Robert Koehler -
No mail on Saturday, maybe, but small-town police get armored personnel carriers?
Let's take a moment -- in the context of these bitter times, and President Obama's recent austerity budget proposal -- to celebrate the questions the residents of Keene, N.H., are asking their city council about the kind of world we're creating.
First of all, the grotesque insult of "austerity" in the shadow of limitless military spending is destroying our national sanity. And the proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, mental health services, environmental cleanup, National Parks programs and even, yeah, Saturday mail delivery are miniscule compared to the unmet social needs we haven't yet begun to address in this country, in education, renewable energy and so much more. But we're spending with reckless abandon to arm ourselves and our allies and provoke our enemies, and sometimes arm them as well, creating the sort of world no one (almost no one) wants: a world of endless war.
SINCE ITS ADOPTION IN 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified more quickly and by more governments than any other human rights instrument.1 There are only two United Nations (UN) members who have yet to ratify the convention: Somalia and the United States. Opponents of ratification object to giving away US sovereignty to the UN (a general objection applying to most treaties), but they also claim the treaty undermines parental rights.2
