utter them. Do you seriously believe in the notion that what you did was right, and would you, if you were able to make that decision again, knowing all that you know now, would you choose the same course of action? Does the burden of what you’re responsible for at all bother you? Does the thought of the children that are dead because of you keep you up at night for even a minute? Do you believe, do you seriously believe that all of this is justified by the phantasmal specter of terrorism? Michael Jason Williams, Gregory Paul Sanders, Jay Thomas Aubin, Lori Ann Piestewa, Ruben Estrella Soto, these are not numbers, they are names, the names of people, Americans killed by your decisions, and there are over 3,500 more just like them. I fail to believe that Hassan Hashin, eleven, was a threat to this country, or Had Naam Mhebs, fourteen; or Afra Hashin, eleven; or Zhra Ali Hsen, eight. I cannot believe that these children were a threat to the security of this country. These names are but a handful of the scores and scores of thousands who have died in the past four years. Nagham Abaas Nahi, an eight year old schoolgirl killed by an American bomb, paid for by our tax dollars and dropped on your orders, in the town of Al-Taheria Al-Mahaweel on April 2, 2003, was most definitely not a terrorist.

Theology and Mortality

Nothing packs the same devastating wallop, a powerful blow to the gut, like the realization of the inexorable march towards death. For as long as I’ve been able to comprehend such things, I’ve known, in an abstract way, about my mortality. However, knowing that, and being able to say “yes, I know I’m going to die”, is much different from comprehending the real implications of such a fact. Knowing that at some point, exactly the same as right now, be it tomorrow or in 2073, there will be a moment when I draw my last breath, think my last thought, see the last image that I ever will see. Nothing has ever felt worse than thinking those thoughts, imagining how it would be like, ever since I first fully realized that, when I must’ve been eleven or twelve. The only thing I can hope for, the only thing I can want is that when the moment comes, to not be afraid, to actually want it to be over, to accept the ultimate. It is hard for me to imagine how it would be possible for me to not be afraid, to want such a thing as that. I can’t imagine anything worse than facing that final hour accompanied by a pervading fear of that last breath.

It gives me some comfort to believe that this, all this that is life, with its peculiar topography of peaks and valleys, is not just an aptitude test, set up to judge us and determine where we should place our reservations in the hereafter. I don’t understand why a god would create conscious beings, and endow them with traits in such a way that it knows, and in a sense even causes, every thing that this being would do, given the situation that it would be placed in, all the variables controlled absolutely by and perfectly understood by the god. Only a sadistic god would create people that it knew would end up in hell, which, I suppose, might very well be the case. Why should a god necessarily be benevolent? Sure, people prefer the idea of a perfectly good god, but what about god-hood makes it necessary for it to not get a kick out of flooding the world, just for the hell of it, or turning people into pillars of salt?

The beliefs and rituals of religions don’t jive with the way I think the world works, from my admittedly limited experience of it. A god capable of creating something as majestic as the universe, ought not care about who sticks what body part in whose orifice. I don’t think that such a god would be so insecure as to require our unquestioning devotion. Such a god shouldn’t care what day of the week you worshipped it on, or what name you called it by. Such a god wouldn’t care if you ate pork, reptiles, amphibians, shellfish, beef, or any other food that’s considered taboo by at least one religion. Such a god would have no reason, nothing to do with arbitrary laws. A god as mighty and as awesome as the one that many people claim to believe in, would not be so vain and insecure that it felt it needed the respect of such a tiny, insignificant group as the human race, a group of beings that would owe their very existence to it.

All it Would Take

I am here, all of us are here, because of an incomprehensible chain of a series of events, each of them as vital as any other, any of which, if they had happened to happen differently, would’ve negated our existence. If anything, any part of it, no matter how seemingly small or trivial, hadn’t happened, I would not be here right now. Possible, someone else would be here in my place, or no one would be here at all. If at the moment of conception, or to be a little more accurate, and pedantic, slightly before it, your father had sneezed, which caused him to shift his position ever so slightly, the lucky sperm that won the race, and specifies half of your genes, would’ve been a different one than the one that it was. That different one would only share half of its genes with the one that it actually was, which would’ve caused the child that resulted from that conception to share only three fourths of its genes with you. While that child would be similar to you, more so than any siblings you may have, it would not be you, it would be a different person, it may even have been of the opposite sex. So a sneeze, caused by a grain of pollen, could have prevented you from existing. Or if a comet that some ancient king took to be an omen, had been struck 78,391,326.0067 years ago by a meteor the size of a grapefruit, which shifted its orbit ever so slightly, and caused it to plunge into the sun 60 million years later, which caused the king to decide that he war he would otherwise have started wasn’t that good of an idea as he first thought, which caused a person who would’ve been killed to give birth to a child who’s great-granddaughter murdered one of your distant ancestors. The tiniest event causes ripples of changes to spread throughout the universe, each of these changes causes its own ripples, and these chains of changes have the power to alter the course of history. If almost anything, no matter how seemingly insignificant had been different in the past, the present would be a different one. Everything that has happened up to and including now relies upon similarly long, complicated, winding, and drawn out chains of happenstance and extraordinarily unlikely and improbable events. What I have trouble getting my head around, is the thought if my sense of me, my ego, would’ve been removed from existence, or if it would belong to someone else.

Ontological Proof of No God

Ontological Proof of the Non-Existence of God

1. The creation of the world and the universe is the greatest, most marvelous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of its intrinsic quality and the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability or handicap of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore, if we suppose the universe is the product of an existing creator, we can conceive of a greater being, one that created the universe while not existing.
6. Therefore, god doesn’t exist.

Darfur

I try to do my best to keep abreast of what's going on in the world, even if at times it can be totally overwhelming, depressing, heart wrenching, and soul crushing. There are far too many things in this world that are not as they should be, many profound injustices. The steady unrelenting march of news stories filled with accounts of murder, massacres, torture, bombings, imprisonments, and a litany of other abuses can be numbing in its monotony. The reality of wars that have been seen to take tens of thousands of lives has, I'm sorry to say, become commonplace, a seemingly normal, unavoidable aspect of humanity. It isn't very often I can learn of something I would have deemed unimaginable, a cruel relic of some past age, but which is being perpetrated as we speak (or more properly as I type and you read), and while the entire world turns a blind eye. I had heard of what's going on in Darfur, and I thought that I had a good, if broad, understanding of what was happening there. I had no idea the magnitude of the scale of that genocide, it can only properly be called holocaustal. Using Google Earth to get an aerial view of that region, and the immensity of the criminal slaughter becomes starkly apparent. To see where thousands upon thousands of villages, schools, homes, mosques, etc., have been levelled, is to see how horrific it really is. Being able to go from a vantage point where you can take in that entire region, on down to being able to discern the remnants of individual buildings is a singularly eye opening, yet gut wrenching experience. It allows you to gain an appreciation of what it means to say 400,000 people have been killed, and another 2,500,000 have been forced from their homes. How the world can stand back and do nothing more than condemn it using words not nearly approaching the strength or harshness that the situation calls for, is beyond my comprehension. I can't even begin to understand why we do this, why people find it necessary to judge someone inferior on account of their race, and deserving of execution. These things have always been a part of the world, and will probably always continue to be a part of it. I don't know if there's a more disheartening thought than that.

The Possibility of Genocide

Right now, we have about 160,000 of our fellow citizens, men and women whose prerogative is to defend this country, but who find themselves caught in the middle of a civil war that has engulfed a country that we have no business being in, one that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the security of the United States of America. Of those scores of thousands of our soldiers, at least three come home every day in flag draped caskets. Every day, several hundred Iraqis are killed, by bombs, gunmen, mortars, executions, being mistaken for insurgents, or caught in the crossfire. As of today, 68,141 people have been reported killed, a number compiled by going through news reports spanning more than four years, adding up the total incident by incident. That number is certainly a minimum, and many more times that number have probably actually been killed.

As much as I hate to admit it, George Bush may have a point. I fear that it is the presence of so many American troops, that while doing nothing to improve the civil war, may be the only thing standing in the way of all out, full blown genocide. Already, sectarian death squads roam city streets, setting up roadblocks to check people's ID's, searching for those that belong to a different sect, so as to summarily and systematically execute them. In the past year, more than 30,000 people were reported killed in an explosion of ethnic, sectarian warfare. That is almost half the total reported killed in four years of constant fighting. If every foreign troop, at this point almost entirely American, was to leave Iraq, it may become the equivalent of a Middle Eastern Rwanda, with tolls that might dwarf the already horrific ones that we're seeing today, as different populations do everything possible to exterminate the others.

This leaves us with an intractable dilemma: do we continue with our open ended support of the war, despite the thousands more deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars that course would ensue, or do we abandon the country to a fate that we have prepared for, risking letting it be absolutely consumed from within? One thing that must be done is to demand accountability from the cabal responsible for this monstrosity, such people as George Bush, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and their ideological compatriots. Ultimately, it is up to the people of Iraq to reject violence and constant internecine warfare, but it takes only a relatively small group of dedicated people to derail that process of peace and reconciliation. Yet it is us that bear responsibility for creating this situation that exists now. Possibly, the best of many awful solutions may be the partitioning of Iraq into three autonomous regions, one for Kurds, one for Shiites, and one for Sunnis. This segregation of the country may be the only way for the violence to eventually end. Yet this option is still fraught with danger and many possibly insurmountable difficulties. There are no good options available, each one involves many more deaths, and much more time, given what is happening now, that's unavoidable. The best one would be the one that leads to the least number of deaths, and the one that might eventually lead to a nation, or nations, that has a degree of stability, and is able to function without constant foreign military support. Nothing good can happen...

To George

For too long, no one has stood up and said that this is not right, that it is wrong, and I will take in no part of it. The only thing separating the Dick Cheney’s and George Bush’s of this world from the mass murderer’s of this world is proximity. They weren’t the one’s holding the knife or the gun, but still, if it wasn’t for them, it never would have happened. The scale of what they have done is orders of magnitude beyond even the most horrific of mass or spree killings, or the most prolific of serial killers. Mr. Bush, surely you can’t still believe that what you have done is right, you must have, at some point realized that engaging in this war was a mistake. How long ago was it that you realized you made a mistake, and how many people have been killed since then? How many of our courageous fighting men and women will be struck down, because you can’t say three little words, “I was wrong”? How many Iraqis, Journalists, Contractors, how many people has this war of yours already destroyed? Some 3,500 coalition soldiers are dead, in all you’ve taken by your actions maybe four hundred thousand lives. That is your legacy. The destruction of that country, and all of those many, many lives that are gone now, that is what you will be remembered for. I bet daddy’s proud of you now. You sure have showed him, haven’t you? You’ve gone and finished what he didn’t have the stomach for. This is your legacy, your contribution to the world; this is what will define your name. Does any of that bother you? Do you care that you will be counted alongside Saddam Hussein, as a tyrant, a torturer, and a killer? Do you care that as a direct result of your actions, a direct result of decisions that you made, scores of thousands of people are dead?

On the War

The defining feature of our era is without a doubt the so called Global War on Terrorism, and, more specifically, the war that is ongoing in the country of Iraq. It was almost six years ago that the precipitating act for most of the relevant events occurred, which was the mass murder of nearly three thousand people, on the eleventh of September, 2001. The men responsible for that doubtlessly deserve to be held to account, but they don’t, nor have they ever, resided in Iraq. Because the administration of George W. Bush was so passionately inclined to subject that country to the full force of the American Military, we let the men with actual culpability slip away into the night, where they can continue to plan for more attacks. Four years ago a contingent of mainly American, with a few Brits and others thrown in for good measure, tanks, hummers, armored personal carriers, and the like rolled into Iraq as “smart” bombs fell upon the country. That month-long opening salvo saw ten thousand civilians killed. That is over three times the number of innocent people that were killed on 9/11. Those people were just as innocent, just as undeserving of that fate as the unfortunate souls aboard the four airliners, and those working at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Even the soldiers that were killed, maybe 45,000 of them, what misdeed of theirs warranted the fate to which they were consigned? They did nothing wrong, they were only defending their country, their homeland from foreign invaders. Motivated by patriotic fervor, or the desire to protect their families, they were just as innocent, just as undeserving of such a fate as anyone else. After the fall of Baghdad, after Saddam no longer held the reins of Iraq, after MR. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished”, what then? The war, the killing continued on relentlessly. The loss of soldiers continued at the steady pace of at least two a day, that being broken only by periods of intensification and escalation. It soon became clear that the primary justification that Mr. Bush Gave for this war was as spurious as his electoral victory. Saddam, and Iraq, was not in possession of any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. There was no link to Al Qaeda, to the people responsible for the three thousand American deaths suffered six years ago. The terrible toll continued, and continues to climb higher every day. Each year has seen more people killed than the year preceding it, and now the situation has grown beyond anybody’s control. There is not one person who can stop this war; there are far too many separate groups and players. No one is in control, not George Bush, not Osama Bin Laden, not anybody. The only thing that can be done is to mitigate as much as possible, the violence that occurs. We must try to draw down, to ease the religious and ethnic tensions, and do whatever is necessary to bring about an end to the killing. The people that perpetrated this atrocity, the people that unleashed this upon the world must be held to account. It must be shown that in a civilized world, actions and events such as these must not be allowed to take place, and the people that would commit them, must not be allowed any power.

On Possibility, Eternity, Genius, and an Infinite Monkey

Any bounded possibility, given an infinite amount of time, can be considered not only an eventuality, but an absolute certainty. This follows because infinity is not merely a big number, it's an insanely, massively, enormously, gigantically bigger number than you can even begin to imagine. If you place a limit on something, no matter how large or liberal that limit is, that thing will happen not just once, but again, and again, and again an infinite number of times if it's given an infinite amount of time to run its course. For example, novels generally have from 60,000 to 200,000 words. That's a large number, but it is still as far from infinity as three is. The English language has, and this is very approximately, 988,968 words that have ever been written down or uttered. This information allows for some calculations to be done. The number of possible ways to write one word is the number of words, precisely 988,968 possibilities. If you were to write two words, the number of possibilities is the number of words times itself, or 988,968^2. That number works out to 978,057,705,024 possibilities. So the total number of two word combinations that are possible is somewhere in the neighborhood, though slightly less than, one trillion permutations. The number of possible two-hundred-thousand word novels is easily deduced from mostly similar steps. You take the number of existing words and raise it to the power of the number of words you have, in this case 988,968^200,000. So there are 988,968^200,000 two-hundred-thousand word English language novels possible, though many of those would be incomprehensible nonsense, but everything up to 200,000 words is in there. Everything that’s been written by, and could have been written by the likes of William Shakespeare, Douglas Adams, Ian Fleming, Stephen King, or anybody for that matter. Each masterpiece, and each masterpiece greater than anything that’s been written, but not yet written, exists in the realm of possibility. There is a limit, the limit is massive, it’s huger than huge, overwhelmingly, mind-bendingly big, but it can be reached, given enough time. This goes for anything, given infinity, or even just a very long time, every thing that is possible will happen, and it will happen over and over again. This especially goes for music. There is a limit to the different patterns of One’s and Zero’s that can be burned on to an audio CD. The information on a compact disk is stored in areas of pits and lands, one’s and zero’s, offs and ons. There are about two billion different pits on a CD, and each of those can be in two different positions. The equation for figuring the number of possible permutations, the absolute upper limit to musical creativity is around 2^2,000,000,000. One should never forget the power of exponential growth; if not for lack of resources, rapidly dividing bacteria would soon consume the earth in their greedy, sexless orgy of cytokinesis. Now most of these CD’s would be static, noise that didn’t resemble a thing, but buried in the monstrous heap you will find every one of Pink Floyd’s records, and the ones they may have made if there situation were only a little bit different. That assortment of CD’s would contain everything there has been, and everything there could be. The same goes for DVD’s, movies, and TV shows. There’s a limit for everything, possibilities aren’t infinite, and eventually you will run out of ways for things to go, if the experience is placed under any bounds or limits. There’s a limit for CD’s, books, poems, shows, and anything else you might want to define. Given a bound, a limit, and more time than can be imagined, the possibilities of existence will play themselves out, everything will happen, and everything will keep happening, over and over again, ad nauseum, trapped in a penitentiary of eternal time.An addendum:
Take the hypothetical case of the monkey banging away on a keyboard for infinity, what are the chances of said simian coming out with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or maybe the King James Version of the bible? The bible has some 3,566,480 individual characters, though I’m not sure whether or not this includes spaces. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, which one can multiply by two to account for capitalization. So a monkey (or maybe perhaps a president) hammering away on a keyboard would have 52^3,566,480 different ways of writing a book of that length, and one of them would exactly match the King James Bible. Searching through all of the reams of pages to find the bible would take beyond an insanely long time, but it would be of a finite length. Anytime you have a limit, something that constrains the dimensions of whatever it is you’re considering, you reduce all of the different ways it can be to something that’s finite, a thing that will eventually come to an end, or be forced to repeat itself.

Genius’s substance lies not in one’s ability to make arise from whole-cloth, but in finding the path of what’s already there. As I’ve gone over, there are a finite number of possibilities when it comes to something that varies. All of these possibilities exist, but most are, and will remain, unfulfilled. Genius lies in the ability to pick out the great from the chaff, to find the path through the space of possibilities that leads to the most moving novel, or heart rending poem. The genius is not a creator, he is a discoverer, one who unveils what was already there, but hidden from the light. Just as a sculptor doesn’t make a statue from a block of marble, the sculptor’s job is to remove the bits and pieces obscuring the masterpiece that has been there since the block was created. As there is a block of marble that represents all of the possibilities, there is a space of possible novels, of possible combinations of words, and it is the erudite author who maneuvers its way through the space that is mostly made up of random nonsense, until he finds a gem. Answers are out there, they just need to be found, found and separated from the gibberish and the misleading ones. Possibility is finite.

( UPDATE: 4/20/07: I wrote this before I discovered Jorge Borge's essay "The Library of Babel", it deals with basically the same topic. It relates a universe composed of every assembly of characters that can be fit into a book of a set length. His ruminations on the subject were remarkably in line with what I wrote. There are a few online Library of Babel simulators that one might find interesting.)

On Love

There’s a quote about love, that most mysterious of human emotions, that I’ve come across that seems to be apt for how I’ve been feeling recently. It’s from a British author named Neil Gaiman, and it is as follows: "Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love". I’m beginning to think that he hit the nail on the head with those words. Love is something that when it works out the way you would like it to, not even morphine can beat, but as is more often the case, things don’t go quite as well as you might like. What is it that lets us give so much of ourselves over, to vest so much of our well being in the whims of another, someone who may or may not be worthy of such a tragic responsibility? This emotion can give you the highest high, but like many drugs, it can at times be unrivaled in the agony, the misery, the absolute unrelenting torture that it can bring to bear on some unlucky fool caught fast in its grip. Love has caused me to lie awake all night, my thoughts racing from one awful thing to another. It has caused me to be able to do nothing else than lay curled up in the darkness crying, with a hollow, empty feeling that’s almost too hard to bear. Love that doesn’t work out the way I wanted it to has caused me in the past to go hungry for days, solely because eating didn’t cross my mind. Love’s such an awful thing, I wish I could go without it, and without the pain that inevitably follows behind it, but I still haven’t given up all hope that someday, things may work out, and while there’s still that little bit of hope, I must continue trudging my way through life, until I collapse under the weight of the world, or love finds a way to work out.

On the Fading of Outrage and the Inevitability of Atrocity

Eventually, things will change. The outrages of today, the assaults on human dignity, the atrocities, and the crimes against humanity will pass into the pages of history, and reading of them will become an academic exercise. Already, for people today, learning of the holocaust doesn’t bring the bite, the pile driver jab to the stomach that it ought to. The machinations of Nazi Germany’s effort to exterminate, to engage in the whole sale bureaucratic slaughter of millions of people deemed unworthy for life, don’t inspire the horror in people that it should. That anything could ever transpire on such a scale, that the human species is capable of that should be terrifying, it’s something that should never lose its power. No matter how much time passes, the fact of the holocaust should always be able to move people to tears, to nausea. Nothing going on today rivals that crime, but there are many crimes today that, while not meeting those epic proportions, are still shockingly brutal, horrific, and, for lack of a better word, evil. What word, if not “evil”, should be used to describe the act of half a dozen men pinning a bound and blind folded man to the ground, while one of them saws through his neck with a knife like someone carving up a Christmas roast or a Thanksgiving turkey? What word, if not “evil”, can describe the maneuvering, conniving, and scheming of people to invade a country, placing hundreds of thousands of their fellow country men at risk, and killing thousands of entirely innocent people in the most brutal ways possible, for reasons not entirely clear and motives not entirely pure? If doing that while knowing that it would destroy lives, families, and futures, unleash a torrent of atrocities, torture, massacres, and countless other misdeed, if doing all of that is not evil, what is? How might something like that not be evil, but two men who love each other getting married is? All of the evil acts of today will fade with time. Eventually, they will lose their power to inspire the raw, unfiltered emotions that they do, in all but a small number of people. They will be replaced with the crimes of their own time, the only thing we can do is try to make sure that the inevitable future atrocities aren’t as barbaric as today’s and those of day’s past. The best we can hope for is to make it impossible, or at the very least harder for tomorrow’s Saddams, Bush’s, Hitlers, Stalins, Nixon’s, and Pinochets to do what they do best. If we are able to ensure that tomorrow's crimes don't exceed or even equal those of today, and those that belong to history, that would be the most success we might realistically hope for.

from A Letter on the Candidates

The next national election won't be until November of 2008, but already, it's impossible to get away for a brief respite from people talking about who will run, who might run, who could win. who should win but won't, who shouldn't run but will, and on and on, all about a contest almost two years away. You know that in my opinion, the party that's not as bad, are the Democrats. The candidates that they have are a very interesting, very diverse group, without a doubt the most diverse field that there's ever been. There's Hillary Clinton, the wife of our former President Bill Clinton, who's our greatest living President. Barack Obama, a first term senator from Illinois who's father was from Kenya, who has many people excited in the media. Bill Richardson is the Governor of my little state, New Mexico, who is Hispanic, and probably the most qualified out of any of the possible choices. There's also John Edwards(former Senator), John Kerry(Senator who lost to Bush in 2004), Tom Vilsack(Governor of Iowa), Dennis Kucinich, and other contenders. Usually every presidential candidate is a white male, but already the Democrats have a woman, a Hispanic, and a black running, along with the usual ones. This is unprecedented, and very surprising. The Republicans on the other hand are stuck with the usual tired, old, white guys.
People can't stop talking about Barack Obama, but I think that it's not because they like him as a possible president, but they enjoy the novelty of a black guy who actually stands a chance of winning. I personally like Obama, I think he'd bring a fresh start to the political arena, but I don't know if he has the right qualifications, the necessary amount of experience. He's only been a Senator for two years. I also don't know if there's much more to him than a good looking, charismatic smile.
Hillary has got a huge political machine backing her up, and she has the benefits of her husband being a former president. Other than that, she's not a very remarkable person. Many people dislike her, and won't vote for her no matter what, so I don't think she has much of a chance. She's much too divisive, and this country doesn't need another divisive figure after enduring the horrors of Dubya.
Bill Richardson is the most qualified, with the most experience. He's competently governed this state for the past few years, he hasn't caused any type of large scale catastrophe. He has continued to meet with North Korean officials because he was the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration. North Korea has continued to develop its nuclear weapons, and that situation is probably the most dangerous one today. When dealing with the diplomatic chess game, he is the go to guy. Recently, he helped negotiate a ceasefire in the Sudan-Darfur war going on, after he met with the President of Sudan on his visit to that country. He doesn't have much of a chance because he doesn't have the name recognition, or the media behind him, but I do think that he may be the best option for the President.
It would be hard to find someone who would actually do worse than George Bush, so I think that anybody will probably be an improvement. over him.
There was an interesting thing that I saw. If Hillary Clinton becomes President and she gets reelected, which is a possibility, a member of the Clinton or Bush family would've been running the USA for 28 years (if you want to count the Vice Presidency, the number's 36). Such a streak is something that worries me. It is too reminiscent of an aristocracy, people inheriting their leaderships. It ought be shaken up a bit.

Letter on the Victory of Good O'er Evil

What follows is a letter I wrote to a friend on Nov. 9 about the Nov. 7 Elections.

I'm not sure if I can even start to describe how happy I am about what happened Tuesday in the elections we had here. The republicans lost the majority that they'd had for the past four years in the senate, and the past twelve in the house of reps. Finally, there'll be somebody there to stop Bush before he does too much more damage. It isn't that the democrats are very much better, they're just incredibly less worse. They probably won't do many good, productive things, but they won't do nearly as much bad, destructive things. With luck, I'm trying not to get my hopes up, there is the possibility that Bush, and Cheney, and the whole diabolical cabal might be impeached and thrown out in disgrace. Already, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense is out. I'm hoping that many more will follow. After so much bad news for such a long time, this provides the first glimmer of hope that I've had in a long time, and for that, I'm happy.

On God and My God and All That

If there is a god, one that created all of existence (save for itself, I think. A god that existed would necessarily be part of existence, but it couldn't create itself), then it would follow that such a god wouldn't be absolutely perfect in every way, as is posited by the many people that believe in it. A perfect should be content merely to exist, in need and in want of nothing. What could possible disturb the perfect god's equilibrium to cause it to want to create the universe? The act of creation would mean that god had a desire, a need for something, something that it didn't have. A perfect being would have everything it needed, everything that it might possible want. Therefore, at the very least, god's not perfect, because in desiring something, it lacked in something, and lacking is an imperfection. To most people, the idea that god isn't perfect isn't very appealing. Though just because it's not what you want it be, it doesn't follow that perfection would have to be a quality of a being that may have created the universe. Many times, I have heard people relate something similar, or sometimes identical, to an argument named Pascal's wager, after the French mathematician. I used to hold it in high esteem, but since then its irredeemable flaws have become apparent to me. In its basic form is that if there is a god, and said god exists, then you get rewarded with eternal, infinite bliss in paradise or heaven. If, on the other hand, you don't have faith, and there's one, then you get rewarded with eternal hellfire. On the other hand, if there is no god, no matter what you believe, you get nothing, because death only provides you with oblivion, faithful and infidels alike. So given the choices of getting nothing, losing in effect everything, and gaining all the pleasure in the world, the rational mind would go all in on the chance that god exists. Most of the wager's flaws arise from holding many unfounded assumptions, the most egregious being that belief is rewarded and disbelief is punished. Why should you assume that? What justification is there other than that's the most common thing for people to believe? A god that rewards skepticism and punishes believers with a vengeance is at least as imaginable as the traditional conception. Likewise, it's perfectly easy to imagine a god that rewards everyone, or punishes all, or doles out sentences at random whether somebody's a believer or not. That any of these are possible destroys the integrity of the wager, in my opinion, irreparably. It also assumes that belief is something that can freely be chosen. That's something that's very hard for me to accept. No matter how hard I try, it would be impossible for me to believe that George W. has been a great president, or even a capable president. I really do understand the appeal that religion holds for people, it provides a concrete foundation and ready made, clear cut answers to almost all questions (Why X? It's god's will). It is a means of escape, a way to get through the day, because it holds the promise, the allure of better things to come, if only you follow some rules and engage in some rituals. I wish that I could throw myself into religion. If that were possible, it would make my life very much easier, but I can't bring myself to it. To be able to believe in something, I'd have to think that whatever the religion said was the way things actually were. From my experience of the way the world works, it's impossible for me to believe that Jesus arose from the dead, or there was a worldwide deluge, or any of the countless other myths that form the basis of most religions. The beliefs and rituals of religions don't jive with the way I think the world works. A god capable of creating something as majestic as the universe, ought not care about who sticks what body part in which hole. I don't think that such a mighty being would be so insecure as to require our unquestioning devotion. Such a god wouldn't give a damn about what day of the week you paid reverence to him on, or by what name you called it. Such a god wouldn't care if you ate pork, shellfish, beef, or any other food. Such a god wouldn't care how you shaved your beard, or the length of your hair. Such a god would have nothing to do with arbitrary laws for agents it created and controls. A god as mighty and as awesome as the one believed in by so many people, would not be so insecure and vain that it needed the respect and fear of such a tiny, insignificant group as the human race.

Rough Draft Commencement Address

Tonight, I suppose that I'm supposed to speak about what the last four years have been like, how I've changed, how things have changed, and what the future may hold in store. So, to get all of that out of the way, the first two years were great. Suffice it to say, the last two haven't been so good. Due to a cluster fuck, a perfect shit storm of inept, incompetent, tyrannical, and bellicose administrators, arbitrary standards dictated by a goofy child president, and a concerted, systematic effort by others unknown to destroy and dismantle, figuratively and literally, our school, they have succeeded in removing one of the best alternatives that used to be available for students who needed one. We have seen the almost total replacement of the staff, including some of the best and most dedicated teachers I've known. As a result of this, there has been a precipitous decline in the effectiveness of San Andres High School as an institution. The school that I chose to come to, the school that I enjoyed coming to, no longer exists, and it is a fucking shame that students like myself have one less good option available to them. If I was not able to go to the school that San Andres used to be, my time in High School would've been much more of an ordeal. But there are larger issues facing us today. For the past few years this country has been on a dangerous course. Most egregiously, we invaded a country in a war of aggression. During the Nuremberg Trials the Chief American Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said this: "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." We started this war over four years ago, and in the intervening months, things have progressively continued to get worse. We've been fighting longer than we did in WWII, we've lost more soldiers than the number of people who were killed on 9/11, and the number of Iraqis who have been killed in those four years is on the same level as the number who were killed during Saddam's 24 year reign of terror, and a hundred more are killed every single day. The monetary cost of all this is approaching half a trillion dollars, with another two billion dollars more every week. The reasons we're there have changed too many times too count. We've abandoned all to readily and whole-heartedly many of the ideals fundamental to our country's being, the 800 year old right of Habeas Corpus, one of the cornerstones of western democracy, has been discarded with hardly a murmur. We stood by as our government abandoned thousands in the hellhole that New Orleans became after Hurricane Katrina drowned that city, killed two thousand people, and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Our government has decided that it is okay to keep people locked up, for years, without charges or recourse to the law; that its justified to use torture, as a routine interrogation tactic. Right now, any one of you can be stripped of everything, every last right that you have, based on a presidential whim, and consigned to the solitary confinement of a naval brig, until you're deemed no longer a threat. From the response to 9/11, to the unmitigated disaster of Iraq, the Valerie Plame affair, the Terri Schiavo circus, New Orleans and Katrina, Warrant-less wiretapping, torture, abu ghraib, Nigerian Yellow Cake, the Downing Street memo, the bankrupting of the treasury, and so many more than can be counted, these last few years have been much worse than anything that occurred in even the Nixonian era, but that is not the worst of it. We, as a nation, have grown complacent. We do not get outraged, even in the face of such blatant transgressions that we've been faced with. There have always been tyrannical, belligerent, and corrupt people in charge, but we've failed to rise up to the challenge. There weren't people in the streets, there were no protests, no widespread instances of multitudes of people standing up and saying, "This is wrong. I will not be a part of this. I will do whatever I have to stop it." An overwhelming majority of people oppose the catastrophe that we created in Iraq, but there have been no occupations of student union buildings or recruitment offices. The vast number of protests have been reserved to standing on the sidewalk, holding signs in the air. The political tide is turning, but we failed to meet the challenges of the chronic crisis we have. The thing that we must do now, is demand accountability from the people who've caused so much damage. In order for us to regain this country's soul, those people must be impeached, they must be indicted, and they must be incarcerated. If lying about a hummer in the oval office justified an impeachment trial for the last guy, lies that have lead to in excess of half a million deaths surely justifies much harsher measures for this one.

A Fragment On Iraq

I think that the course the war in Iraq has been going will stay pretty much steady, at least until this presidency is over. The people in charge are too stubborn and too dug in to admit they were wrong and pull the troops out, and they won't be allowed by the rest of the nation to really escalate things to try to pacify the country. When it comes right down to it, whatever happens in Iraq, life will continue much the same as anything here. The stakes aren't high enough to make people care about it. It's a different type of war than WWII. Back then, losing would've meant the US would probably cease to exist as a nation. That's why we were willing to go all out. Now, if we stay the course, things will stay the same, if we pull out, things will stay the same, so there's not an incentive to do anything differently. Nothing will change for people in the US, whatever the fuck happens in Iraq. My prediction is that because of that, we'll keep doing what we've been doing until a vast majority of the people become weary of the whole mess, then they'll say we accomplished the mission and bring most of the troops home, leaving a few dozen bases just in case we ever need to go back, or use it to go after another country.

On the War and the Passing of Saddam

There seemed to be something disturbingly morbid and ghoulish over the way the news channels were eagerly waiting for Saddam to be hanged. On CNN, they were proud in saying, "even if the news comes in during a commercial break, we'll cut out of it so you'll be the first to know that he's been executed." I can't say that I didn't welcome news of Saddam Hussein's hanging, he is a man who deserves as much as anybody that fate. Although I fail to see what good it'll do. He was a brutal dictator, and unfortunately there are many dictators who are deserving of what he got, but very few of them reach that point. It's a little reassuring knowing that at least one tyrant met his end where he deserved it. Too many have escaped justice. This year, Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet were two dictators with many deaths to their blame. They died naturally; it's fitting that someone who created such violence should receive it. Is there more justice at the end of a rope than there is in a jail cell? I don't know. My personal opinion is that it's better to leave them to rot in a cell. I think that this'll only inflame tensions, and make things worse. I am horrified at the numbers of people killed and hurt in this war, there has been no justice done. This war is sickening, it's revolting, the people who planned it, and executed it, they deserve a rope of their own as much as Saddam did. Even though it may have been justified, or at least justifiable, I can only see how this will only inflame people's anger, and cause even more violence. On Christmas another milestone was reached. The number of American soldiers killed passed the number of people who were killed on 9/11, 2,973. This war is now more of a disaster, at least for the American military, than 9/11 was for the nation. Although, such a comparison doesn't seem very accurate to me. American soldiers wouldn't be analogous to people killed on 9/11, if anything, the best comparison would be to the men who hijacked the airplanes. To compare 9/11 and the Iraq war, you'd have to look at the number of civilians who've died. Recently there was a study done that aimed to find out how many deaths the war has caused. It found that there were 655,000. That number is insane. For every American that's died, as many as more than 200 Iraqis have been killed. Astoundingly, I still hear people try to justify it, they say it was the right thing to do. I just want to scream at those people, "what is wrong with you?! Are you insane!?" It's infuriating. It's also infuriating that even though an overwhelming majority of people in this country have realized that it was the wrong decision, they aren't willing to do anything about it. They don't want to do anything to try to bring it to an end. They don't want to do anything to hold people accountable for unleashing this monster. All they did was wait four years to elect a different political party into power, and remarkably, it looks like that won't help in the least. Bush is looking at the option of, instead of drawing down the number of troops, increasing it by 20,000 or 30,000 soldiers. That will only raise the number of people killed. It's disgusting. It's frustrating, seeing such devastation unfold, and being powerless, completely unable to do anything to stop it, to ameliorate it in any small way.

If there is one good thing you can say about Saddam, it is this, in spite of the indignities that he was made to suffer in his last moments on this earth, he carried himself to the end with the most dignity that could be expected of someone in his position. During his life, it is true that he was responsible for some cruel, evil barbarities, but in the face of taunting hecklers as he stood on the gallows with a noose around his neck, he took on the aura of dignified respectability. I am sure that he's cemented himself as an image, a figurehead, a hero, even a martyr, in the minds of many people, and not just the ones who have supported him all the way. I saw the video, the full one that was released and depicted the entire sordid scene. I am against executions for anybody, be it a low-life criminal gangster, or a deposed president, I would even choose to have perhaps the worst monster in the history of the world, Adolf Hitler, locked up for the remainder of his natural life, instead of showing him to the gallows, electric chair, guillotine, gas chamber, or firing squad. However, in states where people do face that penalty, it is usually administered in a bureaucratic way, aiming for something approaching justice. Saddam's execution more closely resembled a mob lynching from another era, than one where the purpose was to try to bring about justice. No one should face a jeering crowd in the final seconds of their life, except maybe Glenn Beck, I hate that fucking man.

On Torture

In the Global War of Terror, people have questioned how far we should go in interrogating suspected terrorists, and at which point we should stop. How harsh is too harsh? One of the scenarios that the pro-torture camp employs is, "say there's a nuclear bomb in New York City set to go off in three hours. We have a person in custody who knows where it is, but the only way to get him to tell us is to attach a car battery to his testicles." In such a situation, what should we do, and what type of legislation should we have to deal with it? Ignoring the astronomically improbable likelihood of such a situation ever occurring, I have come to what in my opinion is the best solution to an untenable problem. Torture, in any and all forms should be illegal, and prohibited. However, if a situation such as a nuke in New York City were to occur, people would do what they had to do to prevent it from going off, including torture. In the investigation that would hopefully follow such an incident, if it was determined that the torturers were acting in a way that they felt was justified, than they ought not to be prosecuted. However, if we were to legislate guidelines to using torture, it would be used and abused in situations that did not require it. If it is kept absolutely illegal, it will only be used as an absolute last resort in the direst of circumstances.

On Import

In this world of ours, this wonderful, decrepit, horrific world of ours, there are people. Not only that, but there are many people, very many people, billions and billions of people. There are short people and tall people, fat people and thin people, various shades of brown and pink people, people who pray to Allah, people who pray to Satan, people who pray to no one at all, and even people who pray to Joe Pesci. Some of them are presidents, a few are kings, some are senators, and some are bakers. Some of these people are mechanics, clerks, dentists, nurses, teachers, thieves, drug dealers, and pimps. Some of these groups are more numerous, and some are famous, infamous, and unknown. Some follow the flock, and some are trail blazers. All of these people matter just as much as any other, all of these people matter just as little, and all of them are equally worthless. At the end of the day it doesn't matter the size of your house, or your number of friends, your salary doesn't matter, nor does the party you vote for. No matter whether you're the pope, the president of the united states, or an unemployed alcoholic, the world will go on whether you're there to see it or not, whether you want it to or not. The sphere of matter that we live on called the earth would continue to make its merry way around the nuclear fireball known as the sun, whether we continued to live on it or not. What happens matters not, and what doesn't happen matters just as much. Anything is as right or as wrong as anything else, and it couldn't be any other way, nor should it, because anything else would be just as random, just as arbitrary, and just as impenetrably ineffable as it already is. Everything is the most important thing in the world, and nothing is. Whatever you do is right, because whatever you do is the only thing you could have done, it's the only way it could have been, and there is no point in arguing that, unless you are, in which case it must unavoidably follow that arguing it's the right thing to do, just as surely as a hangover follows a drinking binge.