News of the real
We are inundated with news, but it is skewed. This page is a summary of mainstream articles from the past couple of months that are striking in ways that they missed the message.
What if the actual news were right before our eyes, but we didn’t see it? Our goal is to unearth inner news: news of the shattered and the broken, news of the beautiful and the good.
There are many ways to re-capture culture. Simply by becoming fully aware of the reality of news is one way that reality is transformed. See the Discussion forum at humanitynews.net to continue and elaborate—add your own stories—and reclaim news from its bland and conventional condition (the full stories are posted there as well).
Culture
Culture ‘facts’
“Among industrialized countries we have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, abortion, infant mortality, divorce, single-parent families, murder and rape, drug consumption, imprisonment, air pollution, and toxic-waste production.” Michael Shuman, Going Local
Pornography in public space aggressively defended. ‘
County Officials Apologize After Library Porn Incident’
Feb 17, WTOP Radio, Rockville, Md.
Montgomery County officials are apologizing Friday, after two local Homeland Security Department employees tried to prevent people from searching for pornography on the Internet in a public library last week.
Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan tells WTOP the officers clearly broke county policy when they told one Little Falls Library visitor his choice of Internet site violated sexual harassment laws.
“These security officers clearly overstepped their bounds,” Duncan says. “They are not there to look at what people are doing in our libraries and other facilities. They are there to protect those facilities.”
This type of incident will not happen again, Duncan says. “It’s a matter of training and we’ll make sure we get the right training and make sure people understand what their roles and responsibilities are,” he says.
Duncan says he wants people to feel their privacy will be respected in county libraries. “We want people to come to our libraries and feel safe and secure and get the information they need,” he says.
The security officers involved in the case have been re-assigned.
Anchorage Daily News defends pornography through impartiality
Acclaimed romance novelist blushes at her own prose
Jackie Goforth: Author writes under the pen name “Jackie Ivie."’
By S.J. Komarnitsky, January 2, 2006
WASILLA—When Jackie Ivie writes the steamy sex scenes for her romance novels, she is clearly trying to titillate her readers.
But her alter ego, Jackie Goforth, blushes at the prose that makes her an award-winning romance novelist. “The real me isn’t like this at all,” she said.
“Some of the stuff I write is not postal acceptable,” the 47-year-old acknowledged.
Of her awards, she points out that a second place for “most sensual book” lost out to a tale of an incubus invading women’s dreams and fulfilling their fantasies. She also pokes fun at another award for “most historically accurate novel.”
And as far as writing those steamy scenes where the men’s bare chests ripple with sinew and the women swoon with pleasure, the mother of four and grandmother of three said she tries to pretend she’s not there.
“I did it with my eyes closed and a paper bag over my head,” she said, mimicking typing on a computer with her head turned to the side. “All right, all right, I can’t believe I’m writing this.”
Hip culture critic justifies the sexualization of culture for the very young
Teenage sex fiction: ‘Young Adult Fiction: Wild Things ‘
By Naomi Wolf, New York Times, March 12, 2006
These books look cute. They come in matched paperback sets with catchy titles, and stay for weeks on the children’s books best-seller list. They carry no rating or recommended age range on the cover, but their intended audience - teenage girls - can’t be in doubt. They represent a new kind of young adult fiction, and feature a different kind of heroine. In these novels, which have dominated the field of popular girls’ fiction in recent years, Carol Gilligan’s question about whether girls can have “a different voice” has been answered - in a scary way.
Unfortunately for girls, these novels reproduce the dilemma they experience all the time: they are expected to compete with pornography, but can still be labeled sluts.
But teenagers, or their parents, do buy the bad-girls books - the “Clique,” “Gossip Girl” and “A-List” series have all sold more than a million copies. And while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren’t really the problem. The problem is a value system in which meanness rules, parents check out, conformity is everything and stressed-out adult values are presumed to be meaningful to teenagers.
We need a new cultural movement
A New Civil Rights Movement, by Bob Herbert
New York Times, December 26, 2005
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that some of the most serious problems facing blacks in the United States - from poverty to incarceration rates to death at an early age - are linked in varying degrees to behavioral issues and the corrosion of black family life, especially the absence of fathers.
Nearly a third of black men in their 20’s have criminal records, and 8 percent of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars.
I believe that nothing short of a new movement, comparable in scope and dedication to that of the civil rights era, is required to bring about the changes in values and behavior needed to halt the self-destruction that is consuming so many black lives. The crucial question is whether the leadership exists to mount such an effort.
A good first step would be a summit meeting of wise and dedicated men and women willing to think about creative new ways to approach such problems as crime and violence, out-of-wedlock births, drug and alcohol abuse, irresponsible sexual behavior, misogyny, and so on.
Social justice
It’s better to be a cow
‘World’s poorest pay for WTO compromise’ Larry Osei-Kwaku, Johannesburg, December 19, 2005
“It is better to be a cow in Japan, subsidised for $7 per day, than to be a human being living in Africa,” according to the leader of South Africa’s largest labour federation, in a statement, calling Sunday’s last-minute WTO agreement in Hong Kong an ‘abysmal failure’.
“Last year was the first year on record, according to an annual study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, that a full-time worker at minimum wage could not afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country at average market rates.”
“Only human beings are deprived of free access to the basic necessities of survival. We have created a system of ownership which puts the human species below all others as far as access to food and water is concerned. Mountains of food may be rotting in warehouses, and crops of grain burnt to maintain the market value, but if humans have no money they can have neither food nor water.”
Satish Kumar, Resurgence, March/April, 2006
The evening news missed this story last night. Why?
“Twenty thousand children died yesterday of hunger-related causes, twenty thousand will die today, and twenty thousand tomorrow.”
Child abuse not caused by poverty
(Deep response: Culture of care)
‘Children in Torment,’ By Bob Herbert, March 9, 2006
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 1,500 children died from abuse or neglect in 2003, the latest year for which reasonably reliable statistics are available. That’s four children every day, and that estimate is probably low.
Authorities in Michigan reported the heartbreaking case of a 7-year-old, Ricky Holland, who begged his school nurse not to send him home to his adoptive parents. “Let me stay in school,” he pleaded. He was later beaten to death with a hammer, prosecutors said, and his bloody body was dragged away in a garbage bag. His parents were charged with his death.
The deaths, as horrible as they are, don’t begin to convey the enormity of the problem. In 2003, authorities were alerted to nearly three million cases of youngsters who were alleged to have been abused or neglected, and confirmed a million of them. The number of cases that never come to light is, of course, anybody’s guess.
We know some things about child abuse and neglect. We know that there is a profound connection between child abuse and substance abuse, for example. We know that abuse and neglect are more likely to occur in households where money is in short supply, especially if the caregivers are unemployed. A crisis in the home heightens the chances that a child will be abused. And adults who were abused as children are more likely than others to be abusers themselves.
Health
“About three of every ten Americans will be involved in an alcohol related car accident at some point in their lives.”
Being fat is the direct expression of sloth, mediocrity, and meaninglessness. It is the physical indicator of a loss of vitality, inspiration, and joy.
Fat kills far more Americans than terrorists
By Nicholas Kristof, NYT, January 29, 2006.
Fat kills far more Americans than terrorists. Indeed, The New England Journal of Medicine reported last year that because of rising obesity, life expectancy in the U.S. might soon stop rising and could drop.
Obesity is linked to 112,000 deaths a year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and leads to an extra $75 billion in direct medical costs. Type 2 diabetes has increased tenfold among children in just the last 20 years.
One-third of today’s 5-year-olds in America are projected to get diabetes at some point in their lives. It’s already the leading cause of blindness, and a 10-year-old who has diabetes loses 19 years of life expectancy.
External response: Deemphasize use of cars; encourage pedestrian-friendly development. Political response: Curbing soft drinks in schools, informing all parents of their children’s body mass index as a step to encouraging fitness, giving exercise breaks as well as smoking breaks, paying for preventive health checks like mammograms and prostate examinations, subsidizing efforts to quit smoking and seeking to give food stamps more purchasing power when they are used to buy fruits or vegetables.
Government
‘Secret death squads’
‘Sacred Terror.’ Global Eye, By Chris Floyd. December 9, 2005
The much-belated, poll-prompted outcry of a few U.S. elected officials against the widespread use of torture by the Bush administration—following years of silent acquiescence in the face of incontrovertible evidence of deliberate atrocity—is a welcome development, of course. But it has left an even more sinister aspect of Bushist policy untouched, one that likewise has been hidden in plain sight for years.
On Sept. 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of “lethal measures” against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an “enemy combatant.” This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate “enemies” on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.
The existence of this universal death squad—and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents—has not provoked so much as a crumb of controversy in the American establishment, although it’s no secret.
In December 2002 Bush officials made clear that the edict also applied to U.S. citizens, as The Associated Press reported.
Education
11 Million Adults Illiterate, Study Shows
Associated Press, December 15, 2005
An estimated in one in 20 U.S. adults is not literate in English, which means 11 million people lack the skills to perform everyday tasks, a federal study shows.
From 1992 to 2003, the nation’s adults made no progress in their ability to read a newspaper, a book or any other prose arranged in sentences and paragraphs. They also showed no improvement in comprehending documents such as bus schedules and prescription labels.
Perhaps most sobering: Adult literacy dropped or was flat across every level of education, from people with graduate degrees to those who dropped out of high school.
National Assessment of Adult Literacy: http://nces.ed.gov/naal
Economics
Money
“Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange, but in reality it has become the ruler of our lives. And as money is always kept in short supply, there is no way all human beings can have enough, and therefore no guaranteed provision of food and water for every human being on earth.”
Satish Kumar, Resurgence, March/April 2006
Corporations
“Half of the largest economies in the world are corporations, not countries, and with power comes responsibility.”
‘Rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates’
February 27, 2006. By Paul Krugman
What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
The truth is quite different. Who are the winners from rising inequality? It’s not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that’s the real story.