Brazil’s Loss is also ours

Watching Brazil lose to the Netherlands today (by 3 to 0) and to Germany a few days ago (by 7 to 1) in the semi finals of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, I reminded myself of the key point in soccer: Which is not to win or lose a game but to play the latter very well with determination and tenderness. Questions such as the following abound: How could this ever occur? What did the coach (Luiz Felipe Scolari) not do to prevent the catastrophe? How can Brazil get over the humiliation? What next? In all these questions, we forget that the lessons in Brazil's loss in the World Cup are also ours. There are clear moral lessons in the fact that Brazil, the greatest soccer team of the world, lost two major games consecutively without being able to repair the damage on the playground. We must always remember that no one has the monopoly of victory. Empires rise and empires fall. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.  So, Brazil's failure is a parable to everyone because it also shows that this great nation's football can and shall rise again with hard work. 

The Place of D'Souza and Gingrich in the Repertoire of Western Primitivizing of the Other

Please help Haiti

Please help our people of Haiti who are suffering right now under the damages of the terrible earthquake that has struck the jewel of the Caribbean on January 12, 2010. Please contact your local representative, senator, councilperson, or other leader and ask them to help deploy immediate support to the Haitian people. Also, contact a humanitarian group such as Red Cross, World Vision, WyClef Jean's foundation and similar organizations to send your financial support. Every dollar will help reduce the toll of a the most terrible human crises that have ever confronted Haiti. Please check out Wyclef Jean's website on ways to help the Haitian people: http://www.yele.org/



Thanks for your humanity.

Babacar M'Baye

A response to the War in Gaza

The situation in Gaza shows that the United Nations Organization has once again been emasculated by the G8 powers to the point when it has become completely unable to defend human rights. Just as the world witnessed and continues to witness the destruction of the lives of people of African descent in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and, as we speak, in Zimbabwe, Uganda, and the current DRC, it is once again powerlessly bearing witness to genocide of human lives in Gaza. I say “human lives” because no nation or international agency is stepping up to end the violence in this part of the world, as should be the case had we learned the lessons of Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, and the DRC. If we really mean what we say when we talk about "freedom" and "democracy," we should not allow powerful groups to eradicate less powerful groups from the earth. Allowing this situation to happen is tantamount to letting strong gangs eat up weaker gangs while we (patrol officers and so called law-abiding citizens) duck and endlessly brag about our love of “liberty” in the media, courts, and classrooms. Future generations will remember us as the people who did not defend the most basic human need which gives reason to our existence: the need to value the life of one person as being as important as that of another. We keep seeing this devaluation of the lives of other human beings by the narrow-minded and militaristic abusers of human rights that keep contradicting the virtues of reason, liberty, and equal rights that populate their rhetoric and books. One solution to this blindness is for every citizen to call their local representative and ask for a withdrawal of the Israeli Army out of Gaza and for a multilateral resolution of the conflict. Citizens, not the current UN, will be the driving force of liberty. They can ask clear-minded leaders from around the world to get together and find ways to continue negotiations leading to peaceful solutions.