Women's Crossroads

It's true, isn't it, that laughter is good for the soul?

There was an article in the New York Times this week that actually made me burst out laughing, and these days, there is hardly anything in the newspaper that I find funny.

It was the story of the New York City trial of eighteen "grannies" who were arrested by the NYPD for allegedly blocking the entrance to the military recruiting center in Times Square. The defendants claimed that they were not trying to impede traffic into the recruiting center, they were merely trying to enlist themselves!

According to the Times article, "The prosecution's case consisted of testimony from police officers about how the women blocked the door of the recruiting center, impeding entry for anyone who wanted to sign up, although the evidence suggested that the only people who wanted to enlist on the afternoon of Oct. 17, 2005, were the women themselves, who said they wanted to give their lives for those of younger soldiers. But they were not allowed in. "

The women, who range in age from 59 to 91, were not, according to Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis, "resort grannies with dyed hair and manicures. For the most part, they had let their hair go gracefully, defiantly gray. Some carried canes, others used walkers. "

Hartocollis reported that the presiding judge, Judge Ross, "frequently looked mortified, squirming in his seat as if wondering how in the world he, of all judges, had the bad luck to be chosen to rule on the grannies' fate."

She provided snatches of testimony that give a sense of the zany flavor of the trial:

"Did you personally believe you were going to be allowed to enlist?" one of the defendants was asked by a "fresh-faced" district attorney.

"I wasn't sure," she replied. "I do have a skill set." She is a facilities manager and "could be used to deploy equipment," she said.

But, the prosecutor insisted, was she prepared to go to war?

"Yes," Ms. Dreyfus replied. "I was totally prepared. I had just recently gotten divorced. I was ready."

The grannies burst out laughing, and a red blush spread, once more, over Judge Ross's face."

In the end, the Judge did the politically expedient thing, and dismissed the case against the grannies. As the Times article points out, "the verdict was a rare victory for protesters at a time when they have faced uphill battles in other forums.

"Hundreds of people who were arrested and detained for demonstrating at the 2004 Republican Convention are still embroiled in federal litigation charging the police with false arrest and violating their civil liberties. And the police continue to arrest bicycle riders on charges of disorderly conduct when they participate in monthly group rides called Critical Mass."

I so admire these older women for wielding what power they have to bring attention to the on-going insanity of the war in Iraq.

In a month when 69 American soldiers have given their lives in Iraq, when our feckless leaders in Washington are so clueless about what to do with the Iraq debacle that they've called out fixer James Baker, who hasn't been seen since 2000 when he helped manipulate the Supreme Court into appointing W President--in a month when gas prices on the homefront have topped $3 a gallon, when conservatives are yammering to start drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, when Katrina victims are being sent to homeless shelters--this is a month when we can use all the humor we can get.

Thanks, grannies! Keep it up, please! We need your spirit more than ever now!

This week I've been reading Jane Goodall's autobiography, Reason for Hope, and finding it very compelling. She looks squarely at all the problems confronting the world, and yet continues to find, as her title suggests, reasons for hope.

Most people know Goodall as "the chimp lady," the young woman who fortuitously landed an internship in Tanzania with Louis Leakey, and accepted his offer to go out into the Gombe forest and observe the chimpanzees living there. She started this work without any more than an undergraduate degree and her own wits and good sense, and says in her autobiography that she believes her lack of formal education in primatology was what enabled her to observe the chimps with an open mind, and think outside the box. It was Goodall who first observed what would be a field-roiling breakthrough in primate studies: chimps using tools! She was also the first to document the extent to which chimps (and presumably other primates) have emotions and relationships that closely mirror humans.

What is most inspiring to me about Jane Goodall, as revealed in her autobiography, is that even though tempermentally she was most suited to a life of quiet field work in the forest, she did not hesitate to take a different route in order to do what she felt must be done. When it was clear that the chimps of Gombe were in danger, from human conflict in the surrounding countries, and from human pressures on the forest, she left her beloved field station and began her much longer career of public speaking, public education, and fundraising on the chimps' behalf. She has been as successful at this as at her field work, founding the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, and later its worldwide educational program Roots and Shoots which has affiliations with schools and universities in 90 countries.

Among the many good works of the Jane Goodall Institute are the founding of chimp orphanages in Africa for baby chimps whose mothers have been killed and chimp sanctuaries in many countries for chimps who have been retired from service in labs or zoos. Goodall has been a passionate advocate for all the unfortunate primates locked up in laboratories, demonstrating the inhumanity of keeping them locked up in cages the same way a rabbit or mouse would be caged.

Thanks to DNA testing, we now know that chimps differ from humans genetically by only 1% of their DNA, and thanks to the work of Goodall and her field staff in Africa, we know that being locked up in isolation in an empty cage for years on end would "feel" the same to a chimp as it would feel to a human being. The problem of primate labs is far from solved, but Jane Goodall has singlehandedly made a big difference, and has vastly raised public awareness on the issue with her tireless public speaking.

Goodall is unabashedly spiritual in her autobiography, telling the reader that she feels she is "an old soul," who has been around before. She cares passionately and spiritually for the health of the earth and its inhabitants, seeing the planet as an interconnected web of life in which every strand is precious.

Goodall ends her autobiography with four specific "reasons for hope," which are: human intelligence for solving problems once we recognize them; the determination of young people to improve the world they've inherited; the unquenchable human spirit and its visions of a better future; and the resilience of nature, the planet's ability to restore itself.

"I have visited Nagasaki," Goodall says, where after the dropping of the atomic bomb scientists believed nothing would grow for at least 30 years. "But amazingly, greenery grew very quickly. One sapling actually managed to survive the bombing, and today it is a large tree, with great cracks and fissures, all black inside; but that tree still produces leaves. I carry one of those leaves with me as a powerful symbol of hope. "

Goodall herself gives me hope. She has dedicated her life to a cause, and she has accomplished more than many people do in several lifetimes. She is truly an inspiration.

It is simply terrifying to read the latest reports about the Bush Administration's designs on Iran. No, it's not comforting to imagine the Iranian regime, which is known for its harsh fundamentalism, with access to nuclear weapons. But the idea that such a specter could be resolved by more bombing is just trigger-happy nonsense.

We've been down this road before, and so recently that our young men and women in the armed forces are still dealing with the aftermath. But other than a few columnists, I'm hearing very little outrage from Americans. And that's the scariest thing of all: as a nation, we seem to be sleepwalking in some kind of trance. It seems like our leaders can do almost anything and get away with it.

Cut taxes for the wealthy and cut social services for the poor? No problem! Neglect our public school system while cutting back on funds to support higher education? No problem! Allow corporate giants like Enron, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil and so many others to engorge themselves on money that properly belongs to American citizens? No problem! Play golf while the people of Katrina suffer? Why not?

One could go on and on with this depressing list. The point is that all this has happened in the past few years, and still Americans just don't seem to get it. Or even if we do get it, we sit and rage impotently, lacking a coherent movement to give shape and direction to our anger.

Where is the political movement that will throw those jokers out of the White House, out of Congress, and out of the media? What will it take to restore simple human dignity and decency to our nation?

One has only to visit Alternet.org to know that there are indeed voices out there who see what's going on with our country and our world, and have some alternatives to present. The problem is, these voices are not widely disseminated enough. Most of the columnists on Alternet are shut out of major news outlets like The New York Times, not to mention television, which is, let's face it, where most Americans get their sense of what's going on in the world.

Judging from the students I'm encountering these days, fewer and fewer people actually spend time reading, and if they do read, they want escapist fiction, not depressing political reality or exortation. The only way to get to these people, who are the majority in our country today, is through the visual media--TV and film.

What's needed is a concerted assault on the bastions of power in the visual media, a serious and well-funded attempt to open up a space for alternative voices on television and in film, done in a way that looks like what Americans are used to seeing in their media, but says something quite different.

So far, the only thing that has managed to startle sleepwalking Americans out of their collective stupor is horrendous disaster. We woke up briefly for 9-11, for the bombarding of Baghdad, for the tsunami, for Katrina. Each time, though, our collective attention span was brief, and we were easily lulled back to sleep again.

How bad a disaster does it have to be to really get Americans' attention?

We may find out, one of these days. But in the meantime, I'd like to see a new television network founded, with completely independent funding, dedicated to bringing to primetime voices and faces who are willing to speak truth to power. They're out there, and they've been shouting with all their strength for years now, but without a microphone and a platform, no one can hear them. It's time to give them a chance to shake the American people awake.

The lead editorial in The New York Times today was about the big immigrant protests that took place all over the country this past Sunday and Monday. The editorial seems surprised at the numbers who turned out to show their support for immigrants' rights, a new old concept in American policy that we seem to have forgotten about in recent years.

The Times estimated the turn-out at "180,000 in Washington, 100,000 each in Phoenix and New York City, 50,000 each in Atlanta and Houston, and tens of thousands more in other cities.

"Adding in the immense marches last month in Los Angeles and Chicago," the editorial continues, "the immigrants and their allies have carried off an amazing achievement in mass political action, even though many of them are here illegally and have no right to vote. Whether the rallies leave you inspired or unnerved, they are impossible to ignore."

Impossible to ignore the way we've been ignoring the festering problem of illegal immigration for years and years, the Times means. Is it possible to continue celebrating our country as a "nation of immigrants," while still harassing, humiliating and deporting the hardy souls who make it across the grueling desert passage to work for peanuts, in horrendous living conditions, in our plantations, our slaughterhouses, our factories, our restaurants, our construction sites?

We love to celebrate America as a country founded by immigrants, as long as by immigrants we mean everyone who arrived here at least a century ago, and preferably back in the good old days of the Pilgrims.

One immigrant compared Congress's proposed "guestworker" policy to slavery--once they're done with you, they throw you out like an old rag, he said with harsh poetry. And then there's that 700-mile wall Congress is thinking of building on the U.S.-Mexico border. Who are they kidding? There's no wall so high it can keep people desperate to feed their families away from the best source of income in the hemisphere. Are we going to wall off the entire Canadian border too? The very idea of building walls is repugnant. I thought we take pride of being the "land of the free and the home of the brave"? What's free or brave about walling ourselves in?

What are we afraid of, anyway? All those Republican conservatives should be dancing in the streets at the prospect of people with such strong "family values" moving into our neighborhood. Aren't Latino immigrants known for their many children (no contraception or abortion for them!), their staunch patriarchal families, their strong work ethic, their piousness? And they're already here! What we're talking about is allowing them to come out of the shadows and feel proud to be Americans, as they surely are (Mexicans always remind gringos, with irritation, that they are "Americanos" too; U.S. folks are "Norteamericanos.").

I didn't like the way the Times ended its editorial. The penultimate paragraph was fine; the writer should have stopped there:

"...the marchers seemed motivated less by a sense of grievance than by hope, and the pure joy of seeing others like themselves rallying for a precious cause. They were venturing boldly from the shadows and daring the country to change its laws, but were doing so out of a desire to participate in the system, not to undermine it."

But instead the editorial continued:

This became especially clear when the thousands on the Mall recited the Pledge of Allegiance, reading from yellow sheets printed in English and in a crude phonetic spelling to help Spanish speakers pronounce the unfamiliar words. Something about the latter version — with its strange sense of ineloquent desire — was enough to provoke tears.

Ai pledch aliyens to di fleg

Of d Yunaited Esteits of America

An tu di republic for wich it estands

Uan naishion, ander Gad

Indivisibol

Wit liberti an yostis

For oll.

Okay, why the tear-jerker ending? Why emphasize that some of the immigrants proudly waving their American flags are uneducated enough to require a phonetic translation of the "Pledge of Allegiance"?

My great-grandparents probably made hash of the "Pledge" too, in their Yiddish-accented English. But that didn't make them any less smart, capable and dedicated to their new country. Immigrants always have been the lifeblood of the United States (when they weren't the death blow to its native inhabitants, that is). We spurn today's immigrants at our own peril.

There's news on the Simon's Rock diversity front this week. Not very earth-shattering news, but developments worth noting.

Every year at this time, the faculty who teach First Year Seminar meet to discuss the possibility of changing our curriculum. The rules are that all twelve sections of FYS must read the same four books per semester, and faculty can only recommend changing one of those eight books each year. We get to propose "slates" of eight texts, on which one text can be different from the current year's eight books. We then have a complicated system of voting, which I still do not understand--not a straight majority, but some kind of weighted voting that its proponents say is fairer. If I understood how it worked, I might be able to voice an opinion on that--as it is, I just have to live with it.

Needless to say, this makes for a very slow pace of change--positively glacial, in fact.

At this year's meeting to discuss the "slates," all of the second-semester books (Shakespeare's "Hamlet," Mozart's "Don Giovanni," Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice and Frederick Douglass's Autobiography) remained untouched. The burning question of the day was which first-semester texts to offer. The three that have been on the syllabus since I began teaching the course 12 years ago are Sophocles, "The Oedipus Cycle," Plato, "The Last Days of Socrates," and Dante's "Inferno." Then there are a couple of recent additions: we offered selections from "1001 Nights" last year, and this year substituted "Gilgamesh."

One of the faculty had brought in a daring proposal: take Chartres Cathedral, the physical place and all it stands for, as a "text" in the first semester, and use it as a way of talking about Medieval Europe and the rise of Catholicism. Most of the gray heads in the room responded negatively. I commented that this would be an interesting challenge, but even more interesting if Chartres were looked at comparatively with, say, Mecca and Chichen Itza, or other holy sites, in the context of a broader interrogation of the idea of sacred space and architecture.

My bringing Chichen Itza into the discussing had an energizing effect, in that it prompted one or two of the stronger voices in the room to raise the question of the diversity of our curriculum. This triggered the usual response from the usual voices among the senior faculty: defensive assertions of the importance of "cultural literacy," by which is meant knowledge of the Western canon.

Why should cultural literacy be limited to the Western canon, one might ask? Because, as everyone knows, the West is the dominant culture on earth, and we belong to this empire, therefore our students' education must be grounded in the West. This delivered in a pedantic, condescending tone designed to make all opposition feel poorly educated and misguided.

Fast-forward to a second faculty meeting last week, when a student petitioned to be put on the agenda, and came before the entire faculty to ask that students be given a greater voice in curricular decision-making at Simon's Rock. He did not advocate any ideological line as far as text selection goes, he just asked politely that an opening to be made so that he and other students could be part of the deliberation process.

He too, got the pedantic treatment: "It's the faculty's job to make curricular decisions," he was told. Basically, he got a pat on the head and was told to run along and leave these weighty decisions to the PhDs in charge.

After this second meeting, feeling frustrated and discouraged, I sent out a global email to the First Year Seminar faculty saying that I didn't think simply tweaking one text a year was enough of a response to repeated calls to update and diversify our curriculum, to make it useful and appropriate for the global citizens our students must become. I didn't expect a response, but I couldn't keep silent about my frustration, either.

Lo and behold, one of the staunchest defenders of the Western Canon flag at SRC did respond to my email and concede that it was time for a "review" of our General Education sequence and other requirements. Now of course, by "review" he probably means that it's time for he and other senior faculty to restate in no uncertain terms why they conceived the course as they did, and why it should stay that way forever more. But it's also an opportunity for dialogue that may lead in directions these eminences grises at SRC can neither anticipate nor control.

Or maybe I'm just a diehard optimist, and need to get over it.

There were two big pieces of good news this past weekend on the international women's front: one, Jamaica elected its first-ever female prime minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, and two, American journalist Jill Carroll was freed after four months of captivity in Baghdad.

Blogging on the Pan Collective: Caribbean Life, Mikaila wrote:

"This Thursday, Jamaicans will be inaugurating our first ever female Prime Minister- the Honorable Portia Simpson Miller. In the same vein as Liberia and Chile, they have decided that “Since men have gotten us into this mess, let’s see if a woman can get us out of it.” Now, Jamaica is an interesting climate of matrifocality and chauvinism, which means that while more women than men earn the money that supports the households, most men still feel comfortable expecting their every desire and opinion to be taken as law. So, are Jamaican men scared about this shift in power? Yes… but they are more than kind of intrigued by this female politician that is known to be Bible-quoting, baby-kissing, and just the right amount of feisty. In many ways, it is her matronly persona that won over even the most sexist of men, who will always have a soft space in their heart for their mamas."

Will it be possible for Jamaican women, and all of us "mamas" to play on that "soft space" in our sons' hearts to make them less sexist--with their wives and daughters as well as their mothers? It remains to be seen.

As for Jill Carroll, hers is a remarkable story in many ways. It turns out that Jill was just a freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor, and as such was largely on her own in Iraq, without the usual cortege of body guards, drivers and interpreters that routinely accompany more established journalists in Baghdad. Living on a shoe-string, paying her own expenses, she daringly donned a headscarf and Iraqi dress and ventured into the streets in search of the real story of the American invasion of Iraq.

In an article for the American Journalism Review, published in the February/March 2005 issue, Carroll spoke coolly of freelancers' awareness of the dangers of their mission in Iraq.

"Iraq became terrifyingly dangerous almost overnight last spring. Everything changed during the U.S. Marines' siege of Fallujah the first week of April 2004 and the simultaneous Shiite uprising led by firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It wasn't safe for foreigners to walk the streets, and car bombs became an almost daily occurrence.
"The anger and violence have only gotten worse since then, and a new terror has been added: kidnapping.
"Some 200 foreigners, several freelance journalists among them, have been kidnapped in Iraq since insurgents adopted the tactic last April."

Carroll could not have known when she wrote those words that she would soon take her place among the ranks of disappeared journalists in Baghdad. But she was well aware of the dangers, and she took the calculated risk of staying on and going about her business as a freelancer.

"In a place where keeping a low profile is the best way to stay alive," she wrote, "the small operations of a freelancer seem safer than those of big media organizations, which rent houses replete with armed guards and a stream of foreigners coming and going." Competent in Arabic, Carroll was driven by "the sense that I could do more good in the Middle East than in the U.S.," and she "moved to Jordan six months before the war to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began.

"All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent," Carroll said, "so when I was laid off from my reporting assistant job at the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, it seemed the right time to try to make it happen. There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn't want to be a part of that."

The Iraq War has seen perhaps the highest numbers of female journalists ever in the field under such dangerous conditions, and they have taken their share of hits. Sheila Gibbons reported in Women's ENews in January that "Carroll was the 35th media worker to have been kidnapped in Iraq since the start of the war," and "the latest in a series of abductions of female journalists. Florence Aubenas, a veteran reporter for the French daily Liberation, was kidnapped in January 2005 and released last summer. Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for Italy's Il Manifesto, was abducted in February 2005 and released a month later. She was wounded by U.S. troops as she was being driven to freedom. The body of Iraqi journalist Raeda Mohammed Wageh Wazzan was found on Feb. 25, 2005 in Mosul five days after she was kidnapped by masked men. She had been shot in the head."

In politics, in journalism, in the military, and in so many other high-profile professions, women are moving out front and center and accepting the risks of visibility as necessary to the successful performance of their chosen careers. No doubt they carry their fears with them, but they remain undaunted in the pursuit of their dreams. All Jill Carroll ever wanted was to be a foreign correspondent--and by george, she has made her dream come true.