POEM: I am not an Indian (0)

Posted 18 February, 2010 in Audio Poems, Family, My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

I Am Not An Indian [2:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Listen to this poem by pressing the play button above.

A Blackfoot woman

I am not an Indian

My great-great-great-great grandmother
was a full-blooded Blackfoot Indian.
People say full-blooded not because
they have any proof,
but because it sounds wild, native.
If you do the math, that makes me
1.5% Blackfoot, and not very wild at all.
Say what you will about Ward Churchill;
he was right that all our accomplishments
as a country, all our technology, all our freedom,
all our music and poetry and art and dance and theater,
is being created on land that we stole from people
whose names we don’t even remember.
In college, my roommate’s best friend
paid less for his tuition because he was
above some arbitrary threshold
of Native American ancestry.
Not full-blooded, but bloody enough.
He was generously allowed
to learn quote-history-unquote
in a government building on the very land
his ancestors occupied before they became
little more than discount coupons for the state.
Another branch of my family has lived
in New England since 1638.
We never owned slaves, you’ll hear them
attest proudly, and it appears to be true.
Less lauded is my some-number-of-greats
uncle John Flanders, who served
with distinction in the army of Gen. John Sullivan,
helping to rid upstate New York of the Iroquois.
Sullivan’s troops burned and shot and hung and scattered
the people of many nations, including the Cayuga.
The army destroyed their town of Coreorgonel, and in its place was
established Ithaca, now a haven for higher education and
an oasis for studiers of organic farming and
Native American spirituality.
Living at Coreorgonel were the remnants of the Tutelo people,
who’d been forced from their homes
on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky,
and who were taken in by the Cayugas. It has been
112 years since any human being spoke the Tutelo language.
Sitting on a stage at the Tokyo Film Festival, director Chris Eyre
(of the Cheyenne-Arapaho, remember them?)
was asked by a member of the audience whether he preferred
to be called “Indian” or “Native American.”
“We have so many other problems to deal with
that we don’t have much time to worry about
what we’re called,” he said.

POEM: Citizenship 101 (2)

Posted 15 February, 2010 in My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

Happy Presidents Day!

Citizenship 101

close the blinds
snuff the candle
fasten the shutters
douse the lamp
pull the shades
don’t ask questions
believe the lie
smile and nod
obey the law
cover your ears
shut your mouth
take your seat
toe the line
pull your weight
watch your language
step right up
place your bets
take your pick
know your place
keep the peace
respect your elders
follow the rules
take it easy
expect the worst
don’t ask why
clean your plate
eat your veggies
wipe your feet
find your name
get in line
sign right here
read the label
write this down
answer the question
raise your hand
recite the pledge
say your prayers
sit up straight
stop right there
do your chores
wash the dishes
do the laundry
empty the trash
mow the lawn
shovel the walk
walk the dog
mind your manners
stand your post
post no bills
salute an officer
straighten your tie
tie your shoes
bow your head
kiss the ring
don’t be late
tote that barge
lift that bail
pay your taxes
pay your bills
pay the fine
pay the piper
follow the crowd
tell the truth
name the names
reveal your sources
betray your friends
kill your enemies
respect the flag
swear your loyalty
sit back down
swear your loyalty
sit back down
swear your loyalty
sit back down
swear your loyalty
sit back down

More evidence that either God or Al Roker hates gays (0)

Posted 20 August, 2009 in Politics & Activism

God al-roker-bluebackground

From a Facebook exchange today. You need to read the initial link for the rest to make sense.

Sonya posted a link.
The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality

“What do you all think?”

Will:
WOW! I’m sure they’ll miss the overtones of this.

Graham:
Proclaiming truth and extending grace. It made me think of the verse in Proverbs 24:26 that states “an honest answer is like a kiss on the lips.”

Jason Crane
Remarkably offensive.

Meli:
sound thinking. it is a very serious problem for the church to feel she has the right to decide whether or not something is sin when God’s Word very clearly states that it is sin.

Jason Crane:
A gay man is stranded in a sailboat, and a wind comes up and he reaches shore; does that mean God loves gays?

Sonya:
Jason, I think the question for me goes back to the probability issue – what the heck is the probability of this just happening. The meteorologists happened to be clueless. That is where this differs to me a bit from an event such as a tsunami which is the result of an earthquake that was predicted and noticed, or a hurricane that was tracked for days. This sort of came out of nowhere and left to go nowhere…

And, yes, the answer is God does love gays. He loves us all. He just cannot be with sin.

Thank you also, for reading my page. I am grateful for your friendship!

Jason Crane:
I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor. In this case, is it more likely that a meteorological event happened, or that an incorporeal invisible entity made a political statement by making the wind blow?

Plus, how do you know it wasn’t Zeus telling the world that he dislikes Lutherans? Or Vishnu declaring hatred for the Minnesota Twins? There is exactly as much evidence to support both those positions as there is to support a Christian reading.

And if logic isn’t enough: How does God loving everyone mesh with creating a potentially deadly tornado near a densely populated area?

The thing that I find hurtful is that it’s OK to demonize gay people, but not to criticize the frankly crazy notion that an invisible being decides where tornadoes go based on conversations about individual sexuality.

Your comment under the article is “What do you all think?” If by “you all” you meant “you all who think the same way I do,” then you should be more specific about inviting only certain types of comment.

Bigotry and plain language (1)

Posted 24 April, 2009 in Family, Politics & Activism

Yesterday I posted this uncharacteristic message as my Facebook status:

“Hey, all you opponents of gay marriage: F*CK YOU! (What? That’s not helpful? Oh, sorry. But, uh, f*ck you bigots anyway, OK?)”

This, as you might imagined, generated quite a few comments:

Dean Bowman at 1:36pm April 23: What about opponents of marriage?

Heather Dingman-Glenn at 1:40pm April 23: The majority of students at my school feel that all rights should be equal and are open to all kinds of relationships. However, I would say the boys have it worse than the girls. This is a high school where the majority of the parents are military.

Jason Crane at 2:48pm April 23: @Dean: I’m with you, man. State recognition of unions for legal purposes, and then let folks follow religious practices if they choose, with no state sanction or recognition whatsoever. (Unless, of course, you were just being funny.)

Wendy Ramsay at 2:59pm April 23: Snaps to that!

Julie White at 3:23pm April 23: Ideally, I think that the majority of the rights that come with marriage should just be given to people as basic human rights–you know, like health care, adoption for anyone who’s a fit parent and wants to make a family with anyone else–but as long as we live in a state that thinks that monogamous committed relationships should be rewarded, then … Read Morelet’s at least be equal about that. But in Julie’s utopia, no one kind of human relationship (as long as it’s consensual and doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights)would be privileged over another (I know, dream on)… off my soapbox…but this is why I actually have a hard time with the gay marriage issue…a lot of ambivalence.

Jason Crane at 4:07pm April 23: @Julie: Right on! Although I don’t think any of those rights should be given. We’ve already got them. I think we need to stop letting the corporate state take them away. But that’s just me being a punk. And shamelessly stealing from Utah Phillips.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 4:27pm April 23: Wow! Way to promote tolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 4:59pm April 23
I’m strongly opposed to asshole marriage. Letting assholes get legally married just sullies it for the rest of us. It’s just sick. I mean, there are all kinds of statistics showing that assholes are behind the majority of domestic violence attacks, robberies, burglaries, bombings, wars and crappy BSG season finales. And I’m pretty sure that being … Read Morean asshole is very strongly correlated with being a pedophile. I mean, how can we let these people get married and (GOD FORBID) have kids? It’s like they ruin marriage for us decent people who just want to raise our non-asshole kids to be non-assholes. I’m not saying they should be discriminated against for being assholes. I mean, people can be however they want to be in the privacy of their own homes, but when public schools teach that it’s ok to be an asshole, that’s where I draw the line. Once we let them get married, they’re going to turn the rest of us into assholes too.

Jason Crane at 5:14pm April 23: Amen!

Jason Crane at 5:59pm April 23: @Brenda: It’s always hard to tell if someone’s kidding or not on this here Facebook. But in any case, I’m kinda over being tolerant of intolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 7:57pm April 23: Is tolerance of bigotry ‘tolerance’? Interesting question.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 10:12pm April 23: Is it not possible to oppose gay marriage, without being intolerant of those who support it? Since bigotry, by definition, is intolerance of anothers beliefs religion or opinion, it would appear that the one F-bombing those who disagree would be a better example of the bigot.

Jennifer Cornish at 2:30am April 24: I think that by saying ‘Fuck You’ to gay-marriage opponents, Jason is being less of a bigot than those people fighting to take away the right for responsible, consenting citizens to get married and live their own lives in peace. I wouldn’t try to actively take away a bigot’s right to be a bigot.

Jason Crane at 7:13am April 24: Thanks, Jenn. You’ve said it better than I could have. I’m just tired of having people’s religious views imposed on my supposedly secular government. Discrimination and bigotry in the name of religious opinion are still discrimination and bigotry. No excuses.

Many people who are smarter than I have made the following point more intelligently, but here goes: You don’t get to shout “intolerance” when people oppose your bigotry. If you try to deny people their civil rights based on your religious preferences, then you are a bigot, and no one — absolutely no one — is bound to respect your point of view or shy away from denigrating it.

On open source software and our electoral system (0)

Posted 16 April, 2009 in Free & Open Source Software, Politics & Activism

vote

Dan Wallach wrote an interesting piece today titled Open Source vs. Disclosed Source Voting Systems, in which he discusses the need for open source software to be used in our voting machines if we’re to have any hope of electoral transparency. Here’s an excerpt:

Sometimes, working on voting seems like running on a treadmill. Old disagreements need to be argued again and again. As long as I’ve been speaking in public about voting, I’ve discussed the need for voting systems’ source code to be published, as in a book, to create transparency into how the systems operate. Or, put another way, trade secrecy is anathema to election transparency. We, the people, have an expectation that our election policies and procedures are open to scrutiny, and that critical scrutiny is essential to the exercise of our Democracy. (Cue the waving flags.)

And one more excerpt:

Voting systems, in this regard, are just like Microsoft Windows. We have to assume, since voting machines are widely dispersed around the country, that attackers will have the opportunity to tear them apart and extract the machine code. Therefore, it’s fair to argue that source disclosure, or the lack thereof, has no meaningful impact on the operational security of our electronic voting machines. They’re broken. They need to be repaired.

The entire article is worth your time.

Evangelism (the open source kind) (0)

Posted 13 April, 2009 in Family, Podcast, Politics & Activism, Ubuntu Linux

Software journalist Bruce Byfield has an interesting post today about free software evangelism and why he keeps his mouth shut at parties.

I tend to feel — and act — this way regarding most evangelism. It’s usually not fun to have political discussions at parties because people have so few facts at their command. Maybe it’s my personality, but I find it very hard to have “discussions” between entrenched positions where there is no hope of movement.

Constitutional scholar apparently needs to brush up on Constitution (0)

Posted 8 April, 2009 in Politics & Activism

nsa_front_obama2

Look, I know the guy’s a centrist, OK? I know he’s not the Messiah. But I’m still quite disappointed:

In a stunning defense of President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, President Barack Obama has broadened the government’s legal argument for immunizing his Administration and government agencies from lawsuits surrounding the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping efforts.

In fact, a close read of a government filing last Friday reveals that the Obama Administration has gone beyond any previous legal claims put forth by former President Bush.

Responding to a lawsuit filed by a civil liberties group, the Justice Department argued that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” from lawsuits because of a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act. The government’s legal filing can be read here (PDF).

For the first time, the Obama Administration’s brief contends that government agencies cannot be sued for wiretapping American citizens even if there was intentional violation of U.S. law. They maintain that the government can only be sued if the wiretaps involve “willful disclosure” — a higher legal bar.

The text above is from an article by Raw Story’s John Byrne.

I didn’t expect Obama to do the right thing on the war(s), or to be some great progressive leader. But I did expect him to at least break with the Bush administration when it came to respecting the basic tenets of the Constituion and U.S. law. Apparently that faith was misplaced. Sad.

By the way, if you want to help the Electronic Frontier Foundation do its good work in this and other cases, visit their Web site and toss them some money.