Christian Leftist

The blogosphere is doing its job quite well in reporting stories globally that otherwise might only be noticed locally. The flip side of this is that it’s incredibly difficult to keep up. Just when I think I’m going to catch up with current events, there’s a whole bunch of new and even more depressing news stories that make me want to quit the internet for good. Of course, the feeling passes and I recover, but as I become more adept at not just looking but really listening to what people are saying behind their façades, it’s more and more difficult to pick and choose what’s more important to write about in the limited time I reserve for blogging each day.

Should I report blurbs on these stories and miss the education of reading these other stories? Won’t I be a better, more educated person if I try to learn as much as possible about the issues that matter the most to me? The end result of these questions is that I do more reading than writing, and my blogs suffer for it. I’m not making money from blogging as of right now. I’m doing this because I believe in social justice and activism, that this world could be better, that we need to treat other human beings with respect and dignity, that we need to NEVER FORGET what others do in ignorance because we can learn from their and our mistakes.

I just thought I should explain why “This Week in Racism” missed a few weeks.

Without further ado, this week’s list:

• William Sanders, editor-in-chief of Helix, a sci-fi / fantasy magazine, has some major issues with Arabs and chose to express his bigotry in a rejection letter to Luke Jackson, who sent him a manuscript about a Muslim terrorist.

  No, I’m sorry but I can’t use this.

  There’s much to like. I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people - at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can - and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities.

  He also used the phrase “most of the SF magazines are very leery of publishing anything that might offend the sheet heads.” Sanders and others who rushed to his defense after Jackson posted the letter said that his words were ‘taken out of context.’ Jackson himself intimated this before deciding that the legal issues of posting rejection letters were more relevant than Sanders’s bigotry, which I find deeply flawed, but the guy is at least allowing free discussion on his blog and has a willingness to listen, which is hard to come by in cases like this. To top it all off, Sanders obviously expected to find a sympathetic ear behind the story he received because of the subject of the story, so he was acting like the sci-fi community is a white old boy’s club, despite the fact that he himself is not white.

• Ed Kuck, a member of the Pemberton Republican Club in Burlington County, PA, decided that the group’s membership numbers weren’t low enough and posted a banner on the club’s website that read, Obama loves America like O.J. loved Nicole. The local GOP head decried the dirty slogan as having “no place in Burlington County Republican politics.”
• Florida’s New Smyrna Beach Police Department’s Commander William Drossman used his government email account to send a fallacious and racist chain letter full of invented and misleading quotes about Obama to members of his all-white force. One officer saw a print-out of it and reported the incident to the local news. I especially like how WFTV 9 included both a copy of the email and a link to the Snopes article that debunks the anti-Obama letter. According to the local laws, the Commander could be fired for using his work email to distribute political material. What’s more important than if he can be fired, of course, is the fact that he should.
  Share and Enjoy:

  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  •