denial

Photo by Daniella Zalcman

If you don't know what the Kübler-Ross is all about, I am talking about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who in her book, "Death and Dying", outlined the five stages people go through in order to deal with grief and tragic loss.

1. Denial: The initial stage: "It can't be happening."
2. Anger: "Why me? It's not fair."
3. Bargaining: "Just let me live to see my children graduate."
4. Depression: "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"
5. Acceptance: "It's going to be OK."

The grief model is not a "5 step" program but milestones in a continuum of emotional stages. So if you have a group of people grieving the same loss, they all are not necessarily going to hit those milestones at the same time. Which is why I've been asking Clinton activist supporters the hard question : What if Barack wins?

Just when I think the Bush administration couldn't get into a deeper cesspool of corruption, that then comes news like the one about Michael Chertoff being the possible replacement for Alberto Gonzales and ... well ... I have to slap myself out the shock.

Let me refresh your memory :

This the same Michael Chertoff that allegedly traced the 9/11 to Al-Qaeda and who helped market and brand "the war on terror".

Michael Chertoff is the guy that helped write the "torture memorandum" while he was at the criminal division of the Justice Department.

This is the same guy that was supposed to manage and supervise FEMA, especially before, during and after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

At least we can say one thing about Bush : He's loyal.

I have been to Japan four times, including one year living and working in Kyoto. Love the place. But Japan is mired in its own equivalent to Holocaust denial that keeps them from fully moving on from the WW II era. I experienced this first hand more than 10 years ago during the 50th anniversary of the end of WW II, and I see it today in the news headlines. From Salon.com:

March 01,2007 | TOKYO -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday there was no evidence Japan coerced Asian women into working as sex slaves during World War II, backtracking from a landmark 1993 statement in which the government acknowledged that it set up and ran brothels for its troops.

Abe's comments to reporters came as a group of ruling party lawmakers urged the government to revise the so-called Kono Statement, which states that Japan's wartime military sometimes recruited women to work in the brothels with coercion.

"The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," Abe said. "We have to take it from there."

Historians say that up to 200,000 women, mainly from Korea and China, were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in brothels run by the military government as so-called "comfort women" during the war...