Psychofishy wrote:nc ?
what state is that... .i do not know every state yet
remember... /me's not an american
hehe
anyway.. i wanna live somewhere where it's not crowded
i don't like being in the middle of the city or something similiar..
i'd rather be in a very peacefull town without much people
just.. somewhere quiet...
but i don't think those places still excist in this world
Greetz
Ruud
North Carolina, it's in the southeast above Georgia, below Virginia and sided by Tennessee, South Carolina and the Atlantic Ocean. It's home to the eighty-duece!
Asheville is a small city but there are people around. You can walk to huge forest, a huge mountain or a bunch of waterfalls. I think you'd like it here.
"They are one person
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for each other"
+LIVE+ (the band) is performing TWICE there... march 21 in BOCA RATON (which is also the hometown from that other band i know) and march 22. in Orlando
Of course... i get tickets for free (for the vennue).... and the trip.. oh... well...
i get to see both my favourite bands again !
MorissonPoe (the other band) will even join me in visiting +LIVE+ in Boca Raton ! .. .hehe.. isn't this just AWESOME
remember... i'm from holland.. to get there will take 12,5 hours flying !!!!
lizzytysh wrote:Happy travels to you, Ruud.....I hope you find the United States and its people to your liking. I wish you the best of all traveling experiences.
~ Lizzytysh
hehe... thank you very much
i'm sure i'll like it very much there.... but.. i'll only stay for 8 days :-/
i have a study to complete here in holland
but hey.. when i'm there.. the band promised to take care of me.. sleeping places.. food.. etc. etc..
Hi Paul! Welcome! This may not be the best place to put this sentiment, but with the "Ol' Black Joe still pickin' cotton, for your ribbons and bows.....everybody knows...." line, amongst many other things that come to mind with that, a current one regards the Iraq war and the fact that there are a disproportionate number of blacks in the armed services, due to the opportunities that exist for them there, as opposed to in the general job and education markets. As I look at media coverage, particularly the still photos in newspapers and on the Internet, I am always looking to see if/how many blacks are in the photos. It seems from what I've seen [not everything by a long shot], the impression could be that the white men are fighting/winning this war "for America." Yet, as in the Civil War, the same lack of credit prevailed. There are many subtle and insidious forms of "Ol'BlackJoe.....pickin' cotton.....for your ribbons and bows."
I know you can't help bringing the American military or the Iraq War into every thread. So here is another post to refute your erroneous conclusions.
For everyone else, I realize there are some who are sick of cut and paste. So this is a warning------DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS POST
Blacks not overrepresented on battleground, experts say
Pentagon says most front-line fighters are white, working class
03/31/2003
By ARNOLD HAMILTON / The Dallas Morning News
As a medic in Vietnam, John Butler never gave thought to the race of wounded and dying soldiers he served. As a graduate student, though, he became fascinated with the popular notion that blacks are overrepresented in the military's front lines.
"It never has been true," said Dr. Butler, 55, one of the first black students at Louisiana State University and now a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "Except maybe with the Buffalo Soldiers who escorted covered wagons into the [19th century] West."
Indeed, as the nation stands on the brink of war in the Middle East, Pentagon figures show that troops most likely to face combat – and death – in Iraq are disproportionately white, and typically working class.
In the Army, nearly three-fourths of the enlisted infantry are white. In the Air Force and Navy, fewer than 3 percent of pilots are black. And experts say the military's special forces units are overwhelmingly white.
The disparity is especially intriguing to analysts, and troubling to military officials, because blacks make up about 12 percent of the population and 20 percent of active-duty military but are underrepresented in front-line troops.
The experts agree on one point: Black troops' job choices in no way imply that blacks are any less courageous or patriotic than their white counterparts. Indeed, they said, military service long has been viewed among many blacks as a bold statement of love of country.
Just what led high percentages of black volunteers to migrate to such noncombat tasks as administration, logistics and communication, at the same time white enlistees steered in greater numbers toward high-risk positions, isn't easily answered, analysts say.
Some suggest that many white volunteers sign up for ground combat units because of cash bonuses and as a shorter-term way to earn GI benefits for college. Others theorize that blacks tend to view the military more as a place where skills can be learned and experience gained for a second career later in the private sector.
What is certain is that America's military – including the 300,000 or so amassed in the Middle East – tends to be made up of the nation's socioeconomic middle, experts say. Not the upper one-fourth, typically destined not only for college but also in many cases graduate school. Nor the bottom quarter, where lower educational levels, criminal records and physical or mental problems seem more prevalent.
"They [America's troops] are going to look more like the college-bound youth than the one working at McDonald's," said James Burk, a political sociologist at Texas A&M University.
"We can think about the military as a bridging institution from wherever you are, bridging to a better place in America for economic mobility but also for educational mobility."
In January, a senior defense official conceded that military demographics don't mirror society when it comes to ethnicity, noting concerns that Hispanics are underrepresented in all branches but the Marines. But he also hailed the diversity achieved in the 30 years since the all-volunteer force was instituted.
"We all want a force that, roughly speaking, looks like America, and by and large that's what we have [today]," said the official, who briefed reporters on the condition he not be named. "It's a great force, it performs very well, it's the envy of the world."
Convention challenged
The statistics counter a decades-old convention – that blacks are disproportionately assigned to the front lines – that still pervades American politics.
"I thought we had disabused that myth," said Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University military sociologist who co-authored with Dr. Butler the book All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way. "But it never did go away."
The misconception remains, military analysts say, because early in the Vietnam War, blacks were dying at a disproportionately high rate, creating – as the Moskos-Butler book noted – the impression among many Americans that blacks "have been used by their country as cannon fodder."
But at war's end, blacks accounted for 12.1 percent of all Americans who died in Southeast Asia – a figure that almost mirrored their percentage in the U.S. population.
Questions about the makeup of the troops were raised last fall in Texas' Senate race when former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk said American fighting forces in Iraq would be "disproportionately minority."
More recently, Rep. Charles Rangel, a Korean War veteran, proposed reinstating the draft, contending "the burden of military service was being borne disproportionately by members of disadvantaged groups."
The New York Democrat said he believed Congress would be more cautious in its approach to war if a broader cross section of the nation's sons and daughters were at risk.
Cultural variations
Overall, minorities make up just under 25 percent of the American population – but nearly 35 percent of the nation's enlisted military force. Military experts say the number of Hispanics in the military is increasing, but the figure is less than 8 percent.
Some say blacks may be drawn to administration, logistics and communication because of tradition – often the duties their fathers or other relatives carried out in the military.
Most important, though, blacks may pursue such jobs out of a sense of economic necessity. Since the all-volunteer military commenced, black unemployment often has been double the rate for whites.
As a result, experts say, blacks have pursued tasks designed to provide skills and experience that can be transferred later to the civilian workforce.
The numbers reflect such a strategy: A recent Pentagon report said blacks account for 36 percent of functional support and administration and 27 percent of medical and dental career fields.
"This is, after all, what an all-volunteer military is about," the report stated. "Volunteers making choices to join and remain in the military, and to select certain occupations, including those associated with combat or those that provide skills more readily transferable to the private section."
Military analysts and Pentagon officials note, however, that all American forces – whether in front-line combat or support – are just as likely to be targeted these days by terrorists or anti-American activists.
Thank you for this article, George Gordon. I find several things in it to be encouraging. I'm not going to dwell just yet on Texas showing up so much throughout it. I'm not sure just whether all this is accurate and how much is framing/reframing the issue on the administration's behalf. I'm not sure who has the better/most reliable figures. Of course, I realize this can be said of any article that anyone brings forward. I'm willing to consider what it says, and am hoping for its accuracy.
Yes, I have heard Representative Rangel speaking to this very thing. However, I'm not going to discount out-of-hand the information in this article, either. I'm also aware that many blacks were dying in VietNam. I had wanted to mention the Buffalo Soldiers when I wrote my post, but couldn't bring their name to mind, so let it go. Per this article, perhaps there's valid reason for seeing primarily, dirty, white faces in the blowing sands of Iraq. Thanks for bringing this to me. I'll be reading it several more times.
Another cut and paste supporting George Gordon's with a little relevence to current war - and Like George Gordon warned those who don't like reading cut and paste IGNORE.
Poverty, military service seem to go hand-in-hand
By ROY MacGREGOR
Saturday, April 5, 2003 - Page A1 Globe and Mail
PALESTINE, W.VA. -- This spring, yellow is the colour of choice in the Appalachians.
The forsythia is in full bloom in the high hills north of Charleston. There are dandelions lining the ditches and daffodils growing wild along the clear creeks that empty down into the muddy Kanawha River. In the little town of Elizabeth and the even smaller Palestine, there are yellow ribbons around every telephone pole, yellow bows on most of the trailers that speckle the rolling hills and even the odd yellow wreath on the broken-down vehicles that pass for landscaping in this desperately poor country they call hardscrabble.
There is a story here of prayers being answered -- a story they are calling The Miracle in the Hills.
But there is also the harsher story of the reality of hills -- and of sometimes not even having much of a prayer.
Most houses and trailers have some yellow, but only one house -- three kilometres up Mayberry Run Road where the pavement gives way to gravel and visiting cars had better give way to logging trucks -- is surrounded by yellow police tape.
The simple, small, tin-roofed house with the backhoe in the front yard and chickens bobbing along the side belongs to Gregory Lynch and wife, Deadra. It is a house also surrounded this past week by satellite trucks and television cameras in search of any word on America's newest hero, 19-year-old U.S. Army Private Jessica Lynch.
Gregory Lynch, a 43-year-old self-employed trucker, wears a faded blue-checked shirt, jeans and work boots, and periodically walks within range of the yellow tape, limping badly on his right leg. The television reporters, hair perfect, suits pressed, hurry to see if he will say anything.
He has nothing to say this day, the story already known, the images everywhere from the front pages to the tree at the end of the lane with a poster of Jessica in full uniform, looking dainty and far less threatening than the light rain that sends the television reporters and their hair racing for the broadcast trucks.
Such signs are everywhere in Wirt County. And dozens of other signs hang from the churches and buildings of this deeply religious county: "Thank You God for Saving Jessica," "Praise the Lord for Answered Prayers."
Down at The What-Not Shop in Palestine, three older men -- one a Second World War combat veteran, one a Vietnam veteran, one a veteran who fought no war -- say they never gave up hope that the teenager would be rescued.
She had been missing in action since March 23, when her unit took a wrong turn near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah and ran into an ambush. She was dramatically rescued from a Nasiriyah hospital on Tuesday. The fate of her fellow missing soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company is still unknown.
"We knew she'd be back," says Harry Hemmick, who served in the armed forces in the 1970s. He says he's known Jessica since the day her parents brought her home.
"This is a praying community," says Ron Pettry, the Vietnam veteran, adding he's known her since she first began crawling.
"One hurts, we all hurt" says Clifford Reynolds, the Second World War veteran who admits he doesn't know Jessica, but "I know her daddy, and I knew her grand-daddy, and I even knew her great-grand-daddy."
All three have something else in common with her. They saw the military as a way out of circumstance, an opportunity not to be passed up. It is no surprise to any of them that Jessica Lynch joined up the same day as her 21-year-old brother, Greg, and no surprise that her 18-year-old sister, Brandi, has also signed up and will report for duty in August.
That's just the way it has always gone in Wirt County.
"There's no jobs around here," Pettry says. "There's no employment. Most of them go into the service because they know the government will pay well and they'll come out of it with some training."
"There has never been a lot of work here," adds Reynolds. "People who didn't leave during the Depression are still stuck in the Depression if they stayed."
There has long been a link between poverty and the U.S. military, even between poverty and heroism. The last great American war hero -- winner of the Medal of Honor in the Second World War -- was Texas's Audie Murphy, the sixth of nine children born to sharecroppers so poor the family often lived in abandoned boxcars.
Jessica Lynch is unique in that she is a teenager and a woman, and not even the military can figure out the last time an American PoW was rescued.
But she is also from a poor background, and in that she is not unique at all.
The song from the musical Hair suggested that Vietnam was "white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people," but the lyrics are not entirely accurate.
The popular myth is that blacks died in far greater proportions in Vietnam than whites, but while this was true in the early stages of the ground war, by war's end, blacks had suffered 12.5 per cent of the total deaths in Vietnam, slightly less than their proportion in the overall population.
Today, there are 1.4 million Americans in the military and the Pentagon maintains that the demographics are quite representative of the population as a whole, especially given the increasing number of Hispanics who have joined in recent years.
A strong sense remains, however, that the poor soldiers so vastly outnumber the well-off that New York Democratic Representative Charles Rangel has said: "It's just not fair that the people that we ask to fight our wars are people who join the military because of economic conditions, because they have fewer options."
Oddly enough, Jessica's sudden fame has brought some trappings of wealth -- offers of new cars, college scholarships -- but the experience has been rather overwhelming to the Lynches.
"They are exhausted," U.S. military spokesman Randy Coleman says, coming to the end of the lane to talk.
There was some hint that the family would be flown to Germany to be with Jessica as she recovers in hospital, but the complications were now more on this side of the ocean than the other: the family, for one, would need passports.
"They're nervous," Coleman says. "If they fly, they're flying for the first time."
No wonder the story of Jessica Lynch has so immediately become the stuff of legend -- soon, surely, the stuff of Hollywood.
Earlier reports this week quoted officials saying Lynch had sustained "multiple gunshot wounds" and had been stabbed as she "fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers . . . firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition."
The Washington Post quoted one official saying, "She was fighting to the death" and had no intention of being taken alive.
The story, unfortunately for the movie, turns out to be untrue. Her father spoke to her by telephone from Germany, where she was airlifted for treatment on an injured spine and broken legs, and he quietly told reporters there had been no gunshot wounds or stabbing.
No matter, she was still a hero, and nothing like this had ever before happened to Wirt County.
"We weren't even on the map before this happened," Pettry says.
But they certainly are now, with badly folded road maps on the seat of every reporter's car lined up and down Mayberry Run Road.
All the interest delights Alice Coplin, who pasted Jessica Lynch's picture over the front door of her yellow-ribboned trailer, and who says this rescue was the answer to the prayers of an entire community that doesn't get much but has so much to give.
"And did you see the forsythia as you came along?" she asks.
"I don't think I've ever seen it so lovely as it is this year."
Yes, Vern, this speaks to the distribution of various ethnicities in the military. It also speaks to why many people tend to join, i.e. for economic purposes, not because they're anxious to kill. It also speaks to what I had heard with Rangel regarding his questioning of his peers on Capitol Hill as to who had relatives in the military [deafening silence], and to who knew people who had relatives in the military [deafening silence]. His point regarding reinstating the draft was that if the decision-makers knew how it was to be even remotely, personally impacted, they might not be so anxious to send others' children to war. And the military would not tend to be more that of the economically oppressed. While in the military, they continue to live at pretty much poverty level, except they do get training which can benefit them later, and they get big bonuses [of which I wasn't aware] to go into frontline, direct combat.
Like usual on message boards the original theme of this thread has morphed into something totally off topic. So I didn't read too much of it.
I'd just like to say one thing that I found interesting. I took a certificate course in Public Relations a few months ago and was fortunate enough to have an amazing teaching for "Effective Speaking" and "Practical approach to p.r.". She taught us what P.R. was all about (well, as much of it that can be taught) and she was diffenitely fighting for the right cause.
On the last day of class she decided to play a song for us (the idea being inspired by me ) that song happend to be "everybody knows." Only that it was the cover version by Don Henley (which I thought was more effective cause I think the original would of made everyone un-comfortable.) But the reason that she played the song was cause she wanted us to listen to the lyrics.
Later on that night we had a little celebration for finishing the course at a local pub and people were talking about why she played that for us and they were totally clueless. I thought about this a bit and I think I know why she played it.
She talked a lot about politics and about how much p.r. is used in politics. She talked a lot about "The play within the play" and how essentially politics (politricks) is all showbiz. You keep the public thinking one thing while the REAL shit goes down. This leads me to believe that she thinks (which I agree with) that when Leonard says "everybody knows" he doesn't really mean it literatly. When a person "knows" something they close their mind to everything else and often miss "what is".
I'm probably wrong about this but so what, at least I hope this will be thought provocking and maybe steer this discussion in the right direction.
To me this song might reflect what the New Testament speaks about when it says that politics and faith is two different things. Politics is about making a sociaty which is just. Christian faith says that this cannot be done if people dont live up to their knowledge of suffering. Christian faith says that people never do, in spite of their knowledge. They might feel just, and often do, but they never are.
That this perspective is not only a wild shot from the hip, is shown in the line :
Everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
from the bloody cross on top of Calvery
to the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows is comming apart
take one last look at this sacred heart
before it blows
and everybody knows
We neglect the suffering of our brothers and sisters, an claim that we by paying taxes, offering soup in the streets, supporting a child in africa are the rightous ones. This is what the bible call sin. The lacking ability to accept that we, no matter how hard we think we try, let people down.
The gospel talkes straight into this context :
We are sinners but forgiven sinners.
Nothing will ever be the same again
) that song happend to be "everybody knows." Only that it was the cover version by Don Henley (which I thought was more effective cause I think the original would of made everyone un-comfortable.) But the reason that she played the song was cause she wanted us to listen to the lyrics.