Trump, Gaza, and Genocide

Since 10th grade (1991-92) I have supported the Palestinians (i.e. I have publicly said in the last 18 months that if it resembled, in terms of targets and methods, what the Irish Republican Army did I would probably support an armed campaign by the Palestinians (see this and this). Since Oct. 8th I have often but decreasingly thought that a lot of Palestine solidarity activists might be using the term “genocide” inappropriately. Looking at the UN definition, yes there have been and are several elements of the crime found in the war on Gaza and to a much lesser degree, Israeli Apartheid in general (stretching back to the creation of the state). In the last 18 months I was not certain that there was an INTENT to destroy the Palestinian population. After I learned what kind of government there is in Israel now, and as the assault on Gaza went on and on and on, I started thinking- more and more that maybe, yes, something I THOUGHT was possible was ACTUALLY HAPPENING- the genocide of the Palestinians. But that’s nothing- in terms of my certitude that it’s genocide and in terms of the national destruction involved- compared to what Donald Trump has proposed.

Moving the entire Gaza population elsewhere would eliminate them as Gazans. They would be leaving their land, not because it’s become a “dust bowl,” not because the place was nuked and humans in general couldn’t live there anymore, etc. but because of hatred towards them in connection with their racial and/or national and/or religious identity (one thing that backs me up on this is an explanation here of how Apartheid IS the right word to apply to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in areas it controls). And transforming that now-blood-drenched beach-front property into something that practically no Palestinian could afford to live in would underline their loss- news reports (for example) about Trump’s Riviera would be reminders of what Trump did and would be rubbing it in. In general, Trump’s plan would involve some kind of national trauma comparable to the historical trauma experienced by American Indian communities.

(Nothing in this essay is meant to excuse or justify what happened Oct. 7th, which was mostly an attack on Israeli civilians. I have written a LOT of material critical of Hamas (here, here and here), but at this point it is time for me to focus more on the Palestinians)

In Ireland, the political party Sinn Fein (which was associated with the IRA and is now the biggest party if you look at votes in both the North and the South) announced that they will be boycotting the St. Patrick Day events at the White House this year and they are doing that because of Trump’s plans for Gaza. It might help everyone if I explain something here- SF, especially in the last 3-4 decades, makes a fair amount of effort to avoid conflicts in America with American politicians when it’s about something not central to justice for N. Ireland Catholics and/or peace in N. Ireland. That should help Americans understand how serious this situation with Gaza is- SF and most of the world are terrified by what Trump said.

In addition to the trauma experienced by Gazans, Trump’s plan will not bring peace to the middle-east. To one degree or another almost everyone there supports the Palestinians. If Egypt and/or Jordan cooperate with Trump, the governments in those two countries will probably be overthrown. The odds are pretty good there will be various renewed efforts to attack Israel. There will be more efforts to attack American targets.

There are some other flaws in Trump’s plan. How many REALLY nice pieces of real estate are A) empty of people and B) lucrative enough that two million or more Palestinians could prosper there? I have no idea what location Trump is thinking of. He kind of skirts around this, but he should be politically apprehended for pretty much saying that there will be no reconstruction in Gaza as long as the Palestinians are there but as soon as they are dragged away THEN it will be re-built for rich people. And he’s pretty much said that no, there will be no return.

Trump and Israel must be stopped before they do something horrible.

(An essay I wrote about the flaws in the Zionist argument and how to resolve the conflict is here)

What I've Done For Ireland

This is an essay about how I became concerned about Northern Ireland’s Catholic population and mostly about what I have done to support that cause. Although I wasn’t INCREDIBLY successful, between 1997 and 2004 I did a LOT of political activity as a progressive American college student in support of the North’s Catholic population, and here and there there was SOME success. I attended the 2002 National Conference of Sinn Fein Youth as a representative of the Anti-Racism Commission of the Democratic Socialists of America. More recently I have done this blog since 2008 and about 1/3 of it is about the North (years ago it was closer to 50% about the North).

I started college in the Fall of 1994. For various reasons that include the time I spent doing activism, it took me until Spring 2003 to officially graduate. I had done some political stuff in High School and there was something I did that was a little immature but nonetheless republican that I will describe next.

At some point in Jr. High I was to a small extent exposed to republicanism by a friend of my mom’s who was supportive of the PIRA. In 9th grade I read a novel that bizarrely fueled my interest in the IRA- the book was more or less anti-republican but it still had a positive effect on me (it was Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games). In the Spring semester of 10th grade, at the same time that I was becoming a sort of active and sort of radical and sort of militant opponent of racism in America, I took a white Notre Dame baseball hat and wrote some stuff on it in pen, including “IRA” and “PIRA.” I ended up having to change my class schedule because there were at last 2-3 people in my gym class that were pissed off at me about the IRA stuff (one guy suggested that Irish-Americans supporting the IRA was like Italian-Americans supporting the mafia and threatened me; an Israeli exchange student and her male friend (who was probably a supporter of Israel) gave me mean looks). I knew almost nothing about the N. Ireland conflict and didn’t respond to the Italian-American guy and even AFTER I got out of that gym class I stopped wearing the hat.

In the Summer of 1994 right before my freshman year of college I read an article about the IRA in “Spin” magazine (which was mostly about popular music but apparently also did some hard news as well). At the very end of 1996 I read a book by Gerry Adams, I then read two books by Tim Pat Coogan (The IRA and The Troubles), and in the Spring of 1997 I finally got on the internet and started educating myself there (i.e. reading the Irish News).

There is one aspect of this that I plan on mentioning only once. From about June of 1997 to about July of 2000, I was flirting with supporting the Irish Republican Socialist Party (a very small rival of Sinn Fein’s in the Catholic community of the North). As bizarre as it will sound to people familiar with one or both parties, I was also a Sinn Fein supporter- and MORE of a SF supporter- I had mixed feelings about both organizations but I really was closer to SF. My more recent, well-developed and probably permanent thoughts on the IRSP are here.                          

Setting aside my mistake with the IRSP, in general I have never been a supporter of SF exclusively and I will not apologize for that at all. Starting in 1995 (and ending in 2002) I was an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose sister organizations on that island were (until about 9 years ago when DSA left the Socialist International) the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Irish Labour Party. I have always rejected the SDLP (see this). I have always gotten the impression that the ILP was not anywhere near as bad as the SDLP was. Thusly I was a friend of theirs and in 2002 or 2003 wrote a letter to the editor of the Irish News, encouraging the ILP to organize in the North. I like the left of the BLP, but have always believed that the BLP could, over all, be a lot better when it comes to the North.

I have some positive thoughts about some other parties in Ireland and want to remind everyone that if I LIVED THERE I could VOTE for more than one party at the same time (they have something called Single Transferable Vote, which involves votes being transferred from one candidate to another based on a voter’s preferences), so why can’t I have positive opinions of more than one party at the same time?

Around August of 1997 I started organizing a student group at the University of Colorado at Boulder where I was an Ethnic Studies major. To be honest the first year the group had a questionable name- the “Bobby Sands Association.” For better or worse we didn’t do much that first year. The second and third years we were called Students for Justice in Northern Ireland (an independent group). I could go into more detail, but I will say this- we did about 5 events and there was an average of about 50 people at each event. We did do a bit of a campaign at one point, circulating a petition asking the History Department to offer a course on Irish History.

This might have been questionable and possibly even illegal, but I took the text from a lot of pages about the North on the internet and put them in word-processor documents, reformatted them (font size, margin width, etc. so I could get a LOT of words on each page) printed and copied them. We would make that stuff available at events and when tabling in the student center. To a large degree I think that no literature would have been a pretty big hole in our effort to educate people and we gave conspicuous credit to the organizations responsible for the content in the literature we offered.

In the Fall of 2002 I started organizing SJNI again. This time it lasted two years and was probably less successful than the first incarnation. We did about 5 events and there was an average of about 20 people at each event. We did three things that went a bit beyond just educating people. We organized a slightly-successful fund-raiser partly for the Pat Finucane Centre  (we collaborated on organizing it with the other beneficiary, the Rocky Mountain Peace (and Justice) Center). We did a VERY SLIGHTLY successful petition in response to Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey being deported from the US in 2003. And we did a sort of successful fund-raiser for an ex-IRA Volunteer facing deportation from the US- no money was raised, but his campaign might not have connected with an influential local journalist (who ended up being very helpful) if we hadn’t organized that event (the journalist was on the panel discussion). We tried to organize a debate about the North but the pro-Unionist guy (a Northern Protestant fan of Jeffrey Donaldson who was teaching history at CU-Boulder for, I think, a couple years (Donaldson was more or less anti-Good Friday Agreement)) said he wouldn’t debate our choice for the republican position because he had no relevant academic degrees (he would have been a great representative anyway, he WAS totally qualified and it might have been noteworthy that he’s Protestant).

A lot of my N. Ireland activism was anti-racist and anti-homophobic. For more about that and some other relevant thoughts, you might want to read a post here.           

There’s several miscellaneous things I did that I want to mention.

1) In either 1998 or 1999 I went to a fund-raiser for the Chiapas Coalition in Denver (they were supporting the Zapatistas in Mexico) that was on May 5th. Because May 5th is not just Cinco de Mayo, it is also the day in 1981 that Bobby Sands died on hunger-strike, I showed up and asked if I could speak for a couple minutes about Sands. They enthusiastically agreed and the response from the crowd was very good.
2) Although I made some mistakes and it wasn’t successful, I made some effort to try and get the Democratic Socialists of America (and their youth wing the Young Democratic Socialists (of America)) to abandon their sister-organization in the North, the SDLP (and the SDLP Youth).
3) I was involved in one way or another with getting the progressive and popular local radio station KGNU to do several things about N. Ireland from a more or less republican perspective 1997-2002.
4) The notes BELOW the poem here are probably worth high-lighting.
5) This post says some stuff about me doing activism on both the North and for the Palestinian cause simultaneously .

*******

I had to stop doing activism because my neurological disorders had gotten worse  (it was a gradual decline and started either Aug. of 2001 or some time around 2007 and was completed at some point in 2010). I do 3-4 things to sort of replace that although only one thing is relevant to N. Ireland- since 2008 I have done my blog, and at this point there’s about 750,000 words on it.

Since 2020 the N. Ireland component of my blog has shrunk as a percentage of the whole- it was about 1/2 and now it’s about 1//3 of my blog. This is partly because since the beginning of the pandemic, for various reasons I have not followed events in the North anywhere near as much as I did 1997-2020 (during those years I read an average of about 100 articles a week about Irish politics).

There are several posts on this blog that are pretty important in terms of what they say about the North.

1) A post here is in some ways very important, although it needs to be re-done at some point in the near future because it could be and should be shortened and some other changes need to be made to it. It’s called “Sell-Outs?!?!?! Sinn Fein, The Good Friday Agreement, And The World.” It is about how the GFA isn’t that bad, and my theory that the world didn’t support the Northern Catholic population as much as they supported South African Blacks and, how to one degree or another that’s a serious problem, and dissident republicans should be mad at the American Left and the Western European Left instead of at SF.
2) A post here called “In the Spirit of Malcom X” could be re-written and possibly shortened, but it might be worth reading in it’s current form. It’s about how SF needs to approach generating support in America in a more progressive way than what they usually do.
3) A post here called “IRA terrorists?” proves, in an objective way, that the PIRA was not a terrorist organization.
4) A post here is probably worth reading. It’s called “Gerry Adams and the N-word.”
5) ”Strategically Comprehensive,” a post here, is about the overall strategy of the Provos during the conflict.
6) Nazi Germany and the North, a post here, explains that the comparison isn’t as stupid as some think it is.
7) See- “A Brief Argument in Favor of the IRA.”

A GREAT WAY TO OPPOSE TRUMP!!

In late Oct. I stumbled onto an ad for a “funny t-shirt web-site” (as I call them). One of the pictured shirts had something that caught my attention and what I saw was a shirt that said:

"VOTE PALPATINE 2024

MAKE THE GALAXY GREAT AGAIN"

With an image of the Death Star.

Palpatine was the Sith Emperor in the Star Wars movies.

I ended up buying six of them (one for each color except yellow, which I think might be so light that you’d have difficulty reading the text) and have been wearing them almost every day since then. Although it’s been cold out and few people have seen me wearing it, I have gotten about 5 very positive responses in Boulder County.

I am not sure how many Star Wars fans there are in the US, but I think this might be a great way to oppose Trump.

You should buy one, here.

Tom

How I Became A Socialist

 In High School I was, as I put it, transitioning towards being a socialist. In Jr. High, if I was political at all I think that I was probably pretty close to being a neoconservative (I’m not sure if Tom Clancy was a neocon or not, but I think he may have been close to one and in Jr. High probably 25% of the political material I read (fiction and non-fiction) were books by him; I also was, without doing any research, vaguely zionistic). The Summer after 12th grade I went to a protest rally against the “Promise Keepers,” a conservative Christian thing. One of the groups listed as a sponsor of the rally was the (local) Democratic Socialists of America. That might be why, when I saw flyers on the CU-Boulder campus (where I went to school starting in the Fall of 1994) for the campus chapter, I got involved.

About two months later the National Director of DSA visited Boulder (or at the very least the CU-Boulder DSA, but maybe the local one as well) and at a small gathering in a classroom we went around the table and briefly described how we each became a socialist. Probably about 1/4 of what I said was about reading novels by Clancy and people like him- Stephen Coonts, Frederick Forsyth, Larry Bond, Nelson DeMille, Payne Harrison, and Harold Coyle (I’m not sure when I started reading these authors, but I include them in what I call either the national security genre or the Tom Clancy genre). I am pretty sure I gave people the wrong idea, although it is a little mixed. I believe that what I was trying to do by referring to those authors was describe how I became INTERESTED IN POLITICS. On the other hand, some of those books DID make me a little curious about socialism (in HS one day I briefly checked DAS KAPITAL by Marx out of the school library but read almost none of it) and some of them actually said a few left-wing things here and there (see this).                           

This essay is kind of meant to undo any damage to my reputation that earlier conversation did (I DO realize that probably not a single person remembers that conversation, but I wanted to do this essay for a lot of other reasons as well).

************

I grew up at least kind of if not VERY middle-class. I am also white, a cisgendered male, a heterosexual, and some kind of Christian (I am just starting something kind of formal where I might convert from being a Catholic to being a Protestant). For various reasons that I don’t think should be held against me, I have spent practically all of my life in Boulder and until college I did not interact much with people of color or with poor people. My parents were more or less liberal but not progressive or very politically active- I wasn’t exposed to liberal Democratic politics as a child.

The first thing that got me thinking like a socialist was when I read, around the age of 11, the Children’s Bible THREE TIMES. I can’t remember much and I have never read the entire Bible (the regular one). But I know that there was at least some material about poverty and wealth, about loving your brothers and sisters, etc. I believe that is why, when I was about 12 or 13 I remember telling a kid I was briefly friends with that I thought everyone should just automatically get all the food they need.

I don’t think I made any left-ward progress in Jr. High. I DID start listening to rap music in Jr. High- it was “soft-core” non-political stuff by The Beastie Boys, RUN DMC and The Fresh Prince. I have no idea how I started listening to rap in Jr. High, but I think that is why I started listening to Public Enemy and Ice-T at the beginning of 10th grade. Below is a section of this essay about the role that MUSIC played in my High School transition to being a socialist. It’s copied and pasted, with a little editing, from a post here.                         

***********

The High School Years: Becoming A Socialist

So, a focus on music and my political development.

One aspect of this that I think about is, why did I come to focus more on racism than other symptoms of capitalism and get an Ethnic Studies degree instead of a Women’s Studies degree? I have no idea how I found myself listening to rap music in Jr. High. I wasn’t watching MTV and my parents were no more than moderately anti-racist. I didn’t have older siblings who listened to rap (actually, I might have been watching a LITTLE MTV because I have memories of watching 1-2 music videos by The Fresh Prince). On one hand, as far as I can remember, the rap I was listening to in Jr. High was non-political but It probably contributed to how I started listening to Public Enemy and Ice-T in late 1991.

I think that listening to that “Hard Core” rap is a huge part of why I did my first political act (and that may have been AFTER the Ice-T/Body Count concert I went to). In the Spring semester of 10th grade, in early 1992, I walked out of my 4th period class (I think it was 4th period) and joined about 50 of my peers walking around Boulder protesting the not-guilty verdict in a California trial of the racist white police officers who beat Rodney King a year earlier. That night I went to a march and rally for the community in general and/or the CU-Boulder campus and I was actually on the front page of the paper the next day (next to me was someone who later was the first or second person to get an Ethnic Studies degree at CU-Boulder, and there was someone wearing a Primus shirt and one person wearing a Body Count shirt).

This is a little embarrassing because I have heard things here and there indicating they’re not progressive, but I think some political stuff by Megadeth and Metallica nudged me towards the left in High School. Those songs are:

Metallica
“Fight Fire With Fire” is about the need to avoid nuclear war.
“Ride the Lightning” is in opposition to the death penalty.
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” could almost be mistaken for an anti-fascist song because it is indirectly inspired by an anti-fascist novel by Ernest Hemingway. The thing is, the MOVIE based on that book retained the anti-war message but not the ANTI-FASCIST message of the book.
“Disposal Heroes” is anti-war.
“Blackened” is about nuclear war.
“…And Justice for All” is basically about politics and power in this country, but I am very unsure about what EXACTLY is it saying. This one may have had no affect on me becoming a socialist.
“One” is anti-war.

Megadeth
“Set The World Afire” is about nuclear war.
“Holy Wars…. The Punishment Due.” The first half I’ve heard might be about international conflicts like Israel and the Palestinians and/or (possibly more specifically) Northern Ireland. Beyond that I’m not sure what to say about it.
“Take No Prisoners” is anti-war.
“Rust in Peace” is about nuclear war.
“Symphony of Destruction” is about politics but I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say.
“Architecture of Aggression” is sort of the same- it probably IS anti-war, but I am less certain than I am when it comes to “Take no Prisoners.” Megadeth just wasn’t consistently and explicitly progressive.
“Foreclosure of a Dream” is I BELIEVE about US federal farm policy in the 1980s. I am just not familiar with farm policy. I DO like the license plates in Colorado that say “No Farms, No Food” but I just don’t know anywhere near enough to comment on this song.

I think that is a pretty complete list of the relevant Megadeth and Metallica songs I listened to in High School that may have nudged me towards the left.

The hard-core rap I listened to, including three Ice-T albums, and 3-4 Public Enemy albums probably had a better effect on me than the Metallica and Megadeth stuff I just referred to. And then there was the (hardcore punk) Dead Kennedys stuff- some of their songs might not inspire progressive politics but about half of them do. And there was at least a couple that were about economic injustice- “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and “Kill the Poor.” There were several other political DK songs whose lyrics I’m too lazy to confirm- with the exceptions of “Police Truck” (police brutality), “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” and “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” (about Ronald Reagan), which I definitely remember (I believe that in High School I listened to 3/4 or 4/4 of the Jello Biafra DK studio albums).

There were a handful of songs by Suicidal Tendencies that contributed to me becoming   progressive:

“Two Sided Politics” is basically contrasting the life of a rich person with that of a working-class person, and there’s some anti-Reagan stuff, etc. One thing I think is noteworthy is that there’s one line that says “I’m not anti-government, government is anti-me.” I like to think that might be in part an anti-anarchist statement.
“Fascist Pig” could be a little more political (that is, deeper) but Mexican-Americans criticizing the police may have pushed me a bit to the left.
“I Want More” is about the class conflict with some references to the minimum wage.
“Give It Revolution” was a little vague but probably nudged me in the right direction.

There were a handful of songs by a thrash-metal band called Nuclear Assault that pushed me to the left in High School. Although I have listened to their other stuff in recent years, in HS pretty much the only album I listened to was “Handle with Care.”
“New Song” which was a fairly good anti-racist song.
“Critical Mass” is a pretty good environmentalist song.
“Inherited Hell” is also like that.
“When Freedom Dies” Although I’m not sure what it’s saying about US foreign policy during the Cold War, it IS saying that freedom and civil liberties, etc. shouldn’t be weakened in the name of national security.
“Search and Seizure” is sort of similar, but basically about law enforcement harassing metal-heads (I’m not sure whether or how the lyrics-writer would generalize that statement to include punks, hippies, etc.)

Another band that influenced me in High School was a “cross-over” hard-core punk/thrash-metal band called DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles). In HS I saw them play live twice and listened to three of their albums.

First there was the album “Definition” which included the following songs:
“Acid Rain” was about the environment.
“The Application” is about multiple forms of employment discrimination and DOES include a line about racism and a line about homophobia, and one about religion and one that is probably about being HIV+.

The album “Thrash Zone” has several political songs.
“Labelled Incurable” might be about AIDS (as far as I can tell DRI were probably anti-homophobic).
“Kill the Words” is sort of generally about censorship and dictatorship but seems to be at least partly if not totally about that sort of thing in the Muslim world; I have no idea if they’re anti-Muslim or just consistently opposing fundamentalism, censorship, and dictatorship (there IS another song where they condemn religious discrimination in employment, so they probably aren’t anti-Muslim)
“Worker Bee” although it’s not written as a socialist song, I think it’s basically about economic justice and is by a band that I’m pretty sure is in favor of social justice as well (I’m suspicious of bands, people, etc. who are economically progressive but not socially liberal).

There was one Soundgarden song about the environment called “Hands All Over.” Although I don’t feel like looking at the lyrics, I believe that there were at least a few L7 songs I liked politically (one example is “Pretend We’re Dead”).

This will require at least one paragraph. Although I’m not real familiar with this, I have gotten the impression that Rage Against The Machine were a bit to my left politically. One social-dem critic told me that the political forces RATM admired either would have told RATM to fuck off, or alternately, should be killed (I think that may have been a reference to the Peruvian leftist army/terror organization called Shining Path). I sort of stumbled onto RATM a little earlier than most of their fans. Somehow I knew that their performance at a small club in Boulder around late 1992 or early 1993 would inspire moshing, so I showed up. I don’t remember thinking about it much but I guess I liked the music enough and the general vibe and bought their album shortly after the show. At some point at least a couple months later they came to Denver with House of Pain and it was great listening and moshing KNOWING that they were promoting dissent in this country. At that concert I learned about Leonard Peltier, and generally drifted towards the Left. (Right before House of Pain came on stage they played the music sans vocals of a song I mention below called “Just Look Around” by Sick of it All). Yes, RATM was alternately politically vague and/or leaning towards the hard-left. But they contributed to me becoming a dissident of some sort and it’s slightly possible that wouldn’t have happened if not for them. And musically they were pretty cool.

**************

Probably the main thing that contributed to me drifting towards the left is material that I learned in 11th grade when I took Advanced Placement US History. On one hand, I remember saying something inconsistent with what I’m saying here- in one debate I took some kind of bizarre LIBERTARIAN stance and criticized one of my peers because they were pro-government for some things but anti-government for other things. I also made one or another mistake with the two research papers we were assigned during the year. On the other hand, I got a 5 out 5 score on the final Exam, and I was pushed further to the left when I learned something about the Great Depression, something that might not have been covered in a regular 11th grade History class. At the very beginning of that period the (Republican) administration tried to fix things by lowering taxes on the rich and corporations which they thought would stimulate expansion (building new factories, etc.). The thing is, there was no increase in stimulus spending by corporate America and the Depression got worse. I got the strong impression that the New Deal alleviated a lot of suffering and empowered workers and probably kept the nation from sliding into such a deep socio-economic/political abyss that we wouldn’t be able to climb out of it when WWII started.

***************

As I mentioned above there were some novels that played one or another role in my voyage to the left.

The main one is a book called “Vortex” which had some serious progressive elements as I explain here.                                

“Fire Lance” is summarized here.

I think it was in High School that I first read a book by Harold Coyle called “Trial By Fire.” It’s about two things. First, a pilot program in the US Army involving four female Lieutenants (I know there are two kinds of Lieutenants in Army, but I can’t remember which one leads a platoon) leading ground combat units (platoons and in the case the story focuses on, a Mechanized Infantry platoon). I am, to one moderate degree or another hostile to the US military, but in this paragraph I need to explain that as long as we HAVE an institution, it should involve equity for women. Part of why I say this is that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a large chunk of the male American population who get the wrong idea about equity for women when they see that the US military doesn’t HAVE EQUITY FOR WOMEN. The book is simultaneously also about a conflict between Mexico and the US. I haven’t read this novel for about 5-10 years now but I could swear that I remember Coyle making the pro-war people look stupid- it might even be progressive. I think I will read it again soon and I might publish an essay about it on this blog.

**************

There was one TV show I should mention. I think that in Jr. High and High School I watched about 75% of all the episodes of Roseanne (see this). As you may know, poverty and/or the working-class was a pervasive theme and from a relatively (or in some cases VERY) left-wing perspective. It was overall fairly if not very anti-racist and even more so, feminist. 

1-3 different TV shows that should be here but aren't. Although I LOVE watching almost anything Star Trek (and that started 27 years ago), I didn't start watching the TV shows until 1998. So, I missed The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine (which is probably the most left-wing of all Star Trek series). On the other hand, I am  sort of working on something about how progressives in America could use ST to advance their agenda, and if I come up with some ideas that are worth your time, I'll publish them here and/or email them to some political friends of mine.

*************

That is about it as far as what changed my thinking. On a related note, I am proud of the fact that I was kind of politically active in High School. Below is a list of political stuff I did:

The very first political action I took was in early 1992 when I walked out of 4th period (Spanish) and joined about 50 peers marching around Boulder to protest the acquittal in California of some racist LAPD cops who savagely beat a black man (Rodney King) a year earlier. We even went up to the CU-Boulder campus to show them how it’s done : ).That night I went to a community/CU-Boulder march and rally about the same problem.

In 11th grade my best friend James (of Oregon) and I did a “‘Zine” (a small and unprofessionally written and edited magaZINE). James’ stuff was definitely more creative than mine, and may have been almost as political as my stuff. I did one article (in this case I tried to be as unbiased as possible) about an incident of job discrimination against a gay man in Boulder. IN THE SAME ISSUE I wrote an editorial criticizing Amendment Two (in 1992’s election in Colorado a ballot issue was approved by voters that outlawed gay rights anti-discrimination measures in CO).

In one issue, I did something that was far from creative and maybe even illegal, but I published the lyrics for an an incredibly anti-racist song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers called “The Power of Equality” (it’s close to the only RHCP song I listen to, but it’s AMAZING).

That’s pretty much all the relevant stuff I remember writing in the ‘zine.

I also was transitioning towards being pro-choice, and I wrote a Letter to the local paper (the Daily Camera) in which I expressed some degree of support for a woman’s right to choose.

I joined the Rocky Mountain Peace (and Justice) Center when I was 16 and wrote a letter to the Camera that was sort of pro-Persian Gulf War, but was also critical of the sanctions that had been applied to Iraq. Although that letter was not totally progressive, in response to it the Peace Center invited me to join them at a meeting with the Congressperson for that part of Colorado.

I probably had about 5-10 t-shirts of music groups I liked that were also political. I had a Body Count shirt, a Fishbone shirt that said “FUCK RACISM” (It’s possible it was “RACISM SUCKS” or maybe I had both??), at least one Rage Against The Machine t-shirt, a Public Enemy shirt and probably 1-2 Dead Kennedys shirts.

I think that’s about it. I might type up something about my thoughts about socialism- no, it won’t be very philosophical.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews MM

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“A Better Person” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

Once in a while I actually read the Wikipedia summaries I link to (or copy and paste, 2-4 years ago) (I almost never read ANYTHING in the summaries I link to on the “All Things Law and Order” blog because they are REALLY long, probably around 5-7,000 words). In this case the wikipedia summary is worthless.

It’s about a man whose “son” is killed and it turns out that she was transitioning towards being female and her dad didn’t know that or tried to bury it mentally. This results in him messing with the crime scene (he’s a cop and is the first one to find his daughter dead) to eliminate all the evidence that she’s female. He doesn’t seem ridiculously transphobic and with some help from SVU he moves towards recognizing and valuing the change that his late daughter made.

“Jumped In” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

The head of SVU expresses support for a federal investigation of a small part of the NYPD.

“Intersection” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

The couple that gets engaged seems to be an inter-racial one, probably a black man and a white woman. Also, at one point a SVU detective makes an interesting statement. He says something about how humans are just “homicidal monkeys” who don’t respect the planet. I think it’s a non-bigoted environmental statement, but intertwined with it is another statement about how humans treat each other, and I am not sure the writers should have used the word “monkeys” because when NYPD cops refer to humans as “homicidal monkeys” I usually find that very offensive (in this case the detective I’m talking about gets along very well with the character played by Ice-T, so he probably isn’t a racist).

“Dutch Tears” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

One of the two criminals is a Corrections Officer.

“Bubble Wrap” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.                     

They tell a rape survivor that they don’t care if she was using cocaine.