NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

We Are Guahan  WeAreGuahan.com *FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *  *September 23, 2010; Guam*- With the release of the DoD’s Record of Decision, it has become evident that the Department of Defense will continue to disregard concerns voiced by the people of Guam. Guam’s local residents will be the demographic most severely impacted by plans to increase the US military’s presence within the region through one of the largest peacetime military relocations in modern history. We Are Guahan will be hosting a rally on Oct. 1 to unite the community in response. The island participated actively within the NEPA process, with over 10,000 comments submitted in response to the Draft EIS from the community and Government of Guam agencies. Despite the outpouring of community involvement, the Final EIS failed to incorporate many of the island’s concerns into their final plans. Guam’s community and local leaders presented a united front in opposition to the condemnation of land and the taki...

The shortcut for talking about the US military fighting in Afghanistan is to say "Afghanistan." Even though fighting there has dramatically increased in the past two years, it still hasn't come to the point where it has been embedded in peoples' minds as being a "war." There are few very people who say Afghanistan War and the phrasing of "the war in Afghanistan" could simply be descriptive and not meant to convey a unique particular set of events or a stand-alone period of time. Although the war there is getting bloodier and bloodier and more and more hopeless (at least it seems), it still is not its own experience, or hasn't had its own substantive impact on the US and its psyche. Even tiny, public relations wars such as Grenada have their own particular meaning, even if the events of the US invading a tiny island in the Caribbean for no real reason cannot under any circumstances be counted as enough to shoulder the label of being a "war....

Achokka' esta apmam desde hu na'funhayan iyo-ku Ph.D. pat esta apmam desde humokkok i umestudiante-ku, guaha na biahi, kada diha na hu alok "Si Yu'us Ma'ase" na makpo' ayu na patten lina'la'-hu. Achokka' hu gof agradesi ayu na tiempo, ya bula ineyak-hu, mas ki 13 na anos umestudiante yu', ya hagas esta listo yu' para bai hu tutuhun i otro na patten lina'la'-hu. Lao, put i chinatsaga' UOG, ti hu tungo' ngai'an nai na bai hu tutuhun ayu gi minagahet, ya ti hu tungo' kao Guahan i lugat nai bai hu tutuhuni. Esta mas ki un sakkan hu kekena'halom maisa yu' guihi, lao sesso ma fama'dagi nu Guahu. Lao para ayu na klasin institutsion, ti gaibali iyo-mu merits pat i bida-mu pat i minalate'-mu. I mas impottanten na arekla na kao manmassa' i esta manggaigaige gi halom nu Hagu? Put este na i meggaina na ma'estro yan ma'estra siha giya UOG, ti mangkapas. Lao ai adai, este na prublema-hu, bai fa...

After the Record of Decision was signed, the Pacific Daily News  collected responses from Senators in the Guam Legislature, detailing their thoughts and concerns on the military buildup finally being officially declared "begun." I have pasted them below for people to read and reflect on. I have heard so many people over the past few months speak with some satisfaction that the rhetoric of so many of our political leaders have changed, that the efforts of so many who were critical of the buildup have helped make it so that no potential political leader who wants to be taken seriously can be 100% supportive of the military buildup, but instead has to hover around 50% - 70% good and the rest bad. This is a very real shift in rhetoric since for the first few years of the buildup, politicians would try to convince people that the buildup was a boon, that it was great and that the problems were minor and not such a big deal. That was how the public was shaped back then, in such a ...

The US military buildup to Guam "officially" starts now. The Record of Decision which is supposed to mark the end of the Environmental Impact Assessment process was signed earlier this week and so now construction on the projects outlined in the Final Environmental Impact Statement can "officially" begin. At this point, there is almost too much to be written about this issue and not enough time in my day today (since this is my long teaching day) or energy in my body (since this is my long teaching day) to do it. Although I've been writing about this DEIS and FEIS issue for months now and been actively participating in conversations and actions challenging the military buildup at so many levels, I still can't help but feel as if I did not do enough, that I could have done far more. But for all the feelings filtering through my mind and body right now screaming that something has ended, something is over or we have moved into a new phase and something can...

For those who have been following politics in the US the past few weeks, the phrase “Ground Zero mosque” has been thrown around quite a bit. Conservatives and Republicans have been using the phrase to refer to a planned Islamic Cultural Center which will be built two blocks away from the edge of Ground Zero in an abandoned Burlington Coat Factory. These cries to prevent the building of this cultural center are joined by protests throughout the US in cities big and small where people are trying to prevent Muslims from building mosques or cultural centers. The angry rhetoric is mixed and contradictory to say the least. Some would claim that two blocks away is simply too close to such a sacred site. Even if the Constitutions gives them the right to do it, they shouldn’t, and for them to force it upon the US is in bad taste, like salt in the wound. Here’s two things wrong with these arguments: 1.If the site is truly sacred then why are these Conservatives not moving to get rid of all t...

Yanggen guaha salape'-mu konsedera este na ginagao lismona, ginnen i inetnon Common Dreams. Gof maolek este na website, siempre sina ta alok na Guiya i mas kabales na lugat para infotmashon. Estague i kattan ginagao ni' mana'huyong gi duranten i ma'pos na simana. ************************* In March of 2003 our anti-war numbers were in the millions... We were around 30% of the country according to most polls (that's nearly 100 million Americans!) and yet we had no way to communicate with each other aside from through the Nation and a few websites like CommonDreams.org...." -- Michael Moore Dear Friend, What if you woke tomorrow to find that Common Dreams was gone? Our voices silenced? This community exists only through the support of our readers. Our readership continues to grow, but we are working with limited resources. You won’t find advertising financing our site. Nor will you find that we are influenced by any corporate sponsorships. We ar...

I got an email the other day which featured the "purest" example of ideology I've seen in quite a while. It contained an email that had been sent to my friend (who I won’t name in case she wants her identity kept secret) from a “Marxist” professor which basically attacked her for not being Marxist enough. I only know some of the context, but she had just recently helped organize an Ethnic Studies summit in San Diego and so the listserv for the conference has been the site for a lot of pointless posturing, of which this purely ideological email is a perfect example. Reading the snarky, snippy Marxist email was both hysterical and depressing. It represented on the one hand something so hilarious in the way in which the author took himself and his orthodox defense of Marxist theory, thought and intellectualism so seriously. It was depressing because it made him look like someone so sublimely out of touch with reality and even the nature of the very theories he was shrou...