Only a few more days to kill

The incoming Biden administration will, of course, overturn many of the current president's policies.  It is no secret.  So, the current administration is on a pace to do whatever can be done before Inauguration Day, 2021.

One of those that is being rushed is not one that will ever sound important to be rushed.  Only a few might believe it has a high priority.

To execute as many federal death row inmates as possible before January 20, 2021.

Federal executions were restarted only this past summer--on July 14th.  Yes, ironically, on Bastille Day--a month after the storming of the prison led to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The current administration and its staunchest supporters do not think that the powerful state using its machinery to end of life of humans has anything to do with the Rights of Man or the words humane and humanity.  And, yes, even more ironical that they are the supposedly pro-life religious party that eagerly seeks to end lives.  The late Christopher Hitchens articulated well this blood-thirst of the religious:

The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

What we do with the mighty power of the government machinery is “a mirror” on ourselves.

The reflection in the mirror is not what I want to see.

The Justice Department published a rule change, set to take effect this month, allowing federal executions by methods other than lethal injection, including firing squads or electrocution, in certain circumstances.

They are so pro-life that they want to bring back the firing squads!

These are the same anti-government people who have the utmost faith that the government is doing the right thing really, really well!

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?

So, if their plans work out well, "the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump’s federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliest in the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century."

All these in addition to the nearly 300,000 that they condemned to die because of a pandemic that they couldn't care about, and do not care about even now.

What a tragedy that the sanctity of the fertilized ovum is the only one that qualifies as worthy of their support!

Burning memories

I had a whole bunch of classmates from South Korea when I was in graduate school.  My dissertation guide referred to them as the Korean mafia, for the manner in which they operated as a tight group.

Thanks to the military service, I think, they were typically two to five years older than me.  A couple of them were married, and at least one had a kid, as I recall now decades later.  One guy went to Vegas one weekend and came back about 3,000 dollars richer!!!   He took me to a Korean BBQ restaurant, which was quite an experience.  Another guy always had a nice car, in which we went to Santa Barbara for a conference.  He took me to the Chart House in Malibu, which was a huge deal for the starving graduate student that I was. 

One of the mafia guys emailed me a few years ago.  Some how he tracked me down.  "Do you remember me?" he asked.  Like I could have forgotten them all!  In the warm email recalling old classmates, he wrote that the mafia was doing well, with a majority of them in academia.  He himself was a university provost.  "If you have a chance to visit Korea, these Mafia will really welcome you," he added.

With two of them, I recall having had discussions about culture and art and movies.  Boy would it be a pleasure to find out what they thought about Burning.

The movie has plenty of intellectual stuff to talk about.  The urban-rural divide that was so much a part of the graduate school discussions.  Income and wealth inequality.  The role of women in society.  North Korea, which is only a stone's throw away from Seoul.

And personal matters too.  Did one of my old classmates ever find out whatever happened to the grandparents and his eldest sibling who were left behind in North Korea, and whom his parents never saw again?  What are the mafia's kids up to, and what do they think about Burning?  Do they smoke cigarettes even now like how they used to in grad school?

In the journey of life, we are fellow passengers for a while.  We exit at different places and continue on with our separate travels.  Rarely do we travel together again.  

I am glad that I traveled for a while with the Korean mafia.

Sweet home, Alabama?

In my initial few days after getting to Los Angeles, I thought everything looked fantastic, like how a rich country should. 

It didn't take me much to understand that I was using the old country as a frame of reference. 

After that red-pill experience happened, I could see problems everywhere.  Like how the one grocery store in the area was always crowded and it stank.  Or how apartment buildings were secured behind electric gates and intercoms.  How the sidewalks were not all even, and how sometimes there were no sidewalks.

Halfway through graduate school, a friend told me about a room that was vacant in his apartment complex.  A single unit, with a shared laundry in the building.  The rent that he quoted was phenomenally low.  I rushed there and signed the lease.

It was inexpensive for a reason.  For plenty of reasons, actually.  The water in the faucet ran brown sometimes.  The neighborhood, it turned out, had a drug business problem.

The nearly two years there was my only ever experience to have lived in near-poverty conditions.

I was now increasingly convinced that there was something seriously wrong with the image of America as a rich country.

Close to graduation, I went to New Orleans for a conference.  I wandered through without a map and accidentally ended up in neighborhoods that looked run down and anything unlike a rich landscape.  I worried about the country that I knew would be home to me.

A decade later, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and when a good chunk of the country and the world woke up to the reality, I was relieved that finally a lot more people were seeing the city that I had walked about.

I have often told students that my travels provide me a wonderful reality check---going to economically depressed areas in the US or in the rest of the world gives me a clear idea of the luxurious life that I lead, and going to affluent neighborhoods in affluent cities reminds me that I am nowhere near the upper echelons.

Often, even without traveling, I get my lessons.  Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker.  It is brutal depiction of the gross economic (and racial) injustice in a rich country.  An injustice when a community lacks a sewage treatment process, and when crap literally floods people's yards.  A sewage scene that the UN rapporteur said "was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world."

This was not in New Orleans though.  It was in Alabama.  It was in "one of the poorest counties in one of America’s poorest states."

I have seen enough, read enough, and watched enough to know that it is way past time that we addressed the economic and social injustice in my adopted home.  I hope that the new administration will be laser focused on these.