May 1, 2007
Last night a friend and I went to a program about the embattled queer movement in Serbia. It was really interesting, and disturbing. It was held at the LGBTQ Center, a big, beautiful, five-year-old property on the edge of the Castro. My friend and I both commented that we had only been inside the building twice before; once for a meeting with officials of the "Pride" Committee, after we were kicked out of last year's LGBT Pride festival for trying to hand out leaflets shaped like sleep masks, and once for a community event. I had been outside the Center a few other times, most recently a few months ago to leaflet people going to a reading sponsored by the Israeli Consulate.
On our way out after the program, we decided it would be good to leave some fliers about some of our current campaigns on the literature racks. We went to see where we could do that, and encountered big signs announcing that any literature not approved by the front desk would be removed. We went to the front desk and I told the young man there, presumably a volunteer, what we wanted. I handed him one of our fliers, asking people to pressure Frameline, presenter of the San Francisco LGBT film festival, to stop taking sponsorship from the Israeli Consulate until Israel stops violating international law.
The young man looked at the flier and shook his head.
"It's political," he said. "We can't put up anything political, unless it's about gay marriage."
His face was deadpan, but I thought he was kidding. He wasn't.
"We can't have anything about protest, nothing against the Bush administration," he said.
"You're not serious!" I burst out, and he mumbled "Our nonprofit status."
"It's not electoral," I said. "It's just asking people to pressure our queer institutions …"
"Where is this policy written?" my friend asked.
"I don't know," he said. "But it's what I was told. Nothing about protest, nothing political, unless it's supporting gay marriage, because that's something that presumably the queer community all agrees on."
Well that's actually a big presumption, since we are queers who are not in favor of marriage in any form. But we didn't bring that up.
When I kept arguing, he said, "Well, we'll try it," and took a few of the fliers. I am quite sure they will never see the light of day.
Now this is patently absurd. First, no community center's nonprofit status is threatened by allowing free exchange of ideas, political or otherwise, within its premises. The Women's Building has been a community institution for over 25 years, and you can put anything you want on their shelves, to be ignored by everyone who comes there for Rhythm & Motion, AA meetings, poetry readings or whatever. When I went to the Embarcadero YMCA, there was a bulletin board where you could post pretty much anything. The Center is not being asked to put its name on the flier. In fact, by having a policy that literature has to be approved by them, they slightly increase their liability for its content; if they would just allow free for all, there would be absolutely no problem.
But if there were any validity to their concern about their nonprofit status, then why the gay marriage exception? Because lobbying for gay marriage is still lobbying. So it seems like the intent is more to avoid "controversy" than to shun everything political.
Finally, as I previously mentioned, they have hosted events sponsored by the Israeli consulate. They presented an event with Irshad Manji, a spokesperson for anti-Arab and anti-Islamic forces that many queers find highly offensive. These are just a couple things I happen to know about, but doubtless, they have also hosted any number of both left- and right-wing events, and many in between. And though I wish they would NOT cosponsor programs with the Israeli consulate, and was there urging others to tell them the same, in general I think it is good for the LGBTQ Center to provide space for the range of opinions and interests within our communities.
I spend a lot of time being depressed these days. There's a lot to be depressed about: The war in Iraq, the fact that there seems to be no way to end it, the fact that the enormous death toll has become so normal that even those of us opposed to it don't really think about it, the fact that immigrant children are being kept in prison, wearing little prison clothes and being threatened with isolation if they "misbehave." The ongoing disgrace of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the new humongous detention facilities in Iraq which are presumably being filled with the victims of all those house-to-house searches that were the basis of the "troop surge", and the fact that we haven't heard a word about them in months. The fact that in the endless media discussion of the various bad proposals for "health care reform" in California, it is NEVER mentioned that a single-payer universal health care bill passed both houses of the legislature more than a year ago, and was vetoed by the governator, who is now promoting a plan that will force low-wage workers without employer-provided health benefits to pay insurance companies for policies that won't actually cover their health needs.
Then on the personal front, there's the fact that I have breast cancer and am about to flood my body with carcinogens to hopefully prevent a recurrence that might not happen anyway. Add to that the fact that my insurance is for some reason rejecting my lab bills, and I'm getting incomprehensible bills from the anesthesiologists.
Compared to all these issues, the fact that we can't put out our fliers at the LGBTQ Center might seem pretty trivial. After all, it's unlikely that anyone who goes to the Center would even be interested in helping us get the Israeli government out of our film festival. But in fact, none of the other issues hit me as hard as this one, because it signals that an identity that is core to who I am, that informs all the other political work I've done for the last 25 years, has been stolen. Yes, stolen.
We cannot afford to be silent about this. We cannot afford to just shrug, like Gay Shame and other alienated queer groups do, and say, well of course, the Center is just bourgeois, it doesn't represent us, gay people are sell-out, forget them.
In the late 1980s, when ACT UP, Queer Nation, Stop AIDS Now Or Else, Men of All Colors Together, Let It All Hang Out, Lesbian Avengers and other grassroots queer groups were organizing active resistance, we waged a big struggle in the community around postering. There was a group called Golden Broom, that was going around tearing down the posters that groups would put up to let people know about actions and meetings, and they had the support of the police, and we fought for the right to use the utility poles and trash cans in queer neighborhoods to communicate with each other in an unmediated way. We lost.
Now, we've even lost the right to communicate with each other in mediated ways. Ordinary queers have limited access to the queer press, we have no access to queer streets, we can't afford billboards – in fact, we can't even afford to rent meeting rooms in the Center. The Pride Committee has two types of information only booths. One is for the 501c(3) nonprofits, with their grants and paid staff, and costs $65, plus a $40 environmental fee and $55 for insurance. The other is for "free speech" and costs $80 plus $40 + $55. Because of our experience last year, they were willing to waive the environmental fee, so we can have a booth for $135. How is that free speech? It's not, it's $135 speech.
To be told what queer literature can and can't be distributed inside the queer Center, or at the queer Parade, is to lose our community. How do we engage with each other on political issues? The answer is we don't.
Gay Shame and others who dismiss the LGBT community as apolitical and apathetic are in a way right. The organized LGBT community is sold out, in the same way that the organized Jewish community is sold on Zionism. But it isn't because LGBT people are sold out or apathetic or apolitical, any more than all Jews are Zionists. It's because while weren't paying attention, our progressive grassroots institutions turned into corporate monoliths. It's time to take them back.
These institutions take enormous resources from our communities. They get all the grant money, they get all the bequests, they get your $5 guilt money at the entrance to the Pride Festival and the Folsom Street Fair, and they use a lot of volunteers. According to the Center's website, its budget for 2006/07 is $2million, of which 32% comes from the government, 24% from foundation grants and 16% individual donations.
When they take all that and then deliberately exclude all of us whose priority is not gay marriage, they are basically stealing from us.
Our queer institutions, the Center, Frameline, NGLTF, HRC, GLAAD, NCLR, etc., also claim to represent us. Among the objectives listed in the Center's mission statement are:
"- unite our community across lines of age, race, gender and economics
- give visibility to the history, culture and diversity of our community
- organize and plan our political and cultural future"
So they are going to organize and plan our political and cultural future without even giving us the opportunity to weigh in on what our political and cultural priorities are? By what right do they determine that gay marriage is an important issue to queers but where our queer cultural institutions get their money is not?
We can whisper down dark alleys that they don't speak for us, but who is going to hear us? I for one am not about to let them get away with it.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
Secretaries' Day on KPFA
KPFA Women's Magazine acknowledges Administrative Professionals' Week, a time of lunches, flowers and umbrellas embossed with company logo. Some support staff appreciate the appreciation, but others say they do not want to go out to lunch with the boss. Clerical workers Kate Raphael and Rosemary Lenihan share interviews from many of their coworkers about the meaning of this corporate holiday.
Listen at http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=19871.
Listen at http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=19871.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Democracy Now! and the Gender Gap
Democracy Now!, the largest progressive media collaborative in the country, calls itself “The Exception to the Rulers.” But when it comes to inclusion of women as sources, DN! is not so exceptional.
Sometime in September, as election coverage started to take over more and more of the hour, it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember when I had last heard a woman on the show other than Amy. I looked at their website, to see if my perception was correct. In fact, in the seven weekdays from September 21-29, Democracy Now! interviewed only one woman on the show. The one woman interviewed during that week, the wife of a military resister who had turned himself in, was not the main spokesperson on the issue.
Was this an aberration? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. I started going through the last several months’ shows and recording who was interviewed about what. Eventually, I decided to analyze the whole year.
The facts
Women were 28% of all guests on the show in 2006.[1] 38% of broadcasts did not interview any women, while 4% did not interview any men. 78% of the time, there were more men than women on the show. Most broadcasts contained 2-3 interview segments; 35% of segments included women; 82% included men.
While these numbers make it clear that women were seriously underrepresented on DN!, looking at which segments most often include women and which do not is more revealing.
When only one person is interviewed on an issue, that person is most likely to be an expert, and thus most likely to be male. A majority of segments consisted of interviews with only one person, 75% of whom were men. Similarly, people who are invited onto the show regularly are mainly experts. Of 34 people interviewed at least three times during the year, 24% were women.
Women were underrepresented on almost all topics covered on DN! in 2006. I identified 272 separate topics covered. Women were never interviewed on 59% of them, while men were not interviewed on 15%. Out of the top 28 topics (ones on which at least six people were interviewed in two or more segments), women were a majority of those interviewed on only two: AIDS and “women’s issues.” Women’s issues,[2] including such topics as women in Iraq, sexual harassment, abortion and the death of Betty Friedan, were addressed by 22 speakers during the year. Only one of those “women’s issues,” sexual harassment in the military, made it into the top 28 by itself. There was no topic among the 28 on which men were not interviewed, including, obviously "women's issues."
Women were 26% of people interviewed about Iraq, 25% on Israel/Palestine, 14% on Lebanon, 39% on New Orleans, and 26% on subjects related to U.S. elections.
What it means
These statistics signal a serious lack of attention to the inclusion of women’s voices.
On the other hand, a 2005 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in 45 different news outlets, “More than three quarters of all stories contain male sources, while only a third of stories contain even a single female.”[3] By this analysis, DN is neither better nor worse than average - 35% of its stories, or just over one-third, included women; 82%, or over three-quarters, included men.
I don’t believe Democracy Now is deliberately booking more men than women, although, since the show is hosted by a woman, she or her producers may feel their gender bases are covered. More likely, they are simply failing to rise above the social reality that men still have more power in this country than women.
In this country, men are a majority of college professors (72%), reporters (63%) and bestselling nonfiction authors (68%).[4] So a list of expert sources on most subjects is likely to be top-heavy with men. Women were 42% percent of lawyers interviewed on DN! last year, but only 21% of public officials, closely reflecting the proportion of women in those professions nationwide.
1) Stop privileging experts over activists, and rethink who is an expert. Rather than acting as gatekeepers to make sure that only those with the right credentials get on their show, the producers of a program called Democracy Now! might think of their mission as democratizing the airwaves by giving a voice to people who don’t have access to other media.
KPFA Pacifica’s daily talk show Against the Grain has a policy against interviewing anyone more than once a year. Their goal, says former producer Sasha Lilly, is not to create movement stars but to air a diversity of perspectives. Seymour Hirsch and Robert Scheer, both smart and interesting guys, don’t actually need Democracy Now! to get their ideas out; they both write regularly for major U.S. newspapers and magazines. By giving more air time to ordinary people who are doing things to increase democracy in their own communities, DN! would do more to foster democracy now.
2) Cover a broader range of issues. Of the 609 segments produced in 2006, 309 (51%) were devoted to 24 topics. Only two segments all year dealt with India, one with China, none with Romania, El Salvador, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or Rwanda.
Stories that DN! did not cover at all in 2006 include:
3) Cultivate women as sources on issues that are covered frequently. Katha Pollitt, Urvashi Vaid and Cynthia Cockburn, none of whom were on DN! last year even once, are as knowledgeable and articulate as Seymour Hirsch, Dahr Jamail and Noam Chomsky, each of whom was on at least 3 times. There is no subject on which there are no women experts, from nuclear physics to the nuclear family. If at least half of the people on your list of sources are women, there’s a good chance of achieving close to parity.
4) Don’t assume that women need men to restate what they’re saying or put it into a broader context. In activist circles we joke that if a woman has a good idea, a man should repeat it and take credit for it. The media version of this is that women are interviewed as victims or activists and men are interviewed, often more at length, for political analysis. But women, given the chance and encouragement, are usually more than competent to provide their own analysis.
Some years ago, when Helen Mirren burst into the limelight as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennyson, a reporter asked her if she was going to fight for better roles for women on television. She said no, she was going to fight for better roles for women in the world, that television mirrors society.
A friend turned me on to Pacifica Radio’s daily newsmagazine shortly after 9/11. Since then, I have listened to it almost every day. I’m in good company. As host Amy Goodman reminds us at the end of each broadcast, they are broadcasting on over 450 radio stations in North America, including Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, and satellite television, and podcasting on the internet.
Sometime in September, as election coverage started to take over more and more of the hour, it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember when I had last heard a woman on the show other than Amy. I looked at their website, to see if my perception was correct. In fact, in the seven weekdays from September 21-29, Democracy Now! interviewed only one woman on the show. The one woman interviewed during that week, the wife of a military resister who had turned himself in, was not the main spokesperson on the issue.
Was this an aberration? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. I started going through the last several months’ shows and recording who was interviewed about what. Eventually, I decided to analyze the whole year.
The facts
Women were 28% of all guests on the show in 2006.[1] 38% of broadcasts did not interview any women, while 4% did not interview any men. 78% of the time, there were more men than women on the show. Most broadcasts contained 2-3 interview segments; 35% of segments included women; 82% included men.
While these numbers make it clear that women were seriously underrepresented on DN!, looking at which segments most often include women and which do not is more revealing.
“Experts” - journalists, authors, scholars, filmmakers, lawyers, and staff of major nonprofits - make up the backbone of DN, as of any news magazine. These experts were 58% of all guests in 2006, supplemented by activists and people with a personal stake in the issues (you might say “victims”). Only 22% of expert guests were women.
When only one person is interviewed on an issue, that person is most likely to be an expert, and thus most likely to be male. A majority of segments consisted of interviews with only one person, 75% of whom were men. Similarly, people who are invited onto the show regularly are mainly experts. Of 34 people interviewed at least three times during the year, 24% were women.
Women were underrepresented on almost all topics covered on DN! in 2006. I identified 272 separate topics covered. Women were never interviewed on 59% of them, while men were not interviewed on 15%. Out of the top 28 topics (ones on which at least six people were interviewed in two or more segments), women were a majority of those interviewed on only two: AIDS and “women’s issues.” Women’s issues,[2] including such topics as women in Iraq, sexual harassment, abortion and the death of Betty Friedan, were addressed by 22 speakers during the year. Only one of those “women’s issues,” sexual harassment in the military, made it into the top 28 by itself. There was no topic among the 28 on which men were not interviewed, including, obviously "women's issues."
Women were 26% of people interviewed about Iraq, 25% on Israel/Palestine, 14% on Lebanon, 39% on New Orleans, and 26% on subjects related to U.S. elections.
What it means
These statistics signal a serious lack of attention to the inclusion of women’s voices.
They are far better than those for mainstream public affairs programs, such as Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour or Meet the Press. In a cursory look at Fresh Air’s recent broadcasts, I had to go back nine shows to find one woman guest. In the last six months of 2006, 8 of 92 guests on Meet the Press, or less than 9%, were women.
On the other hand, a 2005 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in 45 different news outlets, “More than three quarters of all stories contain male sources, while only a third of stories contain even a single female.”[3] By this analysis, DN is neither better nor worse than average - 35% of its stories, or just over one-third, included women; 82%, or over three-quarters, included men.
I don’t believe Democracy Now is deliberately booking more men than women, although, since the show is hosted by a woman, she or her producers may feel their gender bases are covered. More likely, they are simply failing to rise above the social reality that men still have more power in this country than women.
In this country, men are a majority of college professors (72%), reporters (63%) and bestselling nonfiction authors (68%).[4] So a list of expert sources on most subjects is likely to be top-heavy with men. Women were 42% percent of lawyers interviewed on DN! last year, but only 21% of public officials, closely reflecting the proportion of women in those professions nationwide.
If, though, Democracy Now! and other progressive media want to have gender parity, there are a number of things they could do to improve their chances:
1) Stop privileging experts over activists, and rethink who is an expert. Rather than acting as gatekeepers to make sure that only those with the right credentials get on their show, the producers of a program called Democracy Now! might think of their mission as democratizing the airwaves by giving a voice to people who don’t have access to other media.
KPFA Pacifica’s daily talk show Against the Grain has a policy against interviewing anyone more than once a year. Their goal, says former producer Sasha Lilly, is not to create movement stars but to air a diversity of perspectives. Seymour Hirsch and Robert Scheer, both smart and interesting guys, don’t actually need Democracy Now! to get their ideas out; they both write regularly for major U.S. newspapers and magazines. By giving more air time to ordinary people who are doing things to increase democracy in their own communities, DN! would do more to foster democracy now.
2) Cover a broader range of issues. Of the 609 segments produced in 2006, 309 (51%) were devoted to 24 topics. Only two segments all year dealt with India, one with China, none with Romania, El Salvador, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or Rwanda.
Stories that DN! did not cover at all in 2006 include:
· National Coming Out Day
· Women’s History month
· the burgeoning feminist protest movement in Iran
· welfare
· the arrest of all six progressive members of the Philippine Congress on sedition charges
· the first major United Nations report on violence against women
· organizing by restaurant workers, hotel workers or exotic dancers
· the coming out stories of WNBA MVP Sheryl Swoopes and Wimbledon champion Amelie Mauresmo
· the arrest and trial of Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho for exposing a child sexual abuse ring
· the approval of the morning after pill for over-the-counter use
· the ongoing women’s peace camp outside a U.S. air base in Scotland
3) Cultivate women as sources on issues that are covered frequently. Katha Pollitt, Urvashi Vaid and Cynthia Cockburn, none of whom were on DN! last year even once, are as knowledgeable and articulate as Seymour Hirsch, Dahr Jamail and Noam Chomsky, each of whom was on at least 3 times. There is no subject on which there are no women experts, from nuclear physics to the nuclear family. If at least half of the people on your list of sources are women, there’s a good chance of achieving close to parity.
4) Don’t assume that women need men to restate what they’re saying or put it into a broader context. In activist circles we joke that if a woman has a good idea, a man should repeat it and take credit for it. The media version of this is that women are interviewed as victims or activists and men are interviewed, often more at length, for political analysis. But women, given the chance and encouragement, are usually more than competent to provide their own analysis.
Some years ago, when Helen Mirren burst into the limelight as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennyson, a reporter asked her if she was going to fight for better roles for women on television. She said no, she was going to fight for better roles for women in the world, that television mirrors society.
Democracy Now! did not create male supremacy; it simply reflects it. Alternative media, however, should not just mirror society but critique it. Will Democracy Now! live up to this challenge or will women be left asking, "Democracy When?"
Postscript: After publishing this article in 2007, I invited Amy Goodman, along with Katha Pollit, onto my radio show, Women's Magazine. As gently as possible, I pointed out to Amy the show's lack of gender parity. She seemed pretty surprised and took the critique seriously. Two years ago, I decided to do the analysis again, to see if the numbers had improved at all. To my disappointment, the statistics for 2008 were a little bit worse than those for 2006, both in terms of overall percentage of women guests - 26% down from 28, and broadcasts with no women guests - 40% up from 38. That year, I also surveyed The Nation, probably the leading progressive weekly print magazine. It did not fare any better: Women made up about 27% of contributors and 25% of sources.
Postscript: After publishing this article in 2007, I invited Amy Goodman, along with Katha Pollit, onto my radio show, Women's Magazine. As gently as possible, I pointed out to Amy the show's lack of gender parity. She seemed pretty surprised and took the critique seriously. Two years ago, I decided to do the analysis again, to see if the numbers had improved at all. To my disappointment, the statistics for 2008 were a little bit worse than those for 2006, both in terms of overall percentage of women guests - 26% down from 28, and broadcasts with no women guests - 40% up from 38. That year, I also surveyed The Nation, probably the leading progressive weekly print magazine. It did not fare any better: Women made up about 27% of contributors and 25% of sources.
[1] This data counts only people who were actually interviewed on the show (either recorded or live), not people whose voices were heard in features, clips of movies or radio documentaries, brief news stories, Congressional hearings, or vox pops (audio collages).
[2] In fact, all issues are women’s issues, but not, as we have seen, according to the media.
[4] Interestingly, women are 57% of best-selling fiction authors http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol3/issue4/sexist.htm).
Friday, August 11, 2006
What Is Effective? (Or, Where the Zionists Live)
Tonight a small group of mostly Jewish activists disrupted a talk by the Israeli consul general to a group of about 300 hard-core Zionists at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. It was a surreal experience, and I'm still wondering how worthwhile it was.
The best thing about it was that we did it with almost no planning. We met about 40 minutes before we needed to be there. Some people felt we should just stand up and hold up a banner, while others wanted to try to speak out. We agreed that we would do both, which worked out to be an excellent strategy.
We discussed what we should do if there was no media there. I argued that in that scenario, we should not do the action, because it would just let them know who we were and what we were planning, and probably limit our ability to do it another time, when there might be more potential impact. Other people felt that it was important to do it just to send a message to the Zionists, that we will be there challenging them wherever they go, that we won't let them have events without confronting us. "No Justice, No Peace," someone said.
We assumed they would have pretty heavy security, do a big search of all our stuff, so we sanitized what we were carrying. Figuring out how to stuff the banner under people's clothes without making them look like they had five breasts was pretty amusing. We decided we needed to go in in pairs and not sit together.
In fact, we just could walk in, no one took any particular notice of us, they didn't really search our stuff though they were making people open their bags, and the middle-aged guy in front of me had to open his jacket, so our precautions were probably well taken. I took a seat in the middle of a row about a third of the way up the large stepped hall. I figured being in the middle would keep them from ejecting me easily once I started ranting. Waiting for the event to start, I tried to read the novel I had brought (you know I never go anywhere without one), but I couldn't really concentrate. As people filtered in, I looked at them and thought, god, it really could be the synagogue my mom goes to. These people look like the people I should feel most at home with, and yet they are right now the people I feel most alien from. I really can't figure out what to do with that. As the song goes, How did I get here?
There was no media present as far as I could tell. It occurred to me as the lights went down that since we were all sitting separately (the banner group of 3, two who were designated as observers/documenters, and three of us singles, who would be the ones to stand up and yell things out), and we had not worked out any signals, we had no way to call it off. I figured, well if someone else does it, I will. But even as Yoel Kahn, San Francisco's first openly gay pulpit rabbi, got up to welcome everyone, I thought, what is the point of doing something here? No one in this room is interested in a word we have to say, and no one outside it is going to hear them.
And then the speaking started. The new director of the Israel Action Center, talking about the kibbutz in the Galil where he and Yoel first met, and the Katyushas now falling there. No mention of the US-supplied GBU "bunker busters" and F16s strafing Beirut. He mentioned a place called Kfar Qana, but not the massacre of a family sleeping in a shelter in Qana, Lebanon. He asked us to rise (they never say "stand", it's always "rise") for a moment of silence to remember those who have fallen. There was no question, he did not mean the 1000 Lebanese and 200 Palestinians. (They had already talked about Israel's heavy military and civilian casualties, and not one word about the Lebanese casualties who are more than 10 times higher.) The director of the Jewish Community Federation's Israel Center, just back from a visit to Israel, spoke about the wonderful resilience of the Israeli people, undeterred by the evil Hezbollah, and how "though the news gives a very different story," Israelis (like most Israelis, using "Israelis" to mean "Jewish Israelis") were opening their homes to those evacuated from the north, "even allowing Druze and Arabs into their homes." Not a mention of the 1 million refugees forced out of Southern Lebanon by these very generous Israelis.
And then the Consul General got up and spoke about the current "hostilities" and how Israel had had no choice, after it generously gave back "every inch" of Lebanon in 2000 (which it did not, actually), and Hezbollah, which exists for no other reason but to kill Jews, to gleefully kill children, continued to engage in unprovoked attacks, but to go to war to destroy Hezbollah. And he said that the Israeli army was shocked to find out what firepower Hezbollah had -- "anti-ship missiles," he said with horror, they had advanced military technology, they were "almost like a real army!" And so, he said, of course as you attack Hezbollah, some civilians are going to be hit, but you have to understand that some of those so-called civilians are really Hezbollah.
The thought swept over me, it was like it was 1940 and a group of German Americans had assembled to listen to a representative of the German government talk about the invasion of Poland, and how they were surprised to find out that the Jews actually had some weapons after all, that they were not quite a primitive and easily wiped out as they had expected, and so it would take a little longer and the attacks would have to be a little more fierce, but it was going well and with your support, we will prevail. And I thought I cannot just sit here and not speak out. It doesn't really matter who hears or doesn't hear me, I just have to do it because to let this kind of racist venom exist unchallenged, from anyone but especially from people I feel responsible for, is wrong. Instead of "How did I get here?" I asked myself, as I have done so many times, "How did we get here?"
After what seemed like an eternity, Rebecca, Margot and Arla got out of their seats. They stood in the aisle and unfurled the banner, which said something like "Jews Say Stop Bombing Civilians" and they chanted, "No one is free while others are oppressed, We as Jews should know that best." People ran toward them immediately, grabbing at the banner. One guy managed to put a rip in the banner, which is pretty sturdy vinyl, with his bare hands.
I heard people yelling, "Dykes, Bitches" from across the room. Interesting, how linked homophobia, sexism and militarism are, that that is almost always the first insult people (men) in situations like that think of to hurl. People were hurling other things at the women, spit, fists. A guy climbed over me to get to them. I was trying to decide at what point I would throw off my cover and intervene if it looked like they might be hurt, when thankfully Yoel Kahn rode to the rescue. He urged people to go back to their seats, leave the situation to him to defuse. Some women were also trying to shush the crowd, while others were just as bad as the men, screaming abuse at our girls.
The consul general also exhorted people to leave them alone, saying, "This is what is so great about free speech." I heard someone say, "Only Israel would be so tolerant," which is ridiculous, of course, since we are not in Israel and Israel is not that tolerant of dissent, and anyway lots of aggressive/repressive countries are happy to tolerate free speech when it doesn't interfere with carrying out their agendas. But people got the point, and they turned to the women and started to applaud, and that was truly creepy. But I decided, okay, I could applaud too then, and I would mean something different than they meant. Yoel got security guards to come and stand in front of the banner, so people couldn't read it, and the consul general would really have continued his speech, but people were too fixated on the disrupters to listen. And then, as I heard it later, Rebecca said, "We're ready to leave now," and they were escorted out.
The room got quiet, and the consul general picked up where he left off, saying that there was consensus among the Israeli public that this war was totally necessary. Well, he said, maybe there was some difference of opinion, after all, you know Israelis, we all think we should be the commander, and that's one of our problems, but it's okay. But there is consensus. That was my cue, because I had planned my rant to be about Israeli dissent. I jumped up. "Actually, there is no consensus," I said, and started to quote Gideon Levy. I didn't get out very much, people started yelling at me, and the guy from my row who had tried to attack the others came over and started grabbing at me. He said, "Come with me." I said, "Don't touch me, who are you?" He let go and said, "I want to talk to you," and I said, "I don't have to talk to you." A woman was behind me saying, "You have to sit down now, this is not your turn." So I sat down. And the consul started again and after a few seconds, I popped up again and started talking again. That happened two or three more times, and then security was there and I decided it was enough. Just before I was ejected, the woman behind me demanded, "Who are you?" so I said, "I'm a Jew who cares about 1 million Lebanese refugees. I'm a Jew who cares about 6 million Palestinian refugees. I'm a Jew who understands that it is Israel's conduct in the world which is making us unsafe." I just kept ranting until I was gone.
As I was being ushered out of the building, through two emergency doors which set off hideous alarms, two Asian cops appeared and asked for my ID. I argued a little and then gave it to them, because why not? They asked what it was about, and I told them, "The israeli consul is in there defending the murder of children." They were getting ready to write down my details, and then one of the security guards came out and said to them, "They're coming out of the woodwork in there!" They almost took off with my ID, but instead one of them ran inside, leaving the other guy to take my information, and when he was done, he couldn't get into the building.
I waited for a long time to see the next person come out, but they didn't. I got kind of worried and curious, what was happening, and so when someone finally came and opened the door for my unlucky cop, I ran and held it open, keeping the alarm blaring, which I thought might up the commotion level. The cop turned around and said, "What are you doing? He opened it for me, not you." Like I didn't know that. But I decided it wouldn't be worth getting busted, so I closed it. Still, no one came out. Finally I went around front and saw "Nabila" and Brian walking out. Nabila had been overcome by the moment, and found she just had to speak. Brian says, "She was so powerful, it was really beautiful to see." Nabila told us afterwards, "I feel like I haven't been able to breathe for the last three weeks. I have had no voice. This is the first time I feel I can talk."
A few minutes later, Micah came out and then Sarah, who was the last one. The cops were very pissed at her, they were saying she was "out of control." What probably really was freaking them out was that they had no way of knowing how out of control the situation was going to get. They didn't know she was the last one, they must have been imagining that there might be 20 or 50 of us in there, and how would they know? They couldn't tell!
So what did it accomplish? It felt great, that's for sure. It lets the Zionists know that they are not "safe" from our criticism and our demand that an alternative perspective be heard. They will certainly tell others about it, and doubtless they will feel like they need to have more security at their next events. Which is good and bad. I don't want to be like Lee Kaplan and Dan Kleiman, who come to all of our events, and we find them very annoying and a little scary but we are certainly not impressed with them. They are a joke, and I don't want to be a joke to the Zionists. But Sara was pointing out that it won't need to be us all the time, we have 40 people on a list of Jews who want to do direct action, and there are plenty more who are not on the list. If we could have had another 7 tonight, the event would really not have been able to take place. If we have 10-15 at every event they do, they will have to face the fact that we're not just a tiny lunatic fringe, we're a real part of the Jewish community.
In our debrief, someone said, "But it increases their sense of being embattled, of being victimized everywhere." Someone else said, "Nothing we can do can make a dent in their belief that they are embattled." I think they are both right. It makes them feel justified in their paranoia, but they are so paranoid anyway, that it doesn't really matter. True, the media was not there, but there's no guarantee that if they had been, they would have covered it, or covered it in a way that didn't make us look like total nuts (although I don't really believe there is such a thing as bad press).
What it did do, was confront them where they live, make them see (in spite of themselves -- "You're not really Jews" people screamed at us) that it is not just the evil Others who criticize what they are doing, but their own flesh and blood, some of those they claim to be fighting for. And for now, that might be the best we can do.
The best thing about it was that we did it with almost no planning. We met about 40 minutes before we needed to be there. Some people felt we should just stand up and hold up a banner, while others wanted to try to speak out. We agreed that we would do both, which worked out to be an excellent strategy.
We discussed what we should do if there was no media there. I argued that in that scenario, we should not do the action, because it would just let them know who we were and what we were planning, and probably limit our ability to do it another time, when there might be more potential impact. Other people felt that it was important to do it just to send a message to the Zionists, that we will be there challenging them wherever they go, that we won't let them have events without confronting us. "No Justice, No Peace," someone said.
We assumed they would have pretty heavy security, do a big search of all our stuff, so we sanitized what we were carrying. Figuring out how to stuff the banner under people's clothes without making them look like they had five breasts was pretty amusing. We decided we needed to go in in pairs and not sit together.
In fact, we just could walk in, no one took any particular notice of us, they didn't really search our stuff though they were making people open their bags, and the middle-aged guy in front of me had to open his jacket, so our precautions were probably well taken. I took a seat in the middle of a row about a third of the way up the large stepped hall. I figured being in the middle would keep them from ejecting me easily once I started ranting. Waiting for the event to start, I tried to read the novel I had brought (you know I never go anywhere without one), but I couldn't really concentrate. As people filtered in, I looked at them and thought, god, it really could be the synagogue my mom goes to. These people look like the people I should feel most at home with, and yet they are right now the people I feel most alien from. I really can't figure out what to do with that. As the song goes, How did I get here?
There was no media present as far as I could tell. It occurred to me as the lights went down that since we were all sitting separately (the banner group of 3, two who were designated as observers/documenters, and three of us singles, who would be the ones to stand up and yell things out), and we had not worked out any signals, we had no way to call it off. I figured, well if someone else does it, I will. But even as Yoel Kahn, San Francisco's first openly gay pulpit rabbi, got up to welcome everyone, I thought, what is the point of doing something here? No one in this room is interested in a word we have to say, and no one outside it is going to hear them.
And then the speaking started. The new director of the Israel Action Center, talking about the kibbutz in the Galil where he and Yoel first met, and the Katyushas now falling there. No mention of the US-supplied GBU "bunker busters" and F16s strafing Beirut. He mentioned a place called Kfar Qana, but not the massacre of a family sleeping in a shelter in Qana, Lebanon. He asked us to rise (they never say "stand", it's always "rise") for a moment of silence to remember those who have fallen. There was no question, he did not mean the 1000 Lebanese and 200 Palestinians. (They had already talked about Israel's heavy military and civilian casualties, and not one word about the Lebanese casualties who are more than 10 times higher.) The director of the Jewish Community Federation's Israel Center, just back from a visit to Israel, spoke about the wonderful resilience of the Israeli people, undeterred by the evil Hezbollah, and how "though the news gives a very different story," Israelis (like most Israelis, using "Israelis" to mean "Jewish Israelis") were opening their homes to those evacuated from the north, "even allowing Druze and Arabs into their homes." Not a mention of the 1 million refugees forced out of Southern Lebanon by these very generous Israelis.
And then the Consul General got up and spoke about the current "hostilities" and how Israel had had no choice, after it generously gave back "every inch" of Lebanon in 2000 (which it did not, actually), and Hezbollah, which exists for no other reason but to kill Jews, to gleefully kill children, continued to engage in unprovoked attacks, but to go to war to destroy Hezbollah. And he said that the Israeli army was shocked to find out what firepower Hezbollah had -- "anti-ship missiles," he said with horror, they had advanced military technology, they were "almost like a real army!" And so, he said, of course as you attack Hezbollah, some civilians are going to be hit, but you have to understand that some of those so-called civilians are really Hezbollah.
The thought swept over me, it was like it was 1940 and a group of German Americans had assembled to listen to a representative of the German government talk about the invasion of Poland, and how they were surprised to find out that the Jews actually had some weapons after all, that they were not quite a primitive and easily wiped out as they had expected, and so it would take a little longer and the attacks would have to be a little more fierce, but it was going well and with your support, we will prevail. And I thought I cannot just sit here and not speak out. It doesn't really matter who hears or doesn't hear me, I just have to do it because to let this kind of racist venom exist unchallenged, from anyone but especially from people I feel responsible for, is wrong. Instead of "How did I get here?" I asked myself, as I have done so many times, "How did we get here?"
After what seemed like an eternity, Rebecca, Margot and Arla got out of their seats. They stood in the aisle and unfurled the banner, which said something like "Jews Say Stop Bombing Civilians" and they chanted, "No one is free while others are oppressed, We as Jews should know that best." People ran toward them immediately, grabbing at the banner. One guy managed to put a rip in the banner, which is pretty sturdy vinyl, with his bare hands.
I heard people yelling, "Dykes, Bitches" from across the room. Interesting, how linked homophobia, sexism and militarism are, that that is almost always the first insult people (men) in situations like that think of to hurl. People were hurling other things at the women, spit, fists. A guy climbed over me to get to them. I was trying to decide at what point I would throw off my cover and intervene if it looked like they might be hurt, when thankfully Yoel Kahn rode to the rescue. He urged people to go back to their seats, leave the situation to him to defuse. Some women were also trying to shush the crowd, while others were just as bad as the men, screaming abuse at our girls.
The consul general also exhorted people to leave them alone, saying, "This is what is so great about free speech." I heard someone say, "Only Israel would be so tolerant," which is ridiculous, of course, since we are not in Israel and Israel is not that tolerant of dissent, and anyway lots of aggressive/repressive countries are happy to tolerate free speech when it doesn't interfere with carrying out their agendas. But people got the point, and they turned to the women and started to applaud, and that was truly creepy. But I decided, okay, I could applaud too then, and I would mean something different than they meant. Yoel got security guards to come and stand in front of the banner, so people couldn't read it, and the consul general would really have continued his speech, but people were too fixated on the disrupters to listen. And then, as I heard it later, Rebecca said, "We're ready to leave now," and they were escorted out.
The room got quiet, and the consul general picked up where he left off, saying that there was consensus among the Israeli public that this war was totally necessary. Well, he said, maybe there was some difference of opinion, after all, you know Israelis, we all think we should be the commander, and that's one of our problems, but it's okay. But there is consensus. That was my cue, because I had planned my rant to be about Israeli dissent. I jumped up. "Actually, there is no consensus," I said, and started to quote Gideon Levy. I didn't get out very much, people started yelling at me, and the guy from my row who had tried to attack the others came over and started grabbing at me. He said, "Come with me." I said, "Don't touch me, who are you?" He let go and said, "I want to talk to you," and I said, "I don't have to talk to you." A woman was behind me saying, "You have to sit down now, this is not your turn." So I sat down. And the consul started again and after a few seconds, I popped up again and started talking again. That happened two or three more times, and then security was there and I decided it was enough. Just before I was ejected, the woman behind me demanded, "Who are you?" so I said, "I'm a Jew who cares about 1 million Lebanese refugees. I'm a Jew who cares about 6 million Palestinian refugees. I'm a Jew who understands that it is Israel's conduct in the world which is making us unsafe." I just kept ranting until I was gone.
As I was being ushered out of the building, through two emergency doors which set off hideous alarms, two Asian cops appeared and asked for my ID. I argued a little and then gave it to them, because why not? They asked what it was about, and I told them, "The israeli consul is in there defending the murder of children." They were getting ready to write down my details, and then one of the security guards came out and said to them, "They're coming out of the woodwork in there!" They almost took off with my ID, but instead one of them ran inside, leaving the other guy to take my information, and when he was done, he couldn't get into the building.
I waited for a long time to see the next person come out, but they didn't. I got kind of worried and curious, what was happening, and so when someone finally came and opened the door for my unlucky cop, I ran and held it open, keeping the alarm blaring, which I thought might up the commotion level. The cop turned around and said, "What are you doing? He opened it for me, not you." Like I didn't know that. But I decided it wouldn't be worth getting busted, so I closed it. Still, no one came out. Finally I went around front and saw "Nabila" and Brian walking out. Nabila had been overcome by the moment, and found she just had to speak. Brian says, "She was so powerful, it was really beautiful to see." Nabila told us afterwards, "I feel like I haven't been able to breathe for the last three weeks. I have had no voice. This is the first time I feel I can talk."
A few minutes later, Micah came out and then Sarah, who was the last one. The cops were very pissed at her, they were saying she was "out of control." What probably really was freaking them out was that they had no way of knowing how out of control the situation was going to get. They didn't know she was the last one, they must have been imagining that there might be 20 or 50 of us in there, and how would they know? They couldn't tell!
So what did it accomplish? It felt great, that's for sure. It lets the Zionists know that they are not "safe" from our criticism and our demand that an alternative perspective be heard. They will certainly tell others about it, and doubtless they will feel like they need to have more security at their next events. Which is good and bad. I don't want to be like Lee Kaplan and Dan Kleiman, who come to all of our events, and we find them very annoying and a little scary but we are certainly not impressed with them. They are a joke, and I don't want to be a joke to the Zionists. But Sara was pointing out that it won't need to be us all the time, we have 40 people on a list of Jews who want to do direct action, and there are plenty more who are not on the list. If we could have had another 7 tonight, the event would really not have been able to take place. If we have 10-15 at every event they do, they will have to face the fact that we're not just a tiny lunatic fringe, we're a real part of the Jewish community.
In our debrief, someone said, "But it increases their sense of being embattled, of being victimized everywhere." Someone else said, "Nothing we can do can make a dent in their belief that they are embattled." I think they are both right. It makes them feel justified in their paranoia, but they are so paranoid anyway, that it doesn't really matter. True, the media was not there, but there's no guarantee that if they had been, they would have covered it, or covered it in a way that didn't make us look like total nuts (although I don't really believe there is such a thing as bad press).
What it did do, was confront them where they live, make them see (in spite of themselves -- "You're not really Jews" people screamed at us) that it is not just the evil Others who criticize what they are doing, but their own flesh and blood, some of those they claim to be fighting for. And for now, that might be the best we can do.
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Food from the Bar and Other Dilemmas
The law firm where I work (which I’ll call M&L) just finished a big fundraising drive for the San Francisco Food Bank. The San Francisco Bar Association was having its annual “Food from the Bar” drive, which they’ve been doing for a few years. It had as its goal to raise $250,000 and 18,000 pounds of food, which apparently will feed 13,000 children a day.
Of course, the partners at M&L want to look good, so they put pretty heavy pressure on the staff to participate in various ways – give money, give time, give food, sponsor contests, have bake sales. To make it more “fun” they decided to have a floor-to-floor challenge; the floor that got the most points (1 point = $1 or 5 pounds of food; 2 volunteer hours = 25 points) per person on that floor would be served a lovely lunch by the people on the losing floor.
There was a lot about that approach to rub me the wrong way. First of all, it always creeps me out when anti-hunger programs have banquets to raise money, and I had the same reaction to the lunch – it would seem more appropriate somehow if it was a canned food luncheon or one made up of food rejected by the food bank, but I suppose that wouldn’t motivate people to want to win. Second, I’m on what’s called the “service floor” which we like because it has no lawyers on it and you even use a different elevator bank from the lawyers and high administrators, but is it actually fair to make us compete against partners? It might have been if they had just said the floor that got the most points, because we’re the biggest, but they wanted to be “fair” so they put that per capita condition, which tells you something about what they think “fairness” means.
A lot of my coworkers were upset about the whole drive for even more basic reasons.
“I consider my giving to be a private thing,” one said. “I give a lot of money, and I give to organizations I have worked with for a long time, and I don’t want to be pressured to give to the organization they choose.”
Another person, who with others from her floor spent a Saturday morning volunteering at the Food Bank, made the same comment – “I already do a lot of volunteer work, and the Food Bank doesn’t really need us, they had so many people there, we sat around for an hour before they even found anything for us to do.” Moreover, she found the volunteer operation disorganized – some people were scrubbing and cutting cabbages in a freezer for 3 hours, and others were putting things in bags, where they could sit down all the time. Why not rotate the easy jobs and the hard, dirty ones, she wondered? Plus they were not hospitable – there were no snacks while you were hanging around waiting, no coffee even, just a vending machine.
I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I’m community spirited, so I would rather see people setting up goofy golf tournaments to raise money for the food bank than doing what we get paid to do most of the time. Food banks are the best our country has to offer right now, to people who are working full time and can’t make ends meet, or people who can’t work, or can’t get work, and the SF Food Bank is, I understand, pretty effective at stretching the dollars (according to a partner here who is president of the Bar Association, they buy $9 worth of nonperishable groceries with each $1 they receive) and getting the food to people who need it.
Some of my coworkers, who are like me, single people in their 40s or 50s, say they cannot afford to give. I say they can. Anyone who makes the money we make can afford to give $15 or $50 or even more to the Food Bank. It’s like five lattes or something.
On the other hand, this is a firm whose partners worldwide took home an average profit of more than $911,000 in 2005. The partners in this office could easily just write a check for $250,000 themselves, which would cost each of the 55 partners $4500, and still have more than $906,000 to play with. And remember that $250,000 was not the goal for our firm, but for all the law firms in the City, which when you look at it this way, seems like a pretty paltry goal.
It made me a little ill to see people in the mailroom, who don’t even work for M&L but for an outsourcer with worse benefits and lower wages, spending their own money to have a bake sale so that the partners here can look good to their fellow millionaires. I guess it seemed not quite right to the partners too, because when it came time to award the floor prize, and the winner was 28, where some of the biggest muckety-mucks have their offices, they quick-awarded an extra prize to our floor for the “most creative fundraiser” – the aforementioned goofy golf tournament.
One of the partners in our firm is the president of the SF Bar Association, the first woman of color to hold that position. I don’t know her at all, but she seems like a pretty conscience-driven person, for a corporate lawyer. She certainly is passionate and articulate when she talks about social issues. In a radio interview about the “Food from the Bar” drive she said, “The thought of having one hungry child a day in San Francisco to me seems unacceptable.” I couldn’t agree more.
She also said, “All we want to do is to level the playing field so that people have a shot at becoming successful adults, and that means they have to be well nourished kids.”
Whoa. Raising money and food for the Food Bank is not leveling the playing field. It’s helping the unlevel playing field to survive, while making the people on the top of the slope feel a little less guilty about it. You do not get to talk about a level playing field when you are making something like 25 times the salary of the people who do your copying and deliver your mail. Especially not when the work you are doing is directly sustaining the system that preserves those inequalities. M&L represents “Healthcare” companies, which should not be confused with health care providers, who get rich off denying people the care they’ve paid for, and asbestos producers who try to prove that it wasn’t the insulation the guy worked with all those years that killed him, it was the second-hand smoke, and they negotiate contracts for executives who will come in and layoff thousands of workers in order to boost the value of their stock options before they take their golden parachutes. It’s not this firm in particular, it’s just that the role of corporate law firms is to grease the wheels of corporate domination.
Food banks are not a solution to hunger, just as shelters are not a solution to homelessness. What we really need is for people working full time, or even less than full time, to be able to feed themselves and their families, and have something left over to go on vacation. No amount of giving to food banks brings us any closer to that. At the same time, we know we’re not going to get that real solution any time soon, so the food bank enables people to live, who would otherwise die. Yet, it was the lack of any services, the sight of so many recently middle class people standing in soup lines, that brought about the New Deal in the ’30s. So in that sense, supporting the food bank is supporting the system that creates the need for the food bank, and the more progressive thing to do, the more humane thing in the long run, would be not to support it.
I can’t pass by hungry people on the street, and I can’t advocate letting people starve. But where does it stop? When do the temporary solutions supplement the real solutions, and when do they impede them?
I was talking the other night to Sitara, from the prison abolition organization Critical Resistance, about a bill in the legislature to open a big new private “Community Correctional Center” for women in California. CR opposes it, because they oppose all prison expansions, they oppose private prisons, well, they just oppose prisons. They are abolitionist, which “is a political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”
Sitara and I were talking about the fact that they might be criticized by prison reform organizations, who are often seduced by the idea that since right now, women are locked up in terrible prisons, we have to support the creation of more humane, less crowded facilities where they can be closer to their kids, have more of an opportunity to get integrated into the community. Some years ago, there was a group called Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, which Barbara Smith was involved in starting, and I’m pretty sure (I looked for info about this online and couldn’t find it, so if I’m wrong, I apologize in advance) that one of the projects they were doing was trying to set up a jail in New York where mothers could be with their kids. The Criminal Justice Program of AFSC, where I worked in the 1980s, was also trying to do something like that, which might make sense if what you want to do is make things easier for people in prison, but there is a way that is saying it is okay for people to be in prison.
Sitara pointed out that these prison expansions in the guise of humanizing prisons never work out the way the reformers hope they will. Every time, it ends up being true that they arrest more people and give out longer sentences and soon all the new beds are full and the old prisons are just as crowded as they were.
The other day there was an article in the Christian Science Monitor about MachsomWatch, the Israeli women’s group that my friends Susy and Dafna work with, which goes out to the checkpoints to monitor the abuse of human rights. The article, to the seasoned eye, anyway, actually captured some of the tension in that group. Adi Dagan, one of the women who has been with the group from early on, expresses frustration that “After five years, we haven't been very successful.…Not a single checkpoint has been removed, and we haven’t been able to change policies on restriction of movement for Palestinians.” Another volunteer, Susan Lourenco, is quoted as saying, “We show a peace-loving face to Palestinians who see no other Israelis but soldiers and settlers.”
The women who founded MachsomWatch saw it as a way of opposing the checkpoints, the whole system of control of Palestinians’ movement. They are against the occupation of the 1967 territories in general, and some of them are active in even more radical groups like Zochrot, which advocates for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes inside what is now called Israel. After a couple years, they got very big and attracted some very mainstream liberal women, one of whom is from what Susy calls an “Israeli Mayflower” family, a number of whom have fathers who were high-ranking generals.
Some of the new women were just as left-wing as they were, but many of them are really not left-wing at all, they are not necessarily opposed to the checkpoints, they just don’t want people to be unnecessarily humiliated and abused. Or they are opposed to the checkpoints that are deep in the West Bank but not ones that are in “border” areas which ignores the fact that those “borders” themselves were unilaterally imposed by Israel. Some of the MW women argue with the soldiers the whole time they are there, while others are willing to stand in for them and tell the Palestinians to stand in line or tell internationals to leave (one group tried to do that with me once; I asked her to tell the soldiers if they wanted to tell me something, they had to do it themselves). One friend told me about being at a MachsomWatch meeting where a woman announced that she had begun volunteering with the army as a civilian volunteer at the checkpoint, checking people’s IDs and deciding if they have the right to go where they wanted to go.
More comprehensive solutions are often dismissed as impractical, or tantamount to doing nothing, or just complaining instead of helping people. But recently, that ultraleft rag Forbes magazine featured Critical Resistance in its (somewhat bizarre) list of “Ten Alternatives to Prison” http://www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=Forbes0406 . Here’s what they said,
“It may sound like a radical idea. But locking people up in cages doesn't make society safer, says Rose Braz, director of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots group that works to abolish prisons. So why not try something different? ‘Our goal is to create safer communities. The way to do that is for the government to invest in housing, education and job training. We know that communities where these needs are met have lower crime rates,’ says Rose.”
If even Forbes is ready to look at the radical approaches, maybe real change is not as distant a dream as it seems. Here’s hoping.
Of course, the partners at M&L want to look good, so they put pretty heavy pressure on the staff to participate in various ways – give money, give time, give food, sponsor contests, have bake sales. To make it more “fun” they decided to have a floor-to-floor challenge; the floor that got the most points (1 point = $1 or 5 pounds of food; 2 volunteer hours = 25 points) per person on that floor would be served a lovely lunch by the people on the losing floor.
There was a lot about that approach to rub me the wrong way. First of all, it always creeps me out when anti-hunger programs have banquets to raise money, and I had the same reaction to the lunch – it would seem more appropriate somehow if it was a canned food luncheon or one made up of food rejected by the food bank, but I suppose that wouldn’t motivate people to want to win. Second, I’m on what’s called the “service floor” which we like because it has no lawyers on it and you even use a different elevator bank from the lawyers and high administrators, but is it actually fair to make us compete against partners? It might have been if they had just said the floor that got the most points, because we’re the biggest, but they wanted to be “fair” so they put that per capita condition, which tells you something about what they think “fairness” means.
A lot of my coworkers were upset about the whole drive for even more basic reasons.
“I consider my giving to be a private thing,” one said. “I give a lot of money, and I give to organizations I have worked with for a long time, and I don’t want to be pressured to give to the organization they choose.”
Another person, who with others from her floor spent a Saturday morning volunteering at the Food Bank, made the same comment – “I already do a lot of volunteer work, and the Food Bank doesn’t really need us, they had so many people there, we sat around for an hour before they even found anything for us to do.” Moreover, she found the volunteer operation disorganized – some people were scrubbing and cutting cabbages in a freezer for 3 hours, and others were putting things in bags, where they could sit down all the time. Why not rotate the easy jobs and the hard, dirty ones, she wondered? Plus they were not hospitable – there were no snacks while you were hanging around waiting, no coffee even, just a vending machine.
I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I’m community spirited, so I would rather see people setting up goofy golf tournaments to raise money for the food bank than doing what we get paid to do most of the time. Food banks are the best our country has to offer right now, to people who are working full time and can’t make ends meet, or people who can’t work, or can’t get work, and the SF Food Bank is, I understand, pretty effective at stretching the dollars (according to a partner here who is president of the Bar Association, they buy $9 worth of nonperishable groceries with each $1 they receive) and getting the food to people who need it.
Some of my coworkers, who are like me, single people in their 40s or 50s, say they cannot afford to give. I say they can. Anyone who makes the money we make can afford to give $15 or $50 or even more to the Food Bank. It’s like five lattes or something.
On the other hand, this is a firm whose partners worldwide took home an average profit of more than $911,000 in 2005. The partners in this office could easily just write a check for $250,000 themselves, which would cost each of the 55 partners $4500, and still have more than $906,000 to play with. And remember that $250,000 was not the goal for our firm, but for all the law firms in the City, which when you look at it this way, seems like a pretty paltry goal.
It made me a little ill to see people in the mailroom, who don’t even work for M&L but for an outsourcer with worse benefits and lower wages, spending their own money to have a bake sale so that the partners here can look good to their fellow millionaires. I guess it seemed not quite right to the partners too, because when it came time to award the floor prize, and the winner was 28, where some of the biggest muckety-mucks have their offices, they quick-awarded an extra prize to our floor for the “most creative fundraiser” – the aforementioned goofy golf tournament.
One of the partners in our firm is the president of the SF Bar Association, the first woman of color to hold that position. I don’t know her at all, but she seems like a pretty conscience-driven person, for a corporate lawyer. She certainly is passionate and articulate when she talks about social issues. In a radio interview about the “Food from the Bar” drive she said, “The thought of having one hungry child a day in San Francisco to me seems unacceptable.” I couldn’t agree more.
She also said, “All we want to do is to level the playing field so that people have a shot at becoming successful adults, and that means they have to be well nourished kids.”
Whoa. Raising money and food for the Food Bank is not leveling the playing field. It’s helping the unlevel playing field to survive, while making the people on the top of the slope feel a little less guilty about it. You do not get to talk about a level playing field when you are making something like 25 times the salary of the people who do your copying and deliver your mail. Especially not when the work you are doing is directly sustaining the system that preserves those inequalities. M&L represents “Healthcare” companies, which should not be confused with health care providers, who get rich off denying people the care they’ve paid for, and asbestos producers who try to prove that it wasn’t the insulation the guy worked with all those years that killed him, it was the second-hand smoke, and they negotiate contracts for executives who will come in and layoff thousands of workers in order to boost the value of their stock options before they take their golden parachutes. It’s not this firm in particular, it’s just that the role of corporate law firms is to grease the wheels of corporate domination.
Food banks are not a solution to hunger, just as shelters are not a solution to homelessness. What we really need is for people working full time, or even less than full time, to be able to feed themselves and their families, and have something left over to go on vacation. No amount of giving to food banks brings us any closer to that. At the same time, we know we’re not going to get that real solution any time soon, so the food bank enables people to live, who would otherwise die. Yet, it was the lack of any services, the sight of so many recently middle class people standing in soup lines, that brought about the New Deal in the ’30s. So in that sense, supporting the food bank is supporting the system that creates the need for the food bank, and the more progressive thing to do, the more humane thing in the long run, would be not to support it.
I can’t pass by hungry people on the street, and I can’t advocate letting people starve. But where does it stop? When do the temporary solutions supplement the real solutions, and when do they impede them?
I was talking the other night to Sitara, from the prison abolition organization Critical Resistance, about a bill in the legislature to open a big new private “Community Correctional Center” for women in California. CR opposes it, because they oppose all prison expansions, they oppose private prisons, well, they just oppose prisons. They are abolitionist, which “is a political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”
Sitara and I were talking about the fact that they might be criticized by prison reform organizations, who are often seduced by the idea that since right now, women are locked up in terrible prisons, we have to support the creation of more humane, less crowded facilities where they can be closer to their kids, have more of an opportunity to get integrated into the community. Some years ago, there was a group called Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, which Barbara Smith was involved in starting, and I’m pretty sure (I looked for info about this online and couldn’t find it, so if I’m wrong, I apologize in advance) that one of the projects they were doing was trying to set up a jail in New York where mothers could be with their kids. The Criminal Justice Program of AFSC, where I worked in the 1980s, was also trying to do something like that, which might make sense if what you want to do is make things easier for people in prison, but there is a way that is saying it is okay for people to be in prison.
Sitara pointed out that these prison expansions in the guise of humanizing prisons never work out the way the reformers hope they will. Every time, it ends up being true that they arrest more people and give out longer sentences and soon all the new beds are full and the old prisons are just as crowded as they were.
The other day there was an article in the Christian Science Monitor about MachsomWatch, the Israeli women’s group that my friends Susy and Dafna work with, which goes out to the checkpoints to monitor the abuse of human rights. The article, to the seasoned eye, anyway, actually captured some of the tension in that group. Adi Dagan, one of the women who has been with the group from early on, expresses frustration that “After five years, we haven't been very successful.…Not a single checkpoint has been removed, and we haven’t been able to change policies on restriction of movement for Palestinians.” Another volunteer, Susan Lourenco, is quoted as saying, “We show a peace-loving face to Palestinians who see no other Israelis but soldiers and settlers.”
The women who founded MachsomWatch saw it as a way of opposing the checkpoints, the whole system of control of Palestinians’ movement. They are against the occupation of the 1967 territories in general, and some of them are active in even more radical groups like Zochrot, which advocates for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes inside what is now called Israel. After a couple years, they got very big and attracted some very mainstream liberal women, one of whom is from what Susy calls an “Israeli Mayflower” family, a number of whom have fathers who were high-ranking generals.
Some of the new women were just as left-wing as they were, but many of them are really not left-wing at all, they are not necessarily opposed to the checkpoints, they just don’t want people to be unnecessarily humiliated and abused. Or they are opposed to the checkpoints that are deep in the West Bank but not ones that are in “border” areas which ignores the fact that those “borders” themselves were unilaterally imposed by Israel. Some of the MW women argue with the soldiers the whole time they are there, while others are willing to stand in for them and tell the Palestinians to stand in line or tell internationals to leave (one group tried to do that with me once; I asked her to tell the soldiers if they wanted to tell me something, they had to do it themselves). One friend told me about being at a MachsomWatch meeting where a woman announced that she had begun volunteering with the army as a civilian volunteer at the checkpoint, checking people’s IDs and deciding if they have the right to go where they wanted to go.
More comprehensive solutions are often dismissed as impractical, or tantamount to doing nothing, or just complaining instead of helping people. But recently, that ultraleft rag Forbes magazine featured Critical Resistance in its (somewhat bizarre) list of “Ten Alternatives to Prison” http://www.criticalresistance.org/i
“It may sound like a radical idea. But locking people up in cages doesn't make society safer, says Rose Braz, director of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots group that works to abolish prisons. So why not try something different? ‘Our goal is to create safer communities. The way to do that is for the government to invest in housing, education and job training. We know that communities where these needs are met have lower crime rates,’ says Rose.”
If even Forbes is ready to look at the radical approaches, maybe real change is not as distant a dream as it seems. Here’s hoping.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Where's the Christian Human Rights Lobby?
My long-awaited (or at least long-winded) critique of the Walt-Mearsheimer study on the Zionist lobby.
Every day in my email I get a report called "Today in Palestine." It's compiled by an incredible dedicated guy named Shadi, who combs the Palestinian, Israeli and European press, and also the alternative and the very very alternative press to send out news and rumor that you just can't get anywhere else. It arrives in an extremely readable form: headlines linked to the article, followed by a one-sentence synopsis. [2023 update - seems to be sadly no longer publishing.]
Every day in my email I get a report called "Today in Palestine." It's compiled by an incredible dedicated guy named Shadi, who combs the Palestinian, Israeli and European press, and also the alternative and the very very alternative press to send out news and rumor that you just can't get anywhere else. It arrives in an extremely readable form: headlines linked to the article, followed by a one-sentence synopsis. [2023 update - seems to be sadly no longer publishing.]
One day a few weeks ago, I caught the headline, "Study: Israel Lobby Motivating US foreign policy" nestled in between reports of more Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes and stories about the challenges facing the new Palestinian government. I clicked on it immediately, and was taken to a new study by Harvard professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
"This is going to be trouble," I said to myself after reading through it quickly. And of course it has been. Harvard, under pressure from the very Zionist establishment that is the focus of the study, insisted that its name be removed. It has been attacked non-stop in the mainstream press. Make no mistake, that would probably have happened if the study were absolutely perfect. As the authors point out, any printed piece that is remotely critical of Israel is lambasted as anti-Semitism. Which is why it is all the more unfortunate that this one is far from perfect.
It carefully lays out unimpeachable facts, but the facts don't support the conclusions, unless you add to them assumptions that are faulty.
These assumptions are:
-- That there is a "U.S. national interest." In fact, there is not one interest, there are many. There are elite interests, there are public interests, but within those broad interest groups there are many and competing interests. A construction worker who is a homeowner, for instance, presumably has an interest in high wages for construction workers and low costs of home remodeling. Because of the way that our society is structured, those two interests are seen as incompatible, and she will be forced to choose whether to support outsourcing to nonunion construction companies or high construction costs.
-- That the US government normally acts in "our interests." This seems to be the fundamental premise of the study -- that the US elite is a band of good-hearted people who but for the evil Zionist puppetmasters, would act in the interests of global peace and justice.
Let me ask you: when was the last time the U.S. government did something you really felt was in your interest? I'm pretty sure it was sometime in 1972, when I was 12.
I admit it: as a Jew, it makes me very nervous to read statements like, "Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy" in scholarly papers. Maybe that's clouding my judgment. But having read this paper closely, and tried to keep my feelings in check, I concluded that it's poor scholarship, which makes it very attackable by those who paint any criticism of Israel, or US policy toward Israel, as anti-Jewish.
The authors are conscious of this potential. They strive for a balanced tone and set out to distance themselves from anti-Semitic groups. "There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better." I do not think the authors are anti-Semites, but they play on anti-Jewish beliefs of white Americans: that "we" are good people so if we're doing something bad, "they" must be making us do it.
The title of the paper is itself misleading, because they do not make the argument that the Israel Lobby drives all US foreign policy, but only our Middle East policy. I maintain that US Middle East policy is just one part of its global policies, and unless the Zionist conspiracy theory explains our policies toward Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria and China, it can't really explain our Middle East policy. The Zionists' interests intersect neatly with other priorities of US elites, such as controlling Middle East oil fields (Standard Oil and four other US companies acquired control of 23% of Iraq's oil in 1927, when neither Israel nor the Zionist lobby existed) and creating undreamed of wealth for US contractors like Bechtel, Halliburton and Lockheed Martin (none owned by Jews).
The authors seem to accept at face value U.S. government claims to care about democracy and fairness. They also presume that high U.S. decision-makers are seriously interested in ensuring the security of non-wealthy U.S. citizens. So, they say, support for Israel can't be based on shared interest in security, because that support actually makes us more vulnerable to attack. It can't be based on the desire to support a democracy in the Middle East, because Israel -- given its race-based citizenship policies and brutal military occupation of Palestinian land -- is not a democracy.
If the U.S. non-Zionist elite is interested in democracy, what part of democracy is served by concentration camps and "extraordinary rendition"? Okay, the authors would explain that as an offshoot of our policy toward Israel, because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being fought for Israel's interest, which is making us stray from the ideals our country's actions have traditionally embodied.
They claim that this situation is without historical precedent, but make no attempt to show how it is different in kind from our support for South Vietnam, El Salvador, Indonesia, Chile, Iran under the Shah, Haiti under the Duvaliers, Iraq under Saddam, Colombia, apartheid South Africa, Noriega before he suddenly became the public enemy in the red underwear, and on and on. Yes, Israel receives more money with fewer strings than any of those regimes did, but is propping up repressive regimes okay for a democracy as long as it doesn't cost too much?
In arguing that our invasion of Iraq was really just a bow to the Israelis, Mearsheimer and Walt act as if the US never invaded other countries and stole land and resources in the name of democracy before AIPAC set up shop in Washington. Was Theodore Herzl, then an unknown playwright, secretly responsible for US colonization of Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898?
They completely ignore the importance of racism as a motivator. This is not the first time that the U.S. has supported a white-dominated* colonial power in the Global South because of a shared interest in white domination of the region.
Isn't it possible that the US government supports Israel because it recognizes a kindred spirit? That the idea of a group of people who have been a persecuted minority conquering another land, proclaiming themselves its discoverers, taming the wilderness (making the desert bloom) and annihilating its indigenous people sounds good to us because it worked so well when we did it? That a country where half of Palestinian men have been in prison doesn't look bad to one where one-third of African American men have been in prison?
Do you believe that if it weren't for the Zionists, the Bush administration would have responded quickly and compassionately to the Katrina disaster? You don't if you know that in 1927 (21 years before the State of Israel was created) the Army Corps of Engineers blew up levees in Mississippi and Louisiana, wiping out poor and African American areas to save wealthy neighborhoods and plantations.
Walt and Mearsheimer's first five pages are a cogent statement of all the reasons the US government should curtail its support for Israel. In the middle of page 5, they get to their core argument:
"So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
"The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use 'the Lobby' as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that 'the Lobby' is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either 'not very or 'not at all' emotionally attached to Israel."
So the authors start off talking about the Israel Lobby, and then with no segue, they are talking about Jewish Americans.
The study itself points out that Jews are an insignificant percentage of the population, but discounts that. "Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, … The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates 'depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money.' And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them."
California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Those five states account for 155 members of Congress. So 390 of our elected representatives should be free to vote their consciences (on Israel). Okay, but maybe they aspire to be president, and Jews apparently account for 60% of presidential campaign contributions. WHY? Of Fortune 100 CEOs, less than 10% are Jewish. A few years ago, something like 84 of the Forbes 400 were Jews. What are the Christians doing with their money?
Moreover, as the authors themselves point out, at least 40% of Jews don't agree with the Israel Lobby. A 2004 poll found that Jewish voters do not vote according to the Lobby's priorities; 42% of Jews, just like non-Jews, say the economy is their highest priority in deciding who to vote for.
Yes, the Lobby targets Congresspeople it declares enemies of Israel and has succeeded in getting them defeated. In 2002, they mercilessly attacked Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, and she lost. In 2004, McKinney regrouped and was reelected. It is unlikely that the Zionists liked her any better in 2004 than in 2002. Her reelection shows that even the sworn enemies of the Zionist lobby can win, if they have a strategy. So that should embolden any representative who is capable of recognizing that supporting Israel's ethnic cleansing project is counter to anyone's interest. Why hasn't it?
It's easy to blame the Zionists. It's harder to blame ourselves -- whether for our own racist past and present, or for the fact that we in the Palestine solidarity movement have not organized ONE mass protest against the US, European and Canadian governments' decision to literally starve the Palestinians to punish them for exercising their democratic right to elect whom they want.
If we could somehow curtail the influence of the Zionist Lobby, it might help the Palestinians, and G-d knows that would make me happy. But I don't believe it would help the Iraqis, and it certainly wouldn't help the Chinese, Senegalese or Cubans.
Forget about the Jews. Let Jewish Voice for Peace wrestle the so-called mainstream Jewish organizations for the right to represent the Jewish community.
Forget about the Zionists. You're not going to win a fight with them. Why attack the Israel lobby, even if they deserve it? They are not the problem. Their influence is a symptom of the problem. You are just going to set up an opportunity for them to scream about anti-Semitism and some people who never heard them before might hear them this time.
Just go get every non-Zionist Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or atheist you know to give every dollar they can spare to the non-Zionist Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or atheist candidate of their choice. Tell them to send a note with the money, saying, "End US aid to Israel now or I'll never give you another dollar."
What? You don't know enough non-Jewish non-Zionists you can get to do that? What's the matter with you? They're 97% of the population, or at least 93% if you scratch out the Christian Zionists. There's our work. What are we waiting for?
* A majority of Israelis are people of color, with ancestry in Arab or African countries, but political power is controlled by Jews of European ancestry.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Get Up And Sing
March 22, 2006
"Why are you preaching to the choir?" the man from the radio station asked me. "Everyone here in San Francisco agrees with you."
That's the question of the hour. Our website, ActAgainstTorture.org, got a bunch of comments to that effect after our awesome street theater action on Monday, dramatizing the illegal detentions and torture of foreign prisoners by our government to morning commuters. www.sfgate.com/ "Why don't you protest in Wichita?" one of them asked. Of course, if we did protest in Wichita, we'd be called carpetbaggers, or outside agitators. We wouldn't just be called that, we would be that.
It was only last night that I thought of the answer I wish I had given: We're not preaching to the choir, we're telling the choir to stand up and sing.
If all of San Francisco is really against the war, against torture, against indefinite detentions (concentration camps), then let's see it. I hate to keep coming back to the same analogy, but there's just not a better one: if you asked an 85-year-old German what they did during World War II, and they said, "Oh, well everyone in my town was already opposed to the Nazis, so I didn't do anything. We all voted for another candidate when we had the chance," you would not be impressed. So how can we get San Francisco to demonstrate its opposition, if its opposition is so deep?
What people were upset about was that we blocked traffic on a busy street for nearly an hour while everyone was hurrying to get to work on time. Actually, we didn't block it for an hour. We blocked it for about 15 minutes, and the police blocked it for the rest of the hour.
But that's not the point. What is the point, is that there have been quite a few days in recent years when business in San Francisco has completely shut down. 9/11 and the day after. The couple days after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The day after the Rodney King riots began in Los Angeles. Yeah, that's right. The day after Black L.A exploded in justified rage, I got a call from my supervisor at work telling me not to come in. Fearful of demonstrations in downtown, the firm had decided to close for a couple days, making it possible for me to go participate in a demonstration that was shut down before it began by a police chief who declared martial law. Honest, he used those words.
Yet the day that our bombs started raining on Bagdad, and every day thereafter, unless it was some dead president's birthday or something, business in San Francisco rolled on as usual. Those of us who felt the need to diverge from our routine took sick time, personal time, sick of war time, Paid Time Off, Leave Without Pay (which I just realized has the same acronym - LWOP - as Life Without Parole - hmmm). What none of us can understand, even those of us who care deeply about the war and human rights and every other good thing, is that for the Iraqis, every day since March 19, 2003 has been 9/11. Or maybe I should say since January 17, 1991.
We don't even have to look so far away for a massive earthquake most of us good San Francisco liberals and radicals are pretty oblivious of. Yesterday, I got a bunch of emails announcing a week of actions in support of a hunger strike protesting SB 4437, the Sensenbrenner/King anti-immigrant bill. The latest in the proposed draconian measures to punish people who dare to come here to pick tomatoes or clean toilets for subminimum wage, this bill if it passes will imprison not only undocumented workers and their kids, but people who provide them health care or help them find a place to live. Tell me, who is helped by that? We know it costs more to keep someone in prison for a year than to send them to Harvard. So why do we want to spend our money that way?
The government tries to say it is to protect us against terrorists, but then, isn't everything? I must have missed something, because I don't recall that Mohammed Ata or any of his 9/11 coconspirators, or any of their predecessors, came from Mexico. If this really had anything to do with national security, the government would be much better advised to mine the Canadian border. But of course, in their minds, Canada is the nice snow-covered home of law-abiding white people, and the South is where all those dangerous brown people who all look alike come from. They can't tell a Latino from an Arab from a Turk, but it doesn't matter since we're going to lock all of them up anyway.
So I went to this demo, which was very powerful and spirited, with lots of drumming, and in the crowd of 300 people, I saw three people I knew. The week of actions has been organized by Deporten La Migra, which more or less speaks for itself - I was one of three or four people who were not Latino. The Asian immigrant communities, which actually make up an even larger part of San Francisco than the Latino immigrant communities, were also noticeably absent (although looking at a blog account of the events, I see that today, the Progressive Chinese Alliance and the May 1st Alliance, the Chinese Progressive Association and the May 1st Alliance [grassroots alliance of low wage worker organizations] organized a noon rally to support the hunger strike). Our demo on Monday also had about 300 people, of which maybe 3 were Latino.
I'm not criticizing anyone. I mean, I only heard about yesterday's action about three hours before it started and it happened I didn't have plans after work; if it had been any other day this week, I wouldn't have been there either. And I know that there is an action on Monday, also at Dianne Feinstein's office, just like ours was, that is connecting the war on Iraq to the war on immigrants I'm just thinking about what it means that there was almost no crossover between those of us who were protesting the current incarceration of brown-skinned Muslims, and the group protesting the threatened (and current) incarceration of brown-skinned Catholics.
On one hand, it doesn't really matter. We are all out there, that's what really matters, and we are ultimately part of the same movement, whether we know it or not. We all work in our own communities, and maybe that makes us stronger. I guess we're churches with different choirs. But if we all put our voices together, could we make better harmony?
For news and photos from the hunger strike for immigration justice, and to find out about this weekend's actions, see http://www.edjustice.blogspot.com/
For tons of photos and widespread news coverage of our action against torture, and to get involved, see www.actagainsttorture.org (but don't send us any nasty emails about preaching to the choir).
To listen to my interview with Jamila al-Shanty, recently elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council on Hamas ticket, see http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/03/1807770.php
Or better yet, see you in the streets.
"Why are you preaching to the choir?" the man from the radio station asked me. "Everyone here in San Francisco agrees with you."
That's the question of the hour. Our website, ActAgainstTorture.org, got a bunch of comments to that effect after our awesome street theater action on Monday, dramatizing the illegal detentions and torture of foreign prisoners by our government to morning commuters. www.sfgate.com/ "Why don't you protest in Wichita?" one of them asked. Of course, if we did protest in Wichita, we'd be called carpetbaggers, or outside agitators. We wouldn't just be called that, we would be that.
It was only last night that I thought of the answer I wish I had given: We're not preaching to the choir, we're telling the choir to stand up and sing.
If all of San Francisco is really against the war, against torture, against indefinite detentions (concentration camps), then let's see it. I hate to keep coming back to the same analogy, but there's just not a better one: if you asked an 85-year-old German what they did during World War II, and they said, "Oh, well everyone in my town was already opposed to the Nazis, so I didn't do anything. We all voted for another candidate when we had the chance," you would not be impressed. So how can we get San Francisco to demonstrate its opposition, if its opposition is so deep?
What people were upset about was that we blocked traffic on a busy street for nearly an hour while everyone was hurrying to get to work on time. Actually, we didn't block it for an hour. We blocked it for about 15 minutes, and the police blocked it for the rest of the hour.
But that's not the point. What is the point, is that there have been quite a few days in recent years when business in San Francisco has completely shut down. 9/11 and the day after. The couple days after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The day after the Rodney King riots began in Los Angeles. Yeah, that's right. The day after Black L.A exploded in justified rage, I got a call from my supervisor at work telling me not to come in. Fearful of demonstrations in downtown, the firm had decided to close for a couple days, making it possible for me to go participate in a demonstration that was shut down before it began by a police chief who declared martial law. Honest, he used those words.
Yet the day that our bombs started raining on Bagdad, and every day thereafter, unless it was some dead president's birthday or something, business in San Francisco rolled on as usual. Those of us who felt the need to diverge from our routine took sick time, personal time, sick of war time, Paid Time Off, Leave Without Pay (which I just realized has the same acronym - LWOP - as Life Without Parole - hmmm). What none of us can understand, even those of us who care deeply about the war and human rights and every other good thing, is that for the Iraqis, every day since March 19, 2003 has been 9/11. Or maybe I should say since January 17, 1991.
We don't even have to look so far away for a massive earthquake most of us good San Francisco liberals and radicals are pretty oblivious of. Yesterday, I got a bunch of emails announcing a week of actions in support of a hunger strike protesting SB 4437, the Sensenbrenner/King anti-immigrant bill. The latest in the proposed draconian measures to punish people who dare to come here to pick tomatoes or clean toilets for subminimum wage, this bill if it passes will imprison not only undocumented workers and their kids, but people who provide them health care or help them find a place to live. Tell me, who is helped by that? We know it costs more to keep someone in prison for a year than to send them to Harvard. So why do we want to spend our money that way?
The government tries to say it is to protect us against terrorists, but then, isn't everything? I must have missed something, because I don't recall that Mohammed Ata or any of his 9/11 coconspirators, or any of their predecessors, came from Mexico. If this really had anything to do with national security, the government would be much better advised to mine the Canadian border. But of course, in their minds, Canada is the nice snow-covered home of law-abiding white people, and the South is where all those dangerous brown people who all look alike come from. They can't tell a Latino from an Arab from a Turk, but it doesn't matter since we're going to lock all of them up anyway.
So I went to this demo, which was very powerful and spirited, with lots of drumming, and in the crowd of 300 people, I saw three people I knew. The week of actions has been organized by Deporten La Migra, which more or less speaks for itself - I was one of three or four people who were not Latino. The Asian immigrant communities, which actually make up an even larger part of San Francisco than the Latino immigrant communities, were also noticeably absent (although looking at a blog account of the events, I see that today, the Progressive Chinese Alliance and the May 1st Alliance, the Chinese Progressive Association and the May 1st Alliance [grassroots alliance of low wage worker organizations] organized a noon rally to support the hunger strike). Our demo on Monday also had about 300 people, of which maybe 3 were Latino.
I'm not criticizing anyone. I mean, I only heard about yesterday's action about three hours before it started and it happened I didn't have plans after work; if it had been any other day this week, I wouldn't have been there either. And I know that there is an action on Monday, also at Dianne Feinstein's office, just like ours was, that is connecting the war on Iraq to the war on immigrants I'm just thinking about what it means that there was almost no crossover between those of us who were protesting the current incarceration of brown-skinned Muslims, and the group protesting the threatened (and current) incarceration of brown-skinned Catholics.
On one hand, it doesn't really matter. We are all out there, that's what really matters, and we are ultimately part of the same movement, whether we know it or not. We all work in our own communities, and maybe that makes us stronger. I guess we're churches with different choirs. But if we all put our voices together, could we make better harmony?
For news and photos from the hunger strike for immigration justice, and to find out about this weekend's actions, see http://www.edjustice.blogspot.com/
For tons of photos and widespread news coverage of our action against torture, and to get involved, see www.actagainsttorture.org (but don't send us any nasty emails about preaching to the choir).
To listen to my interview with Jamila al-Shanty, recently elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council on Hamas ticket, see http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/03/180
Or better yet, see you in the streets.
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