"Tell me how you gonnah change the world
When you haven't got the love?...

... DON'T shake me by the hand
PRETEND to understand
To get into my mind
You gottah get into my groove...

Step into my shoes
Come and feel my blues... " ‚ Incognito

Examples: My dissassociations from Ugo.com and O'Flaherty's Irish Pub. Both handled in a quiet, politic manner. I think I even made the transition from Casa de Caca with that same seething anger at play. I become more deliberate when you really piss me off. But I am also at my most vengeful then. I used to get pissed off and just walk away. I didn't want to "waste" my energy. Not anymore. I'm older now and have no reason for worry about the allocation of my energy. What wasn't spent getting from zero to fifty is now allocated to making sure that I feel good. Revenge feels good. Revenge served cold is best.

They say that "Success is the best revenge." I don't completely agree with that, either. Now I know that just doing well oneself is NEVER as good as seeing your enemies and those who have slighted you suffer and the penultimate is having had a secret, silent hand in bringing that suffering about.

"Whoa, Dude! YOU! You've been preaching compassion in this here bully pulpit of yours for over a decade!!!

"Revenge?!? What are you saying?"

IN THIS ISSUE OF THE G21 we present two very special looks at the crisis in the Middle East. BERNARD SABELLA writes from Israel, on-the-killing-ground, and gives you an intimate perspective. WOLF DE VOON returns to these pages to challenge the traditional orthodoxy again.

These men have differing takes on the cycle of vengeance that feeds this killing in the Middle East, but both agree on one thing: THE KILLING MUST STOP.

What I am saying is that after having lived in Egypt, Yugoslavia and Oakland, California, over this fifty, I've come to comprehend the need some people feel for getting theirs back.

Rough stuff, I know, but part of what makes we foolish mortals tick.

Certainly, there are scales to the level of pain we inflict. It's seldom that the individual can inflict the same devastating revenge, up to and including bloodshed, that a nation state has the power to wreak --- and quickly. But I've always been in the camp that argues that the intention is as valid as the level of pain one can inflict. So I don't make that fine separation between emotional and physical violence. I can't see the effective difference. Depriving a man of economic survival is just as heinous as depriving him of immediate physical survival, as far as I'm concerned.

So, I believe that if we spend our time praying for -- if not directly planning -- the misfortune of our enemies, it is only because prayer is our only resort. We're still "bad" and vengeful people. When we get up to planning bad things to happen to other people, we've moved into that area that we all know in our heart-of-hearts is called sin. When we execute on our plans for another's misfortune, we're in the full-blown zone of revenge. The blood might as well already be on our hands.

Knowing this, if we make any claim to intelligence and conscience whatsoever, means that by following our impulse for vengeance, getting ours back, bringing the personal injury we believe we have suffered home to those we consider the perpetrators of that injury takes us into dangerous waters. I'm certain even President Bush must know this, faced as he is now with using the same standards in judging Sharon and Israel's actions toward the Palestineans as those to which he held himself and the United States to as regards Afghanistan. What's good for the goose, as the saying goes. But this is dubious moral ground on which the President now stands, and he must know that, too.

There's no other explanation for the shameful waffling and wiggling and waggling he's done on the issue of this crisis during the last month. In the process, Yassir Arafat has been conferred less-than-human status.

In this same process, abetted by connections to the Enron/Andersen debacles, George Dubya is standing a little shorter in the view of most segments of the international community. He knows this, too.

Europe was already questioning the validity of the USA "coalition" -- a tawdry euphemism for our brutal stance of demanding revenge -- and the true goals of our "War on Terror." (After all, they've been watching us wage our decades-long "War on Drugs" while remaining the world's largest drug-consuming nation.) Americans need their highs, whether it's Prozac or cocaine. The pharmaceutical companies know this, so do the Kosovo Liberation Army and the kid posting up in the 'hood. Our moral stature in both conflicts has been exposed for the flimsy facade it is.

Revenge does feel good -- until the reptile mind is satisfied and the higher mind kicks in and forces adults to accept that revenge simply leads to retaliation.

Life on The Bayou

This being New Orleans, he of course ignored the legal nicety that requires that if he dismiss me he is to be prepared to pay me immediately. Instead, he insisted that I return to receive my final paycheck on Wednesday. In this plantation culture, the law counts for little or nothing, as I've mentioned before...

You're wondering what brought this on? Fair enough.

It had to do with that raise I've been mentioning for about the last five weeks. You see, despite the fact that I was doing work that in any actual American city would have paid around $15 - $20/hour, I was being paid a "salary" that equalled about $8.75/hr. --- IF I only worked forty hours a week. Long term readers know that the weeks were few when I had the luxury of those kinds of hours. Thus, I was effectively making less than minimum wage.

After being promised for weeks that my raise would be considered, I took the last (ephemeral) deadline as the last I would accept. I was making more money working as the janitor at O'Flaherty's and while I was working construction, in effective hourly income. So I submitted my resignation.

My boss seemed to think that balking after waiting five weeks was just unreasonable. I still don't.

So, I'm again, a statistic. Of course I'm now a statistic with a better sense of the lay of the land here and A LOT more knowledge about how things and people work in this town.

I have seen the face of the Massah, and the last thing on his mind (if it crosses his mind at all) is what or whether the slave gets to eat.

The Other Stuff on My Mind

So, looking back, that turmoil about being 25 provoked major life changes for me. Many of those obtained for fifteen years. I trust that these changes will be less permanent. But it's very easy to feel that decisions made this year will stick for a long time. That's what is so frightening.

Even a guy who has made changes and transformations his stock and trade gets intimidated by a prospect of those proportions.

AND, honestly, there's a degree of dissatisfaction with the level of motivation and intellectual achievement of some of the people I've encountered here. New Orleanians have more admirable traits than I might have ascribed to them on first blush, but there is also a disregard for those little things like honor, ethics and productivity that one cannot help but finding positively chilling.

I can only hope and pray that I find my way clear to move back to "civilization". Until then, I have to find a way to make this Kingdom of Slack, "work for" me. Heh!

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LIFE OF ROD THIS WEEK

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

This year he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. (Think: The Boy.) Oh yeah, Rod's designing Web sites for other people. And he's the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. In his spare time, he chases women.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. The new home of the magazine. He wants to live somewhere civilized when he grows up. Wish him Luck.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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