Sunday Skool: Madame Wildhair and the Spark

Cynthia McKinney definitely has the SPARK: Look at what it did to her hair!

I still voted for her.

Daily Kos is the #1 Kontrolled Ops “liberal” website.  If you’ve lurked there you’ve probably noticed that the site is staffed primarily with Israel-Can-Do-No-Wrong-And-If-You-Prove-Us-Wrong-Ur-An-Anti-Semite” types.” Boring and predictable, and although I have an account there I’ve moved on to the Wild West of the internet where people are able to write more freely without having TPTB and Megaphone Minders shut them down for speaking the truth.

While the rest of the world was watching round-the-clock coverage of  Governor Sanford’s wayward peen or Michael Jackson’s demise, former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, 20 other activists and her boatload of humanitarian aid were highjacked by Israel in international waters. Ms. McKinney described it as “an outrageous violation of international law” as the boat was on a humanitarian mission and was not in Israeli waters. On the other hand, the Israeli military said the boat was trying to enter Gaza illegally. As of Sunday morning Ms. McKinney is still in a cell block in Tel Aviv with other women detained for much of the same: Trying to enter Gaza “illegally.” Radical women with humanity on their minds.

One may won ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there fire two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

- Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

The legality or illegality of the actions on both sides is debatable in a nitpicky kind of way but the splitting of hairs detracts from the point of this admittedly political gesture:  Civil disobedience by definition involves breaking laws when such laws result in an injustice being done. Isn’t the larger crime the Israeli siege against, and the collective punishment of, the Palestinian people?  According to Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies 96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs.  The denial of food and medicine to people is a war crime, is it not? What possible benefit can be derived from an increasingly impoverished, unhealthy, densely crowded, and furious Gaza alongside Israel?

Here was the first comment on the post at Kos about Ms. McKinney’s most recent incarceration for trying to bring toys, medicine and building supplies to the beleaguered Gazans:  “She broke Israeli law protesting. She’s in an Israeli jail as a result. So?” Lincoln Deshain had something to say about that:

Maybe some have taken the final stance that she is just a grandstanding troublemaker with a tremendous ego. Now how much of that is truth, or media projection and portrayal? Thats a question only to be answered by those who know her personally, which I don’t. But I have seen her work. The lady is fierce. She doesn’t need to do half of the things she undertakes. She could just as easily have protected her career and sat back like the rest of the Washington wallfowers. (She might still be a congresswoman today if she had.)

It isn’t as if these things she has done, the places her convictions have taken her have placed her in a good light. She’s Madame Wildhair, who ran for as the Green Party candidate. She doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut, and she doesn’t know her place.  She probably went over there to cause trouble, and to seek publicity for some kind of ‘comeback tour’ to save her political career, right? She probably went over there with all those other ambassadors and the convoy of ships full of humanitarian aid just so she could get back on TV and wriggle her way back into our hearts, right? Obviously by giving this any attention, we’re just encouraging her bad actions . . . (snip)

. . . Now she will be released. But this is a far cry from chaining yourself to a tree in hope that a TV camera might show up. And I don’t like to see the kind of Kraft Easy Math i’m seeing here where the rule of law is assumed to be correct, even in an area where we KNOW the opposite is true, with contextual basis stating otherwise, just because you’re a little annoyed by Cynthia McKinney. I think it does her a disservice, and the people she went over there with, and of course the Gazans who we’ve all but forgotten about now that Peace has broken out all over the Middle East.

There’s a collective habit that weak-minded people  fall into: Dismissing the protests of individuals who go against the grain, or challenge the conventional wisdom put forth by the dominant culture. Martin Luther King was once considered a wild eyed radical, was followed by the FBI and disparaged mercilessly by our so called ‘objective press’ after he came out against the Vietnam war–at a time when the Democrats couldn’t even primary in an anti-war candidate.

Going a back a little bit further in history, Henry David Thoreau was visited in jail by Emerson, having been arrested for protesting the Mexican American War by refusing to pay taxes. Emerson, incredulous, asked Thoreau, “Why are you in here?”

Thoreau, equally incredulous, replied, “Why are you out there?”

You don’t need to like Cynthia McKinney or her tactics. You don’t need to agree with her.  All I ask is that you SEE her:  Madame Wildhair has the Spark.  She has IT.  Maybe it’s something you never had, or something you had once upon a time and lost.  Maybe you still have it, that spark of liberty that will make you do and say outrageous things in the face of the overwhelming odds against you, because some things are just right, and some things are just wrong, and no unjust law is going to prevent you from taking a stand.

Those who do not hear the music think the dancers mad.

- African Proverb

And that my dears is your sermon for today. I return you to your round-the-clock coverage of Sarah Palin’s incoherent resignation. Oh, and Michael Jackson:  ZOMG Did He Fake His Death?

According to international humanitarian law children are to be afforded special protection during international armed conflicts. This includes military occupation such as exists in the Palestinian territories under Israel. Legal protection is provided by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Israel signed the CRC in 1991.