meanderings

murder at the grammies

nothing matches a play for eustress... at least for me. all that intensity. as i sat in the wings of our final performance yesterday i worried about the energy onstage because i was dragging so. also, we were giving back to back performances which is always difficult. but those in the audience for both shows said the second was the best.... which really surprised me because i thought the audience was so much better in the first show.
but the deepest sense of satisfaction was the kids. they were incredible! it's always a raw performance. i never get to polish and fix things the way i want to because too much of my time is spent in ground control discipline. all that energy is easily misdirected into misbehavior. but even in all its rawness, they just continually surprise me with how good they are. i'm at the point now that i have a solid core that are dependable as greed, and i know their performance will lift the others into a better performance; but i also always have those new performers, those who have never been on stage before and find themselves so at home there. jamie is the first that comes to mind.... and hali. their debut on stage was so satisfying to me as a director. and then there's the ones who had tiny roles in previous plays who graduated to more responsibility with great confidence... haley and fatima especially. it's just such a pleasure to see success, to know that no one will ever take this away from these children, that this moment in time is theirs forever, a time when they were justifiably proud of their achievement with all that positive effect on their self image. i just love the magic of the theater! i love being able to step out of a reality that is so negative and create something positive and good.
i had two real "projects". they both convinced me several times that i had made a mistake to take a chance on them. both had real problems with social interactions with their peers and with really disruptive behavior. but in the end, i know my decision was the right one. i had a real problem child in the christmas show last year. she was really, really good onstage and drove me crazy with her disruption and downright vandalism whenever she was off stage. she tried out for this play and i didn't give her a part. but i think i might give these two a try again. one was a really minor role, and one was a main character. at one point i told one of them that i would not cast her in my next play... but i might. because i saw her grow.... as i did my boy problem child. because when all is said and done, i love both of these children. i want what is good and best for them.
i used to feel embarrassed at how much i loved kids. that wasn't an important enough accomplishment. i needed to change the world in some big way. i wanted to be a great writer. i wanted to create something lasting and significant.
i'm not worried about that anymore. my children may do those things. they are so much smarter and more creative than i will ever be, and that doesn't bother me a bit. because i have found that it's important to love those who go on to do great things, and we never know who they will be.... but they always start out as children. children who just want to be loved and encouraged to be all that they are capable of. this is my job and i am content.

some things are beyond belief, and sadly true

just when i think i can live more positively, i read something like this.
i need no convincing of the presence of evil.


Tony Blair’s New Friend

He made the moral case for war – but backs a dictator who boils prisoners to death
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 28th October 2003


The British and US governments gave three reasons for going to war with Iraq. The first was to extend the war on terrorism. The second was to destroy its weapons of mass destruction before they could be deployed. The third was to remove a brutal regime, which had tortured and murdered its people.


If the purpose of the war was to defeat terrorism, it has failed. Before the invasion, there was no demonstrable link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Today, Al Qaeda appears to have moved into that country, to exploit a new range of accessible western targets. If the purpose of the war was to destroy Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction before he deployed them, then, as no such weapons appear to have existed, it was a war without moral or strategic justification.


So just one excuse remains, and it is a powerful one. Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. While there was no legal argument for forcibly deposing him on the grounds of his abuse of human rights, there was a moral argument. It is one which our prime minister made repeatedly and forcefully. "The moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing Saddam", Tony Blair told the Labour Party's spring conference in February. "Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity. It is leaving him there that is in truth inhumane."1


Had millions of British people not accepted this argument, Tony Blair might not have been prime minister today. There were many, especially in the Labour Party, who disagreed with his decision, but who did not doubt the sincerity of his belief in the primacy of human rights.


There is just one test of this sincerity, and it is the consistency with which his concern for human rights guides his foreign policy. If he cares so much about the welfare of foreigners that he is prepared to go to war on their behalf, we should expect to see this concern reflected in all his relations with the governments of other countries. We should expect him, for example, to do all he could to help the people of Uzbekistan.


There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan.2 Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water.3 Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.4


His crime, like that of many of the country's prisoners, was practising his religion. Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, learnt his politics from the Soviet Union. He was appointed under the old system, and its collapse in 1991 did not interrupt his rule. An Islamic terrorist network has been operating there, but Karimov makes no distinction between peaceful Muslims and terrorists: anyone who worships privately, who does not praise the president during his prayers or who joins an organisation which has not been approved by the state can be imprisoned.5 Political dissidents, human rights activists and homosexuals receive the same treatment. Some of them, like dissidents in the old Soviet Union, are sent to psychiatric hospitals.6


But Uzbekistan, as Saddam Hussein's Iraq once was, is seen by the US government as a key western asset. Since 1999, US special forces have been training Karimov's soldiers.7 In October 2001, he gave the United States permission to use Uzbekistan as an airbase for its war against the Taliban.8 The Taliban have now been overthrown, but the US has no intention of moving out. Uzbekistan is in the middle of central Asia's massive gas and oil fields. It is a nation for whose favours both Russia and China have been competing. Like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, it is a secular state fending off the forces of Islam.


So, far from seeking to isolate his regime, the US government has tripled its aid to Islam Karimov. Last year, he received $500 million, of which $79 million went to the police and intelligence services, who are responsible for most of the torture.9 While the US claims that its engagement with Karimov will encourage him to respect human rights, like Saddam Hussein he recognises that the protection of the world's most powerful government permits him to do whatever he wants. Indeed, the US State Department now plays a major role in excusing his crimes. In May, for example, it announced that Uzbekistan had made "substantial and continuing progress" in improving its human rights record.10 The progress? "Average sentencing" for members of peaceful religious organisations is now just "7-12 years", while two years ago they were "usually sentenced to 12-19 years."11


There is little question that the power and longevity of Karimov's government has been enhanced by his special relationship with the United States. There is also little question that supporting him is a dangerous game. All the principal enemies of the US today were fostered by the US or its allies in the past: the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Wahhabi zealots in Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein and his people in Iraq. Dictators do not have friends, only sources of power. They will shift their allegiances as their requirement for power demands. The US supported Islamic extremists in Afghanistan in order to undermine the Soviet Union, and created a monster. Now it is supporting a Soviet-era leader to undermine Islamic extremists, and building up another one.


So what of Tony Blair, the man who claims that human rights are so important that they justify going to war? Well, at the beginning of this year, he granted Uzbekistan an open licence to import whatever weapons from the United Kingdom Mr Karimov fancies.12 But his support goes far beyond that. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has repeatedly criticised Karimov's crushing of democracy movements and his use of torture to silence his opponents.13 Like Roger Casement, the foreign office envoy who exposed the atrocities in the Congo a century ago, Murray has been sending home dossiers which could scarcely fail to move anyone who cares about human rights.


Blair has been moved all right: moved to do everything he could to silence our ambassador. Mr Murray has been threatened with the sack, investigated for a series of plainly trumped-up charges and persecuted so relentlessly by his superiors that he had to spend some time, like many of Karimov's critics, in a psychiatric ward, though in this case for sound clinical reasons.14 This pressure, according to a senior government source, was partly "exercised on the orders of No 10".15


In April, Blair told us that he had decided that "to leave Iraq in its brutalised state under Saddam was wrong."16 How much credibility does this statement now command, when the same man believes that to help Uzbekistan remain in its brutalised state is right?


www.monbiot.com


References:

1. Tony Blair, 15 February 2003. Speech to Labour's local government, women's and youth conferences, Glasgow.

2. The Guardian (26 May 2003) reports estimates of 6,500, citing independent human rights groups and the Sunday Times (26 October 2003) estimates of 7-10,000, citing Ambassador Craig Murray.

3. See for example, Human Rights Watch, World Report 2003; Amnesty International, Annual Report 2003; Human Rights Watch, 4 April 2003. Deaths in Custody in Uzbekistan. Briefing Paper

4. Human Rights Watch, 4 April 2003, ibid.

5. Human Rights Watch, 25 March 2003. In the Name of Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Abuses Worldwide. Briefing Paper for the 59th Session of the United Nations Commission http://hrw.org/un/chr59/counter-terrorism-bck4.htm#P364_91494; Human Rights Watch, 10 August 2001. Memorandum to the U.S. Government Regarding Religious Persecution in Uzbekistan.

6. Amnesty International, 2003, ibid; Human Rights Watch, World Report 2003, ibid.

7. CJ Chivers, 25 October 2001. Long Before War, Green Berets Built Military Ties to Uzbekistan. New York Times.

8. United States Department of Defense, 5 October 2001. Secretary Rumsfeld Press Conference with President of Uzbekistan. http://www.dod.mil/transcripts/2001/t10082001_t1005uz.html

9. Nick Paton Walsh, 26 May 2003. US looks away as new ally tortures Islamists. The Guardian

10. Human Rights Watch, 3 June 2003. Uzbekistan: Progress on Paper Only. Analysis of the U.S. State Department's Certification of Uzbekistan.

11. ibid.

12. Richard Norton-Taylor, 27 February 2003. Export of arms criticised. The Guardian.

13. See for eg Craig Murray 17 October 2002 - Speech to Freedom House, Tashkent. The British Embassy. http://www.britain.uz/inform/presrel.htm

14. David Leigh, Nick Paton Walsh and Ewen MacAskill, 18 October 2003. Ambassador accused after criticising US. The Guardian; Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas and Mark Franchetti, 26 October 2003. The British ambassador says his hosts are boiling people to death. The Sunday Times; Martin Bright, 19 October 2003. Short backs envoy who criticised US. The Observer.

15. David Leigh, Nick Paton Walsh and Ewen MacAskill, ibid.

16. Tony Blair, 14 April 2003, 3.30 pm. Statement on Iraq to the House of Commons. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/cm030414/debtext/30414-05.htm




28th October 2003

the desires of my heart

what are the desires of my heart, and can i be honest in a public forum.... even if that forum is just a few friends and family.

i don't know if it's my birth order or some part of my childhood, but one of the greatest desires of my heart is to please, to gain approval. there's dysfunction there. i'm aware of that. i wake up in the middle of the night full of guilt and remorse. my play wasn't as good as it could have been, my dream was disturbing, i had no great words of wisdom for my lonely child...
but i can bring good of a desire if i am conscientious about it. i try to use that desire for approval and mold it into a desire for peace. i try to see that desire in others and fill that need. i try to never build barriers over the small stuff.

i desire to be a warrior. not a soldier. there's a huge difference. a soldier has many and varied motivations, a warrior only one - to give his/her life for a cause. my cause is people, and children in particular. i want to fight against the forces that hurt children, that prevent them from the potential for good in which they enter life. children need and deserve to be taught to love and be loved. it is not a given. it does not come naturally. it must be taught and modeled by the people around them. i yell too much at my cast. i know i do. there's all this energy to be harnessed and directed and i can't do it without being filled with passion myself. so i tend to yell, and i need to work at that. but i hope they know what a labor of love each play is for the children who join me. i think one of the things i do best is to cast my characters. i see these children for what they are capable of, and they haven't let me down yet.

i desire to know my children. not who they were but who they are now. i love to read my daughters' blogs. i love even more that they trust me enough to share. i love to sit in church and run my fingers through my son's long, curly hair and think about the man he is becoming. i love coming from family and being family. this is such an intregal part of who i am and what my life is.

i have this hole in my life that i desire to fill, although the hole is so deep that it is a desire i can only view from a safe distance. it is the loss of something precious and i once thought crucial. but i am learning that what is essential is smaller and bigger than i used to think. on lake woebegone this morning, garrison kellor said that winter makes all things simpler. there's in hereness and out thereness. such a truth! all i really need is the in hereness of living the life that the god i believe in gave me. this is the final and greatest desire of my heart.

the smell of grass on a friday night

i've spent the last two friday nights, after five 10+ hour days at school, traveling to a high school football game to see my nephew play... literally every minute except for stopping the bleeding and getting instructions for the next play. it's been strange to take that walk in my former moccasins... to the smells and sounds of a high school football stadium and memories of tennis shoes and a short skirt in the only athletic endeavor that was allowed a high school girl in those supposedly liberated days of the early 70's. It reminds me of the desire to win, to surpass the last performance, the sheer joy of physical competition.

a desire overflowing in my nephew... who suffered two heartwrenching defeats after "leaving it all on the field" as they say. and as i watched this big teenager, who i'll always think of as "sweet baby james", sobbing as if his heart would break, i couldn't help but smile (because i'm the aunt and not the mother). what a healthy, honest hurt! no meanness involved, no cruelty. a simple "i gave it all i had and i lost anyway". an educational pain that builds character not mistrust and doubt.

we've been lucky in my extended family. we share our dysfunctionalities, but as my wise daughter so aptly puts it, "they're funny, not sad". and we share a love and loyalty that has always been the definition of family. my nephew's oldest brother was always the first to reach him and to put his big arms around him in unabashed love. he never had less than three different parts of his extended family cheering him on and looking on sympathetically in his defeat.... and i'm thinking this is the way life should be lived. no matter what the outcome, we should leave it all out on the field, knowing that there will be loving arms to surround us when it's all over.

a need to be more positive.

i'm a teacher. and guess what? i don't get a lot of encouragement. i'm really self motivated and most of the time i think i don't need it. but then i sit in a team meeting and i find that i am living in such stress and pressure. i know it's there because i can see it in my peers. we are given more and more to do and less time and resources to do it in, and then we get another set of requirements.
it's discouraging. and it makes it really difficult to be positive.
the problem is that being positive is one of the most important things we do. we must find the strength to give the encouragement to our students that is so often denied to us. and there's something to recognizing that need in yourself that should make it easier to give it to others. but it's not. it's harder. i find myself lifting this weight off myself to smile and say the kind, encouraging word to my students that is missing in my own professional life.
and you know what helps????
the encouragement from my students. they are so resilient. some of these kids live with this incredible amount of garbage and manage not only to survive but to grow. what an amazing thing to witness. i know that i am blessed by it.
and i know that i need to reach horizontally to my peers who get so little vertical affirmation and to offer my support. and maybe it's not such a bad thing to know how much we need each other.

who am i?

it amazes me sometimes to think of all the people i have been. i retrace some moment in my past and look on as a stranger. i was that person and am no longer. but then, of course, we carry all of who we once were with us. pick an acquaintance from any decade of my life (working on my fifth) and i think they would describe very different people. and i wonder if that's good or bad. and then, there's family. certainly they know a core. real family does because they share your history. they have seen you in all your different manifestations. but even there, i believe they see a side of me but not the whole. the side is true, but it is so incomplete.
i am one of the rare, lucky ones in that i have one person who knows me as deeply and truely as one human being can know another. it is my spouse....(i had some great sentences from my students this week who weren't terribly sure what that word meant... my mom has three spouses.... and some more really funny ones that i forget at the moment... damn the aging process) but i have been blessed with an honest relationship in my marriage that i am well aware is a rarity. i am also aware of how much that has influenced who i am. it is one thing to be loved by someone who has an inflated image of who you are. it is another to be loved by someone who laughs at all your humor because he understands it. he knows the thoughts behind the irony, the conflict between what seems to be and what is.
i can't really imagine marriage any other way and yet i know it is the exception rather than the rule. most couples settle for something far less. or maybe settle is the wrong word. many would not welcome such intimacy. it certainly requires more vulnerability and trust than is comfortable for anyone who has ever been hurt. it is intensely spiritual, and as such, both fragile and strong.