well...

I forgot to mention that a lot of Nicaraguan workers on strike. Teachers just ended; government workers just started; public transportation in Managua; and, the scariest, doctors are on strike. Although there are definitely a lot of complicated politics at play, the role of the IMF and of neoliberal politics in all of this is hard to look by. The IMF mandates a cap on social spending, including health care and education, meaning these professionals get a whole lot less than they should. (My coworker wrote an article about this recently.) Neoliberalism says that privatization is always more efficient and better for everyone in the end; what happens with the bus strikers, for instance, is they want subsidies from the government to be able to pay the insanely expensive oil costs but to also be able to make prices affordable for most people. The government doesn't want to do this, saying it's inefficient. So, the bus strikers have begun burning tires, people are getting used to walking a lot and crowding into trucks, and oh yeah, dying because they don't have access to doctors. Shit.

I went out with some Danish friends the other day. Naturally, the topic of the cartoons came up. I used to really strongly argue that there were no limits to free speech, but as I've gotten a little wiser, I question that belief. Whether or not it should be made illegal may be another question, one that I have yet to decide about. I do think it's interesting how the media keeps framing it as a religious issue, as so often happens with Middle East issues: Muslims are only upset because it's against their religion to depict the prophet Mohammed. Well, I'm not going to suppose to know why they're protesting, but at least to me the bigger issue seems to be that the cartoons were equating the demagogue of more than a million people with murder and terrorism. That seems to me like making a cartoon with Jesus killing an abortion doctor or something; the point is, it's not only depicting Mohammed, it's also denigrating an entire group of people. So, does that excuse burning the embassies? Well, as MArk Levine points out, the embassies themselves (as well as US air bases in Afghanistan) could be interpreted as symbols greater than just anger directed towards the cartoon. In any event, I think the media has (surprise, surprise!) distorted the issue. Overall, I think this is an interesting sentiment expressed by Reza Aslan:

Of course, the sad irony is that the Muslims who have resorted to violence in response to this offense are merely reaffirming the stereotypes advanced by the cartoons. Likewise, the Europeans who point to the Muslim reaction as proof that, in the words of the popular Dutch blogger Mike Tidmus, "Islam probably has no place in Europe," have reaffirmed the stereotype of Europeans as aggressively anti-Islamic. It is this common attitude among Europeans that has led to the marginalization of Muslim communities there, which in turn has fed the isolationism and destructive behavior of European Muslims, which has then reinforced European prejudices against Islam. It is a Gordian knot that has become almost impossible to untangle.

And that is why as a Muslim American I am enraged by the publication of these cartoons. Not because they offend my prophet or my religion, but because they fly in the face of the tireless efforts of so many civic and religious leaders—both Muslim and non-Muslim—to promote unity and assimilation rather than hatred and discord; because they play into the hands of those who preach extremism; because they are fodder for the clash-of-civilizations mentality that pits East against West. For all of that I blame Jyllands-Posten. We in the West want Muslim leaders to condemn the racial and religious prejudices that are so widespread in the Muslim world. Let us lead by example.

The issue may be a little deeper for me than stereotypes and tolerance, but I think it's true that the incident, as portrayed by the media, has become "fodder for the clash-of-civilizaations mentality". And that is just unfortunate.

It's that time again!

The third transit strike since I've been here. Bus drivers say petroleum prices are too high, government says they should be able to hack it, they say no please subsidize us, and then....STRIKE! It's crazy to think about the effect oil, and the discovery of it thereof for an energy source, has had on this world. jesus. i guess it's walking/taxis/riding in the back of trucks for a little while.

So I haven't written in a long time...

Bullet points:
-There is a very small community of activists, politicians, writers, intellectuals, etc. in Nicaragua. It constantly surprises me how easy it is to meet with major figures, and talk like any two people in the street. This is what I've been doing the past few weeks.
-I sometimes get very tired of the very white, very self-righteous community of mostly Christian solidarious US citizens that live here. A lot of them are doing great work, but I can't help but feel that a lot of them feel a lot more validated by their fame here than they would in the US, where they'd be small small fish. Am I the same way?
-My relationship with G is a spiritual experience, but a very confusing one. Last night he was heartbroken because of the state of the world; Nicaragua is fucked. With both teachers and doctors striking because their salaries are ridiculously low (as mandated by IMF regulations), with a 70% unemployment rate, he's feeling lost and like he's wasted the past 7 years of his life here, since he came back from Cuba. He is worried the US will rig the elections so that the right wins again, in which case he said he can't help but keep living here. I can't tell him not to despair because I have no idea what its' like to be him. I also don't want to feel like he's my own personal project. I also want to support him, and to feel like we're creating a world of hope together for the two of us. I do not know how to do this.
-My coworker the other day made a joke about criminals getting ass-raped in prison. First of all, having met victims of prison rape through my past job, it disgusts me that in popular culture it's acceptable to joke about these human rights violations as if they were ever humorous (count the number of prison ass rape jokes you've heard in movies and tv shows. Disgusting, isnt' it?) Second of all, the bigger problem is that criminals are accepted as throway people. Since millions of people are behind bars for a certain drug addiction which has been criminalized (which, shockingly, falls upon racial lines), and are there as a result of a racist penal system, which is part of a much larger racist socioeconomic system. Even if they have committed a crime, they are still fucking human beings and deserve rights. Anyway, the fact that a so called progressive person has succumbed to the disgusting idea that prison inmates are throwaway people from whom anal rape is just a funny part of life is shocking to me. Furthermore, I hate being preachy and self righteous, but I fear I didn't state my opinion strongly enough: I just reminded her of basically those two points: that a) rape is never funny and b)dehumanizing prison inmates as criminals doesn't exactly jive with the values that we purportedly share. I'm still obviously upset about it, and I think it relates to my second point, in which I feel kind of alienated from a lot of the Americans here, in addition to being a foreigner myself.
-Beyond these inquietudes, I've actually been extremely happy recently. In love with G, doing work that I feel is meaningful, taking French and bellydance classes (random, I realize); in other words, keeping busy. I'm also trying to track the elections here, which I'm going to be talking about soon. Oh yeah, and politics in the US=too depressing; Alito? SOTU? jesus, folks.