Mr. Stroud Responds Again

Posted by Pinky.

I just heard back from Mr. Stroud in Syracuse. His e-mail:

Idiots,
So what were we supposed to do? Just let them kill our families as we sit around and do nothing? Do you even know anybody who died at ground zero? Go tell their children how you plan to do nothing to bring those terrorists to justice. I'm so sick of all your whining about peace and consider this conversation over. J. Stroud

You know, I read Mr. Stroud's e-mail several times, and the most striking thing for me is how he apparently sees retaliating with violence as the only ‘real' or ‘legitimate' response to violence - fighting for peace, or understanding, or healing looks a lot like 'sitting around doing nothing' to him. I think his inability to even imagine an alternative to violence is actually a large part of the problem. Of course he's not the only one - we (all of us on planet Earth) wouldn't be in such a giant mess if we'd put as much effort into fighting violence instead of supporting it.

~p.

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Posted by Bunny: This is America. You’re going to have to give some examples of exactly what “fighting for peace” looks like.

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Posted by Kim: I hang out with you guys all the time and even I have a hard time thinking of examples. But punching someone in the nose is super easy to imagine!

Mr. Stroud Responds

Posted by Pinky.

I received quite a few e-mails in response to yesterday's (September 11) diary entry. Most of them went kind of like ‘hey pinky i didn't know there were so many other things that happened on other 9-11s', stuff like that. This one interested me the most though:

Dear Idiot,
I mourn on September 11 because as an American I feel we all need to remember those who lost their lives to the terrorists. I'm not going to feel bad for people killed in a battle 700 years ago in England. We are talking about New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania in 2001. Different time, different place - get it? You have no right to tell me, or anybody else, how to mourn. Fuck you very much. J. Stroud
Syracuse, New York

He raises an interesting point (the part before the fuck you part) and I thought that responding would be a good way for me to explain a bit more regarding my reasoning and intentions. Here it is:

Dear J. Stroud,
I wasn't telling you how to mourn. My point was that everyone remembers some deaths while omitting others. For example, my friend Pat was killed by a truck this past January 31. If I want to light a candle for Pat this coming January 31, without having to light candles for all other bunnies run over by trucks on every January 31 since the beginning of time (and believe me, that would be a lot of candles) of course I'd be totally entitled to do that. But a personal memorial service for a single bunny is not the same as a national day of remembrance wherein an entire nation reflects upon a violent, traumatic, history-changing event. One is personal (me & Pat), the other involves the transformation and re-writing of an entire nation's identity - isn't that a big difference? What I'm saying is that for certain things I’m more interested in what nations end up doing, rather than individuals, especially when armies, bombs, and thousands of civilian deaths later become involved.The official response of the U.S. government to the September 11, 2001 attacks was to answer violence with more violence. So apparently revenge is a justifiable response to killing, which of course is not a new idea. That's why I placed September 11 (v. 2001) alongside the other September 11s (versions 1297, 1649, 1683, 1709, 1944, 1973, and 1982) - it was my way of pointing out that throughout history, many human beings have rejected life and peace in favor of death and war. I know there are always more than a few people out there who believe that life and peace are good, but the fact is that horrible things like these still happen. I'm trying to understand how and why.

Remembering September 11, 2001 as yet another example in a long line of human beings' failure to overcome their violent tendencies helps me to keep my eyes fixed on one of my long term goals: I want human beings to be more conscious of the suffering they create through their selfish thoughts and violent actions. I'm going to keep working towards that.

~pinky

Anniversary of the Modern Non-Violence Movement

​Posted by Bunny.

While Pinky posts her gloomy, all-bad-news September 11 entry over in her diary area, I'm going to remind everybody that September 11th is also the 100th anniversary of the birth of the modern non-violence movement. On September 11, 1906, Mohandas K. Gandhi first publicly put forth his call for a method of resisting violence with non-violence. Ironic, isn't it? Find this on the front page of your local newspaper!

We were also surprised to find out, after the fact, that Oahu public access TV Channel 56 aired our Pinky Show episode The American War: The U.S. in Vietnam this morning at 6:30 a.m. When we first submitted the program for broadcast we had actually been told that they were going to show our program starting September 30, but apparently somebody at Olelo decided to kick off their September 11's broadcast schedule with our show. We only found out when we started receiving phone calls from people telling us they had just finished watching it and really liked it (public access TV requires contact info at the end of every program). Nice…

~B.

Other September 11s

Posted by Pinky.

Those terrible airplane attacks happened on today's date, exactly five years ago. I just saw a newspaper poll that concluded that for Americans, "September 11 ranks as the most pivotal event in history".

The poll did not need to explicitly state that September 11 refers to the destruction of the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 - everybody knows; it is assumed. But a quickie review of world history shows that September 11 has been a violent day many times over. Just a few examples:

September 11, 1297: The Battle of Stirling Bridge between Scottish and English forces. Over 5,000 people killed.

September 11, 1649: Oliver Cromwell's forces (English) massacre the Irish at Drogheda. Approximately 3,000 people killed.

September 11, 1683: The Battle of Vienna begins between the armies of the Ottoman Empire and various Central European kingdoms. Around 20,000 people killed.

September 11, 1709: The Battle of Malplaquet (France versus England/Netherlands/Austria). About 40,000 dead or wounded.

September 11, 1944: The RAF (British Air Force) firebombs Darmstadt, Germany. About 12,000 people killed.

September 11, 1973: A U.S.-supported coup deposes democratically elected President Salvadore Allende of Chile. From 1973-1990, military dictator Augusto Pinochet would murder, torture, and ‘disappear' the Chilean people by the tens of thousands.

September 11, 1982: Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps (Lebanon) are abandoned by international forces assigned to protect them, allowing Phalangist militia to enter the camps and massacre Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces seal the camps' perimeter. No one knows exactly how many civilians were killed - estimates range from 700 to 3,500 people killed.

Those who perished on those airplanes, or at the World Trade Center, or at the Pentagon, will be remembered today. These other victims of violence, for the most part, will not be mentioned or even remembered. If we believe that all life is precious, and we want to be respectful to all, then what to do?

~pinky

Am I Neurotic?

Posted by Pinky.

I just read some articles about the SMART-1 research satellite at the European Space Agency's website. It's been orbiting the moon for the past three years or so, carefully mapping the moon's surface, testing its solar powered thruster, and other scientific-y stuff like that. Anyway, the mission came to an end four days ago, on September 3rd, when the satellite was deliberately crashed into the surface of the moon. Is that for real? Doesn't that suck for the moon? I mean, I don't know if you've ever looked at close-up photographs of the moon's surface, but it's real pretty up there. And now there's about 630 pounds of space garbage littering the surface of the moon that wasn't there before. How long's it going to be just sitting there, looking all messy, before someone goes there to tidy up?

I get pretty annoyed whenever I see someone toss a cigarette out a car window, like the Earth is their own personal trash can. To me this is just a bigger, more moon-oriented example of the same idea. According to the European Space Agency, "SMART-1 ended its journey in the Lake of Excellence region, in the point situated at 34.4° South latitude and 46.2° West longitude." Okay guys - apparently you know exactly where you crashed it - now go clean it up!

~p.

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Posted by Bunny: That's moon vandalism.

Lancet Report: Haiti

Posted by Pinky.

I was reading a report in the British medical journal The Lancet about human rights abuses in Haiti. It stated, among other things, that 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 girls and women raped or sexually assaulted in the Port-au-Prince area during the period immediately following President Aristide's removal from power in February 2004. The crimes were committed mostly by the police, UN peacekeepers, anti-Lavalas (Aristede's political party) groups, and other associates of the U.S.-backed interim government. Assassination and rape were basically being used as instruments of social control and punishment for political affiliation, and all of this has been going on for the past couple of years right off the coast of Florida. The report was published in the journal's September 2, 2006 issue, so it's been in circulation for several days now. I've been watching the front pages of lots of major U.S. newspapers and news websites and so far I haven't seen any references to it appear anywhere.

An obvious question: Why not? It can't be that the numbers aren't shocking enough, or the crimes not heinous enough (i.e., death squads gang raping children - isn't this generally considered news?). And it can't be that Haiti's too far away for us to care - I'm looking at my globe right now and I can cover Florida, Haiti and Cuba with my paw all at the same time (and I have really small paws). I can only assume that its absence must be for 'other reasons' - I shudder to imagine.

So what is in the news at the moment?

• the recent quadruple-murder/dismemberment in Maine;
• The Crocodile Hunter's death-by-stringray;
• Andre Agassi's retirement from "tennis" (a.k.a. giant ping-pong);
• Pluto's demotion from planetary status to glorified asteroid;
• etc., etc., etc.

It's not that I don't think any of the above stories are worthy of inclusion in a newspaper, because, yeah, I actually did read all of those stories too. *cough* [ Bunny's note: Pinky reads People magazine! ] But I’ll bet you $20 [ Bunny: she doesn't have $20. ] that if you did a poll of a million newspaper readers, most of them would (maybe reluctantly) agree that these stories really don't have the same degree of social relevance as the Haiti story. Which kind of raises a potentially interesting question: Why do we gravitate towards reading stories that we know aren't important?

I'm kind of wondering why we read the news. I mean, some of us are almost addicted to it, like it's an absolutely essential ritual we have to do every day, right? But do we read the news as a 'first step' towards actually going out there and changing the world? Or do we read the news as a more passive form of entertainment and self-gratification? (I'm guessing more often the latter) And if it's more of the latter, I wonder if these kinds of choices imply something's gone wrong with our sense of values. It's hard not to wonder how and why we became the way we are. Sorry, no real answers yet, just questions. As always, for those of you out there who have all the answers, please feel free to e-mail them to me here.

Oh, by the way, we're making some pretty good progress on our next episode. Hopefully it'll be done sometime next week (it's fairly short, we're calling it a 'donut & coffee' episode). On a side note, this one will be the first in which Bunny and I actually have music in the background. So far the 'music' (gotta put that in quotes) we made is very bad - “tortuous” - but we want to try out not having just empty space behind the narration, and we also don’t want to pay for music.

~pinky

Gandhi Quote

Posted by Pinky.

I read various newspapers every day. I also read books everyday. I put them both in my head and let them fight it out.

In contrast to the (apparently) currently popular idea that war/invasion/occupation are all effective ways of spreading democracy, today's book-quote:

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
- Mahatma Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War.

We still like Gandhi, right?

~p.

The Pinky Show on TV

Posted by Bunny.

We just heard that our most recent episode, The American War: the U.S. in Vietnam will be aired on Olelo, public access television channel 56 in Hawaii at 10pm, 9/30, 10/1, 10/7 and 10/8. That's cool because 10pm on that channel (weeknights) is Democracy Now! so maybe somebody will not realize it's the weekend and accidentally watch our show.

The American War: The U.S. in Vietnam

​Posted by Bunny.

The Vietnam War episode is finally done, you can see it here. So far the response has been really great, and that makes me feel good because it took us a long time to put it together - lots of reading, lots of searching for appropriate pictures, lots of maps to draw (Pinky), and so on. I went to Washington D.C. to do the research - It was hard work but also fun because I had some time to sight see and act like a tourist before coming home.

Now on to the next episode. Pinky has already started writing. At least the next couple episodes will be much shorter ones - we're going to try to have them fall in the 6-8 minute range. So it won't be long before we have a new episode on our site, my guess is in about 10 days or so.

I've finally posted Pinky's diary entry - just kept forgetting (sorry Pinky!). You can read it here.

Thank you.

~B.

New Blurbs

Posted by Bunny.

A few days ago I posted a new blurb about stupid toys. If you haven't already seen it, you can check it out by clicking here. I also posted a blurb yesterday called Students against Rice Eaters. I like rice.

Pinky's Ants Speak

Posted by Bunny.

The Ants from Pinky's AntFarm™ have prepared a statement so we've made it into a mini-blurb. You can hear what they have to say by clicking here. I've also posted a new Idea in the Fight! section.

Bumper Stickers

Posted by Pinky.

One of the things I like to do to relax is to browse the internet. I guess you could say it's kind of like a hobby (I've heard people call watching television their hobby - that's also pretty bad). I don't really like to do physical activities like exercising (yeah, I know), and there's not too many things to do around here that anyone could call 'amusements', so reading, talking with friends, looking for stuff to eat (and then eating it), and browsing the internet are what I like to do best. Which brings me to the subject of today's entry - annoying bumper stickers. Here's one of the stupidest ones I found tonight:

Not really sure what to say about it other than this bumper sticker makes no logical sense to me at all (if anyone out there can educate me as to how U.S. soldiers have saved us from speaking Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Russian, or [insert evil/inferior foreign language here], please feel free to e-mail me a mini-history lesson). Okay, here's another:

Aren't human beings also made of meat...?

Yesterday Bunny and I were arguing about something (not bumper stickers) and she implied that I'm a humorless slug (by calling me a "humorless slug"). I may be a slug (see exercise thing, above), but I don't think I'm actually totally humorless. But I've noticed that whenever I don't laugh at something somebody else thinks is funny, suddenly I'm 'humorless'. Like now.

~p.

Not a Good Performance; Moving On

Posted by Pinky.

Hi everybody.

It's a good thing March has 31 days in it, otherwise I would have had no entries this month. We finally finished our first video episode yesterday, and while we're quite happy to get number one out of the way, making that episode was also a pretty stressful process. I suspect we're going to run into quite a bit of problems for a while, being that I'm not going to be able to fix many of the problems we encountered any time soon. First off, we found out right away that I'm not a good performer. Talking with your friends is sure a lot different from talking with a microphone and camera in front of you and having that little red recording light flashing. I'm learning all kinds of things I didn't really want to know about myself: I tend to slur a lot of words together. I tend to trail off at the ends of sentences. I mispronounce a lot of words. When I'm reading my script, it really sounds like I'm reading from a script. And it's almost as if the harder I try, the worse everything gets. Plus, I really don't like the sound of my voice… I think I need voice lessons, acting lessons, and a whole bunch of other lessons I've never even heard of yet. I'm sure it's just going to take a lot of practicing on my part to get better, and it's actually really nerve-wracking to think that there's people out there listening as I'm floundering around in front of a microphone. My ego's all slumped over and tired from the mean ass-kicking it received this week.

But Bunny, Mimi, Kim, and I, we've been talking about it a lot these past few weeks, and we keep on coming to the same conclusion - it's important to keep working. We'll keep trying to improve as we go along, but for the time being, we just feel like we have to be stubborn and single-minded and force our way forward. We read the newspapers every day and sometimes we just feel so overwhelmed, almost like there's nothing we can do to make anything better. We probably won't know for a while if anybody will find The Pinky Show useful in some way or not, but one thing we've definitely found out for ourselves already, is that in order to make The Pinky Show, we have to talk a lot things out. And all this talking and discussion is helping us to kind of sort out our thoughts and think through some of the things that's been pressing down on us. An other option would be for us to lie around and spend all our time complaining and whining about stuff - I'm pretty sure that kind of behavior accomplishes absolutely nothing. Cats don't live a long time you know, we're here in this world for a little while and then we're gone. We don't have much time to waste.

~pinky

Our First Video Episode

Posted by Bunny.

I just put our first video episode online (Fabulous Imperialism: The Columbian Exposition of 1893). Working on it was fun - not counting the research and collection of all the materials, that episode took us about a week to put together. It's a bit rough and now that we are done with it, there's quite a few parts that we would have liked to have done differently (or better). But rather than keep on working on it forever we decided to move along and just put it out there and see what people say about it. So there it is. Hopefully we'll get feedback that'll help us to get better at making these things.

To me, the first half is kind of boring but it is necessary and the second half ties everything together so please watch the whole thing.

~B.

We're on a Roll

Posted by Bunny.

We are on a mini-roll. Another blurb done, this one is about elephants. No real message or anything like that, we just liked Tim's elephant story and decided to share it with everyone. Mimi was upset that we put in the picture of the elephant stepping on that person's head - she said it is 'anti-elephant', which I don’t think it is. If anything, I think it's anti-guy-riding-the-elephant or anti-guy-who-told-guy-riding-the-elephant-to-step-on-that-other-guy's-head. Anyway, the new blurb is here.

Watch a New Blurb

Posted by Bunny.

Another blurb done. This one is about those 'Support Our Troops' ribbon stickers. I don't know if they are popular all over the country but around here they are everywhere. Please watch, download, and e-mail.

The Pinky Show Trailer

Posted by Bunny.

Okay, so we finally have a short video introduction to The Pinky Show. You can watch it by clicking on the tiny television set icon on our home page. Pinky and I never made anything like that before so we just watched a bunch of trailers to get some kind of ideas. The first thing we noticed is that all the trailers are 2:30 minutes long (why is that?). Ours came out to be 2:21 - we tried but couldn't think of nine more seconds of something to put in there, sorry.

Our First Blurb

First blurb done. Click here to watch it. Small enough to download and attach to e-mail. Please e-mail to your friends if you like. It's about B2 bombers. According to Pinky they actually built those B2 bombers very near here. Thank you.

The Olympics™

Posted by Pinky.

Bunny, Mimi, and I watched the Olympics™ tonight on television, it was the final night of the ladies figure skating competition. I have to admit, I'm a bit confused by the whole idea. To me, figure skating looks like some kind of art-form, maybe similar to dancing, theater, or maybe even painting. It's weird to me to make that into a competitive sport, with winners and losers. I said "Why does this have to be competitive? Why not just have all these girls perform, and we can enjoy all of their performances without having to say 'you were the best, you were second best, and so on'…?" Then they both looked at me like I was from the moon and said "Nobody would watch…"

Really?

Why are human beings so hard-wired for competition? Is it simply a handy motivational mechanism useful for promoting excellence and forward-movement? Or is it something more primal, perhaps a deeply-embedded animal instinct that long ago allowed certain cavemen the ability to survive by clubbing their smaller, weaker, less competitively-inclined cavemen buddies to death during long winters and other times of food scarcity?

Not being the competitive type myself, I won't pretend to know the answer to this. Bunny recommends that I just interview some ice skaters to find out what they think about this. Personally I find it hard to believe that any ice skater would have anything at all in common with a club-wielding caveman.

~p.

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Posted by Bunny: Tanya Harding? In your face Pinky.