Women's Crossroads

New Year’s Day 2007

2007-01-01T08:29:00.000-05:00

A dreary, rainy New Year’s morning it is, and it suits my mood this year just fine. I was unable to celebrate last night, just had dinner with my family and went to bed, remembering back glumly to so many other years when champagne was uncorked at midnight, when laughter and lights warmed the dark winter night.

Not this year, not for me. Although I remind myself that there were some things to celebrate in 2006—for example, the return of the American Congress to Democratic control, the election of women leaders like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Michelle Bachelet, and many women at lower levels of governance—still, 2006 has basically left a bad taste in my mouth, and I don’t expect much from 2007 either.

Global warming marches on. It still hasn’t snowed this winter in the Northeast, while the Rockies are being battered with record-breaking blizzards: isn’t that exactly the kind of erratic, extreme weather shifts that the scientists have been predicting to result from global warming? But our leaders are apparently still blind to the urgency of this issue, and lack the politcal will to tackle the problem head-on.

They’re too busy mopping up after the disastrous adventure in Iraq, which was, after all, designed to give the US another 25 years or so of carefree oil dependency, and further enrich all the contractors and military supplies manufacturers who were afraid, in the absence of the Cold War, that they might not have enough to do.

How fitting it is, in a somber, nightmarish way, that the 3,000^th American soldier to die in Iraq should die on the very last day of 2006. Let’s all clink our glasses to that brave young man, age 22, who died defending truth, justice, and the American way of life…or was that some other movie?

Dustin Donica, the 3,000^th American casualty in Iraq, died because of the shortsighted greed and reckless machismo of our political leaders. He died because his fellow and sister Americans were too busy worrying about our own small concerns to stand up and demand, in no uncertain terms, that this foolish war be stopped before any more young people have to die.

Then there was the lovely, fitting triple-death scene to send out 2006: James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein. You could just see the media scrambling to try to distract American audiences from the grisly death of Saddam by focusing on the vacuous pomposity of Ford’s official funeral, and the glamorous legacy of James Brown.

By the last day of 2006, though, all attempts at diversion failed—it was impossible to keep Americans from witnessing the last horrific moments of Saddam’s life, as he was led to the gallows in the middle of the night and hanged to taunts and mockery.

Just imagine if every political leader in the world with blood on his hands were actually brought to “an eye for an eye” justice in this way! Bush and Cheney would be among the first to go.

But would it make the world a better place? Has the unceremonious hanging of Saddam Hussein made Iraq any less violent, any more humane? Is violence ever a wise response to violence?

It’s these sorts of thoughts that keep circling in my mind on this New Year’s Day, and keep me from my usual energetic, positive look ahead at the year to come. I don’t even feel like making any New Year’s resolutions, other than to just keep on keeping on.

But here’s a piece of news for my readers: I am going to close the book on my Women’s Crossroads blog, and start a new blog for 2007.

You can find me at The Glocal this year, where I’ll be commenting on what I’ve realized is my strongest interest: the interconnections between the local and the global, between what is happening here in my own little life and immediate surroundings, and what is happening on the big world stage—for women, of course, but also for all of the inhabitants of our struggling planet.

Happy New Year.

Americans: Time to Stand Up!

2006-12-20T06:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Circumcision: No Time to Waste, for Men or Women

2006-12-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

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.

Reaching out with Manos Unidas

2006-12-12T05:56:00.000-05:00

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.

Kids Just Wanna Have Fun

2006-12-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

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.

Power of the People

2006-11-24T07:47:00.000-05:00

Many years ago, I visited the ruins of the ancient Zapotecan city of Monte Alban. It was a cool, overcast morning, and from the plateau on which the city lies the view of the surrounding sierras was breathtaking, the power of the place palpable. From the top of the huge southern temple, which some archeologists believe was used as an astronomical observatory, I watched threatening dark clouds moving swiftly towards us--so swiftly that we were quickly enveloped in the rain storm, and only with difficulty made our way back through the thick fog and driving rain to the shelter of the visitors' center.

A storm of this magnitude has engulfed the state of Oaxaca today, seemingly fueled by some of the ancient power that I sensed from Monte Alban. It's a political storm, grounded by the desperate resistance of the masses of Mexican indigenous campesinos and ordinary poor folk to centuries of oppression. Finally unwilling to stand for the open corruption and brutality of the state governor, the people of Oaxaca are standing up for their rights, and resisting police and military efforts to bludgeon them back into cowering silence.

As with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, 1994, the movement in Oaxaca is benefiting from friends with internet connections. The declaration of the indigenous movement was posted online at the Narconews.org website on November 22, courtesy of El Enemigo Comun, and it makes for inspiring reading! Here's a small sample from the introduction:

"Today we are not only struggling against a local tyrant, but against an entire system, which for many years has implanted its political and economic structures and continues to import external cultural forms in order to dominate us. Thus, all the repression and low intensity warfare that we’re experiencing in the state and in the country as a whole stem from the confrontation between two projects: that of the oppressors and that of the oppressed, our project.

"We are resisting the demand to turn over our wealth to a few people and to become modern slaves in the new exploitation centers, the maquiladoras, or to become the muleteers of our natural resources. We are resisting the loss of our culture, of being governed by a gang of thieves that utilize power in their own self-interest and to serve those who keep us in dire poverty.

"We also remind you that it’s not only the powerful who are responsible for our situation, but also we, the oppressed people, who have let them have their way for many years, many decades, who have let those who degrade us stay in power. In other words, we’ve often elected our own executioners or have sold our dignity for a plate of lentils. And they’ve used our poverty to throw us a few crumbs. Our people have lived for too many years in this system that reduces us to beggars."

We here in the US like to think of ourselves as the most enlightened, modern society on the face of the planet, but don't you think we have a thing or two to learn from these grassroots activists from the sierras of Mexico?

In the US, the tactics of repression have indeed grown more subtle. For example, we don't deny the masses education, we use education as a tool of indoctrination into conformity to the system. Kids who aren't sufficiently pacified by mind-numbing media and multiple-choice pedagogy are put on expensive cocktails of psychiatric drugs. Their parents struggle to maintain the middle-class American dream--a nice house, two cars, a family vacation every year, and putting the kids through college--by locking themselves into endless cycles of expensive debt, and see it as a personal failure, rather than systemic inequity, when they just can't make their dreams come true.

Meanwhile in the halls of power, the pharmaceutical, financial, energy and insurance industries seem to have a stranglehold on our political system that mirrors the ironfisted control of the elites in Mexico. Both countries claim that their political systems are "democracies," but in reality, here as throughout the world, money talks, and the vast majority of ordinary people have to try to survive on the crumbs.

Those of us who are interested in the possibility of truly inclusive and fair democracy should pay attention to what's going on in Oaxaca these days. The grassroots leaders there are envisioning a system of governance that is non-hierarchical, consensus-based, and free of elitist corruption. Let's try to imagine what it would be like if Americans at the local level started embracing the radical vision expressed by the indigenous people of Oaxaca in their declaration, to whit:

"We must earnestly seek a new way of conducting politics.

"The APPO [Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca] now has the ability to change the correlation of forces in favor of the people because it is the people themselves. It can’t betray itself. We must understand that. That’s why we must all be heard. We can’t build anything if not through consensus. That does NOT mean voting and following the will of the majority. It means looking for a solution that we all agree with. Our program should be based on NEVER AGAIN MAKING DECISIONS WITHOUT CONSULTING THE PEOPLE."

Yes!

We Give Thanks

2006-11-19T07:46:00.000-05:00

What I love about Thanksgiving is the fact that it celebrates coming together and enjoying good food. What I hate about it is—a much longer list.

The holiday celebrates a duplicitous moment in American history, when the pilgrims were saved from starving by the generosity of the Native Americans, and gave thanks to their God for sending them such beneficent friends. It’s duplicitous because as soon as they could, those same smiling, grateful pilgrims turned around and massacred their Native neighbors in droves, savagely murdering any men, women, children or old people who had the audacity to think they could continue to reside in their ancestral homeland.

In the succeeding years, American capitalist culture has taken this nice family-oriented holiday and turned it into an orgy of gluttonous excess. We’re not supposed to just sit down to a special meal together, we’re supposed to stuff ourselves into total lethargy, like geese being force-fed to produce fois gras.

Most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving at home, not in a restaurant. And who do you think is responsible for producing this great feast? You guessed it, the women of the house.

Over the years I have asked hundreds of students to write about Thanksgiving at their homes, and it’s amazing how every one of them describes their mothers or grandmothers getting up at the crack of dawn to put the turkey in the oven, and slaving over the side dishes and desserts—not to mention serving and cleaning up after the meal. And then there’s the shopping that goes on for a good week beforehand—many hours spent in accumulating all the food that will be laid out on the groaning board that day.

In traditional American homes—and I warrant we are still talking about the majority of American homes here—the women do all the preparation, serving, and cleaning up for Thanksgiving. Maybe the man of the house carves the turkey when it’s presented to him on a platter. But the main activity of the men in the house, from little boys on up to grandfathers, is watching football, eating and drinking.

Someone please tell me I’m behind the times, and this picture has changed! I know there are some men who love to cook, and take responsibility for preparing holiday meals. But as far as I know, these men are exceptions to the rule.

The truth is that on Thanksgiving, we give thanks for the Native Americans who happily gave us this bountiful land, and for the women who have happily shopped and cooked so we could enjoy this bountiful feast.

Who the hell are “we”?

It's 2006, America. Do you know where your children are?

2006-11-08T09:14:00.000-05:00

Oh Happy Day! It appears that America has finally awakened and begun to roar out its disapproval of the Republican leadership, from the President on down. The Democrats have been given a mandate to try to put out the raging fires of war and crisis that have erupted under Bush's mismanagement, and although it's going to be one hell of a task, the sooner we can get down into the bowels of the burning building and shut down the gas valves, the better. Donald Rumsfeld, here we come!

There will be many many pundits talking in the coming weeks about how best to get started on this monumental project, so I'm going to leave that discussion to them for now and turn to a more local matter.

It's 2006, America. Do you know where your children are?

Did you know that your teenager children are not welcome to congregate on the quiet, picturesque and touristy streets of downtown Great Barrington, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts?

Did you know that if they're on the streets of Great Barrington, not only are they likely to be harrassed by the local police and threatened with loitering charges, not only are they going to be watched by surveillance cameras with a live feed to the World Wide Web, but they (along with your younger children, I might add) are going to be subjected to blasts from a "Sonic Youth Repellent" to clear them from the streets?

Are our kids rodents, to be dispersed with such harsh electronic weapons? What's next? A police-enforced curfew for all kids under the age of 18?

When I was growing up, the public service announcement "It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?" used to run on TV every night. The implication, in those pre-cellphone days, was that if kids weren't at home, parents should be concerned about their whereabouts, for the safety of their children.

Now, in 2006, it seems that rather being afraid for our teenage kids, we are afraid of them.

Richard Stanley, the Great Barrington landlord who has taken his distaste for loitering teens to extraordinary lengths, claims that the groups of kids hanging out in his parking lot behind the Triplex Cinema are frightening off his customers, as well as the potential customers of other stores in buildings he owns in the Railroad Street area (you can read more about the issue in The Berkshire Eagle).

I've been in that parking lot at night, and observed the knots of teenagers hanging out, smoking cigarettes, talking enthusiastically and yes, sometimes loudly with each other. Although I am a former Manhattanite with alert antennae as regards the possibility of danger lurking in dark alleys, and a seemingly inborn fear of boisterous groups of young men, none of my warning bells went off in the presence of these kids.

Indeed, there have been no muggings or assaults in the Railroad Street area in my memory, and that may in fact be thanks to the regular presence of so many of our teenagers on the street!

I'm not starry-eyed about the possibility that some of the kids hanging out in town are, among many other activities, engaging in the commerce of illegal substances. It may certainly be true that some kids are buying or selling drugs in town, as some of them do in school, and in the privacy of their own homes. I don't condone this, but I do accept the reality that it happens today, just as it was happening when I was a teenager.

But as a parent of a young teen, I would far rather my kid hang out in the public square, as it were (and although it's a pretty sad excuse for a public square, the Triplex parking lot does serve that function by virtue of its central location in town) than be off in some dark park at night, where he might be at risk of becoming a victim of crime or drug pushing himself.

If you think back to your own teenage years, you may remember the exceptional happiness that could come from simply kicking back with friends and talking about anything and everything. In these academically pressured and media-bombarded times, many kids don't have enough time to just relax and enjoy each other's company, in person, rather than online.

In fact, one thing that's especially positive about the fact that teenagers want to hang out together in town is that it actually provides them with an unusually media-free environment, where the chief form of entertainment is--gasp!--talking with one another, face to face. Isn't this much preferable to the options that are available to most of them at home: playing video games, surfing the Web, watching TV, or chatting endlessly on MySpace?

We should be celebrating the fact that in our little town, a good number of our kids are choosing to make friendship a priority in their lives. And we should be glad that our kids are choosing downtown Great Barrington as their stomping ground--it's good for the kids to be in the public eye, and it's actually good for most of the merchants in town, especially those providing inexpensive meals and--yes, Mr. Stanley--movies.

War Against Women, Worldwide

2006-11-02T08:32:00.000-05:00

Just a quick birthday post before I run off to work, to thank Bob Herbert of the NY Times for sending out a cry for help on behalf of the world's women in his column today! I couldn't ask for a better birthday gift. Even though it's such grim news he's spreading, it's news that needs a wider audience, and what better pulpit than the op-ed pages of the NY Times?

Herbert is responding to a recent U.N. report on the "permanent world war" being waged against women all over the planet. He gives examples, familiar to those of us who follow international women's issues: sexual trafficking, honor killings, wife abuse, female genital mutilation of girls, systematic rape as a weapon of war or ethnic cleansing, infanticide of girls...the list goes on and on and on.

And the abuse is by no means limited to Third World nations--those "savage" countries! Herbert tells us that "The most common form of serious abuse against women and girls around the globe is violence by intimate partners. Huge percentages of female murder victims, even in such developed countries as Australia, Canada, Israel and the United States, are killed by current or former husbands or boyfriends."

Indeed, he continues, "A study of young, female murder victims in the U.S. found that homicide was the second leading cause of death for girls 15 to 18, and that 78 percent of all the homicide victims in the study had been killed by an acquaintance or intimate partner."

Women are targeted because they're women, and they're targeted in all kinds of ways--from the subtle forms of fashion and beauty standards that lead to anorexia and other self-dstructive behaviors, to the more open treatment of women as property, to be abused at will in many places in the world.

Herbert is right to call this a World War, and to demand that those sitting safe on the sidelines--readers of the New York Times, for example--take note and take action.

What can you do? Support the work of the United Nations on behalf of the world's women, for one thing: make a donation to UNIFEM or the UNFPA. Get involved in your own community, working on behalf of local women. Celebrate International Women's Day with a big event or an intimate women's circle!

The first step toward action is simply becoming aware, and letting your compassion and concern resonate until it finds the appropriate channel for you to act. It's never too late to start, and nothing is too little a step to help the women and girls of the world put this war behind us and move on into a peaceful, prosperous, equitable future.

Colonized chic

2006-10-22T06:30:00.000-04:00

Odd, isn't it, that Western women's fashion errs on the side of semi-nudity and outright promiscuity, while in the Muslim world shapeless drapery that even covers the face is de rigueur? There's seemingly little that emphasizes the difference between East and West more than the fashions our women don.

And yet, how different are these extremes really? In both cases, women wear what men want to see.

Here in the U.S., young girls announce their sexuality boldly, wearing halter tops or spaghetti strap tank tops with their brightly colored bra straps peeking out. Their tight jeans are so low-cut you can see their hip bones and the smooth dip of their backs rising to meet their buttocks. There's very little left to mere suggestion!

In the Muslim world, I don't know how women dress when they're in the confines of their own homes, but out in the world the most pious and admired among them wear the full hijab with the niqab, a head-to-toe black body bag with a black veil hiding all but their eyes and the center line of their nose. In Afghanistan under the Taliban it was those blue one-piece burqas, with a lace grille covering even the eyes.

So in the West we get women dressing as tramps in order to flaunt their sex appeal to the male gaze, and in the Muslim world women dress as walking drapery in order to conceal their sex appeal from all but the particular male gaze of their husband. The story goes that these respective dress codes oppress Muslim women and liberate Western women, who are free to let it all hang out.

Poppycock. In both cases, women are being objectified and used to satisfy male desire in a way that does not give equal weight to their own desires and that does not treat them as equal to males.

There's such a thing as "internal colonization," a term invented by Tunisian psychologist and sociologist Albert Memmi to describe the way colonized people tend to internalize the mind-set of the colonizers, even those aspects that elevate the colonizer as superior to the colonized. A sense of inferiority is in this way implanted into the colonized, generally in childhood, which can be almost impossible to overcome in later life. It's an incredibly effective strategy of indoctrinating a subject people.

I would argue that this process of internal colonization is on display in women's "choice" of fashion. Western men want women on display as sex objects; Muslim men want women concealed. But in both cases, it's what the men want that counts. Women's comfort and sense of dignity is irrelevant. And in both cases, women are trained from earliest childhood, by the media and by watching their elders, to accept these fashion dictates as inevitable and desirable, worth fighting for.

Yes, men too have their fashion dictated by social mores--men don't get to wear high heels, I admit it. But why is it that men's fashion is all about comfort and dignity, while women's fashion either turns them into sex kittens or walking body bags?

Freedom? Liberation? Equality? Muslim women don't have it, to be sure, but Western women have no business thinking we do either. Fashion does provide a window into a society, and for both Western and Muslim women, the view through that window is very depressing indeed.

Do the RED thing

2006-10-14T06:49:00.000-04:00

"She was the first woman of whom it truthfully could be said that she shopped until she dropped," writes Liesl Schillinger of the doomed French Queen Marie Antoinette.

Although she's purportedly reviewing the new Marie Antoinette novel Abundance, by Sena Jeter Naslund, Schillinger seems much more interested in non-fiction book Queen of Fashion, by Barnard professor Caroline Weber, which argues that the queen, a 14-year-old Austrian cast adrift in a hostile environment at Versailles, used her adroit fashion sense to craft an "image of influence and splendor...using fashion as her buttress."

Americans have always been entranced by the splendor and excess of Versailles--which of course at the time our Puritan-led nation deplored. Sofia Coppola's new movie, in which the beautiful young Kirsten Dunst plays the daring and doomed Queen, is getting all kinds of fawning publicity--we love to see the beautiful queen prance in her finery, and we love to see her punished for it too, apparently. Versailles meets the White House.

Marie Antoinette used her fashion sense and purchasing power to "project power," Schillinger writes. "“Through carefully selected, unconventional outfits and accessories, she cultivated what she later called an ‘appearance of [political] credit,’ ” Weber argues."

Using fashion politically is nothing new. But what is new, and seems to be gaining steam, is the practice of using fashion to appeal to consumers' moral sensibilities. Shop til you drop, by all means! But buy MY brand, which is hip and cool not just on the basis of quality and visual appeal, but on the basis of the politics it represents.

Thus we have the amazingly lavish and undoubtedly ferociously expensive new GAP campaign launched this week, in which the likes of Stephen Spielberg, Don Cheadle, Penelope Cruz, and many other cool dudes and dudettes pose winningly in Gap outfits, all bearing the signature color RED.

"GAP is collaborating with (Product) Red and the world's most iconic brands to help eliminate AIDS in Africa," the advertising copy reads. "Every time you purchase a GAP (Product) RED item, half of the profits will go directly to the fight against this disease. Do the (RED) thing."

Okay, yeah, let's all go out and "do the red thing," why not? Shop til we drop to fight AIDS in Africa--thanks, Bono and Bobby Shriver, for coming up with such a brilliant campaign!

There's just one problem. What if, like the tragic Marie Antoinette, we get so caught up in our own image (as well-dressed, well-heeled, well-intentioned shoppers) that we lose sight of the fact that there is a difference between "doing the RED thing" and "doing the RIGHT thing"?

I'm glad, I really am, that GAP and the other corporate sponsors of the (Product) Red campaign (what, pray tell, is the function of those oh-so-Derridean parentheses?) are going to donate as much as half their profits on certain products to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Channeling Americans' fashion sense into social responsibility is certainly better than the mindless consumerism we're known for. But does anyone else agree that sometimes, in order to do the right thing, we have to forget about our own image for a while, and think deeply, with real compassion, about someone else for a while?

What Women Want

2006-10-08T08:51:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post to note my irritation with the continued media-driven marginalization of women in American politics. If it's obvious in the enlightened pages of The New York Times, just think how blatant it is in the mass-media, places like CNN and Fox News!

What I'm talking about is today's political commentary on the opinion pages of the Times. Out of 18 pundits whose views are presented, only THREE are women. Of those three, two were invisible speechwriters for male politicians; the other is Ellen Malcolm, the president of the women's political action group Emily's List.

In her commentary, "What Women Want," Macolm informs us that women might be persuaded to pay attention to the elections if politicians start "talking about issues that directly affect their families and showing them how voting for Democrats — especially women candidates — can make a difference. They’ll be receptive to Democratic policies like protecting Social Security, making college affordable and finding an end to the morass in Iraq."

Okay, these are worthy issues. But I find it insulting to suggest that women are only interested in politics if the issues are directly related to our families. There's a whole lot that women want out of politics, and the scope of our interest goes way beyond education, health care and social security, though of course these issues are important to all Americans, regardless of our gender.

If the Times wants to know what women want, they should ask more of us what we think. Ask some non-elite women for a change! Ask some Latinas or African American women! Ask some ordinary teachers, nurses, and bank tellers, for pete's sake!

If, like me, you're impatient with the mainstream media's nelgect of women, a good place to look for more vibrant coverage would be the blog Feministing. The blog itself is always interesting, but what's really useful is the amazing blogroll and resource list running down the right side of your screen. Want to know what women want? Spend a little time exploring that blogroll, and you'll find out!

Moral Authority vs Joy

2006-10-05T16:40:00.000-04:00

In a week when deaths in Baghdad from roadside bombings and sectarian violence reached an all-time high, what are Americans focusing on? Something much more sexy: the scandal over Congressman Foley's sexually explicit email come-ons to a 16-year-old Congressional page from Louisiana.

The Times is right to worry that Republicans and conservatives may use this scandal as the basis for more ugly gay-bashing. As spectators, would we be any less horrified by Foley's behavior if he'd been suggestively emailing girl pages? I have a feeling the answer there is yes--heterosexual male Congressmen flirting with the young women who bring them coffee can be brushed off far more easily than gay male Congressmen hitting on teenage boys.

But haven't we learned by now (thanks, Monica Lewinsky) that young people in the halls of power are at risk of sexual predators--some of them very illustrious men indeed?

Power corrupts, and what more gratifying way to display and enjoy personal power than by sexually manipulating a beautiful young thing, male or female?

David Brooks, bless his soul, has seized the occasion to compare this real-life story of sexual predation with a fictional one--Eve Ensler's monologue in The Vagina Monologues, told in the voice of a young girl who was seduced by an older woman, and loved every minute of it. The Ensler monologue celebrates the awakening of a young girl's sexuality, and passes over the fact that it was an older woman who called the shots in their sexual encounter.

Both scenarios are wrong, Brooks says, "because when an adult seduces a child, it tears the social fabric that joins all adults and all children. "

Family values, here we come again!

Brooks drives his point home in no uncertain terms:

"In a country filled with parents looking for a way to raise their children in a morally disordered environment, Foley’s act is just one more symptom of a contagious disease.

"In the long run, the party that benefits from events like the Foley scandal will be the party that defines the core threats to the social fabric, and emerges as the most ardent champion of moral authority."

Of course I don't believe it's a good idea for adults to engage in sex with minors, however consenting they may be. But trust David Brooks to take every opportunity to castigate the very idea of joyful sexuality, linking Ensler's "vagina-friendly" fictions to the sordid account of Foley's transgressions.

The problem is that the "moral authority" Brooks is invoking here is synonymous with abstinence-only sex ed, parental consent for teenage abortions, and the sanctity of exclusively heterosexual marriage. Foley himself fades in importance behind this much larger, much more dangerous agenda: it's no longer about the rights of young people on Capitol Hill to mingle with their elected representatives unharmed, it's about tightening the screws of "moral authority" in an increasingly decadent society.

Where is that decadence coming from? Not from Eve Ensler. Not from sex ed. Not from upholding a woman's right to control her own body and reproductive health.

It's coming from sleazebags like Congressman Foley and the whole stinkingly corrupt Republican leadership now falling all over each other in their efforts to point fingers at others and get out of the mud-wrestling match unsmeared.

It's coming from an increasingly sexualized media, from internet to TV to film, that gets off on portraying women and children as sexual objects to be hit on and abused.

It's coming from our heartless capitalist system, which forces parents to work ever longer hours, leaving children alone and exposed to predation--whether through media or in vivo--and without enough guidance and support.

Our age of innocence has most definitely come to an end, in more ways than just the sexual. Americans must finally turn and confront what we have become. And we must summon the vision and the backbone to set ourselves on a new path. More "moral authority" is not what is needed here. It's more kindness, more compassion, more of the true joy that comes from giving joy to others.

Just another death

2006-09-27T06:45:00.000-04:00

What a busy week it's been already! a CIA report blaming the Iraq war for the upswing in terrorism since 9/11 is "leaked," throwing the Bush team on the defensive; Maureen Dowd skewering Hillary for being too calculating as the 2008 presidential elections come into the political crosshairs; John Tierney lambasting Donna Shalala and her all-woman panel of experts for concluding that yes Virginia, there really are still barriers to women entering career paths in math and science.

But what's really caught my attention this week are two stories which at first sight do not seem to have much in common: Nicholas Kristof's two-part series on maternal mortality in Africa, and the revolutionary Spanish ban on stick-thin fashion models, discussed at length in Judith Warner's blog "Domestic Disturbances."

Kristof's description of a 24-year-old Cameroonian mother of three dying unnecessarily in childbirth, for want of a $100 worth of surgical supplies to support a Caesarian section, is harrowing and heart-breaking, especially after he drives home the point that 500,000 young mothers die like this in childbirth every year. "An African woman now has one chance in 20 of dying in pregnancy," Kristof reports. "In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is to become pregnant."

Meanwhile, in the fashion capitals of the West, young women face quite a different threat: self-inflicted starvation. Bravo to the regional government of Madrid, which recently legislated that fashion models participating in that city's annual fashion shows must have a body-mass index of 18--much higher than the average model's B.M.I. of 15. Normal B.M.I. for women is around 20.

If for women in developing countries getting pregnant is the most dangerous thing they can do, for women in developed countries, it's opening a magazine or turning on the TV. How many young girls are starving themselves today to try to meet the "ideals" they absorb from the media?

Some 8 million American women suffer from anorexia nervosa, the self-starvation mental disease. Another several million are categorized as bulimics, who alternate between binging and starving. And there must be many many more borderline cases who don't make the official statistics, but who are at risk nevertheless.

Did you know that:

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness
A study by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reported that 5 – 10% of anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease; 18-20% of anorexics will be dead after 20 years and only 30 – 40% ever fully recover
The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for females 15 – 24 years old.

This is pretty frightening! But what's really jarring is the disparity between what's happening to women in the developed world vs. the developing world. In rich countries, women starve themselves to increase their sex appeal, and end up dying as a result. In poor countries, women don't worry so much about their sex appeal, but they end up dying for it anyway: sex=pregnancy=death. That, is, if AIDS doesn't get them first.

As Kristoff concludes, if men were suffering and dying at this rate over their sex appeal, the world would pay more attention.

A Mighty Mouse for Our Times

2006-09-21T08:22:00.000-04:00

Oh, the audacity of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela! He is fast becoming a modern-day David, or, more colorfully, a Mighty Mouse of Latin America, rivaling and even surpassing his friend Fidel Castro in shaking his fist at the huge Goliath of our time, the US of A.

The difference between Castro and Chavez can be summed up in one short word: OIL. Sitting on top of one of the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, Hugo Chavez can literally afford to be cocky.

But what cheek, what gorgeous and appropriate rhetoric, to stand up at the United Nations and call George W. Bush the Devil himself!

The New York Times reported: "Speaking on Wednesday from the same lectern Mr. Bush had occupied the day before, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela announced, to gasps and even giggles: “The devil came here yesterday, right here.

“It smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of,” he said."

Can it be denied that Mr. Bush has led the U.S. with fire and brimstone, and the victims of American aggression abroad probably do feel themselves in hell? (On American military might, by the way, see David Unger's excellent Times Talking Points piece on the way billions of dollars of the Pentagon's budget are going to support obsolete, Cold-War era weaponry, money that could be much better used for education, welfare, and genuine efforts at Homeland Security (a phrase I detest)).

It didn't surprise me to hear that Chavez was making waves at the United Nations. What did surprise me, however, was the reaction of the audience. Times reporter Helene Cooper plays up the "gasps and giggles" in her article, burying down towards the end of the piece the fact that Chavez's performance was met by"loud applause that lasted so long that the organization’s officials had to tell the cheering group to cut it out."

He drove his ethical position home, Cooper reports, by pledging to "double the amount of heating oil Venezuela donates to poor communities in the United States. He reminded reporters that Citgo, which is owned by Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., delivered free and discounted oil to Indian tribal reservations and low-income neighborhoods in the United States, including the Bronx.

"“We are ready to double our oil donations,” Mr. Chávez said. “That is a Christian gesture.”"

Go Chavez!

I just want to take a minute to express my annoyance with Ms. Cooper for faithfully reporting that Chavez made the faux pas, in front of reporters, of saying that Noam Chomsky was already dead:

"He brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)"

How about cheering a world leader who actually reads and appreciates Noam Chomsky!

How many many many many faux pas has the press let our fearless leader GW Bush get away with? And what, pray tell, is his bedtime reading?

My advice to readers? Buy Citgo!

POSTSCRIPT, Sunday 9/24: Al-Jazeera reports that since Chavez told Americans they should read Chomsky's book, "Hegemony or Survival" has jumped to first place in sales, from its previous position at #26,000! How's that for a marketing ploy!

True Democracy Starts Here

2006-09-16T06:40:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to be able to report that there are many ordinary Americans who are working hard to celebrate next week's International Day of Peace meaningfully. But you'd never know it from following the mainstream media.

It's nothing new to say, but it nevertheless bears repeating: we define ourselves by the image reflected back to us by Big Media, and sadly, most of us never actually appear in that image. TV sends us images of celebrity culture, with its attendant stress on money, power, possessions and glamorous beauty (defined, for women, as tall, thin and sexy). In the print media, you have to be a total stand-out, to have achieved recognition on one of the mainstages of life, to be allowed access as an individual to the hallowed pages of the national press.

But the Worldwide Web really is changing the picture. By removing the media gatekeepers, who almost always, these days, represent the interests of the rich and powerful, the Web has allowed a million flowers to bloom, in the form of blogs, listservs, email lists, websites, you name it. We still don't quite allow ourselves to acknowledge the power of this incredible grassroots movement--we have been too well indoctrinated by the mainstream media to believe that if it doesn't show up in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, it isn't really something worth getting excited about.

It's true that these giant media outlets have a global distribution reach that dwarfs any single alternative press outlet. But the sheer diversity and tenacity of the millions of bloggers and web activists is beginning to shine through. I am beginning to believe that there will come a time when a substantial portion of the world will insist on telling its own story, its own way; on setting its own priorities, developed locally and at the same time in concert with thousands or millions of other local organizations throughout the world.

For this to happen, the sham of "democracy" will have to be exposed for the hollow trick of mirrors and light that it has become. Today's "masters of the universe" think they can get away with treating voters as though they're stupid sheep who can't recognize fraud even when their noses are rubbed in it. They think we won't notice that what is really going on in almost all national elections, worldwide, is a form of musical chairs among the rich and powerful and those who serve them.

By assuming control over the media giants, and hijacking the public education system, the Bush-era elites have come perilously close to accomplishing their goal of turning Americans into a country of obedient sheep. But not quite. Individual lackeys have begun to turn against their own leadership: witness Colin Powell's remarkable letter this week to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, arguing against the Bush plan to gut the Geneva Conventions.

And there's more. It was not from The New York Times, but through email that I heard that September 19, 20 and 21 have been designated "National Bush Crimes Days," when citizens all over the country will organize to speak out against the Bush administration's war crimes and crimes against humanity. Last week, as I again heard through email, a group of concerned citizens tried to deliver an antiwar message to Bush at the White House, but were rebuffed and ignored. Here's how one activist who was there described the scene:

"At the gate of the White House a remarkable scene played out. The 50-page indictment and verdict was offered to those on the other side of the gate. But the document was refused and we were told that we must send it to the White House by mail." How can you refuse us? asked Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst. We are American citizens and you work for us. It is our constitutional right to present our wishes, demands and judgments to the President who represents us. Ultimately he had to reach through the gate and drop the document on the ground while security personnel, yelping dog on a short leash, and various “inside” press recorded the event with suspicious eyes, video cameras, and cell phones."

Well, there are other ways of delivering messages to the White House!

Here in quiet Berkshire County, citizens are stirring. A fabulous celebration of the International Day of Peace, September 21, will occur in Pittsfield next week. Our own citizen-run radio and cable TV stations are thriving.

Even in the schools, which have become carefully controlled in these days of "No Child Left Behind," I was pleased to see that my son's social studies teacher, in the Great Barrington public high school, chose to start the year by having his ninth graders read 1984, George Orwell's grim testament to the resilience of the human spirit, despite the best efforts of fascism to quench resistance. He supplemented the reading with a documentary film on Stalin, just to drive home the point that Orwell's vision is not mere fiction. Any alert student, looking out into the world today, will be able to grasp the parallels between 1984 and 2006.

It's up to us to keep alive the old, true meanings of words like "freedom" and "democracy." It's up to us older folk to show the new generations coming up that we still believe in activism, in using our bodies and our minds to create an alternative to the nightmare world conjured up by the likes of Bush, Cheney and their henchmen.

Another world IS possible. And you know what? I do hear it breathing now. Loud and clear.

Politics As Usual

2006-09-12T19:09:00.000-04:00

All this solemn posturing over the fifth anniversary of 9-11 is just sickening! Even the New York Times succumbed, leading off on 9-11 itself with a sappy article about W. and Laura placing a wreath on the World Trade Center site.

Yes, yes, we are sorry about the nearly 3,000 people who died in that terrorist strike. But what about the nearly 3,000 people who have died since then in Iraq--and that's just the Americans in Iraq, that doesn't count the Americans in Afghanistan, and the thousands of people of other nationalities who have died in the violence spawned by the Bush Administration's stupid, ill-conceived response to 9-11.

Meanwhile, here's a story that's barely receiving any press at all. In Mexico, the Presidential elections were decided by Supreme Court vote--oh-so-much like what happened in this country in 2000, with Gore vs. Bush. And guess who won? Felipe Calderon, the conservative candidate, backed by the U.S. against the leftist challenger, the mayor of Mexico, Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador. Did someone say those ballot boxes were tampered with? Hell yes they were! But what with all the hoopla over the fifth anniversary of 9-11, this sabotaging of justice just went unremarked int the mainstream press. The Times practically fawned all over Calderon.

And while the champagne flowed in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, the followers of Lopez Obrador cried with fury and grief.

Once again democracy is flouted in Mexico! But if we can't trust in the democratic process in the United States, how should we trust it anywhere else in the world?

Ordinary people (what the odious commentator David Brooks calls "human capital") desire a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness FOR ALL matter more than dividends and tax breaks for the wealthy elite. How many tears must be shed, how much blood must be lost, how many years do we have to wait for this simple and powerful vision to become reality?

Mexicans are not taking the outrageous appointment of a conservative President lightly. La Jornada, a big Mexico City daily newspaper, decried the appointment of Calderon as a move likely to further polarize the country.

And over in the beautiful little town of Oaxaca, which I remember fondly from my travels in Mexico, a group of teachers has been striking in the zocalo, or main square, all summer long, trying to oust the corrupt governor of the state of Oaxaca. This is the way change has always happened: people getting angry and frustrated enough with the usual channels (such as elections) to put their bodies on the line to demand change.

What will it take to get the ordinary citizens of the US out of their chairs, away from their computers and TV screens, and into the streets?

Labor Day Resolution: Lose the Plastic!

2006-09-09T19:43:00.000-04:00

My apologies to my loyal readers, I have been away from the Crossroads for two weeks while busily engaged in getting all my beginning-of-the-school-year balls in the air. Juggling does seem like an apt, if tired, metaphor for what I am doing, multi-tasking away at my two paid jobs and several more unpaid ones!

Instead of writing in this space last weekend, I was busy re-reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, always the book with which we launch the semester in the Simon's Rock Sophomore Seminar class "Voices Against the Chorus." Every time I teach this course, I am gratified to be reading Marx just in time for the U.S. Labor Day celebration; and every time Labor Day rolls around, I feel more glum and irritated by the superficial show of support for working people that this holiday entails.

In Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, she talks bitterly about New Year's Day, which was one of the very rare occasions when the enslaved people of the South were allowed to take the day off, drink a little booze, and celebrate with each other. It wasn't really a happy time, however, Jacobs says, because January 2 was the day when many slaves would be sent to distant plantations to work for the next year, separated from families and friends and thrown on the mercy of unknown overseers. How can one celebrate with such an imminent trial ahead?

I feel that way about the current Labor Day celebrations, and indeed about each of the seasonal secular long weekends: Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day (Christmas and Easter are somewhat different because they're religious holidays, though for many of us they feel like just one more three-day weekend). In each case we're being thrown a crumb of a holiday, which often just has the effect of making us work all the harder when we go back to the four-day work week that follows.

Now of course, as a teacher with summers and school vacations off, I am personally in a different situation, and I can't complain too much. But I do feel that we Americans are increasingly enslaved by our jobs, by our credit cards, by our mortgages and car loans and home equity loans. And in fact I'm always thinking these days about whether I could possibly manage to juggle a third paid job in addition to everything else I do, just in order to make ends meet.

It's really another form of debt bondage, isn't it? In many places in the developing world, debt bondage is a fact of life: in India it's common for people to borrow money to, say, build a house or marry off a daughter, in full awareness that they will become indentured workers as a result, possibly for the rest of their lives. It's also all too common for girls to be sold into prostitution, or boys into servitude, in order to pay off such debts.

Here in the US, things are more subtle. Children aren't sold to pay off debts here, at least as far as I know. But parents do routinely go deeply into debt in order to pay for their children's education, and to maintain the lifestyle they have been led to believe should be theirs. Sometimes the only way out of this debt bondage is bankruptcy, and indeed the bankruptcy laws have been tightened this year, as personal bankruptcies threatened to get out of hand.

Karl Marx described the capitalist system as "naked, shameless exploitation" of the poor by the rich, and he had the courage and vision to imagine that another way of life was possible. When students today encounter Marx, they tend at first to dismiss him as overly idealistic. It's human nature to be greedy, they say, it's our nature to exploit others aggressively for our own gain. So it has always been, and always will be.

But usually as we talk about it, this surety of theirs falters. Could it be that we have been indoctrinated to believe that might is right, that the rich deserve their wealth, that the poor are somehow deficient--that it's their own damn fault if they're poor? Could a socioeconomic model based on cooperation and compassion, rather than competition and greed, be possible?

Readers of Women's Crossroads know that I am a diehard believer, with Arundhati Roy, that "another world is possible. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

Communism in practice turned out to be repressive, rather than liberatory as Marx envisioned it. But his theories are still sound, and his description of capitalist exploitation rings as true today as it did in 1848 when the Communist Manifesto was penned. If anything, globalization has made things even more grim than they were in those days. Certainly the need for an international workers' movement is just as urgent today as it was then.

A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times asked plaintively, "Where have all the protesters gone?" And it's true--the days of colorful and powerful protests, a la Seattle, Genoa, and Montreal, seem to have passed. But some real gains have been made, and the continued vibrancy of the World Social Forum attests to the on-going efforts to imagine another, better world.

Another world is possible. But we may have to tear up our credit cards and detach ourselves from American consumer culture in order to manifest it. Now that's something worthing Laboring for.

Iranian Nobel Prizewinner Threatened

2006-08-26T17:22:00.000-04:00

In the last hundred years, just 11 women worldwide have been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. Five of those have occurred since 1991, when the pace of women honorees quickened: Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, Rigoberta Menchu in 1992, Jody Williams in 1997, Shirin Ebadi in 2003, and Wangari Maathai in 2004. That’s a pretty impressive record of women working for peace.

It’s interesting to note that of the five recent honorees, only Jody Williams of the U.S. has been able to work for human rights without falling prey to brutal retaliation from oppressive regimes. Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma has been under house arrest for years and years; Rigoberta Menchu was forced into exile and hiding for a long time in her home country of Guatemala; Wangari Maathai was long jailed and harassed for her environmental work with women in Kenya; and Shirin Ebadi was also arrested and imprisoned for her outspoken defense of women’s human rights in Iran.

As she recalls in her autobiography, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, “from the day I was stripped of my judgeship to the years doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran, I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith. It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered….I have been under attach for most of my adult life for this approach,” Ebadi concedes, but she remains defiant, insistent on using her training and talents as an attorney to defend human rights, especially for women.

Most Nobel prizewinners enjoy a degree of personal security, thanks to the prestige and worldwide recognition the award brings. But the government of Iran, perhaps unsurprisingly, is thumbing its nose at world opinion, banning Shirin Ebadi’s Center for the Defense of Human Rights. The Center provides free legal representation to prisoners of conscience, supports their families, and reports on human rights violations occurring in Iranian detention facilities.

Ebadi, who has spent months in Iranian prisons herself for her activist work, remains defiant. In a recent statement to the international community, Ebadi wrote that she and her staff “do not intend to shut down the center and we shall continue our activities. However, there is a high possibility that they will arrest us. The government's action in this regard is illegal.”

In response to Ebadi’s statement, there is a call circulating on the web demanding that the Iranian government allow Ebadi and her Center to continue working without hindrance or harassment; I’ll append the sample letter below.

Just imagine the face of His Excellency Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, Head of the Judiciary, as thousands of letters begin to pour into his office from around the world! Let’s do it!!

You can send a letter online, or work from the sample letter below:

His Excellency
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
Head of the Judiciary
Ministry of Justice
Park-Shahr, Tehran
Islamic Republic of Iran

Your Excellency,

I am deeply concerned about your Interior Ministry's recent decision to ban the work of the Kanoon Modaefan Hogooge Bashar, led by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi. I understand that the members of this organization have been threatened with arrest, should they continue their invaluable human rights work.

I am alarmed by this decision of the Ministry, four years after failing to respond to the Center for the Defense of Human Right's request for registration. Under Article 12 of the Political Parties Law of 1981, the Political Parties Commission is required to respond to such requests within three months of receiving them. In the absence of any response, the Ministry of the Interior is legally obliged to issue a license to the Center.

The refusal of the Ministry to issue this license suggests that this illegal ban, like the arbitrary detention of Nasser Zarafshan and Abdolfattah Soltani, is an attempt to prevent human rights defenders from reporting and protesting violations of human rights violations in Iran.

Kanoone Modaefan Hogooge Bashar is one of the most important human rights organizations in Iran, and its work is critical to ensure the protection of the basic rights of the Iranian people.

Any arrests of individuals who are trying to inform the public about human rights or human rights abuses are direct violations of the 1998 UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, under which all persons have the right ''freely to publish, impart or disseminate to others views, information and knowledge on all human rights and fundamental freedoms.''

Other international and regional instruments that are binding on the government of Iran, like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, similarly prohibit the persecution of peaceful critics of the Iranian government.

I demand, therefore, an immediate withdrawal of the ban on the Center for the Defense of Human Rights, and the release of Abdolfattah Soltani and all other human rights defenders. I will continue to monitor this and other similar cases closely. I appreciate your attention to this most serious matter.

cc.

Ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the U.N.
622 Third Ave. New York, NY 10017

Utopian Visions: A Breath of Fresh Air

2006-08-22T07:48:00.000-04:00

I have been reading Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, a 1960’s-era utopian novel envisioning what would happen if the West Coast of the U.S. seceded from the union, and became entirely self-sustaining by reducing its demand for fossil fuels and inventing new sustainable technologies. The book also describes a social revolution as radical as anything Marx ever came up with—communal living, free love (of course, it was written in the 60’s), and cradle-to-grave security. Ecotopia also happens to be governed by women!

I’m reading the book for potential inclusion in my syllabus at the University at Albany—it was suggested by one of the faculty on my team at Project Renaissance. I actually prefer Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing as utopian novels go, because it’s a more lively read, and less pat—there’s still a chance that Starhawk’s Californian utopia could fail, whereas Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a done deal, and so a little static.

But why am I telling you this? I’d been privately scoffing to myself as I read along in Ecotopia—this could never happen! What pie in the sky! And then this morning I received an email from Susan Witt at the E.F. Schumacher Society in South Egremont, Mass., announcing the launch of a new local currency program in the Berkshires, BerkShares.

Lo and behold, right here in our little corner of the world, a social experiment is underway—modest, to be sure, but real nevertheless. The idea is to replace federal currency with local money called BerkShares, which would be accepted by local businesses only. You would exchange dollars for BerkShares at local banks ($90 for 100 BerkShares) and participating businesses would accept each BerkShare as one dollar, thereby offering a 10% discount to BerkShare consumers.

Susan Witt has been talking about the potential of local currencies for quite a while, but it didn’t really sink in for me until this morning just how positive they could be. Just as in Ecotopia, there’s value in investing in the local, thinking small, green, and self-sustaining.

When I look out into the national scene and see the uses that my tax dollars are going towards (and not going towards), it definitely puts me in a secessionary kind of mood. I hardly recognize the leaders of our country as “my fellow Americans”—I don’t share their vision of how the world should be, I don’t share their values, I want to distance myself from them and hunker down among likeminded people in my local community waiting out this siege.

And while we wait it out, we can and should be working for change! Buying BerkShares is one way; electoral activism is a must; trying to be as green as possible in one’s individual lifestyle is another.

For me, as a teacher, having students read a utopian novel and discuss the ideas it generates seriously is yet another realm of activism. My SUNY students usually come in pretty mainstream and unquestioning. As a new school year approaches, I look forward to challenging them to think outside the box a little bit. There’s just not enough fresh air inside that mainstream box, is there?

Way to Go, Judge Taylor!

2006-08-19T18:02:00.000-04:00

I am very proud that it is a woman judge--and a Black woman judge at that!--who has had the gumption to stand up to the Republican machine and strike down their wiretapping program as illegal. Federal court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last week, the New York Times reported, "that the National Security Agency's program to wiretap the international communications of some Americans without a court warrant violated the Constitution, and she ordered it shut down."

Anna Diggs Taylor is no stranger to civil rights work--she earned her stripes in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and was appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, the first African American woman to be named Chief Judge of the Eastern Region of the U.S. District Court (there still aren't many women in these positions, let alone African American women). She has the reputation of being fair, tough, and impartial, outlawing discrimination where she sees it, whether the bias favors whites or minorities.

Of course, Judge Taylor is being demonized by the Republicans, and the ruling was being appealed almost before the ink dried. So be it. In a time of Gilded-Age-style pandering and cravenness, it's wonderful to see a judge with the backbone to make an independent, hard-nosed decision. If only we had someone like Judge Taylor as our Attorney General, instead of the brown-nosing Alberto Gonzalez!

Postscript: Has anyone noticed how the New York Times has been publishing a daily feature called "Names of the Dead" for the past few weeks? I think it's laudable that the newspaper is giving us access to the daily rollcall of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it irritates me no end that the online version of this feature juxtaposes the names of the dead with the most frivolous stories and images from the day's paper as well, such as "The St-Tropez of Turkey," or "The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack," complete with inane, happy-go-lucky photos:

Names of the Dead

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: August 19, 2006

The Department of Defense has identified 2,597 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday:

McKENNA, John J. IV, 30, Capt., Marines; Brooklyn; Fourth Marine Division.

PHILLIPS, John P., 29, Sgt., Marines; St. Stephen, S.C.; Ninth Engineer Support Battalion, Third Marine Logistics Group, Third Marine Expeditionary Force.

Please! Have some respect for those who are dying over there in a quagmire they didn't deserve!

Now Playing: Terrorist Strike IX! Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!

2006-08-11T09:44:00.000-04:00

And now for this week's chilling installment of the on-going action-thriller of world events: LONDON-BASED TERROR PLOT FOILED! What really gets me about this is the smaller headline underneath: ARRESTS BOLSTER G.O.P. AS ELECTION NEARS.

How can The Times report with a straight face Bush's pronouncement yesterday that the world is safer than it was after 9/11? Do the Republicans really think people will take seriously their self-righteous spewing into any available microphone, "We told you so! We can't pull out of Iraq when there are terrorists afoot!"

Let's be real here! It's been well-proven that Iraq and Al Qaeda had nothing in common in 2001, and if they have more in common now it's thanks to the disastrous US occupation of that country, promulgated by the Republicans. Once again Cheney is going around trying to make connections between waging war in Iraq and Al Qaeda-driven terrorism that simply don't hold water.

Meanwhile, notice how quiet Republicans are being about what's really driving these terrorists: Israel and the devastation of Lebanon. Granted, Lebanon has become a haven for Hezbollah (in a way that Iraq was never a haven for Al Qaeda). But does that justify the destruction of homes and infrastructure, the wanton bombing of civilians?

There's been a little hemming and hawing this week from the US about shipping Israel a big load of cluster bombs--a little hand-wringing over the fact that cluster bombs will inevitably end up killing civilians. But you know that shipment will go out, and those bombs will be dropped on Lebanese families, killing children or maiming them for life. You don't hear much talk from Cheney or Rumsfeld about that, do you?

It's become increasingly obvious to me that Israel is fighting a proxy war for the US. Our hands are tied in Baghdad and things are going from bad to worse. It's necessary to shift world attention somewhere else, to take the heat off American (non)leadership, and distract Americans from the fact that their young people are dying every day in Iraq. Israel is a convenient scapegoat for Arab fury, a lightening rod for all the angry militants in the region. Israeli soldiers are well-trained, well-equipped, and at least they have the satisfaction of feeling like they're truly fighting for their country, their own families and territory. Let them do the job.

But the London terrorist plot of Summer 2006 shows that the hardcore terrorists aren't fooled. They know the US is still to blame. Who is supplying Israel with weaponry and intelligence? Who has abdicated the effort to secure a reasonable two-state solution for the Palestinians? The latest terrorist attempt was actually a brilliant plan to punish both the US and its henchman, Britain, in one fell stroke. The only problem is that as with all terrorism, it's innocent civilians who become the pawns, and pay the price with their lives.

Not that I can really in good conscience say that any American or British citizen is "innocent." We're all going along with what's been happening here in our lifetimes. The injustice, the greed, the short-sighted policies, the thuggery of the weak--we view it as a fact of life, background noise that we learn to screen out. If we cared, we'd have impeached this president by now.

We have a chance, this November, to send a strong statement, not just to our politicians but to the whole world, that Americans have had enough of the kind of leadership that has given us one crisis after another ever since 2001. Things have not gotten better under Bush leadership, they've gotten much, much worse. Maybe we've finally hit bottom, and can begin, battered but determined, to make our way back up.

World in flames--and the band plays on

2006-08-04T09:19:00.000-04:00

Okay, I admit it. I’ve been avoiding posting because every time I think about what I might say, my mind dissolves into something like the famous painting “The Scream”—I just want to hold my head and wail. Every day I think morosely, “Well, things can’t get any worse, we must be hitting bottom,” and then the next day comes and—it's worse.

And the fact that the violence isn’t touching me directly, the fact that I am going about my ordinary comfortable American existence day by day, makes it even harder to bear somehow. The juxtaposition of my sweet, easy life and the maelstrom taking place in much of the world is so jarring that most of the time I just can’t stand to maintain the polarity. I give myself small doses of world news, and pull the covers of my narrow, pleasant existence back over my head with ostrich-like obstinacy.

There are small signs that the American public is awakening. A coalition of social justice activists, educators and a few courageous politicians have just published a full-page ad in The New York Times listing all the crimes of the Bush Administration against the world and calling for a “mass day of resistance” on October 5. The graphic is powerful—the globe going up in flames.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton finally called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, after a Senate hearing at which two of the generals in charge of the American forces in Iraq admitted that the country might be “sliding into civil war” and that the violence was as bad as it’s ever been. “Yes, we hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration’s strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy,” Clinton told Rumsfeld at the hearing. “Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?”

Why indeed? But the real question is, why has it taken Clinton and so many other politicians and pundits so long to read the writing on the wall?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world where there’s no place to hide, an anguish to match my own: Riverbend gives vent to a rage I haven’t yet heard from her, in the three years since she started blogging from Baghdad. She has always seemed like a moderate voice, a voice of reason in the midst of the hysteria of Iraq. But now even she is calling for vigilante justice to be visited on the American occupiers of her land, in response to the rape of a young girl and murder of her and her family—an incident that received some attention in the US press, but only in Riverbend’s blog was the rape victim named and mourned:

“Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

"In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes... Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today.

“I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

”It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

”Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get?”

HOW MUCH WORSE CAN IT GET????? The fact that someone like Riverbend is ready to deliver US soldiers to mob justice in retribution for their crimes of war is truly terrifying, because as I said before, she is a moderate voice in Iraq. If this is the way she is thinking, one can only imagine with horror what's in the minds of the Hezbollah and Hamas militants.

Israel is taking the fall right now, but it's really the US that's to blame for this crisis, and the only person who may not understand this is the average American, the millions of CNN/Fox News devotees who are still suckers for the stars and stripes.

I have never been more ashamed to be an American. And I've had just about enough of hiding under the covers, too. Election season is coming up, and there is a chance to make a difference, if a strong enough message can be sent to the august halls of Congress through the ballot box. If Senator Clinton is finally summoning the backbone to speak out openly against Rumsfeld and his disastrous fumbling of Iraq, maybe the tide is turning and others will follow her lead. Maybe there is still time to put out the flames and reconstruct a global civilization worthy of that designation.

Treading Water

2006-07-22T09:36:00.000-04:00

After a week of Israel pounding Lebanon and killing hundreds of civilians in an attempt to rout the Hezbollah fighters, the world is taking notice. Lots of voices are chiding Israel for using “disproportionate force”—except of course for our illustrious President, who admonishes the Hezbollah folks to “stop that shit.”

The humanitarian agencies are all scrambling to get aid to the displaced Lebanese—the Israeli jets were leafleting neighborhoods in Beirut yesterday, warning the people to leave their homes, and thousands are doing just that, but they have no where to go, and nothing to eat when they get there.

Those of us who can spare a few minutes from our sweet summer plans to ponder all this are left wringing our hands on the sidelines, and eventually shrugging our shoulders and going on with our barbecues and trips to the beach.

What can be done? Those Israelis and Palestinians have been going at it for decades, and things have only gone from bad to worse. Thank heaven it’s happening over there, far, far away from our green and peaceful safe haven.

I confess to having indulged in this train of thought several times during this past week. Ordinary Americans like me just don’t seem to be able to affect world events—we can’t even manage to elect a decent President of our own country, or end the corruption in our Congress. Every time I’ve tuned into the news this week it’s just sunk me further in depression, and who needs that?

I was thinking how, in the old days, there was just as much fighting and conflict in the world, but ordinary people were less in contact with it than we are now. Without computers and satellites, it might take weeks for your average person living on a farm in the Midwest, let’s say, to learn that a battle was raging in Armenia or Egypt. One might never learn of it. And what one didn’t know couldn’t hurt one.

I do believe that what Kaethe Weingarten has identified as “common shock” is a real problem for us 21^st century folks. We know far too much about what’s going on on our planet, and so much of what we learn about faraway places is negative. This gloomy awareness settles over us like a pall, and for those of us who are sensitive to the suffering of others, it can cast a shadow over every hour of every day, however happily we may be engaged in enjoying the fruits of empire.

Weingarten, a psychologist, urges us to work through our common shock, our distress and even trauma over the violence we see around us, by channeling our fear, pain and anger into action that will bring about a more positive world.

But that’s the problem lately: I feel, and I am sure I’m not alone, totally stymied in my desire to act. Protests have gotten us nowhere. Voting has gotten us nowhere. Writing has gotten us nowhere. The violence just seems to be escalating, and with it the problems of the environment, climate, and suffering of all the beings on our planet.

Right now I am falling back on the very small, very local sphere, the only place where I can truly have an impact and make a difference. My family, my community, my friends, my workplace. I am trying to root myself in the present moment, which is in fact a peaceful summertime in the beautiful Berkshire hills, where I am nestled in a loving web of family, friends and friendly acquaintances. I am planting flowers and flowering shrubs, tending my vegetable garden, caring for my children, my husband and my cats.

It’s tempting to just retreat into this cocoon and try my best to forget about the mayhem going on in the outside world. Many people in my position are doing just that.

I can’t really shut it out entirely. The shadow of war, fear, pain and grief stays with me at all times. But the only satisfying way I can think of to push it back right now is through the small offerings of love I am able to give to the world immediately around me.

I’m treading water, waiting for a movement that can offer real change.

Tierney: Back to the Future

2006-07-15T17:25:00.000-04:00

What’s up with New York Times columnist John Tierney? Clearly, things are really bad in the Republican / conservative world, because instead of his usual cheerleading for Bush Administration policies, he’s feinting with unwarranted attacks on women and girls.

First a column last week arguing that Title IX is no longer necessary, since girls are succeeding so well at school now—let the boys rule the one place they excel, he whines, on the playing field!

And the very next column goes on in the same vein. After dismissing the outraged outcries of respondents to his Title IX column, he goes on to argues that “the gender-equity programs established in the 1990’s, besides perpetuating a bogus crisis, mainly served the cause of girls who didn’t need it”—ie, middle-class white girls.

This is Rove-style bait-and-switch at its best. Let’s distract our (upper) middle-class white New York Times readers from the real news at hand—the disastrous unfolding of events in the Middle East this week, coupled with a steep plunge in the stock market—by getting them into a tizzy over the always-juicy sport of taunting the ladies. And don’t waste any more than a throwaway line over the fate of those even Tierney admits are being “shortchanged,” African American and Latino/as.

Last summer, Larry Summers of Harvard tried something similar, baiting women by tossing off a remark about how we don’t succeed in science because we lack scientific brains. Tierney is more subtle—he’s purporting to stroke women’s egos by telling us how well we’re doing in school, while actually making a case for restoring the playing field to the way it was in the good old days, when women were cheerleaders and men ruled the field.

Anyone who has taken a look at professional sports lately knows that women are still remarkably handicapped in sports. No women’s pro teams come anywhere near men’s pro teams in terms of sponsorship or popularity with the public. A few women make it in individual sports like tennis, swimming, gymnastics, and track—but by and large ours is a culture that still prefers its women on the sidelines cheering in ridiculously short skirts.

The fact that women are doing so well in school is something to be proud of, but we also have to ask why this success at the undergraduate level and below isn’t translating more readily into professional success once young women graduate. Remember that long, front-page Times article last spring interviewing women undergrads from Ivy League schools, all of whom claimed to have gone to college primarily to find a husband?

Our culture still insists that strong, successful women, like Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada,” are fearsome dragon ladies, objects of dread and something like scorn. Until that cultural attitude changes, young women are going to continue to sabotage themselves intellectually in order to please the men in their life, who, like Tierney, wish for a 2010 that looks like 1950, bobby socks and all.

Hellbent on Tragedy

2006-07-14T08:08:00.000-04:00

There is an ode in Sophocles “Oedipus” cycle that keeps coming back to me lately. It goes on for many lines about all the wondrous things that human beings can accomplish with our intellect and our dexterity. And then the last couple of lines are brief but terrible: the chorus reminds us that we are also capable of destroying it all with our willfulness, anger and greed.

This ode comes to me when I read, juxtaposed in the newspaper, about how scientists have managed to implant an electrode in the human brain that enables a paralyzed man to move a cursor on a computer simply by thought—and about how the Israelis and Palestinians continue to pound each other, leaving as-yet untold civilian tragedies in their wake.

How can human beings be at once so magnificently intelligent, and so destructively cruel?

I do feel like a member of the Greek chorus lately, chanting by the sidelines, recounting what’s happening and offering some suggestions—but all the while the actors continue obliviously going through their motions, hellbent on tragedy.

I begin to understand the impetus behind the suicide bombers, the terrorists, and all the other frustrated human beings on this planet who feel strongly that we are collectively moving in the wrong direction, and need to DO SOMETHING to get the world to pay attention and change course.

Of course, that is not to say that I sympathize with Islamic fundamentalists, or believe that violence is ever going to be the right answer.

But I do understand why these individuals get to the point where they can see no other way.

Is there another way?

Ervin Lazlo is one visionary thinker who says yes, there is another way. Lazlo, a professor of philosophy, systems theory and future sciences, writes in Kosmos Journal that a planetary civilization based on interconnection and holism is already emerging, propelled by the work of “cultural creatives,” who, according to one recent study by the Fund for Global Awakening, make up a surprising 28% of Americans.

Not surprising is the finding that the majority of this 28% are women, a fact that is expanded upon by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson in their book The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. Lazlo writes:

“The common denominator of values and lifestyles among the cultural creatives is holism. This comes to the fore in their preference for natural whole foods, holistic health care, holistic inner experience, whole system information, and holistic balance between work and play and consumption and inner growth. They view themselves as synthesizers and healers, not just on the personal level but also on the community and the national levels, even on the planetary level.”

Lazlo is clear-eyed about the difficulties of channeling the energy and wisdom of the cultural creatives into true planetary change.

“Although the new culture at the margins of society is growing, its members are not well organized and the culture as a whole lacks cohesion,” he says. “The cultural creatives do not yet possess the political, social, and economic weight to make them into a significant agent of societal transformation. If transformation of the required kind is to get under way, mainstream society would have to enter the scene, with more adapted values and priorities.

“But for the present, most people in the mainstream are disoriented and disheartened. They find themselves in a rat-race for economic survival in a world where jobs become ever scarcer and finding employment beyond middle age is nearly impossible. Those who pose deeper questions find that they are surrounded by a spiritual , moral, and intellectual vacuum. There are no meaningful answers to questions such as “Who am I? And “What am I living for?” The consequences include a continuing rise in the popularity of mystical teachings, and an explosion of religious fundamentalism.”

Lazlo finds hope in the growing integration of the insights of science and spirituality. Nearly every branch of science is now discovering, at an ever-accelerating rate, the extent to which our planet, and ever bit of matter that composes it, “proves to be a harmonious structure where all things interact with all other things and together create a coherent whole. This is not a mechanical aggregate, for it is not readily decomposable to its parts. It is an integral whole, where to some extent and in some way all things interact with all other things. And the scope of this interaction appears to transcend the hitherto known limits of time and space.

“The findings that ground the new world picture of science,” Lazlo observes, “come from almost all of the empirical disciplines, from physics, cosmology, the life sciences, and even consciousness research. Although the specifics of the phenomena on which they focus differ in detail, they have a common thrust. They speak of interaction that creates interconnection and produces instant and multifaceted coherence. The hallmark of a system of such coherence is that its parts are correlated in such a way that what happens to one part also happens to the other parts — hence it happens to the system as a whole….

“The pertinent insight in this regard is that people wherever they live on the globe are just as connected to us as the birds in the sky, the trees in the forest and the fish in the sea. When moral people realize this they do not regard any person or culture as a stranger whose fate is a matter of indifference to them. They realize that they are part of a larger whole, and that either they co-evolve with all others within that whole or risk degradation and demise….We have sound reasons to seek wholeness both in us, and around us. Wholeness in us signifies the integral functioning of our organism: it means health. And wholeness around us means a healthy social community and an integral ecological milieu.”

I know a lot of people who would fit into the category of “cultural creatives,” those who, with varying degrees of conscious intention, practice holism in their own lives, and understand its importance in culture and ecology. It’s helpful to begin to understand this group as potential movers and shakers of the planet. What holds us back?

Lazlo observes that “the factor that identifies the cultural creatives is less what they preach than what they practice, for they seldom attempt to convert others, preferring to be concerned with their own personal growth.”

This seems to be the Achilles heel of the holistic movement, given the dimensions of the global tragedy we face today. We’ve got to stop focusing so much on our own personal growth, and understand the depth of our connections with the rest of the planet. If the planet goes down, how much will our mastery of yoga or our carefully cultivated organic lifestyles be worth?

Cultural creatives have a lot of energy, intelligence, curiosity and a willingness to buck the mainstream. All these resources must be put to the crucial matter at hand: getting our planet out of the hands of the warmongers, the chemical producers, and the destroyers of the environment. If that can happen, everything else will fall into place.

If you haven’t read Starhawk’s futuristic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing yet, go out and get a copy. It’s the best blueprint I’ve seen for what our world could be, if it were guided by the principles of peace, cooperation and a focus on physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing for all.

Change starts with vision. We’ve got to keep a hopeful, positive vision alive, even in the tempest of current world events. And we’ve got to try, however we can, to make that vision come alive for others, too.

More News on the Marriage Front

2006-07-08T07:46:00.000-04:00

Maybe because it’s early summer, a time when many new marriages are being consummated, that there seems to be so much buzz about marriage lately. Unbelievably, that Amy Sutherland article about “training your husband” remains Number One on The New York Times “most-emailed” list—possibly the longest a single story has ever retained that position to date.

Times columnist Maureen Dowd noticed this too, and wrote a response entitled “How to Train a Woman,” for which she interviewed Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist and the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Fisher agreed with the Sutherland principle of rewarding pleasing behavior and ignoring irritating behavior, but with certain refinements depending on the gender of the spouse—women prefer their rewards face to face, while men “get intimacy by doing things side by side.”

Why this distinction? Fisher says women’s preference for face-to-face contact “comes from millions of years of holding your baby in front of your face,” while men prefer side by side contact “because for millions of years they faced their enemy but sat side by side with their friends.”

This is evolutionary biology / cultural anthropology at its worst, and I’m surprised to find Maureen Dowd falling for it. But she seems to be lost in the haze of sentimental summer marriage mode right now, since her very next column is also about marriage: this time addressing the important question of how men and women should change their names when they enter into marriage.

Maybe Maureen just wasn’t up to dealing with the real news this week on the marriage front: that the New York State appeals court ruled against gay marriage, sending the question over to the state legislature to be hashed out there. Or maybe she’d be more interested in finding an expert to discuss whether “training” a gay spouse would be more successful with face-to-face or side-by-side rewards?

The truth is that marriage is a very conservative institution, and I speak with the authority of someone in a longterm heterosexual marriage here. I often discuss with my women’s studies students whether women gain or lose from marriage—the answer always being “it depends”: it depends on whether the culture sanctioning the marriage conceives of marriage as an equal partnership, or is still operating within the traditional idea of the husband having more rights within marriage and society than the wife. These discussions sometimes lead to my suggesting that if a couple really wanted to be radical and free, they’d avoid marriage altogether. This is not something most of my students want to hear.

And it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at their age either. I was just as obsessed with getting married as the next twenty-something girl in my time. When I did get married, though, it was as much a question of legal necessity as romance—my boyfriend was Mexican, I wanted him to come live with me in the U.S., and the only way to get him here was to get married.

So we did. We went to City Hall in Staten Island and got our license; we were married in front of friends and family by an Ethical Culture minister (a woman) at the United Nations Chapel in New York. And immediately we became, in society’s eyes, each other’s “significant other,” automatically welcome in each other’s hospital rooms, given joint custody of our yet-to-be-born children, and awarded society’s pat of approval in the form of tax breaks, easier credit lines, and access to housing.

The ease with which we transitioned from dating to marriage should be available to anyone in the United States, regardless of sexual preference. My husband and I, in marrying, crossed other lines that previous generations would have found intolerable: a Catholic marrying a Jew, a Mexican marrying a woman of European descent. As Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis points out in her commentary on the New York State Court of Appeals gay marriage ruling, “history has shown that normality is a flexible standard,” which can change over time. If this were not true, a woman entering into marriage in this country would still be forfeiting to her husband all her rights to her children and property, a tradition it took years of determined work by feminist activists to overcome.

I feel sure that we’re going to look back on this time of gay activism for marriage rights the same way we now look back on the years of struggle for women’s electoral enfranchisement—with a kind of disbelief that the people of the time were so obtuse as to resist what was so obviously right and necessary.

That doesn’t make it any easier for today’s gay partners, though, or for the activists who now have to gird their loins for the battle in the state legislature.

And why is it, a little voice keeps whispering in my ear, that these divisive issues always seem to come up at election time? While gay marriage is certainly as important as any other human rights issue of our time, what really matters just now is getting rid of the crew in Washington: the Bush gang and their cronies in Congress. We all need to keep our eye on that prize, even as we move forward as best we can on other fronts.

Taking Action for the Women of the World

2006-06-29T07:06:00.000-04:00

I always find it interesting to look at the list of “Most Popular” articles in The New York Times online edition—it’s a little window into the preoccupations of the target audience of The Times (educated, upper class, privileged).

For several days now, Number One on the list has been the article “Modern Love: What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage,” Amy Sutherland’s account of how, using techniques she learned at a facility for training wild animals, she overcame ennui and annoyance in her marriage, and trained her husband to behave better.

“The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers,” Sutherland says, “is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

“Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

“I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.”

Now, I admit that I read this article with interest, and saved it in my Times file so I could refer back to it if needed. Sure, the American wife needs all the advice she can get, and positive feedback seems like a good idea, if nothing terribly novel.

But it just astonishes me that with all that’s going on in the world, Sutherland’s article is the most popular article the Times has printed in the last four days!

It must be because all of us privileged New York Times readers prefer not to think about all the real news that’s been going on these last few days. Who would want to confront the re-ignition of the Israeli-Palestinian war, or the grim statistics coming out of Iraq, or the continued inaction of the world community in the face of genocide in northern Africa? Who would want to contemplate global warming, or pesticide residues in fruit and vegetables, or the accelerating extinction of species on this planet?

The temptation to escape, especially for those of us comfortable enough to be able to do so, is always present. But I stubbornly persist in believing that it’s still not too late to turn this civilization around—that all it takes is sufficient will, and human beings can reverse the tide of destruction we’ve started.

In Oakland last week, I met an inspiring woman who has refused the path of escapism and apathy, and is working hard to improve life for women on this planet—not by “training” their husbands one by one, but by mounting an aggressive campaign to make family planning accessible to everyone.

Jane Roberts, a retired tennis coach and French teacher, read in the news one morning in 2002 that the Bush Administration had reneged on its commitment to contribute $34 million to the UNFPA, the population fund at the United Nations. Most of us, reading that, would have muttered a quiet curse and gone on to the next story.

Not Jane Roberts. Working with Lois Abraham, she launched a campaign called “The 34 Million Friends of UNFPA,” which is pledged to raise $34 million from Americans, $1 at a time.

“I knew I had to do something when the decision came down from Secretary of State Colin Powell on July 22, 2002,” Jane recalls in her book 34 Million Friends of the Women of the World. “A letter to my Congressman wasn’t enough. A letter to the editor wasn’t enough either. A brainstorm came to me at 3 a.m. as I lay awake, anger simmering in my brain. Why not, I said to myself, ask 34 million of my fellow Americans who appreciate their contraceptive choices and doctors in the delivery room, to chip in a dollar?”

The UNFPA was initially simply bemused by the idea, but agreed to allow Jane and Lois to circulate a letter on the web calling for donations. Stirling Scruggs, former director of the Information, Executive Board and Resource Mobilization division of UNFPA, recalled that “some in UNFPA were doubtful about such a grassroots movement. They thought it would last a few weeks, and that the two women would tire and it would end quickly. That is until bags of mail started piling up at UNFPA’s mailroom.”

Within months, the campaign reached its first $150,000, most of it coming in cash, in small bills. Now at the four-year mark, Jane Roberts and Lois Abraham have raised over $3 million for UNFPA, and the work goes on.

When I had dinner with Jane in Oakland, both of us exhausted after two days of intense participation at the National Women’s Studies Association conference, we talked about our mutual passion for improving the conditions for the women of the world, especially those women who have the least, in terms of education, health care, and opportunities for advancement. My admiration for her grew as we talked.

This is a woman in her sixties, who could be spending her time reading novels by the pool, but instead has chosen to trot around the country and around the world trying to galvanize others to take action to give women more control over their reproductive health, and to combat violence against women, female genital mutilation, rape as a weapon of war, early marriage, obstetric fistula, and other grave problems that women face today.

It has been proven that as women’s education and social standing goes up, fertility goes down. Women who are able to exert control over their reproductive health almost always want to do so—the grim statistic, quoted by Jane Roberts in her book, that around the world 40 women per minute seek unsafe abortions, speaks volumes.

“The fact that clandestine abortions are rampant shows utter contempt for the lives and full humanity of the female sex,” says Roberts. The UNFPA does not fund abortions, but it does fund reproductive health care and contraception all over the world.

Maybe we can’t do anything today about ending the violence in the Middle East, or stopping the genocide in Darfur. But there is something we can do for the women of the world. We can become one of their 34 million friends by contributing to the 34 Million Friends Campaign. Surely we can all spare $1?

Don't Miss "An Inconvenient Truth"

2006-06-24T11:20:00.000-04:00

Al Gore’s new documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” is really a must-see. Like Michael Moore’s documentaries, Gore's film is an unabashed polemic. He is determined to raise public awareness about the impending global climate crisis, and he does an amazing job at making and presenting his case.

The film is based on a slide show presentation that Gore has delivered, he says in the film, “more than a thousand times” in towns and cities across the world. There is also a companion book which has just come out, containing many of the same images from the slide show and film, and going into slightly more depth on some of the issues.

Basically, in all three media, Gore’s message is the same: human activity on the planet is endangering the global ecosystem in ways that may quickly become irreversible.

To me, the scariest image he presents is the chart of carbon dioxide levels over the past 650,000 years (as determined by scientists taking ice core records in Antarctica). Laid out before you is a record of previous Ice Ages and warm spells, which occur at fairly regular intervals every 100,000 years or so. At no time in the past 650,000 years did the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere exceed 300 parts per million.

Today, Gore shows, we are rapidly closing in on 400 parts per million. In less than 50 years, if the current rate of global warming continues unabated, our atmosphere will contain more than 600 parts per million of carbon dioxide.

“There is no fact, date or number [in this chart] that is controversial in any way or in dispute by anybody,” Gore asserts in the book commentary that accompanies this dramatic chart. “To the extent that there is a controversy at all, it is that a few people in some of the less responsible coal, oil, and utility companies say, ‘So what? That’s not going to cause any problem.’ But if we allow this to happen, it would be deeply and unforgivably immoral. It would condemn the coming generations to a catastrophically diminished future.”

Gore’s presentation goes on to show how we can measure demonstrably that global warming is occurring rapidly (a point also shown by Elizabeth Kolbert in her series of New Yorker articles on the topic, now published as a book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury, 2006).

He points to 2005 as the hottest year since temperatures were reliably recorded, in 1880, and argues that it is no accident that we’ve seen a surge in violent storms like Katrina as the oceans heat up.

He shows, with satellite images, photographs and charts, that the polar ice caps are indeed rapidly melting, along with all the remaining glaciers and snow-capped peaks in the world. If the current rate of melting ice continues, the oceans will rise 20 feet, deluging many low-lying countries and changing the coastlines of every continent. Millions of people who rely on glacial melt to feed the rivers that provide water for drinking and a multitude of other uses will find themselves acutely short of fresh water within the next 50 years.

Coral reefs will die off, touching off imbalances in the entire ocean-based food chain. “We are facing,” Gore says, “what biologists are beginning to describe as a mass extinction crisis, with a rate of extinction now 1,000 times higher than the normal background rate.”

Diseases and infestations are becoming ever more severe—one dramatic photograph Gore shows is of a few of the “14 million acres of spruce trees in Alaska and British Columbia that have been killed by bark beetles, whose rapid spread was once slowed by colder and longer winters.”

As the film goes on, the news gets worse and worse. You can tell from Gore’s face that he doesn’t enjoy being the bearer of such bad tidings. You can tell that the only reason he’s up there in front of us doing his damnedest to get our attention is because he cares so deeply for the planet and all its denizens, including us, that he feels he has no choice.

Indeed, in the film Gore comes off as more human than he ever appeared during his presidential campaign in 2000, and also more heroic. He is a lonely prophet for our times, and he is someone we need to be listening too.

My only disappointment with Gore's crusade is that he does not go far enough in casting blame on the politicians and corporate leaders who have gotten us into this mess. He talks about the logging of the rain forest and shows us dramatic pictures of clearcuts in places like Washington state or the Amazon, but doesn’t talk about the timber companies that have lobbied hard to maintain their right to clearcut, and played hardball with activists who have sought to bring attention to their destructive activities (see, for example, Julia Butterfly Hill’s foundation website for information, Circle of Life.org).

He talks about destructive mining and agricultural practices, but again, points no fingers at the companies who are the worst culprits. No mention is made of giants like Monsanto, for example, which is behind the spread of GMO seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides through the world.

He does take the Bush administration to task for putting greedy short-term gains above longterm, sustainable energy solutions. Officials in the Bush-Cheney administration, Gore says, “have attempted to silence scientists working for the government who, like James Hansen at NASA, have tried to warn about the extreme danger we are facing. They have appointed ‘skeptics’ recommended by oil companies to key positions, from which they can prevent action against global warming. As our principal negotiators in international forums, these skeptics can prevent agreement on a worldwide response to global warming,” as has happened with the Kyoto Treaty, which Gore helped to draft. The Kyoto Treaty has been ratified by 132 nations, but not by the United States or Australia.

Both the book and the film end on a note of hope, which is most welcome after the depressing and shocking information Gore has presented. Gore shows that with the implementation of fairly simple policy measures, including increased vehicle fuel efficiency, more efficient use of electricity in heating and cooling systems, increased reliance on renewable energy technologies like wind and biofuels, and stronger pollution controls on power plants and industrial activities, we could reduce carbon dioxide emissions to a point below 1970s levels.

What’s needed above all is the political will to accomplish the changes in policy, and that’s where we, the citizens come in. Both book and film end with a long list of what we can do to work towards change. All of this information is available on the accompanying website, Climate Crisis.org.

Truly this is an issue that puts all our other concerns in stark perspective. “This is what’s at stake,” Gore concludes. “Our ability to live on planet Earth—to have a future as a civilization.”

We cannot afford to let things slide any further.

PS: After this renewed and much more intimate exposure to Al Gore Jr., I would vote for him again for President in a heartbeat. Will he run? Could he win? It remains to be seen.

PPS: An interested, related video discussion is available from YouTube.com.

Living Feminism at the NWSA

2006-06-20T05:12:00.000-04:00

Just back from a trip to northern California for the National Women's Studies Association conference. The NWSA is the only national organization dedicated to Women's Studies professors and Women's Center directors, and for me it was exhilarating to be in such hardy feminist company for a few days. Being an "out" feminist is often a lonely post, and women's studies is hardly the most admired academic discipline, so to feel the power of numbers and solidarity was definitely invigorating.

The conference opened with the keynote from Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's beautiful young daughter, author of the anthology To Be Real, the very first of the "Third Wave" anthologies of the 1990's, and Black, White and Jewish, a memoir of growing up bi-racial, bi-coastal, and bi-cultural in the 1980's. Rebecca is a practicing Buddhist (she named her son Tenzin, after the Dalai Lama), and in good Buddhist fashion she did not give many answers, but she did pose some interesting questions.

She posited that the feminist movement has been "plagued by divisiveness," and is now "stalled." Part of the blame, she said, is the movement's "unhealthy success model," wherein "women who are successful politically are broken personally." It is crucial to the movement that:

feminism be inclusive
men be brought in as visible strategists
leadership be dispersed and democratic
activists maintain healthy family ties

Each of these points names a familiar problem of the feminist movement over the years. The NWSA itself has long been criticized by women of color for not being inclusive enough. The question of how to bring men in effectively as allies remains unsolved. There is a tendency in the feminist movement, as in many other movements, to gravitate around a celebrity "star," and give up individual agency in the spell of her orbit. And Rebecca Walker, as a "movement child" who criticized her own parents pretty harshly in her memoir for their neglect of family in favor of political engagement, came out strongly on the final point: that "children cannot survive on political theory."

Walker's advice for how to address these issues was unsatisfying for many in the audience. She was criticized for focusing too much on the biological family; several women stood up to argue that the biological family needs to be redefined, that ties of affiliation (the family we choose, rather the one we were born into) are at least as important as biological ties.

Walker stood her ground. "We have become too invested in not talking about the power of the biological family," she said. "The deconstructed family can be over-idealized."

As she went on, Walker injected a note of urgency to her speech, which was largely delivered verbatim, without reliance on notes. "I'm very concerned about the survival of humanity, and about the survival of what makes us human--compassion," she said. "The feminist movement is behind the times now, we need a true visionary plan of action to make us relevant again. And it's important to focus on the children or we're going to lose them, as we are losing them now."

Drawing on the work of her mentor bell hooks, whom she invoked several times, Walker argued for a position of "radical openness" to new ideas, and a focus on results. "We must assume responsibility for communicating our agenda, and own our power to create language that will have the impact we want," she said. She suggested that feminists focus on "communicating with people outside our rarified environment," in strong, accessible language that will help us "reach the Baptists in Arkansas--that's who we need to reach."

At the other end of the conference, and in an entirely different register, was the talk given by M. Jacqui Alexander, the dynamic Black Caribbean feminist now teaching at the University of Toronto. Alexander's talk, delivered in an incantatory style that had the audience roaring with appreciation, focused on the specifics of our political moment, and how feminists need to respond.

"U.S. feminists have been neglectful in taking on the state," Alexander asserted. "Do we want a free-market feminism, or a liberatory feminism? The real question is, since we know that there is no theory that is not autobiography, are we prepared to live differently?"

This question echoed Walker's focus on "living feminism," but where Rebecca talked about giving time to her child, Alexander's talk was dedicated to the bigger picture.

"Who should be the subjects of feminism? The most marginalized--that is to say, the lives of most of the people in the world," Alexander insisted. "We don't have to rescue Third World women, or use them as case studies--we need solidarity, and it doesn't happen behind our desks."

Alexander picked up on the remarks of an earlier speaker, Native American activist Andrea Smith, who described American higher education as "the academic industrial complex." "Are we going to continue to disappear into detention centers in Women's Studies?" Alexander demanded. "And what about the militarized zones inside ourselves? Who is denied entry there?

"The academic industrial complex requires a profound silence that it defines as collegiality," she said to loud applause. "The question is, what are the costs? We chase citizenship and entry at institutions that want to deny us entry," she continued, alluding quietly to her own unsuccessful battle for tenure at The New School in New York. "We can be disappeared instantaneously on our own campuses. The constant potential for disappearance should not make us disappear others, and we should not disappear ourselves.

"The question we need to ask ourselves is, what kind of patriot are you going to be?"

Alexander concluded by calling for what she called a "poetics of landscape," in which feminists "tell the stories of our lives, in order to create habitable spaces where the analytic, the political and the divine can all mingle. We need to allow ourselves to be moved sufficiently to act," she said. "We need to lay siege to Empire--to shame it, to mock it, and ultimately to transform it with the fiery power of our own stories. "

Taken together, Walker and Alexander re-validated the longstanding feminist mantra that "the personal is political." We cannot "do politics" in the world without starting at home--home defined both as our own families and communities, and our nation in the global community.

At the very last plenary session of the conference, Julia Sudbury , a young Black transnational feminist whose personal trajectory has taken her from Nigeria, to London, the U.S., Canada and back again to Mills College in Oakland CA, gave a rousing talk about the dangers of Empire, at home and abroad. Discussing the "transnational military prison industrial complex," she decried "penal warehousing" as a means of dealing with unemployed youth, with $60 billion a year spent on prisons in the U.S. alone.

"We need to remind ourselves that all social justice issues are feminist issues," she said. "Our task as Women's Studies teachers is to engage students as agents of resistance, here, where they are. We need to challenge them to understand their position in Empire, and translate their anger into action."

Interestingly, Sudbury ended on the same note as Alexander did: invoking the spiritual as part and parcel of the political. "Bringing the sacred into political vision is a transgressive act today," she said. "We can't abandon the language of the sacred to the state-sanctioned religions. We need to come out spiritually as radical political people, to our students and to others. We don't have to leave ourselves at the classroom door."

All I can say to that is--Amen!

The Personal as Political, from Global to Local

2006-06-14T07:38:00.000-04:00

Lately it feels like life is unfolding on three distinct levels. Let me give you a snapshot from each one.

On the global level, I am aware of increasing violence and dispair every day. Random missiles fly between Israel and Palestine, knocking out families on the beach or little girls on their way to school. Howls of vengeance rise up from the smoking ruins, and mingle with the screams of suffering civilians in nearby Iraq, where the killing of bystanders has become so routine the foreign press hardly bothers to report it anymore. In Guantanamo, desperate hunger strikers are tied to chairs and forcefed through their nostrils. Over in Africa, millions of children die each year from totally preventable diseases, while their parents succumb by the millions to the scourge of HIV/AIDS.

Then there's the national level. Here in the U.S. cancer is epidemic, asthma and diabetes are on the rise, and the drug companies are making out like bandits, selling us not only chemotherapy, bronchodilators and insulin, but also anti-depressants, sleep aids, and Ritalin by the ton for our stressed-out children. Wages are stagnant and consumer debt is ever-rising, as our taxes go to pay the war machine rather than the social good of our people. The politicians seem ever more plastic, ever less genuine--the real ones, like Howard Dean, who was accompanied on the campaign trail by a wife in sneakers, seem doomed to failure, while the most diabolical, like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove, go laughing all the way to the bank.

And then there's the personal level, where something totally different is going on. For the past couple of weeks I've been focused on celebrating my firstborn son's graduation from middle school (a big deal, as he's leaving the Waldorf school that has nurtured him since the age of three, the teacher who has guided him since first grade, and the classmates who have become his family). I've hosted my in-laws from Mexico for a week, and worked at odd moments to prepare my paper for the National Women's Studies Association convention, which I'll attend this weekend. I've been taking advantage of brief breaks in the prevailing rainy weather to plant my vegetable garden, weed out the perennial beds, and get some geraniums into pots on the deck, and I'm trying to find homes for the two affectionate, hungry stray cats that have taken up residence on my porch. Tonight I'll celebrate my mother's 66th birthday with her, and next week begins a round of routine doctors' visits for the kids.

Compared to the global and national levels, where everything seems to be spinning out of control, in a constant state of crisis, my personal preoccupations seem so middle-class and pedestrian. But I am also aware of working hard in my personal life to build a protective cocoon of normalcy, seeking to counteract the constant bombardment of negativity emanating from the larger world.

Psychologist Kaethe Weingarten of Harvard, in her book Common Shock, talks about how witnessing violence impacts us, even if the violence is not done directly to us. All of us who bear witness to the grisly battles unfolding on the world stage feel something akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome, she maintains, which we must work through and try to channel into positive action, lest it fester within us and turn to self-destructive poison.

I may not be out sabotaging whaling ships with Greenpeace, or blowing up SUVs with ELF, or even standing on the White House steps with the women of Code Pink, but I am with them all in spirit as I seed my cilantro and plant zinnias in the backyard, as I read a chapter from Narnia to my seven-year-old at bedtime, and drive my older son to a rendezvous with his very first girlfriend. I am constantly aware of my own miraculous good fortune, to be able to peacefully raise my family and plant my flowers while billions of people suffer "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" on a daily basis.

It's clear to me that those of us who live charmed lives like mine have a responsibility to do our utmost to put our good fortunes at the service of others. We all have gifts to make use of and to offer to the world. And the world-- she needs us now.

Witch Hunt at Duke? Really?

2006-06-07T20:56:00.000-04:00

Conservative columnist David Brooks of The New York Times has really outdone himself this time with his latest column on the scandal over the alleged violent sexual assault of a Black woman at a lacrosse team party at Duke University last winter.

When the story first broke, the details were indeed scandalously unsavory. “Officials are investigating the incident as first-degree forcible rape, common law robbery, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree sexual offense and felonious strangulation,” reported The Times on May 16, 2006.

That’s right, forcible rape and strangulation. If you remember, the woman (a dancer who was paid to perform at a party held at a house rented by three team members) was forced into the bathroom and held in place by her neck while several lacrosse team members brutally gang-banged her.

According to The Times, “The woman told the police that she and another woman went to the house expecting to dance for 5 men at a bachelor party and instead found more than 40....She said that almost immediately upon performing, the men started taunting them with racial epithets. The women left shortly thereafter…but they were persuaded to return after one of the men apologized.”

When they returned to the house, The Times reported, "Someone closed the door to the bathroom where she was and said, 'Sweetheart you can't leave.' "

Enter David Brooks. “We now know,” he proclaims sententiously, “that the Duke lacrosse players were not the dumb jocks they were portrayed to be. The team has a 100 percent graduation rate.” This is hardly persuasive information to those of us in academia, who know how common grade inflation is, and how athletes can be fawned upon at schools like Duke where sports reign supreme.

But wait, there’s more: these upstanding young men have also been praised by “the groundskeeper and the equipment manager,” Brooks announces; these individuals “described the current team as among the best groups of young men they have worked with during their long tenures at Duke.”

Here we see Brooks busying himself with digging up unimpressive praise from the custodial staff at Duke, while wasting no ink whatsoever on the Black rape victim. Incredibly, Brooks has managed to write a full-length column with only one buried reference to the crime for which three team players, including the captain, have now been indicted.

His only mention of the word “rape” is in paragraph eleven (of 14 paragraphs total), where he says offhandedly: “There may have been a rape that night, but it didn’t grow out of a culture of depravity.”

Who said anything about “a culture of depravity,” Mr. Brooks?

If anyone is engaging in a witch hunt, it’s Brooks himself. Listen to his Inquisitor’s snarl:

“When you look at the hyper-politicized assertions made by Jesse Jackson, Houston Baker and dozens of activists and professors, you see how mighty social causes like the civil rights movement, feminism and the labor movement have spun off a series of narrow social prejudices among the privileged class.”

With one masterful stroke of his pen, Brooks dismisses the work of the three most important social movements of modern times, as having apparently degenerated into no more than “narrow social prejudices” against poor, misunderstood kids like the lacrosse players at Duke.

The fine, upstanding members of the lacrosse team, Brooks says, “were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance. For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that’s left of their once-great activism.”

Well excuse me! In my book, holding young men accountable for their actions is simply the ethical thing to do, and it happens to be the legal thing to do as well. It has nothing to do with “bashing” anyone, and last I looked, there were no witches burning on any pyres.

Dare I suggest that if it had been a golden-haired suburban bourgeois middle class white girl who was raped at the team party, David Brooks and his ilk might not be quite so cavalier about the whole thing? And heaven forbid, if it had been a Black athlete who had done the strangling and raping and sodomizing—Brooks would undoubtedly be singing quite a different tune!

As it stands, the boys’ defenders, Brooks included, are following the standard procedure in these situations: start out by smearing and blaming the victim; then ignore her while glorifying the perpetrators; and above all, slow things down until the case loses momentum, the unpleasantness blows over, and the boys can get on with their gilded lives.

It turns out that the mother of David Evans, the indicted team captain, is chairwoman of the Ladies Professional Golf Association board of directors and founder of the Evans Capitol Group, a Washington lobbying firm. David’s dad is a Washington lawyer. The proud mother accompanied her son to the indictment hearing wearing on her suit lapel a large button emblazoned with her son's photograph and jersey number.

You can just hear the sweet sound of Scotch glasses clinking at the club, as the old boys’ and girls’ network rallies around the kiddies, who were, after all, “just having some fun.”

Tell that to their victim, a single mother who was dancing to support her two children while attending classes at the state university. Fun is hardly the word.

Medical Study Confirms Severe Health Risks of FGC

2006-06-02T06:14:00.000-04:00

Some important news for millions of women in Africa broke today, but you have to peer pretty deep into the recesses of The New York Times to find it.

Results of the first major study of women who have undergone female genital cutting have been released in the respectable British medical journal The Lancet, and the study confirms what women's rights advocates have been saying for years: that FGC is a serious health issue, not just a benign cultural practice that ought to be left alone.

The study was conducted with the cooperation of 28,000 women in six African countries, from 2001 through 2003. There are currently 100 million circumcised women in Africa, and approximately 2 million girls are cut each year, usually in unsanitary conditions without anesthesia or hygienic medical equipment.

The cutting ranges from full excision, where the labia and clitoris are totally removed, with infibulation, in which the vaginal opening is sewn up leaving only a small hole for menstrual blood to escape, to a modified procedure where just the clitoris is removed, or even just the tip of the clitoris rather than the whole organ. In many North African countries, excision is performed on more than 75% of young girls.

Why is this done? The most succinct answer is simply, "tradition." It's always been done, and is considered essential to render girls marriageable, which is of course their main function in the societies that practice FGC most religiously. Anthropologists who have looked more deeply into the custom say it has something to do with removing the "male" side of women (the clitoris resembling a miniature penis), so that they will be more docile.

When full excision and infibulation, the procedure serves as an effective chastity belt for young girls, since intercourse becomes excruciatingly painful. I recently read an oral history by a Somali woman, who spoke movingly of the pain of being "devirgined," as she put it; not by her husband, in her case, but by a rapist.

But the largescale study released today provides more than anecdotal evidence of the dangers and pain of FGC.

Elizabeth Rosenthal reported today in The Times that "The study found that the women who had undergone genital cutting of any degree of severity and their babies were more likely to die during childbirth. More extensive genital cutting produced the highest rates of maternal and infant death during childbirth, even many years later.

"The lesser forms of cutting caused about a 20 percent increase in death rates, while extensive procedures caused increases of more than 50 percent.

"By almost all measures studied by the World Health Organization, a history of genital cutting put both mother and baby at risk. Mothers who had had the procedure had longer hospital stays, experienced more blood loss, and were more likely to need a Caesarean section. Babies were nearly twice as likely to require resuscitation at birth.

"The researchers noted that the study almost certainly underestimated the potential for death and damage, because it only tracked women who delivered their babies in hospitals.

"Many women in the African nations where genital cutting is practiced deliver their babies at home, where typically it is not possible to treat medical complications like severe bleeding or to resuscitate an ailing newborn."

One of the most frightening things about this "tradition" is that it is perpetuated by women themselves. Older women do the cutting of young girls (sometimes as young as 5 years old) who are brought to the knife by their own mothers. Alice Walker has written powerfully of this phenomenon in her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, required reading for anyone interested in this issue.

In the course of discussing FGC in my global feminisms classes, I've come to realize that Western women also engage in harmful cultural practices that we pass on to our daughters unthinkingly. Like Chinese women binding their daughters' feet, we accept high heels as "sexy," and pass on this attitude to our children. We also accept the "thin is beautiful" myth, and smile indulgently as our adolescent daughters begin the first of a lifetime of diets. There are undoubtedly many other more subtle cultural practices that we condone without even thinking about their potentially harmful effects.

But female genital cutting does seem like a tradition that's on another level entirely. Cutting off the clitoris, a woman's organ of sexual pleasure? Sewing up the vaginal opening, so that a man must "break in" in order to have sex with his wife? Condemning young women to a lifetime of high risk during pregnancy, in cultures that regard motherhood as the highest calling for women?

Elizabeth Rosenthal doesn't even mention the worst side effect of FGC, fistulas, in which the walls separating the vagina from the urethra and/or bowels are torn during the difficult childbirth that is routine for a "circumcised" woman. Although these tears can be repaired with operations, such medical care is beyond the reach of most African women, who are condemned to a lifetime of ostracization because they can no longer control their bladders or bowels. How awful is that?

I am glad to see that a largescale study has finally been undertaken; glad to see the issue receiving mention in the mainstream press, however buried behind more pressing concerns like the impact of of bone growth drugs on jaw disease (placed on today's front page of The Times, even though the problem affects only 1 to 10 percent of the 500,000 American cancer patients who take the drugs because their disease is affecting their bones).

Some two million African girls come under the circumciser's knife every year. It's now been medically proven that this practice is almost unbelievably harmful.

What is being done? U.N. agencies like the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNIFEM have been working on this issue for the past ten years or more, aiding local women's groups in providing more educational awareness, as well as pressuring governments to ban the practice (Senegal leads the way, the first African nation to ban excision). American women who care can support the work of these agencies, as well as other NGOs like Women for Women International, which is raising money now to open an office in Sudan.

There's every reason to hope and expect that this practice will come, in our lifetimes, to be relegated to the closet of abandoned curiosities, like foot-binding and lobotomies for "hysterics." The harder we push for it, the faster that day will come.

The Good Fight

2006-05-30T05:49:00.000-04:00

Memorial Day is usually celebrated by veterans marching in parades down Main Street, USA, to remind us of their service to the country. It's a day to remember those who have given their lives to keep America "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It's supposed to be a sad day, a kind of collective mourning for those we've lost along the way.

Instead, most Americans take the opportunity of the long weekend afforded by Memorial Day to get some well-earned R&R with their families, to barbecue and celebrate the onset of summer. And can anyone really blame us for wanting a little relief from the grim realities of war?

According to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 2, 465 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the start of hostilities there. Every day that number goes up. Included in this count are 60

U.S.

servicewomen who have died in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan since 9/11/2001. "These 60 deaths," says Pamela Burke of Women's ENews, "outnumber female fatalities in Korea,

Viet Nam

, and the first Iraq War combined."

Also grim is the number of wounded soldiers returning home. Not even counting the tens of thousands with post-traumatic stress syndrome, there are 17,500 wounded vets walking our streets, just since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq in 2003. About 400 of these are amputees.

No, I don't think we can be blamed for wanting to just forget about this horror for a while and enjoy planting our gardens in the first warm weather of the season. And yet...our blessing and our curse as human beings is that we cannot be oblivious to the impact of the past and the present on the future. We cannot live totally in the moment, like the birds who are busily building their nests on these lovely May days.

I chose to celebrate Memorial Day by forgetting about the war for a while. But now the holiday is over, and it's time to resume the fight. The good fight! The fight against war.

The Path to Nirvana, Here and Now

2006-05-23T08:24:00.000-04:00

I have been reading Scott Peck's book from almost 20 years ago, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace. He's writing during the late eighties, the Reagan era, which was nearly as dark a time as the present day--the Cold War not yet over, the Latin American civil wars hot and dirty, anti-Semitism rampant in the Middle East, on and on. Much of what Peck had to say then about the importance of building true community in order to attain true peace is still highly relevant today.

Peck's great insight is that most of us, especially in the U.S., live in what he calls "pseudo-community." "The essential dynamic of pseudo-community is conflict-avoidance....In pseudo-community it is as if every individual is operating according to the same book of ettiquette. The rules of this book are: Don't do or say anything that might offend someone else; if someone does something that offends, annoys, or irritates you, act as if nothing has happened and pretend you are not bothered in the least; and if some form of disagreement should show signs of appearing, change the subject as quickly and smoothly as possible....It is easy to see how these rules make for a smoothly functioning group. But they also crush individuality, intimacy, and honesty, and the longer it lasts the duller it gets."

In order to get beyond this stage and move towards true community, Peck says, groups must go through a period of unpleasant, uncomfortable chaos and conflict:

"'There are only two ways out of chaos,' I will explain to a group after it has spent a sufficient period of time squabbling and getting nowhere. 'One is into organization--but organization is never community. The only other way is through emptiness,'" Peck says. Emptiness "is the hard part. It is also the most crucial stage of community development. It is," he explains, when individuals within a group "empty themselves of barriers to communication," which include expectations and preconceptions, prejudices, ideology, theology and solutions, the need to heal, convert, fix or solve, and the need to control.

Peck describes this stage in the most dramatic terms possible. "During the stage of emptiness my own gut feeling is...the pain of witnessing a group in its death throes. The whole group seems to writhe and moan in its travail. Individuals will sometimes speak for the group. 'It's like we're dying. The group is in agony. Can't you help us? I didn't know we'd have to die to become a community.'"

If they hang in there and make it through this period of suffering, Peck says, they will finally enter true community. "It is like falling in love. When they enter community, people in a very real sense do fall in love with one another en masse. They not only feel like touching and hugging one another, they feel like hugging everyone all at once. During the highest moments the energy level is supernatural. It is ecstatic." And it "can be channeled to useful and creative purpose."

I know that I spend almost all my time in pseudo-community, and so do most of the people I know. I am afraid of conflict, and will, just as Peck says, do everything I can to smooth it over and avoid it when it threatens to crop up. As he says, this is rather dull, but functional. Even within my family, pseudo-community is the norm. The effort of getting down deep and dirty into our differences is just too much--it seems much easier to let those sleeping demons lie, and live in superficial harmony.

On a national and international scale, too, pseudo-community is actually all we're aiming for: respect for diversity, mutual tolerance, peace.

But Scott Peck has prompted me to imagine how truly powerful it would be if humanity actually made the effort to get past pseudo-community into a more authentic mode of communication and connectedness. If we were willing to talk through our conflicts, from the family level all the way up to the international level, and work through the chaos and anger, to empty ourselves of all the barriers to communication, to actually attain what we've always longed for: a brotherhood and sisterhood of mankind.

The United Nations was founded on this vision. Many religious groups aspire to it. But to actually get there, it requires more than just vision. It requires hard work, and as Peck says, conflict so intense that it feels like "the throes of dying," only to be reborn on the other side.

"When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community," Peck says, "I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word. I almost hesitate to use it. The word is 'glory.'"

Human beings have always sensed the possibility of this kind of glory. The Bible tells us we once knew it, in the Garden of Eden; the New Testament and the Koran tell us we can go back to it, in Heaven after our earthly lives are done. The Buddhists call it nirvana. In all of these religious views, what we do in our communities here on earth determines whether or not we can attain glory after death.

Scott Peck tells us we don't have to wait until after death to achieve this kind of collective nirvana. I think he's on to something incredibly powerful. The question is, how many of us have the nerve and the stamina to walk the path of true community?

To Feed, OR NOT TO FEED, the Maw of War

2006-05-18T08:32:00.000-04:00

Here we go again. Sorry, but I can't help a snarl of furious bitterness at the news this morning from the Rose Garden of the White House:

Surrounded by Republican leaders and Vice President Dick Cheney, The New York Times informs us, President Bush endorsed a Republican Senate measure that "calls for increasing military spending by 7 percent, to nearly $558 billion in 2007, a figure that includes $50 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The package would essentially freeze or cut spending on most domestic discretionary programs, including education, energy and national parks, and it calls for trimming $6.8 billion over five years from entitlement programs like Medicaid and farm subsidies.

"The plan would raise the debt ceiling by $653 billion, to $9.6 trillion, and it assumes that the shortfall next year will be $348 billion, about what it is likely to be in 2006."

Meanwhile, the government is throwing yet another bone to the military-industrial complex, this time putting out to bid efforts to erect a "virtual fence" on our border with Mexico. The National Guard can't do it, they're already hemorrhaging too badly thanks to the occupation of Iraq. So let's leave it to the mercenaries. What's a few more hundred billion dollars of debt?

I have been reading Starhawk's book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery lately, and lingering over the passages where she talks about the power of vision to change reality. Many people have been saying this of late, in many different ways. We have to start telling another story. We can't leave it to "our" government representatives and their lapdogs, the media, to tell us how it is. We have to start telling them how it must be.

This is how Starhawk sees it:

"Politics is a form of magic, and we work magic by directing energy through a vision. We need to envision the society we want to create, so that we can embody aspects of it in each act we take to challenge domination.

"The edifice of war and domination is supported on three main pillars: our obedience, the construct of the enemy, and the enormous resources we devote to war. Each of these footings can be undermined. When our vision of what we want is clear, each act we take against an aspect of domination can become a positive act for the alternative we create. "

In the reality I want to envision, it's the military budget that will be cut and cut again, not the supposedly "discretionary" budgets of education, health care, the quest for renewable energy, and safeguarding our national parks. We won't waste money on patroling our borders with ever newer and more expensive gadgets! We won't spend billions on spying on our own citizens! If we were to focus on cooperation and collaboration with our neighbors (and in this global society, everyone is our neighbor), on making sure that everyone is able to live a decent life of dignity and self-respect, that no child is hungry, that health care is a basic right of global citizenship....if we were to send our energy in this direction, there would be no need to spend nearly $600 billion a year feeding the maw of the military. Let the military beast starve.

Approaching the Spiritual Death of our Nation--But NOT THERE YET!

2006-05-17T06:19:00.000-04:00

In a recent post on Alternet.org, Norman Solomon reminds us of a comment made by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, which is all the more pointed today:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

According to Solomon's calculations, when all the ancillary programs are factored in, our nation spends something like $2 billion a day on the military. The official figure just for the war in Iraq is $10 billion a month. These are numbers it's hard to wrap our minds around. $10 billion? That's $100 million dollars times 10. Every month.

And our "programs of social uplift" are being chipped away at little by little, insidiously--witness the pathetic spectacle of Medicare Part D drug coverage, otherwise known as the harassment of the elderly poor.

Solomon reminds us of Dr. King's observation in a column about hunger: he quotes news stories that tell us that "Poor nutrition contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children every year," and that "one in four children under age 5, including 146 million children in the developing world, is underweight."

Millions of children are dying every year from starvation, diarrhea, and other perfectly preventable diseases that could be easily remedied if the developed world were focused on the well-being of the global community, rather than on maintaining its stranglehold on trade and commerce through the injudicious and very expensive use of force.

And no, this wouldn't have to lead to over-population that would hurt us all. As so many studies have shown, in a healthy, educated society, the birth rates go down. If people's first and second babies can be expected to survive into adulthood, the necessity of having that fourth and fifth child disappears. If women are able to work and participate in the political life of their communities, they are more likely to use contraception.

And no matter what conservatives say, preventing an unwanted pregnancy by using contraception is far better than letting children suffer and die needlessly by the millions, every year, as is currently the case.

Are we "approaching spiritual death" as a nation, as a global society? I'd have to say yes. But we're not there yet--if we were, it would be impossible for me to be writing this today. There is still plenty of room and plenty of time to turn this ship around, and there are many people working very hard to do so.

This weekend there will be a huge spiritual activism conference in Washington D.C. organized by Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun and many other spiritual progressives. Rabbi Lerner's "Spiritual Covenant with America" will be presented to the U.S. Congress. This remarkable document should be read--indeed, studied--by everyone who is serious about reviving the suffering patient that is our country.

The principles laid out in the covenant are not new, but they are radical and profound. "Institutions, corporations, legislation, social practices, our health care system, our education system, our legal system, our social policies" should be judged "not only by how much money or power they generate, but also by how much love and compassion, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and by how much they nurture within us our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred and to respond to the universe with gratitude, awe and wonder at the grandeur of all that is."

The covenant lays out specific ways to begin to approach these lofty goals, with "talking points" for discussing the issues with liberals, conservatives, Congresspeople, journalists, friends and family.

The scope of the conference this weekend gives me hope that we can turn this ship around, and bring our country's actions back into alignment with spiritual values that make sense. Millions of children today, and millions of those as yet unborn, are counting on us to create a human society that they can join with pride. We can't let them down!

Mother's Day Letter to Laura

2006-05-13T08:18:00.000-04:00

I did get off my butt this morning and sent off a letter to Laura Bush for Mother's Day. Here it is:

May 13, 2006

Dear Laura,

A couple of weeks ago you came to visit my neck of the woods in Lenox, Mass., to celebrate the acquisition by the Edith Wharton museum of a major collection of books formerly belonging to Wharton. I was not among the crowds that turned out to catch a glimpse of you, Laura, and here’s why: I am too angry at you for the callous way you have continued to enjoy your own privilege while ignoring all the grief and desperation that your husband’s mismanagement of our country has wrought.

Can I assume that you, a former librarian and educator, do read the newspapers, even if your husband does not? So you know that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in recent history, right up there with Richard Nixon, right? You know that the city of New Orleans is still reeling from the Katrina disaster, for which our newly minted Department of Homeland Security was woefully unprepared? You know that many of the displaced children in New Orleans are still not attending school regularly, not receiving regular health care, and do not have decent housing?

You know, of course, that your husband has not even had the decency to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the warrior-mother who has turned her mourning for her son Casey, killed in Iraq thanks to the lying and manipulation practiced by his Commander in Chief, into a powerful antiwar rallying cry. You know that as of today 2,432 American soldiers have been killed by the cabal of which your husband is the leader, and nearly 18,000 shipped home to their mothers grievously wounded.

You know that the Administration presided over by your husband has raised taxes for the wealthy while cutting back on health care and education for the masses. You know that under this Administration, the largest government surplus in American history has been turned into a multi-trillion-dollar national debt.

I could go on, Laura, but it’s just too depressing. Knowing all this, how could you stand by with that grim smile on your face, and NOT SAY A WORD??? What kind of model are you setting for us as First Lady? Hillary Clinton showed us how to grin and bear it while your husband is, on a personal level, sleazy and unfaithful. But you? You are going her one much better, showing us how to smile and continue playing the oblivious hostess while all of Rome crashes and burns around you and your people!

I yearn for an American First Lady, or perhaps a first American woman president, who will show us American women how to live ethically and responsibly in this incredibly complex world of ours, how to think for ourselves and not be afraid to speak up when we witness wrong-doing—even when that wrong-doing is conducted by our husbands, or our sons, brothers and fathers.

Laura, now is your chance to be the courageous leader you were born to be. Don’t let your loyalty to George blind, fetter and gag you. Step outside this Mother’s Day and speak to the mothers who will be standing in vigil outside your front door. Give them the respect and acknowledgement they deserve. You will be surprised at how good it feels to stand on the side of peace and justice. You might even decide to stay.

In hope,

Jennifer

Dreams of Peace for Mother's Day

2006-05-11T09:15:00.000-04:00

I received the saddest email this morning from Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq three years ago. Sent under the auspices of CODEPINK, Cindy's letter is an invitation to join her and other mothers in a 24-hour protest vigil in front of the White House this Mother's Day, to demand an end to the US occupation of Iraq, and to protest US government plans to invade Iran.

Cindy writes:

"This Sunday will be the third Mother's Day that I have spent without my oldest child in my life. Casey was killed in Iraq exactly five weeks before Mother's Day in 2004.

"Everyday is an incredible experience of pain and longing: for Casey and for his future and for his here and now. Special days like holidays and birthdays always seem to be harder. Casey will never call me again to wish me Happy Mother's Day. I will never get another funny card from him. I will never have a daughter-in-law or grandchild from Casey.

"George and Laura Bush will probably celebrate Mother's Day with their daughters, secure and happy in the fact that they are together. Jenna and Barbara will never be put in harm's way for the avaricious and destructive policies of their father, policies that have sent too many of the world's mothers into a tailspin of grief and emptiness."

Cindy Sheehan is pulling on our heart-strings for a reason--to pull us out of our apathy, to get us moving to demand that the Bush Administration change its destructive course and start focusing on peace, rather than warmongering.

There is no time to lose! According to the grim but excellent website Iraq Casualty Count Coalition, 2.432 American soldiers have died in Iraq as of today. Nearly 18,000 have been shipped home to their mothers grievously wounded, both physically and psychologically (see the excellent PBS Frontline report on post-traumatic stress syndrome for returning Iraq vets, reaching epidemic proportions).

And that's just the American casualties. Start counting all the Iraqis who have lost their lives, including women, children and the elderly, and you really begin to enter the nightmare.

Cindy Sheehan and CODEPINK are absolutely right. This Mother's Day, we mothers who are fortunate enough to be sitting pretty with our children safe and well should not be focused on whether they're going to bring us breakfast in bed, take us out for lunch, or send nice flowers. If we can't get down to Washington D.C. for the White House vigil, we can at least follow Cindy Sheehan's lead and send our letters of protest to Laura Bush, to let our First Lady know that we don't approve of her husband's conduct, and want her to stand with us rather than cling to him.

It's a dream as old as Lysistrata....if the mothers of the world were to unite and insist that our husbands, fathers, brothers and sons wage peace rather than war, just imagine what might be possible!

It may only be a dream, but I prefer to focus on forward-looking visions like this than to accept the current waking nightmare.

Profiterole Warriors

2006-05-05T09:11:00.000-04:00

Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, is "back in the saddle" again with her blog "Domestic Disturbances," published on Fridays in The New York Times. Now maybe it's true that I'm a wee bit jealous of all the attention Warner is getting with her chronicles of the trials and tribulations of motherhood--but that in itself is part of the problem I'm registering here.

Why is she getting so much attention? Why are New York Times readers so eager to read about how Warner nearly had a nervous breakdown while preparing the profiteroles for her nine-year-old daughter's French-themed birthday party?

Here's the scene Warner describes in her latest column:

"On Saturday, I found myself, midafternoon, standing in the kitchen, preparing to hurl a pan of unpuffed cream puffs through the window. The alleged “puffs” — really the size and color of underbaked digestive biscuits — were intended for the profiteroles I was making for Julia’s birthday party with friends that evening. The party was French-themed, at her impassioned request, and there were drinking cups in the shape of Eiffel Towers and an Eiffel Tower centerpiece. There were quiche and two kinds of goat cheese and Trader Joe’s sparkling French lemonade. There were supposed to be profiteroles — cream puffs stuffed with vanilla ice cream, topped with homemade chocolate sauce and fresh whipped cream, piled together into a pièce montée topped with a candle in the shape of the number nine.

"Now the mere commingling of the concepts “profiteroles” and “nine-year-old” may signal, to some of you, the presence of a problem. But it hadn’t to me, at least, not until that point. Before then, I’d been too busy figuring out how to get quiche, salad, melon and pâtes au beurre onto the dining table while supervising “tween” makeovers and making warm but not burnt chocolate sauce. I was too worried about how to get my mother and mother-in-law out of the kitchen without alienating them even more.

"(To give you a sense of the atmosphere: I turned on the electric beater. The dog began to howl. I opened the back door and shouted at him, “Get out!” My mother replied, “Let me just get my things.”)"

It makes for an entertaining column, no question about it. But I find the unabashed description of privilege to be startling and kind of eerie. This frantic baking is going on while Warner's journalist husband is "out at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner" (wasn't his wife invited too?). Really I just feel like shouting at her some very old, cliched lines: "Don't you realize kids are starving in Sudan?" and "Why don't you get a life??"

Here is Judith Warner, a talented, well-educated woman living an incredibly privileged life in the heart of the capital city of the Empire, Washington D.C., and she can think of nothing better to do with her time and talents than make profiteroles for her nine-year-old daughter? Aren't there more interesting, less navel-centered ways of celebrating a ninth birthday, come to think of it, than having your mother and both grandmothers in the house frantically preparing to slavishly serve you and your friends?

This is how blind privilege--that super-confident sense of entitlement, which we see on display every day in its adult form in the person of our own George W. Bush--gets perpetuated. Mother to daughter, mother to son, on and on. And obviously New York Times readers are part of that charmed circle, because they're just lapping it up in Warner's columns and best-selling book.

I'd like to suggest that Judith Warner and her fans do something different for Mother's Day this year: go out and join the CODE PINK women who will be standing a 24-hour vigil in front of the White House to "honor all the mothers -- US and Iraqi -- who have lost sons and daughters in the conflict in Iraq." These women--many of them mothers and grandmothers, all of them daughters--will be calling "for our troops to come home so that no more mothers will suffer the unbearable grief of losing a child to Bush's war," and also sending "a message of sorrow, friendship and peace directly to the women of Iraq and their families."

There is simply too much at stake, Judith, to waste your energy and talent on such frivolities as perfect profiteroles! Do you really want to go down as another Marie Antoinette, focused on cake while the palace burns down around you? Our children need us more than ever now, but the battles we must fight for the sake of their futures, and the futures of all living beings on this planet, aren't going to take place in our ultra-stylish kitchens.

A Subway Car of Their Own

2006-05-03T08:20:00.000-04:00

Brazilian women are the latest to join women in Mexico City, Tokyo, and Cairo, all places that grant women the special privilege of...a subway car of their very own. As Suzy Khimm reports today on Alternet.org, Brazilian women demanded this privilege in response to unrelenting sexual harassment (otherwise known as groping) in the packed commuter trains taking them to work.

"Men think it's extremely normal to do this. They don't feel guilty at all," says Monica Aranjo Neves, 34, an administrative assistant who has been groped on several occasions. "We have to go to work, then take care of everything at home, and we shouldn't have to deal with this on the train."

That's right, women who enter the public sphere, the working world, should not be subject to harassment from men who continue to see them as no more than sexual objects. Unfortunately this macho attitude is perpetuated in many cultures, including our own, via the very unequal dress code for working men and women: squared-off pants suits and flat shoes for men, tight shirts, curve-hugging skirts and heels for women. I still wonder how women can expect men NOT to see them as sexual objects when they are so clearly dressing the part.

It's no surprise that some Brazilian men are responding to the new law granting women their own subway cars with cries of reverse discrimination. Others quoted by Khimm complain that the law unfairly demonizes all men. More serious are charges by Brazilian women's rights organizers that the law "will do little to change the behavior of errant men, other than keep them at train car's distance"; Brazilian authorities, they say, must do more to educate the entire population about the illegality of sexual harassment of women.

Clearly simply segregating men and women is no more than a stopgap measure. Male attitudes towards women in the public sphere reflect male attitudes towards women in the private sphere, and in both realms, inequality is the rule. Why should men feel free to grope women anywhere, whether on the dance floor or in a crowded subway? Why is our society so comfortable with women earning only 77 cents on the male dollar? Why are housework and child care still almost exclusively women's work, the world over? Why are only 14% of U.S. Senators women? These are the deeper questions that must be addressed before the temporary protection afforded women by a subway car of their own will be rendered unnecessary.

Three Cheers for the Grannies!

2006-04-29T10:21:00.000-04:00

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!

Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope

2006-04-22T07:27:00.000-04:00

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.

Wake up, America!

2006-04-17T06:42:00.000-04:00

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.

America, the (Immigrant) Beautiful

2006-04-12T08:09:00.000-04:00

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.

The West vs the Rest

2006-04-09T07:39:00.000-04:00

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.

Dreams Come True for Portia Simpson-Miller and Jill Carroll

2006-04-04T10:16:00.000-04:00

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.

Take a Look Upriver, Paul

2006-03-31T08:20:00.000-05:00

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.

Short Take: Sap Rising

2006-03-29T18:10:00.000-05:00

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.

Speaking Pidgin at the University at Albany

2006-03-25T10:36:00.000-05:00

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.

A Grim Anniversary, and a Resolution

2006-03-19T12:06:00.000-05:00

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.

Time to Awaken True American Democracy: The Power of the People

2006-03-15T08:28:00.000-05:00

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.

Diversity Battles: The Full Stakes

2006-03-11T10:26:00.000-05:00

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.

Dreams and Visions for the World's Women

2006-03-07T15:33:00.000-05:00

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.

Hope in Action for International Women's Day

2006-03-05T08:32:00.000-05:00

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.

Who's Got the Force?

2006-02-26T18:02:00.000-05:00

The rapidly brewing civil war in Iraq has the foul odor of a manufactured crisis, and the question is, who is doing the manufacturing? Which faction in Iraq would most benefit from civil war?

One commentator speculates that it's the Americans who have the most to gain from a disunified Iraq. It's an extreme view, but he might just be on to something.

Who would lose the most? Clearly, the poorest sectors of society would be the most torn up by the violence. And women, as usual, would be caught in the maelstrom.

It's disheartening to hear that the fundamentalist Shiite al-Sadr militias that "own" the streets of Baghdad this weekend are, among other things, harassing women for not appearing sufficiently modest in public--presumably this means, not covering themselves up from head to toe in fabric.

It's disheartening to hear the tone of resigned, benumbed fear in Riverbend's voice as she discusses last week's bombing of the mosque in Samarra.

"The situation isn’t good at all," she said. "I don’t think I remember things being this tense- everyone is just watching and waiting quietly. There’s so much talk of civil war and yet, with the people I know- Sunnis and Shia alike- I can hardly believe it is a possibility. Educated, sophisticated Iraqis are horrified with the idea of turning against each other, and even not-so-educated Iraqis seem very aware that this is a small part of a bigger, more ominous plan….People are scared and watchful. We can only pray."

Riverbend is describing a scenario of absolute civic disempowerment. I recognize it because I live it too. Of course things in Iraq are almost unimaginably extreme, and yet here in the heart of empire, in the cushioned, comfortable world I inhabit, I also feel so, so politically disempowered.

So many of us watched with horror as the World Trade Center towers fell on that fateful morning in September, 2001. We watched with equal horror as our political leaders wrapped themselves in the American flag and marched our young soldiers off to a vengeful war, first in Afghanistan (which seemed marginally justified) and then in Iraq (which seemed cynically opportunistic and totally misguided).

We knew that Saddaam was a bad guy, but after all, our diplomacy had created him, and presumably our diplomacy could take him down too. We'd done it before in Latin America, hadn't we (think Allende, Duvalier, Trujillo, Noriega, Aristide, and they tried with Chavez just recently). But no, it wasn't just about getting rid of Sadaam in Iraq, it was about seizing control of the country's oil wealth.

That short-sighted greed has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, and tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It has thrown Iraq into turmoil that it looks like it will take generations to resolve.

And we who predicted that a civil war would come of an American invasion of Iraq now sit on the sidelines and watch bitterly, in horror, as events unfold. Riverbend typing at her computer in Baghdad, I typing at mine in Massachusetts, both of us distraught, disbelieving, disheartened.

Those who created this mess do not want me to join hands with Riverbend and feel the power crackle between us as we connect. They want to keep us separate, and they don't want us to perceive the connections between, say, the recent coup in Haiti, the violence erupting at the oilfields in the Niger delta, and the continued outrage that is Guantanamo Bay.

We must make these connections, and state them loud and clear so others will begin to awaken from their media-induced stupor and see what is happening in our global society. The way it is is not the way it has to be.

We need to think outside the box, outside of what Frances Moore Lappe would call our "thought traps," and not only imagine, but begin to live alternatives. In the war of visions, the Darth Vaders of the world are ascendant. But not forever. Not for long.

Rumbles at the U.S. Committee for UNIFEM

2006-02-23T06:28:00.000-05:00

UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, is the only U.N. fund devoted specifically to empowering women in developing countries, through financial and technical support of innovative programs that help women become central players in their own socio-economic systems. UNIFEM has offices all over the world, staffed by local experts, who evaluate proposals and implement successful programs.

UNIFEM programs range from working with the government of Jordan to educate women in e-commerce and launch them in the digital economy, to working to bring women into the peace negotiations in conflict and post-conflict regions in Africa, to strengthening women's participation in politics and government in places like Iraq and Timor-Leste, to fighting the social causes of rampant HIV/AIDS infections in women throughout the developing world.

Working directly with governments, under the banner of the United Nations, it's fair to say that no international women's organization is as well-known and well-respected throughout the developing world as UNIFEM.

Not so here in the U.S., however, where hardly anyone knows what UNIFEM is or does. I've been on the board of my local Berkshire Chapter of UNIFEM/USA for several years now, and I'm constantly having to explain to people what UNIFEM is all about.

I put the blame for this on the U.S. Committee for UNIFEM, one of 15 or so national committees in the developed world that support the work of UNIFEM at the United Nations. The governments of countries like Canada, Denmark, Italy, France and Germany, to name just a few, each contribute funds to UNIFEM, and in addition each country has a civic arm of women, organized in chapters, who work on educational outreach and fundraising, contributing additional millions of dollars each year to UNIFEM.

Sadly, the United States is one of the countries in the developed world that contributes the least to UNIFEM, both as a government and through the grassroots. Recently, after much pressure, the U.S. Congress doubled the annual allotment to UNIFEM, from $1 million to $2 million. Given the hundreds of billions being spent annually to wage war, this is a paltry sum indeed to help the women of the world wage peace.

And the U.S. Committee for UNIFEM has been able to raise only $50,000 in the last year to help the world's women. This is truly a pathetic sum from the women of the world's most powerful nation, to help women in the world's most ravaged and impoverished nations.

What's the problem? Not surprisingly, it has to do with poor leadership. I have been serving on the Board of the U.S. Committee for the past two years, and I have been dismayed to see the lack of real commitment on the part of the executive council of the Board to increasing membership and communicating with the existing membership about the goals and mission of UNIFEM. This is another case of an organization trying to maintain a hierarchical power structure, with all the power concentrated at the top, and finding that--surprise!--there's no one there at the bottom to prop them up anymore.

Under the current leadership of the U.S. Committee, the organization has alienated members and actually lost chapters. It's hard to believe, but UNIFEM/USA only boasts six active chapters throughout the U.S., in New York, Washington D.C., the Berkshires, Florida, Atlanta and southern California. Nascent chapters in Boston and northern California have either become disenchanted with the national leadership and shifted their energies elsewhere, or have failed to get off the ground.

There is currently a movement afoot to dislodge the leadership of the U.S. Committee, and get new, more focused and talented leaders in to turn the ship around. The board president, Sheryl Swed, and her executive council, are digging in their heels and refusing to leave, despite clear signals from the United Nations that a change of leadership is desired.

It's interesting to watch the battle unfold, mostly in the form of a series of increasingly vituperative global emails among board members. The sad thing is that as the Board of the U.S. Committee fights for power, our focus on the women of the developing world wavers, and we end up squandering precious energy on in-fighting. Sometimes, however, there is no other way. Let's just hope the transition will be fairly swift, and that the new leadership of the U.S. Committee will be much more effective and vibrant than the old.

Getting Out the Women's Vote: What Will It Take?

2006-02-19T09:15:00.000-05:00

A lot of pundits, particularly of the Democratic variety, have been pondering lately about how to get out the women's vote in 2008. It's an important question.

In a commentary published by Women's ENews last week, Alex Sanger, grandson of Margaret Sanger, the feisty founder of the modern "family planning" movement, observed that "the feminist vote has become detached from a broad set of interests--such as enhanced health care and child care--in which women, as a group, show particular interest. Instead, it has come to be seen as an isolated and controversial single-issue focus on abortion rights that does not translate reliably into votes."

To remedy this, Sanger says, "feminists should be looking at ways to swing the women's vote--both in midterm elections and in 2008--by claiming the rubric of successful family life. They should represent parents' desires to have children when it is best to have them, to raise their children safely to adulthood, to get them to adulthood in good health and educated for the jobs of tomorrow....Feminists should talk about abortion, as well as birth control, in terms of family formation, not just as a right or a matter of individual autonomy."

Specifically, he suggests, feminists should look to win the crucial women's vote by focusing on issues like "child care, school quality, health care reform and national security in terms of the safety of families. Emphasizing these issues will get feminists out of the single-issue abortion pigeon hole and enable them to talk to U.S. women and men, on a broader set of issues about which every citizen has deep concern."

Sanger is right that the feminist appeal to women voters has to be made on a broader platform than just abortion rights. But I don't think his approach goes nearly far enough. What would it take to get me really excited about voting for a national political candidate?

Well, for starters, I'd like to see more women candidates. And I'd like to see women candidates who didn't all look like they're cut from the same WASP-y cookie cutter mold. She was only the candidate's wife, but I loved seeing Judith Steinberg on the campaign trail. Someone who wore running shoes in public! Who didn't have dyed, processed, permed hair! Who obviously wasn't fond of make-up! Who was a hard-working doctor with her own professional, personal, and political agenda! Who wasn't willing to kow-tow to the expectations of the press!

We might actually get more women candidates like Judy Steinberg if our political culture weren't so totally driven by TV. A woman can't appear on network TV news unless she's tall, thin, and has "regular" American features, or beautifully "exotic" Asian, Black or Latina features. And unfortunately, the same is true for politicians, who, after all, also have to pass the TV test.

Male pols get away with far more deviance from the Barbie & Ken TV norm, though. John Kerry's craggy face and wild hair was "interesting"--and at least he was tall and thin. His running mate, John Edwards, was actually chided for being too pretty! A woman candidate could never be too pretty.

But I digress. Back to Sanger's contention that if feminists want to attract women to the voting booths next November, and in 2008, we need to start talking up families as our issue, broadly conceived.

Okay, maybe I'm missing something here. But how exactly is this a progressive idea? Why should families be the special provenance of women in the 21st century? Why shouldn't the health and welfare of the American family be just as much a men's issue as a women's issue? And why shouldn't job creation, social benefits, and foreign policy be just as much women's issues as men's issues?

I am frankly disappointed to find Alex Sanger calling for feminists to rally around the American family as if that were an end in itself. His grandmother fought for women's reproductive rights as a means to a much more ambitious end: if women could be freed from the danger and drudgery of conceiving, delivering, and raising children for the whole extent of their child-bearing years, Margaret Sanger knew, they would be able to fully develop as human beings, able to productively contribute to all areas of society.

Margaret Sanger's battle has been largely won today in the United States. To be sure, there's still work to be done to make sure that sexual education, contraception and abortion are available to each and every American woman. But the fundamental right of women to control their own bodies has been legally established and I don't believe that even the new Supreme Court conservatives will dare to try to take that right away.

But the deeper issues challenging the vexed American family today have yet to be tackled in a serious, concerted way by the feminist community. And these issues should be the provenance not just of women, but of men too. Men as well as women need to focus on "the rubric of the successful family life," and debate what this would mean for both sexes. By the same token, women as well as men need to concern ourselves with the bigger picture beyond the confines of the family: the economy, the environmental crisis, trade imbalances, militarism.

The point being that Alex Sanger's appeal to women voters simply on the basis of our concern for our families is far too parochial to be a successful rallying cry for the 21st century feminist movement. Putting women back in the family box is not going to work, at least not as long as the capitalist system insists on sending both parents out into the workforce in order to provide the basics for their children.

If we want to reach out and motivate women to vote, we need to: a) put up more smart, individualistic, deeply ethical women candidates, candidates strong enough to resist the tremendous pressure to conform to the culture of celebrity and corruption that currently rules Washington; and b) appeal to women as smart, worldly, ambitious human beings who want success for themselves and their families on all fronts--personal, professional, familial.

Is that too much to ask?

V-Day Does It Again!

2006-02-14T18:24:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to a rousing Simon's Rock College performance of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues," which I almost know by heart by now since I've been teaching it in my Intro to Women's Studies classes for years. No matter how many times I read the book or see the performance, it never fails to choke me up.

For those who have never seen the play performed, it's a series of monologues created as composites of hundreds of interviews that Ensler conducted with women of all ages, from all walks of life, talking about--their vaginas. An unlikely topic for a play, you might think, but in fact the stories that Ensler has created from these conversations are nothing short of amazing.

From the six-year-old girl who, when asked what her vagina smells like, responds, "Snowflakes," to the adolescent Black girl describing episodes of sexual violence in her childhood, and moving into an exhilarating description of her seduction by an older "bulldagger," to a painfully moving confession by an older woman of how her "down there" got "closed for business," the stories spin by in a mesmerizing litany of humor, pain, grief and joy.

I have seen the film of Ensler performing the monologues herself, but I think the college performances I've seen are more intense and more moving, because you can so clearly see the depths of the actors' passion for their subject. At last night's performance at Simon's Rock, one of the performers could not restrain her tears as she described a woman whose face was burned off by acid thrown on her by her abusive husband (a not-uncommon occurrence in parts of South Asia). The young woman who read the monologue of the raped women of Bosnia was pale and controlled, but clearly feeling the impact of every line.

And then there was the other side of the emotional coin--the sheer gutsiness and effervescence of the young women who read the monologues celebrating Vagina Power. "My vagina is angry," one performer declared, and launched into a scathing explanation of why, punctuated with assertive demands. Another performer held the audience spellbound with her description of a woman finding her clitoris for the first time in an orgasm workshop.

And then there was the monologue about the woman who switched careers, from prim corporate lawyer to dominatrix, specializing in women. The dominatrix's particular area of expertise is in eliciting from her female partners every type of pleasurable moan imaginable--and then some! To see this beautiful young woman get up before the packed audience last night and moan--I mean MOAN, loudly, creatively, and without any inhibitions--was truly a liberating experience, even for those of us just watching with vicarious delight.

What I love about "The Vagina Monologues" is how it manages to look sexual violence straight in the face, and yet also not lose sight of the pleasure-giving power of sexuality, especially female sexuality. Men are celebrated too, at least some men: last night's performance included a brilliant rendering of the monologue about "Bob," the ordinary, average guy who is transformed into someone heroic in his open-hearted admiration for a woman's vagina.

Last night's performance at Simon's Rock was a benefit for Berkshire Kids' Place, an advocacy program for women and children who have suffered first or second-hand sexual and physical abuse. BKP representative Ananda Timpane reminded the audience before the show began of some of the horrendous statistics about sexual violence--that one in four women will experience sexual assault at some point in their lives, for example.

We need to be aware of these statistics, and do whatever we can to empower women and channel male rage in other, more productive directions--if not eliminate it entirely. But in our concern over sexual violence we also must not lose sight of the beauty and delight of human sexuality. Even as it condemns sexual violence, "The Vagina Monologues" helps us remember what sex is supposed to be all about.

If you care: Visit the Berkshire Kids Place website to find out how you can help support their important work with women and kids at risk. Information about Eve Ensler's V-Day Foundation and its mission to stop the violence against women and girls worldwide is also available online. The list of hundreds of colleges performing the "Monologues" as part of the 2006 V-Day campaign is truly awe-inspiring and heartening!

What Does It Take to Get Action?

2006-02-05T18:34:00.000-05:00

Simon's Rock is in the midst of a slow-motion crisis, built of first one incident among the students, then another. It you weren't looking for pattern, it would be possible to miss it and lull yourself into believing that everything's okay.

But talk to most of the students at Simon's Rock about their personal lives, and you'll quickly realize that everything is not okay. Not at all.

Two weeks ago four Simon's Rock students went to the emergency room of the local hospital with acute alcohol and drug poisoning. The idea of someone dying from our refusal to come to grips with substance abuse on our campus doesn't seem at all far-fetched. And while less dire, issues of racism, sexism and elitism continue to plague our community.

It's time for us to start living up to our responsibility as educators--to lead by example, and to model the kind of behavior and engagement we want to see in our students.

Is that too much to ask?

This weekend I sent to the entire faculty and staff my proposal for a proactive approach to this many-headed problem: a required series of courses in social issues, offered to the students in small groups, each led by a pair of trained adult facilitators and a couple of older students as peer leaders.

I believe we should take the time and make the effort to explore the social issues that college students run smack up against every day of their lives--explore them intellectually, and also from the feeling place, hopefully developing enough trust within the group so that students feel comfortable expressing their true feelings, trying out new ideas, and remaining open to the possibility of growth.

Among the issues to be covered:

substance use and abuse (including alcohol and prescription drugs, as well as the usual recreational drugs);
sexual harassment and date rape, as well as general insensitivity to, and ignorance of, basic sexual health and relationship etiquette;
intolerance of difference, including racism, misogyny, elitism, and lack of respect for others' preferences, be they political, sexual, or religious;
rampant cultural arrogance and unexamined privilege;
and a general sense of apathy, malaise, stress over academic work, and depression--which compounds every issue above.

It will be very interesting to see the reactions of the faculty and staff to this new idea. Will we continue to bury our collective heads in the sand? As one student said to me recently, in an anguished tone of voice, "Are they going to wait until someone DIES at Simon's Rock before they take action?"

Teens, Sex and the Media

2006-02-03T06:41:00.000-05:00

It's a no-brainer that kids are affected by exposure to the media, right? But amazingly, very little concrete research is being done to find out just how early and repeated exposure to media-generated sexual scenarios is affecting how kids go about their personal lives.

Jane Brody points this out in her January 31 New York Times article, "Children, Media and Sex: A Big Book of Blank Pages." She starts off the piece rather sensationally:

"In last summer's prize-winning R-rated film "Me and You and Everyone We Know," a barely pubescent boy is seduced into oral sex by two girls perhaps a year older, and his 6-year-old brother logs on to a pornographic chat room and solicits a grown woman with instant messages about 'poop.'

"Is this what your teenage children are watching? If so, what messages are they getting about sexual mores, and what effect will it have on their behavior?"

Our children are exposed to sexuality, of all kinds including the most bizarre and destructive, not just through fictional media like film and TV, or borderline genres like reality TV and pornography, but also, perhaps most disturbingly through the daily news. Does anyone believe that kids are oblivious to the sexual content of our constant debates about topics like abortion, gay marriage, priests and pedophilia, and Oval Office pecadilloes, for instance?

They soak it all in. And of course it affects how they view themselves as emerging sexual beings.

The strange thing is that when I express concern over the frequency of violence in media depictions of sexuality, I'm often branded (by students in my women's studies classes, for example) as an old-fashioned prude. Indeed, they make me feel like one sometimes. Is it a sign of advancing middle age that I often catch myself feeling nostalgic for the "good old days" of my own youth, when the internet did not yet exist, and our individual imaginations were so much more robust?

The scariest thing about the colonization of our pysches by the media is that we can no longer claim our fantasies as our own. Kids who have grown up watching the national average of 24 hours of TV a week, much of it cable, much of it "junk," find their minds simply awash with images that they could never have imagined on their own, but which become part of them in an insidious process of internal colonization.

Then, no surprise, like kids everywhere and in all times, they want to go try out in reality what they've fantasized about privately--except that "the private" no longer exists in this brave new world, and their own fantasies turn out to be media manipulations, often of the most unsavory sort.

The media has become a giant, out-of-control collective unconsciousness for our society, and is spreading rapidly throughout the world. Those of us who haven't been totally indoctrinated by the media need to fight back by advancing our own visions, our own stories, and insisting that these humble offerings have value.

I'm not a prude, I am all for teens experimenting with sex--I sure did it myself! But I am frightened of the crudeness and callousness that many teens I've talked with seem to take for granted as a "normal" aspect of human sexuality.

No, we can't spoonfeed them honey and roses; yes, ugliness exists and they should know about it. But they should also know the extent to which their own minds have been polluted by the media images they've consumed throughout their short lives.

And they should be encouraged to break free of that indoctrination and reawaken the most precious gift of all: their connection to their own deep feelings and their own unique imaginations.

We are the ones we've been waiting for

2006-01-31T08:10:00.000-05:00

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.

What Does It Take to Make Lasting Institutional Change?

2006-01-25T19:25:00.000-05:00

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.

Endless Diversity Battles Sap Our Strength

2006-01-23T07:55:00.000-05:00

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.

Educating for the 21st Century: Putting Diversity Front & Center

2006-01-21T19:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Wise Words on Privilege (White, Male & Otherwise) from Tim Wise

2006-01-18T16:04:00.000-05:00

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.

Not One But TWO Women Presidents This Week

2006-01-16T17:59:00.000-05:00

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.

Woman Wins Presidency of Chile!

2006-01-15T19:10:00.000-05:00

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!

The Madness of American Parenting

2006-01-14T16:53:00.000-05:00

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.

An Unstoppable Woman

2006-01-11T16:41:00.000-05:00

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.

Crossing the Desert

2006-01-10T06:34:00.000-05:00

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.

Swimming Against the Tide

2006-01-05T14:29:00.000-05:00

I never thought I’d find myself in agreement with NY Times columnist David Brooks, but maybe he’s on to something when he says “Power is in the kitchen. The big problem is not the women who stay there but the men who leave.”

He’s arguing with Linda Hirshman, a retired Brandeis professor, who wrote in in the December issue of The American Prospect that "The family - with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks - is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government."

Wrong, says Brooks. The family is where it’s really at as far as “full human flourishing.” Both men and women should take parenting and the creation of a happy, harmonious home more seriously.

I agree, although I don’t see this as an either/or debate: both men and women should have equal access to both the public and the private spheres of life. Women are more and more moving out into the public sphere, at least in the USA. But surprise! Men don’t want to do the dishes!

What is it going to take to really get men to pull their full weight in the work of parenting and homemaking?

The big picture staggers me, but I try to do a little bit in my own sphere every day: I involve my sons in cooking, cleaning, laundry and all the other routine domestic chores, and their father too, for that matter. Yes, I am doing the lion’s share, particularly in food prep where I am the resident expert in my family. But at least I welcome the men in my household into the kitchen alongside me.

Women have a choice: to go along with the mainstream, with its constant barrage of sexist stereotyping, or swim against the current. It’s hard work, swimming against the tide. But it’s the only way we’re going to make real change happen.

Not enough men in college? Let's be worried....

2006-01-03T20:53:00.000-05:00

Very worried. John Tierney, conservative columnist for The New York Times, and Melana Zyla Vickers of The Weekly Standard sure are.

"The trends are grave," Vickers warns. "Women outstrip men in education despite that there are 15 million men and 14.2 million women aged 18--24 in the country. Kentucky colleges enroll at least 67 first--year women for every 50 men. Delaware has 74 first--year women for every 50 men."

Tierney puts a personal cast on these statistics in his coyly titled article "Male Pride and Female Prejudice," observing that with fewer college-educated men available, college-educated women may have difficulty finding adequate mates. "When there are three women for every two men graduating from college, whom will the third woman marry?" he asks plaintively.

What to do? Vickers actually suggests that the government should "take a serious look at whether continued enforcement of Title IX is keeping men away from college."

You've got to be kidding! Heaven forbid that women actually take the lead in some aspect of our civil life! The consequences will be certainly be dire, these pundits warn. To Tierney, the success of affirmative action for women in college enrollments will undoubtedly turn sour: "You could think of this as a victory for women's rights, but many of the victors will end up celebrating alone," he warns.

Oh yeah? Well maybe "many of the victors" will end up celebrating with each other! Maybe there's more on women's minds these days than finding a mate! The calculated reference to Jane Austen in Tierney's title takes us back to the days when "it was universally acknowledged that a single man of good fortune must be in want of a wife," and when women like the Bennett sisters were eager to oblige. But read Pride & Prejudice a little more carefully, and you'll notice that even in those days, women like Elizabeth and Mary Bennett, who would certainly rank among today's top undergrads, were more interested in intellectual stimulation than in securing a rich husband.

Of course I don't want to see men fail at college. But I resent the implication that women are succeeding at men's expense, and that if they leave men in the dust, they will come to regret it. Women have been left in the dust for so long that hey, we know it doesn't feel good. But the way around it is empowerment for everyone, not holding women back so men can catch up.

Gloria Anzaldua: The personal is political is spiritual

2006-01-01T18:50:00.000-05:00

Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua died prematurely in 2004, of diabetes. She had no health insurance, despite her great influence on an entire generation of feminist literary theorists and writers. Having just come back from the Modern Language Association annual convention in Washington DC, where I spoke at a panel on "The Legacy of Gloria Anzaldua," I am moved to dedicate my inaugural post in this blog to her memory, and I'd like to use this space to explore one of her key ideas: spiritual activism.

This is not the idea of hers that has received most attention in academia to date--that honor would go to her theory of the borderlands. The chapters of her ground-breaking 1987 volume Borderlands/la frontera that are most frequently anthologized are the ones that discuss her queer Chicana identity and the stresses of living in the linguistic, psychic, and physical borderlands of South Texas, where she was born and bred. But re-reading the book through the lens of one of her last essays, "now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts," it is clear to me that what she was reaching for in Borderlands was a way of describing her own process of "conocimiento," or coming to a spiritual and political awareness that moves from, as the title of her late essay suggests, inner work to public acts.

What is conocimiento? Anzaldua describes it as a seven-stage spiral process without start or end point, moving forward continually and non-chronologically--something hard for our linear minds to grasp. It starts with a jolt of awareness, a crash of emotional or physical sensation that throws us into the second stage, "nepantla," a liminal space of openness to new perspectives. The third stage, the "Coatlicue state," named for a dark Mexican goddess, represents the turmoil that such new perspectives or ideas can often provoke. Growth is not easy or neat, and one of Anzaldua's central insights has to do with the importance of PAIN in the process of coming to awareness. In our Prozac Nation today, I think this can't be stressed too much: psychic pain has to be worked through; or as Jean Houston puts it, pain is the entrance to the sacred. On the other side of that threshold, we'll find a "call to action," and ways to act productively in the world will open before us. The inner work will lead to public acts, in other words--among them the "crafting of a new personal narrative" that reflects our new awareness.

But we're still not done in this process of conocimiento, or coming to awareness. With our new personal narrative in hand, we'll take it out to test it in dialogue with others, a dangerous process, fraught with risks of rejection and conflict that could send us spiraling back down into Coatlicue again. But if we work through this stage, we can find ourselves in the glory land of the seventh stage, where we're able to make "holistic alliances" with other individuals and groups, in order to further our collaborative productive engagements with the world. And then it's back into nepantla again, to grow and learn and develop and start all over again.

It's pretty plain how this process is both personal and political. How is it spiritual as well?

I would say that spiritual activism is any form of engagement with the world undertaken out of love, compassion and the desire to collaborate with others in a common project of highlighting the interconnection of all beings on our planet, and perhaps in our universe as well. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and other conventional formulations along these lines contain the essential kernel of spiritual insight, which is that we are all sparks of a divine flame and the positive forces in our world pull us toward unity and harmony and the apprehension of our interbeing.

What makes Gloria Anzaldua such a wonderful model for spiritual activism and the process of conocimiento (coming to awareness, and then taking action on that new awareness) is that she somehow manages to balance the spiritual and the material, the intellectual and the emotional, the theoretical and the pragmatic. These are the strands she is weaving together so brilliantly in her texts and in her lifework, and we women of the world must take note, and gird ourselves to continue her important project in her absence.

As we continue to think and work and act in the wake of her legacy, we will find that she is not really gone at all.

Best wishes for a peaceful and productive New Year to Gloria and all my other sister nepantleras....

You can read Anzaldua's essay "now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner works, public acts" in the anthology she co-edited with AnaLouise Keating entitled This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation" (Routledge, 2002). Another good discussion of spiritual activism can be found in M. Jacqui Alexander's book Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Duke UP, 2005). More on Jacqui's book to follow.

--JBH