At this very moment, a corporate imaging satellite is circling Earth in Orwellian orbit, spying the surface and publishing our photos in the grandest of larceny. We fall from Sputnik onto our own roofs, spot our cars, twist our bodies and spread our arms to catch the wind like wounded birds, pull back on air and howl recklessly in screaming descent to the safety of swimming pool suburban splashdowns.
If I looked better in black, I’d vote anarchist. But I like the way Google Earth makes the world feel smaller. I plot fantastically on the White House, hunt nukes in North Korea and prowl African plains in successive instants, grip Sumatra with Mickey Mouse kid gloves, spin the globe East, sail back to Denver and hover over my girlfriend’s apartment. If I had money, an ill-fated illusion I’m only now coming to terms with, I’d upgrade my membership to this planetary community, low angle a live shot and peer through her window to see if my clothes still pile the floor. As a freeloader, though, the picture simply goes flat in an awkward reminder that intimacy comes only to those willing to pay the cost. For now, I’m contented to know that I’m as far from home as I can get, drinking a beer with my friend Faraj in a Palestinian refugee camp.
Unlike me, Faraj didn’t choose Balata Camp. He came with his family from their own camp in Jordan just as the Intifada broke out. At a rally against the newly erected and now infamous Huwarra checkpoint, he bought his residency with a bullet to the hip and the legitimacy that blood on the street affords the foreign. A year and a half later, he was in an Israeli prison for harboring wanted men. Now, desperate to return home to his family, he’s stranded, a secret evidence security risk. Out of one prison and into another.
His friends call him Urdani, (Jordanian) and though he’s Palestinian through and through, I call him Ajnabi. It means ‘foreigner,’ and though it’s not intrinsically derogatory, there remains something harmlessly disparaging to be consistently addressed as an outsider. I would know.
Like a lot of the foreign volunteers here, I find myself embroiled in ceaseless effort to fit in and shed my strangeness. I smoke local cigarettes in harsh quantities and burn successive pots of Arabic coffee, an acquired art for which I have an obvious learning disability. I like that Faraj tells me straight when I’ve blown another attempt. I appreciate his teasing and the look on his face that assures me that although I am still ajnabi, in his flat, that’s a good thing.
Technically, you’re never really alone in a West Bank refugee camp. Twenty-five thousand people share a single square kilometer of cinder block oblivion. Narrow alleys jag across each other, kids pause marbles to pelt strangers in playful trauma, clothes drip from Little Italy’s memory and garbage smolders in the blank spots. It’s an incongruous sort of loneliness to wander the crowd without your friends, your shows, your jokes.
My speech becomes a silly aberration of subconsciously broken grammar. It’s the next best thing to actual Arabic, but regression nonetheless. "I live here since before three months," and so forth, peppered with ‘yanis’ in place of the ums… and proven phrases like Esh Ekbeer! (What’s up big guy!) These make people laugh, but I don’t have to do that with Faraj; he gets it. He gets me. There’s a reason the foreigners find him. We make him happy. Maybe we remind each other of home. But we leave, as foreigners do, one by one, uncertain if we will be blessed Israel’s permission to return. “I become don’t care,” Faraj says. He’s grown used to being left behind by friends, many forever, one by one. Our friends from California look at him, puzzled, and I laugh because to me, he makes perfect sense.
When I start to sleep through the gunfight nights and my dreams turn to television and Chinese food, I turn to my good friend Google Earth. Faraj and I spin the planet and look for his mother’s home, buried in a camp four times Balata’s size, somewhere near the airport between Amman and Zarqa. After seven years, it takes a few minutes to find his way back. He missed his sister’s wedding. He missed a lot of things.
We sail together over the Atlantic, to Colorado, to my mother’s home in Highlands Ranch, where white flights flourish and transplanted trees struggle through foreign soil. Manicured streets wind snaking in successive half circles toward a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill. As we fall from heaven toward suburbia, I brace for gasping disbelief at the size of our house. A British girlfriend toured our mansion once, sickened by splendor and awed by a garage door that lifted in magical intuition upon our arrival. Faraj was strangely comfortable with its appearance.
“They’re all in a circle, man. Like big family.” I admitted that of the seven houses within earshot of my mother’s home, I new the name of only one person, Max, the black guy, our own ajnabi. “The houses are so close together,” he said.
“Faraj, you’re a Palestinian. You’re telling me our houses are too close together?” He laughed. “You know,” I said, “people that live in glass refugee camps shouldn’t throw stones.”
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
For Jennifer
An overdue journey guided me briskly through relentless rain, my brown leather trainers soaked and weighted as I leapt across and into murky puddles. Sweet, charcoal smoke climbed upward and away from the burning embers of a determined grill, stolen from an awaiting chimney by heaving drafts, drenched and denied promises of broiled tomato, onion and za’tar.
I drew and held a tentative breath, passed the butcher with averted gaze, straining as a child when witness to his first paraplegic; a slaughtered, skinned body swayed heavily in segments from steel hooks. The butcher scraped a rubber broom across chipped, spotted tiles, pacing methodically in crimson splashed galoshes. Blood spilled onto the black asphalt in tides, swirled through a meandering spectrum of oily rainbows, and found the piled beaches of a construction site. It pulled at the powdery dunes of unmixed cement and wandered lazily on, a brown, silted concoction, between crowded steel bars, briefly floating the rotting skins of discarded vegetables and an empty cigarette pack before disappearing beneath the road.
I pulled the collar of my wool coat around my neck and peered upward through a thin, stinging veil to a dimly lighted window. Cinderblock walls, pocked by Israeli guns, shown dark grey as they slowly absorbed a days old storm. I wrenched my hands from dewy pockets and pushed through the metal door, punctured and ironic, its sharp, rusting bullet holes inviting the chill fury behind me.
I ascended a narrow corridor towards the blaring explosions of an Egyptian action movie and collapsed unto a crushed velvet cushion. In the corner, an elderly man stroked his wiry, metallic beard and kneeled eastward upon a faded rug. Next to me, a boy with Coke bottle glasses squinted intently at a television mounted high on the wall, secretly anticipating the change of channel and hippie-era Speed Racer cartoons during commercial breaks, impossibly tiny feet hanging motionless from his perch on the couch’s edge.
Three cracked mirrors reflected a disguised man, a foreigner’s face hidden beneath squalid black shrubbery, neglected tan curls protruding from beneath a stretched winter cap. I waited, a stranger unto myself, until beckoned to the stiff rose leather of a motorized chair, my dingy jeans wiping oily hair from its surface.
It is here that the ritual and clanship of men transcend nations. This fraternity of artisans lifts itself from the currents of three worlds, pauses solely on its universal day of rest, and invites only those who know the way as Tuesdays dawn.
He scanned the crowded counter. Scissors, an oversized comb, a brush, thick with shorn black hair, a towel to drape over his shoulder, its worn cloth drenched with heavy shaving cream and subtle after shave.
Trust is releasing Western vanities to the mercy of Eastern considerations, without the luxury of language, bound beneath nylon and vicars’ stretched white paper.
It is letting a declared enemy of state brush through your dusty hair; pull through tangles and examine moles cautiously; advise you as a doctor with the concurrence of waiting patrons; cut through American brown amidst Palestinian black; grasp your jaw and tilt your head with rough, steady hands; examine, evaluate, strategize; touch you prone; set a razor blade to your throat and deftly scrape away self neglect; return you to a vaguely familiar self. It is trust that opens wide the heart, without the longing of expectation.
“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” --Paolo Freire
I drew and held a tentative breath, passed the butcher with averted gaze, straining as a child when witness to his first paraplegic; a slaughtered, skinned body swayed heavily in segments from steel hooks. The butcher scraped a rubber broom across chipped, spotted tiles, pacing methodically in crimson splashed galoshes. Blood spilled onto the black asphalt in tides, swirled through a meandering spectrum of oily rainbows, and found the piled beaches of a construction site. It pulled at the powdery dunes of unmixed cement and wandered lazily on, a brown, silted concoction, between crowded steel bars, briefly floating the rotting skins of discarded vegetables and an empty cigarette pack before disappearing beneath the road.
I pulled the collar of my wool coat around my neck and peered upward through a thin, stinging veil to a dimly lighted window. Cinderblock walls, pocked by Israeli guns, shown dark grey as they slowly absorbed a days old storm. I wrenched my hands from dewy pockets and pushed through the metal door, punctured and ironic, its sharp, rusting bullet holes inviting the chill fury behind me.
I ascended a narrow corridor towards the blaring explosions of an Egyptian action movie and collapsed unto a crushed velvet cushion. In the corner, an elderly man stroked his wiry, metallic beard and kneeled eastward upon a faded rug. Next to me, a boy with Coke bottle glasses squinted intently at a television mounted high on the wall, secretly anticipating the change of channel and hippie-era Speed Racer cartoons during commercial breaks, impossibly tiny feet hanging motionless from his perch on the couch’s edge.
Three cracked mirrors reflected a disguised man, a foreigner’s face hidden beneath squalid black shrubbery, neglected tan curls protruding from beneath a stretched winter cap. I waited, a stranger unto myself, until beckoned to the stiff rose leather of a motorized chair, my dingy jeans wiping oily hair from its surface.
It is here that the ritual and clanship of men transcend nations. This fraternity of artisans lifts itself from the currents of three worlds, pauses solely on its universal day of rest, and invites only those who know the way as Tuesdays dawn.
He scanned the crowded counter. Scissors, an oversized comb, a brush, thick with shorn black hair, a towel to drape over his shoulder, its worn cloth drenched with heavy shaving cream and subtle after shave.
Trust is releasing Western vanities to the mercy of Eastern considerations, without the luxury of language, bound beneath nylon and vicars’ stretched white paper.
It is letting a declared enemy of state brush through your dusty hair; pull through tangles and examine moles cautiously; advise you as a doctor with the concurrence of waiting patrons; cut through American brown amidst Palestinian black; grasp your jaw and tilt your head with rough, steady hands; examine, evaluate, strategize; touch you prone; set a razor blade to your throat and deftly scrape away self neglect; return you to a vaguely familiar self. It is trust that opens wide the heart, without the longing of expectation.
“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” --Paolo Freire
Friday, February 9, 2007
Peaceful Warrior
Mark,
What can I say? It's not that I haven't thought of you, and often. But I didn't have the tools or the time to track you down. Funny, since all it took was google. From what I've read of your projects on the internet, you've completely redefined yourself....or maybe I never knew the real you, if there is such a thing for anyone. With your good looks and your athlete's confident charm, you must present quite a paradox to the activist community. Did you know I became fairly immersed in campus activism after I got back from Ireland?
You'll forgive me for making assumptions, but college seems to have been an especially tumultuous time for both of us, each trying to make all the bits and pieces of our fractured lives make sense, trying to integrate them into a single, coherant narrative, engaged in our own way in that fabled search for the "integrated self." Though Tim's impact on our lives ultimately had different results, I think you'll agree his magic was that he showed us, perhaps unknowingly, that there is another possibility for the self, what might be called the “inconsistent self.”
Before your eyes start to glaze over and I lose you, just try to understand that this is simply my agonized attempt to understand what happened to us, to me, to Tim. Beginning in Ireland, I think we three underwent a paradigm shift, a shift that would eventually be called, at least in Tim's case, “sick,” delusional, and even dangerous. What made this shift possible? It was the validation we offered each other, helping each other see that we shouldn't be anxious, depressed, or disgusted when we found a multitude of interests and potential selves.
If Tim had lived, I think he would have been a broad thinker and doer, but would his ideas and his life have impacted us with the same magnitude? If he had lived, there would be somebody who had witnessed a beginning, who implicitly understood me at a time I didn't understand anything, let alone myself. So what’s tragic is that Tim knew what I believe now to be my idealized, albeit germinal self, and that self is lost forever. What's even more tragic, I'm realizing now, is that I've never been able to wrap my head around your struggle, and we've lost the time together that might have produced some powerful moments. Why didn't we combine our strengths then, or even go to each other for comfort, to grieve? But that's water under the bridge, impossible to recapture now... and here you are, under your own power, you've done it. You've cast aside fear and taken a bold step into nothingness, with only an ideal, and hope, and maybe a little faith in the goodness of man. What surprises me is that I'm not skeptical at all.
It doesn't matter to me how much money you raise for your charities, or how many people you draw to a screening of your DVD (which I just ordered), it doesn't even matter to me why you're doing what you're doing. What I'm saying is I'm proud of you...not just for what you're doing, but HOW you're doing it, with such clarity and vision and purposeful drive. Of course, given what I know of you now, it almost pains me to have to tell you that I'm in the military, but if you've been in contact with anyone from the group you already know what I've been doing. Why the miltary, which is so fundamentally wrong for me? Again, I suppose it doesn't really matter why. I've now become jaded and I have to give it one more year...what really matter's is what I do after.
So please don't disappear again. Don't get shot again. And for god sake don't go to Baghdad. Or is that me succumbing to fear? As you must surely know by now, there's fear, and then there's healthy awareness of our own fragility....basically, I hope you'll be wise enough to watch your ass. If you're wondering, I'm stationed in England now, an easy hop over to Ireland. I was just there in Dublin for the new year, looked for Tim's tree at Glencree one afternoon, but couldn't find it....Aeveen was also out of town. If you're on this side of the Atlantic again, let me know and I'll do what I can to meet up with you. And you know you have a place to stay, whether I'm home or not. Be well, be strong.
-Kris
Kris,
In some place, I’ve been waiting for your words for a long time. I well know the need to make sense of what happened to us in Ireland. Tim’s death, and the time I spent with his family in Woodstock, accelerated me. I never felt anger about his suicide, though I grieved for so long. In many ways, I am still grieving. I wonder if he hadn’t killed himself, and brought me into his family, if I might have succumbed to a similar fate.
Tim, uncontainable and dangerous, flooded my senses, an opiate quickening, blinding me with rage I’d never known. We prowled Dublin, drunk with possibility and risk, searching for someone to fight. We found only ourselves. We exchanged fists and bruises for hours, dancing in the cold rain, slamming our knuckles into each other, laughing out as we shattered.
When I returned home, I fell forward into myself. I am lucky to have survived those next few years. I battled anyone who would oblidge me. I never won, I never wanted to. I wanted the fury of strangers to knock through my walls, crack my grinning mouth, crush me, burn me to ashes and leave behind only the essence. I sobbed heavy, private tears as I waded into the icy waters of the surging creek, searching for Tim amidst a current that should surely have swept me away. I destroyed what was around me, reflections of a self I wanted to transcend. There was no peace in it.
I nearly dropped out of school. I forced myself through an innocuous and false world I no longer believed in. I lived for Tim with the solitary hope of making him proud. I carried his great weight upon me. When I finally collapsed in exhaustion and loneliness, it was his quiet chuckle and calm reassurance I heard through the dull and enduring clamour of our memories.
I had sought alchemy but found a cell of madness and self-doubt. The fear I believed abandoned in Derry was in fact now bearing sharply through the raw, vulnerable skin of a trembling body. It was this fear alone, when everything else had crumbled and fallen, which remained to embrace. It was this that brought me to Palestine.
For three hours in the West Bank I was invincible. I stood beneath a 30-caliber machine gun, firing over my head with ferocious and gross neglect. I walked shoulder to shoulder with the strongest people I have ever known, a mere child in their presence, cast not into the shadows of their unfaltering steps, but bolstered as a pillar amongst them.
In this place, fear rips through from the center, flies outward and away without pausing to reconcile, leaves you breathless and faint. It pits the greatest of self against the least, and in the end, reveals itself an illusion. I watched a soldier take aim, and I watched as he pulled his trigger. I watched as bullets seared through a two-year-old child and his three-year-old sister. I watched as the blood poured from their eyes, their ears and their noses. I watched as my invincible self walked briskly away from me, turned back for a final, yawning look into my wide eyes, wink and fade to the other side, Tim’s side.
I rose from ashes at that moment, destroyed and renewed. Indeed, I have not arrived, merely ventured, and my steps are sure. With each moment, the world’s definitions of me slip from my heart and the possibilities of who I will be rise in their place. I am a better man than I was, but only a fragment of what I will become. What I have learned from Tim is that time is not short, the body not delicate. It is our sight that is short, our hearts that are delicate. The three of us will again meet on this path he gifted us, of that I am certain, and I will follow it with great appreciation, to Glencree.
Your friend,
Mark
What can I say? It's not that I haven't thought of you, and often. But I didn't have the tools or the time to track you down. Funny, since all it took was google. From what I've read of your projects on the internet, you've completely redefined yourself....or maybe I never knew the real you, if there is such a thing for anyone. With your good looks and your athlete's confident charm, you must present quite a paradox to the activist community. Did you know I became fairly immersed in campus activism after I got back from Ireland?
You'll forgive me for making assumptions, but college seems to have been an especially tumultuous time for both of us, each trying to make all the bits and pieces of our fractured lives make sense, trying to integrate them into a single, coherant narrative, engaged in our own way in that fabled search for the "integrated self." Though Tim's impact on our lives ultimately had different results, I think you'll agree his magic was that he showed us, perhaps unknowingly, that there is another possibility for the self, what might be called the “inconsistent self.”
Before your eyes start to glaze over and I lose you, just try to understand that this is simply my agonized attempt to understand what happened to us, to me, to Tim. Beginning in Ireland, I think we three underwent a paradigm shift, a shift that would eventually be called, at least in Tim's case, “sick,” delusional, and even dangerous. What made this shift possible? It was the validation we offered each other, helping each other see that we shouldn't be anxious, depressed, or disgusted when we found a multitude of interests and potential selves.
If Tim had lived, I think he would have been a broad thinker and doer, but would his ideas and his life have impacted us with the same magnitude? If he had lived, there would be somebody who had witnessed a beginning, who implicitly understood me at a time I didn't understand anything, let alone myself. So what’s tragic is that Tim knew what I believe now to be my idealized, albeit germinal self, and that self is lost forever. What's even more tragic, I'm realizing now, is that I've never been able to wrap my head around your struggle, and we've lost the time together that might have produced some powerful moments. Why didn't we combine our strengths then, or even go to each other for comfort, to grieve? But that's water under the bridge, impossible to recapture now... and here you are, under your own power, you've done it. You've cast aside fear and taken a bold step into nothingness, with only an ideal, and hope, and maybe a little faith in the goodness of man. What surprises me is that I'm not skeptical at all.
It doesn't matter to me how much money you raise for your charities, or how many people you draw to a screening of your DVD (which I just ordered), it doesn't even matter to me why you're doing what you're doing. What I'm saying is I'm proud of you...not just for what you're doing, but HOW you're doing it, with such clarity and vision and purposeful drive. Of course, given what I know of you now, it almost pains me to have to tell you that I'm in the military, but if you've been in contact with anyone from the group you already know what I've been doing. Why the miltary, which is so fundamentally wrong for me? Again, I suppose it doesn't really matter why. I've now become jaded and I have to give it one more year...what really matter's is what I do after.
So please don't disappear again. Don't get shot again. And for god sake don't go to Baghdad. Or is that me succumbing to fear? As you must surely know by now, there's fear, and then there's healthy awareness of our own fragility....basically, I hope you'll be wise enough to watch your ass. If you're wondering, I'm stationed in England now, an easy hop over to Ireland. I was just there in Dublin for the new year, looked for Tim's tree at Glencree one afternoon, but couldn't find it....Aeveen was also out of town. If you're on this side of the Atlantic again, let me know and I'll do what I can to meet up with you. And you know you have a place to stay, whether I'm home or not. Be well, be strong.
-Kris
Kris,
In some place, I’ve been waiting for your words for a long time. I well know the need to make sense of what happened to us in Ireland. Tim’s death, and the time I spent with his family in Woodstock, accelerated me. I never felt anger about his suicide, though I grieved for so long. In many ways, I am still grieving. I wonder if he hadn’t killed himself, and brought me into his family, if I might have succumbed to a similar fate.
Tim, uncontainable and dangerous, flooded my senses, an opiate quickening, blinding me with rage I’d never known. We prowled Dublin, drunk with possibility and risk, searching for someone to fight. We found only ourselves. We exchanged fists and bruises for hours, dancing in the cold rain, slamming our knuckles into each other, laughing out as we shattered.
When I returned home, I fell forward into myself. I am lucky to have survived those next few years. I battled anyone who would oblidge me. I never won, I never wanted to. I wanted the fury of strangers to knock through my walls, crack my grinning mouth, crush me, burn me to ashes and leave behind only the essence. I sobbed heavy, private tears as I waded into the icy waters of the surging creek, searching for Tim amidst a current that should surely have swept me away. I destroyed what was around me, reflections of a self I wanted to transcend. There was no peace in it.
I nearly dropped out of school. I forced myself through an innocuous and false world I no longer believed in. I lived for Tim with the solitary hope of making him proud. I carried his great weight upon me. When I finally collapsed in exhaustion and loneliness, it was his quiet chuckle and calm reassurance I heard through the dull and enduring clamour of our memories.
I had sought alchemy but found a cell of madness and self-doubt. The fear I believed abandoned in Derry was in fact now bearing sharply through the raw, vulnerable skin of a trembling body. It was this fear alone, when everything else had crumbled and fallen, which remained to embrace. It was this that brought me to Palestine.
For three hours in the West Bank I was invincible. I stood beneath a 30-caliber machine gun, firing over my head with ferocious and gross neglect. I walked shoulder to shoulder with the strongest people I have ever known, a mere child in their presence, cast not into the shadows of their unfaltering steps, but bolstered as a pillar amongst them.
In this place, fear rips through from the center, flies outward and away without pausing to reconcile, leaves you breathless and faint. It pits the greatest of self against the least, and in the end, reveals itself an illusion. I watched a soldier take aim, and I watched as he pulled his trigger. I watched as bullets seared through a two-year-old child and his three-year-old sister. I watched as the blood poured from their eyes, their ears and their noses. I watched as my invincible self walked briskly away from me, turned back for a final, yawning look into my wide eyes, wink and fade to the other side, Tim’s side.
I rose from ashes at that moment, destroyed and renewed. Indeed, I have not arrived, merely ventured, and my steps are sure. With each moment, the world’s definitions of me slip from my heart and the possibilities of who I will be rise in their place. I am a better man than I was, but only a fragment of what I will become. What I have learned from Tim is that time is not short, the body not delicate. It is our sight that is short, our hearts that are delicate. The three of us will again meet on this path he gifted us, of that I am certain, and I will follow it with great appreciation, to Glencree.
Your friend,
Mark
Sunday, February 4, 2007
A letter to Parents & Teachers
Dear Parents and Teachers,
"It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." Anne Frank - July 15, 1944
Her voice was uncontainable. From an attic, as the lights of her captive world flickered and conceded darkness, she preserved her single, beautiful perspective. Its worth is irrefutable, though simple, told through the trembling hand of a fourteen-year-old girl. We would not deny that though her journal lacked the insights of scholars or the repudiation of the Gestapo, it remains in fact an invaluable window into her era.
In our era, we often walk with trepidation into understanding the confusing and heartbreaking world. We shy from topics that challenge our beliefs and burden our confidence. Our sources must be objective, our teachers non-committal, our news balanced. We grasp for “both sides of the story” during minute segments afforded in clipped articles and Katie Couric’s nightly world debriefing.
If a young Rwandan had penned Anne’s diary during that country’s genocide, would her words not possess the same merit? If it had been written by Yolanda King, would we demand of those pages the white voices of Jim Crowe’s South lest her journal be deemed unbalanced and her point of view tainted?
Anne Frank offered the perspective she was capable of providing, her own. Through her words we are gifted the history, love and hope of an individual person. We do not search for “the other side” because her poetry inspires in us the understanding that there were in fact millions of perspectives all around her, striving, struggling, being extinguished. Her life could not be inscribed upon a side of a coin, flipped over to reveal the faces of her tormentors, or those who stood by as her essence was stolen.
During a talk I recently gave to a group of high school students, I asked them to identify someone they know for certain to be biased.
“Ok,” I began, “How about Osama bin Laden?”
“Definitely,” they agreed.
“Can you prove it?”
“He hates America, he’s responsible for 9/11.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s common fact,” they scoffed, “Everyone knows that.”
“Have you ever met him?” I asked, “How did you discover it was him?”
“Watch the news,” someone chided.
“Ok, fair and balanced. We’re looking for evidence. Let’s say we get all our information about Osama from Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Is Bill biased?
“Yea,” a few young Democrats laughed, “He loves Bush.” Thoughtfully, a boy added, “It’s clear what he believes about things - abortion, the war in Iraq, terrorism…”
“And that helps you to identify his bias?”
“Sure.”
“So you know things about him, what he thinks, how he feels…What did O’Reilly have for breakfast this morning?” I asked. “I had two cups of coffee, by the way. Can you think of someone else’s bias you might have more evidence of?”
“How about you?” a young Republican erupted.
I winked. “You’re so right and you’re almost there.”
“You’re saying I’m biased?!” he grimaced, his discovery not relieving his frustration.
“I’m saying you know more about yourself than anyone else,” I encouraged. “You have more evidence of your own bias than any other source of information you could ever find. It’s your eyes and your ears you are learning through, and a lifetime worth of experience is how you integrate what you encounter. But that means you’re also the most qualified person in the world to evaluate that bias. Your’s is the only voice on the planet for which you have everything you need to critically analyze. You know where you spent Christmas Eve three years ago and you know what you’re going to do Friday night. Can you tell me the same about Wolf Blitzer?”
Bias need not be a four-letter word. Bias is simply the culmination of our experiences and a pre-consolidation of our understanding. No politician, reporter or teacher is exempt from their perspective, and rightly so. Be wary of the person who claims to possess a coin with the world engraved into opposing halves. Listen with caution when a reporter tells the story of another’s life without giving pause to reconcile you to his own.
As educators, we retain a remarkable possibility, an exercise in honesty, to teach not facts to be remembered, but perspectives to be questioned. If we are to bestow anything, let it be the facility of our students to doubt us, to disagree with what we know and to discover their own truths.
Our endeavor is a risky one. Our method seems absurd and impractical. Our discoveries will be wrought with the discomfort of allowing our beliefs to be challenged and limited by the constraints of our own senses. Rightly so.
Sincerely,
mark turner
Founder, Research Journalism Initiative
"It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." Anne Frank - July 15, 1944
Her voice was uncontainable. From an attic, as the lights of her captive world flickered and conceded darkness, she preserved her single, beautiful perspective. Its worth is irrefutable, though simple, told through the trembling hand of a fourteen-year-old girl. We would not deny that though her journal lacked the insights of scholars or the repudiation of the Gestapo, it remains in fact an invaluable window into her era.
In our era, we often walk with trepidation into understanding the confusing and heartbreaking world. We shy from topics that challenge our beliefs and burden our confidence. Our sources must be objective, our teachers non-committal, our news balanced. We grasp for “both sides of the story” during minute segments afforded in clipped articles and Katie Couric’s nightly world debriefing.
If a young Rwandan had penned Anne’s diary during that country’s genocide, would her words not possess the same merit? If it had been written by Yolanda King, would we demand of those pages the white voices of Jim Crowe’s South lest her journal be deemed unbalanced and her point of view tainted?
Anne Frank offered the perspective she was capable of providing, her own. Through her words we are gifted the history, love and hope of an individual person. We do not search for “the other side” because her poetry inspires in us the understanding that there were in fact millions of perspectives all around her, striving, struggling, being extinguished. Her life could not be inscribed upon a side of a coin, flipped over to reveal the faces of her tormentors, or those who stood by as her essence was stolen.
During a talk I recently gave to a group of high school students, I asked them to identify someone they know for certain to be biased.
“Ok,” I began, “How about Osama bin Laden?”
“Definitely,” they agreed.
“Can you prove it?”
“He hates America, he’s responsible for 9/11.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s common fact,” they scoffed, “Everyone knows that.”
“Have you ever met him?” I asked, “How did you discover it was him?”
“Watch the news,” someone chided.
“Ok, fair and balanced. We’re looking for evidence. Let’s say we get all our information about Osama from Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Is Bill biased?
“Yea,” a few young Democrats laughed, “He loves Bush.” Thoughtfully, a boy added, “It’s clear what he believes about things - abortion, the war in Iraq, terrorism…”
“And that helps you to identify his bias?”
“Sure.”
“So you know things about him, what he thinks, how he feels…What did O’Reilly have for breakfast this morning?” I asked. “I had two cups of coffee, by the way. Can you think of someone else’s bias you might have more evidence of?”
“How about you?” a young Republican erupted.
I winked. “You’re so right and you’re almost there.”
“You’re saying I’m biased?!” he grimaced, his discovery not relieving his frustration.
“I’m saying you know more about yourself than anyone else,” I encouraged. “You have more evidence of your own bias than any other source of information you could ever find. It’s your eyes and your ears you are learning through, and a lifetime worth of experience is how you integrate what you encounter. But that means you’re also the most qualified person in the world to evaluate that bias. Your’s is the only voice on the planet for which you have everything you need to critically analyze. You know where you spent Christmas Eve three years ago and you know what you’re going to do Friday night. Can you tell me the same about Wolf Blitzer?”
Bias need not be a four-letter word. Bias is simply the culmination of our experiences and a pre-consolidation of our understanding. No politician, reporter or teacher is exempt from their perspective, and rightly so. Be wary of the person who claims to possess a coin with the world engraved into opposing halves. Listen with caution when a reporter tells the story of another’s life without giving pause to reconcile you to his own.
As educators, we retain a remarkable possibility, an exercise in honesty, to teach not facts to be remembered, but perspectives to be questioned. If we are to bestow anything, let it be the facility of our students to doubt us, to disagree with what we know and to discover their own truths.
Our endeavor is a risky one. Our method seems absurd and impractical. Our discoveries will be wrought with the discomfort of allowing our beliefs to be challenged and limited by the constraints of our own senses. Rightly so.
Sincerely,
mark turner
Founder, Research Journalism Initiative
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Paper Bags
My mother is afraid to go alone into her own basement. As a girl, three brothers waited patiently for her to descend the carpeted stairs of their parents’ home, hidden in the darkness. As she groped nervously for the light switch, they prepared their boyish attacks. Her few years had already taught my mother through arduous repetition what lay ahead, yet despite her brothers’ constancy, in each startling detonation of an air-filled paper bag, terror emerged anew, embedding itself deep within her psyche. Her burgeoning confidence betrayed, even into adulthood she remains trapped within pervasive readiness. This is the sound of a low-altitude sonic boom wrought by an American built F-16 fighter plane.
In the activity center, I joined a grammar school dance and drama class. Between laughter and applause, hand-in-hand I was ushered about, clung to by small fingers with sure grips. Children climbed into my lap, wrapped their arms around my shoulders and recited their names excitedly. Unable to be close enough, cheek-to-cheek they whispered to me their brief histories and offered gag candy with spring loaded rubber beetles glued to sticks of gum. Diminutive dancers fumbled the steps of the Dabke, unwilling to shift their gazes, beaming eyes lavishing the delights of being watched. They took proud and eager turns introducing me to dead older brothers, cousins, fathers – tiny photographs tied with shoelaces to their necks.
We wake throughout the night to deafening percussions, windows rattling, pressure pounding against our chests and clapping our ears. Silence. Then in thunderous waves, wraiths shake the cinderblock walls and torture our wary solitude. Babies cry, children wet beds. Kids peer over dusty windowsills, searching the sky for the fading blue afterburners of jets long since passed. We flinch but internally, terribly revived, then resheathe our bodies beneath readiness and sink trembling back to sleep.
The soldiers came last night for Fadi’s older brother. Amidst a barrage of stun grenades and automatic gunfire, he took refuge inside a partially destroyed building. They attacked the structure with an American built armored bulldozer, its throaty diesel engine heaving as steel tracks cackled laborously over the asphalt. M16 assault rifles cracked sharp brass rounds through shattering concrete, severely wounding him in the abdomen as he made his escape. The hours-long operation began on the street below my window, less then thirty meters from where I slept. I awoke only when a sonic boom shook the camp just before sunrise.
In the activity center, I joined a grammar school dance and drama class. Between laughter and applause, hand-in-hand I was ushered about, clung to by small fingers with sure grips. Children climbed into my lap, wrapped their arms around my shoulders and recited their names excitedly. Unable to be close enough, cheek-to-cheek they whispered to me their brief histories and offered gag candy with spring loaded rubber beetles glued to sticks of gum. Diminutive dancers fumbled the steps of the Dabke, unwilling to shift their gazes, beaming eyes lavishing the delights of being watched. They took proud and eager turns introducing me to dead older brothers, cousins, fathers – tiny photographs tied with shoelaces to their necks.
We wake throughout the night to deafening percussions, windows rattling, pressure pounding against our chests and clapping our ears. Silence. Then in thunderous waves, wraiths shake the cinderblock walls and torture our wary solitude. Babies cry, children wet beds. Kids peer over dusty windowsills, searching the sky for the fading blue afterburners of jets long since passed. We flinch but internally, terribly revived, then resheathe our bodies beneath readiness and sink trembling back to sleep.
The soldiers came last night for Fadi’s older brother. Amidst a barrage of stun grenades and automatic gunfire, he took refuge inside a partially destroyed building. They attacked the structure with an American built armored bulldozer, its throaty diesel engine heaving as steel tracks cackled laborously over the asphalt. M16 assault rifles cracked sharp brass rounds through shattering concrete, severely wounding him in the abdomen as he made his escape. The hours-long operation began on the street below my window, less then thirty meters from where I slept. I awoke only when a sonic boom shook the camp just before sunrise.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Demonstration
1/12/07
From IMEMC and RJI (Bil’in, West Bank) - Approximately 150 Palestinian, Israeli and international demonstrators, accompanied by several journalists participated in a demostration today against the illegal Isreali Annexation Wall in Bil’in.
The procession approached an access point in the Wall and demanded the gate be opened. Residents held pictures of photojournalist Fadi Aruri, (24) of Ramallah, who was shot several times in last Thursday’s invasion of that city. Aruri remains in critical condition in Tel Aviv.
Demonstrators took refuge on the adjacent hill as youth began lobbing stones toward the soldiers. Israeli forces fired tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets at the youth, before opening the gate to allow access for two Israeli Border Police units.
Residents and activists lay in the road and were intially successful in preventing the passage of the two jeeps. They were joined by resident Muhammad Ali abu Sadi, (70) after he had been struck repeatedly by soldiers. Abu Sadi suffered exhaustion and collapsed shortly thereafter. After a scuffle in which soldiers attempted to prevent treatment, he was attended to and revived by Bil’in medical relief volunteer Sheik Suliman Yassin. The remaining protesters were beaten and dragged across stones as they were removed from the scene.
Two Israeli Border Police units then pursued Palestinian youths several hundred meters into a residential area of the village, firing tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated metal bullets. Three Border Police Officers attempted to arrest an American activist who retreated as the military approached. The activist surrendured after soldiers fired several rounds of rubber-coated munition at him, though he was not injured. He was forced to his knees and soldiers began binding his wrists when an Israeli videographer interceded. He was released shortly thereafter.
Border Police units retreated toward the access gate in two jeeps, firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets from rooftop hatches atop the vehicles. Bil’in, located near Ramallah in the West Bank, has lost close to sixty percent of its land to the construction of the Wall and expansion of Modin Illit settlement. Residents here have held similar protests every Friday for nearly two years.
Several people reported injuries, including:
Adib Abu Rahma (35) – beaten with batons
Sameer Suliman Yassin (31) baton injuries to the hand
Wha’il famil nasser (29) baton injuries to the head
Khaled shoukat al Khatib (20) explosive gas bomb to the back
Ashraf Muhammad Jamal Khatib (27) rubber coated bullet in the leg
Zuhdia ali al Khatib (40) rubber coated bullet in her leg
Motassem ibrahim abu Rahma (20) rubber coated bullet in the leg
Associated Press Journalist burned by percussion grenade
Jonothan Pollack, Israel (25) rubber coated bullet in the stomach
Sarah, international volunteer (25) explosive gas bomb to the shoulder
For more information, please contact Abdullah Rahman, international volunteer coordinator for the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Bil’in at: (972) 054 725 8210.
From IMEMC and RJI (Bil’in, West Bank) - Approximately 150 Palestinian, Israeli and international demonstrators, accompanied by several journalists participated in a demostration today against the illegal Isreali Annexation Wall in Bil’in.
The procession approached an access point in the Wall and demanded the gate be opened. Residents held pictures of photojournalist Fadi Aruri, (24) of Ramallah, who was shot several times in last Thursday’s invasion of that city. Aruri remains in critical condition in Tel Aviv.
Demonstrators took refuge on the adjacent hill as youth began lobbing stones toward the soldiers. Israeli forces fired tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets at the youth, before opening the gate to allow access for two Israeli Border Police units.
Residents and activists lay in the road and were intially successful in preventing the passage of the two jeeps. They were joined by resident Muhammad Ali abu Sadi, (70) after he had been struck repeatedly by soldiers. Abu Sadi suffered exhaustion and collapsed shortly thereafter. After a scuffle in which soldiers attempted to prevent treatment, he was attended to and revived by Bil’in medical relief volunteer Sheik Suliman Yassin. The remaining protesters were beaten and dragged across stones as they were removed from the scene.
Two Israeli Border Police units then pursued Palestinian youths several hundred meters into a residential area of the village, firing tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated metal bullets. Three Border Police Officers attempted to arrest an American activist who retreated as the military approached. The activist surrendured after soldiers fired several rounds of rubber-coated munition at him, though he was not injured. He was forced to his knees and soldiers began binding his wrists when an Israeli videographer interceded. He was released shortly thereafter.
Border Police units retreated toward the access gate in two jeeps, firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets from rooftop hatches atop the vehicles. Bil’in, located near Ramallah in the West Bank, has lost close to sixty percent of its land to the construction of the Wall and expansion of Modin Illit settlement. Residents here have held similar protests every Friday for nearly two years.
Several people reported injuries, including:
Adib Abu Rahma (35) – beaten with batons
Sameer Suliman Yassin (31) baton injuries to the hand
Wha’il famil nasser (29) baton injuries to the head
Khaled shoukat al Khatib (20) explosive gas bomb to the back
Ashraf Muhammad Jamal Khatib (27) rubber coated bullet in the leg
Zuhdia ali al Khatib (40) rubber coated bullet in her leg
Motassem ibrahim abu Rahma (20) rubber coated bullet in the leg
Associated Press Journalist burned by percussion grenade
Jonothan Pollack, Israel (25) rubber coated bullet in the stomach
Sarah, international volunteer (25) explosive gas bomb to the shoulder
For more information, please contact Abdullah Rahman, international volunteer coordinator for the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Bil’in at: (972) 054 725 8210.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
The Mall
In Tel Aviv there is a place that looks like home. It’s a mall, full of movies and music and sports wear and panty shops. There is a sign, in Hebrew, on a window in a pizza shop that reads, “Delivery driver wanted, apply after military service.” Most citizens are required to serve in the Israeli army, but everyone here knows that. Palestinians, on the other hand, are forbidden.
There are scores of Palestinians in Tel Aviv who have come seeking work. They pick fruit and pave roads. They paint walls and collect garbage. This mall, far from the checkpoints and curfews, where food is thrown away and teens scurry about coveting fashions, is where Apartheid manifests. It’s hidden away, but buried deep beneath, are the Wall, the blockades, the assassinations and the colonies. And every so often, Apartheid peeks through to the surface, in the form of a sign, on a pizza shop window, that translates, “Delivery driver wanted. Arabs need not apply.”
There are scores of Palestinians in Tel Aviv who have come seeking work. They pick fruit and pave roads. They paint walls and collect garbage. This mall, far from the checkpoints and curfews, where food is thrown away and teens scurry about coveting fashions, is where Apartheid manifests. It’s hidden away, but buried deep beneath, are the Wall, the blockades, the assassinations and the colonies. And every so often, Apartheid peeks through to the surface, in the form of a sign, on a pizza shop window, that translates, “Delivery driver wanted. Arabs need not apply.”
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