Buo Lai En

AbdelIrada

About Buo Lai En

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I will nod to you as an equal, but I will not bow to you as my better, for my better does not exist. Nor, for the same reason, should you ever bow to me.
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Yesterday a voice spoke: "We can do better. We can *be* better."

Today a thousand million voices cry out: "We can do better. We can be better. And this time, we have to."

--Excerpted from "Ru'yaa," a poem in progress.
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Xenophobia is a crime against interdependent humanity, an offense to reason, and an abomination to morality.

It is a profanation of the ethos of Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha, and it belies the ideals of secular democracy. It is an illogical and barbarous vestige of primitive prehistory, a bootless defiance of the findings of science.

Men, women, children: All are individuals -- not, our former defense secretary to the contrary, fungible units in some inchoate mass -- and they must be judged as such, "according," in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., "to the content of their character, and not to the color of their skin."

At this terrible minute in our species' history, news reports that we mostly ignore or read and forget tell us that we have (within the past 50 years alone) consumed 60 percent of our world's vital resources, that anthropogenic environmental change has now become so ubiquitous and severe that that we as a species face potential *extinction*.

In this light, how can anyone argue for a second that we can still afford the lethal legacy of hate?

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"The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

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La yarshadu allahu az-zalima: God does not guide the unjust.
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"And the will therein lieth, that dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For *God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness.* Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." -- Joseph Glanvill
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Today, heedless, we crush the grass beneath our feet; tomorrow we shall be its mulch.
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I recently studied the Myers-Briggs personality-typing system on Wikipedia. This has (re-)convinced me of one thing: I am of the type that distrusts all systems of thinking that try to arrange people into artificial categories.

People are individuals. (How can they not be, when the constellation of influences -- heredity, environment and perhaps an ineffable "something more" -- that made each of them has never existed before, and never will again?) This defines diversity. And diversity is the engine of evolution, and evolution -- both biological and moral -- the purpose of existence.
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"I love my country because it is mine." -- Stephen Orbelian, 13th-century Armenian bishop and poet
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A conservative is like a man who, coming upon a hulking thug in the act of mugging an old lady, rushes in, fists upraised and mouth roaring imprecations, to the aid of the thug.
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Consumer culture is the moral anesthetic that numbs our souls against the pinpricks of outraged conscience.
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I think most stumblers are here for the same reason I am: to discover, share and critique new web pages. But there are also a few people who are here essentially to promote their own sites or businesses, and think the rest of us were put here to help them do it. To them I say: Think about what you're doing. If you send me a page from your site now and then, I will rate and possibly review it, giving my honest opinion about its content. But if you keep on sending me pages from one or two sites, and I think you're doing it for commercial reasons, I will first simply pass over your offerings; then, if you persist, I will disable toolbar sharing with you. __________________________________________________________________________________________

In this capitalist "democracy," we the citizens are welcome to say whatever we want -- as long as dissidents are not actually audible. And we may vote for what and whom we choose -- provided that it is to ratify a choice that the elite has already made for us.

We stray outside these bounds at the cost of becoming nonentities to mainstream American media: extremists by definition.

Our candidates have no chance of election, are not admitted to media debates, are dismissed out of hand for their "wacky ideas" without a hint as to what exactly is wacky about them.

Measures that would be helpful and cost little are condemned as boondoggles by pundits, who then endorse projects producing private profit and no public benefit at far greater cost as necessary to defend against ephemeral and ever-metamorphosing threats.

Amoral corporate interests perform cost-benefit calculations on every measure on our state ballots, and have worked out an apparently reliable index showing how much they will have to spend in advertising to sway enough voters to pass or defeat a measure, which is discussed with surprising frankness by some of their operatives.

Electoral insurgencies, in which the public interest supersedes the private, or the universal rights of man trump those of the elite, are in general short-lived and are followed by vicious reprisals from a resurgent elite.

Nonetheless, I think we need to remember that it is only through such "crises of democracy," arising among the citizens and directed toward a cogent moral purpose, that democracy can really exist.

And it is also only through such crises that we have wrested from the elite such concessions as emancipation (although it cost us a Civil War whose echoes haunt our discourse today) and the civil rights and enfranchisement of most of our citizenry.
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"Wi kull al-asrar/Maktub fi 'l-ahalam": "And all the answers/Are written in dreams." -- Natacha Atlas, "Ya Weledi"
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My communications policy is simple: I will listen to you unless you prove to me that I shouldn't. I see no advantage in joining a community and then proceeding to ignore everyone there except people you already knew. There is something to learn from everyone -- even if it's merely "This person really is nuts" -- so why deprive yourself of the opportunity to learn it?
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I am an American by blood, birth and breeding; but before I am an American, I am a member of the human species.
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My username, Abdel Irada, means "Servant of the Will" in Arabic. Hence the relevance of the Glanvill quote. And the Arabic inscription on my avatar ("Yawm al-eid milad") means "Today is the festival of the birth." It comes from a song ("Angel") by the British group Zohar, and its meaning is metaphorical and rather subtle.
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Carminal I: Fluid Fire*

Who but she, that fluid fire of my heart,
Hath eyes of ice in burning aqua framed,
Whose sparks like midnight fountains' blazes start
To flash in spectral firestreaks from their spheres
Like firefalls on mountain cascades untamed
Or dance of city lights on darkling meres?

Who but she, igniter of blood and mind,
Hath on her head a crown of gold ablaze
In tides of fire surging to make eyes blind
From phosphor seas of moonbeams burning bright
As gold and pearls in gulfs of silver rays
Whose waves like gems blaze in dawn's topaz light?

Who but she, she who sets men's souls afire,
Hath aspect so with beauty's rays aflame
That bright heaven's stars to its beams aspire,
That the very sun envies its fair glow,
And maids fair as the moon on it lay blame
Like night unstarred outshone by sun-gilt snow?

Who but she hath all these? Yet all were naught
But for that taintless mind, that force of thought,
And perfect beacon soul, of love's light wrought.

*A carminal is a kind of sonnet-like poem I developed as a teenager, using iambic pentameter and the rhyme-scheme ABA-CBC-DED-FEF-GHG-IHI-JJJ. This is my first complete example, addressed to a high-school classmate in ... well, that would be telling. ;-)
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Vers libre: Downwind

Daily the freeway edges a little closer.
Daily it grows a little bigger, dirtier,
More crowded, more congested. Daily it
Roars ever so slightly louder, with just
So much deeper a note of menace.
Pollution, too, and airborne death in
A thousand shapes: Daily the freeway
Vomits a fraction more of these its woes
Upon a luckless downwind multitude.

Daily wanes the scant screen of ragged redwoods
That have for so long stood sentinel --
Forlorn hopes, perhaps; reminders of
A better time; symbols still, whether
Effectual or no -- melting almost
Perceptibly before thousands of luckless
Downwind faces. Daily, too, the CalTrans
Trucks rattle past, rows of carrion
Beetles grown enormous, racing to some
Wound in raped and moribund nature's flesh
To aid in the corruption.
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Having been a writer, editor and journalist for many years, I am scrupulous in attribution. This means that if any words on this page or in any of my reviews were originally written by someone other than me, I will tell you so; if I don't know who originally wrote them, I will also tell you that. Therefore, absent attribution, you may safely assume the words are in fact mine.