Item 1: Beautiful Downtown Newark. I made no entry into this blog yesterday because I was out exploring Branch Brook Park in a part of my city, Newark, NJ, that I was not familiar with. I had a glorious day in a glorious place, taking over 200 pictures to sort thru later for a photo gallery on my Newark website, “Resurgence City, Newark USA”. Here's one view:


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Branch Brook is an Essex County Park that spans Newark and Belleville, a northern suburb. Each year in mid-April it is the site of a Cherry Blossom Festival, because it contains more flowering cherry trees, of more varieties, than Washington, D.C.’s famed Tidal Basin. I didn’t get there in time this year, but had been in prior years, and a picture of the best area appears as the third photo on the main page of the Resurgence City site.
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Yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the Cathedral from the park. I didn’t know there were not just trees but also a lake to take in. BBPk is the only county park I have yet seen that is well occupied. Yesterday it was much like New York’s Central Park, with people whose ancestors hail from East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe all mingling happily together under a warm sun, amid lush greenery and some late cherry blossoms. People were fishing (the lake is stocked with trout), barbecuing, jogging, playing basketball, roller skating indoors at a crowded public rink. (The comparison to Central Park is particularly apt inasmuch as Branch Brook Park was designed by the son and nephew of Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer, with Calvert Vaux, of Central Park.)
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Earlier this week my firm (I work as a legal secretary and word processor for a major New Jersey law firm) treated the nonlegal staff to a luncheon at the Newark Club high atop One Newark Center, a building that also houses the Seton Hall Law School. The views are terrific. Here's one:


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These two great days in the new Newark made me think again how badly misperceived Newark is, even by people who should know better, people who work in Newark but spend no leisure time here. Newark had ONE riot, a bad one, but in 1967! In the same year, Los Angeles had the Watts riots. L.A. has also had a minor riot after a basketball game at the Staples Center and a horrible, huge riot after Rodney King’s attackers were acquitted. But people don’t automatically think “riots” when they hear the words “Los Angeles”. Nor should they think “riots” when they hear the word “Newark”. One riot 37 years ago should not still taint the reputation of a splendid American city.
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Most people think Newark is a black city and, so, filled with crime, aggressive panhandling, racial hostility and the panoply of social ills associated with the ghetto. Not so. For one thing, in the 2000 census, only 54% of Newarkers identified themselves as black. The rest, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, are: “26.52% White, ... 0.37% Native American, 1.19% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 14.05% from other races, and 4.36% from two or more races. 29.47% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.”
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Moreover, the races get along fine in Newark. Our mayor, Sharpe James, is black, competent and (apparently) honest, a hardworking and well-respected figure on the national scene. But that's just one factor that makes for racial peace, one that Newark will soon outgrow, because I believe black Newarkers are ready to vote for a good person no matter his or her color. You see, black Newarkers are black people, with the stress on "people". They don't have the racial chip on the shoulder that so many "blacks" in New York and other cities have. They have manners and extend courtesy and respect to people as an automatic reflex, for having the expectation of being treated courteously by others -- which they are. Newark is a very polite city. People hold the door open for you, to elevators and public buildings. This happens so often that it is not just refreshing to someone, like me, who spent 35 years in New York City. It's nearly astonishing how nice Newarkers are.
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So if you live near or are visiting the Newark/New York area, check out Newark. We have a major museum, the Newark Museum and a Performing Arts Center that contains what Clive Barnes of The New York Times called "the most glamorous theater in the Nation". The cherry blossoms are gone, this year, but will be back mid-April next year. And the Museum and NJPAC, Cathedral, parks and streets are open year-round.
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Item 2: (Anti-Post): Whatever Happened to Empathy? The New York Post isn't alert to irony. An editorial today blasts al-Qaeda for "using mass murder as a political weapon." What, exactly, has George Bush done if not exactly that? He launched a "pre-emptive" war against Iraq, a country that never attacked us. That is properly called "aggression", and, outside the niceties of "war", mass murder. Murder is killing without provocation or justification. Iraq never attacked us; ergo, killing Iraqis in an invasion was murder. As Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz observed, "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Thus, killing thousands upon thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children, soldiers and civilians both, in war (even if that war was undeclared and thus illegal) is quite literally "mass murder as a political weapon". In short, mass murder is mass murder, no matter who commits it.
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In the same edition, on "Page Six", Richard Johnson calls Michael Moore a "deranged documentarian" for "liken[ing] the cowards who murder U.S soldiers in Iraq to the colonists who fought in the American Revolution." Let's review.
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In 1776, the legitimate and de facto government of all Thirteen Colonies was the British government of His Majesty George III. The colonists were quite literally "insurgents", which is defined as people who "ris[e] in revolt against established authority, especially a government". The British authority was literally a government; the U.S. occupation is not a government, and occupied Iraq does not have a legitimate government; the U.S. occupying administration, however, functions as a government, against which Iraqi "insurgents" are "rising".
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In 1776, the British were seen as foreign invaders; in 2004, Americans are, without question, foreign invaders.
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Americans employed guerrilla warfare against the British invaders; Iraqis are employing guerrilla warfare against Americans. The British denounced the Americans as cowards for not standing out in the open and firing where they could be fired upon, 'like men' in the European custom of the day. The Post denounces as cowards Iraqis who won't risk traditional military engagement against overwhelming U.S. superiority.
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The comparison between Iraqi opponents to the U.S. occupation today and American opponents to the British occupation of the 1770s is, alas, exact.
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If the circumstances were reversed and Iraq had invaded and conquered us, would we consent to be "liberated" from the Bush Administration by force and occupied by an Iraqi army for months or years after that particular "regime change" had been effected? Or would some of our people have the guts to fight back, no matter the dangers and unlikelihood of military success, at great risk to life and limb?
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Fighting a guerrilla war is not risk-free behavior, and people who take up arms against a powerful occupying army are anything but cowards.
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What has happened to this country when we can't see the other guy's side but insist that when we do terrible things, they're fine, but when the other guy does exactly the same things, they're crimes? We used to side with the underdog as an automatic, kneejerk response. Now we're the bully on the block and have no sympathy whatsoever for the people that bully is kicking and killing in the name of "liberation" -- but really to make the Middle East safe for Zionism.
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Iraq was never a threat to the United States; only to Israel. The American people, in their innocence (a polite word for "ignorance" or "stupidity"), bought the lie that a tiny country 6,000 miles away was capable of taking on the greatest power in the history of the world, so we had ‘no choice' but to attack first. The practically instantaneous defeat on their own territory of this ‘threat' put the lie to that pile of crap. No Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. The "regime" has been "changed". Why are we still there?
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Iraq was stable under Saddam -- repressive, but stable. Now Iraqis suffer a new oppression, worse than Saddam's. No aspect of life can go on as usual, because bombs and mortar shells are exploding all around them. To go to the market is to risk death. The oil industry, Iraq's one commodity with value enuf to lift the people out of misery, is being systematically targeted by terrorists attracted to Iraq by the U.S. occupation -- terrorists Saddam would have found and killed before they could hurt innocents.
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Every Iraqi death from both U.S. actions and terrorists who could not have operated under Saddam is our fault. Every single one.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:02 PM