Guantanamo Bay and Ralph Nader
Recently I saw two documentarys that had a signifigant effect on me as a human being and activist. One was the new movie about Ralph Nader called "An Unreasonable Man" and the other was about three British citizens held captive for 3 years called "The Road to Guantanamo Bay". Both reviewed two major staples in my political convictions: The two party dictatorship this society allows, as well as the gross abuse of human rights by the United States that is barely even heard of.
Lets start with Ralph Nader. Nader gets a bad rap because many blame him for "allowing" Bush to win the presidency by taking away votes from Gore and Kerry, subsequentially, in 2000 and 2004. His new documentary touches on the reasons why he ran and so forth, but I want to get into the importance ofhim running. Does anyone really feel that there is that much of a difference between the Democratic and Republican parties besides a thing silver lining? Although I believe things would be different under Gore or Kerry I still think that Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans for the current, previous and seemingly future mistakes of this government. Many Democrats hopped on the bandwagon for the Iraq war and all Democratic Presidential nominees hope to gain monetary funds from corporate lobbying. I think what Nader is doing is great. He won't win, and he doesn't even get the 5 percent vote necessary to get funding, but he is doing exactly what should be done to expose the fact that we live under a two party dictatorship that is running this country with an iron fist and is the exact opposite of what democracy stands for. If you don;t know anything about Nader, look him up at Wikipedia and you will be pleasantly surprised.
Next, Guantanamo Bay. I really don't know where to go from here so I will just say straight up that this disgusts me. The guilt of the "prisoners", or "enemy combatants" as the US government calls the--not even allowing them the term POWs, thus rebuking their rights under the geneva convention, is not something I am concerned with. In fact, the three men detained had a pretty pitiful story about why they were in Afghanistan in the first place. Anyways, they were released innocently. A recent law requiring that all those who are arrested and detained be allowed to know why they were arrested and detained was rebuked because of Guantanamo Bay and to ease the level of human rights violations going on here. I do not see how this sort of mistreatment of human beings can continue in the broad light of the international stage without a massive uproar! It speaks volumes to the mediocratic, subservant and dumbed down lifestyles we all are accustomed to in a capitalist society.
I, for one, was deeply moved by both these documentaries and urge anyone to see them both.
Also, I am new to the site and was drawn by the scholarship contest but I can see that this is a pretty enlightened community to share thoughts with so I think I'll have fun winning that cool thousand. haha.
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