Archive for the 'General' Category
Everywhere we go, we find places for Charlie to be off his lead. Here in Loveland, Colorado, there is a section of a national park that runs alongside the back end of the farm. Each morning, while the moon is still in the sky, we walk our way to the top of the mountain, catching the sunrise and a view of Eastern Colorado. Charlie runs much of the way up and down, stopping to smell things and pick up branches. The larger and more unruly the branch the better. These are wrestled to the ground, the smaller branches he breaks off with his legs and mouth. And when it’s over, he is victorious and proud of himself. Head high, tail wagging.
Rain on the canvas above, cold air on my hands, warm Charlie lying curled up beside me. We are both under blankets on a futon, on the floor of a yurt, on an organic farm in Loveland, Colorado. I am visiting my friend Val who taught with me at the Ramallah Friends Schools in the West Bank (www.palfriends.org/). Yesterday we went to a biodynamic farm and harvested carrots. Today it’s raining and a perfect day to write.
It’s been a long while since I have been able to sit long enough to put words down. My four days in Columbia, Missouri, were packed with five events each day. Then it was off for a day each in Kansas City, Missouri, and Lawrence, Kansas. What stands out most from these places are the people I met, beginning with Iman Labadia, the main organizer of my events in Columbia. Her energy and organizing skills matches that of my friend Jim Harb in Knoxville, TN. She arranged events at colleges and highschools, a bookstore, a radio station, and a local tv station. Iman is one of those who never looses an opportunity to make a connection and I soon learned anyone she said “I should meet” I really should.
One of these is Ibtisam, a Palestinian poet and writer, around my age, who left Ramallah 15 years ago. She came to the presentation at Missouri University and eloquently expressed the generosity of the Palestinian people and the suffering of peoples everywhere, including that of Palestinians. “The Jews have perhaps been the most persecuted people in history….We, the Palestinians, were ready to share our land. Come, we said, come, this land will be a haven for both of us… But our land has been taken.” She has a book soon to be released about her childhood in Ramallah (details when I have them). And Chronicle will be publishing her first children’s book. We talked about collaborating on another book. It will tell the story of her first good dream, at 25 years of age, of a whale and a zippered pocket in his belly which she climbs into.
And, there is Carol, a woman who was part of a coalition of people who protested my coming to Columbia, and who came to the MU event so she could “see for herself”. Before the event started, she introduced herself and throughout the evening was closely watched me. At the end, she embraced me and the work.
There are longtime peace activists Robin and Paul whose home, The Peace Haven, I stayed in. Paul, who teaches classes on terrorism, made five star breakfasts each morning and Robin sent me off with a care package which included black seed tea and handmade soap from Prague.
There is Paul Sturtz who started a storefront theater in Columbia (www.ragtagfilm.com) and initiated the True/False Documentary film festival (www.ragtagfilm.com/truefalse/home.htm). Paul showed Iman and I samples of animated documentaries created by his students. After just a few minutes of watching, I knew what I am doing next. An animated documentary. Paul gave me a list of tools I will need and offered help in learning to use the equipment.
Paul and Iman at Ragtag Theater
There is Nanette a human rights investigator and community educator who came to three presentations. To one she brought her 11 year old daughter Kai Lee. To another, her friend Rebecca who had recently come back from Israel through Birthright Israel, a program which pays the airfare for Jews who want to visit.
There was a group of students at Hickman High School. Most of them were either from the Muslim Student Association or Amnesty International. “What can we do, now, here?” one asked. We talked and brainstormed creative approaches to education.
And there were shared dinners. I met with members of the Columbia Tikkun group at a vegan restaurant on 9th street. And on two separate evenings broke the Ramadan fast with Muslim families: one Palestinian American; one Iranian.
Group shot after Missouri University event
Presenting at Hickman Highschool
Students from Amnesty International and Muslim Students Association, Hickman Highschool
With Paul and Robin
Just sat talking with (mostly listening to) Mary Routh a Catholic Worker Catholic, feminist, and 8th generation Iowan. She told stories, mostly of her family. She’s got seven siblings that live within a 50 mile radius. She told a story of a sister who will soon be forced to move out of her house because she won’t be able to afford the rise in natural gas prices (it’s expected to jump 40% this winter). She told a story of her born again brother who is trying to save her and who supports Steve King, the Republican who represents western Iowa in the House. Steve King has been in the press recently for saying McCarthy was a “great American hero.” Apparently he was quoted as saying, “If you don’t think so, read your history”. And he is so popular in western Iowa that his seat is safe, he can say most anything he wants.
Just back from the library event in Ames. There weren’t many people, maybe 15, however we had a good time talking at the end. Sometimes a smaller group allows for a more intimate conversation.
Michael Gillespie from the Washington Report (www.wrmea.com) interviewed me before the event. I liked him. He was easy to talk with. He thinks, in addition to an article about the tour, WR will want to review the book and the American Educational Trust (which publishes the magazine) carry it. This would be a great help in getting the word out.
A good time in Minneapolis. Highlight: dinner with Jeanie.
With Jeanie in restaurant near University of Minneapolis
Back in Iowa, after four days in Minnesota.
A run with Charlie this morning. I was thinking of these days on the road, reminded of the stage in a marathon when all senses become focused on the running. I’ve run three marathons: Jericho, Boston, and Nashville Country Music Marathon. At the start of each, the first seven or eight miles, I talk with other racers, take in scenery, buildings, people, music. However, by the tenth mile the focus narrows, voices dim, including the one in my head, and there is just listening to the breathing, feeling legs and arms moving and feet striking the road. After three weeks on the road, I’ve hit a stride. Every leaving is an arrival is a leaving is an arrival. There is conservation of energy. During events, answers to questions have become more concise. Between events I am quiet and sometimes at a loss when asked simple questions. How do I like Iowa? ” I like it. The sky is so big here it’s part of the landscape.” ???? I call friends and family to stay connected and to hear their voices, however, I don’t have much to say. “It’s gotten cold here in Minnesota.” Most days, Charlie and I go for long walks. He keeps his nose to the ground and stops often to linger on a smell. I can get impatient, wanting us to keep moving. Yet later, when I am unsure of the way back to where we started, he turns us in the right direction.
In a couple hours, I will be heading to Ankeny and then to a library event in Ames. Tomorrow another library and, in the evening, an Islamic Center in Des Moines.
I have received several strange emails from my website recently. Here’s one I got from England:
HELLO,
I WILL LIKE TO PLACE AN ORDER FOR 100 COPIES OF THE BELOW BOOK TITTLE BY BILL CLINTON
BOOK TITTLE………MY LIFE
AUTHOR……..BILL CLINTON
FORMAT……….HARD-COVERPLS DO FORWARDED THE TOTAL COSTS OF 100 COPIES NOW
Until I reached Bill Clinton’s name I was excited. I thought they were ordering 100 copies of Outside the Ark.
Four presentations today at University of Northern Iowa, including two art classes and a community wide event. Tomorrow, another class presentation then back to Grinnell.
11 highlights of the the tour so far:
- Giving my first sermon (Hickory Lutheran Church, Hickory, NC, September 11). I was scared and glad the pulpit was there to hide my shaking legs, however, everyone was very quiet and no one fell asleep. The subject of the readings was reconciliation.
- Seeing Aunt Carol, Uncle Art, and Lisa (Malaprop’s Bookstore event, Asheville). Felt good to have the work seen and appreciated by folks who remember me as Fifty-five.
- Re-meeting Hanaan, a Palestinian woman I met last spring at a Women in Black gathering (Knoxville, TN). She was studying in Egypt during the 1967 war and was never allowed to return to Palestine though the rest of her family were there. She’s a great storyteller and one of the most outspoken Muslim women in Knoxville. Her stories are often funny and warm and include someone waking up to their prejudice and ignorance towards Muslims and Arabs. We talked about doing a book together.
- Listening to Jim Harb talk about the vegetables and flowers in his garden (Knoxville, TN). Jim, an old friend, and one of the hundreds of Harbs of Ramallah living in Knoxville, has flowers and vegetables from all over the world. Eight varieties of tomatoes, including a Lebanese tomato which we ate for breakfast.
- Hiking with Charlie to Fall Creek Falls (Fall Creek Falls State Park, TN).
- Eating a Bocca pizza with Pastor Joe Hoffman and Noel Nickel (Asheville, NC).
- Sharing a story during Children’s Time (First Congregational United Church of Christ, Asheville, NC). First time I told part of the Magic Nation story to kids.
- Walking with Carol, Flower, and Charlie along the Tennessee River (Knoxville, TN).
- Sitting and talking with Brenda Bell in her home (Maryville, TN). Brenda just turned 60 last year, quit her job to work in Afghanistan to train teachers in literacy education. She will return in October.
- Listening to the music at the Nashville Peace Rally (Nashville, TN).
- (As I write this) talking with Chris Lugo of Nashville IMC about all the places I am headed next (Nashville, TN). He seems to know something about every place I will be presenting. Like that the Mall of America (the largest mall in the US) is in Blooomington, MN. And Focus on the Family is based in Colorado Springs. And Lawrence is the Boulder of Kansas.
I am figuring out what this blog is for and who it is I am writting to.
Last week, I wrote about an event at a bookstore in Asheville, NC. I listed some of the responses to the presentation: sadness, gratefullness, despair, hope, anger… anger directed at our government and anger directed at me. I mentioned that the anger towards me came from a woman who had commented that the presentation was one-sided, that if one were to truely work for peace one needed to also tell the stories of the lives of Israelis (not just of those Israelis working for a just peace, but those suffering from suicide bombers). A couple days after I posted the blog, a Peace Studies program from a college in Iowa dis-invited me. They say they are concerned that the presentation would not be “balanced.” (Had they read the blog? Probably not, but I wondered.) We had already agreed that after my presentaion they would host a panel of different voices. However, in their dis-inviation I was told thay had not found an artist to provide the “other side.” I am surprised that in their minds it needed to be an artist that would offer this “other side.”
How how do we, how do I, get beyond the talk of sides? In what other conflict do we expect one person to tell all stories? And, in what other occupation are we as reluctant to use the word occupation? Or to recognize the difference in power between peoples? I deleted the post. I was concerned I didn’t give enough context to the woman’s argument and that future event hosts would read the blog and get concerned.
Do I need to be more clear on this website about what folks can expect and not expect from the presentation? And I keep clarifying for myself what this is. Stories of Palestinians, of friends, whose lives I want to honor and celebrate and whose deaths I want to mourn. Stories of kids, bakers, teachers, doctors, hairdressers. Stories of hope and creation in the midst of death and destruction. And stories of how some stories hide other stories. So we don’t get to hear about the kids, bakers, teachers, hairdressers.
And the stories themselves change, even when the words remain the same. The paintings and rememberings of the Noah’s Ark story, which begin and end the book and presentation, were painted before the levees broke in New Orleans. Now, when I read about the bodies, of whether Noah looked outside the ark and saw the bodies, something has shifted. We’ve seen the bodies floating in water, if only on tv or the newspaper.
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.
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:
