Sparsely, Sage and Timely
Hunkered down in West Marin
"This world’s getting to be such a dangerous place a man’s lucky to get out of it alive." – WC Fields
In Guatemala, my stepdaughters Shaili, Kristeli, and Anika, along with my former wife Ana Carolina, have been working with relief groups to package the food being airdropped to victims of landslides caused by Hurricane Stan. Southern Mexico and El Salvador were also hit hard by the hurricane, but some Salvadoran rescue work had to be abandoned when a volcano erupted.
In the past few months, Blaise Goelet of Inverness Park took part in relief work in Thailand following the South Asia tsunami while Bert Crews of Tomales filmed a documentary on tsunami relief in Sri Lanka. School students in West Marin have raised money for victims of the earthquake in Pakistan. Bolinas firefighter Steve Marcotte went to the Deep South helping victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In addition, West Marin residents have been collecting supplies for disaster victims at home and abroad.
But aside from "Acts of God" (which also include flooding in the Northeast and famine in southern Africa), the rest of the news from around the world seems pretty good these days. At least if you’re in West Marin and looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
A new UN Human Security Report notes that armed conflicts worldwide have dropped 40 percent in the past 13 years. The Associated Press this week quoted the UN as saying, "Civil wars, genocides, and international crises have all declined sharply" – a change that is "dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded."
Perhaps one reason none of us here have taken much notice is that there are still 60 wars going on around the globe, with the Iraq War and the war in the Darfur region of Sudan the two biggest.
Nonetheless, if one looks hard enough, there is some good news to wipe away West Marin residents’ Weltschmerz. "In 1950, the average war killed 37,000 people directly," the AP quoted a Canadian researcher as saying, but "by 2002, it was 600 – an extraordinary change."
All the same: Sixty wars being waged right now. You may have forgotten, but there are only 193 countries in the world (192 if you don’t count Taiwan, which the US government doesn’t).
In other good news reported by the AP this week, the FBI said last year’s US murder rate was the lowest in 40 years. "The rates for all seven major crimes were down, and the overall violent crime rate reached a 30-year low," AP quoted the FBI as saying.
As the crime rate continues to fall, it’s obvious why prison guards need to keep politicking for tougher and tougher sentencing. Otherwise, they’d be running out of product.
As it is, the American criminal-justice system has to dig deep into the population to keep its prisons full. The Chronicle last week noted, "California has 180 prisoners serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for murders committed when they were 16 or 17."
Human Rights Watch, The Chronicle reported, "found that 2,225 inmates in the United States were serving life-without-parole terms for crimes committed when they were under 18. About one-six were under 15, and six of the inmates were only 13, all of those in states outside California… Only three other nations – Tanzania, South Africa, and Israel – sentence juveniles to life without parole, and they have a total of 12 such prisoners combined."
Alas, with our current governor and president, civilized treatment of prisoners of any age won’t happen soon. The King James Version of the Bible may say, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," but unfortunately neither Gov. Schwarzenegger nor President Bush has fully mastered the English language.
Despite a request from Amnesty International, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Office last week said it has no intention of commuting the sentences of those 180 teenaged killers even after they’ve spent 25 years in prison. For his part, President George Bush has already said he’ll veto a defense bill that includes military pay if it also includes a ban on torturing prisoners.
"On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
– Journalist HL Mencken (1880-1956), who is still remembered as "The Sage of Baltimore." (No relation)