Politics

"Each generation must, out of their relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it."

-Frantz Fanon, from the Wretched of the Earth

Politics has been a part of my life from a very young age. Not so much politics in the sense of donkeys and elephants (though of course I pay attention to such things), but politics in the sense that there are vast problems in the world that shouldn't exist, and that as a modern society we should make steps to fix. In my opinion, considering all the resources and technology that we have, why should suffering and misery continue to exist not just in this nation, but also around the world? Far from subscribing to some misguided theory of social darwinism that selfish people use to justify their own greed and avarice, I think that people will succeed best when everyone around them succeeds. Towards this desire to make a difference in the world, the following are a few of the main issues that I have interests in:

The Prison-Industrial Complex
If you want to understand a society, then you should look at who they incarcerate. In the United States, there are over a million people currently incarcerated, with higher proportions of poor people of color incarcerated than their representation in society in general. Is it that way because we people of color are more prone to commit crime? I don't think so. Crime is caused by a combination of factors, including but not limited to reactions to racism, socio-economic opportunities, geographics, peer pressure, family, and mental illness. How do you solve this problem? Just lock people up and throw away the key? Get tough on crime? No. How about committing some resources away from an emphasis on punishment to an emphasis on rehabilitation. How about stopping the warehousing of the American workforce in prisons, and stopping the process of economic restructuring that caused the outsourcing of jobs to other countries that had previously been in the United States. And how about decriminalizing drug use and treating it as an illness, while you're at it.

Pro-Peace Work
The United States currently commits huge amounts of its resources towards maintaining its military presence abroad. Is this really necessary in a post-Cold War environment? Sure there are "concerns about terrorism," but how much terrorism is really "state-sponsored" and how much is being committed by small groups of extremists who are not operating out of a national context? Even if you buy the party line fomented by the administration, if you were to add up all the military forces and arms of the quote-unquote "rogue nations," do they truly represent a threat to the combined military might of the Unites States and its forces abroad, not even counting its allies? No. Even in a post-9-11 environment, there is little justification for the huge numbers of troops and conventional weapons (not even counting the nukes) that we continue to maintain. If the United States wishes to be effective in dealing with issues such as terrorism, then it should focus on economic development to shrink the disparity between rich and poor nations, and focus on bridge building instead of bombing.