After the Anniversary Comes the Fighting ...

March 30, 2008

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we the ones we're waiting for?

March 16, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Tattoo!

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

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


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

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


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

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

Hair 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

Five O'Clock Shadows

September 30, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Pieces on KPFA (Radio) Women's Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there were none

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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