Monthly Archives: November 2015

An Opinion on Events at the University of Missouri

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An Opinion Piece by Donal Mahoney

I was born, reared, educated and worked as an editor in Chicago for many years. I now live in St. Louis, Missouri, where work brought me long ago. In retirement, I stay busy writing a little of this and a little of that.

But I am distracted now but not surprised by the racial discord at the University of Missouri, a year or so after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. I find racism in St. Louis much different than I remember its counterpart in Chicago. But I am white and still a Chicagoan, albeit an expatriate, and perhaps that skews my thoughts. I like the people of Missouri but I’m not one of them. I lived too long in Chicago that almost as many years in Missouri cannot counteract.

I find that unlike in the Chicago I recall, where racism was often loud and abrasive, racism in St. Louis has until recently seemed largely silent.

But as an outsider I find racism in St. Louis is part of many white folks’ emotional DNA while perhaps it is not in Chicago, at least to the same degree. I can’t speak, of course, for blacks in either state except to note the obvious. Until recently blacks in Chicago addressed issues more forcefully than in St. Louis. And then came the killing of Michael Brown.

Missouri was and is still considered by some to be a Southern state. Not so Illinois. Nevertheless, I have found that many whites in Chicago and in St. Louis respond to blacks negatively but for different reasons.

In Chicago, blacks moving into a white neighborhood meant property values would drop, a happening anathema to white property owners and to be avoided if at all possible. Blacks were also considered to be bearers of crime, doubtless due in part to the poverty they lived with then and many still live with now. To what degree the lack of opportunity caused by racism in whites is a contributing factor is difficult to calculate but impossible to deny.

In Chicago, I found that not many whites, myself included, knew any blacks well. As a teen I almost got to know one black man while I was working at a summer job in a soft drink factory. He was an older man who worked the day his son was executed by the state later in the night. He never said a word during his shift. A white supervisor told me about the impending execution the way a good reporter might, sans any emotion.

The black worker looked no different that day doing his repetitive job than he did any other day, putting empty soda bottles into holes in a conveyor belt so they could be washed and sterilized. Except for two breaks and lunch, he could not stop inserting the bottles. If he stopped, the conveyor belt would stop. He used both hands to stuff the bottles in the holes as the machine clanged on, the conveyor belt rising and disappearing into the steam of the soapy boiling water. It was like watching a dwarf stand in front of Niagara Falls running in reverse.

In my time in Missouri, I have lived in St. Louis and in a rural part of the state. I have found whites and blacks may know each other better in St. Louis than in Chicago even if they do not like each other any better.

In the past, rural whites and blacks in Missouri lived in fairly close proximity as blacks often worked for whites on their farms. Perhaps from their rural ancestors, urban blacks and whites in St. Louis bring with them attitudes and opinions about each other that have not been driven off despite the different kind of life many of them now lead in an urban area.

After three decades in Missouri, following four in Chicago, I am still surprised that blacks have not rioted in St. Louis long before now, not that whites in St. Louis have given them greater cause to do so than whites may have done in the Chicago I knew.

But the lethal silence of racism in Missouri that I sense must have aggravated and now continues to aggravate problems over three or four generations. As a social illness, I find this silent racism not unlike AIDS in that until it begins to show, one doesn’t know if someone else, white or black, is a carrier.

When I first emigrated from Chicago, I told my wife, a University of Missouri Journalism School grad with four books in print, that I thought St. Louis was another Watts in gestation, that some day the lid would blow, and the destruction, seen and unseen, would be incalculable. It hasn’t blown yet but there are days I think I hear the water boiling.

The day Michael Brown died was one of those days. The day the president of the University of Missouri resigned in the face of black protests was another. I have to wonder if there isn’t among blacks protesting at the University of Missouri some subliminal connection to what happened in Ferguson. I also have to wonder if the roar of the black students now isn’t louder as a result of what happened in Ferguson. Is it all part of the new continuum called Black Lives Matter?

Despite local, national and international coverage that might lead some to a different opinion, Michael Brown was no angel nor was Darren Wilson, the white cop who shot him. One was a young black man and the other a young white cop raised in the simmering silent racism that I, as an outsider, believe is pandemic in St. Louis and parts of rural Missouri.

I realize that many natives of the state will resent and dissent from this opinion. I disagree with them but understand they have a different emotional DNA than I do. I’m not saying mine is better. It’s just different. Growing up in Chicago I learned to yell in the face of any kind of oppression, real or imagined. Black folks there did so as well. Not so in St. Louis, until recently.

I don’t believe racism over time will evaporate in Chicago, St. Louis or other parts of the United States. The Pulitzer-prize-winning black poet Gwendolyn Brooks, back in Chicago in the Fifties, wrote something to the effect that racism in America will disappear when we are all “tea-colored.”

From my experience over many years in both cities, I see no reason at the moment to disagree with Gwendolyn Brooks. But as do others on both sides, I have hope. Hope is the advent of progress. We need more hope fueling our actions and less gnashing of teeth.

Veterans Day 2015

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lai (from): http://projectagentorange.com/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=2.msg18163#msg18163

Lần đầu tiên tôi đã bao giờ bắt đầu nghĩa vụ quân sự của mình bằng bất cứ ai ngoài gia đình là vào năm 1985, bởi một người đồng nghiệp. Đây là mười tám năm sau khi tôi trở về từ Việt Nam. Thời gian tiếp theo là vào năm 2012 khi tôi ở trong nước mắt ở phía trước của “Moving Wall,” bản sao đi du lịch của Đài tưởng niệm Việt Nam, và một cựu chiến binh đồng, một docent, cuộn lại vào trong xe lăn, vỗ nhẹ vào lưng tôi, và nói với tôi, “Không sao đâu; bạn đang ở nhà bây giờ! ”

Tôi không chia sẻ này nhẹ và tôi không muốn nhầm lẫn giữa các vấn đề: “. Làm cho nó trở lại” Memorial Day là một ngày tưởng nhớ cho những người không ngày Veterans ‘là trong danh dự của tất cả các cựu chiến binh của Mỹ, quá khứ và hiện tại. Vâng, tôi nhớ suốt năm những người bạn tôi đã mất và tôi cảm thấy không có gì nhưng hỗ trợ và quan tâm đến các thành viên quân sự của chúng tôi.

Nhưng giữa hai ngày kỷ niệm, không phải trong không gian hoặc thời gian, nhưng trong ý nghĩa và cảm xúc, chúng ta đang thiếu sự thừa nhận của những người có cuộc sống bị quá sớm mất hoặc bị ảnh hưởng tiêu cực bởi những ảnh hưởng của chất độc da cam và người thân của mình. Không chỉ các thành viên của chúng tôi quân đội và gia đình nhưng những cuộc sống Việt bị mất và bị thương do những tác động của tất cả các hóa chất được sử dụng trong chiến tranh chống Mỹ.

Tôi nhận ra rằng với sự thành lập của Order of the Silver Rose đã thừa nhận sự hy sinh cực của các thành viên dịch vụ của chúng tôi những người đã chết như là kết quả của những tác động có hại của chất độc da cam. Không có cách nào làm tôi bôi nhọ giải thưởng này. Tuy nhiên, có rất ít công nhận bên ngoài Bộ Cựu chiến binh cho sự đau khổ liên tục của các thành viên dịch vụ của Mỹ do sự tàn phá của chất độc da cam và ít để không cho các khuyết tật di truyền thông qua vào thế hệ con cháu của cựu chiến binh. Oh! – Và không có gì cả cho quân đội Việt Nam, phía bắc hay phía nam, và thường dân và các thế hệ của họ về dị tật bẩm sinh liên quan đến chất độc da cam.

Tôi không và sẽ không ủng hộ thiết lập riêng một ngày để tưởng niệm những mất mát trên cả hai bờ Thái Bình Dương do chất độc da cam. Cái chết như vậy và “vết thương” không kém các kết quả của các cuộc chiến tranh tiến hành trong các khu rừng, đồng bằng, sông, biển xanh, và không khí ở trên Việt Nam. Họ cần được ghi nhớ và kỷ niệm như vậy; nhớ không phải là thiệt hại tài sản thế chấp nhưng như tiền lương của chiến tranh.

Trên ‘Day, và mỗi Veterans’ Veterans Day này và Memorial Day là tốt, nhớ và kỷ niệm cuộc sống của tất cả các nạn nhân của chiến tranh; phân biệt quốc gia, chính trị, thế hệ, hoặc bản chất của cái chết hay “vết thương” nhận được.

Veteran’s Day, 2015

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This was originally posted on projectagentorange.com’s site.

https://projectagentorange.wordpress.com/2015/11/07/veterans-day-2015/

An Essay by Richard D. Hartwell

Project Agent Orange

The first time I was ever thanked for my military service by anyone outside family was in 1985, by a co-worker. This was eighteen years after I returned from Vietnam. The next time was in 2012 when I was in tears in front of the “Moving Wall,” the traveling replica of the Vietnam Memorial, and a fellow veteran, a docent, rolled up in his wheelchair, patted me on the back, and told me, “It’s okay; you’re home now!”

I don’t share this lightly and I don’t want to confuse issues: Memorial Day is a day of remembrance for those who did not “make it back.” Veterans’ Day is in honor of all America’s veterans, past and present. Well, I remember throughout the year those friends I lost and I feel nothing but support and concern for our military members.

But between these two commemorative days, not in space or time, but in meaning and emotion, we are missing acknowledgment of those whose lives have been too early lost or adversely affected by the effects of Agent Orange and its kin. Not just our military members and families but those Vietnamese lives lost and maimed by the effects of all the chemicals used during the American War.

I realize that with the establishment of the Order of the Silver Rose came acknowledgment of the extreme sacrifice of our service members who have died as a result of the deleterious effects of Agent Orange. In no way do I denigrate this award. However, there is little recognition outside the Department of Veterans Affairs for the ongoing suffering of American service members due to the ravages of Agent Orange and little to none for the hereditary defects passed on to veterans’ progeny. Oh! – and none at all for the Vietnamese military, north or south, and civilians and their generations of birth defects linked to Agent Orange.

I do not and would not advocate setting aside a day to commemorate these losses on both sides of the Pacific due to Agent Orange. Such deaths and “wounds” are equally the result of the war waged in the jungles, plains, rivers, blue waters, and air above Vietnam. They should be remembered and commemorated as such; remembered not as collateral damage but as the wages of war.

On this Veterans’ Day, and every Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day as well, remember and celebrate the lives of ALL the victims of war; regardless of country, politics, generation, or the nature of the death or “wounds” received.

Project Agent Orange

To see the original posting on Project Agent Orange’s forum, please click here:

http://projectagentorange.com/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=2.msg18163#msg18163

November 5th

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Greetings citizens of the world.

We are Anonymous.

Today we have shut down servers, gotten personal information on members of the KKK, and infiltrated your twitters and websites. And this is just the beginning. On November the 4th we will be having a twitter storm, spreading awareness about the operation. And on the 5th we shall release more than 1000 Ku Klux Klan members Names and websites, new and old.

We are not oppressing you, Ku Klux Klan. We are not here to strip you of your Freedom of Speech. Anonymous will never strip you of any of your Constitutional rights. There is no “hate speech” exception to the Constitution. In a free society, we do have a duty to protect free thought, even when especially offensive. Your hateful ideas and words remain yours to keep. You are allowed to speak and in kind, we are allowed to respond. You are legally free to live and be any which way you choose to live and be. Keep in mind, it is not illegal nor oppressive to hurt your feelings. With that said, we are stripping you of your anonymity. This is not a threat, but rather a promise.

We never forgot your threats to the protesters in Ferguson, and we certainly never forgave you. And the same will be done to the threats you give now. More than four hundred years ago a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. So if you’ve seen nothing, if the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan remain unknown to you, then I would suggest to allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand with me on the fifth, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.

Twitter: @Operation_KKK , @Anon6k , @AnonyOpNews, @encrypted_six

AnonOps IRC Channel: #OpKKK

IG: anonymous.group
We are Anonymous.

We are Legion.

United as one, divided by zero.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Ku Klux Klan, expect us.

Meanwhile around 4pm this afternoon @YourAnonNews tweeted out :

https://anonintelgroup.wordpress.com/2015/11/01/opkkk-press-release-video-november-1st-2015/