We Are Virginia Tech Nikki Giovanni, University Distinguished Professor of English, VPI&SU http://www.english.vt.edu/
We are Virginia Tech We are sad today We will be sad for quite a while We are not moving on We are embracing our mourning We are Virginia Tech We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly We are brave enough to bend to cry And we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again We are Virginia Tech We do not understand this tragedy We know we did nothing to deserve it But neither does a child in Africa Dying of AIDS Neither do the Invisible Children Walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army Neither does the baby elephant watching his community Be devastated for ivory Neither does the Mexican child looking For fresh water Neither does the Iraqi teenager dodging bombs Neither does the Appalachian infant killed By a boulder Dislodged Because the land was destabilized No one deserves a tragedy We are Virginia Tech The Hokie Nation embraces Our own And reaches out With open heart and mind To those who offer their hearts and hands We are strong And brave And innocent And unafraid We are better than we think And not yet quite what we want to be We are alive to imagination And open to possibility We will continue To invent the future Through our blood and tears Through all this sadness We are the Hokies We will prevail We will prevail We will prevail We are Virginia Tech Nikki Giovanni, delivered at the Convocation, April 17, 2007 From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *** http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/opinion/19herbert.html?th&emc=th A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun By BOB HERBERT NY Times OP-Ed: April 19, 2007 "God I can't wait till I can kill you people." - A message on the Web site of the Columbine killer Eric Harris. . In the predawn hours of Monday, Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a former marine and Eagle Scout in Austin, Tex., stabbed his wife to death in their bed. The night before he had driven to his mother's apartment in another part of town and killed her. Later that Monday morning, Whitman gathered together food, water, a supply of ammunition, two rifles, a couple of pistols, a carbine and a shotgun and climbed the landmark 30-story tower on the campus of the University of Texas. Beneath a blazing sun, with temperatures headed toward the mid-90s, Whitman opened fire. His first target was a pregnant teenager. Over the next 80 or so minutes he killed 14 people and wounded more than 30 others before being shot to death by the police. More than four decades later we still profess to be baffled at the periodic eruption of murderous violence in places we perceive as safe havens. We look on aghast, as if the devil himself had appeared from out of nowhere. This time it was 32 innocents slaughtered on the campus of Virginia Tech. How could it have happened? We behave as if it was all so inexplicable. But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody. Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a "central component" in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country. "What I've concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal," he said, "is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one's manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act." Violence is commonly resorted to as the antidote to the disturbing emotions raised by the widespread hostility toward women in our society and the pathological fear of so many men that they aren't quite tough enough, masculine enough - in short, that they might have homosexual tendencies. In a culture that is relentless in equating violence with masculinity, "it is tremendously tempting," said Dr. Gilligan, "to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one's sense of masculine self-esteem." The Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung-Hui, was reported to have stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate told CNN that Mr. Cho once claimed to have seen "promiscuity" when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus. Charles Whitman was often portrayed as the sunny all-American boy. But he had been court-martialed in the Marines, was struggling as a college student and apparently had been suffering from depression. He told a psychiatrist that he absolutely hated his father, but he started his murderous spree by killing his wife and his mother. The confluence of feelings of inadequacy, psychosexual turmoil and the easy availability of guns has resulted in a staggering volume of murders in this country. There are nearly 200 million firearms in private hands in the U.S., and more than 30,000 people - nearly 10 times the total number of Americans who have died in Iraq - are killed by those guns each year. In 1966 Americans were being killed by guns at the rate of 17,000 a year. An article in The Times examining such "rampages" as the Charles Whitman shootings said: "Whatever the motivation, it seems clear that the way is made easier by the fact that guns of all sorts are readily available to Americans of all shades of morality and mentality." We've learned very little in 40 years. *** http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/opinion/19thu1.html?th&emc=th Denying The Right to Choose NY Times Editorial: Thursday, April 19, 2007 Published: April 19, 2007 Among the major flaws in yesterday's Supreme Court decision giving the federal government power to limit a woman's right to make decisions about her health was its fundamental dishonesty. Under the modest-sounding guise of following existing precedent, the majority opinion - written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito - gutted a host of thoughtful lower federal court rulings, not to mention past Supreme Court rulings. It severely eroded the constitutional respect and protection accorded to women and the personal decisions they make about pregnancy and childbirth. The justices went so far as to eviscerate the crucial requirement, which dates to the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, that all abortion regulations must have an exception to protect a woman's health. As far as we know, Mr. Kennedy and his four colleagues responsible for this atrocious result are not doctors. Yet these five male justices felt free to override the weight of medical evidence presented during the several trials that preceded the Supreme Court showdown. Instead, they ratified the politically based and dangerously dubious Congressional claim that criminalizing the intact dilation and extraction method of abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy - the so-called partial-birth method - would never pose a significant health risk to a woman. In fact, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has found the procedure to be medically necessary in certain cases. Justice Kennedy actually reasoned that banning the procedure was good for women in that it would protect them from a procedure they might not fully understand in advance and would probably come to regret. This way of thinking, that women are flighty creatures who must be protected by men, reflects notions of a woman's place in the family and under the Constitution that have long been discredited, said a powerful dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer. Far from being compelled by the court's precedents, Justice Ginsburg aptly objected, the new ruling is so at odds with its jurisprudence - including a concurring opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (who has now been succeeded by Justice Alito) when a remarkably similar state abortion ban was struck down just seven years ago - that it should not have staying power. For anti-abortion activists, this case has never been about just one controversial procedure. They have correctly seen it as a wedge that could ultimately be used to undermine and perhaps eliminate abortion rights eventually. The court has handed the Bush administration and other opponents of women's reproductive rights the big political victory they were hoping to get from the conservative judges Mr. Bush has added to the bench. It comes at a real cost to the court's credibility, its integrity and the rule of law. *** Prensa Latina http://www.plenglish.com USA: The Terrorist Nation Buenos Aires, Apr 18 (Prensa Latina) The United States is a terrorist country and needs international criminals like Luis Posada Carriles to carry out its crimes against humanity, Argentine journalist and writer Stella Calloni stated. "The United States stands out as a world terrorist state that violates the right to life in several parts of the world and attempts not to punish this criminal," Calloni told Prensa Latina. She repudiated Washington's legal maneuvers to not to try him as "one of the largest terrorists in the tragic Latin American history in which it has planted terror and pain." The author of the book "Operation Condor, Criminal Pact," said that US authorities know very well who was the responsible for the mid-air explosion of a Cuban airplane off the coast of Barbados with 73 people aboard in October 1976. sus iff ocs mf PL-16 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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