Democracy Sometimes

Peace March in Richmond Responds to Homecoming Rape

2009-11-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

A Peace March will be held in Richmond this Saturday
November 7, 11:00 a.m.
Richmond High School, 1250 23rd St, Richmond, CA (get directions)
For more info malupresents@gmail.com

Richmond girl raped outside homecoming dance
BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Richmond

Richmond girl raped: A 15-year-old Richmond girl who had left the homecoming dance was hospitalized in stable condition after being assaulted and allegedly raped by several men on the Richmond High School grounds, police said.

Police received several reports shortly before midnight Saturday and when officers arrived at the high school several men ran away. One was caught.

The 19-year-old Richmond man was in the county jail in Richmond on rape charges, said Richmond Police Sgt. Bisa French. She would not release his name, saying they were trying to get more information from him and police were concerned that if his name were known he might be more reluctant to talk.

The girl was unconscious and flown by helicopter to a hospital.

French said police believe the girl was raped by several men an they are looking for "at least" four males.

"She left the dance at some point and that's when this occurred," French said.

She said the girl apparently knew at least one of her assailants.

Mike Taugher

Expanded mainstream media coverage
News and Commentary from savvy sista
Rape seen as almost inevitable
Friend of survivor speaks out on CNN

Health Care Activism: Mobilizing to Lose?

2009-10-31T13:11:00.001-07:00

It's been forever since I blogged, I know, and I'm sorry about that. I've been sooooo swamped, mostly with organizing, but also with some difficult personal stuff. A good friend of mine, Rosemary Lenihan, whom I worked with at Brobeck years ago and stayed in touch with through a lot of tough times for both of us, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in August and died less than two months later. I went to her first and just about only oncology appointment, and was planning to put in motion all the great support I learned from you all when I had b.c., but didn't really get a chance to because she declined so quickly. Her sister, Eileen, and a couple of her other friends and I mainly tried to keep her company in the hospital for the last couple weeks as she essentially wasted away. I've witnessed a lot of difficult deaths, my father's, from brain cancer, and of course Stephen and Ron and David and all the others we lost during those early years of AIDS, my aunt Brina from lung cancer, and even the "easy" ones, like my friend Joan, who dropped dead of a stroke at 51, are not easy when you're losing someone you loved. But this was about the worst for me, although she was apparently not in pain once they got her on methadone.

There's been quite a lot of other death in the last few months, two friends lost their mothers, one of whom I also knew and was fond of, my coworker's long-time lover died of HIV complications after being in a nursing home for 15 years, two women I knew slightly died suddenly of heart attacks, and Nancy Redwine, a writer and activist I admired a lot who was close to friends of mine in Seattle and Santa Cruz, died of breast cancer after battling it for years. She and I were the same age and of course, my cancer experience made me feel more connected to her.

So this Halloween/Day of the Dead promises to be a highly emotional time for me. I planned to go to the Spiral Dance, but due to the Bay Bridge closure I just can't face taking that much public transportation in San Francisco on Halloween. Last night on BART I felt truly homicidal. I'll just have to light my own candles and think about my gone-beyond people while enjoying some much-needed solitude and calm quiet time, oh, and cherishing that extra hour of sleep.

I went to two pretty good actions for health care this week. One I was heavily involved in organizing – a blockade of Blue Shield in San Francisco on Wednesday, part of the national mobilization for health care for all. We worked really hard to get about 30 people to risk arrest – I had hoped for 50 but still it was good, and there were about 200 people at the rally, also good but a little disappointing because I’ve been to some very large pickets for single payer and I think a lot of people didn’t hear about it because of infighting among the various groups here in the Bay. We publicized the action for a nearby building that houses United Healthcare, where we rallied for about half an hour before marching to Blue Shield, and that worked out really well because they had no idea they were the target so they didn’t lock everything down ahead of time. They didn’t make a complaint so the cops ignored us and after about an hour, we decided to call it a day, leaving behind a lot of crime scene tape and sidewalk chalking. Everyone had a good experience, and a lot of different groups participated together for the first time, which was excellent. (Check out the great video and photos.)

Then on Friday there was an action organized by the San Francisco Labor Council at the office building which houses Cigna (and also Aetna, although the group didn’t seem to know that). This one was fun because we wore costumes and went into the lobby of the building, but of course didn’t get anywhere near Cigna’s second-floor offices; the security guards informed us that the elevator would not go up with us in it.

Incidentally, the reason I had pushed for Blue Shield as our target was specifically because they have a whole building, with their logo prominently displayed all over the outside of the building, in contrast to these other companies which are hidden in the bowels of generic office buildings. I think that a lot of activists are not as attentive to the visual impact of their actions as they could be. It’s fun to go chant in the lobby, and I’m sure the companies that are targeted hear about it, but is pissing off the security guards of highrises really our goal?

Yesterday’s action was politically all over the map – some people were all about public option, some were saying single payer one minute and public option the next. Our action was very consciously supporting only single payer, and some people went ballistic because one of the national organizers put out an email telling people about our action in which she said people should demand the public option. I personally think that it doesn’t make that much difference, I mean, of course it makes a difference, I’m totally for single payer, but we’re not going to get either, and I think we should not let the divisions within our movement overshadow the main points which are, 1) that we need health care for all, and 2) thirty cents of every health care dollar goes to insurance company profits. I’m sure all those tea party people don’t agree on everything, in fact I know they don’t, some of them are complaining about Wall Street bailouts while others are busy demanding and grabbing those same bailouts, but they don’t let that stop them from coming together to destroy their enemies – Obama and the Democrats.

Now people are gearing up for more actions next week, to pressure Pelosi, Waxman and Miller, the House leadership, to restore the Kucinich Amendment (allowing states to elect a single payer system) to the bill that will go to the House floor. Some people are saying we have to do them on Monday because the decision is likely to be made that day, others that we should wait until Tuesday because we don’t have enough time to organize for Monday, and others that it doesn’t matter because we can’t influence the legislative process anyway.

Myself, I think that we need to pressure Pelosi in her home district, remind her that she still works for us, even if she doesn’t think so, and that she can’t be speaker of the House if she doesn’t represent San Francisco at least occasionally. But more than that, I just think it’s great that there are rowdy well-organized health care actions several times a week in this area and in a number of cities around the country. Okay, so the mass media are not giving us as much hype as they did the right-wing-nut-cases, but when did they ever? We are making noise, we are coming together, we are building a movement, and that’s what we need to do, even if it’s late. Until National Nurses Organizing Committee, Physicians for Single Payer and Health Care for All started interrupting Congressional hearings, Pelosi, Reed and Obama were sure that they could just tuck the public option and any other concession to the idea that insurance companies are not our pals in a drawer and say no more about it. The activism has forced them to at least give lip service to what they once claimed to believe. And as my friend Deeg says, we need to start reminding people that win or lose, and it’s almost assured we will mostly lose, the vote is not the end, it needs to be the beginning.

I don’t really know whether I hope the Democrats win or lose the health care vote. If they lose, that is, if they don’t succeed in passing a plan, they’re pretty much through. The Republicans will doubtless take back Congress next year, and then even if Obama wins a second term, he’ll be like Clinton in his second term, hamstrung and moving ever to the right – and let’s face it, he doesn’t have that far to go. And while we can say that it doesn’t make any difference, they’re all the bourgeoisie (which they are), they’re all sold out to the corporations (which they certainly are), they’re all warmongers and robber barons and liars and torturers and imperialists and Zionists, all of which they are, it’s also true that there are some differences, and the small differences matter most to the people who are the closest to not making it in this country. My friend Jean mentioned the other day that in 2000, she was going around West Berkeley campaigning for Nader, and an older Black woman said to her, “I can’t afford that.”

If the Democrats and Obama lose the battle for health care, it’s not going to get written as a victory for the progressive forces, punishing them for writing us off. It’s going to be seen as a massive victory for the Republicans and the insurance industry, which despite their posturing (“We were the first to call for health care for all” claims the CEO of Blue Shield, who did in fact author a plan in 2006 which is very similar to the one Obama is pushing now) and their back-room deals with the Democrats, are really hoping to derail any reform. I voted for Nader in 2000, and I probably would have voted for him even if I lived in Florida, and I would probably do it again. But the fact is that voting for Nader that year did not bring us closer to being a real democracy or to breaking the two-party stranglehold. It certainly didn’t make the left look strong. It proved that going all out, with a celebrity-level candidate, the left could muster 2.75% of the vote, not even enough to qualify for federal funding. Erstwhile Republicans John Anderson and Ross Perot did much more to challenge the two-party hegemony in their third-party presidential bids, getting 7% and 18.9% respectively, in 1980 and 1992. (And Perot can take credit for getting Clinton elected, which I’m sure is something he wants on his epitaph as much as Nader wants electing Bush on his.)

So working to make sure the Democrats don’t succeed in passing a crappy health reform bill, with or without a lousy public option hardly anyone has access to, is not going to help win single payer, nor is it going to prove that the left is a force to be reckoned with in this country. At best, it is going to make the less-right-wingers in Congress look more like a house divided than it already does. At worst, the 40 million people and rising who currently have virtually no access to health care will have even less as the public health systems continue to be eroded and the numbers of people dying for lack of health care will climb.

On the other hand, if the Democrats do succeed in passing some form of health reform, they are going to be unstoppable in their drive to run over anyone who tries to challenge them from the left. It’s going to prove that Rahm Emmanuel and Max Baucus were right to bulldoze over the progressive caucus and the single-payer advocates and the people who pointed out that the main beneficiaries of this bill are going to become gods. And realistically, barring some major upheaval in this country, it will be at least twenty years before we will be able to build a major movement for reforming the reformed health care system.

It seems pretty clear to me that whatever passes, if something does, is likely to double or triple the costs of health care coverage for people like me, people with pretty good employer-paid health insurance. It’s likely to cut quality and drive up costs of care to people on Medicare – the Republicans are not actually lying about that (of course, they are lying when they claim that they are the defenders of Medicare, when they have consistently voted to privatize or kill it). In exchange for all of that destruction, some people who currently can’t get health insurance, or who have insurance but can’t use it to get health care because of preexisting conditions, etc., will actually be able to see doctors. We can’t let our principled objections to bad compromises obscure that important point.

People say, “Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.” No one could call this plan good. But one might say that we should not let the good become the enemy of the slightly better. True? Who knows?

Cause and Effect

2009-07-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, I had the late news on TV while I was doing some household chores, and I heard a teaser for what was coming up that caught my interest. They were announcing a breakthrough in research offering new hope to people who suffer from migraines. I have several friends who suffer from severe migraines, so I ran back into the living room to be sure not to miss the item. Guess what the breakthrough was? Turns out that the main cause of migraines is … drum roll please … you guessed it, obesity! Since the two people I was hoping to be able to tell that their days of suffering are over are both painfully thin, I turned off the TV in disgust.

A week later, a news headline in the elevator at work – those of you who read my last blog are going to suggest I stop reading those headlines – announced that the common thread linking people who had died from the H1N1 virus is – da da da da – yup! obesity again! More specifically, “stomach obesity,” leading to the headline, “Fight The Flab To Fend Off Swine Flu.” Okay, I admit, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I found it really hard to believe that among Mexican college students, New York schoolkids, Argentine workers and Indian computer programmers, everyone who was fat got H1N1 and died from it and no one who wasn’t obese did. Of course, my skepticism turns out to be right – the obesity-swine flu-linkage data are only for the U.S., the samples are small, most of the research was on mice, and the people doing it were, not surprisingly, obesity researchers.

Last week it was hot dogs. Apparently the hot dogs they sell at ballparks cause colon cancer – at least, that’s how they reported it on the news. Cause for concern, even panic. I thanked my stars that I’ve never eaten a hot dog at a ball park, and haven’t eaten a hot dog period in over 35 years. But wait. If eating hot dogs caused colon cancer, then at least 10% of the population would have colon cancer, because surely at least that percentage of people have gone to a ball game and eaten a hot dog there. So maybe that’s not quite what they mean. Presumably what they meant to say is that eating hot dogs increases your risk for colon cancer. In fact, the spokesperson from the group suing to get warning labels on hot dogs says, “Just as tobacco causes lung cancer, processed meats are linked to colon cancer,” so he sort of splits the baby, implying cause-and-effect without quite asserting it.

I learned about causation and risk factors years ago in the AIDS movement. The issue of whether the HIV causes AIDS is one that has been rumbled about in activist and scientific circles for years. In general, the scientific community put it to rest in 1993, by modifying the definition of AIDS to include the presence of HIV. But before that, most of us accepted that HIV, along with other risk factors, does cause AIDS, while a small but vocal group who became known as “AIDS deniers” insisted that HIV was a harmless virus that happened to be present in people who had a collection of unrelated illnesses with no known cause. In between there were some scientists who generally accepted the HIV-AIDS linkage but were troubled by the existence of a few people who had HIV but never developed AIDS and a few cases in which people seemed to have the symptoms and other markers of AIDS but no HIV. The AIDS deniers seized on this data to point out, correctly, that in order for something to be the “cause” of something else, it needs to be present in every case.

A friend from the AIDS movement, who had been homeless for many years and is a housing rights activist, used to get furious when people suggested that drug use and alcoholism “cause” homelessness. She would point out that if that were true, then Elizabeth Taylor, Betty Ford and Ted Kennedy, among many others, would be homeless. I got her point, but also felt that in making it she seemed to want to deny that there was any connection between alcoholism or drugs and homelessness. I’ve definitely known people who were housed when they weren’t using drugs or alcohol, and homeless when they were. It’s true that their homelessness was also caused by poverty, because when their friends/roommates/girlfriends threw them out, they had no alternative to the streets, while if they’d been rich, they could have gone to hotels or rented apartments. But if our definition of “cause” and “effect” is that there has to be a one-to-one relationship, then poverty is also not a “cause” of homelessness because plenty of poor people are not homeless. We can’t say that capitalism or greedy landlords or even our general lack of compassion as a society causes homelessness, because most of the people who live in this wretched capitalist uncompassionate society still have homes, however tenuously they’re clinging to them.

Once I started thinking about these contradictions, they kept popping up everywhere. Most recently, they appeared in my reflections on the controversy over today’s showing of the film “Rachel” at the Jewish Film Festival.

The Zionists constantly claim that Hamas is the cause of Israeli violence, and in fact, that Arab intransigence is the cause of the entire conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and its neighbors. And I wonder how anyone can make that claim, when Hamas never existed until 20 years into the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, 40 years after Israel conquered most of the land that had been allocated by the U.N. for a Palestinian state. It seems quite clear to me that the root of the problem is Zionist aggression and insistence on having a Jewish state in land that other people had been living on for generations. But to them, that is a mere outgrowth of the underlying problem, of which Hamas and the Palestinians and Iran are a symptom, which is the irrational, inevitable and omnipresent hatred of the Jews.

Inevitably this line of thinking leads me to the desire to be rid of my association with this group of crazy fanatics who call themselves the “Jewish community.” As I went from the Women In Black vigil outside the movie, “Rachel,” about the death of Rachel Corrie, to a huge rally in solidarity with the people of Iran (where, according to an Iranian friend, many people were carrying monarchist flags – yuk!), I told myself, “These people cannot make me hate being a Jew. They are not fomenting all this hatred and attempting to censor everyone who disagrees with them because they’re Jews.” But how can I say that, when they insist that they are doing it because they’re Jews? How can I say that their Jewishness is not the cause of their viciousness, if they say that it is? Just because I’m not like them and I’m a Jew, my friends from Jewish Voice for Peace and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network aren’t like them, isn’t that just like saying, but there are poor people and alcoholics who aren’t homeless?

Does it matter which is the chicken and which is the egg? Does it matter if eggs or chickens are more likely to cause obesity? Isn’t the thing that really matters that both the chickens and the eggs be able to enjoy their chickenness or their eggity? Has anyone studied the negative health impact on “obese” people of constant haranguing about the health risks of their weight? Probably not, because what obesity research wants to know that, but a recently released Harvard study found that “only women gain weight when stressed about strained family relationships, while men gained weight when stressed about their lack of decision authority and their ability to learn new skills at work.” As if that told us something we didn’t know, or needed to know.

I decided some day, if I get rich enough to fund studies (you’re holding your breath on that one, I know), I’m going to commission a study on the health advantages of political activism, because I’m pretty sure that’s what accounts for my having fewer health problems than most people I know, despite my love of fried things and ice cream.

What Do You Do When It's Not Your Moment?

2009-07-15T23:47:00.001-07:00

I was leaving work and they have these headlines in the elevator. Sometimes they’re news – I know things are bad when I realize I’m getting most of my news that way – and sometimes they’re entertainment or the Word of the Day (today’s was “lamster”), and they also have opinion polls. So tonight when I was leaving, the inspirational factoid they had decided to share was “60% believe obese people should have to buy a second seat on airplanes.”

I was stunned. First, I thought, “God, people are mean!” Then I thought, “What are they doing asking people that question?” It’s like asking if people think women should have the right to vote, or if gay babies should be euthenized. A lot of people think a lot of stupid things; who cares? So when I got home, I went online to see if I could find out why they were even talking about this. I didn’t exactly figure that out, because it didn’t seem like anything had happened in the last few days that makes it particularly relevant, but I did find out that back in April, United announced a new corporate policy requiring “obese” people to buy a second seat. Continental, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest also have such policies (Southwest has had it since 2002). Air Canada did but the Canadian Supreme Court, which is doubtless more enlightened than ours will turn out to be, struck it down.

So now I’m asking, “Why haven’t people been up in arms about this?” The articles I found online quoted people from NAAFA and even a woman from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University saying that the policies are discriminatory, but I didn’t find anything about a boycott or picket line against United or any of the others. Incidentally, I also learned that the standard for seat width, 17 inches from armrest to armrest, dates from 1954, when the average U.S. woman weighed 140 and the average man 160. Those numbers themselves surprised me, because 20 years later, I was told unequivocally that a woman who was 5’4”, which I think was the average height for women at that time, couldn’t weigh more than 120. So even then, before Kate Moss, we were basically being sold an impossible standard.

This small-ish (though in fact, it’s really not that small; national health data consider 32% of us “obese” so theoretically, one-third of our population could be double-charged because airlines are too cheap to provide enough space) incident got me thinking about something that I’ve been hovering around for the last few days: What can you do when you realize the moment you’re living in is not the one that you wish it were?

Sounds like kind of a duh moment, but it’s not really. My whole life, I have secretly believed that things were going to change for the better. I think most of the left cherishes some kind of hope that a different way of organizing society is somehow just around the corner, or at least that it might be, or that if we just work hard enough, form the right coalitions, craft the right strategy, cover enough butcher paper with the right power analyses – that we can push neoliberalism out the door and usher in a compassionate green society.

It started when I was watching the news and they announced that California legislators are close to an agreement with the governator on the budget. I thought, “Is that good or bad?” It’s good because people have been getting IOUs instead of checks, and no one will cash the IOUs or accept them as payment, so people are being thrown out of their SROs (another time when “How can people be so mean?” comes to mind), and not being able to buy food. But it’s bad, because the gov has made it clear that the only deal he’s willing to consider is one that slashes every social service while preserving tax breaks for the rich, so if a deal goes through, people might be able to eat today but a lot more are going to be starving tomorrow. And no matter how long it drags out, it’s not going to get any better because the people making these decisions will never have to choose between putting food in their kids’ mouths and putting shoes on their feet, and they determinedly have no compassion for the people who are making that choice every day.

I know people who are working on “reforming” Proposition 13, which is one reason we’re in this mess, and some people are talking about an initiative to repeal the two-thirds majority required for a budget which is another reason. And both of those would be good things to do, but I don’t have real hope that either of them is going to pass any time soon. And if they did, they would help but would they help enough? Because isn’t the real problem that people don’t believe everyone has a right to eat, be housed, have medical care and enjoy their life?

The health care debate is another thing that drives me crazy. 72% of the voters support single payer, which is pretty amazing given how steadfastly the media has refused to even mention it. Lot of credit to Michael Moore and the National Nurses’ Organizing Committee. But we’re not going to get it. We’re not even going to get a good “public option” plan. Why not? Because somehow, the people in Congress don’t have to do what the voters want, and we can talk about voting them out, but who else are you going to vote for? What seems most likely is what happened in 1994, that the Republicans are going to take back Congress because the Democrats didn’t deliver on anything they promised. And I know people who will say that that won’t make any difference, but as unlikely as it sounds, I know it will. Things are terrible now but they will be worse if the right wing sweeps back in with a mandate to scrap whatever’s left of the social welfare state.

I do know that if there were Million Voter Marches for Single Payer in every major city, or even in Washington DC and a few other places, that would be our best chance to actually get it. But I haven’t heard any of the activist groups organizing for single payer propose that. Instead, they’re mounting endless internet petitions and sending a few people to Washington to disrupt hearings (which is great), standing in for the rest of us. It’s like they’re trying to bore people into voting for it. But wait ‑ Cleve Jones is planning a Million Gay March for marriage, which is just kind of insulting. They keep saying the reason they want marriage is for health care, so why not call for a huge health care march and then you can have a marriage contingent – but of course, if we really had universal health care, we would not need marriage so they don’t want to join forces lest people notice that they’re asking for first-and-a-half class citizenship for some rather than equal rights for all.

Why can’t what is happening in Iran happen here? Two elections were stolen outright, and a third was by public relations, and still people won’t go out into the streets. Everything right now is about symbolism. Sonia Sotomayor is about symbolism and Obama is about symbolism and marriage is about symbolism, Guantanamo is a symbol and Afghanistan is too. It seems like symbols are somehow satisfying people, even people who can see that their real lives are getting worse and worse. And it’s not only here. I watch Charles Taylor in the Hague, denying that he committed war crimes, and think why is he up there and not Bush? Why are the same people who put Milosevic on trial shaking hands with Tony Blair? Why is Europe so stirred up about Muslim overpopulation that an Egytpian woman in Germany is killed for covering her head?

It doesn’t make sense to me to keep trying to chip away at the crust of cruelty that is covering everything. I mean, maybe I will, because I’m an activist at my core, but I know know know that it won’t make any difference. We need to strip away, not chip away; we need a revolution in our core values, so that people value an equitable society, or at least one in which people have their basic needs met, more than they value the opportunity to feel better than someone else. I don’t know what it is going to take to bring that change about, but I know it’s not in our control.

So what should you do, when you realize it’s just not your moment?

Thoughts on creativity and judgment

2009-07-09T13:09:00.000-07:00

On BART last night I was sitting next to a woman who seemed to be writing a blog or journal. I couldn’t help reading what was on her screen, which I realized was incredibly rude on one hand, but on the other, I feel like if you’re going to type on your computer on BART, you can’t necessarily make any special claim to privacy. The thing was that this woman was not a fabulous writer, or better to say that her writing was not that polished, but she was very engrossed in it, spending a lot of time getting it right, and I found the subject matter compelling in a certain way, and I kept sneaking peeks to see if she had written any more.

This experience made me really think about what it means to write “well.” What makes me hunger for this woman’s next rough-hewn sentence, while something much more finely crafted can leave me cold? If I want to know what comes next, isn’t that the most important thing, more important than whether the adjectives are perfectly chosen or the metaphors scintillating?

Earlier today, I was trying to break down, in writing, what I found disappointing in someone’s radio piece. It didn’t challenge me, I said. It raised important issues but didn’t give particular insight into them, or suggest ways of looking at them that listeners might not have thought of themselves. The commentator reported that someone could not find “appropriate” clothing for his daughter, but didn’t delve into what would be appropriate.

I don’t know if the person I gave that feedback to found it at all helpful, but it was helpful to me, to have to get really concrete and specific about what makes a piece work for me. At the same time, I realize how subjective this standard is. Is there such a thing as writing which is objectively “bad” or “good”, or is there only writing one person likes or doesn’t like? This is hardly a new question, but it’s one that’s very much on my mind because I am once again knuckling down to the process of sending out my novel, this time to small feminist or lesbian publishers. As I steel myself for the inevitable flurry of “Thanks, but not right for our list” replies, I can’t help wondering, how many rejections does it take to tell you your book is no good? I know all the stories about John Grisham getting rejected however many times, “Star Wars” getting turned down by every studio, Jane Austen recently being rejected by every agent in Britain. But the fact is, Grisham’s writing is actually pretty bad, though some of his stories are engaging. Really, he could use some better editing. Jane Austen was a genius at capturing the ironies of her time, but despite the obsession with remaking movies based on her novels, it’s not very surprising that in 2009, novels written in that style get a pass.

If I can’t score a publisher, and end up self-publishing online, am I a failed writer? How many people have to read your self-published work before you get to climb out of that particular category? Or is the only failed writer one who stops writing? I know that’s the established answer, but I always get this nagging feeling that writing that is not read by anyone but one’s close friends is fairly useless in the world, that if no one wants to read what I’m writing, my time is better spent doing things people do want – whether it’s making money to give to charities or organizing demonstrations or giving parents a break from their kids.

Okay, but maybe this woman sitting next to me on BART thinks no one wants to read her writing. Yet it’s obviously not true, because I wanted to read it. Maybe she will never post it on a blog or send it to a publisher, because she assumes it’s not good enough. Maybe she will read it at a writing group, and people will gently suggest that it’s not quite there yet; maybe she will send it out and get polite letters from publishers saying it’s not right for them. And maybe she’ll put it away and decide that no one wants to read her writing, so she should spend her time seeing more clients or getting another degree. And the world will be poorer for lack of her writing.

My friend Steve wrote last week that his goal is to write something that approaches the best things he has read. So what if he never gets there? Not to say he won’t, but that’s a high standard. If his writing is only okay, but people who read his book enjoy it – which I did – did he succeed or fail? What if he never tries to publish it because he never thinks it’s ready? A guy I used to work with worked on a novel for something like 25 years, from when he got out of college, or even longer. And he kept revising and refining it, and finally he sent out a few chapters, didn’t get any responses, and then a few years ago, he died. And I swore that wouldn’t be my life, but how can I say that his effort was more wasted than that of someone like James Patterson, who has a factory grinding out a dozen formulaic best sellers a year under his name?

If I spend three hours writing a flier and no one who gets it takes any action, did I waste my time, as well as the people who spent time handing it out? If we hold a vigil to stop U.S. Aid to Israel or shut down Guantanamo, and no one converts to our cause, did we waste our time? For some reason, I can see the usefulness of things like those, despite the objective evidence of their futility, while I can't seem to value my own creative expression independent of other people's judgments. I don't usually make those same judgments about other people's efforts, though sometimes I might seem to. Certainly I feel that Tom, the guy who worked on the same novel for his whole adult life, spent his time better than some of my current coworkers, who spend all their non-working time (and most of their work time) being depressed and wishing they could get it together to write a novel. On the other hand, I can't help feeling like people who garden are using their time better than any of us, but if I published my novel - even if it wasn't any better than the ones people didn't publish - I would not feel that way.

Okay, enough of this not-so-scintillating brooding.

Our Daughters, Our Selves

2009-06-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went to a Radical Queer Convergence in Chicago. The first day, I went to the women's caucus meeting. There were probably 100 women there, pretty much all of them no more than half my age. Things started out slowly but pretty soon they were sharing stories from their growing up, interactions with their moms, with their friends, with guys. The discussion turned to harassment, and one woman said that whenever she tells her radical friends she's been hassled or grabbed inappropriately on the street or in her building, they ask, "What did you do?" and then proceed to tell her what she should have done. Another young woman said, "I have never told anyone this, but I was visiting in another city, and I was supposed to stay with some friends, but I was locked out. So I ended up going home with a guy and he raped me." She said that if she had had her car, she wouldn't have been hanging out on the street and wouldn't have needed to go somewhere with a guy. Now, she said, she drives her car and her radical biking guy friends rag her about not being green enough.

The next topic was body image. One woman after another talked about how her mom put her in Weight Watchers at 10. Another reported that when she came home from college, where she eats one meal a day for lack of money, her mom criticized her for eating too much at home. A Persian woman said that when she was in high school, her grandmother demanded she get a nose job. My mind immediately went to my sister, who saved up from the day she got her first job to get her nose "fixed" – the Semitic woman's answer, apparently, to cultural dis-ease. (Someone later told me that Iran has the highest proportion of nose jobs in the world.)

A rather square-jawed white woman sitting next to the Persian woman was the next to speak. Her voice trembled a little as she said that when she was fifteen, her parents made her get an operation where they broke her jaw and pushed her teeth back to correct the overbite that years of braces had failed to resolve. Now, she said, she has no feeling in her lower lip. She had taken it for granted, she said, until recently, when she started to wish she could feel her mouth. She didn't want the operation, but her parents insisted until she finally agreed.

I was sitting there thinking, "That's one of the most horrible stories I ever heard," at the same time wondering how it was any different from the other woman's grandmother insisting she get an operation where they broke her nose. And then another woman said quietly, "Oh, my parents made me get that operation when I was fifteen too, after nine years of braces." Doing the math, I thought, "So this girl got braces when she was six? But you don't even have your adult teeth then. Could that possibly be WHY her jaw never developed correctly (if in fact, there is one "correct" way for a jaw to develop)?" She too, she said, couldn't feel her lip; she too didn't want to get the operation. She had never talked to anyone about it, feeling it was her private shame. As I was contemplating the unlikely possibility that two women in the same relatively small gathering had the same rare operation, when the woman next to me mumbled, "I had that too." "Can you feel your lip?" I asked her. She shook her head.

Okay, so this hideous form of child abuse is obviously rampant among a certain class of white people, or maybe more widely than that. Why hadn't I ever heard about it before? Where's the women's movement on this? We scream about clitoridectomy in Africa, and we should, but this barbarism is happening in our own front yards. Did I miss the issue of Ms. and the many Katha Pollitt columns in The Nation where they exposed this epidemic of mutilation? (No, is the answer. I just searched Ms. Magazine online, feminist.com, and kathapollitt.org for "maxiofacial surgery," which this particular travesty is called, and came up completely blank.) And while I was sitting thinking about this, another woman said, "Well my parents made me get an operation when I was fourteen, because I sweated too much." "Oh, yes, I had that too!" came a chorus – two or three other women had had sweat glands removed, presumably so they would only glow as women are supposed to. (When I was young, they used to say, "Horses sweat, men perspire and women glow." But I, who have always been a profuse sweater (not to be confused with a cashmere sweater), thought it was just a saying.)

I felt like an anthropologist, learning about an alien culture. In the past, I've tended to be angry at young women either for not being feminists, or for misrepresenting Second Wave feminism and claiming everything good about it for the Third Wave, or for not knowing or not respecting their history. But hearing these young women talking to each other for the first time about these violations of their personal rights, I felt angry at myself and other Second Wave feminists. I feel we have failed these young women, nearly all of whom seem to identify as feminists; it's their moms who don't.

They are reinventing the consciousness raising group, but they don't know that's what they are doing, because they never heard of consciousness raising groups. They don't know that's how Second Wave feminism got started. We didn't pass it on – we didn't have it to pass on, because we stopped doing it. I, in fact, never got to be in a CR group, because they were already passé by the time I was in college (circa 1977), and these young women's moms are probably just about my age. Nevertheless, I thought that every girl was being taught in school that sexual assault is not her fault, that being pro-sex is not an invitation to rape, that she has the right to control her body. My fifteen years in Women Against Rape, which ended ten years ago, were dedicated to ensuring that in San Francisco, but these young women did not grow up in San Francisco. They grew up in places like Ohio, where I went to college, and Maryland, where my sister raised her two kids. They reported having abstinence only sex education, consisting of a teacher drawing a cartoon condom on the board and explaining how the microbes go through it to give you AIDS.

Of course, this is not all the fault of feminists. Feminism didn't lose ground because of its own failings, any more than the Black, Chicano or Puerto Rican Liberation movements did. Every progressive movement has been pushed back over the last twenty years, and feminism has been subject to an unrelenting backlash nearly since it began. And of course, it is because of feminism and other liberation movements that that women's caucus was happening at all. Perhaps, history is cyclical and these young women, having accidentally unearthed the CR group, will share their discovery with other young women and they will create the Fourth Wave to challenge the particular system of repression bequeathed to them by their mothers, the kind that says you can be president, almost, as long as you don't talk too loud or eat like a normal person.

Where's the Market for Feminism?

2009-05-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Now that the death sentence of our women’s radio show has been temporarily reprieved, we have been thinking and talking a lot about what we want to do with it. Especially, we’re talking about what we can do and want to do to boost our listenership, since management’s main objection to the show is that, as they put it, “no one listens to it.”

Of course, one question that springs to mind is how do they know who is listening and who isn’t? The answer seems to be primarily from hits on the website, and that in itself might skew the results. According to a 2005 study by the Pew Research Center, men are faster to adopt new internet technologies, though women in most age groups spend more time online. In the 2005 study, women made up only 22% of those who downloaded podcasts, which was a very new technology at that time. Women seem to have made up a lot of ground over the last few years, and at least one study has women making up a majority of online listeners to public radio, but if the people I know are any indication – and they are at least a reasonable indicator of who might be interested in the issues that I cover – women are less likely to be in jobs that enable them to listen to the radio all day online. Geeks (otherwise known as IT professionals), for instance, are certainly listening to more internet radio during the day than schoolteachers or social workers. At my job eight of nine staff in IT are men, and the woman is the trainer. I decided that making a generalization based on nine people in one office might be considered a little unscientific, even for me, so I went online to see if my impressions were accurate. The National Center for Women in Information Technology reported that as of March 2008, women accounted for only 27 percent of the U.S. IT workforce, while making up over half of all professionals. In fact, according to the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) Taskforce on Workforce and Education's 2003 study, the gender gap in computer professions is widening, while other gaps are shrinking. “In 1984, 35.8% of all computer science degrees were awarded to women, but only 28.4% in 1996. Looking earlier in the pipeline, the College Board reports that only 17% of those taking the Advanced Placement test for Computer Science were female.” (http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/1564501)

By contrast, 98% of kindergarden and preschool teachers, 79% of elementary and middle school teachers, and 83% of social workers are women.

Okay, so those are some interesting facts to mull over, and in fact maybe do some programming about, assuming we have a program. But in the long run, they are neither here nor there, because if people aren’t going to listen to us, even I have to admit that maybe we shouldn’t be on the air. After all, we’re not doing all this work just to amuse ourselves. If no one wants to hear what we have to say, no matter how brilliant it is, we might as well save ourselves the trouble and do something else.

So I go back to the question, why aren’t people listening to us? And more importantly, what are they listening to? I decided that maybe I should listen to some popular shows to get ideas. So I thought, okay, what are feminist radio or television shows that are popular? And that was when I had the epiphany – there are none! And moreover, there have NEVER been any! Is that possible?

I mean, there are shows that have feminist hosts, including Oprah, Rosie O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Ellen DeGeneres. I would guess that even Amy Goodman and Terry Gross consider themselves feminists, though they sure don’t show it in their interviews, more than 70% of which are with men (more on that another time – the Democracy Now! survey 2008 is on the way, along with my survey of the last year and a quarter of The Nation). There are shows like “The View,” that pit conservative women against liberal ones. But there are no shows that focus on women’s issues, even loosely defined, unless you include the cat-fight, nails and hairstyles shows or the pop culture, gossipy ones. Oprah probably does more segments on serious issues of concern to women than anyone, but she also takes care to keep it non-threatening to the guys, and don’t get me started on her obsession with dieting.

The book Women and Journalism, by Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming (2 Brits and a Yank, accounting for the strange spellings), contains only this short statement on the subject, “US experiments in feminist radio have been relatively sparse, although the left-wing ‘progressive’ network WBAI [she means Pacifica] has aired feminist programmes, as have assorted college and university radio stations. Many of these have emphasized music and poetry rather than news, and so, strictly speaking, they are not key to the history of journalism….”

So my first reaction is just sheer shock, that in all this time, over 40 years, since the second wave of feminism began, with the explosion of women into nearly every field, that there has not even been one attempt to capitalize on that energy with a regular national broadcast.

My next reaction is to get pissed off at women, who fail each other on so many occasions. I think about all the women’s businesses we used to have here in the Bay, which went under largely because of our fickleness and lack of support. Bookstores Old Wives Tales, A Woman’s Place, Mama Bears; Woman Crafts West, which sold lovely local jewelry, pottery and cards; bars Ollie’s, Amelia’s, Maud’s, Peg’s Place, A Little More; cafes Artemis and the Brick Hut; newspapers Feminist News, Lesbian/Contradiction and Sojourner (which was from the East Coast); I could really go on and on. And I think, well our little radio show won’t be the first or the last casualty of this curious inability to maintain a feminist version of brand loyalty.

Finally I get around to thinking, well what about looking beyond those who identify as feminists, and thinking about women. What would draw women to listen to a show that is not going to do segments on hair and diet, that is not going to be the public radio version of The View? What about this casually mentioned fact, that “many of these” feminist shows have emphasized music and poetry? We have done some shows that had a lot of poetry and they were never my favorites, because I don’t love poetry, but I think they were pretty well received.

The best solutions I can come up with are:

1) that we try to develop ourselves as a kind of Democracy Now for women. That is, we listen to what DN! does and try to do it too, but always looking for women with interesting things to say and a women’s/gendered perspective on the issues of the day. This is what my coproducer Rivian has been saying for a while. We obviously couldn’t do it by ourselves, because we’re a tiny little volunteer women’s collective, while DN has eight or nine full-time producers, plus interns, so we would need to join forces with all the other embattled women’s media projects out there, which I am pleased to say we have already started exploring.

2) that we do more pieces on relationships – not stupid self-help ones, but serious pieces that look at the dynamics of women’s relationships with each other, with men, in lesbian couples, with parents, in the workplace … Just in my casual research for this blog, I discovered a couple things that seem interesting to do interviews about, including a survey about bullying in the workplace which reports, among other things, that 37% of workers have been bullied, 57% of targets are women, 60% of bullies are men but women who bully choose other women as targets 70% of the time. I know that months ago, I mentioned wanting to do a piece about how women who are long-term single (like me) have to make new friends every few years, as our friends disappear into couples. And the women I mentioned it to immediately said, “Oh, yes, I’m really interested in that,” and volunteered their own stories on the topic. More recently, I’ve been thinking about my mom, who was only 54 when my dad died, which is 4 years older than I am now. She has now been single exactly as long as she was married and she’s had to create new circles of friends several times because so many of her friends have died out.

3) that we try to find a way to look at celebrity culture in a way that is not mainstream or mean-spirited. Katha Pollitt, the wonderful feminist columnist for The Nation, mentioned that when I interviewed her as something that women are very interested in, that left media typically won’t devote time or space to. When Eryn (a young African American woman who works with Women’s Mag) interviewed a couple of her friends just before the inauguration, one of the things they talked about was the Obamas’ relationship and contrasted it to Coretta King and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s relationship. Something I would never have thought of, but it was quite interesting and not dippy. I know a lot of really smart, critical, progressive women who are really drawn to celebrity gossip, and I think it’s something we should try to harness.

Okay, enough for now, if you have any feedback on any of this, please let me hear from you.

BTW, the agent I’ve been working with on my novel for the last two years just told me that she can’t do anything with it for the foreseeable future because one of her junior agents is ill and she had to take over all her clients. I’m getting ready to start combing The Writer’s Market again, and sending out queries, but if anyone has any suggestions, they’ll be most welcome.

On the Silence of the Left and the Spectre of Fascism

2009-04-21T17:12:00.001-07:00

More than any previous time in my life, I feel like I’m living in a schizophrenic community. Half the people I know are in rapture at what Obama has done in his short time in office. And it’s not just mainstream people who feel that way – some of the fiercest left-wing activists I know fall into that category. They talk about his initiatives in arms control and climate change and softening the embargo on Cuba. Half of the other half are deep in loathing of Obama and everyone around him. Armed with the daily litanies of his failings on KPFA and Democracy Now, they point to his appointments of Clintonites and Bushites to high positions, his failure to do anything to step the tide of corporate looting of everything we have left, his refusal to consider single-payer health care and of course, his stepped-up bombing of civilians in Afghanistan and refusal to condemn even the worst Israeli atrocities.

Then there’s the other quarter, epitomized by my coworker. He sways back and forth like a pendulum, depending on which left-wing talk show he’s listening to at the moment. These are the people whose minds and ideologies tell them one thing, and whose emotions and perceptions point them in another direction. Which is to say, they love Obama, while being ambivalent about his policies. As one friend put it, “I still have a crush on him.”

And then there’s the mainstream news, which is having a love affair both with the man and his beautiful family including now their perfect dog, and even more with the idea of him, and what they believe it says about race in our country.

So while I’m trying to navigate these pretty unfamiliar streets, figuring out where exactly I’m wanting to go, along comes the Tea Party movement and the wave of secessionist bills passed in state legislatures in the last week. Yeah, that’s right. Not just Texas and South Carolina, from whom we expect such things, but 28 states including California, are entertaining bills to declare their “sovereignty.” And it’s being kind of calmly reported in the media, pretty much ignored by KPFA which is busy bringing on Scott Horton and Michael Ratner and others to talk about what we already know about the torture memos, and no one is taking seriously the fact that for better or worse, we have our first Black president and for the first time in 150 years, we have major right-wing protests and secessionist movements across the country.

Now it’s true that none of the tea parties were very big, and it’s true that without Fox News, they would have been barely a blip, but the fact is that we do have Fox News and the mainstream media promoted the tea parties as well. Remember, the first lunch counter sit-in had six people participating.

What am I trying to say here? Just that I fear that while the left is busy convincing ourselves – with plenty of help from Obama and his peeps – that the current administration represents no change from the last, the right is capitalizing on what is widely perceived as a sea change. I remember the coup that brought Schwarzenegger to power in California, and it was a time very much like this. We had a conservative Democratic old-time politician in office, after 16 years of right-wing republican administrations. The left sat on our hands because we rightly hated Davis, who was pro-death penalty and pro-corporate, but we also didn’t believe that the right would actually succeed in removing him from office, and when they did, we didn’t believe it would be as bad as it has been. And now we have a situation where a huge Democratic majority in the legislature can’t pass a budget without giving massive hideous concessions to so-called “moderate” republicans. And I’m really quite worried that the left is going to sit around talking about how Obama is just like Bush while the fascists are mobilizing to prove us very very wrong, and when it’s all over, we’re going to be asking “How did we get here?”

International Women's Day

2009-03-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

Sunday was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, and I asked my friends to do a few simple things to commemorate this special day.

First, I have some good news. Although KPFA management was not willing to put Women's Magazine back on the air before the end of April, they did offer us the opportunity to produce a special which aired Sunday evening from 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. My friend Rivian Berlin and I produced a program on the history of International Women's Day. It includes great interviews with feminist historian Eileen Boris and long-time local activists Aileen Hernandez and Judith Mirkinson. It also presents an excerpt from an incredible documentary by our friend Malihe Razazan on the International Women's Day protests following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 - the first resistance to the imposition of Islamic law in that country, led by left-wing women who had supported the overthrow of the Shah and U.S. imperialism, but were deeply disappointed by the turn toward theocracy.

Please, wherever you are, show KPFA that you appreciate women's programming by listening to the show at http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/49006. And if you like it, ask your friends to listen as well.

The second thing is this: In my writing class last week, a woman told us she was reading The Feminine Mystique. The teacher asked who the author was, and she said she couldn't remember. I said, "Betty Friedan," and it turned out that only two of us in the class had ever heard of her. Then I mentioned that I was doing a show for International Women's Day and the woman who was reading Friedan asked, "When is that?" So I told them and I asked who had ever heard of International Women's Day and only one person had!

So, I asked my friend Lisa, who's a wonderful designer, to make a sticker that says "Today is International Women's Day" with a website for more info, and I'm attaching it. I asked people to wear them on Sunday so people would ask them about IWD, and I printed out a bunch of them to give to people I saw over the weekend. People loved them. I've uploaded it here, so bookmark it for next year. They're formatted for Avery 5196 labels, if you happen to have any lying around, but if not, you can print it on a piece of paper and cut it out and pin it to your jacket.

For those of you who would like to learn more about the history of IWD, go to
www.internationalwomensday.com. Happy IWD!

2009-01-26T14:08:00.000-08:00

Chomsky responds:

Thanks for the generous words.

I don't see the disagreement about investment. I just looked at the transcript, and what I said is: "divestment became a proper tactic after years, decades of education and organizing, to the point where Congress was legislating against trade, corporations were pulling out, and so on. That's what's missing: the education and organizing which makes it an understandable move. And, in fact, if we ever got to that point, you wouldn't even need it, because the US could be brought in line with international opinion."

The time-line seems very close to what you sketch below. There was no epiphany, and it wasn't sudden. It was a long-drawn out process, which by the late 70s and early 80s had gained enormous popular support, elite support as well. Pressure for the Sullivan principles was in 1977, but the movement really didn't take off until the 1980s. That was after decades of serious educational and organizing work.

However, there is a fundamental difference between South Africa and Israel. In the case of South Africa, the goal was to undermine Apartheid. In the case of Israel, the goal is to end the decisive military, diplomatic, and ideological US support for Israel -- more narrowly, to bring the US to support the international consensus on a two-state settlement that the US had blocked, unilaterally, for over 30 years. If that happens, Israel will have to go along. So BDS directed against Israel is a very seriously misleading tactic, which absolves the US, the major actor in this affair.

If organizing and education reached the level of opposition to Apartheid, BDS would be beside the point (as well as misdirected), because it would by then be able to shift US rejectionism.

Noam Chomsky

Ask Chomsky to Think Again About Divestment

2009-01-23T11:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Professor Chomsky,

I’ve long been a huge admirer of yours, and I remain so. I heard you on Democracy Now this morning and really appreciated how clearly you articulated the gap between what President Obama said and what needs to happen in order to have a genuine and just peace.

On the issue of divestment, however, I really must take issue with your statement. You are right, of course, that education and organizing are necessary for a divestment campaign to be effective and comprehensible. But you are wrong to imply that the movement for divestment from South Africa did not begin until that organizing and education had already taken place. You are helping to perpetuate the myth that everyone in the U.S. and other countries in the global North always opposed apartheid and came to the divestment solution simultaneously, in some kind of epiphany. And this is very harmful to the young people who are now getting involved in the movement for justice in Palestine, making them feel that they are up against insurmountable odds.

I well remember the movement for justice in Southern Africa. I entered college in the fall of 1976, months after the Soweto uprising, and the first wave of campus divestment actions consumed my college years. I remember sitting in lecture halls and listening to well-reasoned, liberal professors explaining why divestment was the wrong tactic, that it would be morally wrong for Oberlin College to divest, that we needed to use constructive engagement. I remember that the U.S. government’s position was that the ANC was a terrorist organization and that Mandela needed to renounce violence before the South African government could be pressured to negotiate.

We were largely unsuccessful during that period, as you will recall. It was not until ten years later, 1986, that colleges began divesting in large numbers – only three years before the fall of the apartheid regime. The struggle for divestment, boycott and sanctions against South Africa took a very long time, and the U.S. government and major U.S. institutions joined it very late.

Yes, we who want justice in Palestine need to do education and organizing, but divestment/boycott itself is a tool for education and organizing. When you ask a church, union or college to divest from Israel, you are of course going to have teach-ins and panels and all manner of activities to educate people about why divestment is necessary. When you ask consumers not to buy L’Oreal or Sara Lee, you are going to hand out fliers and pamphlets and do street theater to show them what the connection is between their hair care products and tanks and checkpoints.

As one of the most influential intellectuals in this country, and one of those who have done the most to bring the issue of U.S./Israeli colonialism into the light, you are in a unique position to influence how people think about this issue. Therefore, I urge you to carefully consider the issue of divestment/boycott and why you are reluctant to embrace what have unquestionably been the most effective pressure and organizing tactics of our time.

A South African friend wrote to me the other day, “here in South Africa, we can’t find any white people who voted for the apartheid ... sometimes I wonder if apartheid was just a figment of our collective imaginations ... inshallah zionsim will suffer the same fate.”

I believe we can make it happen. The first step is reminding people that yes, apartheid did exist and yes, people did support it and yes, people did refuse to oppose it vigorously and yes, all that changed because people refused to be deterred.

With sincere admiration for all you have done,

Kate Raphael

Rethinking Leadership Paradigms

2008-12-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

The other day I was reading an article by Merle Woo, which laid out the following proposition, “…the most oppressed shall lead in the movements for radical social change because being at the bottom, their perspective is the most clear, and, out of necessity, their conscious vision is a militant and collective one.” (Merle Woo in Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray)

Running across this bold statement made me reflect on the paradigm embraced, or at least espoused, by most of the groups I have worked with over the last 20 years or so. I myself have taken the position articulated by Woo as pretty much unquestionable. But recently, I’ve started to think about whether one, this really IS our working paradigm, and two, whether in fact it should be. I want to stress that I’m not trying to attack anyone or misrepresent what is said or what’s meant by it, and I am not saying that this is necessarily not what we should strive for. What I am doing is looking back on some of the work I’ve been involved in, and asking myself what I’ve learned. I’m not at all interested in turning my back on the analysis of power and privilege within our movements, as well as in the larger world. I am interested in refining how we use that analysis to create movements that are powerful and sustainable.

One of the first objections that someone not well versed in the “unlearning racism” world view might make is that a model that says middle-class white people can’t be in leadership isn’t fair to them. I would try to explain to them that fairness doesn’t really exist in the society we inhabit, and that we who are white, middle or upper class and able bodied have been reaping the benefits of unfairness for so long, we need to put our personal feelings aside for the greater good. I would still say that, but I would also mention that most of the people I’ve explained that to over the years are not still hanging around social change movements. Well, you may say, that’s fine, if they aren’t willing to step back, they’re not really interested in change. That’s the part I’m not so sure about.

It’s not about fairness, it’s about efficacy. In my experience, people who are not the most oppressed but believe themselves to be capable of leadership will not stay in movements where they don’t feel their skills and energy are welcome. To be sure, some of them are people we wouldn’t want anyway, people who don’t have nearly as much knowledge as they think they have, people who if they did get to lead, would tell us why we have to use a marketing approach, or work within the Democratic Party, or whatever. But some of them are people who have a lot to bring to a social change movement, who do understand and recognize that it’s not always appropriate for them to be the spokespeople, who are happy to stuff envelopes and do the heavy lifting, but who also have strong opinions about what should happen, based on years of experience in social movements. They are not going to find it satisfying to be a cheering section for people who do know more about being oppressed, but may know less about building effective and sustainable movements. Since nothing requires them to stay, they are going to leave.

Just to keep this from sounding like a straw man argument, I want to give a concrete example. Since I’m not talking about my own experience, I have changed some of the details, but the basic facts are true. A friend of mine in New York joined a collective that was working to improve conditions for women in prison. My friend is a middle-aged white lesbian, from a middle-class background, who has worked as a teacher for a long time and been active in her union, as well as a lot of other political work. The organization she joined was initiated by a combination of young queer people of color and older white women, and nearly everyone except my friend worked for some kind of nonprofit. The group wanted its leadership should reflect the people most affected by the prison industrial complex: people of color, trans people, and former prisoners. My friend agreed with this. The group also decided that white women in the group needed to participate in an antiracist caucus meeting once a month. My friend went to it a few times and found the level of discussion not that interesting to her, as someone who has done a lot of reading and participated in a lot of study groups about racism. She’s very busy, works a full-time job and has meetings nearly every night. She ended up deciding that there wasn’t enough for her to do to in the group to make it worth going to three meetings a month – two regular meetings and the antiracist caucus meeting, especially since once the group got some funding, most of the work was being done from the office, which was only open during the hours when she was working. Last I heard, everyone but the three paid staff people had also left that particular group.

Now I am a fan of antiracism discussion groups; this example is not a way of dissing them. But they have to serve a clear goal of the organization where they are happening, and they should not be anyone’s primary work in the organization. In my friend’s case, what drew her to the group was a desire to work in a multicultural women’s organization and to oppose the incarceration state. She ended up feeling that she wasn’t doing either; she was mostly getting to know the other white women, and talking to each other about racism wasn’t actually making any difference for women in prison.

The flip side is that often – not always – the people who do stay will not be the people you want. They will be people who are glad for others to take all the responsibility and do the hard work while they reap the cache of being the cool white (straight, male) person. Stuffing envelopes is a lot easier than making phone calls to create networks, going to speak to other organizations, or creating action plans. If I can go stuff envelopes and make coffee a few hours a month and then tell my friends about what a good anti-racist I am, why wouldn’t I do it? The young women of color can work 80 hours a week trying to build the organization and move it toward its goals. And if they don’t succeed, no one can blame me because I was just respecting their leadership.

The next problem with defining our groups as led by the most oppressed is that it encourages lying. First there’s the petty form of lying – lying about our own oppression. People misrepresenting their class backgrounds is probably the most common, but we’ve all met white people who claimed to be people of color, straight people who “identified as” queer, “young” people who were pushing 40. But none of these is as big a problem as the much more common form of lying – lying about who is really the leadership of our movements. I’ve been to lots of meetings that were very careful to have young people of color running the meetings, with middle-aged white people calling the shots behind the scenes, planning the agendas, bringing the materials, getting the funding, ultimately even hiring the staff.

But of course, that’s okay, because they’re the “good” white (old, middle-class) people.

The problem with the “good privileged people” category is that it’s quite finite. I have nothing but respect for Tim Wise; he’s smart, funny, honest, a great speaker, an interesting writer. He is also making his living by being the best straight white guy in the country. You might be as brilliant and sincere and clear as Tim Wise, but you can’t be the good straight white guy, because he’s pretty much got the market cornered. White men who go to listen to Tim Wise and get inspired can’t sign up to become just like him, because face it, none of us want to be spending that much of our time listening to straight white guys talk about their privilege. So what do people who get inspired do?

A parable (please note that this parable is hypothetical/composite and NOT meant to be read as criticism of any actual people or organizations): Once upon a time there were some very good white people. They were passionate about ending racism, so they joined a group of mostly people of color. Then some of their white friends saw what they were doing and saw that it was good. So they wanted to join too. But then the people of color said, “Well, now there are so many white people, this does not feel like our group any more.” So the good white people said, “What shall we do?” and someone said, “White people are the problem. You must work with them, to spread the news about racism.” And the good white people created a workshop, and they saw that it was good. So they made an organization to do more workshops, and the people who did well in those workshops were encouraged to go out and make their own workshops and before long there was a whole workshop industry. And these workshops were turning out people who had learned a lot of theory and a lot of skills to deconstruct racist dynamics in organizations, but the problem was, there were not enough multicultural organizations for them to use those skills in. Because if everyone joined the same groups, then those groups would become white-dominated. So they formed their own organization, the Good White People’s Organization to End Racism. And suddenly it started not to seem so good. In fact, it started to feel almost white supremacist. Which of course was not their goal, so they dissolved it. And most of the Good White People went home and wondered what they could do about racism. And there they remain.

This is an oversimplification, but I think some of you will recognize the paradox. There’s a fine line between working on your own shit, and segregation.

The third problem with “leadership of the most oppressed” is that it leads to the oppression sweepstakes. This is what we’ve seen with a vengeance in the aftermath of the November elections: Obama’s victory combined with the passage of Proposition 8 and other anti-gay-marriage initiatives has given some white gay people (especially men, in my observation) the notion that gay oppression has suddenly replaced African American oppression on the oppression ladder. False, but worse than false, wrong-headed. And that leads some straight people to argue that gay people are not oppressed at all, or that oppression based on sexual orientation is not as bad as racism, which is also false and wrong-headed. And EVERYONE LOSES. (Deeg wrote an excellent statement on this for the latest UltraViolet (coming soon to a website near you). Read it here.)

Of course Woo’s statement doesn’t presume a strict hierarchy. She’s not suggesting that we rank the working-class white transwoman versus the college educated heterosexual African American woman. But the idea of a “last shall be first” approach can lead us in that direction. And that can also give oppressed people a stake in hanging onto their own oppression. I mean, face it, if my place in a social change movement is based on my status as most oppressed, and my place in that movement is a strong part of my identity, I’m going to have pretty mixed feelings if the movement becomes so successful that I’m less oppressed. Maybe that’s not a big fear in terms of racism and class oppression in this country, but I think it was a factor in drawing some white gay men with AIDS to become AIDS deniers in the nineties, rather than taking retrovirals and getting better. It is certainly a reason mainstream Jewish organizations are constantly on the prowl for “the new anti-Semitism.” (Once again, I do not mean to imply that gay men with AIDS are no longer oppressed or that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist in our society.)

Finally, and probably most importantly, this leadership model can put an unfair burden on the most oppressed. If there is commitment to leadership by people of color, and a group doesn’t have many, then those who come in have to assume leadership whether they’re ready or not. If I come into a new group, I can sit at the back and check it out for a while, and no one is very likely to even ask my name, let alone urge me into leadership. Friends who are people of color have gone to check out groups and found that people are all over them. One friend reported that at her first meeting of a certain group, she was offered the chance to represent the group at a conference in Europe. While the attention might be flattering at first, most activists of color quickly realize that they’re being tokenized. They know people can’t be overwhelmed by their talent if no one even knows them, and no one wants to be chosen for the color of their skin (except maybe Clarence Thomas). On the other hand, sometimes people who are not that experienced find themselves very quickly pushed into leadership without the kind of mentorship that would help them use it successfully.

None of this means that we should forget about racism and other forms of oppression in our movements. It’s not meant to suggest that people of color, working class people, trans people, disabled people should not be the leadership of our social change movements. White people, class-privileged people, and men need to be very conscious of how much space we take up in mixed groups. When we think we’re sharing power, usually we’re dominating. Some years ago, there was a study which showed that when girls participate equally with boys in classes, everyone – male and female, students and teachers – believes the girls are talking much more than the boys. I don’t know of a study like that about racism, but I’m quite sure it would come out the same. I’m also willing to bet that in just about any racially mixed group, if you counted the minutes everyone talks, you would find white people talk at least three-fourths of the time.

We do need to step back, but we also need to be sure we’re giving all we can to the movements we are in, and think about how we can support many different types of leaders. I think we all need to consider whether rather than operating by an inverse hierarchy, it’s possible to build movements which model true democracy and equality.

An Open Letter to Naomi Klein

2008-11-29T15:26:00.000-08:00

Dear Naomi Klein,

Thanks so much for your incredibly brilliant work. With The Shock Doctrine, you have given me a great framework for understanding the current economic and political crises. Now, however, listening to you on Democracy Now three times in the last few weeks, I would like to make a suggestion.

Those of us who listen to DN! are well familiar with your critique, familiar enough to do it for ourselves. So next time they call you, why not say, “You know what? I don’t really have anything to add to what I’ve said the last few times I’ve been on. Here are some names of women economists and policy researchers you haven’t interviewed. Try to get one of them.” (In the event you don't have such a list, I'd be glad to share mine with you. I just interviewed two of them on KPFA-Pacifica.)

That’s step one. Here’s step two:

Get together with all the other really smart, well respected experts you’ve been on panels with recently. Make a video of yourselves laying out a progressive – not radical – program of action – things you would like to see the Obama administration do that they might actually consider doing (e.g., put Paul Krugman on the economic team; suspend or repeal the time limits for welfare recipients who can’t get jobs; sign the Employee Free Choice Act; don’t use a bailout of the auto industry to crush the unions; etc.). Post the video on YouTube and post the link on every blog or website you can post to. Ask every blogger you are in touch with to post the links on their blog. Make it go viral. Make sure the Obama team sees it. Demand a response from them.

Step three: Put out a press release letting the mainstream media and the alternative media know what you’ve done. Make noise! The story: progressive economic analysts are using the technologies popularized by the Obama campaign to change the direction of the Obama administration. Keep on them until they cover you.

Then go back on Democracy Now! to tell everyone how you accomplished your great victory.

This is not meant as an empty challenge. The administration is moving to the right so far so fast because they know the right is a threat, and they know the left isn’t. I am unwilling to spend the next four years the way I’ve spent the last eight – shaking my head and feeling hopeless while I listen to the news. The time for critique is past; the time for action is now.

Your sister in struggle,

Kate Raphael

Reflections on Elections

2008-11-17T14:12:00.000-08:00

Election night caught me by surprise. A week or so before the election, I read an article that said that people were experiencing unprecedented anxiety during this election season. They were not able to sleep, and while not sleeping, were reading more and watching more news and pseudo-news that was increasing their anxiety over what might happen. I shared that sense of dread and anticipation. I was terrified about the election being stolen; I was terrified of what the reaction to that might be, and what the reaction of the government to any reaction by African Americans was sure to be. I was obsessed by the fear of what would happen to Barack Obama if he were elected, and how people would react to that and the reaction to the reaction … More than anything, I was terrified of a McCain-Palin presidency, quite simply afraid that the world could not survive it.

Through most of election season, I did absolutely nothing except read and talk to my friends. But in the last weeks I threw myself into the campaign against Proposition 4, a California ballot initiative attempting – for the third time – to force teens to notify their parents before obtaining an abortion. The polls showed Prop. 4 likely to pass, and I was terrified about what that would mean for thousands of girls like I had once been, who felt they could never tell their parents if they became pregnant. (Currently in California, a pregnant teen can qualify for “confidential services,” a wonderful category that too few Californians know about, which means she can get whatever services she needs [whether termination or prenatal care] without her parents knowing, and she can qualify for Medi-Cal based only on her own assets, not her parents’.)

The one thing I wasn’t worried about was Proposition 8 passing. First of all, I don’t really care about gay marriage, and not just because I haven’t had a girlfriend in seven years. When I was in college, I thought marriage was an archaic institution that was on its way out, and one of the big disappointments of my adult life has been watching more and more of my alternative friends go through various kinds of marriage rites. In terms of the pragmatic reasons people give for why marriage is so important, there are much better ways to get health care for all, a just immigration policy, support for children and old people, than tying them to what type of sexual or romantic relationship someone happens to be in. And secondly, I was sure that Prop. 8 wasn’t going to pass. All along, the polls showed it behind though gaining, plus the youth vote was going to be a big factor in this election, and according to everything you hear, youth don’t care about people’s sexual orientation.

I spent most of election day holding a No on 4 sign 100 feet away from my polling place. I was standing next to the people holding No on 8 signs, who were much better organized than we were. All day people ‑ mostly African Americans, because most of the neighborhood is African American – drove or walked by and gave them the thumbs up, and a lot of them asked me, “Which one is Prop. 4?” And when I told them, some of them said, “Oh, I don’t know about that, I have a daughter.” I gave them our talking points and hoped that in two minutes I could convince them their daughters would be safer if they could make their own decisions around what to tell them about their sex lives. Even a lot of the No on 8 people asked me which one Prop. 4 was.

So my first surprise on election night came at 8:01 here, when the numbers flipped from 207 to 274 and the banner started to roll: “Barack Obama elected president of the United States.” I was not by that time surprised at the news, because we had been watching it for an hour and a half and we knew that he was going to win. I was surprised by the sheer elation I felt. Two friends and I walked out onto the balcony and started screaming, hoping to start a collective cheer but only resulting in someone calling down from upstairs, “Is everyone okay?”

And then the other returns started coming in and the first surprise was a good one – Prop. 4 was losing. When early returns showed Prop. 8 ahead, we didn’t worry too much – it was early, these were early voters, it didn’t count San Francisco or Alameda County … but as the night wore on and the numbers stayed pretty much the same, I was shocked to realize how devastated I was. Because this wasn’t about marriage. You can decorate it any way you want, but it comes down to the fact that people don’t think we’re as good as they are. A majority of California voters don’t think that I should have the same rights they have, and the fact that marriage is not a right I am interested in exercising doesn’t matter. We went to the Castro and wandered around, watching the huge TV screen they had set up in the street, and it was a bizarre mix of overpowering joy and gnawing sadness. Bizarre because neither was anything I would have told you that morning I would be feeling.

A week or so before election day, I had decided I was going to vote for Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney for President. After all, Obama was going to carry California, and McKinney’s platform was everything I could ask for. I had to turn off every debate after a few minutes, because I couldn’t bear hearing Obama rant about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, the need to send more troops to Afghanistan and Pakistan, or his unwavering commitment to Israel’s military strength. Then I went to New Orleans. On Sunday, I went to a second line in Central City, and just about every person there was wearing Obama on their body. A woman had on an Obama dress, Obama’s face wrapping around her curvaceous body in a halo of glitter. Someone was giving out fans proclaiming, “Vote First & Be the Change,” which provided a surprising amount of information about how to protect your voting rights. To all of those people, it would have made no difference that McKinney is also African American. To virtually all of them, a vote for McKinney would have been a vote against Obama, and a vote against Obama meant you didn’t want a Black man to be president. Because they have had the experience of voting for a Black person who couldn’t win. I voted for Obama because, very simply, I feel that African Americans have the right to be disappointed by a president they chose.

I know very well that African American politicians can be just as disappointing as white politicians. I lived through the Willie Brown era in San Francisco and am living right now in the hugely disappointing Ron Dellums era in Oakland. The only Black girl in my elementary school was Lynn Wilder, whose father Doug became Virginia’s first Black governor, and trust me, it wasn’t a good period for the state.

When Obama named Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, people in my circles immediately started sending around information about Emanuel’s hard-core Zionist background, the fact that his father was in the Irgun (the infamous Jewish terrorist movement in pre-1948 Palestine), and I got annoyed because it seemed like an inverse of the sort of “But is it good for the Jews?” mentality I grew up with. The chief of staff is responsible for a lot more than Israel/Palestine policy and nothing that Obama has said in the last six years has left any doubt about how good his administration was (not) going to be for the Palestinians. But then I learned that Emanuel is an ultra-successful investment banker, was the largest recipient of campaign donations from hedge funds and financial institutions … it’s not good news. Neither is the fact that one of Obama’s top economic advisers is Robert Rubin, who as Clinton’s treasury secretary started off the deregulation that set up the current financial and economic crisis.

Yesterday I went to the big rally in San Francisco to protest the passage of Prop. 8. It was a pretty good unity event, with speakers like Rev. Amos Brown, an African American former county supervisor who has at times been pretty anti-gay. There were great signs like “No More Mr. Nice Gay”, “Another Str8 Against H8” and “Two Nice Girls In Love = REALLY SCARY.” There were also some really offensive ones like “Black Is the New Gay.” You might think that all the white guys carrying that sign would at least pause to wonder why they didn’t see any Black people carrying it, or if not, you might at least think the fact that a Black lesbian yelled at them that they didn’t have Black skin so they have no idea what it’s like would cause them to think, but not so. We argued with them until we were hoarse and frustrated, but they just couldn’t get what’s wrong with expropriating someone else’s struggle. There were also a lot of signs saying, “Chickens Have More Right Than Gays” or “Chickens 1, Gays 0,” referring to the passage of Proposition 2, giving farm animals the right to turn around. Next time I go to one of these things, I’m going to carry a sign saying, “Queers Rights = Animal Rights.” (Some Israeli friends of mine are in a group called One Struggle, that is a largely queer anti-occupation animal rights group.)

Despite all these conflicts, I feel hopeful. I can’t help it. It feels like a huge cloud has lifted. I believe Obama is a supreme opportunist. I read Dreams from My Father a few years ago, and the person who wrote that book was a lot more progressive than the guy who is about to be president. So I believe he changed his politics to get elected, and that makes it hard to trust him.
The good thing about opportunists is that they sway with the wind. And that means it’s up to us, the progressive movements, to create a huge wind.

Code Pink plans to demonstrate at his house in Chicago for the next two months. That’s a mistake. But it’s not a mistake because Obama shouldn’t be pressured or criticized, or because, as one friend said, “Obama hasn’t done anything yet.” He has done plenty. His appointments speak loudly, as do statements he made during the campaign. It’s a mistake because one, it’s something only a small group of full-time activists can do, and two, they have not built broad support for such actions. It will make people who like Obama, especially African Americans, see the left as old racist nay-sayers, and will make Obama feel embattled before he gets started.

A better approach would be to target every Democratic congressperson or senator for the next two months. That is something everyone can do wherever they live, in whatever manner works for them, and it puts the people who depend on our votes on notice that we’re watching them, not just Obama. For eight years, we in San Francisco have heard from Nancy Pelosi’s staff, “It’s not us, it’s the Republicans. We’re with you. If only we had the majority, we would do what you want. If only we had the White House, we’d make change.” Okay, you’ve got the majority and you’ve got the White House. Let’s see it.

The left needs to get it together, and fast. The people who work on every issue, from health care to green jobs to prison abolition to housing rights to welfare, need to get together and come up with a 100 days agenda for the new administration and the new Congress, and we need to get it out there using all the communication technologies whose power the Obama campaign proved.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the constitution. All the big civil rights groups have announced campaigns to “Restore the Constitution”. Well the constitution is more than the Bill of Rights, though goddess knows, that is something that needs to be restored in a hurry. The preamble to the constitution says something about promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Civil rights are more than freedom of speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Civil rights include the right to housing, the right to food, the right to some leisure time, the right to education, the right to love whom we choose and marry them if we insist, the right not only to survive but to thrive. If we can convince the ACLU and CCR to make this part of their 100 Days to Restore the Constitution campaigns, and if we all unite behind that campaign, then I think we have a chance to get things off to a better start.

Ehud Olmert, the Newest Dove

2008-10-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

Packaging old ideas as new ones is something the Israeli leadership are experts at. If you look at every supposed peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, beginning in 1993 through two weeks ago, you’ll find that every one of them says just about the say thing, and more importantly doesn’t say the same things. The Israelis are encouraged in this approach by their U.S. backers, who are even more gifted at recycling. Every U.S. administration since Nixon’s has vowed that it was going to be the one to solve the “Middle East Crisis,” and they’ve all gone about it the same way – arm Israel to the teeth, back every war crime they commit, threaten the Palestinians for daring to assert any rights at all, and then at the nth hour, find an Israeli hawk to have a “change of heart” so they can sell it to the Palestinians as a miracle from on-high, too good to turn down.

It’s never worked yet. If it works this time, which is unlikely, it will only be because the Palestinians have been beaten down to an unprecedented level in the last eight years. For the first time, the Israelis and U.S. have succeeded in sparking serious internecine fighting in Palestine, especially in Gaza. This has been largely accomplished through the siege of Gaza, which has left people literally starving, without power for weeks, lacking access to basic medicines and desperate for any way to make a living. In other words – Iraq.

Last week, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave an interview to the leading Israeli newspaper in which he castigated himself for his previous right-wing views and said Israel must give up 95% of the West Bank plus 5% of Israeli territory and “most of” East Jerusalem in order to make peace. He claimed that "What I'm telling you now has never been said by an Israeli leader before me."

That claim is flatly false. Remember Camp David 2000? Ehud Barak offered 93% (or so) of the West Bank, plus a portion of Israeli territory to make up for what they weren’t getting, plus “nearly all” of East Jerusalem. The Palestinians, so the legend goes, rejected this “generous offer,” demonstrating once again that they were not “partners for peace.”

Three years ago, in 2005, it was Ariel Sharon who had had his epiphany and gone from right-wing hawk to moderate peacemaker, leading a breakaway movement from the Likud party that formed Kadima. Olmert was one of the first to follow him. Two years earlier, Sharon had rocked the world by using the word “occupation,” committing himself to the creation of a Palestinian state under the U.S.-promoted “road map.” The result? The completion or construction of over 250 miles of Apartheid Wall, isolating 78 villages and annexing nearly 50% of the West Bank; and rapid expansion of settlements in the West Bank, in contravention of agreements under the road map.

Not to be a complete cynic, I believe Olmert has had a significant change of heart. Where he was once a hard-liner, he now believes it is necessary to compromise. But this change did not come about as suddenly as he now represents. In 2003, Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem, gave another frank interview to Yediot Aharonot, this one endorsing Sharon’s policy of “unilateral disengagement.”

“We are approaching a point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want is the right to vote,’” Olmert said at that time. “The day they get it, we will lose everything.” He added that “I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us.”

If Olmert gave too much credit to Jewish activists in toppling South African apartheid, his use of the analogy is important. The fact is that more and more Palestinians have indeed begun saying, in the last few years, “All we want is the right to vote”; the “one-state solution” which had very little support in the Palestinian territories in 2003, has become a mainstream, if still minority, position in 2008. And use of the word “apartheid” to describe Israeli policy has become more common by the international community, including small but growing numbers of Jews both inside and outside of Israel.

Given these facts, what is remarkable is not Olmert’s statement, but that the offer to the Palestinians has not sweetened, eight years after the collapse of the Oslo process and the start of the Second Intifada. The fact that it hasn’t speaks to the success of the very hard-line policies that Olmert now supposedly castigates himself for.

It turns out that we don’t have to speculate or read between the lines of Olmert’s self-provided hype to find out what he really meant. In doing some research for this essay, I turned up a surprising article published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on September 27, one day before the Yediot interview appeared.

Haaretz reported,

“Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday rejected an Israeli peace proposal, which included withdrawal from 93 percent of the West Bank, because it does not provide for a contiguous Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

“Nabil Abu Rdainah, Abbas’s spokesman, told the official Palestinian news agency WAFA that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's plan showed a ‘lack of seriousness.’”

“The centerpiece of Olmert's detailed proposal is the suggested permanent border, which would be based on an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank. In return for the land retained by Israel in the West Bank, the Palestinians would receive alternative land in the Negev [desert], adjacent to the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians would also enjoy free passage between Gaza and the West Bank without any security checks, the proposal says.

“A senior Israeli official said the Palestinians were given preliminary maps of the proposed borders.

“Under Olmert's offer, Israel would keep 7 percent of the West Bank, while the Palestinians would receive territory equivalent to 5.5 percent of West Bank. Israel views the passage between Gaza and the West Bank as compensating for this difference: Though it would officially remain in Israeli hands, it would connect the two halves of the Palestinian state…

“The land to be annexed to Israel would include the large settlement blocs, and the border would be similar to the present route of the separation fence. Israel would keep Ma'aleh Adumim, Gush Etzion, the settlements surrounding Jerusalem and some land in the northern West Bank adjacent to Israel.

“Since Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently approved more construction in both Efrat and Ariel, two settlements relatively far from the 1949 armistice lines, it is reasonable to assume that Olmert wants to include these settlements in the territory annexed to Israel as well.”

I call this article surprising because it seems not to have been covered in the international press at all. Considering the hoopla with which previous episodes of this saga have been met, I don’t know what to make of the silence greeting this round. Is it just that the world has gotten tired of supposed breakthroughs that are clearly not? Olmert’s lame duck status? I don’t know, so I’m not going to spend time guessing. Instead, let’s look at what he actually said.

First, he presented “preliminary maps,” but didn’t commit to anything – a position that must feel quite familiar to Abbas, who was the chief negotiator at Camp David, when Israel also presented various maps but no concrete offer of borders. Since Olmert is saying that the border would be “similar to the present route of the separation fence,” and the “separation fence,” aka the Apartheid Wall, is built 80% on Palestinian land, leaving 16% of West Bank land on the western (“Israeli”) side, it’s hard to see how such a plan could give the Palestinians 95% of the West Bank, even if Israel were not planning to hold onto settlements like Ariel, some 25 kilometers inside the Green Line.

Second, according to Haaretz, Israel would receive the settlement blocs immediately – or more accurately, retain them, but would not hand over any Israeli territory to the Palestinians, nor establish the free passage to Gaza, until “the PA,” i.e., Abbas’s Fatah faction, takes back control of Gaza from Hamas. So in fact, the Palestinians might never get contiguous territory.

Third, the Palestinian state to be established would be expected to be demilitarized, without an army. The Palestinians have demanded that their security forces be capable of defending against ‘outside threats.”

Olmert’s principal claim to a radical change of views is on the question of Jerusalem – which was deliberately left out of his negotiations with Abbas, as a concession to the right-wing Israeli religious party, Shas. Where for most of his career he championed a unified Jerusalem under complete Israeli control, he now supports some kind of partition. This, again, is in the interest of winning the “demographic war”: "Whoever wants to hold on to all of the city's territory will have to bring 270,000 Arabs inside the fences of sovereign Israel. It won't work," Olmert said. So obviously, his proposal is to keep the “temporary” Wall that runs through Jerusalem in perpetuity and turn it into a border.

To understand why this is not such a big breakthrough, one has to be familiar with the political geography of Jerusalem.

The center of the city is the walled Old City, a densely populated 0.9 kilometer area, divided into four quarters: Jewish Quarter, Muslim Quarter, Christian Quarter and Armenian Quarter. The Old City houses the Western (Wailing) Wall of Herod’s Temple, the holiest Jewish site, Al Aqsa Mosque/Haram ash-Sharif, the third most sacred site in Islam, and the Via Dolorosa and Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which comprise the Stations of the Cross. Under the armistice of 1949, the Old City and the areas east of it were Palestinian areas under Jordanian control, and the areas to the west were annexed by Israel.

When most people imagine Jerusalem, they visualize the golden Dome of the Rock or Orthodox Jews praying at the Wailing Wall. What we call Jerusalem, however, comprises 125 square kilometers (43 miles) sprawling to the west and the east. It includes ancient Palestinian villages, stately old Jewish neighborhoods, new modern suburbs, farm land, high-rise pre-fab tenements filled with immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Bedouin sheep camps. To the Palestinians, all the villages between Bethlehem to the south and Ramallah to the north are part of Al Quds (“The Holy”), which the Israelis call Yerushalayim. Israel since 1967, but especially since the beginning of the Oslo peace process in 1993, has been confiscating Palestinian land and building new (illegal) settlements in the outlying areas of Jerusalem and the international press obligingly calls them “neighborhoods” or “suburbs” of Jerusalem.

At the time of the 1948 war, the population of Jerusalem was about two-thirds Jewish, with the vast majority of Jews living in the western part of the city. The partition plan of 1947 called for Jerusalem to be an international city. Under the Armistice of 1949, Israel annexed the territory west of the Old City and Jordan ultimately annexed the eastern areas, including the Old City. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews had to leave the Old City at that time, and tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of West Jerusalem. (The exact numbers are very confusing – generally reliable Palestinian sources say 64,000-80,000, but the British Mandate census recorded only 65,000 Palestinian Arabs in all of Jerusalem in 1948. Probably, this is yet further testimony to the many possible definitions of “Jerusalem.”) One of the most notorious massacres by the Israeli forces was at the Jerusalem village of Deir Yassin in 1947. Other depopulated Palestinian villages in Western Jerusalem included Liftah, which was famous for its citrons, a citrus fruit used in the Jewish festival of Sukkot (which happens to begin tomorrow night).

Currently metropolitan Jerusalem is home to about 750,000 people, of which roughly 64% are Jewish. The government is continually expanding the borders of Jerusalem to include more Jewish areas, in its effort to maintain demographic superiority to support its claim to the city. At the same time, it has declared Palestinian villages such as Azzariya and Ar-Ram, which have always been part of Jerusalem, to be in the West Bank, and enclosing them on the West Bank side of the Wall. House demolitions, refusing building permits to Palestinians, denials of residency permits for spouses of Jerusalemite Palestinians to live in the city, construction of settlements in East Jerusalem and the Old City, and the construction of the Wall, are all tools in this demographic war. Olmert has until now been a prime supporter of this policy of “Judaizing” Jerusalem. As recently as June 2008, he defended increased settlement construction in East Jerusalem in the face of Condoleeza Rice’s criticism of the policy as “unhelpful” to the Annapolis peace process she was trying to kick-start.

Now remember that the Old City is 0.9 square kilometers, out of a total of 125 sq. km, and you will understand why it is easy to believe that Olmert is indeed proposing to offer the Palestinians “nearly all” of East Jerusalem. I’ve walked along the Wall in Jerusalem, and it’s probably less than a mile from Damascus Gate, the eastern edge of the Old City. Even with Israel retaining settlements like Har Homa, Pisgat Ze’ev, Ma’ale Adumim, Mevaseret Tzion and Gilo, the Palestinians would still no doubt be getting some 90% of East Jerusalem. This is roughly the same deal that was offered at Camp David in 2000. The late Israeli scholar, Tanya Rinehart, looked at the map and said that what the Israeli and U.S. negotiators did was label the village of Abu Dis “Jerusalem.” They didn’t lie – Abu Dis, is _part_ of East Jerusalem. I expect that in the coming weeks, Condi Rice and Tony Blair will step up to tell the Palestinian negotiators that Olmert’s conversion is a dream come true and they need to sign now and ask questions later. If they don’t, the international press will report once again that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

What the Palestinians will not be getting under an Olmert Plan, as they would not have under the Camp David plan, is the Old City and sovereignty over their holy sites. Nor will they be getting a border on the Green Line (the internationally recognized armistice line from 1949). If Muslim Palestinians cannot go pray at Al Aqsa Mosque, and Christians cannot walk the Stations of the Cross at Easter, nothing is going to convince them they are in Jerusalem, and no Palestinian leader who tries to do so is going to stay in power.

Olmert _has_ made a major change in his outlook. He used to support ethnic cleansing, and now he supports apartheid. In both cases he is driven by a fear of the ultimate catastrophe – democracy. As for the Palestinians, they remain between the Dome of the Rock and a hard place.

Rachel Corrie, Ben Linder and Me

2008-04-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

April 5, 2008

Tonight I'm going to an event for the premier of a book, Let Me Stand Alone, the Journals of Rachel Corrie (actually, I didn't, but my intentions were good). I haven’t read the book, and I know enough about Rachel to know that this is probably a misperception, but the title of the book rubs me the wrong way. It gives the impression, especially to those who will hear about the book but never read it, that Rachel’s life has meaning because she did something alone, when in fact, what she is known for is something she did as part of a movement, something she could not have done on her own. More generally, it feeds into the American idea that it’s extraordinary individuals who make a difference, rather than groups, what might be called Dr. King Syndrome. It’s the same response that I had to Cindy Sheehan when she issued her (short-lived, as it turned out) farewell as the “face of the peace movement” (see my Open Letter to Cindy at http://democracy-sometime.blogspot.com/search/label/left%20crit-self-crit).

Everything, our media, our literature, our history, is reduced to the actions of individuals. This may be nice for the few who become those icons of personal achievement (though it’s certainly not nice for Rachel Corrie or Casey Sheehan, because they’re dead, and it wasn’t nice for Cindy because it led to a nervous breakdown and a life-threatening illness), but it makes the masses of people feel both that they cannot make a difference, and that they do not need to make a difference.

I remember when I had first started participating in and organizing direct action, primarily against U.S. intervention in Central America, I was talking to a close friend of my mom’s, who has since died. She was impressed with my commitment, but even more, she was impressed that I had friends who had been friends of Ben Linder’s in Seattle. For those of you – probably most of you, at this point – who do not know who Ben Linder was, he was a young Jewish American who went to Nicaragua as an engineer, to help electrify rural areas. The government of Nicaragua at that time was the popular/Marxist Sandinistas, and the U.S. was financing and arming the “contras” in their guerrilla war against the Sandinistas, and Ben was killed in a contra raid in Jinotega in 1986. A lot of U.S. citizens had by that time spent time in Nicaragua, picking coffee and cotton, volunteering in clinics, building houses and schools, and Ben was the first (and last, as it turned out) to be killed. And though his name is barely known now by people who didn’t know him, he was in the eighties at least as well known as Rachel Corrie is today. (And as with Rachel, the U.S. government did nothing to help his family find out what happened to him or to hold anyone accountable for killing him.)

So this friend of my mom’s had heard about Ben and she was opposed to the contra war, and she said she would be willing to participate in civil disobedience, but only if she knew it was going to be worth it. And I struggled with how to convince her, because the truth is, you never know what your actions are going to be worth. Would Ben think that his sacrifice was worth it, if he knew that before the nineties were a year old, the Sandinistas would be voted out of power? Would he think it was worth it now, because Sandinistas have regained power in some areas of the country? Would Rachel think her sacrifice was worth it, if she knew that a few months ago in Gaza, police controlled by Hamas violently broke up peaceful demonstrations commemorating the death of Arafat? Would either of them think their sacrifice was worth it, even if they knew that eventually the lands where they gave their lives would be free and prosperous?

I hope not. I hope that if either of them knew they would be killed, they would have made different choices on those fateful days. Among internationals working in Palestine, we honored Rachel’s life, but we didn’t encourage people to follow her example. When I was recruiting people to go Palestine, if I ran into anyone who said, “I want to be the next Rachel Corrie,” I would say that that person should not be allowed to go, because we are not in the business of recruiting martyrs.

At the same time, who am I to say that their sacrifices were not worthwhile? We have no way to know while we are in the throes of struggle, what is going to be the tipping point. There’s a fallacy which goes along with the culture of stardom, I think, that says that there’s one way to accomplish our goals and we all need to do the same thing. Thus you read books by the people who led the “Troops Out Now” movement claiming that they were the ones who ended the Vietnam War, and ones by people who chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” insisting that no, it was them, while the Silent Majority who stayed home and watched them all on TV saw them all as one bunch of crazies. Lately, everyone in the antiwar movement is talking about “what is effective?” and I sometimes get the feeling that they think there’s one right answer that is hiding just around the corner. We don’t always remember to ask, what is the effect we want to have?

Some people claim that leafleting is more effective than direct action, because it reaches people directly. But how do we know what effect our leaflets have on people? We don’t follow them around so we have pretty much no idea how many of the people who take a leaflet even read it, and how many of those learn one thing from it, and how many (or how few) of those are motivated to do anything. Occasionally, you give someone information and they come back and ask for more, but that’s very rare.

On the other side of the spectrum are the people who only want to do actions that really impede the making of war in some way. Those people are usually putting a lot of energy into figuring out how to outwit the authorities, and they are easily stymied by the fact that the authorities have more resources than we do. At a meeting I was at today, someone observed that the San Francisco police have gotten very fast at dismantling the lockboxes that activists use to prolong blockades, and so he said we need to come up with better lockboxes. I think a better message to take is that we’re not going to win a war of equipment, that we need to stop relying on equipment to make up for the fact that our actions don’t involve enough people.

Then there are people whose main goal in any action is to get positive media coverage, but that’s a big crap shoot because we have pretty much no control over what the media do and don’t cover. On March 19 we got a lot of mostly good coverage, but that wasn’t because of us and how great our action was, it was because March 19 is the one day a year when the media looks for stories about the antiwar movement. It’s like being veterans on Veterans’ Day. We could do the same action next week and get no coverage at all. I know this is true because the group I was part of, which was one of the media stars of the day due to our highly photogenic orange jump suits and hoods, did almost the same thing on January 11 and not a single news outlet responded to our press calls. The wide variety of available media nowadays gives you more possibilities for getting coverage, but also makes it harder to make a dent. It used to be, if your demonstration got on one local television station, a significant percentage of people in the area would see it. Now even if you get on all the TV stations and CNN, most people will not see it because a majority of people who follow current events at all are getting their news from the internet.

The struggle against apartheid in South Africa is considered the epitome of a successful movement that used direct action, and when people think of that struggle, they are always thinking of the huge protests at places like Berkeley and Michigan. They don’t remember, or they don’t know, that there was daily civil disobedience at the South African embassy in Washington for an entire year, and some of those actions had movie stars getting arrested, and some of them had dozens of people, but some of them had five priests or twelve students. At U.C. Berkeley; a different group did direct action every day during one quarter – one day the teachers, one day the disabled activists, one day the queers …. People in many countries protested when South African athletes participated in international sports events, and boycotted South African cultural events. Not one of those actions would have made much difference by itself, but all together, they won the day.

It’s not what one person does alone, or what one group does alone, but the times when in spite of all our divisions, we manage to support one another, that we should be proudest of. Let us all stand together.

After the Anniversary Comes the Fighting ...

2008-03-31T17:56:00.000-07:00

March 30, 2008

Another March 19 has come and gone, leaving those of us who organized protests of five years of war to muse about what we accomplished.

The actions here in San Francisco were pretty successful. We had more people participating than we have had in the last four years, though unsurprisingly, not close to the numbers who came out in 2003 when the war first began. There were 165 arrests, most of people who chose to be arrested, and that was a lot more than any single action in the last four years as well. Which in itself is interesting, because in the 1980s, when the U.S. was involved in covert wars in Central America that hardly anyone knew about, we used to occasionally have actions where 500 people got arrested.

It’s not that getting arrested is the be all and end all of activism, it’s just that it’s one indication of how much personal risk people are willing to take to express their opposition to a government policy. I always assumed that the more egregious the government’s actions were, the more people would be willing to engage in resistance that carried some risk to themselves. But in fact, the opposite has proved true, and I think there are a lot of reasons for that.

First, it’s been several generations now since there was a major example in this country of mass nonviolent action actually being effective in changing policy. In the eighties, the civil rights struggles of the fifties and sixties, and the antiwar actions of the sixties and seventies, were still fresh in a lot of our memories. There were even people who had been involved in the labor movements of the thirties who were participating in those actions. But people who are 35 and under today don’t even know about most of the movements of the eighties which used direct action: the anti-nuclear movement, the movement against the contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador, the sanctuary movement, even the anti-apartheid movement in its grassroots community aspect. It seemed a couple years ago that the immigrant rights movement would provide a modern example, which like the Black civil rights movement, might have rippled to create an activist awakening among other communities. But, for reasons that not being a part of that community, I can only speculate about, that massive uprising quickly dwindled to a movement of the hard core.

Second, a friend pointed out, with cable TV, there are so many more options for what to watch, and that’s compounded by the nearly limitless resources of the internet, while in the sixties, seventies and eighties, everyone was watching the same news. The opportunities to opt out of news altogether mean that even the rare glimpses of the Iraq war on the mainstream television news go unseen by a majority.

At the same time, the overwhelming barrage of disturbing images and stories from all corners of the world causes people to shut down. A few weeks ago, I was listening to the Winter Soldier hearings at work, and when people would come into the center where I work alone on Fridays, I would tell them what it was. “What’s a war crime?” asked one man, a 30-something African American who is a supervisor in the records department. I explained briefly and he was momentarily shocked: “We’re doing that?” But then he said, “I like to maintain a positive outlook, so I can’t think about things like that.” My coworker who came in at 3:00 p.m., a 60-something working class Jew and life-long leftist, said something very similar: the news is too upsetting, and she is done thinking she can do anything about it, so she tunes it out.

On March 19, I was part of a group of about 30 people who walked around in orange jumpsuits and hoods (and a few of us in masks of prominent politicians) doing theater in areas heavy with shoppers and tourists. Many people came up to us and said, “Thank you for being out here,” which at first was gratifying but quickly became deeply disturbing. What will it take, we started to ask each other, for people to move from saying, “Thank you,” to saying, “What can I do?”

I used to think that actions would do that, that people might not decide they could do what we were doing, but seeing us take action would motivate them to think about what they were willing to do. In fact, I think that once that was true, and I think the consumer mentality that the ruling class has worked so hard to promote over the last twenty years has destroyed that possibility. Whether it’s a vigil, a blockade or a die-in, people see it as the same as a billboard, a street band or religious fanatics ranting at them – part of the ambience, something maybe trying to elicit a reaction, but not an invitation to DO anything.

It is, of course, hard to convince people to participate in activism when you can’t point to any specific action and say, “Look at the effect it had.” When I told an Israeli friend who is also a U.S. citizen about the March 19 actions, she pissed me off by saying, “That doesn’t do anything. If everyone stopped paying taxes, that would do something.” It pissed me off because one, there is no chance that _everyone_ is going to stop paying taxes, or even that a lot of people are going to do it. It is extremely difficult to actually stop paying taxes; you can’t have an over-the-table job, you can’t have a bank account, and you can’t own any property. So only a few people are going to do it; a few people already do, and it’s a noble act of conscience but not something that actually hurts the government as much as the government can hurt them. And second, it puts the cart way before the horse. If “everyone” was about to stop paying taxes, we certainly would have been able to get the 68% of everyone who opposes the war to come out to a peaceful demonstration, and we can’t even do that. The point is not the specific act, but that we have to figure out something we can get everyone who opposes the war to do, and that in itself is a monumental task which we are nowhere near being able to accomplish.

The warmakers have made it clear that they don’t care what people think. Cheney said it flat out in the runup to March 19: “We don’t make policy based on opinion polls.” They do care, though, what people do, at least if what those people are doing makes it hard for them to continue governing. So the $64,000 question is, what is there that masses of people would actually do that the government would care about? It would not necessarily be one thing, but some set of things which would signify actual resistance, not resignation.

We can’t just sit around waiting for everyone to stop paying their taxes, but we do need to reframe the concept of resistance. One thing we need to stop doing is equating resistance with demonstrations. I think demonstrations are important, but they are only one kind of resistance. There are people who are never going to go to a demonstration, because, as my friend Jean says, they are just convinced that’s not something people like them do. So we need to open up discussions which will elicit “culturally appropriate” (credit to Jean again) forms of resistance for different communities. But that’s not going to happen by itself, and it’s not as easy as it sounds because anything that is effective is going to come in for repression. If enough people start hanging “Stop the War” signs in their windows that the government feels that’s a threat they can’t ignore, they’re going to outlaw hanging signs in windows.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that if that happened, fewer people would be willing to do it. Repression can energize resistance as often or more often than it discourages it, because people figure that the government doesn’t repress things that aren’t making a difference.

The other day, I got an email at work, from a secretary forwarding a job from the attorney she works for. I’m not sure whether it was the secretary or the attorney, but one of them had as her epigram the quote from Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I thought, if someone who works at a big corporate law firm chooses that tag line for their email, maybe we’re closer to winning than I thought.

Are we the ones we're waiting for?

2008-03-17T01:36:00.001-07:00

March 16, 2008

For the last four months I’ve been focused on March 19, the fifth anniversary of the second war on Iraq, and now it is here. My goal was to reinvigorate a militant anti-war movement this season, and I would say that it looks like we have done that. Direct Action to Stop the War II, a group (or grouping, which remains to be seen) initiated principally by people who were involved in the shutdown of San Francisco in March 2003, has pulled in a couple hundred people, mostly in their 20s, who haven’t been involved directly in organizing for the last several years, and they have good energy. On the other hand, while a lot of people have come to meetings and plan to participate in actions, despite very good intentions, we have somehow not succeeded in getting a lot of them involved in doing work, with the result that it still feels like a few people are taking most of the responsibility, a lot of us have too many different responsibilities to fulfill them all well, and the very ambitious actions feel a little underorganized.

Yesterday was the first of two actions we organized for this anniversary, a rally and blockade at the Chevron Refinery in Richmond (a city just north of Berkeley). The rally was organized mainly by community groups which have for a long time been battling Chevron on environmental issues, and are now fighting a proposed expansion of the refinery. It drew a good crowd – estimates differ of how good, my estimate was 800-1,000; the Chronicle said “more than 300”, other activists put it somewhere in between and I imagine the organizers would say 1,500. There was great music and spoken word mixed in with the speeches, few of which I heard because I was involved in doing a lightning direct action training/orientation for about 20 people who were just plugging into the blockade yesterday. This was my first experience with a super-short training (just under an hour) and I have to admit, you can get a lot in if you’re really focused.

One thing that was kind of disappointing about the rally and the march that followed was that most of the community participants were white (though there was prominent leadership by two African American men), in a community that is overwhelmingly African American and Latino. Even more disappointing was that very few people from the Richmond community participated in the blockade. Neither of these facts was shocking, given that the sponsoring organizations in Richmond were groups like Communities for a Better Environment and Richmond Greens, along with West County Toxics Coalition, an environmental justice group. A friend, who was arrested in yesterday’s action at Chevron, pointed out that at the same time there was a community-wide mobilization in the African American churches that brought out 1,000 volunteers for a day without killing – Richmond has one of the highest murder rates in the state. The fact that we (or at least I) did not even know about this parallel action in the same small city highlights the fact that it is harder than we sometimes want to admit to bridge the huge cultural and political divides that exist in our society.

Last week, there was a panel on direct action as part of a larger strategy for anti-war movement building. At one point, a woman who identified herself as “poor and old” spoke up to say, “Convince me, and others like me, that we should take the risk to participate in your direct action.” Asked to restate the question, one of the panelists said, “She is bringing up the point that many people who are poor can’t take the risk of participating in actions where they might be arrested.” The woman shook her head. “No,” she said, “I want to take the risk. I want you to tell me why I should take the risk.” This exchange (which I’m totally paraphrasing and hopefully not further mischaracterizing) really made me think.

The statement that the panelist made, that people who are poor and/or people of color can’t risk arrest by participating in civil disobedience/direct action, is invoked so often in movement circles, it’s like a mantra. While it’s true that it’s a lot easier for people with class and race privilege to blithely throw ourselves into the arms of police, the mantra irritates me. The fact is that poor people and people of color have done direct action a lot more than rich white people have. If you make a list of campaigns that utilized civil disobedience or direct action, or if you look at one of the lists that others have made, 80% of the campaigns are going to be ones led by people who were either poor or of color or both. To name just a few: the campaigns against apartheid in South Africa (both here and there); the civil rights movement; the labor movements on every continent; the occupation of the refineries in Nigeria a few years back; the rebellions against privatization in Argentina and Bolivia; the first Palestinian Intifada. To say that people can’t take the risk of direct action is to let ourselves off the hook. What I think the woman at the panel was getting at is that most people won’t take the risk because we’re the ones who are asking them to, and they have no reason to trust us, or to think that our interests are theirs.

The flip side is that only a tiny fraction of the people who can well afford to take the (minimal) risk involved in doing direct action in San Francisco or Richmond are going to take it. And for this we also let ourselves off the hook, by telling ourselves that they’re not doing it because they don’t agree with us, they’re in favor of the war, they’re unenlightened or they’re disempowered. But it’s not true. Over two-thirds of people in this country oppose the war; in the Bay Area, it’s probably closer to 85%. In March 2003, something like 20,000 people participated in the direct action in San Francisco, which was unprecedented. That was 10% or less of the people who had participated in marches against the war before it started, less than 0.4% of the population of the Bay Area.

I’m not trying to say that most of the 6,000,000 people in the Bay Area could be convinced to risk arrest or engage in some other form of active resistance. But a lot more of them could be than the 500 or 1,000, or less, who are going to do it this year. And they too are not going to do it because of us, because of what my friend Gopal calls our “self-marginalizing behavior.” Most of them are not going to do it because we’re not going to ask them. We’re not going to ask them because we think they’ll say no, or because they’re not the people we want, or because we look down on their lifestyles or their fashion sense. We might hand people a flier at BART on Tuesday or Wednesday, but few people decide to join an action, especially one that carries an unfamiliar risk, because some stranger hands them a flier. They might do it if a coworker asked them, or a family member, or someone in their church choir or someone in their cancer support group. But I’m not going to ask my coworkers, because they’ll say no, and I’m not going to ask the women in my support group because I think they’ll think I’m weird.

At a meeting of Direct Action to Stop the War in January, one of the few African American women there said that in her community, the attitude toward the anti-war movement is “What have they done for us lately?” I looked around the room and I thought, honestly, a lot of the people there have done a lot. There are quite a few people in this grouping who work for community based organizations, for free or for pay. There are union organizers, teachers, counselors, nurses, people who work on immigration rights, people who work on housing rights, people who work against gentrification. What those people haven’t done, though, is bring the people they’re working with in those community-based organizations to this anti-war organizing. I don’t know if that’s because they’re embarrassed to invite people to an almost all-white, class-privileged group, or because they have invited people and they don’t want to come. I know one friend said some of her friends said they didn’t want to go because everyone is white, and she said, “Well, if you come, they won’t be.” But they didn’t.

Alliance building across race and class is really difficult in this country, and it seems to me that it gets more difficult all the time. I’ve been in a lot of groups that have tried to do it over the years, and most of them failed. But one reason we fail is because we don’t acknowledge how much time it takes. If we’re serious about building alliances with people who don’t know or trust us, that’s what we’re going to be doing for the next six months or a year or more. We’re not going to be able to build the alliances and organize a major anti-war action in four months. We can’t go to a community where we’re not known with our agenda, and say, “Want to do this?” We have to go with no agenda, to support what they are doing. After we’ve been around for a while, shown ourselves to be reliable, then we might be able to say, “Hey, you know what else I’m doing?” and then maybe some of them would say, “Well I might be interested in checking that out.” And then again, they might not.

But we need to realize too that if we did that, we would not be organizing creative, militant anti-war actions, and that feels pretty important right now too. So maybe –I’m not saying it is, but it’s possible – it’s better to just admit that we’re not who we wish we were and concentrate on doing what we can do. Or maybe, we should think about the risks we have not been willing to take, and what it’s going to take to get us to have that conversation with our families, our doctors and our accountants.

New Tattoo!

2007-11-20T13:14:00.000-08:00

My next-to-last day of radiation, I was walking home and I passed a tattoo parlor. It suddenly came to me that what I wanted to do to celebrate being done with all my intensive treatment (as opposed to the hormone therapy which I will now be taking for five years). Though I had vaguely thought about tattoos before, I never really wanted one, but once I had the thought, I never questioned that it was the thing to do. The next day the nurses and doctor asked me how I was going to celebrate being done and I told them, and I was surprised that no one said, “Really?” or “Are you sure you want to do that?” or even “Don’t get it on the arm where you had your lymph nodes removed” (very important because of the risk of lymphedema). They all said, “That’s a great idea!” The medical assistant showed me a few of her 11 tattoos. The nurse asked me what I was going to get, and although I had not actually thought about it, I said “I think maybe a phoenix.” And that became the answer.

The next day I started looking up phoenixes on the internet, and it turns out that it’s quite a scary, ugly bird. Well, actually, as a friend pointed out, it is a mythical bird, so in theory, it could look any way you wanted, but in all the drawings and paintings I found, it has a kind of scrunched up head and long beak, which I don’t want on my body. So I started looking up other kinds of firebirds, and then I thought of the firebird which the artist Eric Drooker painted on the Apartheid Wall at my friend Munira’s house in Mas’ha (anyone who doesn’t know that story and wants to can read about it at http://www.iwps.info/en/articles/article.php?id=189). He and Munira chose that image because of the sensation of freedom it creates, and I felt like I needed to bring that freedom into my life now too.

I asked around and everyone recommended the same tattoo parlor, Black and Blue Tattoo, the only all-women tattoo place in San Francisco. I looked at the website and decided that Leona, who lived in Mexico for years, would be the best person to render the bird, which Eric said was a Mexican design, into body art. I exported a picture from my video of the mural project, and printed it out in color on an 8 ½ x 11 page. So when I showed it to Leona, who indeed really got the energy of the bird, she said, “Is this the size you want it?” I hadn’t thought about it and said, “Well, it’s a little big,” but she held it up to my body and showed how with the body on my arm and the wings on the back and front of my shoulder, it would fly when I lift my arm, so I said “okay, sure.”

I was unprepared for how long it would take – almost 4 hours, but the pain never got too bad and she did an amazing job. At one point Leona said she could feel the poison draining out of my body as the pigment was going in (I had told her about the cancer and the chemo). In a way it is ironic that I chose to celebrate the end of something that brought so much physical discomfort by doing something that caused discomfort of its own, but it feels right. I know some of you will have religious or other objections to it, but I can only repeat, it feels right to me. In years to come, the memories of the cancer experience will fade (I trust), and of course the tattoo will fade over time too, but it will always be a reminder of survival.

I kept this blog in part to help others who go through a similar experience, and I can’t tell you how happy it’s made me to hear that some of you have given it to people you know who are dealing with cancer, or that it has made you feel that if it happens to you, you can get through it. So I feel like I need to be clear about one thing, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea. Getting through this has given me some perspective on my life and things in it, and of course that’s something to be grateful for however it comes. But cancer is not a gift, an adventure or a sacrament. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason (that is, it happens for some reason, but not a good reason), that it’s all part of G-d’s plan or that He never gives us more than we can bear. Cancer is a terrible thing that I wish didn’t happen to people, and to be honest, I especially wish it didn’t happen to me. And within reason, given that I’m not going to obsess or change my lifestyle completely, I am doing whatever I can to make sure I don’t get it again.

Of course, with what’s happened to our beautiful Bay in the last weeks, all of our prospects for being healthy are getting worse every day. (For people not in the area, a container ship crashed into the Bay Bridge and dumped 58,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay two weeks ago; volunteers were soaking up the oil on the beaches with their hair, but the crab and fishing seasons are set to resume next week and today, the Chronicle had pictures of swimmers going back into the water.) Bless those of you who did the ritual on Saturday, I wish I could have joined you, and all of you who are continuing to do rituals or offer prayers, and of course Lisa and others who are working all the time to protect our endangered habitat.

Hair 2.0

2007-10-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

I have a buzz cut. Not something I ever longed for, but everyone seems to love it, from old friends to people at work. It looks mostly gray to me, but it’s hard to tell, there’s darker and lighter, so maybe when it grows out some it will be salt-and-pepper like before. It feels like a kitten and I can’t resist rubbing it a lot.

New growth on my head has made me start thinking about newness inside of me. I feel like I have a new life now, and while, like I said in my last post, I am going to miss my old one, I am appreciating the opportunity to kind of start again. I’m looking at my choices of what to do, and thinking about what I like doing and what doesn’t really make me happy. I’m trying to figure out what I need to do to have love in my life. Starting some new projects, making new friends. Thinking about going back to the gym soon, finding racquetball partners.

In my magical healing class last night, we did an exercise with a “magic mirror.” I had a strange hallucination, or I guess you could say vision. I have a small but painful radiation burn near my collarbone; it should clear up in about a week, says my radiation oncologist, because thankfully they finished zapping that area last Thursday. Last night I had the sense that there is something inside that area that is trying to get out through the open wound, and once it heals up whatever it is will be trapped inside me and have no way out. So I asked my healing partner to work on it. And what I felt when she started pulling out what she described as strings of red energy stuff was that it’s a lot of sadness.

This morning on my way to work, I thought about the fact that as soon as I got my diagnosis, I kicked into business mode. I didn’t want people to think I was falling apart, or melodramatizing my illness. I knew I was probably going to be fine, so there was no need to be upset. I just needed to get the surgery scheduled, it was a small, same-day surgery, no complications, no big deal. Then I found out it wasn’t going to be quite that simple, there was the chemo to deal with, but that too was unpleasant but not unusual, my side effects were contained, I was a healthy person with a little setback, a lot of people have a lot worse illnesses, etc., etc. And although I certainly had low periods -- during every chemo cycle there would be a few moments when I started crying just from the sheer misery of the physical experience -- I never allowed myself to feel sad. Sad about being suddenly in menopause, which would probably not have happened for five years otherwise. So now I almost feel like I’m five years older than I thought I was, even though I know that’s ridiculous. Sad about having my intact body cut up, even just a little, and having scars that will never go away.

Now, it’s all about to be over. At the end of next week, I’ll have my last radiation treatment. And then I will more or less be done with this. My hair’s growing back, my nails are growing back, I’ll be back at work full-time, and life will be back to normal. Other people I know are, unfortunately, getting diagnosed with cancer now and I’m thinking about how to support them. So it’s like if I don’t indulge this sadness now, I will lose my chance, and it will lie there festering inside me. Yet I don’t know if I can, because I also feel happy, to have my hair, to have my life, to have my energy, and I also don’t really have time.

Five O'Clock Shadows

2007-09-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

September 30, 2007

I feel really well. The oncologists were raving about my blood work, which is apparently really good for someone who has just finished chemo. That made me feel good, because I feel like maybe my general good health is kicking in again. My hair is starting to sprout; I have a 5 o’clock shadow on my head. My eyebrows are little barely visible strips of fuzz, an outline for me to follow with an eyebrow pencil. It seems hardly fair, that all the hair I didn’t want, like on my face, is quite visible again. But I am relieved to think that I will probably have a real head of hair by the end of the year. I am working half time; after work I rush off to radiation, which takes about 20-30 minutes (the actual process is about 10, but there’s changing, getting everything lined up, changing back). So far, I have no symptoms from the radiation. My oncologist is really into everyone using lots of corn starch like powder, all over the area that’s being radiated, so there’s a film of corn starch all over my apartment. I’m glad, though, to be using something so simple and benign and cheap, rather than toxic ointments that make drug companies rich.

Last week I had a dream. Someone knocked on my door. It was a young man I knew slightly. He asked to borrow money, and I said, “You really came here to steal from me, didn’t you?” He acknowledged it. He was sorry, but said he needed the money and didn’t know who else he could get it from. I might have given it to you, I said, but it makes me angry that you pretended friendship, when you are only thinking of me as someone you can steal from. I went outside to talk to him, and when he was gone (I think without having gotten the money, though I’m not positive), I opened my door to find that I had been erased from the apartment. It was like I had never lived there. All my things were gone, my books replaced by someone else’s books, my furniture by someone else’s furniture. I thought maybe I was confused about which apartment was mine, so I looked in all the other apartments in my building, but none of them were mine. I went around asking my neighbors, “Where do I live?” and they suggested one apartment or another, but no, I didn’t live in any of them. I concluded I did not live in the building.

When I woke up, I thought, “My house in that dream is my body.”
What “someone” – the universe, karma, G-d, Bad Luck – stole from me was the sense of invincibility I have always had, the feeling of entitlement to good health. I – the me who never got sick, who didn’t see a doctor for seven years and went without insurance for three, has indeed been erased from my body. My very first professional article, written almost twenty years ago, was about women and cancer. The lead was a quote from a cancer survivor, one of the founders of the Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Oakland. “When you have cancer,” she said with tears starting to fall, “everything in your life changes.” At 29, I didn’t really understand what she meant. Now I do. Even if I wanted to go back to my old way of ignoring my physical self, the health care providers I have brought into my life wouldn’t let me. I would have to move out of the area to get away from the constant schedule of appointments. They are making appointments for me three and six months in advance. Although I am happy to say that it’s been a month or so since I swallowed my last drug, I do have a shelf full of naturopathic supplements I’m supposed to take every day, though I admit, I’m not all that good about it. I worry more than I ever did about losing my job, and I couldn’t quit unless I had another one, because I would never qualify for individual insurance.

From this year forward, I’ll always have cancer in my life. The memory of the chemo ordeal has already started fading, and in some years, I am sure it will be a distant echo. I hardly intend to let cancer take over my life, but I’ll always have that worry in the back of my mind.

A lot of people have asked if they have succeeded in shrinking the cancer, or if I’m in remission. I would probably have asked the same questions to someone else a year ago, but the fact is that I have not had any cancer in my body since March 28 (the day after my surgery). The surgeon removed the entire tumor (2.4 cm), plus a margin for error, and all the lymph nodes containing any cancer cells. Everything they have done to me since then is to prevent the cancer from coming back, a recurrence or a new tumor.

I’m taking a class right now in health and healing, that involves some magical-spiritual-meditation practice and some techniques from hypnotherapy and body work. Last week, people were talking about what is health and what is healing. Someone used the phrase, “Healing is growth,” and that made me laugh, because in my body right now, growth is the opposite of healing. In fact, the “healing” processes I’m undergoing are meant to prevent growth. I started thinking, not for the first time, about the oddness of cancer, compared to many types of what we perceive as “ill health,” where you feel bad, and when you start feeling better, you are getting healthier. Six months ago, I felt fine, but I was sick. Four months ago, I was more or less well, but felt terrible (or at least, to the extent I was sick, it was from the treatment, not the disease), and now I am well and feel well. And thank Whoever for that!

(Next week, hopefully I am doing a radio broadcast about breast cancer, for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This week I have a piece about the Philippines; you can hear it tomorrow at 94.1 FM between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. or online at www.kpfa.org/womensmagazine.)

My Pieces on KPFA (Radio) Women's Magazine

2007-08-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

August 20, 2007: Three U.S. activists detained in the Philippines

July 23, 2007: Zimbabwe, interview with local musician Julie Drucker, who recently returned from Zimbabwe, about the economic collapse in that country and how it is affecting the lives of the traditional women musicians

July 2, 2007: The Avon Walk Against Breast Cancer, boon or boondoggle? Interview with Barbara Brenner of Breast Cancer Action

April 23, 2007: Secretaries Day, my friend Rosemary and I interview our coworkers about the meaning of this corporate holiday,

April 9, 2007: The Left Media and the Gender Gap. Interviews with Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, and Katha Pollitt, long-time columnist for The Nation magazine

December 4, 2006: International Day Against Violence Against Women, discussion with Janelle White from San Francisco Women Against Rape; Joy Duenas from Gabriela Network; Athena Colby, author of a study on human rights abuses in Haiti

August 14, 2006: Israeli Palestinian and Jewish feminists on the Israeli peace movement in the face of a new assault on Lebanon

June 5, 2006: "Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States,"an art show currently showing at New College of California. Interviews with curator Rickie Solinger and organizer Helene Vosters, as well as two formerly incarcerated mothers: Angela Wilson, who now teaches theater in jails and prisons, and Linda Walker, an activist with All of Us or None.

November 7, 2005: Human Trafficking: Not Just About Sex (mine is the second segment)

July 18, 2005: What Choice California? Interviews with Parker Dockray of ACCESS Pro-Choice Women's Health Information and Referral, Dr. Eleanor Dray of San Francisco General Hospital, and Saundra Spears, on the challenges of finding and funding abortion in California

June 20, 2005: Lesbians in Palestine, an interview with Alex, member of ASWAT-Palestinian Gay Women

And then there were none

2007-08-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

Just over a week ago, I had my last chemo. The one before that had been so terrible, that is the side effects from it had been, I felt worse than I had felt in months, that I seriously considered not going through with the last one. The thing that got me started thinking about that was that a woman in my support group mentioned that they didn't give her her last Taxol treatment because the neuropathy in her hands was so bad. And I thought, well, how bad does it have to be? Mine seems pretty bad to me, and they wouldn't know because they never ask.

The only things the doctors and nurses seemed interested in was my blood counts, which were not good. By the second-to-last treatment, my anemia was so severe that I could have had a transfusion, but instead I was given the wonder drug Aranesp (erythropoietin). As it happens, I just read a series of articles about erythropoietin in the New York Times because new studies have shown its side effects are more severe than company reps told doctors before it went on the market. The FDA is considering scaling back its approval for use in cancer patients, but lucky for me, they haven't done it yet. (The risks – blood clots, heart attacks and new tumors - don't affect me, but only people who take the drug long-term. All the controversy is resulting in a huge sales loss for manufacturer Amgen, which announced this week that it's cutting 14% of its workforce) But, in the intervening weeks between the treatments and the Aranesp shot, the resulting anemia got so bad that I felt like I was walking through pudding. I could wake up feeling sort of okay, go out, do two errands or go to a meeting, and suddenly be more exhausted than I ever believed possible. And the tiredness would bring with it more waves of nausea. I couldn't fight the anemia naturally, i.e., with high-iron foods like spinach and broccoli, because I had stomach aches all the time and could barely eat noodles. I couldn't take herbal iron supplements because they made me nauseous.

The other terrible thing has been the hot flashes and night sweats. Again, I can't really do anything about them, because everything there is to take for them, whether synthetic or natural, is estrogen or estrogen producing, and that would feed the tumor. Coffee, wine and spicy food –three of my favorite things in life – make hot flashes worse, but I actually have not been consuming any of those during the chemo, except coffee very occasionally because it counters some of the other side effects. So I am stuck with waking up all night, throwing the covers off, putting them back on, putting ice packs behind my head, and generally screaming at the world.

The weekend before my last treatment was scheduled, I sat down with my two best friends, who are both medical people, and we discussed the risk of ending early. Deeg had done a lot of research online, Medline searches, etc., and come up with probably 50 pages of studies, none of which were exactly on point, but which amply demonstrated that they have basically no idea how much treatment is enough. We did learn that there is still some controversy about the value of taxanes (the category of drugs that includes Taxol) in chemotherapy regimens. Many studies show that it improves the rate of non-recurrence of cancer (one by as much as 17%), but some showed that two standard Canadian regimens ((known as EC and CEF) which do not involve taxanes are more effective over 3 years and avoid the toxicity of the taxanes, especially the neuropathy.

In the end, what decided me to go ahead was that Deeg explained that the benefit of each treatment was not what I had been assuming. I figured it was like filling up a basketball: more is better until you get to the point where it's going to burst (i.e., the toxicity overwhelms the benefit), but each time you fill it, you increase the benefit. So I figured, Taxol adds 7% to the effectiveness of the AC (the first set of treatments I had), so by skipping one treatment, I would lose 1.5-2% of benefit. What Deeg explained is that having a half-filled ball is more like not having one at all (she called it a dose-response curve): they don't really know how much Taxol each person needs, but they do know what the maximum is that people can tolerate; if they could, they would give it all to you at once, but since they can't, they break it up into as few as possible – at this point, four every other week is the preference. So it's possible that I got all the benefit I was going to get after one dose, or possibly I wouldn't get any until the last one.

Of course, it is also possible that I got no benefit at all from any of this, either because I was going to be one of the 42% who was fine without any adjuvant therapy, or because I was one of the 26% for whom only tamoxifen (hormone therapy) was enough, or because I was one of the 19% for whom AC was as effective without the addition of Taxol, or because I am one of the 16% for whom none of it works (hopefully not). But this entire thing is a numbers game, because there's just no way to know what category you're going to be in, and so once you're in it, it makes sense to go all the way.

Maybe on some level I always knew that I would have the treatment, and pretending that I might not was just a mechanism for getting through it without having a nervous breakdown. Certainly, now that I've gotten through it, I think I would have been disappointed in myself if I had quit early, just to avoid being uncomfortable for another two weeks. In fact, the euphoria of knowing it was the last one made this one less awful than the previous one, though I definitely had some bad days.

I also had something else to focus on. Just around when I had my last injection of poison, we learned that my good friend Judith Mirkinson (Mirk), and two other members of GABRIELA Network, a U.S.-Philippines women's solidarity group (www.GabNet.org), were being prevented from leaving the Philippines. I had never heard of this particular form of harassment of international human rights activists. We are very used to people being denied entry, sometimes arrested and deported, and more rarely imprisoned and charged with crimes, but this was something different. The three women had attended the Women's International Solidarity Affair in the Philippines (WISAP), a biannual international gathering. (I arranged for a young Palestinian friend of mine to attend, who apparently had a fabulous experience and contributed a lot to the event, and I would have gone too if I had not been otherwise occupied.) Two years ago, after they led a delegation of women attorneys to investigate the human rights violations of the Philippine government led by Gloria Macagapal Arroyo, the three women had learned they and all the members of the delegation (including one who didn't end up going on the trip) had been placed on a watch list and wouldn't be allowed back into the country. Senator Barbara Boxer and others intervened and got that watch list withdrawn, and the three had no trouble getting in last month. But while they were in the country, a new law called the Human Security Act (their version of the PATRIOT Act) went into effect, and apparently brought with it a bunch of new watch lists, hold lists, and blacklists. Mirk reported that she saw the computer screen at the immigration counter, and across the top was a shocking pink bar that said "WATCH LIST HOLD LIST BLACKLIST SUSPECTED TIES TO TALIBAN" which is pretty absurd when you consider you are talking about a Jewish feminist.

The three, Analisa Enrile, Ninotchka Rosca (who is a Philippine citizen and U.S. permanent resident) and Mirk, were not imprisoned, they could go anywhere in the Philippines and do whatever they wanted, but were not allowed to leave the country. It's hard to know what the government imagined they were going to do, if they were stuck there indefinitely. Obviously, what they did was continue their activism, which they could do very effectively via phone and email, and they did. They mobilized support, with the help of Gab members who had made it home, like Mirk's two daughters, who did an amazing job of organizing a fax campaign to the U.S. embassy there and the consulates here, vigils at Philippine consulates around the country, and coverage in the progressive media. The embassy reported receiving hundreds of faxes from all over the U.S. and it worked – last Tuesday, the three were assured by the embassy that they had been removed from the watch lists. Of course, when they got to the airport, they were told the holds were still in place, but Philippine Congresswoman Liza Masa (of the GABRIELA Women's Party, one of the only all-women's political parties in the world) straightened it out and it now appears that the lists have been withdrawn for all 500+ people who were on them. So the campaign had a bigger impact than just getting our friends home.

I wasn't able to do too much, because I wasn't feeling so well, but I did do a little media work and will have a short report on the story and the San Francisco vigil on tomorrow's KPFA Women's Magazine (broadcast at 1:00 p.m. on the West Coast at 94.1 FM or available after that on our website, http://www.kpfa.org/womensmagazine/).

I was really happy that Mirk was able to join me and a dozen of my other closest friends for dinner last night to celebrate my slightly belated birthday and the end of this awful chemo process. I drank a glass of Sangria, my first alcohol in 4 months (I don't think it caused too many hot flashes) and ate a lot of great tapas with lots of health-promoting garlic (with only minor nausea resulting, well worth it!). I am not 100% over the side effects of the Taxol; my energy is still pretty low, and the neuropathy is still pretty bad (it may be for some months), and of course I still have NO HAIR. But I expect within a few weeks to be feeling close to normal. I have about a three-week break, I think, before I start radiation, and I plan to spend it making real headway on the rewrite of my novel, which is about half done now.

Thanks so much to everyone for your support during this difficult and educational experience. Whether you are one of those who came with me to chemo, came over when I was too sick to even laugh at your jokes, took walks, called to check in, made food, sent emails letting me know you were reading my blogs, or just sent good thoughts and energy, YOU MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE! AND WE DID IT!

Why Me? Why Us!?!

2007-07-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

July 4, 2007

Taxol is not the breeze I was promised, but fortunately I didn’t really believe it would be. Nearly every side effect there is to have, I have. I’m still pretty nauseous, I have an itchy rash on my hands and feet and painful neuropathy in my fingers. After the first day or two, I have had only a little tingling in my toes, so at least I can walk, but my energy isn’t so great that I can walk very far.

Still, everyone says I seem better, my acupuncturist says my pulses are much better, that I seem more like “me” and less like someone invaded. So I have to believe them, but I don’t actually feel much better. I can say, yes, I had probably 50% more energy on Saturday and Sunday than I had two weeks ago, and maybe I am 50% less nauseous, but the 50% that is left is still a lot.

I can’t help feeling like I’m failing. The nurse who was giving me my chemo on Thursday said, “You’re not exactly the poster child for sailing through.” I feel like I should be. I guess a part of me thinks that if I really wanted to be, I would, that maybe I just want an excuse not to do so much.

My friend Amanda joked the other day, “Well, if you hadn’t screwed up by getting cancer, then you wouldn’t be having to get all this treatment you’re so bad at taking.” She alludes to the tendency to seek individual causes for “why me” or “why her.” I think every woman who gets breast cancer, and maybe every person who gets any kind of cancer, takes an inventory of her life to figure out what she did wrong. Shortly after my first chemo, I read a good article by Alice Lesch Kelly called “The Struggle to Move Beyond ‘Why Me?’” in the New York Times. She says, “I was 41. I had no family history of breast cancer and no major risk factors. Tests showed I did not carry breast cancer genes. I exercised regularly and ate healthfully. I did not smoke. I had yearly mammograms. The only thing I’d done ‘wrong,’ according to the standard list of risk factors for breast cancer, was having my first baby after age 30.”

We are aided in this need to blame ourselves by the medical/science industry, which generally over-emphasizes the role of individual risk factors like diet and body weight and underemphasizes environmental factors like toxics, plastics, cosmetics and radiation. A fact sheet from the Community Education and Outreach Program of the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility illustrates this:

The first heading under “Environmental Risk Factors” is “Lifestyle Risk and Preventive Actions” and it says: “What we eat and drink and how active we are play a role in breast cancer. Research has shown that the following lifestyle choices increase a woman's risk for breast cancer:

- Consuming one or more glasses of alcohol a day

- A sedentary lifestyle

- Being overweight (especially after menopause)

By contrast, the following factors have been shown to be protective against breast cancer.

- A diet high in fruit and vegetables

- Regular exercise”

This is followed by the heading, “Exposure to Environmental Toxins” under which the text reads:

“Controversy exists about the role of environmental toxins and breast cancer. Scientists agree that exposure to high doses of radiation before 30 years of age, such as being treated for Hodgkin's disease, places women at increased risk for breast cancer. Possible, but controversial, environmental risks for breast cancer include:

- passive smoking (second-hand smoke).

- PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) produced by the burning of coal, oil, gas, garbage or other organic substances.

- certain organochlorine compounds, such as the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) formerly used in consumer and industrial electronics.

Research has shown that human exposure to electromagnetic fields and DDT/DDE, a now-banned but previously widely used pesticide, are not associated with increased risk for breast cancer.”

Now this is interesting for a lot of reasons. One is that so much of the space under “Environmental Risk” is devoted to issues of diet and lifestyle, so it looks like they are telling you about the risks posed by our environment when they in fact are putting the onus back on you and your “choices.” The second is that “being overweight” is represented as a “lifestyle choice,” when in fact nearly all research, as chronicled in Gina Kolata’s new book, Rethinking Thin, indicates that body size is mostly no more a choice than gender or eye color. That’s why 95% of diets fail. That doesn’t mean it’s not good to eat healthy food and exercise, because obviously it is, but it means that you might do those things – which I do – and still be fat – which I am.

Even more important is the statement, “Controversy exists about the role of environmental toxins and breast cancer.” That’s true, of course, because any study that finds a connection between some industrial product and cancer is immediately attacked by whatever industry produces it, and they then fund their own studies to counter it. I know, because the law firms where I’ve worked for the last 18 years collect those studies, since a lot of their business is defending major polluters. But what they don’t mention is that just as much controversy, or more, exists about the correlation of “lifestyle” factors, especially body size and diet. If you Google “breast cancer” AND “fat”, you will get over 2 million hits, and among them will be an equal number of articles claiming to establish a link between eating fat and developing cancer and ones claiming that there is no relationship. Some studies have found that polyunsaturated fats increase your risk, and monounsaturated fats (like olive and canola oils) decrease it. According to the Breast Cancer Action website (www.bcaction.org), “There are plenty of reasons to avoid a high-fat diet, but breast cancer is not one of them. Studies have not shown that a high-fat diet increases breast cancer risk.”

What seems to be true is that people emphasize the risk factors that they are already predisposed to believe in. One study that is rarely mentioned, as it is not in the UNC pamphlet, actually seems to be widely accepted by now, and it found that “Before menopause, obese women have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than do women of a healthy weight. However, after menopause, obese women have 1.5 times the risk of women of a healthy weight.” (http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/uvahealth/news_breasthealth/0611bh.cfm) So apparently what you should do if you don’t want to get breast cancer is be fat until menopause and then magically become thin, which is pretty much impossible.

Another study hardly ever mentioned in mainstream literature about risk factors is the ‘U.S. Bra and Breast Cancer Study,” done in 1996 by Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer. This study found that:

- Women who wore their bras 24 hours per day had a 3 out of 4 chance of developing breast cancer

- Women who wore bras more than 12 hour per day but not to bed had a 1 out of 7 risk.

- Women who wore their bras less than 12 hours per day had a 1 out of 152 risk.

- Women who wore bras rarely or never had a 1 out of 168 chance of getting breast cancer. The overall difference between 24 hour wearing and not at all was a 125-fold difference.

Of course, the first thing that grabbed me about this was that some women wear their bras to bed! But then I started obsessing about the fact that I got breast cancer because I wear a bra more than 12 hours a day most of the time. Now some people, including my acupuncturist have suggested that it’s underwire bras which really do it to you, so I quickly pulled the underwires out of all my bras (which honestly doesn’t seem to make much difference in how they work).

Of course the number 1 risk factor for breast cancer is being over 55, so those who don’t want to get the dreaded B.C. should – die?

In the AIDS movement we used to say, “Some of us have the HIV virus, but we are all living with AIDS.” When we talk about breast cancer (and prostate cancer, lung cancer, and any of the other epidemic cancers among us), we need to stop asking, “Why me?” or “Why her?” and start asking, “Why us?”

Chemo Is Hell

2007-06-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

Friday, June 08, 2007

I have to say, chemo is so much worse than I anticipated. I don't know why, because it's not like I didn't hear that it was awful. The oncologist said it when I first met with him – "You're going to be pretty miserable," were his exact words. I guess maybe you just cannot believe it until you feel it.

So here's what it's like.

I go for treatment on Thursday morning. This phase (Adriamycin-Cytoxin or AC) takes about an hour and a half. The next phase will be Taxol and that takes much longer; the Taxol itself is a 3-hour drip and there are things that happen first, so it might be closer to four. When I get home from the treatment, I feel kind of weird and woozy but okay; I generally can eat a reasonable lunch and a small dinner with a friend.

When I get up on Friday morning, I want coffee, the last time that will happen for some days. I drink the coffee, eat some fruit and yogurt, go for a walk, and don't usually feel the need to nap until late afternoon. If it's a Women in Black Friday, I can go and stand there for an hour and get home okay.

Friday evening is like waiting for a train wreck you saw in a dream. I think I can feel the poison working its way into all my systems. By that time, the steroid they gave me in the office has pretty much worn off. I'm uninterested in eating and starting to feel queasy, despite the best anti-nausea meds they've given me. I lie around and try to convince myself I am not going to be as sick as I was the last time.

Saturday and Sunday I'm a zombie. I sleep about two-thirds of the time, and the rest is filled with being bad company to the friends who come over, taking short walks, fighting the waves of nausea and trying to eat and drink small amounts. I can't handle talking on the phone. My eyes won't focus well enough to read, though sometimes I can do part of a crossword puzzle, so I just sort of drift through movies or whatever is on TV. I wake up several times a night and fight against throwing up. The times I lost, I felt better after, but that doesn't seem to be something you can remember in the moment. This last round, I managed not to throw once, which feels like a victory.

Monday is absolutely the worst day, because I am almost better but not really. I have to go get a shot, and I like to walk over there, which is about ¾ of a mile or so. Someone usually walks with me, we wait a few minutes in the doctor's office, the shot takes no time and then we walk back. This past week, we stopped for lunch at a café a few blocks from my house, but about 15 minutes after we sat down, I was nodding off against the window. I got home and pretty much fell down on the couch, slept for most of an hour, got up, went to acupuncture, fell asleep with the needles in me, woke up feeling a little better, got home, slept.

By Tuesday, I think I should be able to do things, and I can, but I cannot do as much as I think I can. Those are the days I get so frustrated, because I'll be feeling okay, and then suddenly I feel awful. My energy just plunges, like someone siphoned all the gas out of your car right after you filled it up. Once I was standing in line at the grocery store, and I broke out in a cold sweat because I suddenly felt I couldn't stand up one more second. This time, I went to a meeting and then a demonstration, in San Francisco, and there was a cold wind which made it feel like I was trying to move through sand. I suddenly felt like I had to have protein, so a friend and I went for Vietnamese food, which helped. But then I got into the BART station and the readout said there wouldn't be an East Bay train for ten minutes, and I nearly burst into tears. I COULD NOT wait that long. As it turned out, there was one in five minutes, I made it home, and it was okay.

Then starts the period of waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep. I'm not sure what causes that, the drugs themselves, or the nausea meds or the effect of having slept so much of the previous five or six days, but it is totally irritating. While I'm awake at night, I am fighting nausea, and all the anxiety over things I think I should be doing, that I don't feel up to doing yet, crashes in. Then of course, I get up in the morning not feeling rested, and that means I won't be able to make the most of these days when my energy is pretty good. I do have wild dreams that I remember more than I usually remember my dreams.

On Thursday, when I told the nurse I had been nauseous for two weeks, she said very few women are nauseous in the second week. Well, I really envy those who aren't. I am nauseous all the time and by the end of the first week, I have nothing very good to take, plus I am just sick of having so many different drugs in my system, wreaking havoc with my plumbing and making me feel like I'm in a fog, and so I decide I will not even take what I have, and I just walk around feeling disgusting. I get hungry, but nothing seems at all appealing so I don't eat until my body just demands something.

My acupuncturist encourages me not to worry right now about a "good diet" but just eat whatever I can handle. I seem to crave fruit and I can eat it with yogurt, which Susun Weed claims cures nausea – it doesn't seem to do it for me, but I like it and it is good for protein and nutrients. Other than that, I use bread and rice cakes to break through the worst nausea, and sometimes I seem to crave tofu, which I'm supposed to be avoiding because of the phytoestrogens, which might or might not feed the estrogen-sensitive cancer, but I'm not worrying about that right now because I don't eat that much of it and it doesn't seem likely that cancer can be growing in me now when nothing else is.

One of my friends has a coworker who recently finished chemo, and she told my friend the other day that it was so awful she started to hallucinate. It helped me so much to hear that! Because so many people have told me "it's not that bad," or tried to inspire me with stories of friends of theirs who worked every day, which has the opposite effect of what they intend, making me feel that I'm just not tough enough.

While nauseated and not being able to sleep last night, I flashed on what it would be like if I were dealing with this in prison - that based on having said to my niece that I would give anything to be back in immigration prison right now. But of course, I did not mean with cancer (and I didn't really mean it anyway). Anyway, just the thought gave me chills; I cannot get it out of my head. I concluded I would want to die. I am so miserable, and yet I am so privileged. I just can't imagine it in the circumstances at least 90% of people getting chemo are in.