In the local Sydney paper over the weekend, the op-ed column was headed “A time for reflection,” which I thought was nice except that the world would probably be in a much better place if we took time to reflect for the other 51 weeks of the year. Sorry, better make that 50 because Christmas also seems to be the other popular time for reflection.

In response to the article, I took some time myself to reflect on where we are in our world and what the world has suffered for want of reflection for most of the year.

There are still asylum-seekers “imprisoned” in holding centers in outback Australia. Most of them are there because they chose to flee repressive regimes and the fear of death. So they came to Australia, an enlightened Western democracy, and must wonder at times if it is not another repressive regime.

The U.S. also has its own detention center at Guantanamo Bay. I decided to Google and see what the latest news was on the center for suspects in the “war on terror.” In the Salt Lake Tribune for Tuesday, March 29th, there is a report of a member of the Utah Guard who has volunteered to serve at Guantanamo Bay. Colonel Blackner was quoted as saying, “It was important to me to be able to contribute to the fight against terrorism,” he said. “The mission here is critical to the success of this fight.”

Is the mission of Guantamo Bay “critical” to the fight against terrorism? If we take time to reflect on the past year or so, is there not a great deal of injustice being dealt out under the guise of the so-called war on terror?

What about life in Iraq? I’m sure the Iraqi population has had plenty of time to reflect on life after Saddam. Perhaps if America and Britain had formulated a plan for a reconstruction of Iraq before the events, rather than as events unfolded, then maybe the saga of Iraq wouldn’t be in the quagmire it is now.

We have also witnessed photos, in the past 12 months, of American and British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. Oh, of course there were murmurs of discontent from some politicians, but what reflection has this caused for the proud Western nations, the defenders of democracy and justice?

Perhaps, as I get older, I am becoming more cynical, but as I read the op-ed over the weekend, I was struck by just how little our governing institutions really do reflect. Blame and excuse-making seem to take the place of critical reflection. Maybe if a few of us take time to regularly reflect and act upon our deliberations throughout the year, we might be able to build the foundations of a thoughtful, just democracy that is collaborative not just in principle but in practice.

Note to Americans: make sure you find out whether your local pharmacy agrees to fill the prescription you think you’ll need before you need it. Articles in The Washington Post, on Alternet.org,  CBSnews.com, and the websites of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization of Women report that the number of cases in which pharmacists have refused to fill prescriptions is increasing in America.

In a debate today on The Early Show, presidents of Planned Parenthood and Pharmacists for Life International argued about the right of pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Various state laws and refusal clauses allow pharmacists the right of refusal when filling prescriptions goes against their personal moral and religious beliefs.  In response to Pharmacists for Life President Karen Brauer’s statement that pharmacists are as liable as doctors for the prescriptions they fill, Planned Parenthood President Karen Pearl said,

“It’s really a matter of whose conscience matters, and I would say the conscience of the women is the conscience that prevails…[Pharmacists for Life] is a small group of extremists who really want to put their belief system, their ideology onto everybody else, and women in America simply won’t stand for that.”

In her Alternet.org article, “States of Denial,” Abby Christopher draws attention to the fact that currently there is no incentive for hospitals to abide by laws requiring them to make emergency contraception accessible to patients in cases of rape. One implication here is that such a law ties a woman’s decision to be proactive (in seeking medical assistance in lowering her risk of pregnancy) to her identification of herself as a victim (of rape).

NARAL Pro-Choice America has launched a campaign to protect women’s access to birth control in response to pro-life stands being taken by pharmacists, offering two proactive action plans for activists. In the meantime, the National Organization for Women has put together a quick-reference fact sheet which details why women should pay attention to the repercussions of the recently approved federal “Abortion Non-Discrimination Act,” which both overrides Title X guidelines requiring women to be referred for abortions upon their request, and “allows health care institutions to refuse to comply with federal and state regulations regarding a range of abortion-related services, including pharmacist referrals,” according to a heavily referenced article on the Planned Parenthood website.

“I do not know whether I am an adult or a child…All I do is eat and sleep, eat and sleep.”

— Majok, a Sudanese youth who was brutalized and castrated as a child, and who is now a freed slave. Majok does not know how old he is or what his name is.

In January of 2005, an agreement was signed to end the civil war in Sudan that raged for 21 years between the largely Muslim north of the country — where the Arabic speaking Sudanese identify themselves as Arabs — and the Christian and Animist southern region. In the months after the agreement to end the war, the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children (CEAWC), a six-year-old Sudanese organization, founded by the government, has been repatriating southern Sudanese who were enslaved by their northern compatriots. It is unclear how many southerners were enslaved; the London- and Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute has identified 12,000 abductions, 11,000 missing, and 5,000 murdered. In contrast, the controversial Swiss group, Christian Solidarity International, refers to 200,000 people who were abducted, a number generated by local southern Sudanese leaders.

The CEAWC’s repatriation of slaves is problematized and complicated; while many former slaves are relieved and delighted to return to their southern homeland, there are others, particularly of the younger generation, who feel displaced and wish to return to the northern region, which they have come to identify as home. Additionally, agencies including UNICEF and Save the Children UK have criticized or questioned CEAWC’s methodology for repatriating individuals, suggesting that some people were not clearly identified as slaves, or if they were, they were not consulted about whether they wanted to return to the south or if they even had families to return to.

Mimi Hanaoka

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 sent shivers of horror, disbelief, and indignation throughout America, and the American intelligence community was forced to face the tears and recrimination of the nation. Now America has the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, a thee-year pilot program with a four million dollar budget that, by September of 2006, will send a maximum of 150 current or aspiring analysts — most are graduate students — to university programs, generally for two years, to resuscitate what critics have labeled America’s feeble and systemically crippled intelligence community. The question, then, is whether this program is a boon for the nation or a sinister and secret plan. The jury is still out.

The program is clearly designed to meet a near-desperate need of intelligence, as the terrorist attacks in 2001 demonstrated. In 2004 the CIA stated that it aims to increase the number of its analysts by 50 percent, and the organization has undergone numerous personnel reshuffles recently, in addition to the broader changes occurring in the American intelligence community-at-large.

While the program demonstrates an attempt to rectify recent intelligence failures with a larger pool of more focused analysts, there are concerns about the ethics of the program. Importantly, the students enrolled in the Pat Roberts program will be working behind desks and are not actual spies in the field; they seem, however, suspiciously close to spies in the classroom. The students are not obligated to disclose their intelligence affiliations to the academic community or to their professors, and some critics of the program have raised ethical concerns, especially regarding the students’ anthropological fieldwork and work in the social sciences, particularly given previous relationships between social scientists, the CIA, and totalitarian regimes. Associate Professor of Anthropology at St. Martin’s College David H. Price argues that the program may confuse and taint the ethical obligations of the academic with his or her allegiance to the intelligence community. Additionally, he argues that the unannounced presence of an intelligence community member will be tantamount to spying on professors.    

The success and efficacy of the program is still open to debate, and the its four million dollar budget is certainly small; this year’s budget for Title VI fellowships for area studies, which are funded by the federal government, channeled through participating universities, and which carry no government service obligations, is 28.2 million dollars. The issues the Pat Roberts program raises, however, are pertinent and valid; does this program threaten the intellectual and personal freedom of American professors, does it reintroduce an inappropriate dose of secret intimacy between academia and the intelligence community, and would making such a program more transparent compromise its very purpose?

Mimi Hanaoka

George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has figured out how “what was considered extreme just a decade ago [has become] national policy.” And he’s written about it in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Lakoff’s research in cognitive linguistics has shown how human goals, behavior, and actions are shaped by “frames,” which he defines as “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” Consequently, “in politics, our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies.” Lakoff explains,

“You can’t see or hear frames. They are part of what cognitive scientists call the ‘cognitive unconscious’ – structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access, but know by their consequences: the way we reason and what counts as common sense. We also know frame through language. When you hear a word, its frame (or collection of frames) is activated in your brain.”

Lakoff believes in the tie between language and politics: whoever controls language controls politics. He contends that the specific words people use to communicate, and the framing they use, are crucial to the future of the nation: the language used in American politics is a precision tool which shapes our political future.

The idea that language and politics shape each other is not new: George Orwell explored this theme in his novel, 1984, and in essays such as “Politics and the English Language,” as does William Safire in his weekly column, “On Language,” for The New York Times.

“My children don’t see role models in their lives: mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business owners. So we’re setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique society.”

— Marvin T. Miller, who is deaf, speaking through an interpreter about the town for the deaf he intends to build on a sparsely populated stretch of land in South Dakota (Salem, the neighboring town, has 1,300 residents).  The proposed town, Laurent — named in honor of Laurent Clerc, a 19th-century teacher of the deaf — has already attracted 92 families who intend to move to the village, where all services, including stores, the fire station, restaurants, and businesses would be deaf-friendly. American Sign Language would be the dominant language in the village.

Mimi Hanaoka