Nakba Day still largely ignored in the public forum

Today, May 15, is Nakba Day in Palestine. It commemorates the 'Catastrophe' when roughly 750,000 of 1,900,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland before and after Israel’s 1948 declaration of statehood. In addition to those 750,000 Palestinians, over 500 Palestinian villages disappeared. Over 15,000 Palestinians were killed. Israel claimed 78% of Palestine and since 1967, has militarily controlled the remaining 22%. The US has long advocated for a ‘Two State’ solution to create a sovereign Palestinian alongside Israel. However our policies supporting Israel’s inexorable annexation of Palestinian land for Israeli settlements has made that worthy goal largely impossible.

Back in 1952 our second grade class learned current events from ‘My Weekly Reader’, a small version of our parents’ newspaper geared to us newbie readers. The title of the one such edition that May intrigued me: "Israel celebrates 4th birthday". I was stunned. How could a country be three years younger than me? I assumed every country was a natural geographic entity that existed since the beginning of time. The article began to answer that question with discussion of European Jews setting up a new country following the Holocaust in WWII. There was no mention of the 750,000 expelled Palestinians, the 500 villages that vanished, or the 15,000 dead Palestinians. Today, as Palestinians worldwide commemorate the Nakba, there is still virtually no mention of that catastrophe in today’s My Weekly Reader for adults. But every May 15th I’ll pause and think about what should have been taught to me 68 years ago.

Trump’s WHO, China vendetta sabotaged UN pandemic ceasefire

Everybody knows Trump has demonized both China and the World Health Organization (WHO) to deflect criticism from his mishandling of the pandemic and boost his re-election chances. But few understand how that vendetta likely upended a worthy peace initiative: a worldwide ceasefire of military ventures to focus international energies in combating covid 19. UN Secretary Antonio Guterres initiated that ceasefire in a proposed UN Security Council resolution March 23. Besides a worldwide war zone ceasefire, it called for international cooperation with the WHO, the UN’s specialized health agency, to defeat the only true enemy worth fighting: coronavirus.

But cooperating with the world’s number two economy China, and the WHO, both in Trump’s gunsight, was unacceptable. To avoid passing the UN’s pandemic ceasefire, Trump’s State Department inserted two deal breakers: no mention of the WHO and labeling the pandemic the ‘Wuhan Virus’. Initially, hopes for passing the UN Security Council resolution were high as 16 warring parties in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and East Asia paused their killing. But six weeks of senseless wrangling over offending language has caused many to give up and fight on. France and Tunisia even excised out the WHO in a redraft by asserting support for “all relevant entities of the United Nations system, including specialized health agencies.” Uncle Sam nixed that compromise because the UN has only one ‘specialized health agency’…the WHO.

For now the UN pandemic ceasefire resolution is almost as dead as the folks were bombing all over the Middle East and Africa. Richard Gowan, the UN Director for the International Crisis Group put it starkly: “What’s depressing about this is that basically everyone would sign onto the cease-fire. It’s being held hostage by this WHO issue, which is pathetic.”

Ghost of Reagan hovers over US pandemic catastrophe

If you live long enough and pay attention, you can discern historical threads that haunt the present. The current catastrophic US response to pandemic carries me back 40 years to the 1980 presidential campaign. Former actor and governor Ronald Reagan campaigned on a conservative platform of tax cuts and reduced regulations for the well off, and an end to social activism that greatly expanded and empowered the middle class, and ended de jure racial segregation. It wasn’t pure coincidence Reagan kicked off his campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, site of the 1964 triple civil rights murders, advocating for states rights as a 1980 campaign theme in the South and beyond. Then Reagan announced the clarion call of his Conservative Revolution: “Government is not the solution…government is the problem” at his January, 1981 Inaugural Address. Reagan’s political genius packaged this regressive vision as “Let’s make America Great Again” which resonated with millions of working class Democrats to vote against their long term interests, powering Reagan to two overwhelming elections against FDR’s New Deal heirs.

It took forty years for Reagan’s governing meme ‘government is the problem’ to bring the US to the brink of economic collapse driven by an unprecedented health care crisis. As regressive as Reagan and his successors Bush I and II were, we were not prepared that a vastly damaged media celebrity would tweak Reagan’s motto, erasing the “Let’s”, to simply “Make America Great Again”. It worked again brilliantly with working class Democrats to install a regime hell bent to grant trillion dollar tax cuts, decimate regulations affecting health and safety, while cutting gaping holes in the social safety net. While every other industrialized country strategically supports the commons, allowing an orderly reopening of their decimated economies, America thrashes about in an utterly dysfunctional fashion almost certain to worsen the collective health while threatening an unprecedented second Great Depression.

The young and the uninformed need not ponder long how we got here. They simply need to study the history our culture loves to ignore.

That’s quite a resume, President Cantanzara

Usually, the announcement of someone elected to high office mentions their bonafides to lead. The article announcing the election of John Cantanzara president of the 13,500 member Chicago Police Officers Union noted nary a bonafide. But it did mention Cantanzara’s disciplinary record on the force. In 2012 he was suspended 20 days for working security for a restaurant while on medical leave from the force for a back injury. In 2017 he was reprimanded for using his uniform as a prop in a social media post proclaiming love of President Trump and the 2nd Amendment. Two years ago Cantanzara was so outraged with former Chief Eddie Johnson marching arm in arm with Father Pfleger on the Dan Ryan protest march to dampen tensions, he filed a police report on him. That stunt got Cantanzara temporarily stripped of his police powers. Maybe Cantanzara simply figured correctly, if a negative resume worked for President Trump, it would work for him.