Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
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Friday, April 23, 2010
APARTHEID IN ARIZONA DRAWS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Hispanics in Arizona are reacting to a new law that would allow the police to stop every person of color in the state.....a new movement is sprouting from the dry desert.
The chant "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us" is a recollection of the reality that the U.S. illegally grabbed much of Mexican lands by military means many years ago. The chickens are coming home to roost as the empire now faces push back from the descendants of those Mexicans who had their lands stolen from them.
Yeah, I'm often compelled to trot out my own anecdotal evidence about profiling. Both the Border Patrol (who have renamed themselves after Ice, the smokeable version of Meth) and local/state Police in Texas profiled me all the damn time. Several times pulling guns on me. I'm not Hispanic but ethnically mixed, Tsalagi (cherokee) and Celtic. Like a lot of people in the southeast. That gives me common roots with Guatemalan people, we share roots in the Mayan culture. My Tsalagi ancestors "crossed the border" about 1800 years ago. Rome was still a political power.
ReplyDeleteWhen they would stop me and harrass and threaten me often with drawn firearms they would then blame their actions on my facial characteristics. Justify their hatred because I "look Mex". The storm Arizona Racists are raising has a lot of impact on Constitutionally Recognized treaties. Many of the Indian nations along the borders have triple citizenship, not just dual. In the North it's with Canada, the U.S. and their own nations, like the Cheyenne and Crow and Blackfoot near here (the Rocky Mountains) and in the southwest it's Mexico instead of Canada.
The Minutemen already have said they can dictate to the Tribes, like the Yavupai and Apache nations in Arizona and New Mexico, and the Tigua in Texas, how they manage Tribal Identification Cards. Most of the "hispanic" people in the southwest are Indian, not Spanish. They were given Spanish names and Spanish baptisms for 300 years.
Geronimo and Cochise, for instance, are Spanish names for Native American leaders, another Apache leader was called Mangas Coloradas, red sleeves in Spanish. They're no more spanish than I am.
When La Migra hassled me and threatened me with shooting for most of those incidents I didn't even know Spanish. The second time they challenged me with Donde Nacio? I knew enough that it meant "where were you born?" I was born in Topeka, Kansas, close to the geographic center of the U.S.
The FIRST time they didn't identify themselves, looked like a paramilitary Death Squad and I thought they were looking for a friend of mine named Nacho. At gunpoint.
The last time the Ft Worth police told me I looked Arabic. How DARE somebody look non-white non-Anglo Saxon in America?
We're born outside their Society and now, outside their Law. Our skin is now a crime.
Arizona can pass race base laws, pass Birthers laws and the state can continue to boycott Martin Luther King Day, well the rest of the Country can boycott the state of Arizona and spank them where it hurts them the most their pocket book. Their phony patriotism is sickening, they are just racists going by another name. We all know you are just itching to put a sheet on their head? Let’s face it the Republicans had eight years to deal with health care, immigration, climate change and financial oversight and governance and they failed. It appears that the Republican Party is only good at starting wars (two in eight years, with fat War profiteering contracts to friends of Cheney/Bush) but not at winning wars as seen by the continuing line of body bags that keep coming home. The Republicans party will continue turned inward to their old fashion obstructionist party (and their Confederacy appreciation roots) because they continue to allow a small portions (but very loud portion) of their party of “birthers, baggers and blowhards” to rule their party. I will admit that this fringe is very good at playing “Follow the Leader” by listening to their dullard leaders, Beck, Hedgecock, Hannity, O’Reilly, Rush, Savage, Sarah Bailin, Orly Taitz, Victoria Jackson, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the Blowhards and acting as ill programmed robots (they have already acted against doctors that perform abortions). The Birthers and the Tea party crowd think they can scare, intimidate and force others to go along with them by comments like “This time we came unarmed”, let me tell you something not all ex-military join the fringe militia crazies who don’t pay taxes and run around with face paint in the parks playing commando, the majority are mature and understand that the world is more complicated and grey than the black and white that these simpleton make it out to be and that my friend is the point. The world is complicated and people like Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt believed that we should use government a little to increase social mobility, now it’s about dancing around the claim of government is the problem. The sainted Reagan passed the biggest tax increase in American history and as a result federal employment increased, but facts are lost when mired in mysticism and superstition. For a party that gave us Abraham Lincoln, it is tragic that the ranks are filled with too many empty suits and the crazy Birthers who have not learned that the way our courts work is that you get a competent lawyer, verifiable facts and present them to a judge, if the facts are real and not half baked internet lies, then, and only then, do you proceed to trial. The Birthers seem to be having a problem with their so called “facts”. Let’s face it no one will take the Birthers seriously until they win a case, but until then, you will continue to appear dumb, crazy or racist, or maybe all three. I heard that Orly Taitz now wants to investigate the “Republican 2009 Summer of Love” list: Assemblyman, Michael D. Duvall (CA), Senator John Ensign (NV), Senator Paul Stanley (TN), Governor Mark Stanford (SC), Board of Ed Chair, and Kristin Maguire AKA Bridget Keeney (SC), she wants to re-establish a family values party, that’s like saying that the Catholic Church cares about the welling being of children in their care, too late for that.
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