Murdering the Present

The journalist Charles Bowden and his partner, the research librarian Molly Molloy came to our campus last week to talk about the violence on the US/Mexican border, particularly in Ciudad Juarez. Molloy runs a Googlegroups list, La Frontera, that documents the violence, in an attempt to preserve a record of the human cost of the war on drugs and the globalized economy.

http://groups.google.com/group/frontera-list/topics

Check out the link above for a recent Bowden piece in the High Country News; he's also the author of Murder City; hear him talk about that here:

http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2010/04/22/author-charles-bowden-calls-ciudad-juarez-murder-city/

Bowden and Molloy suggest that what we're seeing in Ciudad Juarez is a taste of the future, unless we seriously change our ways: overpopulation, shortage of resources, global warming and energy crises, the despair of poor people and the breakdown of social comity. Are they right? Will we all soon be living in Ciudad Juarez?

Whistleblowers and War Crimes

On 22 October the WikiLeaks site released nearly 400,000 documents ("SIGACTs," "significant actions) that document the US forces in Iraq between 2004 and 2009. The US government doesn't dispute the information contained in them, but will likely seek to prosecute whoever leaked these documents. What's maybe most surprising to me is how little reaction the American public has had to this information. Why isn't this a bigger deal, either as inspiration to an antiwar movement, or in the form of outrage over the leaks themselves?