April 23, 2007
April 18, 2007
Lessons To Be Learned From The Tragedy At Virginia Tech
1. The US desperately needs to enact gun control laws and especially in terms of handguns. The state of Virginia (my home state) is particularly noted for its lenient gun laws — while the metropolitan areas of Richmond. Norfolk and the District of Columbia, are noted for their high rates of violent crime. Consider this:
- There is a one-handgun-per-month limit on sales, but no state license or permit is required to buy a handgun.
- There are no state limits on assault weapons and magazines. An AK47 is as easy to buy as a hunting rifle.
- No background check is required for gun purchases at gun shows, swap meets, or through newspaper or Internet ads. A check is required at federally licensed gun stores.
- There’s no state requirement that gun owners register their firearms, making it harder for police to track gun traffickers and guns used in crimes.
- State law forbids city or county governments from enacting their own tougher gun laws.
2. Every institution needs to re-evaluate its emergency response preparedness and evacuation plans. Upon the report of the first shooting, police followed a bad lead in search of the first victim’s boyfriend which focused their search away from the campus. Furthermore, the campus police did not call in the State Police until after the second shootings because they wrongly assumed they were dealing with a singular domestic incident. For a timeline of events, go here.
3. People suffering from psychological and social disorders are usually easily identified and it is incumbent upon all of us to make sure they get the help they need, or at the very least are prevented from being able to harm others. Cho’s refusal to speak to others and solitary lifestyle were apparently clearly noted by everyone who knew him. He went so far as to refuse to give his name out on a class sign-up sheet and instead entered a question mark. Some sources say that Cho was diagnosed with depression and medication had been prescribed, but even his teachers who were fearful and alarmed by his violent writings, were unable to insure that Cho got the psychiatric treatment he needed. Services were offered – even strongly encouraged — but no one could make him take advantage of them. It really appears that all the signs were there, but the American system with all its personal liberties did not have the mechanism to take any actions that might have prevented this tragedy.
4. Universities need to have the right to consult with and inform parents of their children’s performance and behavior. Currently, American laws in education prohibit universities from contacting parents without the student’s express permission. Had the parents been brought into the matter, they could have had him legally committed to a psychiatric hospital. Instead, the family is in hiding and by all accounts suffering from great culturally defined shame and 33 people are dead.
5. Violence and terrorism know no race, class, religion or ethnicity.
April 15, 2007
April 12, 2007
Tribute: Kurt Vonnegut, Dead at 84
“His popular novels blended social criticism, dark humor”
By Elaine Woom Times Staff Writer
Kurt Vonnegut, an American cultural hero celebrated for his wry, loonily imaginative commentary on war, apocalypse, technology, materialism and other afflictions in “Slaughterhouse-Five” and other novels, has died. He was 84. One of the last of a generation of great American novelists of World War II, Vonnegut died Wednesday night in New York City. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries in a fall several weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz. He had homes in Manhattan and Sagaponack, N.Y.
“There was never a kinder and, at the same time, wittier writer to be with personally,” author Tom Wolfe, a friend and admirer of Vonnegut’s, told The Times. “He was just a gem in that respect. And as a writer, I guess he’s the closest thing we had to a Voltaire. He could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it, which made him quite remarkable.
An obscure science fiction writer for two decades before earning mainstream acclaim in 1969 with “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Vonnegut was an American original, often compared to Mark Twain for a vision that combined social criticism, wildly black humor and a call to basic human decency. He was, novelist Jay MacInerny once said, “a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion.”
Although he was disdained by some critics who thought his work was too popular and accessible, his fiction inspired volumes of scholarly comment as well as websites maintained by young fans who have helped keep all 14 of his novels in print over a 50-year career. Five of his novels have made the leap into films.
He is “together with John Hawkes and Gunter Grass … the most stubbornly imaginative” of writers, novelist John Irving once wrote of Vonnegut. “He is not anybody else, or even a version of anybody else, and he is a writer with a cause.”
His novels, which include “The Sirens of Titan,” “Cat’s Cradle,” “Mother Night” and “Breakfast of Champions,” introduced a revolving cast of odd characters, from the downtrodden visionary Billy Pilgrim to Kilgore Trout, the unsuccessful writer who was Vonnegut’s alter ego.
Vonnegut was also an essayist, playwright and short-story writer, whose shorter pieces were collected in such volumes as “Welcome to the Monkey House” (1968), “Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons” (1974) and “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s” (1991). “Slaughterhouse-Five” was a book he tried but failed to write for 25 years. An agile mix of fantasy and Vonnegut’s World War II experiences, it features time traveler Pilgrim who, like Vonnegut, survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden. Unorthodox in structure and patently antiwar, the novel resonated with a rebellious younger generation. Vonnegut became an icon of the countercultural 1970s and his book became a milestone of postmodern American literature, unequaled in force or artistry by any of his later novels.
“He writes about the most excruciatingly painful things,” Michael Crichton observed in a review of “Slaughterhouse-Five” for the New Republic. “His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. Nobody else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal novelistic approaches.”
He made no pretense of his intentions: He was a public writer — one who directly addressed some of the most vexing issues of his day. “My motives are political,” he once told Playboy magazine. “I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society…. Mainly, I think they should be — and biologically have to be — agents of change.”
On another occasion he explained that his goal in writing novels was to “catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents” and “poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world.”
April 1, 2007
Allah humma atina fid dunya hasana wa fil akhirati hasana
“O Allah, give us the good of this world and the good of the Hereafter…”
Doha: The Emiri Diwan announced that Nasser bin Abdullah Al Misnad died at dawn
yesterday. The deceased was the father of H H Sheikha Mouzah bint Nasser Al
Misnad and the grandfather of the Heir Apparent H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al
Thani.
May the family find comfort in the words of our Prophet (saw): “Verily, to Allah belongs what He has taken, and to Him belongs what He has given. For everything He has set a term. So be patient and be content.” Ameen.
UPDATE: The following is a translation of an obituary written by Dr Lulua bint Abdullah al-Misnad of her brother Nasser bin Abdullah al-Misnad, who died in Qatar on March 31. Nasser al-Misnad is the father of HH Sheikha Mozah Nasser al-Misnad and grandfather of HH the Heir Apparent Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. The obituary was published in our sister Arabic daily Arrayah on Monday.
THE demise of my brother Nasser bin Abdullah al-Misnad marks the end of an epoch that had begun several decades ago with the debate on the need for social change and democratic institutions in our country. He was in the forefront of those who vociferously argued for these changes. His death on the eve of the elections for the third Central Municipal Council is in a way symbolic of the end of that turbulent epoch and the fulfilment of all what he had stood for.Many things have happened in our country between April 1964 and April 2007.
It was in April 1964 that my brother had in the name of the National Unity Committee (NUC) for Administrative Reforms in Qatar submitted to the then Emir a charter of demands consisting of 25 points. These demands were made on the firm conviction by a group of right-minded people that the time had come for our country to switch over from the Bedouin lifestyle to a modern life. Pearl diving and trading in pearls that were the sources of livelihood had diminished. Oil had been struck and the need of the hour was to get ourselves organised and introduce administrative and social reforms that could cope with the enormous revenue from oil.
Unfortunately, the charter of demands was turned down and my brother and all those who spearheaded the movement were sent to prison. Our tribe – the Muhannadis – were deeply upset by such a turn of events. As a mark of protest they decided to migrate en masse to Kuwait in the autumn of 1964.
I remember my school days in Kuwait beginning from the academic year 1964/1965. My mother was insistent that I should wear only the long dress to school. It was totally abhorrent to me because the other girls in my class made fun of me not only for my dress but my plaited hair and my strange dialect. My mother thought that the devil had possessed me and I had become incorrigible. It was a total confusion for me and as a young girl I wondered why at all I am there! It was a sudden transformation from one situation to another which I as a young girl could not comprehend.
I may sound very emotional and sentimental in what I am writing now. But the fact is that my brother was a charismatic figure. He was a man of pleasant manners and a good speaker. I would like to correct certain misconceptions about the aims and objectives of the NUC and the charter of demands. I was eager to seek first-hand information on that turbulent period from the British Resident Mckerny who was posted in Qatar during the years 1963 to 1965. After several months of search, I was able to talk to him when I was in London in the winter of 2001. He politely refused to discuss the matter on the plea that his memory had faded and he was not in a position to recall anything clearly regarding that period.However, I had obtained copies of his dispatches to the British Foreign Office. He had mentioned that Nasser bin Abdullah al-Misnad and his close friend Hamad bin Abdullah al-Attiyah were leading a group of young men demanding administrative reforms. Nasser and Hamad may have been seen as sons of the bourgeois class as stated in some studies of that period. The truth is that they stood for genuine change – a change that will not uproot the society from its traditional moorings but transform it to an entity capable of dealing with the dictates of the changing situation. Thus the establishment of the Central Municipal Council as an elected body, Qatarisation of jobs, equal opportunities for all, revising of overall wages, labour law and so many other things that we are witnessing now are the fulfilment of my late brother’s dreams.
