NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

If the United States can't push through some reasonable form of gun control then we can assume its tenure at the top of the world is over and it is now beyond saving. It is chilling to think that within the United States more people have died in the last six months because of gun violence than Americans who have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and any act of "terrorism" in the past 25 years. It is interesting to watch the debate and where the nation's priorities are, and what is something where it has the ability to change and what keeps it entrenched. All of this reminds me of Bowling for Columbine. Michael Moore tries to figure out what is it that makes the US a country where guns are so pervasive and so much gun violence is tolerated. He notes that alot of other countries have violent histories of repression and genocide just like the US does, but they have taken action to limit access to guns.  One of the things that has really irritated me this past week is

Check out this article below from KUAM. It deals with meetings that the Federated States of Micronesia Association of Guam had in order to draw up some plans on how to deal with violence and crimes that are being attributed to the Micronesian community of Guam, in particular the Chuukese. They even created an education plan with alot of ideas on how to alleviate the social problems within Micronesian communities and those which spill out into the general public. I don't want to speak to the specific issue of Micronesians in Guam, as the available language and ideas makes it almost impossible to have a productive conversation. The "Micronesian problem" is what it is usually referred to as, and it is a textbook example of how a class or group of people become associated, in a way which becomes too commonsensically and too natural, with the ills of the world. Every society has problems, and every ethnic group has problems or roles in creating those problems. The problem

I am almost out of graduate school, and almost an alumni from my Ph.D. program, Ethnic Studies at University of California, San Diego. I say almost, because I'm just waiting on word from my committee to submit the final draft of my dissertation to the graduate school. As I've been waiting for their approval, I've been closely following what's been going on on campus there lately. To say that things have been explosive at my school of UCSD lately would be an understatement. For a campus which I remember for being so large and yet so apathetic, what has been happening there lately has been mind-blowing, in both a positive and negative sense of the word. While I enjoyed my time at UCSD as a graduate student, the school nonetheless had a reputation amongst both undergraduates and faculty for not being very diverse and not being a great place for people who weren't White or Asian. When I was more active in the department it was almost impossible to get African American