BOTTOM DRAWER [2]

David Rothgery
July 12, 2016

BOTTOM DRAWER ( . . . “World Two” glimpses . . . a larger vision )
July 20, 2016

“NOW I AM WAITING FOR THEM. After a little while they will come to take me away. Tomorrow morning I shall no longer be here. I will be in a place which no one knows.” [Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero]
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MARGUERITE BARANKITSE, A BURUNDIAN ACTIVIST, has been awarded the international humanitarian Aurora Prize in Armenia. She is credited with saving the lives of 30,000 children—both Hutu and Tutsi. The million-dollar prize goes to an organization of her choice. [4/25/16]
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ECLIPSED, a play written by Danai Gurira, tells the story of a group of Liberian women trying to survive during the Liberian civil war. It made it to Broadway.
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E. O. WILSON, BIOLOGIST AND WRITER, argues in his new book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life that to save the planet we must do everything we can to preserve the species that haven’t yet gone extinct. He says thousands of species go extinct every year. [4/29/16]
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UNSUNG HEROES OF TWO NOBLE GROUPS featured on Vice: the polio vaccine workers in Pakistan and the mine cleaners in Myanmar and Laos. The former—mostly women—persist in going house to house to eradicate polio in a country where many such workers are murdered as “agents of the CIA” (because a Pakistani doctor who confirmed the DNA of Bin Laden posed as a hepatitis worker). One woman told how her family (including husband and two daughters) was attacked in the night and she was gang-raped. When asked if she would continue doing her work, she seemed overcome and said, “Yes, it’s for the children. I have to.”
A doctor heading the program in Pakistan said the women deserve the Nobel Prize.
The other group locates millions of mines dropped as cluster bombs during the Vietnam War. Children step on those that never exploded and lose arms and legs and their lives. [5/7/16]
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“WHEN ONE HAS A HAMMER, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A NAIL. And when one’s experience is limited to real estate deals, everything looks like a lease negotiation. Hearing Mr. Trump describe his approach to foreign relations, one imagines a group of nations sitting at a table with him at its head, rather like a scene from ‘The Apprentice,’ with him demanding more money, more troops and policy changes in exchange for American protection, trade and friendship. And if he doesn’t get what he wants? ‘In negotiation, you must be willing to walk,’ Mr. Trump said.
“This unilateral approach makes for good television, but this is the real world, in which other nations have agendas, too. “ [“Donald Trump’s Strange World View,” NY Times, 4/27/16]
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ALEJANDRO ARAVENA, a Chilean architect, has won the Pritzker Prize—highest in the Architecture world. He was honored for his low-cost social housing and reconstructing cities after natural disasters. Forty-eight-year-old Aravena heads a firm called Elemental, a self-styled architectural, “problem-solving do-tank, rather than think-tank.”
“According to the Pritzker jury citation, he epitomizes the revival of a more socially engaged architect, especially in his long-term commitment to tackling the global housing crisis and fighting for a better urban environment for all.”
Aravena: “This should be the starting point for architecture: Identify problems that are simple enough that you get the threat or the challenge in one word: pollution, waste, congestion, insecurity, migration, social tension.” [“Architecture Becomes a Tool to Fight Poverty through this Pritzker Winner,” Jeffrey Brown, PBS NEWS HOUR 1/13/16]
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“LEILA ALAOUI, photographer has died aged 33 of a heart attack after being shot in terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Alaoui was in Ouagadougou to work on a photography project for a women’s rights campaign called ‘My Body My Rights’ for Amnesty International.” [Olivia Snaije, The Guardian 1/22/16]
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POACHERS ARE KILLING MORE BLACK RHINOS AND ELEPHANTS than ever in Kenya and South Africa, etc. Only 500 black rhinos left. In the preserve in Kenya they’re using both armed rangers and sophisticated surveillance, but poachers’ intelligence systems are improving. Even greater “Intelligence technology” is the only answer, an expert says. A huge market for rhino horns in China and Ivory in U.S. The greed and selfish pleasures of the rich can wipe out an entire species. [1/28/16]
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SIX ASYLUM SEEKERS ARE THE STARS OF A CONTEMPORARY BALLET that began a month-long run in Copenhagen.
The production, called “Europa,” aims to demonstrate that refugees and migrants are not parasites, as they are sometimes perceived.
The refugees’ personal stories form the backbone of the production, led by Christian Lollike, a director of the experimental Corpus Company, part of Denmark’s Royal Opera . . . .
“Europa” originally started off with ten asylum seekers, but one was deported to France, two have had their applications rejected and another has gone into hiding.
Two of the participants left the Syrian city of Homs in August last year, and during one of the dress rehearsals they learned that Denmark, a nation regarded as hostile to refugees, had granted them asylum.
Music Professor Salam Susu from Homs University was overwhelmed at her selection, praising the “very high professional people who really make me feel like I’m home. And I really restart being a real human being, feeling with everything.”
One of her fellow dancers, Muhammad Ali Ishaq, who left Lahore in Pakistan because he faced death threats over his homosexuality, is still waiting to hear whether his application for asylum will succeed. [Malcolm Brabant, report on PBS NEWS HOUR, 1/29/16]
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MORE THAN 10,000 MIGRANT CHILDREN MAY HAVE DISAPPEARED after arriving in Europe over the past two years, the EU’s police intelligence unit says.
Europol said thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities.
It warned of children and young people being forced into sexual exploitation and slavery by criminal gangs.
Save the Children says some 26,000 child migrants arrived in Europe last year without any family. [BBC, 1/31/16]
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WASIL AHMAD. The Afghan government declared Wasil Ahmad a hero for leading a militia’s defense against a Taliban siege last year, parading him in front of cameras in a borrowed police uniform too big for him. On Monday, the Taliban triumphantly announced that they had assassinated him with two bullets to the head.
Wasil Ahmad was 10 years old.
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[OUR] SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCES ARE DESIGNED in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.” [Wael Ghonim, TED Talk: “Let’s Design Social Media That Drives Real Change, “ Jan., 2016]
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DORADE. Interview on NPR yesterday afternoon with a journalist who had interviewed an old man sitting alone in a bombed out building in Aleppo. He’d been imprisoned by the Assad regime for many years. When he got out, his whole family was gone. Fled? Dead? He wasn’t sure. Journalist took his picture. The old man—“Dorade” (sp?) asked why. The journalist said so he could tell his story to others. Dorade asked him to show it to the right people who actually cared. Otherwise it would come back on him in retaliation. A woman in France saw the picture, heard the story. She sent word back to him she was one of those “who did care.” The man wept.
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THE TALE OF THE UNKNOWN ISLAND, by Jose Saramago, Portuguese Nobel Prize winner. Only 40-50 pages–like a children’s book with drawings. Theme: another world.
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WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GOPI . . . IF ANYTHING?
Gopi was born in a slum to a drunken and abusive father and a sickly mother who has no education. But so were nearly 200 million other children in India.

There is nothing significant there.

His first 10 years were spent surviving the drunken rages of his father, the submissiveness of his mother to that rage, and the meager meals they provided him. Tens of millions of children in India live such a life…

Not much significant there.

In fact there is not much at all significant about the first ten years of Gopi’s life at all. He lived a very simple and sad life like so many around him in this country whose history and culture breeds such situations by the tens of millions every single year as new children are born into poverty, destined to be uneducated laborers in the picking fields. Destined to learn the behaviors and habits of their parents. Destined to walk the same path… unknowing prisoners who cannot see the bars in front of their face.” [Greg Timmons, Orphans International Newsletter, 3/8/16]
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STREET VENDORS IN NEW DELHI ARE BRIBED BY POLICE to give up half their measly earning selling fruit just to not get arrested. [Fred de Sam Lazaro report on PBS NEWS HOUR]:
SUMIT GANGULY (Indiana University): Ninety percent of the work force in India is in the so-called informal sector.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That could be a technical term that means a very hard life. They live from day to day. That is, if there’s work on any given day, they are paid at the end of it, less than $2 for most of them.
SUMIT GANGULY: These are people who have no Social Security provisions, who have no health care provisions, who can be hired and fired at will. And yet, according to a recent Credit Suisse study, it’s close to — they contribute close to 50 percent of India’s gross national product.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Not only are they underappreciated, but they fall easy prey to corrupt officials.
The market outside of Delhi’s main mosque has been here for more than 200 years. The vendors complain that they’re subject to regular harassment from police demanding bribes or from municipal authorities who conduct regular raids to evict them.
IMRAN KHAN, Street Vendor (through interpreter): They kicked us out from here in 2014, citing security reasons.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Across India’s cities, vendors like Imran Khan carry tales of harassment, sometimes along with their own video, of stalls dismantled and merchandise confiscated.
IMRAN KHAN (through interpreter): Then finally, we went to NASVI, to Arbind, and he said, you have only one option, straight to court.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Social activist Arbind Singh founded NASVI, the National Association of Street Vendors.
ARBIND SINGH, National Association of Street Vendors: All those who were kicked out, have them come to the office tomorrow.
[Fred de Sam Lazaro, “Empowering India’s Street Vendors as Entrepreneurs” (part of ongoing series “Agents of Change”), PBS NEWS HOUR, 4/6/16]
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PROTESTORS ARRESTED INSTEAD OF CORRUPT OFFICIALS. Avaaz reported in April that over 1,000 people were arrested outside the Capitol for protesting big money corruption of our elections.
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ANNE DEBORAH ATAI-OMORUTO, A UGANDAN DOCTOR who went to Liberia at the height of the Ebola epidemic in 2014 and helped turn the tide in the battle against the disease, died on May 5 of pancreatic cancer in Kampala, Uganda. She was 59.
Dr. Atai-Omoruto, at the request of the World Health Organization, arrived in Liberia in July 2014 with a team of 14 Ugandan health workers she had gathered. [NY Times, 5/10/16]
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JUNGLE ANIMAL HOSPITAL IN GUATEMALA rescues animals orphaned or injured by illegal pet-seekers in the rain forests that extend from Guatemala through Belize and into Mexico. Endangered macaws, spider monkeys, gray foxes, etc. are healed by a dedicated staff, then raised and gradually (through carefully planned stages) released back to the wild where they are monitored. [“Jungle Animal Hospital,” Nature [PBS], 5/19/16]
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CEO’S FIND MEANINGFUL “SECOND ACT”: “The Advanced Leadership Initiative” at Harvard University helps former executives bring their professional experience to bear on social issues, from affordable food to the Ebola virus.
PAUL SOLMAN: At Daily Table in food desert Dorchester, Massachusetts, apples for just 69 cents a pound, fresh salmon for less than $3, top-flight food at rock-bottom prices.
DOUG RAUCH, Founder, Daily Table: We have got massive amounts of wasted food, and, at the same time, we have got 49 million Americans that can’t afford to eat properly.
PAUL SOLMAN: Doug Rauch opened this nonprofit store after 30 years at Trader Joe’s, the last 14 as president.
So, is this food all rejects, seconds?
DOUG RAUCH: Every single product in the store is a quality product that was either excess inventory, a shorter code, so we don’t sell anything past its code date, or it’s something we made at a special buy on, something that is maybe the product has been discontinued or the label has changed, these sorts of deals.
[“Helping Baby Boomers Find a Meaningful Second Act,” Paul Solman report, PBS NEWS HOUR, 5/19/16]
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CONSCIOUSNESS IS MATTER. “Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness ‘is the most mysterious aspect of our lives’; philosophers ‘have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.’
“I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by ‘consciousness’ I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.
“The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour.” [Galen Strawson, “Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter,” The Stone, 5/16/16]
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65.3 MILLION: TOTAL NUMBER OF REFUGEES AND INTERNALLY DISPLACED PEOPLE WORLDWIDE AT END OF 2015. [UN refugee agency]
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“THE WRITERS WHO INSIST THAT LITERATURE IS ‘ABOUT’ THE LANGUAGE IT IS MADE OF are offering an idol: literature for its own sake, for its own maw; not for the sake of humanity.” [Cynthia Ozick, quoted in an article on her in NY Times Magazine, 6/26/16]
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“I COULDN’T PRETEND THAT WE WERE COVERING A STRUGGLE IN WHICH ALL SIDES“—the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought that people acting on such a belief should have their houses burned down—had an equally compelling case to make.”[Calvin Trillin, Jackson, 1964, 2016]
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“DO AFRICAN LEADERS EVEN REFLECT ON THESE EVENTS AND CRIES FOR REFORM to benefit their people? Will they ever forfeit their excessive lifestyles and greed?
“I tire of seeing African leaders inflicting death and destruction on their people, yet at the same time luxuriating in palaces, with hefty bank accounts abroad.
“It breaks my heart to continue to read how these people and others, too, around the world still suffer needlessly.”
[George J. McAllister, Letter to the Editor, NY Times, 6/27/16]