Women's Crossroads

It makes me feel sick—literally sick at heart—to hear the response of our president to the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations.

That bipartisan group, trying to find some way out of the morass created by BushCheney Inc., recommended phasing out most U.S. troops in Iraq by 2008.

I permitted myself a few days of cautious hope. But this morning’s news threw icy water on that faltering flame.

What has BushCheney come back with? A plan to increase the number of active-duty soldiers by tens of thousands, with additional recruiting efforts to start immediately.

How is it that we Americans are tolerating such incredible political deafness in our leaders? We don’t have the excuse that we are cowed by a ruthless totalitarian regime, as the Soviet people did when their leaders persisted in sending tens of thousands of young men into the maw of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Didn’t we send a clear message, in the November elections, that we were not happy with the Republicans’ conduct at home and abroad, and wanted change?

How could it be that those people now squatting in the White House just don’t get it?

And what will it take to get through to them?

The military generals have responded with businesslike approval—the military is a business, after all, and it’s natural for CEOs to take pleasure in watching their business grow in size and importance. Especially when it’s all paid for by the taxpayers!

Military planners estimate that each addition of 10,000 soldiers costs taxpayers $1.2 billion (a year? It's not clear how this figure actually plays out).

That estimate probably doesn’t take into account the expenses incurred in the countries where these soldiers are deployed—costs of reconstruction, training local armies, “building democracy,” etc.

And it certainly doesn’t account in any meaningful way for the tremendous cost in lost lives, as these young men, most of them gullible teenagers who have been indoctrinated by war-based video games to think of military service as fun and recreational, are tossed onto real-world battlefields, to do and to die.

Enough talk about Iraqis “standing up,” please. It’s time for Americans to stand up and remind BushCheney—and the Congress—that THEY WORK FOR US, and WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THIS WAR!

We are obviously going to have to say it REALLY REALLY LOUD, because it's clear that they have their hearing aids turned off, those gray-haired armchair warriors in the White House.

If the newly empowered Democrats in Congress let BushCheney and the generals get away with this new version of “staying the course,” their credibility will be ruined for at least a generation. And what will we do then? Who will we turn to, we hapless Americans?

Let's start by acknowledging that rearranging the nameplates on the chairs in Congress doesn't accomplish anything unless the voters remain vigilant and active after the elections. Nobody else is going to do it for us. If we want change, we've got to make it happen ourselves, one day and one battle at a time.

Let's start today.

Labels: American politics, antiwar, Iraq war

We wake up to the trumpet of good news: a new study shows that circumcised men run half the risk of HIV/AIDS infection compared to uncircumcised men. A campaign is already underway to get men to voluntarily get themselves circumcised.

Excellent!

But we should also be acting more strongly on what we already knew: that the practice of female genital “circumcision,” most often carried out on young helpless girls in unhygienic conditions without anesthesia, sharply increases the probability that they will contract AIDS.

Just how sharp is that increase? Well, it would be nice to know, wouldn’t it? Common sense tells us that the practice (which usually involves cutting off the clitoris and labia with a razor or knife, and then sewing up the bloody wound to leave only a small hole for urine and menstrual blood to flow through) makes a woman more vulnerable to AIDS infection because she is far more likely to bleed every time she has intercourse. Indeed, intercourse for young women who have been circumcised can be a nightmare, since the man literally needs to “break into” the vaginal canal, repeatedly opening and tearing the wound.

You would think that given the fact that some 140 million living women in Africa have been subjected to female genital mutilation, studies would have been done by now to measure the connection between FGM and AIDS. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence, and the link is clear to anyone who understands the connection between sex, blood and HIV transmission. But as far as I’m aware, there have been no major research programs undertaken in this area.

Not enough profit in such a study, perhaps? FGM can’t be cured with an expensive vaccine or drug cocktail. Changing cultural practices and beliefs takes a long time, and lots of face-to-face communication with people who are naturally suspicious of outsiders.

Tostan is one African-based group that’s doing outstanding work in educating people in rural communities in Senegal and Guinea about the harmfulness of FGM. This month, 150 villages in the West African country of Guinea (where more than 97% of women undergo FGM) decided collectively, after months of workshops and education by Tostan's community organizers, to abandon the practice. That's great news, and hopefully will give more momentum to the growing movement to send FGM the way of Chinese footbinding of women.

I'm very glad to learn that studies have been done on the benefits of circumcision for men in regards to HIV/AIDS. But if we’re talking about circumcision, it seems at least as urgent, if not more so, to give a push to the campaigns already underway to eradicate the practice of female genital “circumcision” of girls. How about some studies on the health risks of female "circumcision"?

It's estimated that two million girls each year are subjected to this life-endangering ordeal. We don't have time to waste.

Labels: FGM, HIV/AIDS

Sometimes you come across people that just restore your faith in humanity. Anaelisa Vanegas-Farrara, who spoke at Simon’s Rock yesterday, is such a person: a caring, kind, hardworking young woman who takes her motto from Margaret Meade:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

How true that is! Anaelisa, with her husband Diego and a small group of thoughtful, committed activists are changing our local community here in the Berkshires with their tireless advocacy work on behalf of immigrant workers and families.

“Immigrants are the backbone of our community,” Anaelisa says; “the tourism industry couldn’t survive without the work of immigrants, most of them Latinos. And yet they’re largely invisible; they don’t get promoted, and they barely earn a living wage.”

Latino immigrants, who make up the majority of immigrants in many areas, including here in Berkshire County (where the official number of Latinos is set at 12,000; the actual total may be far higher) make the difficult journey to this country in order to work and send money back to their families. They are good people by any measure—honest, hardworking, disciplined. One recent study showed that, contrary to popular belief, when immigrants move into a neighborhood, crime actually declines!

With their grassroots organization Manos Unidas (United Hands), Anaelisa, Diego and their associates are working to support and empower local immigrants through educational programs, art projects, festivals and outreach to the larger Berkshire community.

After ten years working out of their living room, Anaelisa and Diego have finally managed to purchase a house in Pittsfield to use as a center for their work. Called Casa Tierra Común (Common Earth House), the center will hold a bilingual lending library, a computer resource room, a food pantry and clothing exchange, a community garden, and a site for events and organizing work.

Anaelisa was at Simon’s Rock hoping to find students interested in volunteering, interning and participating in the grassroots work of building solidarity with the local immigrant community, and she received a warm welcome. Various interesting suggestions for collaboration were batted around the table:

• a Latino film festival;
• a speakers’ series were local immigrants would be invited to tell their stories, through interpreters if needed;
• a free ESL program, with students serving as English tutors for immigrants;
• a bike drive in the spring, with students working to rebuild old bicycles for use by immigrants without cars
  

mmigrants have always been the great engine of America, as we remind ourselves selectively on holidays like Thanksgiving, which celebrates the good fortune of earlier generations of immigrants who found a warmer welcome in New England than many immigrants do today.

At least in our little corner of the world here in the Berkshires, we can do better. And with the help of activists like Anaelisa and Diego, we will.

Labels: activism, immigrants

Yesterday we were talking in my media studies class about the oft-noted issue of teenagers’ political apathy, and disinterest in current events. How could their peers be so oblivious to what was going on in the world, my students asked themselves. Why were they so escapist?

I seem to have this conversation fairly often with students, probably because I teach courses that necessarily bring “the real world” into the classroom. Students who are attracted to my classes tend to be more aware than most of their peers, and feel frustrated that it’s so hard to get other teenagers to become more politically active.

For instance, one of my current students started a campaign to get Coca-Cola off our campus. When she posted a notice on the student blog explaining why she believed Coca-Cola should be boycotted, and asking for support, she was deluged with comments, many of them angry dismissals of her proposal.

“People just want to drink their soda and not be bothered,” she said bitterly. “They just don’t get it.”

Is it true that teenagers “don’t get it?” Or could it be that what they see of the world is just so painful that they can’t afford to take it in, because it would totally paralyze them?

I am educating my children in a Waldorf school, one of the tenets of which is that children should not be exposed to media before high school, because they are developmentally unable to process what’s being thrown at them through TV, movies and the Web.

Few of us follow this precept to the letter these days, but I have tried to shield my children during their early years from the horrors that abound in our world today. Childhood is so fleeting, why should it be weighted down with apprehension of injustice, unhappiness, suffering?

We live in a time in which childhood and teenage depression is soaring; in which the use of psychiatric medications on children and young adults has reached epidemic proportions. I am wondering if there is some relation between the mental health of our kids and the constant diet they’re fed of media horror stories: global warming, HIV-AIDs, cancer and other serious health problems, constant war, strife and violence, political corruption, environmental degradation, abusive sexuality, and on and on.

Maybe the teenagers that I work with are acting in self-preservation when they opt out of politics and issue-driven activism. What they are doing, all the time, is relating socially with one another, and maybe that’s exactly what they most need to be doing in these days of their youth. That may be how they develop the social skills they’ll need to become effective players on the political and activist stage later in life.

It could be that the best we adults can hope for is to instill in our kids a basic sense of ethics, the self-confidence to speak their minds and stand up for what they believe, and the skills and tools they’ll need to make a difference.

And in the meantime, I don’t think we should expect them to take the weight of the world on their shoulders. There will be time enough for that later on. Right now, in their youth, let them play.