Murder, death, kill – too many guns, too easy for young men to get and use guns. ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Late Breaking……….

Sorry to say there is more on this latest shooting.  Truth is I was going to let this go until I read a couple of reports that was just irksome on so many levels….

I realize the the GOP does enjoy blaming Obama for everything that goes wrong…..well this latest shooting is no different…..Ted Cruz when interviewed mentioned the massacre in Texas as an example…..

Cruz also asserted that President Barack Obama shared the blame for a mass shooting that killed 26 at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

“Had the Obama administration simply followed federal law and enforced the law, existing gun laws made it illegal for the Sutherland Springs shooter to buy a gun,” he opined. “But the Obama administration failed to report his criminal conviction so he wasn’t in the background check system.”

And he was worried that the Dems would politicize this latest attack….and what would anyone call what Cruz did?

But the main reason I have this late post was a report on the shooter of this latest massacre…..

The Republic of Florida, a white nationalist militia, confirmed Thursday that the man charged in Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was involved in some of its activities.

Jordan Jereb, the group’s leader, told The Associated Press that shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz had participated in the group’s paramilitary drills in Tallahassee.

The ROF, which says it seeks to establish a “white ethnostate” in Florida, did not order Cruz to carry out the shooting, Jereb told the ADL. However, attacks carried out by groups like the Republic of Florida are on the rise: Murders by white supremacists more than doubled in 2017 compared to the year before, according to an ADL report released last week.

(HuffPo)

I am a 63-year-old white racist. You might not think so if you knew me. However, every morning when I look in the mirror that is exactly who I see starring back at me. I do not write these words with any sense of pride—only with brutal honesty. My friends, even my wife, do not think of me in these terms because from the outside I appear to be nothing more than a “regular guy”. Perhaps a bit more political than most, but surely no racist.

I was born into a liberal Democratic family and my political beliefs have driven me further left as I have aged. I read the Biography of Malcom X in high school and then in college the works W.E.B. Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. I have been a subscriber to the Nation for over 20 years (it is the oldest weekly in our country that started as an abolitionist paper).

I fell deeply in love with jazz before I was 12. That meant Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, John and Alice Coltrane, Abbey Lincoln, Quincy Jones and Art Blakey—to name just a few of the black artist I fell in love with—were the musical sound track of my youth rather than rock and roll.

In high school, I supported the Soledad Brothers not only because Jonathan Jackson was a classmate I knew but because I believed it was the righteous thing to do. Most of the people I look up to as courageous heroes, to this day, are again a list of mostly black men who, more often than not, were killed long before their time—Malcom X, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers, Bobby Seal and women too.

I attended UCLA two years after the dismissal of Angela Davis and she too has been a hero of mine, as have Elaine Brown and Eartha Kitt, who I had the pleasure of working with for a short time; all women of uncommon courage and intelligence.

At this point you are probably wondering where it was that I became a racist. The sad truth is that I was one all that time and remain one today. Lets be clear about one thing right now. I hate racism and all it represents. However, I would be a complete fool not to recognize the virus that swims in my very DNA. It’s there when someone cuts me off in traffic, acts in a way I find offensive or appears not to know “their place.” It is the default reaction that happens without thinking and many times with clear intent as well.

You see, I was born in Pasadena, California. Until I reached high school, I largely attended all-white schools. As I came of age, black people were still considered less than human and of an inferior caliber by almost all the adults around me. Sure, none of those adults would have ever considered their attitudes or beliefs racist in any way. But Pasadena in the 60’s was still very racially segregated and the attitudes from my world taught me that to see someone black in “our” neighborhood should be a cause for fear and anger. I lost count of the times I was to hear the refrain “they are moving in.”

The summer after 8th grade, my sister and I took the bus that stopped in front of my grandmother’s home where we lived at the time. For a dime, we rode the entire circuit, which took us thru the “black part” of town for the very first time. We both were amazed that “they” had their own stores, movie theaters, beauty salons and even billboards. We also became aware of the how much more impoverished everything was. Perhaps that was the first time I began to think in terms like “us” and “them”—as if we were a breed apart.

Shortly thereafter the Watts riots occurred. As the carnage progressed, we watched the fires burn on TV. My stepfather, at the time, after the second night of unrest, bought a cheap rifle (the exact same model that Oswald was said to have shot Kennedy) “just in case.” As I listened to the adults comment on the riots, all I heard was their fear of the animal depravity and sheer stupidity of a people willing to burn their own homes and businesses. What the causes or reasons for the unrest were not discussed, other than the August heat.

As the Civil Rights struggle was in ascendancy, I heard from those same adults, parents, teachers and priests that patience was required from Negros. True equality could only come with more time; always more time. That things could not, and should not, happen overnight. And that the very rights and privileges I took for granted as an 11-year-old white boy, from an all-white neighborhood and all-white schools needed to be “earned”. The message was loud and clear to my young ears: “Let the good Negros have a chance to prove themselves to “us” but the niggers be damned!”

How could I not end up a racist? Everything that surrounded me in my all-white schools and on my all-white TV trained me in overt and subtle ways to think of myself as somehow superior simply because of my lack of melanin.

In college I took a psychology class. One weekend, for the extra credit, I took part in an experiment at The Fuller Seminary across town from Pasadena City College. That experiment was a revamping of the famous Stanley Milgram study on obedience and submission to authority. This experiment calls for three people—a participant (me), someone that I met at the start of the class who I was led to believe was another college student seeking in extra credit and a man in a suit running the show. During this experiment, the other student was out of sight in another room . However, I had witnessed him being strapped in a chair with electrodes attached to various parts of his body.

Once the experiment was underway, I could not see him but I could hear him clearly through headphones. The man in the suit told me that I was to ask a series of questions and when the answer was incorrect I was to administer a shock.

Each incorrect answer required that I give shocks of greater and greater intensity. The end result is that I killed the other participant. Not only that, I tortured him before I killed them.

The only thing the man in the suit told me as I progressed was “The test required that I continue”. However, in the end I was informed that the entire thing was a ruse. The other “student” was part of the test, only pretending to be first in excruciating pain and then dead. Prior to this event I considered myself a rebel, an iconoclast. Someone who would never just follow the rules. Someone who knew what I was and the things I would and would not stand for. How wrong I was!

Afterwards I was informed that I simply did what over two thirds of all participants did. That we have been taught since birth to obey authority. When I shared this experience with my friends and relatives, nearly all of them said the same thing “I never would have done that. Never!”

Racism is just like that. Ask any white person you know if they are a racist and the answer you will get is, more than likely “Me? I’m not a racist! Never!”

Martin King wrote in his last book “To live with the pretense that racism is a doctrine of a very few is to disarm us in fighting it frontally as scientifically, morally and socially destructive. The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease.”

Well, I am here to tell you that each and every day I look in the mirror I see a racist looking back. I know as a diabetic does what is in my system waiting to pollute my mind. Each and every day.

I call myself a racist simply because I never wish to be its victim by falling back to the default position I have been bred to. If you are white in America it, more than likely, is the same default position for you as well.

I truly believe that Black Lives Matter. Perhaps I might have put it differently by simply adding the adverb “too”. That way it might have stopped the “Hey man, White Lives matter or Blue Lives matter!” nonsense. Perhaps not. Of course, all lives matter. However, in America there is a difference that cannot be denied. If, as a white man, I am pulled over by the police I will be considering its impact on my life in a very different way than every Black or Brown Man, Woman and Child. To me it will be an annoyance that may require a day in court or a fine. If you are a person of color it could be the last day of your life. That is a simple fact in America today!

So, what is to be done? People of color do not need white friends to tell them that they have it rough. Of one thing, I am certain; they already know that. They certainly do not need white people to tell them how to solve their problem, because it is not their problem, it is ours! The problem is what, we as a society, choose to allow to happen over and over again to our black and brown citizens.

What I do believe that white people of good conscience can do is to first recognize the mote in our own eye. Regardless of how deeply it is buried or how honorably we may think we act, we need to recognize that our “privilege” has always come at someone else’s expense.

Racism is found in the bedrock of America. Each group of immigrants has had to face it. However, no group has faced it to the degree or in the ongoing manner that has beset black American’s. Our forbearers came by choice and not unwillingly as personal chattels as our black brother’s and sister’s ancestors did. None of our forbearers were subjected to the cruelties of slavery, which lasted for over 250 years. White Americans were never considered less than human. However, until the enactment of the 14thAmendment as stated in law by the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, slaves were 3/5 of a human beingfor legal purposes; less than human. Although all this was long ago there are still far-reaching and lasting effects today.

If you really want Black Lives to matter as much as society does white lives, white people need to talk to all our white friends, relatives, business associates or anyone with whom we come in contact. We need to tell them that prejudice is what we inflict on others. That this is “our problem”. That nothing can change for the better until “we change”. That it is our behavior and actions that need to change, not the behavior or actions of our black sisters and brothers. We all need to be aware that freedom and equality are merely privilege extended unless they are shared by us all equally.

“If you really want to make America Great, if you truly believe in equality and if, you too, believe, as I do, that Black Lives Matter, you start by looking in your own mirror each and every day and recognize the racist that looks back at you and tell him or her “Not today or ever again!”

Vincent De Stefano

The post Confessions of a Life-Long White Racist appeared first on LA Progressive.

On December 13, 1937 the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Nanking and the ensuing six weeks became known to history as the Nanking Massacre. This web site provides access to first hand accounts and photographs from Westerners who remained in Nanking after the Japanese invasion. These resources do not provide a comprehensive understanding of what occurred in Nanjing during 1937-1938, but the observations made by these men and women provide an important historical lens to complement additional research. The materials found in this collection are housed in the Yale University Divinity School Library’s Special Collections.

More information & databases: The Nanking Massacre Archival Project’s website

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, translator and poet, author of the 2017 collection Water & Salt, talked about her poetry, translating from Arabic, and her community of poets:

You write, in “Copybooks”: “But best of all, they taught us poetry. / They tucked gleaming verses into our hearts, / and let them sleep for years.” Who are the poets you first remember reading and building on, your relationship to their words, what they gave to you (and what you wanted to in turn give by writing your own poems)? Are there poems you still have memorized from childhood? 

Photo courtesy of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: It’s difficult to limit it to just one. My childhood was steeped in poetry. Memorizing and discussing poems was a central and prominent part of education. And it wasn’t limited to school—poems swirled all around us. They were sung on radio stations (some of the Fairouz and Um Kolthom standards lived rich lives as poems before they became songs). People around me quoted poems as part of daily conversation. In elementary school, one of my favorite games involved tossing lines of memorized poems back and forth, you say one that ends in a word with the final letter aleph, for example, and I respond with a line that begins with that same letter, and so on. Like most Arab children of my generations and those before, I memorized lines of the great desert poets Antara, Umru’ul Qais. I’m always writing و لقد ذكرت و الرماح نواهل مني on the edges of notebook pages. Desert Ode Doodlings…

My grandfather, Husni Fariz, was the poet laureate of Jordan. I used to relish the chance to sit at his desk and “write poems,” terrible poems in Arabic, ones that tried desperately to rhyme. Several of his poems are still tucked away in memory.

Because poetry was in the air all around me, reading it closely for myself, outside of school and study, was a separate pleasure. The intimacy of the poem on the page was an experience I discovered in high school. I read Mahmoud Darwish, beyond the poems that were popularized and sung (Identity Card, for example) and fell in love with his vocabulary and his cadence. From his poems I learned about compression and time travel, about echo—how a sound pattern can thread through a poem and deepen meaning and resonance.

I also moved a lot as a child, in and out of Arab and American school systems, so my relationship with various literary traditions was interrupted or enriched, depending on your perspective. I was introduced to very few English-language poems by women in middle school and high school. My sense of English-language poetry was that, unlike Arabic, which was peopled by the lines of Al-Khansaa’ and Fadwa Touqan and Nazek al Malaika, English-language poetry was the stately business of old white men. Some of whose work I loved: Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, and this one Ted Hughes poem that I love-hated, that haunted me in 10th grade: “Griefs for Dead Soldiers.” Then there was Naomi Shihab Nye—her work was well-spring and mirror and open fields. I still don’t have the words for what it means to read her poetry. In college, in Seattle, I found—or was found by—the work of Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, H.D., among others. Their work changed my life—how I read, how I write.

I have been reading a book by Dunya Mikhail in which she writes:  “Where do you want to go? America?” one of them said. “But don’t forget, poetry only exists in the margins over there.” For that friend, nothing could be worse than marginalizing poetry! What does it take for you to maintain a life of poetry and poetic community in the US? 

LKT: The good news is that you can make a life of poetry if you want to. It takes work, but anything worthwhile does, I suppose. At my reading in Dubai last year a young poet asked: Do you think we are living in a golden age of Arab American poetry? I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but there is certainly a more visible community of poets that I’m privileged to belong to who are creating, lavishing readers with exceptional work. And this is true beyond the Arab American community of poets, of course.

I’m still learning how to use social media as much as possible without getting overwhelmed to stay in touch with and aware of poetry that feeds me and also that challenges me. I’ve learned that finding actual physical spaces where poetry is read aloud, where poets can be together to work and to celebrate the work is vital for me.

Has translation (the act of, and the close reading it entails) affected how you write, how you see words, your own and others?

LKT: Absolutely. All my reading happens in the liminal space between the languages that claim me. I am bilingual—I can’t really tell which I learned first, Arabic or English, and I’ve studied French since middle school. Maybe that’s why translation seems like such a comfortable space, openly engaging with layers and histories of meaning.

How did you come in particular to translating I Am a Guest on This Earth? And do you continue to be interested in translating poetry?

LKT: I first read a few of Faiza’s poems online, and I was struck by her voice and the work she was doing to embody the experiences of war and survival from a woman’s perspective, from inside of a woman’s experience. I wanted to translate the poems because I don’t think that voice is available to English language readers very often. We get to hear about women as casualties of war in the Arab world, we get to hear about Arab women, not often from them.

Have you considered translation lately? What would make you want to return, what do you think it can/could potentially bring to your own work? 

LKT: YES. I’m also considering translation and mulling over ideas. Translation is braided into my writing and my world view. I don’t even think of it in that term anymore—literary travel, literary citizenship are phrases that come to mind.

Photo courtesy of the author.

In “Dhayaa’,” from Water & Salt, I was enchanted by the interplay of the soundscapes of dhayaa’ and loss. (It’s also interesting to see dhayaa’ rendered in Latin letters instead of ضياع.) You have, for instance, “In English loss sounds to me like one shuddering blow to the heart,/ all sorrow and absence hemmed in,/ falling into a neatly rounded hole,/ such tidy finality[.”

I was interested in the way the poem takes its position right away, with the opening line, “In my language,” and contrasts it with English. Is this something you feel in the context of this poem, or more generally, that Arabic is a language that belongs to you, while English is a language at some distance?

LKT: Thank you. So much of what interests me and what I think was happening in “Dhayaa’” is about the relationship between sound and meaning, the path into language through sound. My relationship status with English continues to be: It’s complicated. The distance doesn’t come from me, I think. I’ve been a diligent student and good citizen for a long-time. But English is the language of power and colonizers and it’s impossible to pretend that isn’t present while writing. And maybe, too, there’s the complication of how English has become the language of my poems, through time and distance and the various impacts of power (State, Academic, etc) on my life.

Again in, “My English Teacher Told Me,” there is a contrast between English & Arabic that (interestingly!) takes place entirely in English, yet manages to evoke a sort of precise-schoolmarm English on the one hand, and a more gently unfolding, older, more meandering Arabic (although also by using English words). How do you navigate the rhythms and grammars of Arabic and English as you write? Do you ever write in Arabic, as a part of your process?

LKT: I like to say I try to write in Arabic. But there are the facts of one’s life—a university education in English, time spent among the books and lives of English-speaking worlds. It would be wonderful to pretend one doesn’t take place at the expense of another. This is why I majored in Comparative Literature as an undergraduate—I wanted a way to be among all the texts and traditions that held sway for me, not to choose a singular perspective, not to look out onto human experience through only one window. Some of the emotional weights assigned to Arabic and to English in “My English Teacher” likely have to do with power, with belonging, with welcome and rejection, too.

There is a wonderful delicateness to the names in “Mountain, Stone,” contrasted by a namelessness, and a stone. The poem begins with Shaymaa’ al-Sabbagh: “Do not name your daughters Shaymaa,/ courage will march them/ into the bullet-path of dictators.”

Did the poem come out of a particular name?

LKT: I hear Arabic names for both meaning and sound. I cannot simply hear Raneem and not be conscious that it means “the laughter of angels.” Because the name introduces Raneem but also immediately tells a story of her parents’ hopes and dreams, of their imagination and associations. The name brings the world of Raneem along with it, as it locates her. And I am interested in how our stories are erased, how our histories are palimpsests, often narrated in news reports (English, Arabic, whatever other languages) without our names. I also approached this poem as a parent, one who labored over the privilege and responsibility of naming her daughters. I wanted to re/name these Arab children, write them back into life, and also to eulogize them and us—our people, our language, our cities. The name that began this poem was Shaymaa’, the young Alexandrine poet who was shot to death at a peaceful protest marking the 4th anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. Proud woman—that was the name her parents gave her. And it is such a profoundly Arabic name, it seems to rise from the desert itself, it can hardly be pronounced in anything but the classical, it demands that you say that hamza at the end, doesn’t it? Imagine her parents, whose Shaymaa’ walked with garland of roses, and was then taken from them. Each of the names in the poem correspond to people, children, who have died in Egypt, Syria, Palestine.

But how can you be sure people are imagine-saying Shaymaa’ correctly? Is it ever a consideration that the Anglophone-only reader gets the rhythm or sound of a poem…. wrong? If they are hearing Shaymaa’ al-Sabbagh’s name as “Shae-ma”? Zeina Hashem Beck, I believe, has a short pronunciation guide at the front of Louder than Hearts, although I don’t know if that changes the reader’s experience. 

LKT: Here I don’t mean that all readers need to pronounce Shaymaa’ as I hear it. I’m more focused on how the sound I know of her name drives or is in conversation with its meaning for me, is as much a source of the poem as the ideas and images. I also don’t think of myself as writing exclusively or even primarily for Anglophone-only readers. The world is rich with multiple Englishes. English is the language of so many non-Anglos who have been colonized into absorbing it. I could go on here—this is what I explored in the critical thesis I wrote for my MFA, a notion I call “expanded English.”

I loved the unexpected end of “Instructions for Making Arabic Coffee,” the twist at the end into fortune-telling and the enormous potential for loss, opened and then left. I suppose in the beginning I thought it was going to be something like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” but this advice is gentle, until opening up into fortune-telling…. Hm, not sure there’s a question in there.

LKT: Ma3lesh, I’ll take the compliment, too. The ending surprised me when I wrote it, which is poetry’s ultimate gift. I didn’t know where I was going when I began, just meandering in the voice of that Arab auntie with all her instructions, and trying to decipher the significance of those instructions. Coffee is served every day, but also with such ceremony, to mark beginnings and endings of many magnitudes, so maybe the poem had to chase after another realm.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, writer, and translator. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize for Arab in Newsland, and the author of Water & Salt, a book of poems from Red Hen Press published in April 2017. ​You can follow her @LKTuffaha