DISPATCH FROM MEDYKA

Bullet-proof vests, helmets, tourniquets, burn kits, trauma kits, gas masks, knee pads, pain medication. I’m one of three people checking thirty suitcases full of tactical gear and medical aid on to a LOT flight from LAX to Warsaw, Poland. There the suitcases will be picked up by men who are unknown to me, men with vans who will drive the aid into Ukraine. One of the vehicles making this trip from Lviv to Warsaw and back was shot at yesterday by Russian troops and one of the drivers was killed. “Someone died trying to get these suitcases,” says Peter Horvath, my friend from the recovery community who’s enlisted me in this operation. Peter is Hungarian, with Ukrainian blood and is a good man. “Hungarians aren’t very smart but we’re strong,” he says, loading several heavy duffle bags onto the carts at Tom Bradley International. Actually he is quite smart and incredibly dedicated, as well as organized, and I admire him. He has also, as of late, become completely immersed in the war effort.

The aid I’m transporting has been supplied by Mira Rubin, president of the San Diego based cultural center House of Ukraine, who I’ve been connected to through Peter. What I imagine was a typical foundation set up to honor the history and culture of Ukraine with evenings of folk dancing and the like, has now become a hub for the transportation of military equipment and humanitarian aid. She forwards me her recently granted license to export up to twenty million dollars worth of things like used body armor, ballistic helmets and soft armor panels which are certified to be “bullet, strike, slash, stab and special threat resistant! Full side protection 15% more coverage! Ultra concealable. Engineered for comfort and maneuverability. Special Mission Ballistic Helmet Multicam. Improved trauma protection thanks to Aramid Construction. 4 sizes available!” I can’t stop reading, I am fascinated by the tone of this weird ad copy on the license. I’m meant to present this to Polish customs when I arrive in Warsaw along with other impenetrable documents. But what I’m pretty sure of is this: no one’s looking to hold this shit up.

To be continued…

ON CRIME BY BEN OKRI

The first crime was the most defining moment in the history of the human. It was not Cain’s murder. That was defining too. But the first crime began in the realm of the numinous. It could only be deemed an act of spirit. Philosophers and religionists and mystics struggle to define it. The closest anyone came is the suggestion that it was a moment that was a break in the eternal axis of harmony. There doesn’t necessarily have to be established and defined laws for there to be a crime. There has to be a realm of order, a system of order, a spiritual aesthetic. For crime to exist there has to be a moral universe, whose morality need not be stated in words but in the law of harmony. The first crime was a breach of harmony which split the spheres. It compelled a new reality. It precipitated the fall. The fall was dimensional, not directional. The fall was the creation, by the deed of spirit, of a new realm. The realm of the material was not there before the fall. It came after the fall. It is necessary that a meditation on crime begins with the numinous. For how else can we account for the sense of evil that somehow entered the human consciousness in the million or so years of its evolution. There can be no crime without a sense of evil. It must be said quickly however that not all crime has to do with the sense of evil. From a certain point onwards crime ceases to be notional. It becomes a construct.

To be continued…

excerpt from:

WHY I HATE BULLIES BY JANINE DI GIOVANNI

For the past 25 years of my life, I have gone after war criminals, in one way or another. I am not a lawyer or a policeman; I don’t have classic forensic training. But I am a journalist who operates in conflict zones; and one thing war criminals and bad guys hate more than anything are reporters. If we get obsessive enough, they know we are always going to find them, or at least have links to them.

My motives for seeking justice for victims of horrendous war crimes stems back to my mentor, a Jewish Israeli lawyer called Felicia Langer whom I met during the first intifada, or uprising, in Palestine. At that time, she was one of the few people legally representing Palestinians, and she had done since the 1967 occupation. The day I met her in Jerusalem, she was in her office crying. She had lost another case, a battle to get a teenage boy who had been murdered in Israeli prison by security forces, exhumed. She had lost her case, and hence, the sobs at her desk. But she was not giving up. She said she would never give up, even though she lost nearly all of her cases.

What did Samuel Beckett write? Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better. When I left her after several years of working in Palestine, she told me I had an obligation to bring the voices and the stories of those who needed justice but were unable to get in on their own, to the world. It was not exactly the recipe for a happy life — traipsing around the world uncovering evidence of horrible crimes. But it seemed she had passed me something, a mantle of some sorts, and so I found myself next in Bosnia, then Rwanda, then Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and on and on and on.

excerpt from:

FREE EVERYTHING BY MIRANDA JULY

I don’t remember the first time I did it, but I remember the first time I got caught. I was a freshman at U.C. Santa Cruz, the store was called Zanotto’s, the item was Neosporin. I took it out of its packaging, bent down as if to scratch my ankle, and then wedged the tube of triple-antibiotic ointment into my white ankle sock. When the guard grabbed my arm, I was so scared I peed on the floor. As we waited for the police to come, I had to watch a janitor clean up my pee with a mop. I was taken down to the station and formally arrested: fingerprints, mug shot—they really wanted to teach this nineteen-year-old, transparent-dress-wearing punk a lesson. The lesson I learned was that I was now legally an adult, so I didn’t have to worry that my parents would be called. I was free—even my crimes belonged to me alone.

In time, I improved. I discovered that stealing required a loose, casual energy, a sort of oneness with the environment, like surfing or horse-whispering. And once I knew I could do it I felt strangely obliged to. I remember feeling guilty for not stealing, as though I were wasting money. After I dropped out of college and moved to Portland, Oregon, it became part of my livelihood. I stared at my shopping list like a stressed housewife, deliberating over which items to steal and which to buy with food stamps. My preferred purse was gigantic and discreetly rigid, like a suitcase. I packed it with blocks of cheese, loaves of bread, and lots of soy products, because I was a vegetarian.