Women's Crossroads

Usually I cheer Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times, but his two latest, on the Mexican immigration controversy currently roiling Congress, really have me disappointed.

Not surprisingly, Krugman takes an economist's point of view in looking at the problem of nearly 11 million undocumented low-wage workers in the U.S., many if not most of them from Mexico and Central America. He points out that "low-skilled immigration depresses the wages of less-skilled native-born Americans. And immigrants increase the demand for public services, including health care and education. Estimates indicate that low-skilled immigrants don't pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of providing these services."

Then he goes off onto another tack, arguing that Congress's "plan to create a permanent guest-worker program, one that would admit 400,000 more workers a year," would have the effect of " institutionalizing a disenfranchised work force," moving the U.S. " a big step away from democracy."

Okay, fair enough. What really perplexes me is Krugman's parochialism here. It reminds me of the old parable about the people who became great experts at fishing dead people out of the river and burying them, but never thought to look upriver and see what was causing all those corpses to float downriver to begin with!

Why is it that literally millions of so-called "low-skilled workers" (who actually are highly skilled in agricultural work, construction, hospitality and service care) are streaming out of their hometowns in the Latin American and Caribbean countries, and braving the rigors of illegal immigration, cold, isolation, uncertainty and disenfranchisement, to toil away at jobs that Americans don't want to do?

Could it be that we bear some responsibility in this? Why is it that Congressional Republicans, and journalists, not to mention ordinary Americans, seem to conveniently forget that the U.S. spent billions of dollars in military aid to the dictators and super-elites that wrecked the Central American countries during the course of the Cold War?

What about the FTAA, have we forgotten about that already? Why is it that farmers who used to get by with some dignity in their small towns in Mexico and Central America, now find that their agricultural products are being undercut by North American corporations who have flooded the markets with cheap commodities and produce? Small farmers across Latin America and the Caribbean are being forced out of the market by the insatiable maw of big agri-business, and what else can they do when they look at their hungry children but head north to try to earn some greenbacks to send home?

And then there's the World Bank, with its marvelous "structural adjustment" programs, which remind me of nothing so much as time-honored "scientific" remedies like leeching, purging, starvation, and more recently, electroshock therapy. If the patient survives, you call the doctor a hero! If she doesn't, it was God's will anyway that she die.

The way to address the problem of illegal immigration is not to build walls, or step up border patrols, or pass guest-worker laws. The only way to staunch the tide of human beings desperate to make a living for their families is to take active steps to improve the economies of their home countries, and that's what Paul Krugman should be telling his New York Times readers. Not by passing arcane patent laws that take away indigenous rights to native medicinal plants; not by flooding the market with cheap imports and forcing local production into exports; not by continuing to support the ruling wealthy elites on the backs of the majority of the people.

Once again, we must look beyond narrow self-interest and realize that in the 21st century our world is smaller than ever before, and we sink or swim together. It's time to look upriver and begin the long process of making sure that our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean have the means to live out productive, happy lives in their own home countries. If Congress feels it has a few billion dollars to throw at the "immigration problem" this month, that's where the money should go: to building schools, not walls; to encouraging small-scale sustainable farming, not subsidizing American agri-business; quite simply, to putting the well-being of the masses over the profit of a few.

The weather has been SO FINE these past few days, that I just have to pause to appreciate simple pleasures like hot sun, cool wind, and the little pink noses of tulip leaves poking their way up out of the earth. I have been out in the garden raking off the dead leaves and fertilizing the perennials; even now I am typing with dirt underneath my fingernails, and I am in no hurry to brush it out, it feels good.

Most of us academics live far too much in our heads, and even more so now that we spend half our days in cyberspace. Springtime has a way of pulling me back to earth, and reminding me of the elemental rhythms that sustain us on this planet. Suddenly the ten urgent projects I have to attend to TODAY fade into the background; I find myself transfixed by the melodious love song of the cardinal singing high up in the maple tree, and nothing is more important than rifling through my drawers for the flower seeds my son and I harvested last fall from the last blooms of marigolds, cosmos, hollyhocks, mallow, and poppies, and getting them into the soil while the fine weather lasts.

The cold will no doubt return before the warm weather rolls in for good. And those projects I put off today really must get done tomorrow. But for now, I will savor the dirt beneath my fingernails, and revel in the heady feeling of sap rising--in the trees, in the plants, and yes, it's true, in me.

I have been teaching as a lecturer in the interdisciplinary first-year general education program, Project Renaissance, at the University at Albany, SUNY, since 2003. If you've never been to the SUNY Albany campus, you can't imagine how dehumanizing it is.

Built on a flat, windy plateau, it is huge and stark, with an oversize modernist architectural style that has the effect of making human beings feel like ants. There is nothing warm and friendly about it, and for years I have gone there and done my best to combat the ethos of the place in my own classroom space, with mixed results--largely because the students are so used to the impersonal lecture-hall format, and a pedagogy that relies on testing as the main form of interaction with the teacher, that they can react in prickly, unpredictable ways to being asked to converse civilly with each other on controversial issues, to come up with original ideas about texts, or to--gasp--take initiative in their response to an assignment.

But yesterday, at a conference organized by the grand-sounding university "Consortium on Africa," I finally felt the first glimmerings that there might indeed be a community of kindred souls for me at the University at Albany. I finally discovered a group of unpretentious, friendly scholars and administrators, as well as serious, thoughtful students, who obviously care deeply about the African community, both in Africa and in the diaspora, and who were willing to do the extraordinary amount of work necessary to put together a full-day conference on the theme "Africa and the Diaspora: Agents for Change."

The morning panel, "Meanings and Experiences of Gender in African Diasporas," was a remarkable example of coalition in action:

• a white women's studies professor, Iris Berger, discussed her research on gender roles in South Africa;
  
• a young Black assistant professor in History and Africana Studies, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, explored how what she called "fissures in the patriarchy" in colonial Gabon, where chiefs briefly took women's side in regulating marriage, in order to increase their control of women's agricultural labor;
  
• a Black male Ghanaian assistant professor of history and political science, Gariba Abdul Korah, picked up this theme in the context of Ghana, showing how as Ghanaian society shifted from one where wealth was measured in wives and children, to a cash economy, conflicts developed between the traditional chiefs and the young men who left the village to work in the mines and plantations--conflicts that ultimately benefitted women;
• and a Brazilian assistant professor of Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies, Patricia Pinho, discussed her research into "roots tourism" among African Americans, looking at what she called "the gendered nature" of this tourism, which is more often undertaken or at least organized by women--women who may be oppressed at home by racist discrimination, but become privileged in the context of places like Brazil and Africa.
  

One of the most interesting moments in this panel came in the discussion period, when a young Somali woman, a UAlbany student, talked about the situation for women in wartorn Somalia. "In Somalia, Islam and the patriarchy are all we have left in terms of institutions," she said, "and both of these are so repressive towards women. How can we take what we have, which is the patriarchy, and make it better?"

Of course, none of the panelists really had an answer for this poignant question. But later in the discussion a similar question came up, asked by a man who had traveled to the conference from Nigeria. "How can women be empowered," he asked, "in societies that consider them to be pieces of property?"

Professor Abdul Korah took this question on, pointing to himself as an example of a man who grew up in a traditional society, but who, through education, had overcome his prejudices against women, and now considered women his true equals. His evident passion on this subject was clear, and one certainly wanted to believe that he was speaking the truth, and that the right kind of education could overcome centuries of gender discrimination in Africa (and elsewhere).

The keynote speaker, Dr. Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi, was a shining example of what education could do for a powerful woman who was given her autonomy. A creative writer as well as a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, Dr. Abbenyi spoke about her own upbringing as a member of the Anglophone minority in Cameroon, and used the example of the linguistic conflicts in Cameroon to illustrate the identity struggles of Cameroonians in the wake of colonialism.

Cameroon was occupied by Germany, France and Great Britain at various points in its history, and when it finally won its independence, in 1960, the country was partitioned into a majority French-speaking area, and two narrow strips of English speakers. One of these strips chose to throw in its lot with neighboring Nigeria, and is now part of Nigeria. The other strip remains part of Cameroon, but in a tense relationship with the French-speakers, perhaps somewhat similar, in linguistic reverse, to the situation of the Quebecois with the Anglophone majority in Canada.

Dr. Abbenyi showed photographs she had taken at the Anglophone university in Cameroon, where signs dot the campus proclaiming:

• "Succeed at university by avoiding Pidgin on campus"
• Pidgin is like AIDS--Shun it"
• English is the Password, not Pidgin"
• Speak English and More English"
• Pidgin is taking a heavy toll on your English--Shun it"
  

Pidgin English competes with English proper, French and the more than 200 native languages in polyglot Cameroon, and is being singled out at this Anglophone university as a special threat. Using Gloria Anzaldua, Homi Bhabha and other theorists as a framework, Dr. Abbenyi showed how these signs reveal "a deep anxiety and malaise" about linguistic and national identity in Cameroon. Pidgin, she said, drawing on her personal experience as a native speaker of this vernacular, is "the language of playfulness, informality, vulgarity, transgression, trade, celebration, and family." To ask students to "shun it" is to ask them to enter the English-speaking public sphere--which is already fraught in majority-Francophone Cameroon--and not look back.

Sometimes I feel at SUNY Albany as if this university, too, has asked us all in a much more subtle way to leave our authentic selves behind when we step onto that cold, windy campus. When I look at the faces of the students, faculty and staff walking the halls during the breaks between classes, I am reminded of the purposefully blank faces native New Yorkers adopt when we descend into the subways (as a native New Yorker, I know this mask well). It's as if you deliberately set up a negative aura around yourself, repelling all attempts at interaction, of whatever provenance.

At the conference yesterday, I finally felt as though I had entered a space in the university where we were being welcomed to come together in an authentic way and "speak pidgin" with each other--to speak the language born of our caring and compassion for others. I look forward to joining the "Consortium on Africa," and helping to co-create this important, empowering space with other members of this newfound community.

Three years ago today, the American military, aided and abetted by the British and few other allies in state-sponsored terror, began the formal invasion of Iraq. I am old enough to remember watching the progress of the first Gulf War on TV: the grainy, nightscope-green images of "smart bombs" hurtling down airshafts of precisely targeted factories and military installations, all narrated with surreal detachment by the waxiest of talking heads, Peter Jennings.

Three years ago, Jennings and his colleagues, officially sanctioned "embedded reporters" were back at it, narrating the "shock and awe" campaign. This time the goal seemed to be maximum destruction: there was no more talk of smart bombs, although mention was made of trying to avoid hitting civilian neighborhoods. But mention was also made of the "fact" that Saadam had been devious enough to plant his military installations right in civilian neighborhoods, as a deterrence method. We wouldn't let him outsmart us, though: entire districts were flattened in carpet bombing raids that were reminiscent of nothing so much as the infamous destruction of Nuremberg in World War II.

As the first week of the bombing campaign stretched into the first month, the pictures that emerged of the devastated Baghdad were nothing short of shocking. A beautiful, elegant city of great historical significance, bombed back into the stone age. People huddling in their houses without electricity, water, sewage or food, just waiting for the American forces to "liberate them," so they could take out those flowers and throw them joyfully at the troops.

Right. Three years later--nearly three thousand American dead later, at least 20,000 American wounded later and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children dead and wounded--Iraqis are still sitting huddled in their homes without electricity or clean water. They still have to wait on mile-long, dangerous gas lines to fill their cars' gas tanks--in Iraq, one the most oil-rich spots in the entire world. They still take their lives in their hands every time they go to the market to buy food for their families.

The Iraqi blogger Riverbend, who has been chronicling this war from her home in Baghdad since its inception, wrote yesterday, "Three years and the electricity is worse than ever. The security situation has gone from bad to worse. The country feels like it’s on the brink of chaos once more- but a pre-planned, pre-fabricated chaos being led by religious militias and zealots." To Riverbend, the advent of the fourth year of the American invasion is especially chilling, because it feels like a nightmare from which there seems to be less and less chance of waking up.

Riverbend concludes her anniversary post:

"Three years after the war, and we’ve managed to move backwards in a visible way, and in a not so visible way.

"In the last weeks alone, thousands have died in senseless violence and the American and Iraqi army bomb Samarra as I write this. The sad thing isn’t the air raid, which is one of hundreds of air raids we’ve seen in three years- it’s the resignation in the people. They sit in their homes in Samarra because there’s no where to go. Before, we’d get refugees in Baghdad and surrounding areas… Now, Baghdadis themselves are looking for ways out of the city… out of the country. The typical Iraqi dream has become to find some safe haven abroad.

"Three years later and the nightmares of bombings and of shock and awe have evolved into another sort of nightmare. The difference between now and then was that three years ago, we were still worrying about material things- possessions, houses, cars, electricity, water, fuel… It’s difficult to define what worries us most now. Even the most cynical war critics couldn't imagine the country being this bad three years after the war... Allah yistur min il rab3a (God protect us from the fourth year). "

What's most disturbing to me is how little attention is being paid to this anniversary here at home. I had to search hard in The New York Times today to find an article about national antiwar protests, and when I finally found it, it was an AP story--the Times didn't bother to assign one of their writers to the task. Apparently 7,000 people turned out to protest yesterday in Chicago, another 1,000 in New York, and in other American cities a few thousand people will no doubt stand up and be counted in their dissent over this war. Around the world, thousands are protesting in Britain, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and other nations. But we are not seeing the mass protests of three years ago. The furor seems to have abated. Why?

It's a combination of factors, I think. There's a small degree of fear: we hear that the Homeland Security team has been hard at work tapping the phones and intercepting the email, not to mention planting themselves in the meetings of scores of antiwar activists around the country. This is something to be taken seriously in a time when people the government suspects of wrongdoings as amorphous as "dissent" can be picked up, put on a plane, and sent overseas for questioning in notoriously brutal interrogation centers.

A more serious deterrent for the average American, though, is simple numbness and discouragement. We protested three years ago, and the war began on schedule. We put all our energies into ousting the Bush Administration, and got absolutely nowhere--not even John Ashcroft, under whose watch the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded, or Dick Rumsfeld, who send our troops into war unarmored and understaffed, have been given so much as a slap on the wrist. Condi Rice continues to shop while conditions worsen in the Middle East, from Iran to Israel and the West Bank, and no one says anything about North Korea anymore.

People in New Orleans still don't have electricity, and in Washington, what are they busy doing? Approving a spending bill that authorizes the outlay of $9.8 billion a month--that's almost $10 billion a month--for U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. That doesn't include spending on rebuilding the shattered infrastructure of Baghdad, taken out of a separate taxpayer-funded account (and paid to contractors like Halliburton). We're paying ten billion dollars a month for young American soldiers (many of whom signed up for National Guard work, not deadly combat in a foreign country) to stand in harm's way and make absolutely no progress in their original mission of "bringing peace, prosperty and democracy to Iraq."

We are citizens of a country whose Vice President can get away with shooting his own hunting partner in the face; whose President cares more about bike-riding than working to restore order to the world he's destabilized; whose legislative branch is dominated by Conservatives more interested in eliminating family planning options for young women than building a healthy, well-educated, prosperous society at home; whose Judicial branch chooses partisan favoritism over justice.

Let's face it, the picture is disheartening as hell, and I think that's one reason why so many people are choosing to observe this anniversary by sulking at home today. Unfortunately, hiding our heads in the sand--or under our covers--is not going to make this depressing world picture go away. We can't change the channel or walk out of the cinema into the bright sunshine of a new day. It's just not going to be that easy.

It's going to take persistence, determination, and a lot of hard, thankless work to undo the damage the Bush regime has done, and get our world back on track towards a future of international cooperation on the issues that matter: peace, health, security, education, and human rights--for all people, not just for the rich and powerful.

On this third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I dedicate myself to this effort with renewed commitment. There is nothing more important that I--or any of my fellow Americans-- could be doing with our time, energy and talents.

Yesterday I was interviewed about my anthology, Women Writing Resistance in Latin America & the Caribbean, on the Berkeley CA Pacifica Radio affiliate KPFA. The show is called "Against the Grain," hosted by C.S. Soong, and focusing on "politics, society & ideas." In the course of our conversation, CS asked me to explain what I meant when I talked about "internal colonization" in the introduction to the book, and the question has continued to resonate with me this morning.

Audre Lorde described internal colonization best when she called it "that piece of the oppressor that is planted deep inside you." It's all the assumptions we carry within us about who is supposed to be dominant or subordinate, what kind of appearance is most attractive or most effective, what we are supposed to accept without question as "the natural order," the way things are meant be.

Resisting internal colonization turns out to be one of the most difficult things anyone practicing resistance to the status quo and activism for social change is called on to do--largely because internal colonization is so very insidious. We are so conditioned to accept the way things are, especially in this day and age of media-induced stupor, that it gets harder and harder to think outside the box. What does it take to provoke outrage in this country?

For example, how could it be that the movement to impeach George W. Bush is having such trouble gaining traction? According to a story posted on Alternet.org yesterday, it's only now that the mainstream media, specifically the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, is beginning to report on the growing impeachment movement in Congress-- months after it became clear that Bush and his team lied to the nation on why we should invade Iraq, months after the flaunting of international law began with the illegal detention and torture centers at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere, months after the widespread illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens began, months after it became clear, through the abysmal government response to the Katrina disaster, that Homeland Security is a great big pork barrel sham.

It's my hunch that we have "internal colonization" to blame for the sluggishness of our national response to these outrages. The one thing the Bush team has been most successful at is wrapping themselves in the American flag and identifying themselves with the invincible power of American empire. And since this kind of nationalist talk is spoon-fed to Americans in the schools and the media from earliest childhood, it becomes implanted, second nature: America is the strongest country in the world, we stand for democracy and freedom, we can do no wrong, not ever, no how and no way--and "we" are the Republicans currently in power.

Ordinary Americans have been essentially brainwashed into the Bushies' black/white dogma--you're either with us or against us, and if you're against us you're evil, inhuman, and deserve to be exterminated. Having finally gotten a chance to watchthe outstanding film "Hotel Rwanda," I am reminded of the way the Hutus referred to the Tutsis as "cockroaches," a verbal move that dehumanized them, making it possible for millions of people to be slaughtered as casually as you might spray a cockroach nest under your kitchen sink.

We have been indoctrinated to believe that the life of a cockroach is worth nothing. It's this kind of hierarchical thinking, placing the value of some forms of life above others, that has gotten us into the present predicament of our planet. Of course I'm not a nut who believes a hunk of algae is as important as a panda bear, or a human being. But we must recognize that without algae, for instance, and trees, and other plant life that we take for granted and kill wantonly when they're in our way, we so-called "higher life forms" could not exist on this planet. Plants produce oxygen, plants underpin our food chain--without plants we die.

The dangerous lack of recognition of the interdependence of every aspect of our planetary ecosystem is due to our internal colonization, which began back with Darwin, who placed human beings at the apex of a hierarchical evolutionary ladder, and insisted, in a scientific twist on the old Biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply and be stewards of the land," that we were destined by evolution to rule the earth.

We are the most powerful species on earth, no doubt about it. We have the power to wipe out ourselves and every other species too, except perhaps the lowly algae and cockroach. But it's a mark of our internal colonization that we admire power that shows itself as destruction, as domination. We need to resist this longstanding indoctrination into hierarchal thinking, and begin to value a form of power that, as Frances Moore Lappe puts it in her new book Democracy's Edge, "builds the capacities of all involved." Lappe posits a form of power that is "creative, freeing, collaborative, dynamic, and based on a give-and-take, two-way relationship," rather than a hierarchical top-down structure.

This is a form of power that we all possess, if only we could recognize its potential sleeping within us. If we could only wake up the great slumbering power of true American democracy, we'd have George Bush and his cronies out of Washington in no time.

Hot on the heels of International Women's Day comes another tempest in a teapot at Simon's Rock, this time over the Diversity Teach-in called by a group of faculty and students.

Campus teach-ins usually take place because there is a sense of crisis or urgency over a particular issue, and there is no other way to properly address it. The last teach-in at Simon's Rock occurred in March, 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At that time there was no question about the urgency of the event and the need to educate the community about what was happening.

This time, the problem is that a significant percentage of the campus community feels absolutely no sense of crisis over diversity-related issues. Even some of the women and minority students don't feel the need to do something as drastic as cancel all classes and force students into mandatory discussions of race, class and gender.

For the past couple of days there has been a heated discussion on the student blog, PB&J,
as to whether it makes any sense to compel students to attend the teach-in. Of course, from the point of view of the faculty and administration, if you didn't require attendance, you might as well call it a snow day--more than half the students would stay in bed.

But students do have a point when they ask whether it's possible to coerce people into having productive discussions about sensitive topics like white male privilege. Although I have supported the idea of the teach-in, and plan to offer a workshop on coalition-building among white women and women of color, the violence of students' resistance to the whole affair has made me think twice about its value.

Will the individual workshops be thought-provoking, stimulating and well-organized? I am sure they will be. Will they reach the hearts and minds of those students most sorely in need of reflection on white male privilege, elitism, sexism and racism? I am not convinced.

The students who resist the idea of the teach-in seem to fall into roughly two camps: students who have experienced discussions like these before and been disappointed in the results; and students who have never been personally affected by racism, sexism or elitism, and therefore feel complacently that there isn't any problem worth talking about.

I don't think that a single day of diversity-related workshops, however well-thought-out and well-intentioned, will be able to overcome these students' ingrained resistance.

What it may do, however, is foster a sense of community and coalition among those students, staff and faculty who are wholeheartedly supporting the event. And this could lead to a movement for more deep-seated, lasting change on the Simon's Rock campus.

As I've said before, I believe Simon's Rock, like every institution of higher education today, has an ethical responsibility to educate students to be engaged, well-informed citizens of the global community. Basic to this goal would be teaching students of every background how to sit around a table together and discuss their differences productively, seeking common ground, mutual respect and support for each other in all their positive endeavors--from math competitions to community service projects to organizing teach-ins.

Achieving an ambitious goal like this takes time. I'd like to see the idea of the diversity teach-in spread out over the first three semesters of students' college careers, with weekly meetings to discuss a whole host of issues related to building a solid, engaged student body respectful of each other and themselves. And yes, these would have to be required; in education sometimes you do have the power not only to lead the horse to water, but also to make her drink.

Education is not about reinforcing ideas already held, it's about opening young minds to new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of doing things. Respect, cooperation and collaboration must be the watchwords of the 21st century, and educators must take a central role in bringing these positive qualities out in our students.

In this first decade of the 21st century, it is essential to foster tolerance for differences in order to move our global community away from the dangerous brink of ever-escalating conflict. The unending battle between Eros and Thanatos that Freud identified in the sad, charged period between World Wars I and II has grown ever more perilous: the next World War could wipe out our species, and take most of the other life forms on the planet with us.

I believe that Eros can be triumphant, but it's going to take hard work, relentless passion and energy. The time to start is now.

Collected from the participants of the Fifth Annual International Women's Day conference at Simon's Rock College, March 4, 2006

My dream: that words such as violence, greed, fear, distrust and domination will be no more. That International Women’s Day will become and legal and recognized holiday!

My dream is to pass on the knowledge that change begins by allowing ourselves to dream.

The opportunity for empowerment for women everywhere and equality with men everywhere.

I dream of homes and communities rebuilt in the Gulf Coast, in the Asian countries hit by tsunami and earthquake, and in all places where war rips apart our families. I dream of home and community embraced by Mother Earth.

I wish for women around the world: peace, good health and sustainability.

That my love for yoga teaching will benefit those in India directly and financially.

My dream is of a day when everyone knows that no human being is more important than any other human being, that no human being is any more or less lovable than any other human being. May all beings happily take care of themselves, may they know ease of well-being. May they be at peace.

I create the possibility of the linen project to collect clean sheets, blankets and bedding and offer them and distribute them freely to those who need them. Perhaps a free store or the Labor Project to help distribution.

One world without borders—loving and fruitful.

My dream is to see each person in each moment of every day begin to make choices actively. The passivity with which we, as world citizens, have begun to live our lives leaves us all feeling like victims of our own inability to move forward. I dream of a world without victims.

To trust in fellow women and to follow our dreams.

One of the most memorable experiences I’ve taken back with me from Ghana was interacting with children, both boys and girls, who asked for something greater than money. They asked for pens, paper, and notebooks. They asked for the opportunity to learn. My dream is to see a world which recognizes the fundamental wants and desires of children and provides it for them.

To create a better and more equal society.

A dream for a language of peace based on love, acceptance, wisdom, hope, possibility, prosperity. May each child be born into a community of love and support, well-being and celebration.

I dream that the laws of this country made to divide, separate and violate the human and civil rights of low-income families will be abolished.

To be able to pursue our dreams and live happily, and still be able to function as a society.

I have the feeling that my dream for the future of the women of the world will take a very long time to become reality. In my opinion this dream can only be materialized by changing the attitudes and ideologies of many cultures who treat women as property of men, degrade them by taking their will away, and in general repress them as second class citizens. May my dream come true very soon for women to be accepted equally and respected.

I dream of a world of psychological summertime, where all people can walk freely without their clothes on, without their masks on, a world where there are no limitations to the continuous unfolding of human potential.

My dream for the future: Every moment of every day I create kindness, and through my actions, inspire kindness in others. It is only through action that we live into a future we create.

I dream that organized religion will come to mean a shared sense of community and not individual power bases, and that religions will come to respect women as equal members of that community.

Reduce overpopulation through education worldwide—through vegetarianism worldwide through education to help save our fellow creatures and the earth. Have women run things instead of men worldwide. Understand reality and truth—thjat men are animals and are totally interdependent on our fellow creatures and nature to survive. We are one with everything in the cosmos, not a separate entity.

I dream of a world that is safe for my children and my grandchildren to be and for every child and grandchild and mother and father.

I pray for a return to the sacred feminine and the renewal of the sacred masculine. I pray our world’s sons and daughters have birth attendants and safe conditions to enter into this world. I pray for childhoods free of war. I pray our elders are respected. I pray we celebrate our diversity and our shared ancestry in the global family.

To end abuse of women and children.

I dream that no one may feel alienated and that no one may feel scorn for those things that they have passively endorsed in the past. I dream of us all being embraced by a feminine, human love, not hated for weaknesses we all possess. With this love, let the fear melt away and let the connection begin.

I dream that each child enters a world where it is understood that s/he will honor their own life by developing and living their talent.

An end to violence and discrimination and the oppressive system which created it.

March 4, 2006. I long for a new frame to look out of, from which we can take responsibility for ourselves and our community. Fear = applause.

I dream of making a difference and knowing my abilities. Of helping through farming food and making it available to many people.

My dream for myself: Use my talents in service to better my sisters’ lives in Asia and Africa. My dream for my sisters and brothers: to feel safe.

I wish for all to have peace in body, mind and spirit.

I dream that there is dancing and celebration—joy—because we know with our hearts and our bodies that we are one.

Find a little hope in every one and everything we encounter and then pass it on!

I dream of a world in which life is honored (but not in the distorted way those words are used in our country today). And life is respected. Hatred is not taught anymore.

I dream that we all begin to recognize the Sacred in all life; that every inner image has its outer equivalent and that every outer image has its inner equivalent, seen in the presence of light. May we all increase our light that we may see this truth.

To help create a safe space for our mothers, sisters, aunts and daughters to grow and expand their minds, power and will to help this world to be a better place.

I liked what Frances Moore Lappé said about freedom—that freedom is about realizing the talents of all so that in a free society all people’s potentials would be realized. There would be no wasted people in ghettos, poor nations, etc. Each person would have a chance.

My dream is to become an inspirational speaker, a friend, lover and revolutionist. I want my children to come and children that my children have to live in a safe, loving world. I want for brothers and sisters in privileged America to feel, to understand, and to have compassion and open their eyes.

To follow my spirit, seek my dreams, share my love, ease a heart of aching. Soothe one’s pain, be open to all possibilities.

My dream is to see women of Congo and children of the world living in a peaceful world.

My dream is to help empower abused and under-served women and children through my natural gift as an artist-activist and educator.

My dream is a world in which no woman has to live in fear, in which each woman has found her voice, in which we can all go to bed at night feeling that our families and communities are safe and secure.

My dream is to encourage and empower young and adult women to believe in and nurture the wisdom and necessity of their voices—each desperately needed in our world.

I believe that together, women can and do make a difference, every day.

Yesterday was the Fifth Annual International Women's Day conference at Simon's Rock College, and it was the best one ever. I've said that every year, and every year it's been the truth! There is something so powerful about women coming together to share expertise, to inspire and enlighten one another--women who in many cases would never otherwise come into contact.

This year's theme was "Women in the Global and Local Economy: The Power of Connection," and the day started with a keynote address by Frances Moore Lappe, who gave a rousing talk to an audience of about 175 people about the importance of "living democracy," by which she means creating a social system in which each member is empowered to act for the good of the individual and the group. She called herself a "possibilist," saying "it's impossible to know what is possible," and therefore we must do "what stirs our passion and builds our power"--what we feel in our gut is the right thing to do.

Frankie said that human beings are innately imitative, and so one of the most powerful things we can do to effect social change is simply to behave the way we would like to see others behave. "Every time you act with intention," she said, "someone is watching, and will imitate you." As a mother I've certainly seen this operating with my children--if I act with kindness and good humor, they will mirror it right back to me; if I'm grumpy and snappish, so are they. But I hadn't thought about applying this mirroring phenomenon to the fight for social justice, and it makes perfect sense.

This is why it's so important not just to talk the talk, but also to walk the walk of of social justice. And here's where Americans usually get into trouble, since our whole lifestyle and political system is built on injustice. As Frankie said, none of us would deliberately choose to send millions of children to bed hungry every day. And yet this is the world we live in, a world dominated by the U.S. of A. None of us would choose to poison our rivers and create huge "dead zones" in our oceans--and yet these are the effects of the agricultural industry we support with our hard-earned dollars in the supermarket. The list could go on.

What we need to do as American consumers is to try to put our money where our hearts are. If we support the idea of fair trade, then we should be buying fair trade coffee and cocoa. If we want to support women's crafts collectives, we should buy their products, for ourselves and as gifts. If we can avoid supporting an exploitative corporation, we should make other choices. It's really pretty simple.

Much of the conference focused on ways to tap the great productive power of women worldwide in order to strengthen connective networks that will reduce conflict and improve social conditions for all. Dr. Caren Grown of Bard College's Levy Institute for Economics, who proudly called herself a "feminist economist," described being asked, during the course of her service on a United Nations task force charged with coming up with a framework for promoting "Gender Equality and Empowerment" worldwide, "how much would it cost to achieve gender quality?"

"What a ludicrous question!" she said heatedly. "How much would it cost NOT to achieve gender equality!"

This point was also emphasized by Marceline White, a gender and development specialist for the U.S. Agency of International Development, who pointed to studies showing that "gender equality is good for economic growth, and economic growth is good for gender equality. When women have more cash," she said, "there are greater expenditures on food, health care and education for families." She cited a study from the Ivory Coast showing that "a $10 increase in a woman's monthly income had the same effect in improving children's nutrition as a $110 increase in men's income." So investing in women is investing in the entire community, and this is a lesson that the World Bank, IMF and other development institutions are finally learning, with the help of gender-focused agencies like UNIFEM at the United Nations.

In the afternoon panels, specific strategies for creating change on the ground were explored. Amber Chand discussed her "feminine" business model, an alternative to the "high-growth, testosterone-driven patriarchal model that has proved to be unsustainable. My challenge," she said, "is to create an enterprise that is sustainable, that relies on truth-telling and intimacy between customers and producers, and makes a profit not at the expense of others, but with others."

Anne Williams, a business consultant who has been conducting capacity-building training workshops for women entrepreneurs in Afghanistan and Jordan, talked about women entrepreneurs she had met in these countries, who were overcoming tremendous cultural and material barriers to create successful businesses that were able to lift whole communities out of poverty.

Anne dramatically showed the gender barriers that exist in Afghanistan by asking the four men in the audience of some 70 people to rise. "These four men would be responsible for providing for all the rest of you," she told the audience. She asked one man to sit down. "That man would be the only one who had not been already seriously injured by a landmine." If the 66 women in the audience were prevented from working, Anne pointed out, entire families would starve, as happened in Afghanistan during the heyday of the Taliban when women were not allowed to leave their homes.

Although still under threat of the re-emergence of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan are beginning to make progress. Anne described two women-owned businesses she witnessed on her last trip to the country, showing slides of women creating magnificent Oriental rugs and harvesting glowing tomatoes, laying them out to dry on racks they had welded and painted themselves. The sense of pride these women had in their achievement was palpable.

Financial support for women in business was also on the table during yesterday's event. Michaela Walsh, founding president of Women's World Banking, and Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society in South Egremont, both talked about innovative ways to make sure that women have the credit they need to build businesses. The best way seems to be, again, making use of the power of connective networks--women working with and for women, both locally and internationally.

At the closing plenary, the speakers all applauded the three Simon's Rock students who had participated in the program--Chanel Ward, Elyse Chaput, and Jing Cao--for carrying on the essential work of highlighting the importance of women to the local and global economy. "You are our hope for the future," Michaela Walsh affirmed. And as Frances Moore Lappe says, "hope is what we become in action....And our hope can spur us on--to take our own stand, to choose."

Coming together to observe International Women's Day is a hopeful action. As one of the audience members said, we gain strength from coming together in circles of intention, and at yesterday's gathering it was clear that our collective intention was oriented around seeking knowledge, as well as seeking pathways to make creative use of what we are discovering, and what we know.

The last event of the day was a reception sponsored by the Women's Fund of Western Massachusetts, organized by Women's Fund Board members Amber Chand and Maria Sirois and attended by some 70 members of the audience. Each was given a pad imprinted with the Women's Fund motto "Women Make a Difference," and asked to write down a dream she had for the women of the world. Then, gathered in a circle around a glowing Jerusalem Candle of Hope, these visions were read out loud.

When I got home last night from the conference, I was exhausted, but couldn't resist dipping into the pile of dreams that had been collected, and I was so moved by what I read that I immediately began typing them up into a collective poem, which I will post separately. These passionate good wishes for the women of the world brought the day full circle: we had moved from Frances Moore Lappe's inspirational talk of "living democracy," through the more technical presentations on women and economics, to discussions of how feminist economic theory is being put into practice on the ground, and ended up again in the inspirational realm, combining passion with knowledge of what is needed-both here in the U.S. and abroad-- to make the world's women fully integrated players in their economies and their communities.

We do know what needs to be done. As Caren Grown said at the end of her presentation: It's time to act.