Women's Crossroads

Every time I check out a news site or turn on the radio news, I have the strangest feeling, a mix of dread and hope: has it happened?

But what is "it"? What am I waiting for?

When I push myself to answer this question, all I can come up with is: Some kind of catalytic event that will propel the world forward into change. It might be a catastrophic event (hence my fear) or it might be a world-changing positive event, such as the rise of a powerful enough social movement to ignite social change (hence my hope).

I have had, for a long time now, this constant sense of impending change, and at this point I have to say I am actively desiring it, even with the knowledge that it may come in the form of a catastrophe I won't survive.

What now seems like the worst sort of torment is the slow, draining, creeping sludge of relentless bad news. The particulars change but the overall message remains the same: our leaders are corrupt, greedy, selfish and hopelessly short-sighted; militarism drives economics and politics, and hence social policy; the environment of our planet is under severe chemical and material assault, and the process of environmental destruction may now be irreversible; and through it all the people with the most power to demand, create and effect change are asleep on the job.

We're not all asleep. But not enough of us are awake. It is the critical job of those of us who see the impending disaster to sound the alarm and try to wake up our sisters and brothers while there's still some time to try to avert the final catastrophe.

The words of that possibly apocryphal saying of the Hopi elders keep sounding in my ears:

It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.
....
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.

This says to me that I should stop waiting for "the news" to tell me what's happening. I know what's happening, deep in my gut. The catastrophe is happening, in slow motion, constantly. And the social movement is rising, also, constantly, in slow motion.

There may not be one dramatic moment in time when Change overtakes us--no storming of the Bastille or assassination of Czar. But the period of change we're in is just as intense and momentous as in those epochs.

My task is to remain awake and alert to opportunities to create positive change, in however small the increments; and to be a source of inspiration and encouragement to the emerging changemakers around me, just as I draw my inspiration from those who are further along the road than I am.

Together we can become the social movement we've been waiting for--and we must. The alternative is too awful to contemplate.

I’m just back from a faculty meeting in which the faculty voted to support the idea of a student teach-in on diversity issues on our campus. I should be elated! Why am I so depressed?

I think it’s because it was so obvious that two-thirds of the people in the room didn’t really understand the urgency behind the students’ request for a teach-in, and didn’t care to understand. They were willing to go along with the idea basically in a spirit of appeasement, and to give the appearance that they were supporting “the minority kids” in a quick, one-day, rather painless way.

I guess I’m feeling jaded and depressed because I’ve been here, done this, before, and seen it lead absolutely nowhere, in terms of lasting institutional change.

At this very same meeting, just before the discussion of the teach-in came up, the chair of the Social Science division, who happens to be a gay woman (a historian who also teaches gender studies courses), passed out a sheet detailing the race/gender composition of the fulltime faculty at Simon’s Rock.

Out of 36 fulltime faculty members in 1997, 11 were women (30.5% of the total) and 5 were minority (13.89% of the total).

In 2005, we had gained six fulltime faculty members, for a total of 39, but there were only 10 fulltime women faculty members (25.6% of the total) and 8 minority faculty members (20.5%). [It should be noted that there is only one African American fulltime faculty member. I don’t know who they’re counting as “minority.”]

Point being that even on this basic level of hiring practices, the college has failed to make any substantial progress in the past eight years.

What does it take to make deep, lasting institutional change? It takes outstanding, committed leaders. It takes funding. It takes the support of a critical mass of the key players (in this case, the faculty)—not just lip service, but a solid dedication to developing and implementing a new vision of how our institution could be.

Yesterday I did something in the vision department, at least. I wrote up a proposal for a series of 2-credit required, sequential courses that would focus on campus-related social issues in a serious, analytical and personal way. Students would be required to take one of these courses every year they’re at Simon’s Rock.

If the institution is serious about changing the culture, it’s gonna take a lot more than a one-day, student-run teach-in. It’s going to take hard work on the part of every constituency in the school.

Are we up for that? Sadly, I doubt it.

My post on diversity on PB&J has generated a lot of discussion. But once again I find myself having to defend the notion that women and non-Western, non-heterosexual, poor or minority folks should be given fair representation in our required core curriculum at Simon's Rock. Because they've been excluded from the Western canon historically, the argument goes, they're inferior, less important, and don't deserve students' time.

Here's the comment in question:

"The only way to introduce female writers into the curriculum is to take out works that are more important historically. For example, of the writers you listed [Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana, Harriet Jacobs, Jean Rhys], the only name I recognize is Harriet Jacobs. I've read Jacobs, and her memoir is important and well written, but she says something very similar to what Frederick Douglas says. We already read Douglas, and Douglas is more important historically than Jacobs. If we substituted Jacobs for Douglas we would be using a lesser text in order to promote diversity. I think that defeats the whole purpose of seminar. We could add Jacobs in addition to Douglas to an already packed curriculum but that would just squeeze something else out.

"College students need to be familiar with Plato and Greek thought, they need to be familiar with Dante and the middle ages, they need to be familiar with Shakespeare, they need to understand Darwin. Sur Juana is less of a priority.

"Obviously we shouldn't select authors based on the results of a google search, but this gives you some idea of the relative influence of various authors in world culture:
Current readings:
William Shakespeare: 15.9 million pages
Plato: 14.4 million pages
Charles Darwin: 10.6 million pages
Frederick Douglas: 7.81 million pages
Karl Marx: 6.04 million pages
Jane Austen: 4.21 million pages
Virginia Woolf: 3.18 million pages
Franz Kafka: 2.03 million pages
Sophocles: 2 million pages
Dante Alighieri: 1.99 million pages*

Important writers not used:
Aristotle: 13.8 million pages
John Locke: 5.91 million pages
Thomas Aquinas: 2.36 million pages
Rene Descartes: 1.87 million pages
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 877,000 pages**

JBH's Suggestions:
Jean Rhys: 849,000 pages
Harriet Jacobs: 802,000 pages
Sor Juana: 430,000 pages
Christine de Pizan: 108,000 pages
*Searching for Dante alone resulted in 15.6 million pages
**A different transliteration (Dostoevsky) gives you another 600,000 pages"

So by this logic, educators should just go on teaching the traditional Western canon, practically devoid of women or non-Westerners, just because that's the way it's always been done. It's disturbing to find students, even at a supposedly progressive college like Simon's Rock, arguing such a conservative, traditionalist approach. Why is Harriet Jacobs less well-known than Frederick Douglass? Because as a woman, she was ignored by scholars and students. Does that mean she deserves to continue to be ignored? In my opinion, her autobiography is far more important and interesting than Douglass's. Does my opinion, as a feminist scholar, count less than the opinion of the male scholar in the next office? Apparently, to these students, the answer is yes.

It's frustrating. I thought we had the multicultural curricular wars already, more than 1o years ago, and I thought the importance of diversity in the college core curriculum had been well-established, at places like Stanford, Columbia, and even Harvard and Princeton. But apparently this is a battle that must be fought and fought again.

You know what? The problem is, we who believe in diversity have to spend so much time and energy proving and re-proving our arguments that our investment in scholarly work suffers. Instead of having this argument with students, I should be busy teaching Christine de Pizan and Harriet Jacobs!

Sigh.

This seems to be my week for facing the reality of white privilege and racism in our country, and indeed in my own backyard--not that this is an issue that's going to go away at the end of the week. Last week Frances Kendall, a nationally recognized "diversity consultant," came back to Simon's Rock College, where I teach, to report on the "Diversity Climate Assessment Study" she conducted at the school nearly a year ago. She painted a pretty sobering picture of race and gender relations at the college.

I wrote about it at length on PB&J, the student blog at Simon's Rock that I launched last year in a class on alternative media. The post has generated a lively conversation, mostly among students, though I know the faculty and staff have been quietly checking it out as well. Some think Simon's Rock spent the money on this consultant unwisely, especially since she didn't tell students of color anything they didn't already know.

Maybe so, but as Kendall herself replied to this complaint, "you can't be a prophet in your own land," meaning it can be helpful to have an outsider come in and give you the straight story, especially an outsider with the experience and authority that she has acquired in her many years of anti-racist activism and diversity consulting on college campuses.

It's true that the people who care about diversity issues at Simon's Rock already knew that "faculty of color are in pain and feel psychologically damaged" by their time at the college, and that "women faculty feel stifled," and that faculty of both these groups feel overburdened by an excessive mentoring load on top of the regular courseload that they share with the white male faculty. But it's one thing for us to know this, and another thing for the administration to hear it from the lips of an impartial outside expert.

Frances Kendall made it quite clear in her presentation that she was only reflecting back to us what she had been told in the focus groups and interviews she'd conducted on campus last year. So of course we knew it already. But she's packaged it for us complete with recommendations for improvement, and now if the administration does not follow through on making changes, we will have that much more ammunition for our complaints.

The fact that her visit to campus has started us talking and thinking in terms of immediate change is in itself valuable, as far as I'm concerned. Tonight I was at the library after my UNIFEM Book Club meeting, and the head librarian struck up a conversation with me about the matter, suggesting that the library could host some "teas" in which diversity would be the topic of structured discussion.

As I said in my post on PB&J, I think we should integrate a discussion of racism and white privilege (along with straight privilege and male privilege, at the very least) into the First Year Seminar that is an A.A. graduation requirement for all students. If Simon's Rock is serious about improving the "diversity climate" on campus, then the college needs to mandate that students engage with these issues on a sustained and regular basis, not just in a two-hour workshop during orientation week.

In Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism, Jen Baumgardner and Amy Richards talk about the importance of "mandatory preventative education" for students. In this case, they're referring to sex ed, "teaching students about affirmative consent, making them understand and abide by rules of conduct that respect their fellow students" (69), but the idea is just as valid for diversity. Young people should be as informed as possible about the realities of racism and white privilege (and, again, straight and male privilege), so they can navigate social and professional relationships gracefully, avoiding ignorant and painful mistakes. And maybe they'll even be fired up enough about what they learn of racism to become anti-racist activists themselves, in their own circles and communities.

As Kendall said in her presentation at Simon's Rock, we should educate students about racism and white privilege "not out of a sense of guilt, but out of the desire to educate them fully for the multicultural world they will encounter in the 21st century." Segregation is still alive and well in America, and it's possible to get to the ripe old age of 16 (entering age for Simon's Rock freshman) without having had a meaningful encounter with a person of another race. In college, even though whites still predominate, people of color are mixed in much more than they are in the lower grades.

Why should we expect that young people will automatically know how to relate to each other across the lines of various differences? It's our responsibility as educators to frame that encounter respectfully, and facilitate discussions on what it means to be white or black or inbetween in this country today. We shirk this responsibility at our own peril.

Yesterday I attended a provocative lecture on white (male) privilege given by Tim Wise at Miss Hall's School in Lenox. Miss Hall's is a pretty elite-looking place, a prep school for girls on a former estate in a ritzy town. I had never been there before, so I was surprised to see how many young women of color filed into the auditorium along with their white peers. Judging from the earnest introduction given by an African American student, begging the audience to keep an open mind and prepare to be enlightened, the anti-racist speaker was invited for good reason.

I was impressed at the way Wise framed the issue of white privilege in terms of structural, institutional benefits that those of privilege are born into but accept as "natural." He also consistently compared white privilege to male, straight privilege, and talked a lot about his wife and two daughters and the world he wants to see for them. It was refreshing to see a white male ally who wasn't afraid to come out and identify himself as such!

Wise used his personal success story as an illustration: he was able to go to college because his mom was able to take out a loan using his grandmother's home as collateral. Had he been born to a black family without the property benefits that whites have accrued after generations of being given advantages, he said, he would never have gotten to college, would never have gotten involved with the anti-racist movement (he cut his teeth on the anti-David Duke campaign in Louisiana in the 1990s) and would not be the successful author speaking to us today.

Wise trotted out some pretty sobering statistics, which most of us have probably heard before, but they still bear listening to again:

• in 1976, the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned 22% of the financial wealth of the country

• in 2006, this had doubled: the wealthiest 1% of Americans now own 46% of the financial wealth of the U.S.

For African Americans, the picture is very different.

• In 1865, African Americans owned one-half of 1% of the wealth of the country.
• In 2006, they own 1% of the wealth of the country.

So look at that, they doubled their wealth in 130 years, while top 1% doubled their already excessive wealth in just 30 years!

During the Q&A period, I asked him his views of the African American reparations movement, and he said he considers himself part of that movement. Instead of spending billions destroying and rebuilding foreign infrastructures like those in Iraq, he suggested, we should have a domestic Marshall Plan, dedicated to pouring much-needed resources into communities of color.
He reminded the audience how the building of the interstate highway system displaced millions of people of color throughout the country, who were never properly compensated for their loss of property--and the interstate system just facilitated white flight from the cities to the suburbs, leaving the property-tax-based urban school systems in the mess we know so well.

Imagine what could be done with our communities of color, and poor communities in general, if instead of building endless prison complexes, we improved the schools, provided decent, cheerful housing, and developed jobs programs to put everyone to work! Of course I know it's complicated, and Tim Wise knows it too. But the money is obviously there, since we're spending it freely in Iraq every hour of every day. So where there's a will there's a way.

I take it as a sign of hope that the administration of an elite school like Miss Hall's cares enough about diversity issues to a) bring all those young women of color into the school; and b) try to address the issue of privilege head-on, by requiring the girls and the entire faculty to leave class and attend a morning lecture on the topic.

Talk is cheap, but it's a start. It's the lack of dialogue on issues like this that truly sound the deathknell for positive change.

Today Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was sworn in as the first woman president on the African continent, in the tiny war-torn nation of Liberia. A Harvard-trained banker, Ms. Johnson Sirleaf, like Michelle Bachelet in Chile, has done her time in jail for her dissenting views. Both women have seen war in their own countries, have been personally affected by the violence (Ms. Bachelet lost her father to prison interrogation under Pinochet), and have come to power on a platform that focuses on economic well-being, based on a bedrock of peace.

''Because I was the victim of hatred, I have dedicated my life to reverse that hatred and turn it into understanding, tolerance and -- why not say it -- into love,'' said Ms. Bachelet, a pediatrician turned politician, after her victory on Sunday.

In an interview with the New York Times, Ms. Johnson Sirleaf commented on her two popular designations, "Iron Lady" and "Ma Ellen."

"The Iron Lady of course that comes from the toughness of many years of being a professional in a male-dominated world," she said. "But also the many young people we have here, and the suffering I have seen, and the despair and lack of hope, brought out the motherliness in me, and that is where the Ma Ellen comes from."

I hope that these new women political leaders are able to show us that combination of toughness and love that is necessary to succeed in turning the tide of violence and hatred that has predominated, worldwide, during the 20th century and beyond. Certainly I think men have had long enough to show us what they can do with power; now it's our turn.

Good news for a change! Michelle Bachelet of the center- left coalition won the presidential elections in Chile today, capturing 53.49 % of the vote. I'll find out more about Michelle Bachelet in the next few days and report in more depth, but for now--this is welcome news indeed for Latin America. I hope Bachelet will prove to be a strong and humanitarian president, on par with Lula in Brazil, Evo in Bolivia, and Chavez in Venezuela. Now if only we could get Rigoberta Menchu elected in Guatemala!

I've just gotten around to reading Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, which came out last year to very mixed reviews. Warner's main thesis is that upper-middle-class American mothers are driving themselves and their children crazy with overparenting, which is largely a result of their having felt driven to leave the workforce and parent fulltime. Warner hits both the personal and the political: her observations are drawn from her own life, as well as interviews with over 150 of her peers in the young mothering biz; and she lays the blame for the "madness" of the upper-middle-class American mother on the shoulders of "the system," that is, the government and the culture, for not providing the supports a parent needs to do the job well without going crazy.

I grew up in this milieu, though my mother did not play the game very well. I may as well confess it: we lived on Park Avenue. But I went to public schools; I had to beg for my music and horseback-riding lessons, and never got the figure-skating lessons I craved. I was not hyper-scheduled at all; in fact, I remember spending countless hours watching "Lost in Space" and "I Dream of Jeannie" after school, while my mom made dinner and we waited for my dad to come home from work. My mom, though a stay-at-home, career-less mother, did not go crazy, because she always made time for herself--she religiously went to her weekly pottery class at the 92nd Street Y, and spent many mornings while we were in school working in clay and perfecting her craft. She's now a successful and recognized potter. And I'm now the (working) mother of two young children.

Of course, I recognize the craziness Warner is talking about, but I don't partake in it. Since I didn't marry a Wall Street financier or a bigtime lawyer, I have to work, and my struggle is different from that of the stay-at-home moms she's describing. I struggle to make sure my family eats well at least most nights; I struggle to make sure that I'm done with my teaching schedule in time to pick up my younger son at school; I struggle to make sure that when I have to go out at night the bedtime routine goes on without a hitch.

Where my struggles match what Warner describes most closely is in my husband's relative lack of responsibility in all this. Warner devotes one chapter to what husbands are doing while their wives are going crazy, and it seems to be basically--opting out. She reports this, and then gets back to her main point, which is that the government should provide better support services for mothers.

If I were her, I would have lingered on the non-participation of fathers a little longer, because it seems to me that this is a major problem that we in the feminist movement must have the chutzpah to address. How could it be that even when mothers are working fulltime, even when mothers are earning more money than fathers, mothers are still doing most of the housework and childcare? I know this to be so because I see it in my own life, and the lives of my working-mother friends. It's outrageous, and it's both the symptom and the source of women's craziness.

Are American men really any different from their counterparts in Africa or Asia or Latin America? Aren't they all equally macho? American men have realized the benefits of having women out in the workforce, and those benefits are considerable. But when it comes to the work of the home, they're as neanderthal as any stereotypical Talibani, just more circumspect about it. If women protest, they're not executed in the public square--they're just divorced.

On the one hand, my response to Judith Warner's depiction of the trials and tribulations of the upper-middle-class American mother is scorn: how can these women be so myopic, so self-centered, so lacking in any kind of broader social conscience? If they spent less time overparenting their kids, and more time thinking about what they could do to make the world--including their corner of it--a better place, they'd make both themselves and their kids a whole lot happier. On the other hand, I do have compassion for them, bless their hearts--these women are trying to do the right thing, and it's not their fault that the society and their own husbands are so astonishingly retrograde.

I can only hope that the next generation of parents, that is, our children, will be a whole lot more egalitarian when it comes to the responsibilities of mom and dad at home!

For a review of Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, see The New York Times Book Review
or Salon. For another earnest inquiry into the "domestic glass ceiling," a.k.a. the gendered inequities of the contemporary American family, see The New York Times Week in Review for January 15, 2006, "Today, Some Feminists Hate the Word 'Choice,'" by Patricia Cohen.

I had lunch today with two remarkable women: Bishnu Pariyar, a young women's rights activist from Nepal, and Eva Kasell, who sponsored her to come to the U.S. to study.

From a very early age, Bishnu was determined to be educated, and she overcame every obstacle set in her path--and there were many--to achieve her goal. A member of the Dalit (untouchable) caste in Nepal, and a girl to boot, she was lucky enough to be born into a family that respected her fervent desire to go to school, and did not insist, as would be the case with many Dalit girls, that she marry at age 13 or 14. Not only did she learn, but she was consistently first in her class throughout her primary education, despite the fact that she had to work for her family's subsistence by day, and study during the night by light of the kerosene lamp (a precious luxury).

Bishnu stood out, and was helped by her teachers to continue her education through secondary school, then through college in Katmandu. At only 20 years old, she began to put her education to work for others, founding Empower Dalit Women of Nepal, a literacy and micro-credit organization that is still going strong today, some seven years later.

In the interim, she was fortunate to have met Eva Kasell, an American woman visiting Nepal, who was so struck by Bishu's intelligence and charm that she did something impulsive: she offered to sponsor her to study English in the U.S. From this generous gesture was born a partnership: Eva has started a non-profit organization to fund-raise for Bishnu's women's empowerment organization, with phenomenal success.

The success comes largely from Bishnu's drive, determination, and incredibly powerful presence. When she tells her life story, you can't help but be moved and inspired, and want to donate whatever you can to make it possible for more Nepalese girls and women, especially the Dalits, to become as literate and powerful as Bishnu.

Bishnu was recently honored by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard with a "Bridgebuilder's Award," and is now writing her autobiography, as well as working on her Master's degree in International Development from Clark University. She's someone to watch--look out world! Here's one woman who won't be stopped!

If you want to help: See Bishnu's website for more information on her organization, Empower Dalit Women of Nepal, and how you can get involved to support them.

A story in today's New York Times reports that more and more Mexican women, on their own, are attempting the dangerous crossing into the US.

Since the borders with Texas and California have been tightened up, immigrants are now forced to cross through the desert into Arizona--rugged territory that often leaves them hobbling with sprained ankles or worse. These people don't have "hiking boots" or any kind of trekking gear--they're lucky if they're carrying a backpack with water.

And they're subject to the most shameful exploitation and--in the women's case--sexual assault by the "coyotes," who time and time again are reported to have robbed, raped, and abandoned them to the Border Patrol.

Yet the women keep coming.

The article reports that they meet up with increasing resentment from citizens on this side of the border, especially when they use the hospitals to have their babies (at taxpayer expense) and send their children to the public schools.

"Whether these workers cost taxpayers more than they contribute has been debated for years, factoring in the taxes collected, the unclaimed Social Security funds and the undesirable jobs filled at low wages," writes the author, Lizette Alvarez.

I don't think there can be much doubt that the millions of Mexican immigrants living and working--hard--in this country do indeed make a valuable contribution to our economy.

Sure, it would nicer for us, and much nicer for them, if their home economy were prosperous enough to allow them to stay within their own borders.

But we bear quite a bit of responsibility for that situation, too. Mexican economic policy is controlled by the U.S., through organizations like the WTO, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank, and others. Invariably these groups make policy to benefit the big corporations and the elites of both countries, who have gotten rich on the backs of poor workers.

As Frances Moore Lappe tells us in her excellent book Hope's Edge, the idea that there is not enough to go around--not enough food, not enough water, not enough money--is a myth promulgated by the wealthy who have been hogging the lion's share of the world's abundance for the past--oh, 500 years or so at least, since the dawn of the colonial period.

If the focus of human activity and creativity were on developing social and economic systems that prioritized quality of life for every individual, and if world resources were equitably shared, with an emphasis on local production and sustainability, then there would be enough for all, Moore Lappe tells us.

And then poor Mexican women could stay home in their comfortable towns and villages, instead of facing rape, robbery and exploitation alone in the desert.

American taxpayers who balk at the idea of supporting Mexican women in hospital obstetrics wards, or Mexican children in public school, should remember the big picture and the forces of inequality that have driven these women to leave their homes and families.

Yes, I agree that our tax dollars should go towards improving the quality of life for Americans. But to do that, we need to step back and re-evaluate the big economic policies that create the frame within which we all live and work, Americans and foreigners alike.

What it's really about is taking power back from the corporations whose sole criteria for success is maximizing profits. Economic policy should be based on making people's lives better--not just rich people's lives, but everyone's lives, and not just in the home country, but everywhere that that policy affects.

Unfortunately, this has not been the trend so far in this new century. The recently passed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is just more of the same old shit. But there's hope further down in Latin America, where Lulu in Brazil, Chavez in Venezuela, and now Evo in Bolivia are standing up to "the man" and insisting on trade agreements that at least make some gestures towards improving the quality of life for their average citizens.

These emergent political movements are being watched and cheered by millions of Latin Americans, and indeed by the entire Third World (hereafter referred to in this space as the Two-Thirds World, to reflect the fact that it occupies a much larger geographical and social space than the so-called First, or One-Third, World).

If we care about those brave women out in the desert, we owe it to them to do everything we can to resist profit-driven corporate and government policies, and encourage policies and politics that put people's well-being first.

If you care: on your next trip to buy groceries, buy at least one item with the Fair Trade label on it. These are widely available in co-ops and natural foods chains, but even my local Pricechopper now has a natural foods aisle where I can get cocoa distributed under the Equal Exchange label, which tells me that by paying a few cents more, I am helping to support small farms using ecological and people-friendly methods of agriculture and distribution.

For those of you who enjoy watching songbirds during the summer--remember that buying organic shade-grown coffee, which is always marketed via Fair Trade methods, will also ensure that your purchase goes to support the maintenance of the trees those birds need to survive during their winters in the south.

A few cents more doesn't hurt me any, and if more of us were to get on the Fair Trade bandwagon, we could become a powerful new economic force, operating under a new permutation of the old revolutionary cri de coeur "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"--yes! But for all the world's denizens, not just the privileged one percent--and maybe not just human beings, either.

# posted by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez @ Tuesday, January 10, 2006 0 comments