NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The past few weeks have been rough for the Commission on Decolonization. Actually, funas enao gi minagahet, the past few years have been rough. After years of nothing happening at the governmental level, we have had three years of something happening. Something is better than nothing I supposed, but when that something amounts to so little, it is hard to find solace. For several years now under the Calvo Administration we have had almost nothing substantive to show for our meeting and our time spent. The Executive Director Ed Alvarez has used free media as best as he can and given presentations both locally and elsewhere about the issue, but as a Commission, it has nothing to be proud of or happy with. The Commission is trapped between the Legislature and the Governor's office. Neither side wants to be the one to fund an educational campaign, since the political payoff for sticking your neck out in this regard is minute. Neither wants to fund anything since there is a potent

Este i ettimon na post-hu para este na såkkan, pues mandisidi yu’ na este na post teneki tahdong yan dongkålu. As the last post of the year, I thought I’d make it big, deep and personal. The image above is from the manga Berserk . As you can guess just from this image alone it is a fairly violent manga, with plenty of blood, guts, gore, depravity, etc. But every once in a while, when the main character (featured above) Guts is particularly enraged and actually does go berserk, the artist Kentaro Miura will draw a simple but ghastly image. These images set the tone for the carnage that follows. It is for this reason that they are almost more violent then the actual depictions of creatures and people being sliced in half. The stark black and white image, has a way of not only powering up the images that follow, but the reader as well, preparing their gaze, communicating through what are sometimes the most simplistic of images, the pure, sublime emotion that is about to be released. Som

Guam and the Marianas Islands don't get much respect, especially in terms of the media in the United States, which consistently forget that these islands belong to the United States or are attached to them. This amnesia is of course very convenient for those wishing to avoid having to refer to the United States as "colonial" in a very ordinary and regular sort of way. Its possible to give the United States labels such as this in extreme cases, but even for some of the most critical people, such labels have to be kept from Guam, since their is nothing extreme about its relationship to the United States. The colonialness of it, is always there, and never really mentioned or dealt with. Guam basically proves that the United States is not an "extreme" or rare case colonizer, but an everyday one. Interestingly enough though, the Marianas Islands do however make regularly appearances in what I guess you could call the world wide web of American progressive/liberal web