Archive for September, 2005
September 21
Highland Presbyterian Church
Maryville, TN
Carpe Librum Bookstore (Knoxville,TN)
September 20 (7 pm)
Childrens’ time at the UCC church ended up being for the whole congregation. I sat up front with the kids and spoke into a mike. Told a piece of the Magic Nation story and one kid spent the rest of the service with his hand up to his eye like a telescope. In the evening, a 95 year old man told a story of being director of the YMCA in West Jerusalem. I ate pizza with the pastor and his wife afterwards and talked about returning to Asheville on my way back to Durham. Tomorrow, Charlie and I are going to Dupont Falls on our way to Knoxville.
September 18
1st Congregational UCC
Asheville, NC
www.uccasheville.org
Storyteller looks at those left off Noah’s Ark
by Alli Marshall
Mountain Xpress
“I was one of eight kids, and one of my fantasies was to live in an ark,” admits artist Ellen O’Grady, author of Outside the Ark: An Artist’s Journey in Occupied Palestine.
“The image was of a storm outside, but safety inside.”
These days, she’s probably not the only one who’s looking for a vessel of mythical proportions. But for this author, the symbolism of Noah’s Ark took a serious detour.
“I heard the story in Sunday school,” she related during a recent interview with Xpress. “All the kids were mesmerized, until one kid called out, ‘What about the bodies?’” In other words, those unfortunates who failed to make it aboard Noah’s floating menagerie. The teacher pooh-poohed the subject, but O’Grady had an epiphany: “As a kid, I suddenly saw the flip side.”
Girl meets world
“We’re all part of this Judeo-Christian culture, but we don’t often see all sides of these stories,” the artist imparts. And though right now it’s easy to draw parallels to the flood, what O’Grady wanted to wade through – as a college student in the 1980s – were the Old Testament fables that had moved her as a child. So, she went to Israel and Palestine.
“I was a theology major when I went to Jerusalem,” she notes. “I hardly knew where Palestine was in relation to Israel before I left.” In fact, O’Grady, more interested in Eastern spirituality, had planned a trip to Nepal. However, a travel advisory worried her parents. Hoping to win approval for Nepal by naming a more dangerous trip abroad, the artist suggested Jerusalem. Surprisingly, her parents bit and she was Middle East-bound.
“I became really involved over there. I became more aware of what the occupation [of Palestine] meant,” she says (see sidebar). After college, she returned to Palestine, where she worked and lived for years. Her jobs included teaching art at the Atfaluna School for the Deaf in Gaza City and at the Ramallah Friends School, in the West Bank.
“I felt it was my responsibility to tell people at home [in the U.S.] a little more about what’s going on,” O’Grady says. “[Americans] just don’t get the context. We might hear about a suicide bomber, but we don’t know what it’s like day-to-day for Israeli and Palestinian citizens.
“It’s so cliché[d] – but these are people just like you and me.”
Why a picture is worth so many words
O’Grady confesses she originally intended her book to be an academic tome, not an artistic tapestry of paintings and stories. “What’s now in the book was originally to help me cope,” she says, laughing. “But once I showed this to friends, they made it clear: This was my voice.”
The childish paintings, sometimes collaged with photos, illustrate poignant scenes of daily life in the war-scarred region. “Aseel’s Dream” uses vivid oranges and watery blues to show a young girl’s world of make-believe. In the midst of curfew, while her family sleeps, she flies out the window on the tail of a kite.
“Adnan and Mamoun,” which resembles Monet’s poppy fields, depicts three laborers in the shadow of a mammoth pair of combat boots.
Planning to commit her travels to paper, the author decided first to take another trip back to Gaza. “I knew it was time for me to share my experiences, but it had been six years since I’d been there,” she says. “I went back in 2002, partially as a response to 9/11. [I was] concerned about what would happen next, and afraid of further demonization of Arabs.”
What she found was that the occupation had progressed. Distressed by the situation, she returned home, taking solace in art – the art that would become her book.
Personal politics
Far from sharing the cerebral text she’d envisioned, O’Grady on book tour now shies away from too much CNN-style discussion of the Middle East peace process. “Since I first went [to Palestine] in 1986, I’ve been struggling with these questions and trying to share these stories. Where am I in this, as a U.S. citizen? I’m not innocent.”
She says that audiences, prior to the current disengagement process, asked questions that revealed their hopes for peace. But the new political climate “doesn’t change how I tell stories,” O’Grady insists. “I think there’s a temptation to sometimes answer people’s questions with political analysis I’ve read, but that’s not my voice. I try to bring it back to what the kids [in Palestine] are feeling, or what a friend of mine in Gaza is experiencing.”
For this author, keeping things simple has a profound effect. “Liberation is only going to come to all of us – to me – by understanding the other person is basically like me.
“It’s always the poor people who suffer most. So I tell their stories.”
September 11 (8:30, 10, 10:45 am)
Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Hickory,NC
from my friend Jordan…
Notes From Inside New Orleans
by Jordan Flaherty
Friday, September 2, 2005
I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.
In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it
would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them – Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for
example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.
I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information
from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to be here at night.”
There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.
To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.
For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz
Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.
It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal
governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.
It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered in just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don’t need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in
revenge.
There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months. The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years.
Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child’s education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.
Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.
Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to “Pray the hurricane down” to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet – instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.
While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.
No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a “looter,” but that’s just what the media did over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.
Images of New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on “welfare queens” and
“super-predators” obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.
City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week’s events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.
The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and a Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.
In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a “New Deal” for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be “rebuilt and revitalized” to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.
Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions to repair.
Now that the money is flowing in, and the world’s eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.
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Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org). He is not planning on moving out of New Orleans.
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Below are some small, grassroots and New Orleans-based resources, organizations and institutions that will need your support in the coming months.
Social Justice:
www.jjpl.org
www.iftheycanlearn.org
www.nolaps.org
www.thepeoplesinstitute.org/
www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=crno_home
Cultural Resources:
www.backstreetculturalmuseum.com
www.ashecac.org/
Current Info and Resources:
Wasserman cartoon from Boston Globe.
“If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you’ve already seen the damage they’ve done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God’s name were you thinking?… I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people.”
–Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, quoted in New York Times
