Human Rights: February 2009 Archives
This continues a discussion about my adventures in Eco-Flackdom.The green/ethical consumer movement is very promising. It shows just how many people want to make a difference with their purchasing power. However, as long as making a difference stays in the domains of consumer trends and personal ambition, well-meaning impulses can easily be co-opted by polluting industries or those with an anti-science agenda.
It's not that the green businesses or consumers shouldn't be doing their thing, it's that they need to constantly think critically about the information they get, and make sure that they remain citizens first and consumers second. The last 30+ years of environmental history have shown us that it's easy for those who make a career or hobby out of environmental advocacy to lose site of people with less access to educational opportunity or resources to make their communities clean and safe.
For me, the shift from Environmental Consumer to Citizen resulted from a combination of the TreeHugger breaching, crazy domestic spying/terrorism, and watching a Movie called Cache. I saw that if we failed to take care of each other by protecting one another's rights, our environmental concerns might prove meaningless.
Continue reading Confessions of a Former Eco-Flack: Part 2.
When you’ve been terrorized by a group of people, how do you refuse to
tolerate their tactics without losing sight of their humanity? Before
spending a lot of time discussing this on Monday I didn’t realize that
this was a central question I’d been grappling with.For a long while, each interaction with individual participants in the anti-Kyeann and Mom terror campaign was painfully taxing. How could this person hate me bad enough to poison my food? Try to upset me while cutting my hair? Ridicule me based on private information he never should have been able to access? Take part in an entrapment scheme? Place listening or viewing devices in my home? Stalk me?
There have been a variety of players with a variety of motivations but it’s clear that there is a small army of extreme right wing zealots in our city, ready to be activated to terrorize people when given the go-ahead. It’s also clear that in our case this is a culmination of years of ideologically based harassment. What they have taken part in recently is the dictionary definition of terrorism: “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.”
Continue reading Tolerating Religious Diversity vs. Endorsing Terrorism.
