Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast and claimed about 1,800 lives. President Obama has astutely pointed out that the disaster was both natural (a storm, duh) and man-made (a combination of poor planning and even poorer engineering). The BBC--my usual news source, I know--has done a pleasant write up of this anniversary.
But it's important to remember that this isn't only a natural or a political disaster; it's a conflict that tears at human life, that generates a tempest of emotions and troubles, and it's this element that makes the remembrance worthwhile. Although we mourn those who are lost and the districts of New Orleans that suffered, we celebrate because, out of the driftwood and wreckage, an existence gets hammered together. But it's also an opportunity for us to delve into the soul of America and see exactly how this country relates to itself.
So how do we keep those sentiments relevant while performing this investigation? You guessed it--literature.
Unfortunately, the body of Hurricane Katrina fiction (and I hate that I'm actually posting this link) is meager, and admittedly, I've read almost none of it--perhaps because the Hurricane Katrina stories don't get the hype that the burgeoning genre of the 9/11 novel gets. 9/11 appears to have been the seminal event of the current generation--America brought to its knees and its hegemony threatened--but Hurricane Katrina actually offers a more poignant portal into American self-discoveries. Instead of just the crashing of the American dream, Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to explore how the gears of our society grate against one another and if it's possible to make this great machine move forward again on a personal as opposed to a nationalist level.
The worst of the Katrina novels would be like the worst of the 9/11 novels: focusing only on stasis and inability to cope. But this isn't the reality, as some novelists (and here I have to praise my mentor, Porochista Khakpour, and her novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects), have cleverly observed: Regardless of the extent of catastrophe, life continues, one step at a time. And as Porochista's novel shows us, tragedy--large scale or not--is always personal, and it's an opportunity to recast notions of identity. Disaster is a porthole for discovery.
There's another thing a Katrina novel could do: explore the race relations in American urban centers. Most of the Katrina stuff I've read (most notably, Katie Ford's poetry collection Colosseum, which I suggest you pick up) studies how life is going to pick up again afterward the crisis. The past has been destroyed, now we rebuild.
Though Ford's collection gets the whole bit about tragedy being personal (her poems are somewhat confessional in that they conjure images from her own experiences in New Orleans during Katrina) this rebuilding idea remains far too facile. It's practically preemptive nostalgia. Perhaps soon we'll get a Katrina narrative that's focusing on the spirit of the Katrina recovery--but also on the spirit of America and the souls of those people who have lived through the crisis.
Showing posts with label American Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Politics. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
The Girl Who Predicted the Twenty-First Century
Over the weekend, I started the third and final installment of the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third and final installment of his acclaimed Millennium trilogy.
Okay, the books are thrillers, and unnecessary descriptions of characters' clothing and Ikea shopping trips abound. But they're at least fun. And simultaneously terrifying.
Keep in mind that Larsson wrote these books in 2004 before delivering them to his Swedish publisher. And we should keep that in mind because the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, followed investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander as they toppled a corrupt financial empire. Lisbeth, an unlikely heroine at just shy of five feet tall and with piercings and tattoos, uncovers that this empire has been built on shady speculations, mortgages, and other unsound investments--all of it on the eve of the financial crisis that sent shockwaves through the global economy.
The second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is more of a manhunt novel, filled with false accusations and a slightly overabundant population of murders. The best part of that novel: several pages going through a shopping trip Salander takes to Ikea.
But the third novel again strikes me as strangely prescient. Salander and Blomkvist find themselves mired in an attempt to unravel a government conspiracy formulated by an inner circle of Sapo, the Swedish Security Police. The plot has gone out of control, illustrating the underhanded nature of even a democratic government. But also, these plots negatively effect citizens and decimate their personal liberties and reputations. Technically, this secret "Section" of Sapo doesn't exist and isn't documented, but its history over a few decades has had unwieldy consequences.
Then, I checked The Washington Post and found that post-9/11 America could have learned a thing or three from Larsson's novel: our secret bureaucracies have become too unwieldy, too expensive, too clumsy. Nobody really knows what's going on, and the impact could be devastating.
So, as campy and cliche as Larsson's novels can be, I think he possessed freakishly good foresight and insight, the attributes that his novels claim all thinkers--writers, journalists, investigators, hackers, even editors--need to possess in order to fix things up and protect citizens.
Okay, the books are thrillers, and unnecessary descriptions of characters' clothing and Ikea shopping trips abound. But they're at least fun. And simultaneously terrifying.
Keep in mind that Larsson wrote these books in 2004 before delivering them to his Swedish publisher. And we should keep that in mind because the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, followed investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander as they toppled a corrupt financial empire. Lisbeth, an unlikely heroine at just shy of five feet tall and with piercings and tattoos, uncovers that this empire has been built on shady speculations, mortgages, and other unsound investments--all of it on the eve of the financial crisis that sent shockwaves through the global economy.
The second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is more of a manhunt novel, filled with false accusations and a slightly overabundant population of murders. The best part of that novel: several pages going through a shopping trip Salander takes to Ikea.
But the third novel again strikes me as strangely prescient. Salander and Blomkvist find themselves mired in an attempt to unravel a government conspiracy formulated by an inner circle of Sapo, the Swedish Security Police. The plot has gone out of control, illustrating the underhanded nature of even a democratic government. But also, these plots negatively effect citizens and decimate their personal liberties and reputations. Technically, this secret "Section" of Sapo doesn't exist and isn't documented, but its history over a few decades has had unwieldy consequences.
Then, I checked The Washington Post and found that post-9/11 America could have learned a thing or three from Larsson's novel: our secret bureaucracies have become too unwieldy, too expensive, too clumsy. Nobody really knows what's going on, and the impact could be devastating.
So, as campy and cliche as Larsson's novels can be, I think he possessed freakishly good foresight and insight, the attributes that his novels claim all thinkers--writers, journalists, investigators, hackers, even editors--need to possess in order to fix things up and protect citizens.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Move Over, Moose and Squirrel
Because Boris and Natasha aren't done yet. And neither is the spy swap saga. It might just be getting longer--and more unnecessarily dramatic--than the Twilight saga.
It seems, now, that everybody is getting into the spy swap that recently occurred between the United States and Russia after ten folks were arrested in the US for spying for the Motherland. As any casual viewer of Cold War-era politics can tell you, the US and Russia don't have the most trusting of relationships, and frankly, these sleeper agents shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. During the late days of the Bush Administration, when the US worked to stiffarm compliance with its proposed missile shield, feelings ran hot, and US plans sparked tension--and dissent--from Sarah Palin's across-the-Bering-Strait neighbors.
But now, the spy swap is starting to obtain a sort of cult, "OMG Britney Spears shaved her head!" status. Recently, two of the Russians expelled from Moscow in the swap--Igor Sutyagin and Anna Chapman--have been sighted in a London hotel. Not just sighted, mind you; technically, they've been reported as "being undercover" in a hotel. And now there are questions of where they're going to go...can they get visas? Will Chapman, who has a British passport through a previous marriage, be permitted entry into the country?
This is, by now, a usual pH/Penguin in the Machine complaint...but (1) why are people surprised that there are still spies and undercover agents, (2) why are these the headline-grabbing current events instead of things that might be of more import to daily existence, and (3) while I feel this would make an interesting human interest story or essay...why don't we focus on the policies and the public personas of the governments these spies were representing? Why don't we ask why they were spying, for what they were searching? It's a question that requires introspection, as opposed to a sort of oohing and aahing that apparently comes much easier.
We have more important concerns. Like snapping photographs of spies in hotels. Just you wait, in the future photographs of a spy at a fountain will be like postage stamps: everywhere, yellowed, thumbed over, and seen by everyone.
A recent Least I Could Do strip provides, I think, the best possible response to this conundrum: Get the experts after all of these spies. I imagine they'd do just as well, and it wouldn't have the predictable inanities of a soap opera plot.
It seems, now, that everybody is getting into the spy swap that recently occurred between the United States and Russia after ten folks were arrested in the US for spying for the Motherland. As any casual viewer of Cold War-era politics can tell you, the US and Russia don't have the most trusting of relationships, and frankly, these sleeper agents shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. During the late days of the Bush Administration, when the US worked to stiffarm compliance with its proposed missile shield, feelings ran hot, and US plans sparked tension--and dissent--from Sarah Palin's across-the-Bering-Strait neighbors.
But now, the spy swap is starting to obtain a sort of cult, "OMG Britney Spears shaved her head!" status. Recently, two of the Russians expelled from Moscow in the swap--Igor Sutyagin and Anna Chapman--have been sighted in a London hotel. Not just sighted, mind you; technically, they've been reported as "being undercover" in a hotel. And now there are questions of where they're going to go...can they get visas? Will Chapman, who has a British passport through a previous marriage, be permitted entry into the country?
This is, by now, a usual pH/Penguin in the Machine complaint...but (1) why are people surprised that there are still spies and undercover agents, (2) why are these the headline-grabbing current events instead of things that might be of more import to daily existence, and (3) while I feel this would make an interesting human interest story or essay...why don't we focus on the policies and the public personas of the governments these spies were representing? Why don't we ask why they were spying, for what they were searching? It's a question that requires introspection, as opposed to a sort of oohing and aahing that apparently comes much easier.
We have more important concerns. Like snapping photographs of spies in hotels. Just you wait, in the future photographs of a spy at a fountain will be like postage stamps: everywhere, yellowed, thumbed over, and seen by everyone.
A recent Least I Could Do strip provides, I think, the best possible response to this conundrum: Get the experts after all of these spies. I imagine they'd do just as well, and it wouldn't have the predictable inanities of a soap opera plot.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Star Wars
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the creations of George Lucas have figured out space travel, war in the stars, and lightsabers.
And possibly, America is launching our world in that direction.
NASA just launched a prototype for the X-37B military spaceplane, which is about one-fourth of the size of a traditional space shuttle. My initial thought at the idea is cool, we've got a spiffy new miniature space shuttle. Cool beans.
But it seems at odds with the President's decision to cancel Dubya's plans to get Americans back on the moon, and NASA creating a spacecraft for the military also seems at odds with the same President just winning a Nobel Peace Prize. The most terrifying words in the BBC's article occur after a mention that the US Air Force is willing to discuss the vehicle's design: "...but its purpose remains classified." Especially problematic, because the vessel appears to be designed to orbit. And the last thing America really needs is being seen as even more aggressive and more war-mongering. Oy.
The sci-fi geek in me thinks that the possibility of life on other planets, of a world that's moved beyond our own, of taking that pioneer spirit into the stars, can be pretty fantastic. But...the military? I have some concerns about that, particularly given the dark side of human nature.
And possibly, America is launching our world in that direction.
NASA just launched a prototype for the X-37B military spaceplane, which is about one-fourth of the size of a traditional space shuttle. My initial thought at the idea is cool, we've got a spiffy new miniature space shuttle. Cool beans.
But it seems at odds with the President's decision to cancel Dubya's plans to get Americans back on the moon, and NASA creating a spacecraft for the military also seems at odds with the same President just winning a Nobel Peace Prize. The most terrifying words in the BBC's article occur after a mention that the US Air Force is willing to discuss the vehicle's design: "...but its purpose remains classified." Especially problematic, because the vessel appears to be designed to orbit. And the last thing America really needs is being seen as even more aggressive and more war-mongering. Oy.
The sci-fi geek in me thinks that the possibility of life on other planets, of a world that's moved beyond our own, of taking that pioneer spirit into the stars, can be pretty fantastic. But...the military? I have some concerns about that, particularly given the dark side of human nature.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Some Thoughts on a Compassionate Life
Ten o’clock on Monday is still a Monday update. ☺
So this one’s a bit behind schedule, since I’ve been following a few things in the news and been a bit all over the place. But things are settling down.
Following David Foster Wallace’s suicide in September of 2008, his publisher (Little, Brown & Co.) announced that they were publishing in book form David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the Kenyon College class of 2005 under the title of This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. It was the only such address that Wallace would ever give.
But what Wallace reminds us of in this speech is that everything that you are at the absolute center of everything that has ever happened in your life. And so we’re always stuck at the middle of our own experiences. But he stresses that life is about more than meeting our own simple needs. He corrects misconceptions about how a liberal arts education “teaching you how to think” is more than simply a platitude; Wallace says, “‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
So in short, I’ve been thinking a lot about the health care debacle, since I--like millions of other Americans--am without health insurance. Whereas I don’t think it goes far enough--it's more health insurance reform than it is health care (and that’s a necessary first step, I feel)--I still feel that the idea behind the whole push was to get outside of narrow, individualist thinking. That government can make a conscious choice from the experiences of people to provide, to pay attention.
Both sides of the debate have used a bit of fop logic and a lot of catch phrases (don’t get me started on those), but what’s important here is moving beyond this shallow, self-interested, self-promoting nature of business as usual. It’s about actually looking at the circumstances and observing the world beyond one’s self. “Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life,” Wallace cautions, “you will be totally hosed.”
So this one’s a bit behind schedule, since I’ve been following a few things in the news and been a bit all over the place. But things are settling down.
Following David Foster Wallace’s suicide in September of 2008, his publisher (Little, Brown & Co.) announced that they were publishing in book form David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the Kenyon College class of 2005 under the title of This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. It was the only such address that Wallace would ever give.
But what Wallace reminds us of in this speech is that everything that you are at the absolute center of everything that has ever happened in your life. And so we’re always stuck at the middle of our own experiences. But he stresses that life is about more than meeting our own simple needs. He corrects misconceptions about how a liberal arts education “teaching you how to think” is more than simply a platitude; Wallace says, “‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
So in short, I’ve been thinking a lot about the health care debacle, since I--like millions of other Americans--am without health insurance. Whereas I don’t think it goes far enough--it's more health insurance reform than it is health care (and that’s a necessary first step, I feel)--I still feel that the idea behind the whole push was to get outside of narrow, individualist thinking. That government can make a conscious choice from the experiences of people to provide, to pay attention.
Both sides of the debate have used a bit of fop logic and a lot of catch phrases (don’t get me started on those), but what’s important here is moving beyond this shallow, self-interested, self-promoting nature of business as usual. It’s about actually looking at the circumstances and observing the world beyond one’s self. “Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life,” Wallace cautions, “you will be totally hosed.”
Monday, January 25, 2010
Some Unintended Eavesdropping, and a Necessary Social Lesson
Even in Pennsylvania, it’s possible to find tolerance.
I was at a café this weekend, where I was finishing John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sitting at a table near mine were a young woman with a son (about four- or five-years-old, if I had to guess) and, sitting across from them, one of the mother’s friends.
The mother talked about her son recently playing with stuffed animals. And these stuffed animals--in pairs, in threes--were getting married; cats married dogs married dolls, and they were all different genders, as well.
And the mother wasn’t complaining, nor did her friend crinkle up her nose or stomp away in disgust.
They praised the boy. And rightfully so.
Sure, there are some things a five-year-old boy wouldn’t understand, and so let’s overlook the issues of polygamy and interspecies dating (ostensibly responsible for that dreadful Nickolodeon show Catdog). The mother explained the boy’s reasoning for why the stuffed animals were all getting married: “Well, they’re best friends, and that’s what best friends do.”
The boy then parroted, in his bright and squawking voice, “That’s what best friends do!”
I’m not saying that all best friends should frolic down the aisle and get hitched right this very moment. I am saying, however, that this mother talking about her son’s game shows that our society is, in some way, advancing and becoming more tolerant. What was fantastic about this little conversation is the reassurance that there are some parents out there who are encouraging their children to be open-minded. There, at least, was a mother who was, by letting her child play minister to dozens of stuffed animal marriages, telling her son that there’s nothing different or wrong about the love between a woman and a man, between two women, or between two men.
Every woman and man--and apparently every teddy bear and Pound Puppy--has the right to love whomever they want to love.
I was at a café this weekend, where I was finishing John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sitting at a table near mine were a young woman with a son (about four- or five-years-old, if I had to guess) and, sitting across from them, one of the mother’s friends.
The mother talked about her son recently playing with stuffed animals. And these stuffed animals--in pairs, in threes--were getting married; cats married dogs married dolls, and they were all different genders, as well.
And the mother wasn’t complaining, nor did her friend crinkle up her nose or stomp away in disgust.
They praised the boy. And rightfully so.
Sure, there are some things a five-year-old boy wouldn’t understand, and so let’s overlook the issues of polygamy and interspecies dating (ostensibly responsible for that dreadful Nickolodeon show Catdog). The mother explained the boy’s reasoning for why the stuffed animals were all getting married: “Well, they’re best friends, and that’s what best friends do.”
The boy then parroted, in his bright and squawking voice, “That’s what best friends do!”
I’m not saying that all best friends should frolic down the aisle and get hitched right this very moment. I am saying, however, that this mother talking about her son’s game shows that our society is, in some way, advancing and becoming more tolerant. What was fantastic about this little conversation is the reassurance that there are some parents out there who are encouraging their children to be open-minded. There, at least, was a mother who was, by letting her child play minister to dozens of stuffed animal marriages, telling her son that there’s nothing different or wrong about the love between a woman and a man, between two women, or between two men.
Every woman and man--and apparently every teddy bear and Pound Puppy--has the right to love whomever they want to love.
Monday, January 4, 2010
(Ir)responsible Politics
Saturday afternoon, I drove to my parents’ house, two hours away, to watch the end of David Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who. While watching “The Waters of Mars” and the two-part “The End of Time” special, I listened to a fair bit of Obama bashing. (Hint: Expect a review of “The End of Time” this week.) Because of the conversation happening while I was trying to get lost in British television, I’ve had American politics on the brain for a few days.
I’m not writing today to deride my parents’ politics; people are entitled to their political views, regardless of whether or not we happen to agree with them. But there are responsible ways to address your political grievances.
Why this reflection? Saturday morning in Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, an effigy of President Barack Obama was found hanged along the community’s Main Street. I found this out through the BBC; many American news outlets are hiding this tidbit away and only using the Associated Press’s news release on the occurrence.
For a country that just shy of a year ago inaugurated its first African-American president, Saturday morning’s effigy is a cruel reminder of the way some people feel we should express our political opinions. Like something directly out of a William Faulkner novel, this event should remind us that whenever things change, people get scared, and they tend to look back to behaviors of the past. Instead of addressing the administration’s politics and agenda, somebody has pulled directly from the South’s sordid history of racial tension.
But Faulkner’s fiction--and here, I’m thinking of stories such as “A Rose for Emily” or his novel The Sound and the Fury--usually demonstrate that those old class hierarchies and that dependence on tradition are problematic, actually responsible for further social decay. The way in which Faulkner’s characters pine after the antebellum South--with both its slavery and its aristocratic glamour--reveals a culture that has stagnated and that collapses as the actual architecture of homes and plantations crumbles and rots.
But Faulkner’s characters--particularly Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!--find their thoughts mired in the past. They get stuck in this frame of mind and unable to move forward.
Listen: Barack Obama is a human being, and as such, he is not infallible. But there are responsible ways of demonstrating your political opinions. Write a letter to your legislature, get involved with a local organization of your political party, attend rallies, town hall meetings, pen a letter to the editor, get somebody’s attention with an argument--not a display of hatred and fear.
My opinion, for what it’s worth: If you don’t like President Obama’s policies, then attack his policies and back it up with ideas and evidence. Say what you don’t like, and why. Don’t attack the man just because you don’t like what he’s saying. That’s about as bad as high school students saying that they hate Shakespeare just because they don’t like Hamlet. The truth is, you don’t know Shakespeare and you don’t know Barack Obama. But you do know their work. Focus on that.
I believe that if America continues to use this fearmongering in its politics and if the population continues to deride people based solely on matters of ethnicity, faith, or sexuality, Faulkner’s image of the South as a collapsed aristocracy yearning for its glory days will become a template for America.
This country overwhelmingly elected an African-American president, and I would like to think that it can move beyond racial attacks. But there remain those who think its appropriate to hang an effigy of the president, which I think is several steps backward from November 2008. Racial politics haven’t left this country, and if there’s anything that we can learn (be it from the dilemma arising in Faulkner’s fiction or from the present circumstances of the Plains, Georgia, effigy), those of us who are lucid and level-headed enough to responsibly address our leaders--through phone calls, letters, grassroots organizations, or some contribution of money or time--have a Herculean task before us: showing others that there are non-violent means to working out our political problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/03/us/AP-US-Obama-Effigy-Plains.html?scp=1&sq=effigy&st=cse
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8438852.stm
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60300720100104
I’m not writing today to deride my parents’ politics; people are entitled to their political views, regardless of whether or not we happen to agree with them. But there are responsible ways to address your political grievances.
Why this reflection? Saturday morning in Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, an effigy of President Barack Obama was found hanged along the community’s Main Street. I found this out through the BBC; many American news outlets are hiding this tidbit away and only using the Associated Press’s news release on the occurrence.
For a country that just shy of a year ago inaugurated its first African-American president, Saturday morning’s effigy is a cruel reminder of the way some people feel we should express our political opinions. Like something directly out of a William Faulkner novel, this event should remind us that whenever things change, people get scared, and they tend to look back to behaviors of the past. Instead of addressing the administration’s politics and agenda, somebody has pulled directly from the South’s sordid history of racial tension.
But Faulkner’s fiction--and here, I’m thinking of stories such as “A Rose for Emily” or his novel The Sound and the Fury--usually demonstrate that those old class hierarchies and that dependence on tradition are problematic, actually responsible for further social decay. The way in which Faulkner’s characters pine after the antebellum South--with both its slavery and its aristocratic glamour--reveals a culture that has stagnated and that collapses as the actual architecture of homes and plantations crumbles and rots.
But Faulkner’s characters--particularly Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!--find their thoughts mired in the past. They get stuck in this frame of mind and unable to move forward.
Listen: Barack Obama is a human being, and as such, he is not infallible. But there are responsible ways of demonstrating your political opinions. Write a letter to your legislature, get involved with a local organization of your political party, attend rallies, town hall meetings, pen a letter to the editor, get somebody’s attention with an argument--not a display of hatred and fear.
My opinion, for what it’s worth: If you don’t like President Obama’s policies, then attack his policies and back it up with ideas and evidence. Say what you don’t like, and why. Don’t attack the man just because you don’t like what he’s saying. That’s about as bad as high school students saying that they hate Shakespeare just because they don’t like Hamlet. The truth is, you don’t know Shakespeare and you don’t know Barack Obama. But you do know their work. Focus on that.
I believe that if America continues to use this fearmongering in its politics and if the population continues to deride people based solely on matters of ethnicity, faith, or sexuality, Faulkner’s image of the South as a collapsed aristocracy yearning for its glory days will become a template for America.
This country overwhelmingly elected an African-American president, and I would like to think that it can move beyond racial attacks. But there remain those who think its appropriate to hang an effigy of the president, which I think is several steps backward from November 2008. Racial politics haven’t left this country, and if there’s anything that we can learn (be it from the dilemma arising in Faulkner’s fiction or from the present circumstances of the Plains, Georgia, effigy), those of us who are lucid and level-headed enough to responsibly address our leaders--through phone calls, letters, grassroots organizations, or some contribution of money or time--have a Herculean task before us: showing others that there are non-violent means to working out our political problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/03/us/AP-US-Obama-Effigy-Plains.html?scp=1&sq=effigy&st=cse
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8438852.stm
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60300720100104
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