What I want to hear from the president

Today I'm supposed to be on a "conference call" on health care reform with the President - and tens of thousands of other people. I have opinions on many of the details of health care reform, of course, having worked in that field for many years. The current state of the debate makes me inexpressibly depressed. But here's what I yearn to hear.

"More than sixty years ago, Americans decided that people have the right, after 50 years of labor, to lay down our work; and to do so with dignity and some measure of security. In making that commitment to ourselves and each other, we lessened the human suffering and nagging fears that haunted our forebears: the fear of ending our days in destitution; the prospect of unending labor beyond the time when bodies can endure it; the economic need for women to bear as many children as possible to ensure caretakers during old age.

"And thus, we created the concept of retirement. Certainly the systems we established along with it are not perfect; they must be adapted as times change, and are on shaky ground right now, requiring our attention. Moreover the promise of retirement does not absolve us from the duty to contribute our own part to that security, to save and plan and take responsibility for our circumstances. But the underlying promise, that of the right to lay down one's burden in old age with dignity and peace of mind, is now enshrined in our culture, and we are better for it.

"We have before us the opportunity to make a similar leap, a collective covenant of equally momentous import. We can create a life for our children and grandchildren that is free of many of the fears that haunt us: fear that our illnesses and injuries will go untreated; knowledge that we live ever on the edge disaster, should our health coverage disappear due to unemployment, illness, divorce, widowhood; dread of the next unexpected jump in our health care premiums, and the associated painful financial choices; terror that we will be bankrupted and become a burden to our families simply because we got sick.

"We have the opportunity to create the concept of health care as a right - not without our own responsibilities and duties, to share the cost, to care for our bodies, to plan for our future and take responsibility for our circumstances. But a right nonetheless, and one enjoyed already by people around the world. We can walk away from the fear and instead embrace the idea that people should be cared for when they require it, with dignity and some measure of security. We, and the generations that follow us, will be better for it."

Why isn't this what the debate is about?

My experience BaRACKing the vote

I know my month-long absence means nobody will be reading this, but - I'm back, nonetheless.

Gentle Reader, trust me when I say you've been better for my absence, because I have been pathologically obsessed with the election and the polls. It's not pretty, though I know I'm not alone. The other night we had dinner with my friend Megan, and at one point I heard myself saying "I feel so much better after talking to you because you're WAY crazier than I am."

In the past few days I attempted to channel my anxiety into something other than obscene amounts of cable news-watching and internet poll-checking, by knocking on doors for the Obama campaign. These folks are crazy-organized, let me tell you. You get your list of people, with their polling place and ballot type, and a map. You get literature and talking points and a phone number to call for anyone whose absentee ballot went missing, or who has a problem with their voter registration. So off I went.

Both times, I was assigned to some hard-knock parts of my neighborhood. These were some of the lowest-income areas of a low-income part of town. And it says something in Seattle when you can spend four hours knocking on doors, and only talk to one white person. I also only talked to two undecided people, and no McCain voters. So really I spent my time making sure people knew how to vote. And boy, was that satisfying.

I encountered a number of people who had questions about where to vote, or who hadn't received their absentee ballot, so I was (hopefully) able to help them actually vote. I met so many first-time voters, including many recently naturalized citizens. They were so excited, some of them invited me in so they could run through what they needed to do and make sure they understood. I met a family of east African women, all voting for the first time, who proudly reported that they'd already mailed in their ballots, and then they erupted into a happy kind of dance, cheering "Obama, Obama, Obama!"

At one point I caught a woman who was heading to her car, and she looked wary when I approached her. I explained my purpose, and she affirmed that everyone in her house knew what to do and that they were all voting Obama/Gregoire. As I walked away, she pulled up next alongside me in her car. "You know, I'm from Africa," she said, "and recently I was back home for a visit. And in Africa, they are all watching us. The world is watching what we do in this election. It is terribly important, because our choice will affect the whole world."

I don't know what it would be like to do get-out-the-vote work in Georgia, or Indiana. Maybe different, maybe not. But here, it was so inspiring. Not only to see all these people inspired to vote, excited about casting their first vote, determined to vote for change. But even just to get deeper into this neighborhood that I've called home for nearly 15 years, to walk down a block that intimidates me a little bit because I stand out so much, and to meet these people who are my neighbors, so different from me and from each other in many ways, but all holding firm to the belief that our vote can make a difference to the world.

A PS re: Obama and Africa - a relevant Doonsbury...

Let's just pause, shall we?

I have been dipping my toe in and out of the Democratic convention, half hoping that my sense of inspiration and hope would get re-ignited, half fearing the relentless gravity of that dreary, myopic, politics-as-usual that drained the primary of all its sunlight.

I listen to NPR and read the speech post-mortems on Slate, mostly on the XX Factor, where for months I've followed the most intelligent debate I could find on the Clinton and Obama candidacies, and all the hopes and angst and bitterness that they engendered.

This morning the post-mortems were all about Bill Clinton's speech, without a single mention of one of the momentous events in US history: Yesterday, one of the two major political parties named a non-white person as their candidate for president.

Oh, the actual roll call vote was buried early in the day's schedule, thanks to lingering nervousness about how the die-hard Hillary supporters would behave. And the traditional absence of the presumptive nominee himself always detracts from the drama of the moment, in my opinion. But still, it was a moment that literally made me weep. I'm not sure I really believed that I, born less than a year after the Voting Rights Act gave black people a meaningful right to vote in this country, would ever see a black man at the top of the ticket.

Sure, seeing a woman at the top of the ticket would have been just as momentous, and I am just as hopeful about that too. I refuse to be unhappy about having to choose between two kinds of momentous.

When we were in France in April, once someone realized they had an American who could converse in French, it was as if they couldn't resist the opportunity to ask: Really, you actually might elect a black man? I could see them rock on their heels a bit, rethinking all the exasperated thoughts they had about us. They want to like Americans, they really do; they find us endearing and strangely, naively kind as a people, yet also so selfish and short-sighted. We share an historical legacy with the French, birthing Western representative democracy through our twin revolutions. But they have been despairing about us lately. This unexpected twist in our election process made them feel genuinely hopeful, for their strange old friends, and for the world.

It really does give me hope, that we might be that kind of a country after all. It's a nice feeling. Not nearly as nice as it'll be if it actually happens.

Sometimes I really hate my brain

For the past year or so I have been making serious efforts at reducing our footprint on the earth, environmentally speaking. We put in more energy-efficient windows, installed a programmable thermostat, and turned the heat way down at night. I'm on this local food kick, because I've become convinced that more localized food production systems need to be the way of the future. We have almost 100% compact fluorescent light bulbs in the house now. I'm tracking our weekly driving miles and gas mileage, so I can start trying to measurably reduce our gas usage.

But so many choices are not so clear-cut. For example, I have become increasingly concerned about plastics. They will not break down in the earth for 100 years, or maybe ever. Scientists don't seem to know, exactly. Plus they take oil to produce. And while a certain amount of recycling is possible, it has limitations. (I know, I should be linking to citations to back all this up, but I'm feeling lazy. I'm sure I've read it all somewhere.)

So, grocery stores are cutting back on plastic shopping bags. Some cities are even banning them. But what is our main use of plastic shopping bags here on Holly Street? As poop bags for our dogs. We have to scoop our poop, not only because it's polite and it's the law, but because all that poop matter going into the watershed really is a problem. (Ok here I'll link to a study on this, because it's actually quite fascinating, if you spend anytime at all thinking about dog poop.)

Because the grocery stores cut the bags, we were buying more plastic bags. But the whole public policy discussion about the bags in the first place made me think about all those poop bags going into the landfill. Is it better to flush our dog's poop, as King County used to suggest? The thought is kinda gross, but I was willing to consider it. Except if we all did that - we, Seattlites, the dog-lovingest city in the nation - the sheer volume of dog poop could overwhelm the waste management systems. And, even if you bring the poop into your house and flush it, you still had to scoop it up in something impermeable - and probably plastic. Thus you have eliminated the poop from the landfill, but not the plastic.

So I found, and ordered, 100% compostable and biodegradable "plastic" bags, made from corn. Which is great, and it makes me feel better. But the bags are produced in Denmark, which means they're shipping them all the way over here. How does the incremental amount of fuel used to ship those bags to Seattle compare with the amount of petroleum used to produce and ship a comparable number of regular plastic bags? And how do you weigh the fuel use against the potentially infinite time the regular plastic molecules will circulate in the environment?

And then Enrico points out that in landfills, nothing composts or breaks down, because they are huge and capped and there isn't any oxygen. For as long as the landfill holds, neither plastic bag will break down; nor will its remains leach into the environment. But the centuries will go by, and eventually that stuff will get into the earth and the water, right?

So since the bag is compostable, and poo eventually breaks down into harmless organic materials, should we dig a compost hole for our dogs' poo on some corner of our property? I mean, people use cow and horse poop for manure all the time. The Seattle Zoo sells the damn stuff to gardners. Armed with our compostable bags, couldn't we just compost our poo?

Apparently not, since the aforementioned study posits that the bacteria in dog poo - due to the nature of their diets and their digestive systems - does not break down quite so easily and harmlessly as poo from animals who mostly eat grass.

None of this even gets into the question of whether corn production for biofuels and compostable plastic bags is exacerbating the food crisis. I have my doubts about that, or at a minimum I suspect it's a red herring, something that could be addressed if we fix our food production systems, globally, which we need to do anyway. But still. Oy.

So what the hell. And this is just one little thing, the poop bags. Magnify it across all of daily life, and the questions, the dilemmas, the tradeoffs, all become overwhelming. The problem is, we as individuals just don't have the tools available to make all the changes that are needed, even if we are fully willing and motivated to give it a go. There are some meta-problems that need to be solved. But will the meta-problems be solved if there aren't individual people clamoring for the solutions?

You think this is bad? Don't EVEN get me started on my quest for a new garden shed.

Stupid brain.

Looking for reading recommendations

My lackadaisical (sp?) blogging of late has reduced my readership such that I will probably get no responses to this, but - here goes anyway.

I would like to educate myself some more about two period in US history, in order to better think about the state of our democracy today, and what we need to do to heal it.

Specifically, I am interested in:

• The earliest days when the structure of our democracy was put into place - the questions the founders thought about, how they thought about them, their inspirations, why they concluded what they did, and where they disagreed. I think we need to go back to some of that original thinking - even though the social norms have changed considerably - and revisit some first principles about democracy, and the conditions and safeguards required to sustain it.
• The "progressive era" between the Guilded Age and the New Deal - that populist uprising in response to obscene concentration of wealth and corruption of power, which yielded women's suffrage, the labor movement, the Grange movement, and a whole host of other innovations by the people, for the people. Plus, there was a depression in there, which also seems relevant to our current circumstances.
  

There are a jillion well-known books about the "founding fathers," and not many about the progressive era, so on both fronts I'm not sure where to start. Recommendations would be welcome.

Suddenly wide awake

Now that it's happened - now that Barack Obama has the presidential nomination of his party locked up - I find that all my ambivalence and fatigue is gone. I want this person to win, I want it so badly that I'm ready to get on a bus to some state that's not so solidly blue, and do whatever the campaign office says it needs. Need me to make photocopies 12 hours a day in West Virginia? Make phone calls in Texas explaining that Barak Obama is not actually a Muslim? Need me to beg and cajole some of Hillary Clinton's die-hard older women supporters in Ohio, state of my birth? I'M THERE.

Because damn, I want him to win. And not just in a dear-god-heal-us-from-the-Republicans kind of way. I am genuinely psyched.

If Clinton had been the nominee, I would have been psyched too. I'm back to my earlier state of mind, thinking - holy CRAP! Take a look at what might happen here! We might actually elect somebody like that for the first time ever! How can we possibly let that pass us by?

Of course, what's happening to me is exactly what all the pols said would happen: That Democrats would unite. We'll see. I've seen heard shockingly hateful, racist scree from some of those older, female Clinton supporters. I hope they change their minds, I really do. I might even be willing to get on a bus to help convince them.

Frustration

I am so depressed at the way the Democratic primary has turned into a full-blown Shakespearean tragedy. As my husband will attest, I cannot stand to read or watch stories where you see this awful train wreck coming, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. That's why I stopped reading Atonement a couple of chapters in, though I went to the movie thinking - hey, it's just 2 hours long; I'm sure it ends with some kind of uplifting resolution, right? I can stand to get there in 2 hours if not 200 pages. And then, there was no uplifting.

Anyway, that is how the Democratic primary seems. Hillary Clinton is determined to destroy Barak Obama at any cost because she's sure that she can and must defeat McCain in the general election. She is convinced that she can do infinite amounts of damage to him, the party, her own standing with black people, because there will be some kind of happy re-set button as soon as the nomination is closed.

I, who once rejoiced that I would eventually be voting for either the first woman president or the first black president, envisioned a general election where I would actually work on behalf of a candidate, for the first time - and it didn't even matter which one it was.

Oh, how those days are gone. I feel nothing but dread and disgust, once again, in the face of our political process. I want to like Clinton but I can no longer muster any warmth of feeling whatsoever. And what bothers me most is that she seems to be showing us that she really loves the dirty, elbow-throwing, grudge-holding, scorched-earth, my-way-or-the-highway politics that have gotten us into so many messes. I guess I thought that after creating so much ill will in the world, after so many years of entrenched bitterness paralyzing our systems of government, we might actually get somebody with the will and the leadership presence to say: "Whoa. Everybody take a deep breath. We're all in this together. There's a better way forward, a more graceful and productive way, and I actually have the vision to help us all take it." I have been waiting for our Churchill moment. Alas, Clinton seems not only to have fallen into the ways of scorched-earthing and grudge-holding, she seems to relish it. And her husband too. That makes me sad.

I actually think that Barak Obama is the person with the will and the leadership presence to mobilize us on that more graceful path, but sadly, it appears that it might actually matter that he is black. This also makes me sad. And again, with the Shakespearean tragedy thing. Jeremiah Wright - why on earth is he stoking the fires? Why can't the media let this go? Why is it that when Wright says 9/11 is God's damnation for America's sins, it becomes endless media fodder that damns the candidate too, but when Jerry Falwell declares that 9/11 is God's damnation for America's (homosexual) sins it's barely a blip on the radar, let alone a real problem for Bush or McCain? Why is the Daily Show the only "news" outlet that is pointing out this hypocrisy?

Meanwhile, we continue to fall for that oldest trick in the book: When the people are on the verge of uniting for real change, find a way to turn them upon each other. Witness the black community under attack, and eating itself alive along with the feminist movement, with the rest of the left either joining in the fight or standing by in helpless hand-wringing. How did the Clinton campaign go so far over to the Dark Side that they are actually fomenting the self-destruction?

So here I sit: The candidate whom I think to be better qualified to make actual reforms (Clinton), now appears to me fatally flawed and blinded by her gleeful embrace of dirty, win-or-lose politics. The candidate whom I think to be our first real shot at a visionary personality who can transcend old ways and mobilize us on a new path (Obama) now appears fatally flawed because of the color of his skin. I'm no longer sure either of them can win, and I think to a significant extent they did that to each other. It's almost enough to make me stay home in November.

The Ethics of Food, Part II

I have been thinking a lot more concretely about the challenge of sustainable living, partly because of the general increase in chatter about climate change, partly because a committed group of people at my church are pushing us all to really, really think about how we are living the UU 's Seventh Principle ("Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part"). My recent increased reflection is not at all due to those stupid concerts last month, however. Those were just lame.

We're pretty environmentally conscious folk, Enrico and I, but my thinking has been pushed quite a bit by joining a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, where you buy a "share" of food for the season from a local farm. We have a half-share each of vegetables, fruit and eggs, which we pick up at our neighborhood farmer's market every Wednesday. (This particular farm also sells meat, and we have gleefully entertained the thought of buying a half hog for the dogs, but alas, we'd have nowhere to store it.)

This all came about because the aforementioned church group was educating us on the enormous amount of fossil fuels consumed just by shipping food. Plus there have been a couple of books recently written by people who have experimented with a strictly local or organic lifestyle, mostly notably Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by the illustrious Barbara Kingsolver. There's a group that challenges people to spend one month living on the "100-Mile Diet," a diet of things produced within 100 miles (local variants include the 150-mile diet and the Washington state diet, which for Seattelites open up considerable fruit, grain and dairy options from east of the Cascades). We're tempted to give it a try, and there's a local organization sponsoring a Seattle effort; their Web site provides tips on where to find specific foods, restaurants that would meet the rules, etc. Of course, I would have to give myself at least one major exception: Coffee.

Meanwhile, this growing awareness of ethical choices in consumption are in my mind every time I buy something. My love affair with Trader Joe's has faded, as I simply cannot bring myself to buy their frozen pizzas any more, imported from Italy. I just don't need to burn that many fossil fuels for a frozen pizza. Sometimes, the choices seem complicated. When you're at the grocery store, how do you trade off organic versus local versus recyclable packaging? Our wooden patio furniture is losing its finish from our wet summer; is it more ethical to paint it with nasty chemicals to preserve it longer, or let it rot faster and consume more wood furniture over the years? Is it better to live in a dense urban area, relying on mass transit and remote food sources, or take up a fat plot of land in the country where you grow your own food but drive a lot? And it's hard to know how significant some of these measures are. I've been skipping my shower on laundry day, to balance the hot water consumption - if everybody did that, what kind of difference would it make?

And yes, I know you can assuage your conscience by paying into a "carbon offset" fund (e.g. you pay someone to invest in a renewable technology that exactly offsets the amount of carbon emissions you generate by, say, flying to visit your sister) - but that seems fishy to me. My carbon has still been emitted, right?

Perhaps the biggest question comes around cost. I used to think that "frugal" living was part of the solution, on the theory that materialism drives overconsumption as well as socioeconomic disparities. When I took a break from work a few years ago, I was a master a bargain-hunting. But many of those bargains break all the sustainability rules - the organic stuff is always more expensive, and the cheapest goods are made in China which, politics aside, require a lot of fossil fuels to arrive at my doorstep. I've been trying to buy local cheese and man, that can be really expensive. Is the sustainable lifestyle inherently elitist? Or is it incumbent on those of us with the financial means to pay the sustainable living premium? In the long run, would this create better and more efficient markets that are financially accessible to more people? Perhaps this is the true cost of living on Earth, but tell that to someone trying to raise a family in Seattle on minimum wage.

Anyway, this is long and rambling, but that's how the whole thing feels. We'd like to craft a life that's in balance with the Earth, but it's a complicated business.

Why you should care about the immigrants

I see in the news that immigration reform has yet another lease on life. This is an incredibly important issue affecting the lives of millions of people. Here are some facts, and why you should care, and maybe even write your senators.

There are an estimated 12 million undocumented residents in the US, 60 percent of whom have been here for more than 5 years. There are 3 million US citizen children whose parents are undocumented - and thus can be deported without their children. Two million US families are of mixed legal status, meaning they have a mix of citizens, legal residents and undocumented residents. About 7 million unauthorized migrants account for roughly 5% of our civilian labor force. They make up 24% of all workers employed in farming occupations, 17% in cleaning, 14% in construction and 12% in food preparation. (Source: Pew Hispanic Center.)

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been conducting a series of raids, dubbed "Operation Return to Sender," which had rounded up about 18,000 people as of February - so I'm going to generously assume we're up to maybe 25,000 now. That's 25,000 people out of 12 million, or 2/10ths of one percent. People are being picked up a few at a time - 2 here, 200 there - in raids notorious for leaving citizen children stranded. Although Operations Return to Sender is touted as targeting individuals who have broken other laws (beyond immigration laws), 37 percent are "collateral" arrests - people they find along the way.

In my community, ICE agents reportedly show up at a local race track and remove one or two people quietly each day, held without the ability to even make phone calls for several days. Imagine the fear parents feel as they drop their kids off at school each morning, unsure if anyone will come to pick them up. The fear among vulnerable people - many from countries with a chilling history of government-sponsored abuctions, of stealing children as a form of political punishment - when their co-workers and loved ones simply disappear.

The fear is the point, really - otherwise, what would it take to round up 12 million people woven into the fabric of our communities? Imagine the money, the detention centers and hearing rooms, the sheer police presence needed to infiltrate and patrol. Trying to menace and terrorize people into leaving on their own is a calculated strategy. And in good American tradition, some of the profit of it all is already flowing into private hands - our local immigration detention center, the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, is managed by a private contractor. We even have "family" detention centers in this country, with little toddler-sized prison jumpsuits.

That is the first reason you should care. Because regardless of what you think about how people should or should not be allowed into this country, or about whether these workers fill critical jobs or drag down wages, or about border security or refugee rights or anything else - the United States government should not be disappearing people off the streets; a government that touts the family as the core of society should not be ripping families apart; and our bedrock legal concepts of due process must apply to everyone, or they are safe for no one.

As for the argument about whether illegal immigration contributes to or drains from our economy, people make the statistics say all kinds of things to support their point of view. But I will point out that the IRS itself estimates that 70% of undocumented immigrants pay payroll taxes - and these taxes paid under "unmatched" social security numbers help shore up the social security trust fund to the tune of $5 to $10 billion per year. As the IRS has made it easier for undocumented immigrants to legally pay their taxes without fear of immigration difficulties, more and more immigrants choose to do so, demonstrating their desire and commitment to be a recognized part of our social and economic fabric.

And for those who say "well, they did break the law" - I will just say that I have heard numerous stories, including from personal friends, who had every intention of following the law and broke it accidentally. Because it changed, and they didn't know it. Because they moved, and something from ICE didn't get forwarded to them. Because ICE employees perpetrated a sort of bait-and-switch, encouraging legal immigrants to apply for a more permanent form of residency and then - oops! - the application was denied while the original, perfectly good, legal documents expired. And once you've ever been out of compliance with immigration law, even for a little while and even if you tried to fix it immediately - you are a criminal.

So, that all said, the situation as it stands is absurd and cruel and untenable, BUT - the current McCain-Kennedy immigration proposal is not good. Here are several things fundamentally wrong with it, as drafted.

1. The "path to citizenship" offered to those 12 million people will take 8-13 years, and require a "touch-back" visit to their home country plus a $10,000 fine. What if they can't afford the $10,000? What if they cannot afford a trip to their home country, or are endangering their lives to go there? What if they're afraid of leaving their families for the "touch-back" and not getting back in? It seems plausible these things might happen, in which case we're right back where we started, with productive members of our communities living in the shadows.

2. The proposal dramatically shifts the immigration system from favoring family connection to favoring professions needed by employers. You get lots of "points" (literally) for having advanced degrees and working in math or science, but very few for having family members or citizen children here. Again, how does that solve the problem? If 24% of our agricultural workers are undocumented immigrants now, and the new legislation doesn't offer them a legal way to stay - will anything change? And besides, do we want to let this become one more way that our country's words say "family values" but our actions say "corporate profits?"

3. The guest worker program proposed in the legislation does not offer a path to legalization, penalizes people for keeping their families together, and offers few to none of the basic worker protections that the rest of us enjoy.

4. Nothing actually changes until the border fence with Mexico is complete, the number of border control agents is doubled, and the number of detention center beds is tripled. Citizen kids will continue to see their parents deported until we have three times the number of beds for non-citizen kids in little prison jumpsuits.

Write your members of Congress. Don't let the seeming complexity of the issue paralyze you. Think about what you believe is fair and humane and practical , and tell your elected officials what you think. Even if you disagree with me. Remember that we are all in collusion in creating this situation. If you eat food in this country, or stay at a hotel, you are part of it.

In closing, I'm not a Biblical sort of gal myself, but for those right-wing zealots wanting to lock 'em all up as criminals, I lift a verse from Leviticus, of all places - that baffling book full of dietary prohibitions and burnt offerings and a noticeable obsession with skin diseases. But it also mandates the jubilee, and forbids cheating of any kind, and tells you not to pick on disabled people or harbor hate in your heart. In one of these better moments, it offers a simple expression of desert hospitality, found throughout all the Abrahamic traditions, which I find strangely poetic and timeless.

"The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt." - - Leviticus 19:34

Thank you for your time. (For more information, try Interfaith Worker Justice, the Catholic Campaign for Immigration Reform, or the ACLU.)

The politics of food

For a long time, I appreciated the importance of organic food, but I was still resentful about how much more expensive everything is at my local "co-op" (it really isn't a co-op, they don't even check your card any more). Trader Joe's has a fair amount of organic stuff, often at a fraction of the price. And the laundry detergent - what's up with that? Why is it literally three times the cost for the same product?

But for some reason recently I have accepted the inescapable morality of my food choices, and begun to try to buy not only organic, but local. The United States has 5% of the world's population, but produces 21% of the carbon emissions. A quarter of our emissions come from our agricultural system, including transporting our food, while ironically, global climate change is projected to put an additional 75 to 125 million people at risk of chronic hunger, due to drought and other disruptions to food production systems. (Citations for these factoids available upon request.)

I happen to live in a place where I could more or less eat locally produced vegetables all year. Granted, if I wanted to be a purist about it, I'd be eating onions and cabbage and beets in the winter, but hey, that's pretty much just going back to my ethnic roots. It would be much tougher in the Midwest.

So lately I have been trying to at least reduce the travel distance of my produce, buying things grown in Washington or even Oregon and BC whenever possible. I can't bring myself to give up peppers, bananas or coffee, which will always have high transport costs, and citrus fruit would be a tough one too. It's not just produce, either - our sojourn in Italy gave us a love of Italian cheeses, and I have yet to find the perfect local artisan pecorino. But I'll keep trying.

I've found that this approach has changed the way I shop and cook. I have in fact become more European, stopping by the store every couple of days and picking my meals based on what looks good at the store. Self-help books on reducing your cost of living will tell you this is a terrible way to live - you should plan your menus out a week in advance, so you can know where to shop cheaply and buy just what you need. I've always been overwhelmed by this advice, and I went through a long period of hating the grocery store. But I have been enjoying myself, selecting the best-looking, most local organic produce I can find, and then figuring out what to do with it while it's still fresh. I've developed an absolute love for collard greens and savoy cabbage!

It's all so tragically familiar

First, we were attacked by terrorists and the administration decided to bomb Afghanistan and oust the Taliban as its government, and hopefully find Ossama Bin Laden in the process. While not everyone thought this was a good idea, it was hard to argue with the ouster of the Taliban, which had basically turned half the population (the female half) into slaves imprisoned in their own homes. And Bin Laden had pretty much declared war on the US. Other countries joined in, so it seemed like a collective effort could be mounted to bring peace and stability to this terribly traumatized country.

But then it proved HARD, darnit. We didn't catch Bin Laden. But instead of buckling down and investing the resources necessary for the job, we decided to shift the blame elsewhere - it's Iraq's fault! Yeah, that's it. The terrorists are still winning because Iraq is helping them. So instead of focusing on the people who had declared their intention to harm us, and on helping the people of Afghanistan, we're going to distract everyone and move onto something new. Because starting things is always easier and more exhilarating than finishing them. Anyone who has ever taken on a home improvement project knows that. Demolishing the wall is fun! Putting up new sheetrock and mitering trim is tedious and slow.

So we trashed Iraq. But dammit, again, it turned out to be HARD. Who coulda guessed? Faced again with something hard, instead of buckling down to our responsibilities, let's deflect attention and blame again. It worked so well the last time we tried that! It's all Iran's fault. Iran is the cause of Iraq's instability, not the grossly incompetently planned and prosecuted US military action and occupation. So once again, let's just bounce on to the next thing, and leave the last one in tatters.

This is not good. This isn't a home improvement project we're talking about. It's the world. How many more countries are we going to go through before somebody finds a way to stop the madness? It's like some kind of sick ponzi scheme, borrowing blame from one country to pay off the blame-debt left on the last one.

Another "I'm not crazy" moment

Great piece on Slate by Diane McWhorter about lobster-in-the-pot effect of vanishing civil liberties and human rights, and the forgotten lessons of history.

"Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel."

Miscellaneous Shellfish

Lots has been said elsewhere about the election and its implications. I have a few random thoughts. In no particular order.

First, I am happy to see the Republicans get their thumpin'. One thing that has made me crazy for a long time are the conservative Christian Americans who say "well, I don't agree with the war, and I think the government has screwed up a lot, but I still support the President because he's a Christian and I know he prays." I don't understand this at all. If your accountant, or your lawyer, or your hairdresser, proved to be incompentent - they lost your money and undermined your legal rights and gave you really bad haircuts - would you keep them around just because they pray? Hell no, you'd fire them. Why would this expectation of competence apply less to the most important jobs in society?

Second, although I am happy to see the Democrats win, I have little hope that they have a cohesive program and a sense of grounded leadership. I hope I'm wrong and I'm more than happy to give them a chance.

Third, regardless - I am delighted at the prospect of the first female Speaker of the House. That is a fabulous and much-overdue milestone regardless of what else happens.

Fourth - the occupation of Iraq. It seems to me that we have broken that country, and it's possible that it simply cannot be fixed. I empathize with people who say, "The war was a terrible idea, but now we've broken the country and we owe it to the Iraqis and the rest of the world to try to bring some stability there." My heart says that same thing. But, it's recently been revealed that military scenario models, conducted over the past decade by the US military think-tank people, showed that even 400,000 US troops - more than three times what we have there - could not prevent Iraq from sliding into civil war.

It is possible that we as a country will simply have to admit that we made a mistake, and no amount of earnest trying can now fix it. We might have to just leave the mess to heal on its own. All of us as people make mistakes like this in our lives - ones that we cannot fix, that have repercussions that leave us sad or guilt-ridden or sick to our stomachs with the wish to go back in time and make different choices. The absolute hardest thing in the world to do is to take responsibility for those mistakes, acknowledge the consequences, and wait in all our powerlessness for the healing to happen. This is not a "cut-and-run" path, a cowardly path. It takes courage to admit you've been wrong, and strength of character to unconditionally accept responsibility for harm you've caused. I hope we have that courage as a nation, if that's what we're facing.

Lastly, I wholeheartedly agree with the speaker currently on my local NPR talk show, who is asserting that "the moral values crisis in our society is greedy consumerism." I actually think that outraged liberals and outraged religious conservatives are both responding to a comon sense of moral sickness, of something being fundamentally off in society. I just think we assign that unease to different causes - corporate greed or gay couples? Entrenched poverty or abortion? I'm as worried about violent video games, and exploding internet pornography, and inappropriately sexy clothing for pre-teen girls, as my religiously conservative fellow citizens. I just happen to articulate the harmfulness of these things in terms like dehumanization and objectification, rather than offensiveness to God. I hope that in our current collective exhaustion, we can find common ground about what really saps our moral core - a fundamentally selfish and materialistic way of life that diminishes our humanity, our sense of connection, and our sense of accountability for the planet and everything on it.

"By week three, I couldn't take it any more"

I was at a conference last week where I was giving a workshop on CEO transitions, and afterwards I stepped into another session already in progress which was a poverty similation. Participants role-play the lives of low-income families, from parents trying to care for their children to senior citizens trying to get by on Social Security. The task of each family is to provide food, shelter and other basic necessities during the simulation. To do so, they interact with various institutions - schools, clinics, social service providers, utility companies, child care providers, employers, banks, pawn shops and payday lenders, transportation systems - which are "staffed" by low-income volunteers from the community.

Each person and family has a profile outlining their situation, and the simulation takes place over four fictional weeks. The simulation has been used broadly around the US, and I have always heard it described as powerful, eye-opening, transforming. Participants learn how complicated everything becomes in a cash economy, the illogic of the social service systems, the mass transit system that can't get you from your babysitter to your job on time.

This was the first time I've seen it in person, and the quotes from the participants during the debriefing discussion bore that out. I paraphrase:

• "I pay my bills online, and it takes me 10 minutes. I had no concept that it can take a whole week just to pay a utility bill, because of the extra hoops and the need for cash and the lousy bus system. It was exhausting."
• "The first thing I did was go to the bank to open a bank account - and I was told I couldn't. I had no idea what to do next."
• (From a volunteer): "I thought it was so interesting that before we even opened up the first week of the simulation, we looked around the room and every single one of you had a calculator out. It was like, this is just a math challenge; if I work the numbers right I can make it all work."
• By the third week, half of the children were no longer attending school. Said one teenage "student:" "Learning the state flower of Missouri had absolutely no relevance to my life. Going to school was not a useful choice when my family had so many crises to deal with."
• "I was a drug dealer, and I felt like I actually had some options, both for myself and to help others. Crime seemed like a pretty good option."

And so I've been wondering - is it possible to design a similar simulation that would help people understand the situation of someone living in a poor, oppressed community in another country, and how it comes to be that violence "seems like a pretty good option?" Perhaps one of the Israeli-Palestinian collaborative organizations has developed such a thing. Because it seems to me that empathy goes a long way toward finding better solutions to problems, and there are reasons that most people decide that violence, or crime, are better options than just obediently going to school and doing what the system tells them to do. Maybe if we come to understand those reasons better, we'll be more inclined to help those people and less inclined to hate them, lock them up, or shoot them.

Anybody know of such a thing?

The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld

For my fellow Seattlites: Next Saturday, October 7 at 7:00 pm, University Unitarian Church, ACLU of Washington and others* are sponsoring an event you won't want to miss:

The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld

A mock trial with dramatized testimony and cross-examination, featuring:

• Jennifery Harbury, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee STOP Torture Campaign, and author of Truth, Torture and the American Way
• Pramila Jayapal, Executive Director, Hate Free Zone Washington
• Ron Slye, Professor, Seattle University School of Law

At Pigott Auditorium, Seattle University, 901 12th Ave. For more information visit www.rumsfeldtrial.org or email info@rumsfeldtrial.org.

"These events occurred on my watch. As Secretary of Defense, I am accountable for them and I take full responsibility." - - Donald Rumsfeld, 2004 testimony to the Senate Arms Services Committee

* University Unitarian Church, ACLU of Washington, Amnesty International Puget Sound, Hate Free Zone Washington, American Constitution Society-Puget Sound Chapter, the Legacy of Equality, Leadership and Organization (LELO), Seattle Fellowship of Reconciliation, Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War, Rainier Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

Poised for what?

I have been reading two books - well, more than that but two in particular that have come to be linked in my mind somehow. One is A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary written by a female journalist living in Berlin in the weeks after it fell to the Russians at the end of World War II. It's very grim and I'm not sure I'll be able to finish it; the main take-away is the enormous incidence of rape by Russian soldiers of German women and girls. The second is A Chronicle of the Last Pagans by Pierre Chuvin, about the Roman Empire in late antiquity. Enrico had picked it up at the library as part of his quest to Understand Italy, and then I picked it up as a reprieve from the relentless grimness of wartime Berlin.

Both of these books feed into a swirl of thought that has rattled in my brain for a while now, thinking about people at other moments in history and whether they had a sense of what their world was poised for. People sitting on the verge of great conflagrations, or change. What did people reading the newspaper in the US in 1938 think? Did they have any inkling of what was to come? Do people ever have an inkling?

I know that by definition it's not possible to know the future, but I look at the times we're in and I wonder what we're on the edge of. And so I feel a strange sense of connection back through history with people of those times, living their regular lives, perhaps feeling great unease at the way things are going. And I'm fascinated by accounts of people living through great upheaval, the dismantling of their life's most basic daily realities as well as their society's foundational structures and assumptions; who find themselves adapting to conditions they never could have imagined a few years or weeks or days before - whether in Berlin or Lebanon.

"And yet it is worthwhile to take the viewpoint of the vanquished - those who seem to have been behind their own times - while bearing in mind that they did not consider themselves defeated or backward...Today we are too prone to believe that their world was dramatically collapsing. Accordingly, we readily attribute to the Romans of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. our own deceptive luidity, mixed with the bitter resignation of 'waiting for the Barbarians'...In reality, never was imperial power more efficient, more absolute, more centralized. And the events that appear singularly ominous to our eyes - the invasions of the Huns or the Goths - would have appeared to contemporaries as difficulties of a familiar kind, which would have to be dealt with sooner or later in any case."
- - Pierre Chauvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans

Some more reminders that I'm not insane

Keith Olbermann on Donald Rumsfeld's chilling American Legion speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5eOvaWKY3g

40 percent of Americans are embarassed by our reputation abroad:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14618513/

And Jon Stewart, speaking a couple weeks ago on The Daily Show with Thomas Kean, chair of the 9-11 Commission:

In a society that is free and democratic, how can you protect - I mean, we're being stalked, to some extent. And it seems unreasonable to expect that the government will keep us completely safe. But it also seems unreasonable that they should keep us completely scared.

A little bit of light

When truth is stranger than anything anyone might think of blogging, what is one to blog, really? What a weird few weeks in the world.

I did attend a lovely peace march last Friday. I had sworn off peace marches because after the glorious one in March 2003 (or was it 2002? it's all a blur now...), prior to the start of the Iraq war, the rest were just huge disappointments. Like street festivals for every loopy lefty cause, from legalizing hemp to saving the minks, with an overwhelming smell of patchouli and absolutely NO prayer of changing anyone's mind.

But last Friday's march was small, and organnized by a moderate local mosque (see here and here, where I can be barely seen as an eensy little head on the right just under the "E" in PEACE). I resisted the urge to fall in with the white folks - the Menonites had a good turnout, as always - and instead found myself walking with another woman there on her own, from Sudan. Where they know a thing or two about war, and the toll it takes on regular people.

We began talking shyly at first - she asking whether I was Muslim, me asking where she was originally from. She had never been to a peace march in the US before, just anti-government demonstrations back in Sudan, which she noted had a different flavor. For example, she was pleasantly surprised that the police turned out to help and protect the protesters, which would not be the norm back in her home country. She laughed in delight to learn that the people honking at us were, by and large, doing so as a sign of support. It was a good reminder of that we've still got a lot of game here in the US, with the whole freedom-of-expression-and-assembly thing.

I asked if people in other countries look at the US and think - they're supposedly a democracy, so the people must all agree with the government, or they'd turn their leaders out. Yes, she said, that's what people think, at least the people she knows. We have the power to change our government and we don't. Which is fair, I guess, but it made me sad. She said the war in Sudan is complicated in many ways, but in other ways it goes on because people just blindly follow their leaders, whose priorities are power rather than peace. I thought to myself that in some ways, it's not so different here, and I found myself hoping she saw that too, and did not judge us too harshly.

Most of all, she seemed truly impressed and grateful that non-Muslims showed up. The low expectations made me sad in a way, but it also made the day worthwhile, to know that at least at this particular march, my choice to show up registered somehow. To have the opportunity to walk peacefully with a woman from the other side of the world, to talk and laugh for a bit, and part ways with a smile.

No need to repeat

Nicely said.

Call for Peace - Global Fund for Women

So, so sorry

I just want to say, for the record, that I disgree in the strongest possible terms with my country's support of Israel's bombing the shit out of of Lebanon. I do not think it's ok, not at all. I am embarrassed and angry that my tax dollars are going to buy more weapons to bomb more Lebanese civilians and to destroy the basic everyday infrastructure that they rely on for their basic everyday lives. I go through my day trying to imagine what I would do if all the roads around me were bombed, and I couldn't get anywhere, and I had no food, water, electricity or information, and I didn't know whether my house might blow up at any moment, and I couldn't get ahold of any of my loved ones to know if they were alive.

I'd like the rest of the world to know that we don't all buy into the assertion that this incredible death, displacement and suffering among Lebanese civilians is somehow a necessary evil, or reasonable tradeoff, or fair gamble, or whatever is that's being argued by my insane government officials.

That doesn't mean I'm hostile to Israel or Jewish people or their right to a safe home. I simply believe that this kind of destruction is morally bankrupt, no matter who perpetrates it or whatever their reasons. You reap what you sow. Scorched earth retribution is the worst kind of laziness.

I am sending money to relief agencies that are helping people in Lebanon and Gaza. I'm probably on some government watch list now, but I don't give a crap. I wish I had more pull, really I do. I'm sorry that we are so self-centered and such a source of suffering to the world, so willing to sacrifice everyone else for our smallest conveniences and our unsustainable way of life. Not everybody here feels that way. Hell, not everybody here even benefits from the conveniences.

Why don't the dissenters turn out en masse in the streets to protest, you might reasonably ask? I don't know. I wish I had the answer. All I can say is that the protests in my town are small, and depressing, and unfocused, and generally run by people whose righteous indignation seems to demand all-or-nothing agreement with their every viewpoint, and I don't see how it helps. Enrico still goes. He's a better person than I in that way.

There are still good things about the United States. The founding fathers, they were onto something with the democracy and the freedom of speech and the checks and balances. As a woman I realize I have more respect and rights and opportunities here than in most places on the planet. Don't give up on us completely, because we really do have something to offer, if we don't completely extinguish it with our government's war-mongering, fear-mongering, swaggering, dictatorial, willfully ignorant destructiveness.