When I was a child and I first considered the that problems people faced, I concluded as if it were obvious, “Why can’t we just help each other out?” My life since has been spent trying to reconcile my youthful idealism with the shortcomings of our world.

2004 arrived after a long four years of our current administration and my will to help solve problems was frustrated. I was eager to find someone on the national stage who I could put my trust in–someone who the political system had not compromised–someone who could relieve my cynicism and revive my faith in the good tomorrow might bring.

John Kerry wasn’t that person. But a young keynote speaker at Kerry’s nominating convention showed promise. My mother got me his book: “Dreams From My Father” by Barack Obama. I read it cover to cover. This was the guy.

I took that book with me after high school to Louisiana where I served in AmeriCorps. It was two years after Katrina had devastated the area and things were still bad. I spent a lot of time in the lower ninth ward, which, prior to the storm hosted one of the highest rates of black home-ownership in the country. When the levees broke, people were washed out of their houses. Most never came back. Now it’s practically a ghost town.

Two years later I realized that whatever I thought I understood from the news at the time of the storm did the reality of the situation no justice. I stood in what was left of a neighborhood on the front line of the levee breach. This was not the best America could offer. This was a hard blow to take.

Even so, there were a lot of reasons to be hopeful. I was part of a movement where people helped one another. I worked with people to build the house that would soon be their home. I saw people stand up and stay standing. Things were getting better.

And even if some of its leaders couldn’t get their act together, Americans seemed to turn a new leaf after that storm. More and more people noticed the failures of the Bush Administration. And as I worked in New Orleans, I noticed my man Barack Obama starting to gain momentum as Presidential Election season approached. I knew who I was for.

If the question is how many red grapes can I fit in my mouth at once, the answer is twelve-give or take. If the question is do I think I look pretty in a thong, the answer is an emphatic yes. If the question is which presidential candidate is the most solid, the answer is Obama.

Obama won’t try to be our king. He will try to be our peer. That’s why he’s got my endorsement.

Rick James once said “Pussy’s pussy.” I include this maxim, not because it has any relevance this essay, but rather because it illustrates the fatalistically induced nihilism that so often befalls my concluding sentiments when I consider the way of the world.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated the power of non-violence in combating imperialistic exploitation. They showed how empathy from the ruling political class of people could lead to change in an unjust policy. The tactic is still powerful, and, in fact, it may be the most powerful means of radical change left in the world.

However, as loudly as Gandhi and King’s success has rung for those who support equality, it has been heard even more keenly by those dastardly purveyors of exploitation. To the particularly craven observer (and I admit that I fall reluctantly into this category), it becomes evident that non-violent resistance was successful only because the goodly people that unknowingly supported the far away tyranny of their government, woke up from their ignorance and took pity on the wrongfully treated. It seems a fairly simple intellectual leap for any sharp Machiavellian to consider that their machinations would be better protected if more time was given to branding the exploited as less morally righteous.

India, when it was under the tyranny of British Rule, was demoralized away from violence by their lack of military resources, which, thanks to the leadership of Gandhi, actually worked in their favor. But remove that sense of militaristic futility–give fuel to the violent intuitions that afflict the human condition after being dehumanized, and person will neglect the moral high ground of pacifism for the satisfaction of their rage.

Add a little media manipulation and you’ve got a cocktail for a real fuckjob.

I give you IRAQ.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/05/23/sprj.nitop.army.dissolve/

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/10/26/explosives_were_looted_after_iraq_invasion/

The Women’s Rights Essay I Spent Nine Mostly Painful Hours Forcing Out
By Greg Westneat

Women: Some just say “Sure, they’re those things with vaginas in ‘em.” others understand the feminine identity as an endless majesty of intellect, strength, and fashion sense. All throughout history, differences between males and females have shaped the way society looks at the shapelier sex, and the unfortunately common patriarchal societies have pushed the female potential-sometimes all too literally-to the back burner. However, with the 19th and 20th centuries came the blossoming of social, technological, and medical advances. These changes became the mother’s milk of progress, and birthed the modern Women’s Rights Movement. In this essay we will expose ourselves to the legal background of one of the most titillating issues surrounding women’s movement in America: Reproductive Rights.

The post World War 2 era was a turbulent time for America. Increasingly tenacious currents of a liberalizing society began to stand up to the status quo’s sentimentalized notions of the way things used to be and challenged their legal manifestations.

Throughout the country, seldom enforced, socially restrictive laws, known as Blue Laws, became the main attraction for progressive ire, and, in the mid-twentieth century, no state’s laws were quite as Blue as Connecticut’s. Indeed, it was from the “Nutmeg State” that one of the most famous showdowns in the history of Reproductive Rights emanated, in Griswold v. Connecticut.

In 1879, Connecticut passed a statute demanding that doctors not provide “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” In the almost 100 years following law’s passage, it was almost never enforced. However symbolic it may have been, several failed legal attempts were launched aimed at overturning the law culminating with a case known as Poe v. Ullman.

Oddly enough, the insurmountable hurdle for these attempts, and particularly for Poe v. Ullman, was that, because Connecticut filed no charges against the plaintiffs in these cases, the Supreme Court felt that issue was not “ripe” for judicial review. In other words, one needed to break the law and be recognized with legal sanction before the Supreme Court would take the case.

The Court’s dismissal of Poe v. Ullman provoked Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, Estelle Griswold and professor of Medicine at Yale, Dr. C. Lee Buxton to test the law, by opening a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. Such flagrant violation of the law succeeded in landing both founders in the kind of legal controversy that lacked in Poe v Ullman, and when their $100 fines were upheld by both the Appellate Division of the District Court and the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors, the case made its way onto the docket of the Supreme Court.

The case was argued before the Warren Court on the dates of March 29 and 30, 1965 and was decided June 7 of the same year. The decision was 7-2 in favor of invalidating the Connecticut law.

Justice William Douglas, writing for the majority, contended that the Connecticut law stood in opposition to the right of privacy, which, though not specifically enumerated in the constitution, existed in what he called “penumbras” of other constitutional provisions. In his argument, he cited as precedent for unenumerated rights, the courts protection, in NAACP v. Alabama, of freedom of association “and privacy in one’s associations” as a peripheral virtue of the First Amendment.

Justice Douglas maintained that, in addition to the First Amendment, penumbras regarding privacy existed in the Third Amendment’s protection against the quartering of soldiers, the Fourth Amendment’s provision for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” the Fifth Amendment’s assurance that one need not incriminate one’s self, and the Ninth Amendment’s assurance that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Several other justices joined Justice Douglas with concurring opinions. The most notable of these was written by Justice Goldberg, who held that the “language and history of the Ninth Amendment reveal that the Framers of the Constitution believed that there are additional fundamental rights, protected from governmental infringement, which exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically mentioned in the first eight constitutional amendments.” To support his assertion, Justice Goldberg cited both a wide array of legal precedent, and a very relevant statement by James Madison that went, “It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure.”

If Connecticut v. Griswold was the child of the Reproductive Rights Movement, surely Roe v. Wade was the afterbirth. Eight years after the decision in which Estelle Griswold and Dr. C Lee Buxton were absolved of their $100 fine, Norma L. McCorvey, better known as “Jane Roe,” won a case against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, and, in doing so, increased the legal support for reproductive rights an entire proverbial bra size.

Roe v. Wade, while far and away the most recognized Supreme Court case in history, was more or less a reiteration of Griswold v. Connecticut. The District Court (which actually ruled in favor of Roe, but declined to grant the injunction against the Texas criminal abortion laws that Roe sought) cited Justice Goldberg’s concurring opinion in holding that the Ninth Amendment, through the Fourteenth, provides a fundamental right for women to decide whether to have a child. Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court, contended, much as Justice Douglas had when ruling against the Connecticut law, that Roe’s right to privacy existed in the “Fourteenth Amendments concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action”

Even so, Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v Wade is distinctly illuminating. He writes, almost as a side note, that legal restrictions on reproductive rights are a fairly recent development. With few exceptions, the regulations on abortion and contraception that pervaded the United States in the latter half of the 19th century had no foundation in either the ancient or common law on which the American legal system is based.

This is significant because it emphasizes the culturally entrenched expectation of reproductive choice as a “fundamental right”. That argument, though only parenthetically recognized, is, in fact, the underlying principle for the decisions in both cases: It is a culture’s expectation of rights that secures its liberty, and it was when the champions of the Reproductive Rights Movement demanded that their rights be respected, that they got their liberty.

The success of the Reproductive Rights Movement paralleled the successes of the larger
Women’s Rights Movement. 1950’s America returned home late in the twentieth century startled to find dinner absent from the table—startled to find that women wandered off the well beaten path between the kitchen and the bedroom to find lives outside of making pies and babies. In the wake of America’s dismay, the movement succeeded in turning a once a month complaint into a permanent menstrolution.