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Well, that sure was a bonehead move on the part of Greenpeace.  When your whole message is ‘save the Earth’ you don’t want to get into trouble with the park rangers.  That’s messed up.  I’m sure their intentions were good.  Put a nice little save the Earth message out there where lots of people could see it (lots of tourists who definitely weren’t there to see it, they wanted to look at the Nazca lines, they wanted to look back centuries, millenia, to a time long before Greenpeace, to a time long before Greenpeace was necessary) and it could be seen from above, good footage for TV and YouTube.

Officials at the site are pissed.  They want jail time.  They want to punish those Greenpeaceniks like Wesley Crusher in that episode where he went after the frisbee in the park but soon found out that walking on the grass was a capital offense on that planet.

“Disturbing the environment,” they said. With their footprints.    Well, any place else in the world, I’d say they  were exaggerating, but not here.

If Greenpeace’s motive was to draw attention to themselves, they’ve succeeded.  But, it’s not the good kind of attention.  As far as political self-expression goes this was about the equivalent of taking a dump on the White House lawn.

The U.S. has  the Kochs and the Waltons, who  we think of as the evillest people in the  world, and there  may be some truth to that, but other countries have their arrogant oligarchs as well.

Meet the Cho’s.  I’d  never heard of them before, either, until macadamiagate.  But that’s my whole  point.  There is probably a family or two like this in  most countries.  People who are wealthy enough to think the laws don’t apply to them because, in fact, they don’t.

The family history  includes the usual stuff, some tax evasion, a road rage thing, but it was the macadamia nut incident that brought them into the public  eye, internationally.  A mosquito can kill an elephant.  What happened is that Cho Hyun-ah, also known  as Heather Cho, was sitting in  first class (of course) on a flight from New York to Seoul.  As the flight was waiting to take off, a steward brought her a bag of  macadamia nuts.

She got pissed off and irate and freaked out a bit, because apparently he was supposed to put the nuts on a plate.  They had to bring the plane back to the gate, and the steward was sacked.  In one sense, she was justified in  pointing it out because she is (or actually was – at least in South Korea, actions still have consequences) the director of  customer service for the airline, and a vice president, which is not too surprising, in view of the fact that her father owns the company.

But, as she’s director of customer service, you’d think she’s be a little more able to handle a situation like that without major consequences.  She could have called the steward back over and said: Hi, you might not know me but I’m Cho Hyun-ah and I’m your boss.  I’d like  to remind you that in first class you’re supposed to serve macadamia nuts on a plate.  Don’t let  it happen  again.”  And the problem would have been solved.

Cho Hyun-ah

The difference between South Korea and the U.S. is that  the incident is being investigated and Cho could be charged with disturbing the peace, interfering with a flight crew, some stuff like that.  Unlike all the police officers who’ve actually been filmed  killing people.

I see a parallel between what is happening in Ferguson, in  Staten  Island, and between the police  and the people  all across America, and the release of the Senate report on torture.  Police have been caught  on camera killing people without any provocation whatsoever, even children, and no police officers have been indicted at all, and it just seems like the police, who are the thin blue line protecting the powers that be against the  unwashed mob that  is the rest of us, are saying ‘Yeah, we know you know that we kill whoever we want to, and we know you know we know and there  isn’t a damn  thing you can do about it, so hahaha.’

Sort of the same thing with the torture report.  It’s confirmed  now that it was happening like  crazy all over the place, so it can’t be  denied.  Of course, there were photos all over the place at the time, too, it’s amazing  that the only person punished for it was that nearly  retarded girl  down  in North  Carolina who only participated to look cool in front of the camp bully, who she was shtooping.

In  a just world, when a report like this is released (or when millions of  people see film of  a police  officer choking a man to death for selling  cigarettes, or of a child  playing with  a toy  gun, gunned  down  in a park by an officer we now know was emotionally unfit for  duty) there would be repercussions, heads would  roll, many people would resign to spend more  time with their families.

No such thing any  more.  There will be legislation calling for bipartisan censure of anything bad that might  have happened and we’re sorry if anybody is offended and so on and  so  forth.

It’s a bad situation.  Until some people go  to jail  over this  kind of thing, we canexpect this kind of thing to continue.

The arguments over Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, the guy who was gunned down in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart, and many others, continues.  It seems there’s a new incident every day or so and, to make it even worse, it seems as if this has been going on forever, it’s just the recent proliferation of camera phones and rapid communication systems like Twitter have suddenly made it visible.

There is one question we should be asking, though, and it doesn’t even seem like most of us are at that stage yet.  The question is “What can be done about it?”

For tonight’s blog I’m just going to cut and paste because my facebook friend Bill Allyn has compiled a list of actions that could be taken to correct this situation, and done a better job of it than I could.  I think numbers 12 and 13 should be numbers 1 and 2, and there are a few others where we might quibble over details, but overall I think he’s done a magnificent job.

Here’s the list:

1. Create citizen oversight committees with powers of subpoena and prosecutorial discretion for every law enforcement agency in the country.

It Happens a Lot

2. Require law enforcement officers to be personally insured to protect taxpayers from lawsuits. Too risky for insurance? No insurance, no badge.
3. Require every law enforcement officer to wear a camera. No camera, no gun. No exceptions.
4. Require yearly psyche tests and lie detector tests to screen out bad apples.
5. Require monthly drug and steroid tests.
6. All police agencies must keep a database of every officer-caused civilian injury, shooting or killing, and that data must be periodically transmitted to a third-party, non-biased national database.
7. Any officer involved in a shooting must be alcohol and drug tested immediately.
8. Officers should be made aware of studies on abuse of power, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures.
9. Create a special number to report police brutality.
10. Create national database of bad cops, so they don’t just get hired elsewhere.
11. Reverse militarization of police forces. Take away military “toys”, weapons, APC’s, uniforms, etc. Keep SWAT/military weapons and equipment under lock and key only to be used in genuine emergencies.
12. End drug prohibition/war on drugs. Use harm reduction strategies.
13. End private prison industry.
14. Create a national organization dedicated to these ideals.

That’s it.  Share if you agree.

I want to write to you tonight about a disturbing trend.  I didn’t think it was disturbing until a couple of days ago.  I thought it was a harmless passing fad  and a clever marketing technique.  Now I see it as an insidious plot to pit human against human and bring about the apocalypse.

Carbonativity

I think Coke started this idea of putting people’s names on each can, which was no problem as long as you’ve got a common name.  Now, Nutella is doing it and since it’s a stick on label they can customize it with any name you want.  So, even if your name is Dingleberry T. Poopypants, you can have it on your bottle of Nutella.  Still, I didn’t give it much thought.

Then, Helena gave each of the kids and me a jar of Nutella for Mikulaš (Saint Nicholas Day, December 5th) and each jar has one of our names on it.  Later that evening Sam asked me if I’d got some Nutella out of his jar.  I said “No, but it wouldn’t matter if I had.  My Nutella is the same as your Nutella and we can all take from each other’s Nutella.”  Nutella’s pretty darned popular in our household,  and when these three jars run out, we will probably rush out and buy some more.

Sam accepted this explanation.  Isabel was adamantly opposed.  “No!  It’s my Nutella.  Do not touch my Nutella.”  I tried to explain that if she  could take from me and Sammy it worked out the same, but she wasn’t having any of my logic nonsense.

Her Nutella.  If Helena’s just bought 3 unlabeled bottles there would have been no problem.   Civilization is like that.  We pin a label on something and then we feel  obligated to respond to that  label.

Sometimes, maybe, we should listen  to a song and just try to enjoy it without  trying to figure out it’s genre.  Sometimes, maybe, when we meet people,  we should ask them what they think  instead of “Where are you from?” or “What  do you do?”  Some day, maybe, we will realize that the borders of the nations of the world are just labels, like thus stuck onto jars on Nutella.  We’re all one people.  It’s all the same chocolate.