Ensnared in the Web

Over the past few years, gun violence has become more than a common theme in this country. While anti-gun activists are busy villifying groups like the NRA and gun nuts are busy trying to convince the world that guns aren’t the problem, people continue dying senseless deaths. For the sake of this post, I won’t bother going into discussions of gun control, constitutional rights to bear arms, and other similar topic areas. Those have been discussed ad nauseum. Instead, I’m turning my attention to one of the faces of said violence and how it came to pass.

We’ve all heard the stories time and time again, each more heinous than the next. But when I heard about the school shooting at the Henry Ford Community College in Michigan a few weeks ago, I was especially numb. In case you haven’t heard about it, 20-year-old student Asia McGowan was shot and killed on campus by Anthony Powell, a 28-year-old who then turned the gun on himself. As it was later discovered Powell got acquainted with McGowan via YouTube, using the site to continuously stalk and harass her. Their interactions (not very pleasant, according to many YouTubers) culminated with Powell finding McGowan on her campus, forcing her into a secluded location, and murdering her with a shotgun. 

The following is a video from young Ms. McGowan where she addresses “haters” on her YouTube page; people (including Powell) who  left nasty and deragatory comments:

Of all the henious killings I’ve read and/or blogged about, this story was notably jarring for me. For one, this took place in Dearborn (a surburb in Detroit) which is no more than 60 miles away from where I live. Add to that the fact that I know a student a HFCC and several people at the neighboring University of Michigan-Dearborn campus. Then, there is the issue of me having early to late teenage relatives who broadcast their lives (sometimes provocatively) all over the Internet. My fear is for them and people like them. The online activities in which they are engaged are often dismissed as innocent and harmless when in reality, those activites serve as   the very fodder used by mentally unstable people to reach out to their unsuspecting victims. It’s a brave new world out there and many our young people are clueless as to what – or who is watching them.

To people who excessively committed themselvs to the online community: exercise caution when you place your life on display for the entire cybernetic world to see. To be sure, harm can be inflicted by people we know and with whom we interact on daily basis just as much as by psychos lingering on the ‘Net. But there is a certain type of danger associated with allowing strangers technological access into our lives. I’ve read several “tweets” on Twitter or Facebook statuses for instance, which could lead me directly to a person if I felt inclined to stalk. Profiles not set on privacy mode or websites with easily attainable information only increase the probability of  discovery by people looking for vulnerable prey. Whatever you do, be careful.

RIP, Asia. If any silver lining can be found from your death, I hope people become more aware of the dangers lurking in each corner of the ‘Net.

- ACL

Random Thought O’ the Day

Al Qaeda, be damned. America’s newest threat: other Americans. Thanks for nothing, NRA.

- ACL

Checking Ethnicity at the Door

Having a hard time pronouncing that Chinese name? Don’t ask the person to pronounce it for you…just tell them to get a new name.

Last week during a House hearing on voter identification, Texas State Rep. Betty Brown (R) was diagnosed with foot-in-mouth syndrome after she suggested Asian-Americans change their names because they’re too hard to pronounce. Said the dear Congresswoman:

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” In addressing  Mr. Ramey Ko, a representative from the Organization of Chinese Americans, Brown went on to ask, “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?” I can only imagine the amount of restraint Mr. Ko must have had to keep him jumping over the Brown’s desk and dropkicking her.

In my capacity, I deal with dozens of international students; many of whom do – in fact – have names very difficult to pronounce. But have we gotten so arrogant and self-absorbed as a nation that we can not take five seconds out of our life to learn a name? Admittedly, many of my aforementioned students – probably recognizing the difficulty of their name – have adopted Americanized names for the sake of accommodating everyday social interactions. But that should be up to them to decide, not some ignorant, culturally-insensitive, Texas cowgirl…especially when she would not ask somebody named Krzyzewski (pronounced “Sha-zef-skee”, by the way) to do the same.

In Brown’s defense, I can somewhat understand her position, given how diametically opposed I am to people who give their children ghetto names. But to directly attack a specific ethnic group just to avoid the occasional lesson in cultural and ethnic acceptance takes the cake. Somebody, PLEASE, pass legislation to make Texas a separate country.

Thank you. End of rant.

- ACL

Defending yarrrrr-self?

You have probably heard by now that – at President Obama’s call – U.S. Navy snipers went gangster on a group of Somali pirates attempting to hold an American captain hostage. I think it was a great call by the President and outstanding work by our Armed Forces. They seriously went Jack Bauer on Captain Hook and the rest of squad. Much like President Bush (though Dubya had a tendency to take things way too far), President Obama made the message clear: you mess with the U.S., prepare to get it.  Hopefully this will quell some of the hysteria brewing lately over piracy, though I’m not entirely holding my breath. 

As good as it is to hear that Captain Phillips is OK, there is another aspect of this whole thing that continues to pick at me; namely the backstory not so widely covered by the media. Sure, the Somalian pirates are bad people. But if there is one thing I have learned in following the media, it’s that there is always more story than what meets the eye.  Just as the war movie Black Hawk Down manipulated facts to hammer home the point that Somalians are evil, attention about Somali pirates has been missing important context. Writes Johann Hari from the Independent:

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.” William Scott would understand.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

Read the rest of the article here.

As it turns out, even assessments from the United Nations tell a similar story.

My point here is not to make some extreme leftist endorsement of piracy.  But this story does bear questioning:  in the grand scheme of things, can these acts of piracy be chalked up to self-defense?

Your thoughts?

- ACL

Guilty of Killing

I’ve always loved this picture. In a way, it gives me chills. It almost makes my body cringe as I wait for the hammer to strike that nail. It’s pretty odd…

Anyway…

Take a good look at this picture. Who do you think that is nailing Jesus to the cross? Keep reading and you’ll find out..

I remember during the release of Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of Christ”, there was a ton of controversy brewing about the anti-Semitic overtones aroused by the movie, particularly with the idea that Jews killed Jesus. The question still circulates today: Who was responsible for the death of Jesus? Was it Judas Iscariot, the traitor who turned Jesus over for money? Nope. How about the Jewish leaders who brought Him to trial? Sorry. Try again. Was it the blood thirsty crowd who preferred to release a murderer than to let Jesus live? Well, while it was pretty ironic that they freed a criminal bearing the same name as Jesus, that’s not it either. Should we blame Pilate for giving in the crowd for political purposes? I’m sorry, but he’s not the red-herring here.

I believe that, while the Jewish leaders, Judas, the angry crowd, and Pilate all served as key players in fulfilling God’s plan of Jesus’ death, they were not at all responsible for His dying.

The truth is: we are responsible for Jesus’ death. You and me. Jesus died for my sins as well as yours. It was only through His death that we would have the chance to procure salvation. As the Bible reminds us in Hebrews 9:22, “without the shedding of blood, [there] is no remission of sin.” So, Jesus had to sacrifice Himself to deliver us from our sins.

Essentially, Jesus was born so that He could die. He died so that we could live. He rose from the dead so that we could be with Him forever. End of story. He paid a debt that He did not owe to free us of a debt that we could never pay. Jesus Himself came to the understanding that He had to endure the agony of death in order to take away the sins of the world. Otherwise, we could have received salvation through our works…which would have made Jesus’ death pointless (Galatians 2:21).

With all of this to consider, let me repeat the question that I asked you at the beginning of this post: Who is that person nailing Jesus to the cross? For the answer to this question, take a look — a good look — at the person in the mirror. There’s your culprit. That’s the person for whom Jesus gave His life.

- ACL