If you’re one taco short of a combination plate, I believe I may have the item right here … and quite a bit more besides. My weekly rant will be something of a grab bag … a disjointed journey through a handful of topics, liable to light on just about anything. Just so much going on lately it’s hard to settle on any one thing. Here goes.
Ebola. This is a disaster for coastal West Africa, particularly because the health systems of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are in such a shambles. That’s due in part to the disastrous civil wars in the first two nations, but more generally it’s the product of the ongoing neoliberal project and the fact that, in so many of these nations, what wealth there is remains in the hands of the top 1%, whose loyalties to foreign powers, international investors, and global capital outweigh their concern for their poorer countrymen. We in the world’s developed countries have been slow to respond, as we are with practically every African crisis. Our hair doesn’t catch fire until somebody carries the virus home in a bucket; then it’s action time, right?
Abortion in Texas. There’s one answer to this latest court ruling that will close dozens clinics immediately: vote the jerks out, ladies, or they’ll continue to eat your lunch and stick their beaks into everything you do. Up to you, now. Will the extremists on the right continue to the carry the day? Only if we do nothing.
War and Peace. Once again, our attitude as a nation about going to war appears to be directly proportional to the degree to which we perceive ourselves to be at personal risk. There is a lack of interest on the part of Congress to get involved at any level; they truly embody the caricature of them drawn by Gary Trudeau some years back: They’ll be for it when it’s popular, against it when it goes bad, and it’s a question of principle.
Whatever we may think of the specific set of beheaders that operate under the black banner of ISIS, one thing is for certain: so long as Sunnis in Iraq are more afraid of the Iraqi army than they are of these black flag crazies, all the bombs in the world won’t make it right. Iraq is a complex place; when we broke it to pieces, we should have taken that into consideration.
luv u,
jp
