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May 29, 2006
A look back through rose-colored sun glasses
An “oldies station” graced my ride to work last week with “Jamie’s Got a Gun” by Aeros-mith, and I had to laugh.
It wasn’t because Joe Perry’s mother, Mary, was my gym teacher in high school and Joe was a little kid who hung out at times with my kid brother. It was more because the ageless guitarist is younger than I am, and I have a hard time accept-ing him as someone whose mu-sic is considered oldies.
The past for me is the ’60s and ’70s, and oldies are from the ’50s and have the words “Shing- a-ling” and “Doo-wop-doo-wadda-wadda” in the lyrics.
The past was so much better I thought as I passed through Shelton on Route 8.
Don’t we all notice that when we look back?
It was a simpler time, more easy going. Not as hard.
Remember when a mile-a-minute was fast? Boy, back then we were cooking with gas and everything was just hun-key dorey. Not like today at all.
We could hear the news at 6 and see the “film at 11.” And TV went off the air sometimes, on purpose, like every day.
There were only two kinds of coffee — hot and cold. Immi-grants meant us, and aliens were on Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and in Terry and the Pirates.
Milk came from contented cows, not mad ones, and Won-der Bread built strong bodies eight ways instead of the puffed up 12 we have now.
The only person we knew from Iraq was Ali Babba and his 40 thieves, and The Sheik was an old silent movie. We liked Ike, not Mike, but we didn’t like his sniveling VP. The big war was over and eve-ryone had a job.
Then my reminiscing burped.
We also had “Machine-Gunner Joe” McCarthy and his communist hunt in the name of national defense, and we all learned how to duck and cover while our parents built fallout shelters that wouldn’t have worked if we needed them.
Black people and women had few rights and fewer job oppor-tunities. And worker strikes were stopped with military force.
There were fewer divorces because even an abusive hus-band with a paycheck was bet-ter for a woman than being os-tracized by her town and having little or no government assistance to turn to.
And, of course, there was Korea, in case you forgot, and tensions in the Middle East.
But how about those ’60s and ’70s I thought.
Now there was a time.
There was free love and Ne-hru jackets, bell-bottoms and mini-skirts. (They invented mini-skirts when I was in Viet-nam, and I thought it was just part of my welcome home. Man, I loved mini-skirts).
We had Phil Ochs and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Any More” and Bob Dylan and “The Times They Are A Changin' ” and Janis and Jimi and the Moody Blues.
There was color TV that you could adjust from across the room, and TV dinners to eat while you watched “Bonanza.”
There were plenty of flower-power rallies to go to and meet women, and psychedelics, and 35-cent-a-gallon gas, and bra-burning, and free love. Did I mention free love. Did I men-tion mini-skirts?
Burp.
Of course there was the war in Vietnam and on TV, and we never had to wait until 11 to see the film, and there were meth monsters and speed freaks, and “OD” and “draft number” be-came household words.
There were missiles in Cuba and Nikita’s shoe tirade at the United Nations.
There were assassinations of a president and his brother and the most important man in our civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.
And there was Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew making a charade out of the Bill of Rights and government ethics in the name of national defense.
And there was the National Guard at Kent State, and the Chicago Democratic Conven-tion and trouble in the Middle East.
Then I was at work in front of my computer screen check-ing the day’s stories on the wire.
There were drugs, ethics breaches by politicians, aliens and immigrants, missiles in Iran, civil rights abuses in the name of national defense, vio-lence in the Middle East, and. of course, war.
I guess things haven’t changed that much. The “good old days,” always look better in retrospect.
But the sad thing that occurs to me as I pore over the wire is that we continue to make the same mistakes, and continue not to learn a damn thing from them.
John Hourihan is wire edi-tor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via e-mail at jhouri-han@ctpost.com
Posted by todd on 6:24 PM | Comments (4)
May 14, 2006
Helping Darfur must be for the right reasons
I guess it’s been a chilly day for the devil.
I figured he’d be ice skating before I would agree with President Bush, but what the president announced May 8, in the name of the American people for the people of Darfur, I agree with whole-heartedly.
With this, we can become the America we are supposed to be, instead of the America we have seemingly become.
Without the “all-the-options-are-on-the-table” threats, we can again be the ideal that was for so long the essence of the United States and help these people without asking anything in return.
The aid the president says we will send, $224 million, is not enough. I hope we send more.
Because, as I think of all the oppressions in history — the Jews, the Tutsis, the Indians, the slaves brought to America, all the oppressed people throughout all times — the people of Darfur have it worse.
It is worse because their oppression comes not from one source but from every source possible under the unrelenting Sudan sun — including part of it being their own fault.
These black farmers are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their non-Muslim religion, and their own lack of knowledge.
They are oppressed because of geography and nature, and because of timing in the world situation.
Ten years ago in Sudan, of which Darfur is a part, seven out of ten had a job, and six out of the seven worked in agriculture. They raised crops and sheep. Unfortunately they planted the same crops year after year in an effort to survive and make a living, which is detrimental to the land. And because of our own cattle/sheep range wars of a few hundred years ago, we know that when sheep graze they leave nothing.
Overcultivation and overgrazing helped the surrounding desert creep across the land squeezing the farmers into a smaller space every year.
And when the annual rainy season arrived, from April to October, it didn’t come as nourishing rain but as a tsunami from the sky, eroding more of the land and allowing the desert to take a bigger bite.
Then the rainfall began to decline and the 110-degree temperatures baked the rest of the life out of the earth.
To add to their bad luck, their natural resources are iron ore, copper, chromium, zinc, tungsten, mica, silver, gold and (you guessed it) petroleum.
In 1999, the government of Sudan made its top priority the development of its oil fields, some of which were populated by farm villages.
With the desert coming from one direction and the government projects from the other, the people of Darfur crowded into their villages, tended their animals, and planted their meager crops.
They hunted for food, and now, overhunting killed off the wildlife.
They were weak and out of hope, but because they still had water, they became a target.
They were also targeted for their color, their religion, and everyone wanted their land for one reason or another.
In attempts to drive them out, rebels calling themselves the Janjaweed, attacked.
Villages were burned and the people were raped, mutilated, branded, murdered, their water was poisoned and crops wasted.
And all their oppressors wanted was for them to be gone or dead.
The government assisted the rebels, possibly in the hopes that the land would be freed up for oil projects.
About 200,000 of the people of Darfur have been killed, slaughtered for trying to defend their villages. Wasted for trying to stay alive. And 2 million to 4 million have been forced from their homes into camps.
And they aren’t even safe in the camps where nightly raids kill handfuls and the roads outside are gauntlets of death.
They are hungry, thirsty, scared, beaten and trapped.
And the one superpower who usually helps in such situations is tied up in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and fighting terrorism across the world.
What the president did on May 8, I am happy he did in my name.
Now, wouldn’t it be perfect if we could go in, not as just another marauding army, but out of love for fellow human beings?
I know pragmatic people say we should send troops to make sure the aid gets to those who need it, but wouldn’t it cost about the same to just send so much food and water that there is too much for everyone?
Wouldn’t we have less of a problem recruiting other countries to share the cost of sending carrots rather than sticks; butter rather than guns?
And wouldn’t it be perfect if we did it without coveting their undeveloped oil fields?
John Hourihan is wire editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via e-mail at jhourihan@ctpost.com.
Posted by todd on 6:16 PM | Comments (3)
