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Writers Who Risk It All

1/24/2016

Incidentally- I am taking new writing clients. My coaching service called Finish & Flourish helps you finish your dissertation, thesis, book and/or article.
Getting students to write, getting ourselves to write can be harder than sitting down to do our taxes. The fear of the IRS eventually gets us to sit down. Sadly there is no IRS for writing... What helps me keep going is meeting, reading about and being reminded of people are are willing to risk everything to write what they believe,

This morning I was reading in When Paris Went Dark about this old machine made of a tin can and some other random parts that shot out toilet paper thin anti-Nazi propaganda over marching soldiers and lay people in occupied Paris during WWII.

It took quite a bit of chutzpah to challenge the status quo...one had to be willing to die to speak up.

Just ask anyone who knows about the brave German kids...known as the White Rose who tried to wake up their country to the insanity all around them. They were all beheaded. They never made it far past 25-years-old.

This past year, I worked on the 12th edition of Language Awareness, one of St. Martins Press' best selling books for college writers. I have been working on this book on and off since 1997. This year, I encouraged us to add a chapter on those willing to die to write. They added something really close. The newest edition has great essays by a North Korean and a Russian who have risked their lives to speak up.

Reading about courage does seem to help build some. Meeting someone who risked it all is another story.

This week, I met Taja Kramberger. A well-know poet, historian and essayist from Slovenia. She spent the better part of twenty years building a university in her country that supported scholarship and free speech.

The university did well...until she was shut down. Forced to leave the country, she feels she must start all over again. France has taken her in. I am proud of the country for doing so. This is a very important time for France to demonstrate its commitment to freedoms. Especially since President Hollande just extended the State of Emergency for three months which allows the government to arrest without warrant. This is a very scary thing for a democracy to do...it is a slippery slope for any country (free or not) to suspend protection.

Back to Taja for a moment. Her work is not in English or French so she feels she must start again. She told us her story over dinner at the Shoah (Holocaust) Memorial in Paris after we finished our presentations.

She agrees that she is free now, but wonders if she has the energy to keep fighting the repression in her country. Even the leaders get tired...especially the leaders in the fight for liberty. It is tiresome on the front lines.

I will remember, Taja, however. When I want to stop writing....the pen (or keyboard) is still mightier than the sword.

Incidentally- I am taking new writing clients.
My coaching service called Finish & Flourish helps you finish your dissertation, thesis, book and/or article.

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Cargo Ship "Floated Into" Iranian Waters- Really?

1/17/2016

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One of the things I love about writing about Language & Conflict is that the news provides so many wonderful opportunities to comment.

I learned of the Iranian seizure of the Maersk Tigris Cargo ship on the radio. The news program announced that the "ship floated into Iranian waters."

What a comical use of language. Firstly, the choice of verb. Ships tend to float, so I did not suspect that it flew or drove into these waters.

Even more entertaining is that the sentence suggests that there was no mind at the helm. The suggestion was that ship floated -- just like jellyfish float.

They meant that a technical failure caused the ship's captain to be unable to control the boat.

Makes sense. But the phrasing left this all very vague.

I imagined the cargo ship just bobbing along pushed by the current like a mindless entity.

I'm especially sensitive to such verbiage because I study whether or not the railways that transported people to death camps during the Holocaust were mindless machines or actually had drivers. It's no surprise that the trains, just as the boat, had drivers.

I do not know what happened with this ship. I was not there. So I am not saying the crossing was intentional. This little blog simply points to how language can obscure accountability.

The Desk Broke...the Ship Floated.....

A few months ago, I sat on my office desk and broke it. I went to our Head of Operations and said, "the desk broke."

He caught on to my cheeky use of language and said, "How did you break the desk, Sarah?" We had a laugh. Of course, I was purposely playing with language to obscure my responsibility. I thought he would be more sympathetic and help more quickly if he assumed I was victim to a spontaneous breakage of office furniture.

Kids often say things like this not realizing that their parents put the true story together rather quickly.

In Japanese and Spanish, it is common to say things like "the lamp broke" instead of "I broke the lamp."

Shame is a powerful force in Japanese culture. Perhaps this is why people speak this way. Or it may just be how the language is structured.

In Spanish, at least in Colombia, I have a fantasy that the say this because they live in a state of magic realism...Things break because forces unseen break them.

In American English, however, such abstractions feel more like a purposeful distancing. We're a very litigious culture. We tend to pay close attention to who did what.

Have a listen this week at work and at home. Do people suggest their projects are victim to uncontrollable forces do they ascribe accountability to themselves or others?

How do you speak?

Do you position yourself as a jellyfish or a self-propelling mammal?

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If You Want Revenge for 9/11, Don't Look to the Kids Who Lost A Parent

1/7/2016

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One of the best parts of graduating from a school of Conflict Resolution is that incredible groups pass through. Today, I had the wonderful fortune of participating in a program sponsored by Tuesday's Children, an organization designed to support kids who lost a parent in 9/11.

They let me speak to the group about how I found my work in conflict resolution and then had the chance to speak to a few of them more intimately about their career interests which ranged from educational reform, security studies, to helping people overcome religious-based conflict.

Two of the girls told me something that made me fall off my chair -- I wanted to see if I could communicate to you why their words startled me.

These young women, college aged, told me about how over the years a number of people asked them if they hated Muslims, felt anger or wanted revenge.

Both of them looked at me right in the eye and said, "I didn't even understand their question. Why would I hate those people?"

One went on to say, "Sometimes it seems like they tried to use me to justify their own hatred."

She doesn't allow it. They are not filled with hate.

If these young people are not filled with revenge and hatred, why should America be?
And they are the ones who really lost something.

They did not just lose a parent for their childhood, they lost a parent for life.

When Losing a Parent Becomes an International Offense

In the summers, I volunteer at Circle Camp at Fleur de Lis. This outstanding bereavement camp supports girls 9-13 who recently lost a parent.

So, I'm no stranger to young people with parent loss. What struck me about Tuesday's Children, however, is how their loss can be used to justify hatred.

It's hard enough to lose a parent, never mind having to overlay the U.S military complex and the conflicts involving the Middle East. What a burden.

Time with them made me think more about scholarship involving victims. Their stories can become vulnerable to manipulation in the name of serving macro-level justice and military agendas.

We must be careful. I must be careful too....

One of the girls told me how one TV station used their summer camp which unites kids who lost a parent across conflicts and within conflict (Ireland, Israel/Palestine, etc.). She said the station tried to highlight conflicts between kids of different ethnic groups. This was not at all what occurred at the camp. On the contrary, the camp brought these different groups together. Sorry, news station there was far less drama and far more healing.

Another mentioned how the news cameras filmed her, her family, and friends crying during the 10th anniversary. She didn't like that.

Today, FoxNews came to film these young adults. I hope they did a good job. More importantly, I hope these young people find a way to contribute and continue to make their own meaning from these events.

I was moved by their ability to skip revenge and move right towards contribution. As often happens, those coming to me for advice often teach me more than I feel like I teach them.

These are special people with big agendas.

They're letting me have dinner with them tomorrow. What a gift!

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Guns Aren't Just In Schools, They're In Your Bananas

1/6/2016

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Many of us have been worried about the amount of guns moving about the United States. There are more guns than people at this point. It's amazing we don't stumble on them on the way to work.

Even though I study corporate accountability for mass atrocity, I did not know until today, however, that our delicious bananas are part of a gun problem.

In 2001, court documents showed that Chiquita banana (whose bananas I enjoy daily) bought 3,000 AK 47s and 5 millions rounds of ammunition from Nicaragua.

Yes, that's correct.

...............5 million rounds of ammunition.....................

I guess it has been, "Bananas for Bullets."

And the company does not just have its hold on bananas. It's one of the largest food distributors in the world with annual revenues around $4.5 billion. So, a few million bullets would hardly seem prohibitively expensive.

Who are the bullets for?

The company has been in operation in Colombia since 1899 and has had been deemed complicit in the murder and torture of townspeople as early as 1927 and as recently as 2001. The company has paid off FARC and other warring factions and still seems up to all kinds of shenanigans.

Holding Our Bananas Accountable

The U.S. State Department took the company to task in 2001, but the results disappoint.

While Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, Inc. paid $25 million in fines for some naughty behavior, most of that money went right to the U.S. Justice Department and NOT to the Colombians. You see, Colombians cannot be represented in U.S. Courts. Complicated.

What seems far more disappointing is that Eric Holder who represented Chiquita was appointed by President Barak Obama eight years later as U.S Attorney General.

I think you might agree that the whole thing sounds bananas.

SOURCES:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15697
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/684/1/

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Writers Who Risk It All

Incidentally- I am taking new writing clients. My coaching service called Finish & Flourish helps you finish your dissertation, thesis, book and/or article.

Cargo Ship "Floated Into" Iranian Waters- Really?

The Desk Broke...the Ship Floated.....

If You Want Revenge for 9/11, Don't Look to the Kids Who Lost A Parent

When Losing a Parent Becomes an International Offense

Guns Aren't Just In Schools, They're In Your Bananas

Holding Our Bananas Accountable

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Incidentally- I am taking new writing clients.
My coaching service called Finish & Flourish helps you finish your dissertation, thesis, book and/or article.