Letter Never Sent

One thing that just occurred to me now, is that many muslims may view the photos of torture and abuse from another perspective, that of preserving traditional Islamic gender roles. In many of the photographs, the same woman is posing with a gesture of “thumbs up”, uniformed in the same uniform as the men, with close cropped hair, and smoking a cigarette, all while posing in front of the hooded, stacked bodies of Iraqi men. Promoting equal rights for women has been a big part of the media campaign of the US war effort, especially in Afghanistan. It adds a real warm, fuzzy dimension to warfare and occupation. I don’t know much about the Arab or Muslim point of view, but it is hard to imagine anyone in the Arab world not taking this seriously and not having serious qualms about dealing with the Americans.

Last night, on Nightline there was a section that talked about how people will obey authority even when it commands that they act against their normal nature, and about how evil can be perpetrated by “normal” people, the point being, it seemed to me, that with regards to the Abu Gharib situation, anyone could have acted the way those guards did. Why is that important? Many of the comments I have heard about this attempt to diminish the seriousness of the issue as if what happened there was frat-like hazing, and that it does not connote brutality otherwise. I’ve also heard others talking about a “double standard” against the US. There is no double standard. There is A standard and it’s called right and wrong.

I’ve been busy playing with the new server and connecting to it via SSH. It’s been a good learning process, and I haven’t felt the frustration of learning something difficult in a long time. It’s really been pushing my boundaries knowledgewise. The good and satisfying part is that it feels nice and there is nothing like the feeling of accomplishment when something actually works, even if you don’t fully understand why.

I am not in debt, however I do have debt. One of my top goals is to pay off my remaining student loans in two years or less. This year I have reduced my student loans by 35% and my total debts by around 45%. There is something I really hate about owing someone else money and paying them interest on top of it. Granted, my student loan interest rates are pretty low but I still hate it. It makes me feel like I have leeches I have to feed out of what little I make. (Interesting reading on The Mandrake Mechanism)

Despite any philosophical arguments about existence and freedom, in practical everyday terms money is security. Having it provides you with a certain amount of security and not having it puts you at a certain amount of risk. To my mind, debt is equivalent to giving a certain degree of control to your creditors. Not only that but it forces you to live within that context of debtor and creditor versus the context of living in terms of what you can afford or not afford. The latter context is preferable as it frees you from entanglement with other entities and from a situation of control. To a certain extent, when you have debt and especially when you are in debt, you live at the mercy and whim of those you owe money to. It is conceivable that your wages could be garnished and your property confiscated to pay outstanding debts. You can, of course, seek protection via bankruptcy law, however this effectively banishes you to the outskirts our economic system for seven years. Declaring bankruptcy is the scarlet letter of the day.

As I just stated yesterday, the website is back up. Apologies to Kelly and Susan whose blogs were likewise marooned as a result. There was some sort of problem with the dns so says my friend and webhost Mike, who is currently not charging me to use his server. I’ve been toying with the idea of essentially renting my own dedicated server, and I think I’ve found a good deal at managed.com. Believe me, I engaged in thorough research. I’ve settled on the 2.4 Ghz Celeron server with 80 GB of hard drive space and 1200 GB transfer per month on a 100 Mbps connection. I considered unmetered bandwidth, but those plans were usually hosted on 5-10 Mbps connections which means that if you happened to receive a lot of traffic at once you might max out your connection. This is unlikely in my case, but you never know.

Anyway, even with the free hosting, I prefer to be in control of my stuff, so I’m looking forward to relocating the site. The plan is to attract enough people to host with me and get enough clients to where the server pays for itself. The good part is, I may have a good deal for many of my friends out here who need webspace or dns, etc.

Over the next few days I will be moving things, as I figure out how to run everything myself. I’ve always had webhosting for the site, but I’ve never been responsible for running the entire server and setting up all the different variables myself. They have administration software that makes it easier, but I will try to figure out how to do most of it by hand.

Sorry, but the website was down for over a week. I had nothing to do with it, so I couldn’t make arrangments to mirror the site elsewhere. A few things interesting have happened, but I’ll just worry about enumerating some other time. Jody and I went and walked around downtown for a while today. We strolled over to the capitol building and then over to the Pecan St festival, which is pretty lame.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back. I thought I’d bust if I couldn’t update the site.

Jody and I drove to Oklahoma this weekend to spend the Easter holiday with her family. They live in the country, and going out there is like being on a mini-vacation since I’m able to be somewhere different in tempo and environment. The air is fresh and full of different smells and you find yourself breathing in deeply to catch things. It’s quiet and not quiet in the sense that the sounds you hear do not overwhelm you. What you hear normally is the wind blowing and grasses stirring. When it is quiet you look around more, you try to pinpoint noises and you find yourself attuned to the subtle background of sound. I do like being alone like that. It allows me to get outside my head more. I find myself observing and listening more as if my senses unfold and uncurl themselves to bask in the gentle presence of nature. When you are in stillness you match its rhythm and find yourself becoming more quiet and attentive.

One of the highlights of my weekend was that I got to bottlefeed a calf who had lost its mother. For a baby he was pretty big; about the size of a big dog. The first night I saw him he was very weak and could not stand on his own. Jody’s father said he thought the calf had not gotten his first drink of mother’s milk, which meant he would not have the necessary antibodies to ensure surivival and that the chances are good he would not make it through the night. His joints were swollen and his eyes were tearing. It made me sad to think that he might only live to be five days old. At first, he was not interested in the bottle, but then he finally started going at it and drank most of it. He actually made it through the entire weekend and he seemed to be getting hungrier each time we fed him. I felt a little embarrassed in my concern for the calf since I’d expect anyone with experience raising cattle would deal with the situation more pragmatically. I mean, if you get attached to each calf that comes along you’re going to be putting yourself under a lot of emotional strain. I felt like it marked me as a naive and squishy city dweller. But, being there patting him on his curly brown head and feeling the large bones under his hide wishing he’d get up made me feel like a little kid, in awe of the experience of life, on my knees making secret prayers within myself.

I’ve been reading about the insurgency in Iraq with some interest. Despite the fact that I have a loved one there who I do not want to see harmed in any way, the rebel in me roots for the underdogs, these poor, proud third-worlders who lack kevlar and air support, fighting with Soviet era weaponry against the world’s most elite military. I don’t mean to minimize the significance of people dying, however in the abstract, from where I stand, there is something romantic and wild about it. It is the kind of thing that would make a good movie, and maybe in Iraq in ten years, there will be a movie about it.

I’ve been following the coverage closely, and I have been looking up a few things here and there wishing I could understand all languages, especially Arabic. One thing I was checking out, is the meaning of the word Mehdi, the name that Sadr’s Shiite militia goes by. Here is an excerpt of some interesting reading on the subject:

The term “MEHDI” is a title meaning “Guided one”. The Mehdi is a normal man who is going to follow the true Islam. His name will be Muhammad and his father name will be Abdullah. He is a descendant from Ali and Fatima (daughter of the prophet Muhammad) so he will be descendant from al-Hasan or al-Hussain or both. The Mehdi will be very just and his capital will be Damascus. The Mehdi is NOT a prophet but he is the final Rightly Guided Khalifah. The Mehdi will lead Muslims to a great victory against the Sufyaani and the Romans. This great war or Armageddon. It will end up with a great victory to Muslims against Romans after six years. Muslims will take over their capital Rome (this can be any city). In the seventh year, the Dajjal (antichrist) will appear and a greater war will start between his followers and the believers for 40 days (longer that usual days) and will end when ‘Eessa (“Jesus”) will come, slay the Dajjal along with his followers. All remaining people will convert into Islam. Peace will pervade the whole world.

From that, it seems many Iraqis have a completely different view of the American occupation, and that if the US tries to overwhelm the insurgents and destroy them, they may end up undoing their coalition and contributing to more chaos.

Today is my birthday. My father actually called me two days before to make plans to come up for dinner, which is highly unusual but encouraging. My mother called me this morning with her traditional birthday greeting which starts out with her singing the Beatles’ “They Say It’s Your Birthday” over the telephone. Then she starts telling me about the day I was born, how she broke her water at 11am and how I popped out at 3:30pm in a hurry, as usual. I’ve heard this story many times throughout my life and I actually look forward to it. It’s a comforting and familiar tradition. Often times, they would describe how they first saw me, “then the nurse brought me a little spider monkey, all arms and legs.” And they always talk about how proud they were. It’s the kind of tradition I’d like to share with my own children; waking them with obnoxious singing and describing the day of their birth.