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Venceremos Comment:
Thoughts about Our World
Part I:
Yet audacity to hope is a campaign slogan with an all too familiar bottom line and far too much empty rhetoric. He talks of America, both past and present, as if it were a beautiful beacon of participatory democracy that just needs a change in leadership, and the dream would be revived from its nightmare. (Read more) Middle Eastern exchange rates: Why Israel is winning the PR war
The recently finalised prisoner/ body exchange between Israel and its Lebanese and Palestinian neighbours is as good a case study as I can remember of the mainstream media's tainted portrayal of the strife ridden conflict zone.
Mass movement halts the neo-liberal bulldozer
Europe's angry men, the plucky Irish and the future of the European Union
Debates on the future of Europe are all too often stripped down to the black and white terms Europhile or Eurosceptic, suggesting that you are either with or against Europe. Speaking as someone who falls into the ludicrously simplified pigeon hole of pro-European, I would say the debate is no longer about whether you are pro or anti-Europe, rather it is about what kind of Europe you want. (Read more.)
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Most,
if not all, religions are present and instilled within individuals
starting at birth. Starting at a very early age, populations are taught
the ideas of their respective religion, to accept it as truth, and
ostracized if they do not. As people grow older within their societies,
they learn that not only is this belief predominant within their own
family, but also the common belief of the majority of their society. The
fill-in-the-blank religion is really just a question of region combined
with history. This strength in numbers, this status quo, leads people to
feel uncomfortable with, and often disgusted by, the presence of another
inferior system of beliefs. 
In
2004, at the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama titled his keynote
address, The Audacity to Hope, after a phrase taken from a sermon
by his good friend and pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In this sermon, Rev.
Wright stresses the audacity, the nerve, to continue to hope when living
in a world of greed and famine, of apartheid and apathy; essentially a
quiet hell. Obama so loved this phrase that he titled his 2006
campaign-igniting book by the same phrase. At the time, this was an
inspiring idea and an inspiring man to rally around.
The
newly elected neo-conservative regime of President Lee Myungbak has been
humbled by the spontaneous emergence of a mass movement, which was
sparked by female middle school and high school students, but which has
seen the largest and longest sustained demonstrations since the fall of
the military dictatorship. The mass protests are primarily against the
imposed resumption of the importation of US beef but have, in the course
of their development, tapped into latent anger of the Korean population
against the implementation of the government
