Rosie loves to lie in the grass and would do it for hours if she could — or unless someone walks past the house. Yhen the hair on her back stands up and she bolts to the fence, with a big, scary bark.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Limits of a BP boycott
I am sympathetic to the call for a boycott of BP — corporate irresponsibility should have consequences and there are few better ways to make corporations pay in our capitalist culture than by voting with our wallets. The problem is that for the boycott to be effect, the message must be clear and I’m just not sure that withholding my gas money from BP while giving to Exxon (Valdez oil spill), Shell (a host of injustices throughout Africa, including the death of the Nigerian activist Ken Wiro-Siwa), Chevron (unsavory activities in the rain forest, Burma and elsewhere), and so on, sends much of a message.
The real boycott would be of gasoline altogether, but that is an impossiblity given how tightly woven into the fabric of our lives the poisonous fuel is (not only do we drive, but everything we buy relies on gas).
I’m not advocating doing nothing — we hve to move as quickly as possible to end our reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear energy (which relies on extraction of uranium and requires disposal of toxic material, making it as bad environmentally as oil or coal), boost our use of renewable energies and conserve, conserve, conserve.
A boycott might make us feel good, but it won’t do much damage to BP and, even if it does, it only means redirecting our money from one nefarious actor to another.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Politics as usual
I doubt that anything illegal happened here, but there certainly is an appearance of impropriety and the scent of the backroom now threatens to overwhelm the fresh air Barack Obama promised.
Presidential administrations have always played these kinds of games, looking to protect the people they consider friends, targeting those they consdider political enemies or potentially problematic. Lyndon Johnson was a notorious horse-trader and Karl Rove’s fingerprints were all over nearly everything done to help Republicans during his boss’ eight years in the White House.
So the Congressional approbrium is a bit, well, hypocritical.
That, however, does not mean the president and his chief of staff should not be called on the carpet for what is being alleged. It is seamy and old-school and completely at odds with the campaign promises Obama made — remember chage?
Someone needs to apologize, at the very least, and it would not bother me if Rahm Emanuel were sent packing (his appointment was the first obvious indication that change and politics as usual were not all that different).
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Happy 50th to my folks
I thought this photo was appropriate for today — my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Here they are on that happy day. Here’s hoping for many, many more.
By the way, they haven’t changed a bit — aside from my dad’s hair line. He had a hair line 50 years ago, but now….
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Best that we could do?
I understand political realities. But I also demand fairness.
So the slow, painful repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that is making its way through Congress as we speak has to be classified as a small victory for human rights.
And yet, it is far too slow, bowing toward a notion of “realism” and “pragmatism” that allows fear to trump fairness for gay and lesbian soldiers, granting the homophobes in the military far too much leeway.
On a related but separate note, the DADT battle makes me a bit uncomfortable, because of the inherent contradition: I oppose militarism and the expansion of the military, tend toward pacificism and loathe the strain i our culture that glorifies the soldier and the warrior ethos, while also realizing that the military can play a normalizing role in society, as it did for African Americans when the military was finally desegregated under Truman.
As things stand now, gays and lesbians are not considered equal citizens because they are prohibited from serving openly in an institution whose members many view (unfortunately) as demonstrating the absolute height of citizenship. The repeal of DADT will make it more difficult for the neanderthals and homophobe to continue to insist that gays and lesbians must be treated differently. The edifice of discrimination — the marriage ban and all that comes with it, the lack of antidiscrimination statutes covering the LGBT community in too many states and the general aversion too many still feel toward LGBT people — becomes weaker once DADT is a thing of the past.
So slow, deliberat progress is not a bad thing, but the LGBT community — and those of us who support its cause — need to push hard to make sure the progress is consistetnt and begins to pick up steam. We should not be satisfied until there are no distinctions, until each American — hell, every human being — has the same rights and privileges and can live the lives each of us choose to live without interference from our neighbors.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
