Vicki's View

On Being Pro-Life and Pro-Choice

2009-06-10T12:41:00.001-07:00

A few days back – in the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller – I wrote a friend, a priest, to voice my grief and horror about that murder and all the hate and fear promulgated around the issue of abortion…adding that I did so as someone who is both pro-life and pro-choice.

He wrote back asking how I could be pro-life and pro-choice.

"Easy," I replied.

For, though I personally oppose abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the would-be mother's health is gravely endangered, I believe that the decision for or against an abortion must always be left up to the would-be mother in consultation with her physician and her God. And, whatever her decision, we - her family, church, and community - should always be there to support her and, if she so chooses, her child, with compassion and non-judgmental love.

And, we - family, church, community, and government - should do all we can to decrease the numbers of unwanted pregnancies by providing adequate access to sex education, birth control information, and, yes, condoms. The bottom line is simple - abortion should be rare, safe, and legal.

Two other related thoughts come to mind. First, I don't have any idea when "life" begins, when a fetus becomes a human being, when the soul enters a body...or leaves it. I am not God, nor do I know the mind of God with certainty. Second, I wish we would all show equal concern for the lives of humans who walk among us. I wish we would stop killing each other in executions - state-sanctioned murder; in the state-sanctioned murder that is war; and in the slow deaths we inflict on others through our indifference to poverty, starvation, and genocide.

I feel, moreover, that each of us should be allowed the freedom of conscience - and the dignity - to determine when and how our own lives should end when that end is near and clear and when prolonging the inevitable would be too painful to body and soul. Life is precious, but not so precious that it is preferable to what awaits us?

There's a certain attractiveness and seamlessness to the Roman Catholic teachings on the sanctity of life, especially as propounded by John Paul II. Too bad, however, that so many have expended all their concern and energy on abortion and apparently forgotten his opposition to capital punishment, unjust wars, and other forms of violence we visit upon each other. But even those teachings - cast, as they are in black and white - fail before all the grays we must all struggle with morally and ethically. For my part, I'll keep struggling in that gray area where one can be pro-life and pro-choice.

And, as you do, I ask you to ponder the words of the President at Notre Dame about how to discuss and debate these issues with civility and compassion.

and

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LINT

2009-05-05T22:01:00.001-07:00

Under a headline "Pro-Israel Group Reasserts Clout," The New York Times ran a story today on the annual convention of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It ended with the following put down of other pro-Israel groups which, like J Street, have the temerity to also be pro-peace: "AIPAC officials have tried to treat J Street as if it were lint."

Lint? Perhaps.

Here are my thoughts on that convention. As I watched on C-SPAN as the parade of American politicians marched in lock-step to the podium, I couldn't help but be impressed by:

- The orchestrated effort to shift the agenda and attention away from Palestine and toward Iran; i.e., Palestine can be addressed only after Iran is "dealt with." That might have succeeded if Dick Cheney were still running the White House. One can only hope that the current occupants are somewhat saner.

- The silence on Gaza and its consequences, both moral and strategic.

- The unapologetic, in-your-face touting of how many fully-paid "America Israel Education Foundation" trips each congressional speaker has taken.

- The overall cognitive dissonance between the rhetoric in the hall and the reality in the world outside.

- The awkward juxtaposition of invocations of prophets like Amos, Micah, and Jeremiah with the drumbeat of rhetoric calling for reliance on military might; witness Newt Gingrich's soaring bellicosity.

- The refreshing, solitary, hopeful voice of reason that was the Vice President's, insisting on a two state solution and a real freeze on the construction of settlements.

- The silence of television news - across the board - on what was being said inside the Washington Convention Center.

- The eery feeling that AIPAC is to Israel what the NRA is to guns; i.e., there can be no hint of compromise, not the slightest bow in the direction of a modicum of rationality or, God forbid, even-handedness in U.S. policy vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine. No matter how pro-Israel they may be, those like J-Street, Brit Tsedek, or the Network of Spiritual Progressives who entertain thoughts of deviation, however slight, from maximalist Likud postions are to be treated as "lint."

My sense - especially since Gaza - is that the lint is collecting. Allowed to build up it can gum up the works of the most smoothly running machine - be it my Admiral dryer or AIPAC. Collected and worked on by skilled, caring hands, however, it can be formed into a beautiful flannel garment...perhaps one of many colors. I think we've now got enough lint to get started on that. Got a loom? Ready to work?

Shalom!

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A TIME FOR TRUE PATRIOTS

2009-04-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

I find myself pained and saddened by the anger, hate, and violence afoot in our land and, even more, by our inability and apparent unwillingness to do anything about it.

We all know the litany of headlines:

March 21 - Gunman kills 4 policemen in Oakland, California.

March 29 - 8 shot and killed at North Carolina nursing home.

April 3 - 14 shot and killed in Binghamton, New York.

April 4 - 5 shot dead in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

April 4 – Graham, Washington father kills his 5 children.

Still grieving from the shootings in Binghamton, where I have a friend seeking to cope with the aftermath of that massacre, I awoke the next morning, turned on the TV, and almost dropped to the floor at the rapid-fire "crack, crack, crack" of gunfire that emanated from a live report from Pittsburgh. It was a sound that I recognized from the long-ago horror of Vietnam. Then it dawned on me - We ourselves, at home, have killed many more fellow Americans these past two weeks than our enemies have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We have done so with weapons that only our soldiers should carry. And some of the gunmen, who pulled the triggers, wore flak jackets that only our soldiers or police officers should be entitled to wear.

Like the killers, this is insane! Oh, I know the knee-jerk letters this will generate. I know already the words they will contain. I know the authors' names. But I'm sick at heart at all the disingenuous words and I just don't want to hear them anymore! Let me say it clearly – The Second Amendment is an antiquated abomination that should be repealed. And, short of that, guns should be sensibly registered and regulated…just like cars and controlled substances - other objects that kill. Having lived in several other free and democratic countries, where hunters and sportsmen have regulated access to sporting guns, I find our unfettered access to military-style weapons, whose only purpose is to be found in war, an uncivilized aberration.

Such unfettered access is particularly dangerous in a time of economic high anxiety. People are scared. All Americans are hurting. And, as Charles Blow pointed out in the New York Times - as fate would have it, April 3 - many on the right "feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their 'leaders' seem to be trying to mold them into militias."

What "leaders?" How about Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman who, on the day four Oakland policemen were gunned down, called on her fellow Americans to be "armed and dangerous?" How about that self-proclaimed "patriot" Chuck Norris who asks "How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?" Then there's Glenn Beck who, on February 13, warned that the only thing standing between "responsible citizens" and an oppressive government are guns in private hands. "So you before you lose your rights," he says, "you go buy a gun as a responsible citizen." "But I'm telling you," he warns, "there will come a time, if you don't have one - you ain't getting it. And I fear it's coming soon."

This, Blow warns, is "not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They're talking about a revolution." Yes, folks like Beck and Bachmann are talking about revolution against the duly elected government of the United States of America…our government, their government. What kind of "patriots" are folks like these, folks like Beck who stoke the fires of fear and urge their listeners to "think the unthinkable?"

And what is our responsibility as truly responsible citizens to counter the inflammatory rhetoric and to begin – at long last – a sensible conversation about guns? We could start by urging our Congressman George Miller and Senators Boxer and Feinstein to support minimal legislation to get a handle on this problem. This should include closing the gun show loophole, banning cop-killer bullets and making the assault weapons ban permanent. Attorney General Eric Holder is of the opinion that such steps would be permitted by the most recent Supreme Court ruling in Washington, D.C. v. Heller.

Of no small import, Holder and others feel that reinstituting the assault weapon ban would also stem the flood of military-style weapons flowing into Mexico and into the hands of drug cartels which are destabilizing the Mexican government and now threatening our border area with increasingly deadly violence. As a recent Department of State travel advisory warned, "Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades. Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico, but most recently in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez."

It's time for clear-thinking, responsible Americans – the true patriots – to stand up to the NRA and their apologists on the loony right and, paraphrasing Chuck Norris, to say "Enough is enough!"

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SHE'S BAAACK!

2009-02-04T22:46:00.000-08:00

[My hometown paper the Vallejo Times-Herald has a columnist, Rachel Raskin-Zrihen, who is well-known in local circles for her Arab-bashing, Muslim-bashing rhetoric. Her column this week was so much over the top, that her editors apparently thought it best not to carry it on their website. Too bad. You'll have to extrapolate what she had to say from my response here.]

Having kept such a low profile during all the killing in Gaza, Rachel Raskin-Zrihen is back…back on her favorite topic.

She's back at it, spewing her trade-marked anti-Arab, anti-Muslim invective, making all the wrong judgments, oblivious to the irony of the charges she tosses out left and right, mostly right.

Irony? Let's take her opening salvo last Tuesday, keyed to the President's message to Muslim leaders that their people will judge them by what they build and not by what they destroy. Might we apply the same standard to Israel's leaders, who, in the run-up to the country's February 10 election, seem to be out-segging each other over how many Palestinians they can kill?

What have they built? A wall three-stories high to pen in one people and blind the other to the reality of what happens on the other side. Then there are the settlements – the huge white cities that dominate every hill from Hebron to Ramallah; the subsidized housing on someone else's land for over 260,000 Israelis, the "new reality on the ground" that, as Bob Simon pointed out on "Sixty Minutes," undercuts the two-state solution.

And what have they destroyed? In just the last month, they've destroyed 1,300 lives, more than half of them women and children. In that time, they've destroyed mosques, hospitals, food storage facilities, olive groves, 20 United Nations schools, and countless homes. They've destroyed the already-frayed support for moderate Palestinian leaders like Mahmoud Abbas. They've crippled hope. Worst of all, they've dragged the good name of Jewish moral sensibility through the muck of senseless, often gratuitous violence, putting their faith not in their – our – God, but rather in their military prowess unleashed against an essentially defenseless civilian population. And that is a sin I think Jeremiah might have something to say about.

But there is a second irony in Rachel's latest that needs addressing. It is her contention that there is some is some "unrivaled" Muslim "propaganda machine…that uses every conceivable cynical means to its end…the destruction of Israel, the Jews, the Christians and the West in general." Phew! Talk about apocalyptic rhetoric! Trouble is it's fantasy. Sorry, Rachel, Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians do not "know us better than we know ourselves," although, I agree, they know us "infinitely better than we know them." For how can we know them, if we don't get any information about them, much less accurate information?

The irony in this second contention of Rachel's is that the "unrivaled" propaganda machine at work around the Israel-Palestine issue is the Israeli Hasbara, an operation I'm sure Rachel knows well.

Hasbara? It is the Hebrew word for "explanation," or, more liberally translated, "public advocacy." And it is the Hasbara that is the "unrivaled propaganda machine." Having proudly worked for the U.S. Information Service for three years, I am in awe of it. Rather than try to explain its scope and reach, I'd just recommend that you click on http://www.infoisrael.net/ or http://www.hasbara.us/ or just google "Hasbara." You'll get the picture.

This was the network that was activated in the midst of the Gaza operation when the scope of the carnage could no longer be denied. In mid-January, the Israeli Foreign Ministry sent an urgent message to all its "Dear Friends." It read: "We hold the [sic] military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media. We need to buy time for the IDF to succeed, and the least we can do is spare some (additional) minutes on the net….The more we post, blog, talkback, vote – the more likely we gain positive sentiment." To that end, as the Jerusalem Post reported, Israel mobilized an "army of bloggers" to "explain" the pictures of destroyed schools, hospitals, and mosques…and all the dead children. Trouble is there is no way to explain away what you see with your own eyes, no way to bring the children – the hundreds of children – back to life.

And, so, Israel has won its "war" against a hapless civilian population, but lost the bigger war for hearts and minds, ours included, and, in the process, tarnished its own image and strengthened the hand of Hamas vis-à-vis Fatah and Israel.

What's left? Sadly, just the name calling, the ad hominem, shoot-the-messenger invective against critics – Israeli and American – who support the legitimate interests of Israel and the United States and urge critical thinking on their behalf. As one Hasbara site cynically put it: "For the Israel activist, it is important to be aware of the subtly different meanings that well chosen words give. Call 'demonstrations' 'riots', many Palestinian political organizations 'terror organizations', and so on. Name calling is hard to counter."

Yes, it is. Rachel does it so well, sometimes subtly, as when she puts quotation marks around Palestine…as in "Palestine," as if there really were a "land without people for a people without land." And then there are her nasty habits of morphing Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims (Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghanis, Indonesians?) into one menacing "radical Muslim world" and her use of pejorative adjectives like "totalitarian," "terrorist," and, shades of Michael Savage, "Islamo-facist" and sticking them on any old Palestinian or Arab she comes across. Stereotypes are hard to shake. One has to wonder, however, does she know the difference between an Afghan and an Arab, between Shi'a and Sunni…or that there are 160,000 Palestinian Christians?

And then there is CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, that has taken the art of name-calling to unparalleled heights in responding to even the slightest criticism of Israel. In recent days, for example, it has spared no invective in attempting to smear Bob Simon, who dared express despair on "Sixty Minutes," and President Jimmy Carter, who dared invoke hope in his latest book We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land.

Bottom line, the time for knee-jerk name calling is over. Too much blood has been spilled in our shared Holy Land. It is time to see things clearly and to think critically and honestly not about scoring points, but about finding solutions. It is time for truth and reconciliation. Shalom, Salaam.

A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL

2009-02-03T22:04:00.001-08:00

What follows below is, on one level, a film review, a Pauline Kael-worthy review of a worthy Golden Globe winner, "Waltz with Bashir." Like the film, it is also moral reflection on the character of moral courage in what the article's Israeli author calls the "post-moral world."

Given the author's background and the nature of the film, it would be too simple to say that this is all about Lebanon and Gaza and Israel…about a particular guilt in a particular place in a particular time,,,about a guilt, a night sweat terror, a spiritual crisis that need not concern those of us who were not at Deir Yassin in 1948, Sabra and Shatilla in 1982, or Gaza last month. And, given Burston's aim – to plumb the troubled Israeli soul – he makes it too easy for the non-Israeli to fall into that trap, just like non-Germans more than sixty years later too easily wrap the Holocaust in a unique box – the particular crime of a particular people in a particular time and place – never to be paralleled, never to be repeated, never to trouble our pristine consciences. To fall into that trap, however, threatens one with a simplistic, unhistorical, and ultimately very dangerous form of moral cowardice. Listen to the eminent Polish Jewish sociologist who, in his Modernity and the Holocaust, wrote:

…the exercise in focusing on the Germaness of the crime as on that aspect in which the explanation of the crime must lie is simultaneously an exercise in exonerating everyone else, and particularly everything else. The implication that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were a wound or malady of our civilization – rather than its horrifying yet legitimate product – results not only in the moral comfort of self-exculpation, but also in the dire threat of moral and political disarmament. It all happened 'out there' – in another time, another country. The more 'they' are to blame, the more the rest of 'us' are safe and the less we have to defend this safety. Once the allocation of guilt is implied to be equivalent to the location of causes, the innocence and sanity of the way of life of which we are so proud need not be cast in doubt.

But that is precisely what Burston and Ari Folman are about – subversively, no, frontally casting doubt on the sanity of the way of life their countrymen are so proud of. And the key word in all this is "sanity," for what Burston and Folman are concerned about is the moral insanity of young Israelis partying in some Tel Aviv nightclub or settlers on the West Bank watching some sitcom on their living room TV, safe behind their walls, "getting on with their lives by turning a blind eye to, blaming away, repressing, or somehow ideologically reprocessing genuine tangible horror." "It has to do," Burston writes, "with the fear of memory…the reluctance to look inward, the quiet terror of what one might actually uncover."

That leads to the very sort of cognitive dissonance I encountered last November, as, again and again, back and forth, I traversed that ugly Wall that separates Israel from Palestine, reality from fantasy. It is the sort of cognitive dissonance that, if not confronted and dealt with, leads ultimately to insanity.

For his part, Burston identifies the raft of palliatives which people attempt to deploy against that threat, among them self-delusion, denial, and superstitious silence…the sort of whistling past the graveyard going on now in Jerusalem and, for too long, in Washington. But sometimes those palliatives prove insufficient, yielding instead to drugs, alcohol, PTSD, anger, rage, and the sort of sociopathic behavior that can yield, in turn, to homicidal violence.

Burston's project, then – as Folman's – is one of moral rehabilitation, of redemptive sanity in the midst of all the madness that is hatred and war. His closing message is simple: "our humanity is better off left open to the air, than locked away for safekeeping."

I urge you to read what he has to say and to go out and see "Waltz with Bashir" (an excellent trailer is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylzO9vbEpPg). You will be moved.

And, when you do, please don't leave the theater thinking it's all about an Israeli-Arab thing that "happened 'out there' – in another time, another country." I'd be glad to loan you my copy of "Apocalypse Now" that I turn to from time to time to remind me of another special place in hell.

Here then is Burston's reflection from the February 2 edition of Haaretz:

A Special Place in Hell: "Waltz with Bashir," Gaza, and the Post-Moral World

By Bradley Burston

I went to see "Waltz with Bashir" this week, not suspecting for a moment that the story it told would have anything to do with me.

That, it turns out, is precisely what the film is about. It has to do with everyone who has been in a war here, which is everyone here. It has to do with all those who have succeeded in getting on with their lives by turning a blind eye to, blaming away, repressing, or somehow ideologically reprocessing genuine, tangible horror. It has to do with the fear of memory here, the reluctance to look inward, the quiet terror over what one might actually uncover. And because it has to do with the moral failings of bitter enemies, we are, every one of us, in the movie.

I knew, going in, that the film had to do with the filmmaker, Ari Folman, and his inability to remember his experiences as a 19-year-old soldier during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and, in particular, at the time of the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp massacre.

What I did not know was that, scene by scene, the film was about to invade me, rumble over me and through me, corner me and take me over. I went to see Waltz with Bashir, but it wasn't really seeing that I did. It wasn't long before the film turned visceral. I saw armored personnel carriers and knew how to operate and load and clean the machine guns at their turrets, and I began to feel a fist inside rise from my gut upward until it took my windpipe, still from the inside, and strangled the air out of me, long ago, in a green uniform gone black with sweat, in what I would only later and only for that one instance recognize as claustrophobia.

The Christian Phalangists began emptying their AK-47s into the air, and I could smell the cordite as if they were in the next row.

For the time of war, adrenaline can seem good for whatever ails: claustrophobia, moral qualms, mortal fears, sleeplessness, free-floating anger, free-floating anxiety, depression. When it wears off, there are other palliatives for those of us who get off lucky, alive, limbs intact, minds formally whole. There is survivor guilt, which can manifest itself in self-delusion and/or self-hate and/or political activism and/or political extremism. There is denial. Then there is my personal favorite, a certain silence born of superstition, the sense that if you don't talk about a fortunate near miss, or those killed and crippled in a place you might have been, then it won't happen to you or your loved ones in the cumulative balance sheet of grief.

On January 11, when Waltz with Bashir won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the war in Gaza had been raging for more than two weeks. Without commenting directly on the fighting in the Strip, Folman told The New York Times that the film, which he has called apolitical but anti-war, "will always be up-to-date because something will always happen again."

In a modern climate of diminished reality and computer-generated truth, the honesty of Waltz with Bashir comes as an astonishment. The Times interviewer, somewhat taken aback, responds: "You mean the prospect for peace seems so remote? That's sad."

"But it's true," Folman answers.

Folman's comment, and no less, his film, suggest that we now live in a post-moral world, a world in which, if nothing else, we can discern that both sides to this conflict commit grievous crimes, to little if any lasting effect, other than the injury done the victims on both sides.

If there is to be peace, and this is one of the world's faster growing of all "ifs," perhaps it will be just this post-moral outlook which will save us. For far too long, the attitude of pro- and anti-Israel sides to the wrangling over the Holy Land, has revolved over sophisticated versions of an "I was right all along" approach better confined to a kindergartener's arguments in schoolyard fights.

Perhaps its time we surrendered to what we know to be true, Arab and Jew both: The leaders on both sides lie. That is their job. They resort to war to protect the lies. Lies like We Will Never Recognize the Enemy. Our Efforts Will Bend Their Will. Only If We Demand Our Full Rights Will We Prevail.

We try to look beyond our leaders, to see someone better, but we can see little down the road.

There will be an election here in a week, but there will be no one to vote for. If the Palestinians were going to the polls on Tuesday to decide between Fatah and Hamas, they'd probably feel exactly the same.

The problem goes far beyond elected officials. We have learned from weary experience, that the apologists and apparatchiks on both sides lie. That is their job. We try to look beyond them, but there are too many of them to see beyond.

As Jews, we have come to see the post-moral world as caving in on us. On the eve of International Holocaust Day, the Vatican rehabilitated the post-moral British Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson, who had flatly denied both that 6 million Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust, and that any had been gassed.

Classically anti-Semitic incidents have multiplied, with daily reports of hate crimes from Caracas to Turkey.

Meanwhile, Palestinians every reason to echo the cries of a woman seen at the end of Waltz with Bashir, who calls, in her distress, "Where are the Arabs? They should be rushing here [to help us]!" For all of the concern and identification expressed across the Muslim world, the misery of Gaza remains a tragic constant.

Every night of the three weeks of hell in Gaza and the south, I had a different dream about the war. This is the one that, in retrospect, made sense:

As Ahmadinejad's campaign for June elections stalls, he orders the Hail Mary, ostensibly to avenge deaths in Gaza: a proportional military strike against Israel. He miscalculates, however, and annihilates everything in the Holy Land, Israeli and Palestinian alike, except for the three things that even nuclear holocaust cannot eradicate - cockroaches, Qassams, and settlement outposts.

Years from now, we may well look back on Waltz with Bashir as a work of rare maturity, a signpost toward a future less enamored of military means to political ends.

Years from now, we may look back on the film not only as anti-war, but, perhaps even more usefully for our purposes and future, a message that our humanity is better left open to the air, than locked away for safekeeping.

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WHAT TO SAY? A GUEST BLOG FROM SONIA

2009-01-30T22:08:00.001-08:00

Dr. Sonia Robbins is a brave, tough-minded woman I met in Daheisheh refugee camp just outside Bethlehem the evening of November 17, 2008. A British reconstructive surgeon working at Gaza's Shifa Hospital, she had been denied access to her patients there since the imposition of the Israeli blockade on November 4. When near fifty of us decided to peel away from the Sabeel Conference * we were then attending to stand in solidarity with the humanitarian NGOs we had learned would seek to enter Gaza the next morning, Sonia volunteered to go with us to the Erez Crossing, offering sound advice on how to behave with the Israeli security personnel and foreign media we were soon to encounter. I will not forget the day - November 18 - nor Sonia. Here is her unvarnished, unscrubbed report from the day before yesterday from Gaza. She finally got in...and this is what she found. I offer it without further comment. It needs none.

Vicki

From: "Sonia Robbins" <robbinssonia@doctors.org.uk>

Date: January 28, 2009 10:51:19 PM PST

Subject: from dr sonia

hi, what to say? the aftermath of the massacre leaves destroyed families and buildings, no sign of cement coming in, rafah still intermittently closed, many patients transferred to egypt and lost into black hole of buearocracy and families cannot trace. medical staff and people still shellshocked although cars and people on the streets again but all people have the memories of the events of 20 days bombardment, charred bodies and probably no family is intact. we visited a number of homes where people often children sit with legs in plaster, dressings on multiple wounds not sure what happened and what is going to happen as the medical services probably did break under the strain and now only with all the visitors is there an ongoing care. medical staff here need time off but still sit in clinics trying to cope. Money will no doubt pour into the system now but unless there is some justice over the use of unconventional weapons on a civilian popultation so the extent that almost every street had bits of phosphurus mixture that kids play with to make it ignite 20 days later in some cases. That also needs clearing up safely particularly as rain water or heat of the summer could reignite these remnants. children are already getting fingers and faces burnt as they play with remnants in the streets. reports will come out but all effort must be made to bring some justice to the palestinian people.Phosphorus and possible other materials used may also have a later carcinogenic effect. I am ok and being accompanied by Greek and Uk colleagues some of the time which is good when seeing and hearing about these events. such weapons should not even be produced for any use. there are also very disturbing reports of executions by il ground personnel. no wonder il has done its best to keep all journalists and foreigners out as long as they could and for most of the war and still making it very difficult for entry with egyptian beaurocratic help even to deciding that a psychiatrist was not 'medical enough - not needed' in thi situation and therefore not allowed in. knowing when to leave will be difficult as it will take many years and perhaps never for all the physical scars and rebuilding to be done as well as the unseen psychological ones. but much will be healed and helped if there is some justice here. without that the physical scars on the bodies and buildings here may be patched up but the deeper psychological ones will remain without the healing salve of some restorative justice.

the picture is as it says - the american school in gaza targetted by il probably with munitions from usa. what an education we are giving here.

sonia

_________________________________________________________________

* We were attending an international conference to mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba or Catastrophe experienced by the Palestinian people in 1948. The conference was sponsored by Sabeel (The Way), an ecumenical Palestinian Christian liberation theology group centered in Jersusalem and Nazareth.

MORNING IN AMERICA: A REFLECTION ON INAUGURATION DAY

2009-01-30T09:29:00.001-08:00

I've waited for this year for forty years…and it's only just begun…a few weeks ago. A member of the "might have been generation," I'd feared it might never come. The youthful hopes of '68 dashed in the hail of bullets and burning cities, I learned to make the best of the numbing mediocrity and worse my country had become. I feared I might never again experience the open-ended optimism of that long-ago time. I even feared to hope and, in these most recent years, came close to despair.

Then, of a November morning, the sun came out; the long bad dream was over. I reached for that copy Langston Hughes' Let America Be America Again on my bedroom bookshelf. Somewhat giddy, I began to read to a dog and a cat:

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

And, for the first time in forty years, I could hope again that it might yet be. Oh, I realize that there's a lot to be done, a lot to be repaired, but we were free again to try and dream we might succeed.

And, soon enough, it was Inauguration Day, a bright clear morning in Washington…and here in California. A time to dream.

I waited till they had left the steps of the Capitol to put out the flag, now flapping crisply in the morning chill…a morning marked for me by silence…a silence that was palpable, as I walked Cocoa, my dog…silent waves of recognition from passing strangers, and just the sounds of distant barking dogs. And, with that sound of silence, peace rushed in, crowding out the anger and discordant noise.

How good, how fortunate the computer's crash last night. Enforced silence – now embraced – a chance to listen to the wind chimes, to watch the fish, to read, to reflect, to refresh - that monk-like silence that is the predicate of action – Friday? Next week? In all due time. For this is a special time, this time that is an unexpected gift.

Already the urge to poetry, to poetry not of anger, but of hope, has returned. While walking Cocoa, one word from Barack's speech crowded my thoughts – "endurance." He spoke of all we had endured and, I added, struggled for. I thought of those who had struggled and endured; of how few they were at the start, at the darkest time; but, oh, how right and righteous they were…the remnant. They were the recurring remnant that is always there to call us back, push us forward.

God bless the remnant

That held firm to truth

And kept the faith,

Endured, struggled,

Its voice once faint

Became a roar –

Hope, believe, yes!

Now, in the winter chill,

A solitary sign –

"We have overcome!"

And, in a poet's words,

The primacy of love,

The light again of promise.

There were other things to reflect upon – the music of simple things…and of a rising, and of "who we are, what we'll do, and what we won't."

And then there were all those thoughts of children and the child-like that came together last night and this morning in God's serendipity. There was that moving inter-faith service at Grace Cathedral last night – one long prayer for Martin and Barack. But, before and after all the pomp and prayers, I paused before the open Book in the side chapel. It was open to Mark 10:13:

And they were bringing children to him, that he might touch

them; and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it

he was indignant, and said to them, "Let the children come to

me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of

God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the

kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it. And he took

them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands upon them.

This morning Barack, too, spoke of children, but in a different way. He called upon us to grow up, "to put away the things of childhood." And, yes, we must. But for me the juxtaposition of Mark and Paul conjured up paradox. But so much of the Book is paradox. Man is paradox…and so is God.

But this was not a time to struggle with paradox, but rather to confront the simplicity of the children themselves. Joseph Lowery's cheerful, playful words echo in my mind, especially his loving nod to "angelic" Sasha and Malia. So too those of Jesus: "Let the children come to me…." And, in those words of Jesus, last night and now, I couldn't help but think again – and weep inside – for all those children in Gaza who have now gone to God…and those I left behind in West Bank towns and camps, their hope still so bright in my memory. Soon after our return from Palestine, a friend spoke of avocations and vocations – mine being to keep alive the collective memory and current reality of Palestinians, a people facing oblivion under the heavy weight of injustice, ignored by an uncaring world.

And, once again, I was angry. But having dipped into Obery Hendricks' Politics of Jesus, I found it okay, appropriate, because I was angry not for any injustice visited upon me, but for the "mistreatment of God's children. I took solace in Hendricks' words:

Jesus…shows us that there are things we should be angry about,

There are things we must say and do as a testimony against

every action, system, policy, and institution that excludes any

of God's children from the fullest fruits of life for any reason.

That is to say, we must endeavor to love everyone, but we must

also take sides. We cannot be against injustice if we do not take

the side of justice. We must be angered by the mistreatment of

any of God's children.

Content that I could now act upon that anger with calm resolve, I turned to my Sunday Times, as always, my week's reading. Even there I found today the stuff of inspiration and reflection. There amidst the 'hard' news of the "Week in review," was Benedict Carey's thoughtful essay on that "Miracle on the Hudson" and "The Afterlife of Near Death." How, he wondered, do people face death…and live with that confrontation?

In "Arts and Leisure," there was a piece on the movies that "made a President," the movies of a lifetime, Barack Obama's 47 years. It was a good enough list, but, my life having been a bit longer, I wondered why they left out "Nothing But a Man.'

In "Sports," there was George Vecsey's reminder to a younger generation of springtimes sixty years ago, of Jackie, Newk, and Roy, and of "a journey from Ebbets Field to the steps of the Capitol.

And, in "Style," there was a jarring full-page Ralph Lauren ad…a light-skinned black kid, lolling on a classic wooden Chris Craft, wearing a straw skimmer, lots of bling, and a Trump-like arrogance. Different color, same message, appropriating someone, something new to all the old wrong ways of Me-Generation materialism.

But even that couldn't mar the joy, the incredible lightness of being of a sunny day of new beginnings…and happy endings. How else to describe that buzzing "It's done" alarm of the Bush countdown clock, that helicopter lifting off disappearing from view? The nightmare is over. It's morning in America.

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On "Weighing Crimes and Ethics in the Fog of Urban Warfare"

2009-01-17T12:16:00.001-08:00

As the carnage in Gaza winds down, some observers, including Steven Erlanger in the January 17 New York Times, have begun a discussion of what he calls "crimes and ethics." His article "Weighing Crimes and Ethics in the Fog of Urban Warfare," is provocative, recommended reading and is available at

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/world/middleeast/17israel.html?th&emc=th. While you're there, I urge you to click onto the three-minute video imbedded in the article. It includes Erlanger's interviews with UN and Red Cross officials in Gaza.

"Opportunity" is an awkward and probably inappropriate word to use in the context of all the killing these past three weeks, but this incipient discussion does offer all of us an opportunity to clarify our own thinking about war and peace and, in particular, the morality and ethics that apply to the conduct of war. The very literal post mortem on Gaza that has already begun offers, moreover, an opportunity to air such issues in our several communities, dare I say churches.

For those of us willing to open such a discussion, there are myriad resources available. Just War Theory, which encapsulates the traditional Christian, Western stance vis-a-vis war, is based on the writings of Augustine and Aquinas. You would do well to go to the source, but those who want a quick introduction can turn to that 21st-Century crib sheet, Wikipedia. There is a very helpful article on Just War Theory at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war. With regard to the issues in Gaza raised by Erlanger, focus on

Jus in Bello or the Law of War as it relates to conduct in war. The 1983 report of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops "The Challenge of Peace" takes a more thoughtful look at Just War Theory from the Christian perspective. It can be found at http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/international/TheChallengeofPeace.pdf.

Those who want to gain some insight into the moral/ethical dilemmas faced by individual soldiers in the fog and horror of war would do well to check out the hour-long film "Soldiers of Conscience" (http://www.soldiers-themovie.com/) and Chris Hedges' Losing Moses on the Freeway which incorporates his moving 2002 New York Times interview with Episcopal Bishop George Packard, Bishop Suffragan for Chaplains, which can be found at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE1DF1E3DF933A15751C1A9649C8B63.

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WHAT SHOULD BE THE U.S. RESPONSE TO ISRAEL'S ACTIONS IN GAZA?

2009-01-14T23:32:00.001-08:00

That was the question asked by the Contra Costa Times Sunday before last, January 4. This last Sunday, January 11, the paper printed close to two dozen responses including mine repeated here. I'd love to hear yours.

What is being done is immoral and damaging to American – and Israeli – interests. It is not too late, however, to pull Israel back from a self-destructive brink and retrieve our own self-esteem and tarnished image.

The current Administration must immediately join the global consensus and demand of both Israel and Hamas a full, mutual ceasefire and the long-term opening of Gaza's borders.

The Obama Administration must then – on day one – engage all parties – Israel, Fatah, and Hamas at the highest level (Now there's a job for Bill Clinton!) to negotiate seriously on the basis of the Saudi plan – '67 borders, divided Jerusalem, reparations for the refuges of 1948 and 1967, and full recognition of Israel by Palestine and all Arab States.

No more rockets, no more settlements, no more eye-for-an-eye idiocy. Enough! In the name of God, enough!

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BE INFORMED: BOOKS ON PALESTINE…AND ISRAEL

2009-01-07T18:20:00.000-08:00

Want to know more about the sources of conflict in the Holy Land and gain some first-hand insights about what's happening there today? Here is list of books in which you can begin your search for answers.

And, in your search for these and other books, please turn to your independent book dealer and, for that cheap used copy, to www.abebooks.com, a worldwide network of independent book dealers. I would sincerely appreciate your take on those you've read and your suggestions for other books I've overlooked and that you recommend. Just click on the comments tool below. Happy reading!

Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989)

Naim Stifan Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008)

Naim Ateek, Cedar Duaybis and Maurine Tobin (eds.), The Forgotten Faithful: A Window into the Life and Witness of Christians in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, 2007)

Anna Baltzer, Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007)

Benjamin Beit-Hallami, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993)

Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)

Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin (eds.), The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (New York: The New Press, 2002)

Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006)

Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)

Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993)

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

Taha Muhammad Ali, So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006)

Sari Nusseibeh (with Anthony David), Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)

Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (New York: Greenwillow Books, 2002)

Amos Oz, Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays (San Diego: A Harvest Original, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1994)

Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World Publications, 2007)

Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 2000)

Mariam Shahin, Palestine: A Guide (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2006)

Raja Shehadeh, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (North Royalton, VT: Steerfort Press, 2002)

Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (New York: Scribner, 2007)

Maurine and Robert Tobin (eds.), How Long O Lord? Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Voices from the Ground and Visions for the Future in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2002)

Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006)

Jean Zaru, Occupied with Nonviolence: A Palestinian Woman Speaks (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008)

Gaza: What Now?

2009-01-07T18:10:00.001-08:00

What is happening in Gaza is not a "war," but a long-planned, one-sided massacre being carried out under cover of journalistic darkness. It was initiated only after getting a green light from the outgoing Administration, carried on with American-supplied weaponry, and continued thanks only to American vetoes of UN cease fire efforts – the parting legacy of a failed presidency.

What is being done is immoral and damaging to American – and Israeli – interests. It is not too late, however, to pull Israel back from a self-destructive brink and retrieve our own self-esteem and tarnished image from the shame of complicity. The current Administration must immediately join the global consensus and demand of both Israel and Hamas a full, mutual cease fire and the long-term opening of Gaza's borders.

The Obama Administration must then – on day one – engage all parties – Israel, Fatah, and Hamas - at the highest level (Now there's a job for Bill Clinton!)to negotiate seriously on the basis of the Saudi plan – '67 borders, divided Jerusalem, reparations for the refuges of 1948 and 1967, and full recognition of Israel by Palestine and all Arab States.

No more rockets, no more settlements, no more eye-for-an-eye idiocy. Enough! In the name of God, enough!

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE AMERICAN RESPONSE TO GAZA

2009-01-06T23:01:00.001-08:00

I am heart sick and writing through tears, having returned just a month ago from the West Bank and Gaza's Erez Crossing and looking now at the Christmas lights out my front window. Through the tears I see the once hopeful faces of bright-eyed children in Hebron and in refugee camps like Aida and Balata, of optimistic university students in Nablus, of a British surgeon seeking to return to her patients in Gaza City, and of young Israeli Jews who've said "Enough!"

And, through those tears, I also see – on CNN - the bloody bodies in Gaza, the confrontations in Hebron, Ramallah, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, and I grieve for new-found friends in all those places, Palestinians and Jews alike.

And, in sorrow and growing anger, I contemplate the premeditated nature of the Israeli onslaught, the outrage expressed by governments and peoples around the world, and the outrageous silence from America.

Our media, with the notable exception of CNN, has given short and one-sided shrift to events that demand thoughtful, contextual response. MSNBC has been missing in action, its allocation of the public interest airwaves filled with pre-canned prison fare and year-end "specials." Fox, as expected, has assumed its self-assigned role as cheer leader for the on-going carnage.

And nowhere to be found in the coverage is there mention of the two-month-long strangulation of Gaza, an illegal act of collective punishment that has denied 1.5 million people of adequate food and fuel and driven them to desperation. All we hear is the standard prefatory canard about rockets – feeble, errant, home-made Kassems that Israel now uses as an excuse for a long-planned operation, the timing for which is designed to take full advantage of our Christmas holiday lull and the inter-regnum between our election and Inauguration. Anyone who professes not to understand those calculations or those of Tsipi Livni or Ehud Barak vis-à-vis Israel's February elections is either a fool or a knave.

Print media have done no better. For its part, the Washington Post turns over its New Year's Day op-ed page to Israeli hardliners (Ephraim Sneh) and their American cheer leaders with not a demurring word in sight. God forbid you live in a "small" town of 120,000 like Vallejo, California where I live and where our local "paper of record," the Vallejo Time-Herald, printed not a single word on Gaza on the first Saturday and Sunday of bombing and has since buried brief reports on events there on its deep inside pages.

But, word counts aside, the pictures are telling the story. And in those pictures of bombed out universities, prisons, mosques, and of hospitals over-flowing with bloody bodies, among them so many women and children, one senses a shifting of sensibilities, an awakening to reality among American viewers.

But what of our "leaders?" Where is the official, collective voice of America?

Our President-Elect, in whom I still have great hope, maintained a sphinx-like silence in Hawaii, a silence he has continued since his return to Chicago and now Washington, his spokesman, David Axelrod, spouting stale AIPAC-approved lines from last summer and declaring that "We have only one president at a time."

Who might that President be? George W. Bush who spent that Christmas week of bombing and death cutting bush in Crawford, Texas? Now back in Washington, he and our Secretary of State only occasionally show their heads from the shadows, their parting legacy being to turn over the voice of government to young Gordon Johndroe – Gordon who? – to talk one-sidedly of Hamas "thugs" and give an implicit green light to an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. This, while the UN Secretary General, the Pope, and presidents, prime ministers, and religious leaders around the globe call in unison for an end to a worsening humanitarian catastrophe.

So, here we stand, the self-purported "leader of the Free World," alone with Israel as it lurches out in anger like a taunted, blinded giant bringing down upon itself – and us – the crumbling edifice of what we might have been…and still might be.

It's not too late. Someone has to speak for America. Someone has to say, on our behalf, "Enough!"

Someone has to remember – and heed – the words of Leo Baeck, the President of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, 1933-43, who, in the face of another onrushing catastrophe, said "Nothing is so sad as silence."

WITNESS IN PALESTINE

2009-01-06T22:56:00.001-08:00

[This report was written just days before the brutal Christmas week assault on Gaza. Since then, the heart-breaking conditions it describes have worsened markedly. In Hebron, for example, young boys are now throwing stones at the IDF soldiers who are firing back tear gas and - so far - rubber bullets. From Nablus, one of the author's student guides reports that the city is again under seige, adding "I hope you will pray for God to help our people in Gaza" and asking again that we listen to the Palestinian's story. Is that too much to ask - to pray and to listen? The hope of so many young people hangs in the balance.]

Just before Thanksgiving, I returned from a two-week visit to Palestine with a team of 22 Christian peacemakers, most from around the Bay Area. We went to mark the 60th anniversary of what the Palestinians call the Nakba or Catastrophe – the destruction of 531 villages in 1948 and the expulsion and scattering of their people. We went also to stand in solidarity with the suffering Palestinians, especially the dwindling flock of 160,000 Christians among them, and to provide witness to their suffering.

The initial portion of our learning process was a week-long international conference in Nazareth and Jerusalem sponsored by Sabeel – The Way – an ecumenical Christian liberation theology center run by The Rev. Naim Ateek, an Episcopal priest. The line-up of speakers – 15 Muslim, 13 Jewish and 21 Christian – was impressive, and we learned a lot.

There is, however, no substitute for first-hand experience. And mine in Palestine has proven to be life-changing. I was stunned, heart-broken, and horrified by what I saw. I still am…and fear I still have a lot to process.

Before and after the conference, our small group travelled the length of the West Bank and to the shuttered gates of starving Gaza. We visited big cities like Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Jericho; squalid refugee camps like Aida, Abour, Daheisheh, and Balata; and two tiny villages I will never forget.

In all these places, the Nakba – the Catastrophe – is not history. It is an on-going moral outrage and a story that is unknown in this country. "The time has come," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said, "to say these things." So let me try...with just a few impressions from along the road.

In Aida refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem some 10,000 souls struggle to survive in one half sq. km. The streets – mere alleys – are impassable except on foot. No sunlight gets in the few small windows and those inside look out at gray concrete walls. Little boys pick through the garbage beneath a scrawled "Don't Forget Palestine" on the larger wall that pens them in and a brown-eyed girl asks plaintively "Why do you come?"

In Hebron, the city center, taken over by extremist settlers, has become a ghost town. One has to pass through a pedestrian checkpoint to gain entry to Abraham's tomb, now a mosque. We had hoped to pray there but were turned back by Israeli soldiers…for no apparent reason. Strolling instead through the now near deserted market, we found it covered by chicken wire…littered with dead animals and garbage tossed from the windows of settler apartments overhead.

Up in Nablus, we walked through a section of the old town that had been besieged for months at a time and that was still subject to nightly raids by the IDF. There were several bombed out or bulldozed houses and, on nearly every corner, their was a makeshift memorial to one or another "martyr" – "Heroes," my young guide from An Najah National University whispered. Maybe they were, defending, as they were, their homes and alleyways.

It was at An Najah, I must add, that I experienced the brightest ray of hope on the whole trip. Our student guides from the Zajel Youth Exchange Program were bright and optimistic and, as we mingled with the more than 10,000 students on two sparkling campuses, we experienced no animosity – only curiosity and a desire to be in touch with the rest of the world. Zajel, by the way, means carrier pigeon – a symbol of communication and peace.

In the far southeast corner of the West Bank, where the Hebron Hills begin yielding to the desert of the Negev, we visited two villages. The first, Az-Zuweidin, is a Bedouin settlement, a collection of tents and corrugated metal shacks on the outskirts of the much more substantial Israeli settlement of Karmel. While the expansion of the latter continued unabated, the IDF, just the week before, had demolished one of the Bedouin shacks. Walking through the rubble, a shiny object caught my eye. I reached down and held it in my hand – a tiny yellow bear once part of some larger toy. It remains my dearest souvenir of Palestine.

The second village, At-Tuwani, is but a collection of stone hovels on a rock strewn hillside, where some 150 people eke out a subsistence living from a small olive grove and as shepherds. Lying in the shadow of the forested Israeli settlement of Ma'on, it has but four substantial buildings – a half-finished well, a clinic, a tiny mosque, and a school attended by eighty children from At-Tuwani and two neighboring villages. With the exception of the school, all those structures are under current demolition orders. The mayor's home had already been demolished and his family now lives in a tent.

Living among the villagers are a few "Internationals" – members of a Christian Peacemaker Team or CPT who accompany shepherds in the fields and escort school children on their daily three hour walks to school from the neighboring villages. Those children are attacked most every day by stone-throwing settlers and, two days after we were there, twenty settlers from Ma'on – all wearing black ski masks - attacked a shepherd and a CPT member, killing a donkey, scattering the flock, and injuring the CPT member. All I could think of at the time was "What kind of God do these people believe in?"

And then there is Gaza, cut off from the outside world since November 5 and denied adequate fuel and UN food and humanitarian assistance in a brazen display of collective punishment. The lights have gone out there and 1.5 million men, women, and children are slowly dying of starvation. And the world does nothing.

For our part, we could not do nothing, when we learned that a collection of international NGOs would again try to gain entry to Gaza November 18. So we traveled - on the spur of the moment - to stand with them at Erez Crossing "as a united people of conscience in non-violent solidarity with the people of Gaza and in support of the NGOs" as they were again refused entry. While we explained our stance to European and Israeli journalists, we could hear the sounds of sonic booms and bombs…and, from America, the continued, deafening sound of silence.

I tell you these things not because I believe Palestinians are better than Israeli Jews – or any worse – but just to let you know that there is a Palestinian people and that they are suffering. All they ask is the dignity that comes with recognition of their humanity.

You should know also that, in Israel, there are many good Jews who are speaking truth to power, resisting the occupation, and exhibiting great moral courage. I met several and found in them a great source of hope.

Most poignant of all was Josef Ben-Eliezer, an aging veteran of the Palmach, who, as a teen-ager in 1948, had participated in the expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda. He had journeyed to Nazareth from London to tell the story of that horrific event and to ask, toward the end of his life, for forgiveness. I will never forget the breaking of the hushed silence, as Samia Khoury, a member of the Sabeel board, strode to the front of the room and, standing before Josef, said simply "Josef, I forgive you."

And that's what it's all about – truth and reconciliation.

So, how do we, as Christians and Americans, promote truth and reconciliation in the Holy Land? As individuals and as a church community, we can:

- promote truth-telling about Palestine and afford the Palestinian people the dignity that comes with the recognition of their humanity;

- support the courageous efforts of the many Israeli and American Jews who seek honest reconciliation;

- urge our church and government to divest from those companies that enable occupation and oppression in the Holy Land;

- urge the new Administration in Washington – as a first priority and at the highest level – to re-engage in the peace process and to bring it to a just and speedy conclusion; and, yes,

- pray.

With that last task in mind, let me offer the following prayer, a collect for the Peace of Jerusalem:

Creator of all – Abba, Adonai Elohenu, Allah: we offer our

prayers today for Israel and Palestine, and especially for the

peace of Jerusalem, that one day she may shine as a beacon

of peace and reconciliation to the world, through Jesus Christ

our Lord. Amen.

FROM DESTROYER DECK TO PULPIT: ONE WOMAN'S JOURNEY

2009-01-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

[The following, the text of a spring 2007 fundraising speech on behalf of Mare Island's St. Peter's Chapel, is offered here as a re-introduction upon the re-opening of a long dormant website. Hopefully, it will answer in advance those who might ask: Who is this Vicki Gray? Where is she coming from?]

Once upon a time – actually, twice upon a time – I ran for city council in Vallejo. I had been energized by the efforts to save Mare Island. I lost, but Mare Island won…and so did we.

During my campaigns, one of my flyers asked "Who is Vicki Gray?" Having read it, one lady exclaimed "Your life reads like Forrest Gump's – always in the company of great people, on the edge of great events!" Yes, I did march with Martin. I did earn a Bronze Star in the Mekong Delta. In the Department of State, I did brief Secretaries of State and Presidents. I did earn a Ph.D and teach at the National Defense University. And once I was a man.

But you know all that. Is that, however, all there is to Vicki Gray? To any person? A resume…of things we did? Are we what we do? Or who we are?

Those are all questions that were swirling in my head when Myrna asked me to speak today and say something about myself and a life so shaped by the Navy and the Church. And, so, the title: "From Destroyer Deck to Pulpit." It's a title I cribbed – shamelessly - from Martin Niemoeller, a World War I submarine commander who became a leader of the Confessing Church in Hitler's Germany. On the eve of being sent off to Dachau, he wrote a book called From Submarine to Pulpit. He has always been a hero of mine.

Another hero of mine and one of my favorite theologians is the Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis. Toward the close of his autobiography, Report to Greco, he describes "three kinds of souls, three kinds of prayers. One: I am a bow in your hands, lord. Draw me lest I rot. Two: Do not overdraw, Lord. I shall break. Three: Overdraw me, and who cares if I break! Choose!" I guess I fall into the third category, though the choices were not mine, but God's.

Today, I'd like to talk about those choices – God's choices – the events, the strains, the losses – that have made me – for better or for worse - who I am.

Again, I've done a lot of exciting things, participated in small ways in big events, and had my share of worldly accomplishments. But far more important than what I've won is what I've lost. As I'm sure many of you have also experienced, we become – we are – what is taken away from us. As we go through life – if we are honest – we find ourselves being peeled…like an onion or an artichoke. And – if we are lucky – we are like one of those brightly colored Panamanian molas in the hands of God, allowing God to cut through life's accretions, always leaving what's important of each layer, but cutting through relentlessly, skillfully, to the core, the heart, the essence of what we are intended to be – something bright and beautiful.

In my case, God has cut deep and with sometimes wild abandon. I've lost a lot. In Vietnam, I lost my innocence. Then I found and lost the love of my life. And, toward the end of her life, I lost myself, or, at least, a great part of myself. But, in the process, I developed a sense of what was important, what had to be held onto. I leave it to you – and to God - to judge whether what I held onto is worthwhile, bright, or beautiful.

At the start, I didn't think about such things. Isn't that always the way of youth, so full of innocence and optimism? Growing up in the Bronx wasn't always easy. We weren't rich and I wasn't very healthy. But I did go to a good school – Fordham Prep -and, after the Naval Academy, escaped to a life at sea on the deck of a destroyer.

But, even then, the clouds were gathering – our national struggle with civil rights and my personal struggle with my gender identity. They both demanded attention. Then came Vietnam, a cloud, it seemed with silver linings. I would make the world safe for democracy and prove to the world and to myself, that I was a man…and a damn tough one at that.

Oh, I was tough. The Bronze Star citation says so. But Vietnam, like any war, was never like a John Wayne movie. My narrow world of jungle canals was more like "Apocalypse Now," a dark nightmare that still sends shivers up my spine. Death – up close – has a way of doing that.

Two weeks after I got there – to Long Phu or, as I call it, "the place I learned to cry" – my counterpart was killed, shot between the eyes at pointblank range. Worse yet, I had already killed my first human being and, soon, the killing became a blur.

There was, however, one death I will never forget. We had received a lot of fire from a notorious island – Cu Lao Dung. I called in an airstrike and soon the shriek of the jet was followed by a series of thuds, bright orange balls of flame, and black clouds that reeked of gasoline. Then, in what has become a recurring personal nightmare, a young woman emerged from the stinking black cloud of burning napalm we had just unleashed, paddling toward us in a sampan,. We stopped her. Caked with mud and soot and tears, she looked much older than her years. Reaching into the bottom of the boat, she held up a tiny chunk of something – black, still smoking – the remnants of her baby. She broke down shrieking – growling - to God and to us! The sound still rattles in my head.

But Vietnam also brought me a far happier dream – a dream of love. It began one September Saturday in 1965, when Vic, a young naval officer on his way to Vietnam, encountered Mimi, a school teacher, four years younger. We fell madly in love.

"Thank God for Vietnam," I've often thought, for it left me with a stack of letters – hers and mine – that attest to the authenticity and urgency of young love. Just weeks after my return to "the world" we were married in Carmel on January 7, 1967. Over the years, neither of us forgot the clarity of each other's smiles that day or the honesty of our shared vow – "Till death do we part."

It was a vow that was tested by the same familiar trials that millions of married couples endure. They were trials, however, that were trumped by a full measure of happiness, adventure, and worldly "accomplishment." We travelled the world and dined and danced with presidents and movie stars, and lived, in every way, abundant lives.

It would have been wonderful to grow old together, to live "happily ever after." But such endings happen more often in fairy tales and B movies than in real life, and, what passes for happiness is, as often as not, ephemeral tinsel. Our epiphany of that truth came much too early or, as we later thought, just in time. For, in the real tests that followed, we found salvation and produced something beautiful.

Those real tests were life-threatening, life-changing, and, ultimately, life-affirming. They were breast cancer and something called gender identity dysphoria. The latter - my confusion - was something we struggled with together for much of our married life. Mimi's cancer overtook us much more suddenly – on an April morning in 1988. They were tests that intertwined and defined our last dozen years together. We found ourselves engaged in prolonged grieving, having to say "Goodbye" to each other in multiple ways.

Making our way "home" to California in the midst of it all, we found ourselves at St. Paul's in Benicia. Mimi was recovering from chemo-induced heart failure, and I, still "in the closet," was embarked on the final stages of the transsexual journey. We knew there would be more, traumatic changes, but, for the moment, felt secure in a church that brought us the solace of a loving family, and a pastor, Harold Clinehens, who stretched our spiritual envelope. Our "outing" could wait…or so we thought.

But we were being pressed – by the growing intensity of my obsession; the growing, self-destructive depths of the depression that accompanied it; the growing need to be honest with family and friends; and the growing sense that our time to do so was limited. We prayed and cried together and determined we would share our truth. We could do no less with those we loved, and, given a new found understanding of Grace, knew we had nothing to fear.

And, so the unfolding began. Each step of the way, it became easier to begin with the simple, declarative "I am a transsexual." So, we began, our disclosure to Mimi's mom, Adrienne, who replied, relieved it seemed, "Oh, that's not so bad; I was afraid you were getting divorced." And, then, there was my Ash Wednesday confession to Father Harold, who replied "I don't see any sin in this," adding honestly, "I don't understand it, but we'll work our way through it together." And we did…together.

I remember vividly my first day at church as Vicki. You want guts?! Mimi had them, as she walked before me to communion. It was a breeze for me, thereafter. Mimi was always there before me; I sensed Christ there behind me; and we all smiled on the way back. Mimi was there, too, that morning, when in our prayer group, someone insisted on speaking his mind about my "sin." She held my hand, as I held his, as he read from his Bible about how I was an "abomination." I will never forget the trembling and perspiration of his hand and the coolness and firmness of Mimi's.

The loss of Vic was not easy for Mimi, or for me. We both grieved his quickening disappearance. For Mimi, Vicki was never an adequate substitute for Vic, but she was always there, each step of the way, supporting me as a wife, teaching me as an "older," wiser sister, loving me as a friend and soulmate. And, in the vulnerability of her own illness, she unknowingly kept me from feeling sorry for myself, from imploding into the self-centeredness that afflicts too many transgendered people. She was always there to allow me to care for her…as she cared for me. And, together, we incarnated an "issue." "Here is transsexuality," we said. "Touch us. Feel us. Interact with us. Above all, love us, as we love you."

And Mimi and I loved each other, too…till the very end. As she lay dying, I said a lot of inane things. And, selfish to the end, I asked, "Do you still love me?" All she could manage through her morphine haze was "Uh huh." But that was enough! I pressed her hand. She smiled. We had kept our vow.

Toward the end of our life together – Mimi's and mine – I got to know the British writer Jan Morris, also transgendered, and her beloved Elizabeth. In Conundrum, she said of their marriage: "It was a marriage that had no right to work, yet it worked like a dream, living testimony, one might say, to the power of mind over matter – or of love in its purest sense over everything else." Nor did ours have a right to work. But it continues to work – like a dream – in those shared dreams that we – Mimi and I - retreat to each night. (Am I in hers or is she in mine?) And, in those love-filled dreams, I sense eternity.

Mimi died on an April afternoon – much like today. It was 2000. God had cut this mola to the core. There was nothing left to reveal. I had reached an end of sorts – a bottom – a widow now, Mimi's ring upon a necklace, no one to care for, not knowing what to do, waiting. For what?

The next summer, I set out on a two-month search for answers – a Celtic pilgrimage to rocky cliffs and islands on Ireland's westernmost edges and to the very top of Scotland. I visited lots of beautiful - and empty - churches, but found God strong and well in the most god-awful places. And, in myself, I found new strength and purpose.

There had to be more to life and church than what I found when I returned. It was September 2001. The shared grief we all endured that second week and the death of a dear young friend a month later shook me hard. I found myself shaking my fist at heaven and shouting "What in the hell are you doing up there!" No I didn't hear the response, But I felt it. It seemed to say: "Quit the whining! Life is tough. Get on with it."

And get on with it I did. I soon found myself at the Episcopal School for Deacons at Berkeley and, after a long and arduous process of discernment and affirmation, I was ordained last December at Grace Cathedral. As a result of that and my various ministries in San Francisco, I've faded somewhat from Vallejo's struggles. Now you can find me at St. James in the Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco – doing this - preaching. You can also find me with the ladies of Pod D in the San Francisco Jail, among the chemo patients at UCSF Mt. Zion, and, if you were there last Sunday, leading morning prayer on Justin Hermann Plaza.

Life is rich and life is good. And, toward the end, I can report, like that Greek poet, "I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet. Full of wounds, all in the breast, I did what I could…."

And, at the end, I will report – what more can any of us say – "I tried."

ON TRUTH, ART, AND POLITICS… AND NEW BEGINNINGS

2009-01-06T22:13:00.001-08:00

ON TRUTH, ART, AND POLITICS…

AND NEW BEGINNINGS

A week ago, on Christmas Eve, a hero of mine died.

In his December 26 obituary of Harold Pinter, Mel Gussow wrote: "His plays often take place in a single, increasingly claustrophobic room, where conversation is a minefield and even innocuous-seeming words can wound." But, Gussow continued, "it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for." He was, in Gussow's words, the "playwright of the pause."

Wednesday night – no, Thursday morning, the first hour of 2009 – I watched, listened again to Pinter deliver that 2005 Nobel speech so strewn with mines and wounding words and, in the pauses, reflected on the rasping breaths of a dying man speaking of his art…and the task of every man. Toward the end, he said:

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity.We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician….

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

I found many of Pinter's words in that remarkable speech – words about my country and my dereliction as a citizen – wounding…stinging all the more because they spoke of self-inflicted wounds. But it is these closing words – and what lies between them - that stick with me this morning, not so much wounding as goading. And now, I find, I've got to act on the words…and pauses…the silences any monk will tell you are the proper, necessary antecedent to action.

I have been a politician, too long self-protecting, self-deluding in a swirl of lies, personal and national. Now I try to write, to smash mirrors, to stare unflinchingly at truth. But how to smash those mirrors in such a way that others, too, will want to look?

I've tried, like Pinter, poetry, seeking to cut to the bone, to cut to the chase, leaving old delusions on the floor midst all the broken glass. But I've found my poems too much like crutches to help me navigate through shards of shattered dreams, too often an opiate to ease the pain of loss and what will never be.

And, so, upon my return from Palestine just weeks ago, I tried through poetry to ease the pain of a truth that still waits for others behind our elaborate polished mirror – the real truth of children still hoping in the garbage of their refugee camps for justice and deliverance.

Aida broke my heart

As did Balata and Aroub.

Children picking through the garbage

Beneath an obscene wall,

Others asking, hands upraised,

"Why do you come?"

Why, indeed, I ask myself

Now safe at home,

Still crying for the children

In their dusty alleyways.

The grafitti on the wall

Cries out loudly:

"Don't forget Palestine!"

And other voices

From another place

Haunt my soul this sunny Sunday.

"Don't forget the children,"

They shout in unison.

How could I, how could I,

Condemned now to remember

A place called Palestine

And all its lovely children?

But, then, just days ago, I found all the hopes and yearnings – theirs and mine - buried once again beneath a recurring avalanche of hate and lies and bombs, no longer visible through clouds of ash, no longer heard above the concussions and screams and sirens. In the long moment of a holy week of so much death, the poet's pen seemed so effete, so ineffective. Reaching through my tears for every verbal stone I could find, I found solace in the despairing solidarity of yet another hero, Bertolt Brecht:

What times are these

When to write a poem about love

Is almost a crime

Because it contains

So many silences

About so many horrors….

What times indeed. How deep, how sad the silences. I raged for awhile at the horrors, frustrated that all I had with which to fight the crimes were verbal stones and wounding words. But, in the silence of the monks and the "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination" of the Pinters, Brechts, Bonhoeffers, and Kings, who still live in their words, I've regained my balance, restored my strength, and am ready to write again in other ways, to take up again the duty of a citizen, the moral imperative that is the search for truth.

But what to write? How to write?

I think I'll pick up where I left off two years ago when I unplugged this blog in anger and frustration. I ended, then, with a tribute to Molly Ivins. My last lines were hers – "Keep banging those pots and pans!" Mine have been silent these past two years and, for that, in shame and sadness, I apologize. But, as they say, I'm baaack! I've got some big pots and pans and a bigger metal ladle to bang them with.

Let's get on with it.

The Budget as a Moral Crisis

2007-02-27T16:38:00.000-08:00

The Federal Budget, like snow and cold rain, comes in bleak midwinter, and this year’s deepens the glumness of the season. How else to react to a budget that, when read as a moral document, reeks of immorality?

It is a budget that would allocate half of all discretionary spending to “defense,” much of that to an unworthy and now futile war, while asking no one save our volunteer soldiers and their families to sacrifice. For the first time in American history we find ourselves fighting a war – one its perpetrators call “civilizational” – while the lavish tax cuts this budget would make permanent are showered on the richest one percent of Americans, tax cuts that deepen an out-of-control deficit.

Other Americans – the middle class and working poor – are nickled-and-dimed to pay for such largesse. Offset “savings” – nowhere near what’s needed to achieve real balance – are carved out of college tuition assistance, food assistance, farm subsidies, Medicare, and, most galling of all in the context of this war, veterans’ assistance. And, when one protests such blatant class warfare, one finds oneself accused of class warfare. Do they have no shame?

Class warfare? Take the imminent tidal wave called the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) that is about to engulf a largely unsuspecting middle class. Originally intended to capture trillions sheltered by the rich in dubious tax shelters but left un-indexed for inflation, it will, next year, wipe out many middle class tax payers unless there is some relief. This budget promises relief – a one year cut in the AMT – conveniently for election year 2008. But no permanent cut here. In 2009, AMT comes back with a vengeance. The answer, of course, is not a one-time candy-coated sedative for voters, but rather real reform involving, at very least, indexing to spare the middle class on a long-term basis.

If, however, the AMT is scaled back to its original modest intentions, the shortfalls in tax revenues beyond 2008 would be astronomical. In the face of such revenue losses, there would be no way to justify other permanent tax cuts that would balloon an already dangerously outrageous deficit. That deficit is being kicked down the road to our children and grandchildren. This is not just fiscally irresponsible, it is morally indefensible.

In sum this is a budget that widens the gap between rich and poor, threatens the middle class, and promises increased generational inequity. Any way you parse it, it is wrong.

SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE EVE OF A 'SURGE'

2007-01-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

I offer here for your reflection –without comment, none being needed –some random thoughts on the eve of an announcement of a “surge and acceleration” ever deeper into Iraq.
*********

Elections have consequences.

President George W. Bush
January 2005
*********

The war…was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President….When the war began, it was my opinion that all…should…remain silent on that point, at least until the war should be ended. Some leading Democrats…have taken the same view…I cannot be silent.

As to the mode of terminating the war and securing peace, the President is wandering and indefinite. First, it is to be done by a more vigorous prosecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemy’s country; and after apparently talking himself tired on this point, the President drops down into a half-despairing tone and tells us that ‘with a people distracted and divided by contending factions, and a government subject to constant changes by successive revolutions, the continued success of our arms may fail to secure a satisfactory peace.’ Then he suggests the propriety of wheedling the…people…to set up a government from which we can secure a satisfactory peace; telling us that ‘this may become the only means of obtaining such a peace.’ But soon he falls into doubt of this too; and then drops back to the already half-abandoned ground of ‘more vigorous prosecution’…it is a singular omission in this message that it nowhere intimates when the President expects the war to terminate….[The President] is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show there is not something about his conscience more painful than his mental perplexity.

Congressman Abraham Lincoln
On President Polk’s conduct of the Mexican War
January 12, 1848
*********

We have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and to do bandits’ work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world, but each detail was for the best. We know this. The Head of every State and Sovereignty in Christendom and 90 percent of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fifty state legislatures, are members not only of the church but also of the Blessings of Civilization Trust. This world- girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right.

Mark Twain
*********

Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war, neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood.

But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Goering
Nuremberg Trials
*********

One of the great tragedies of our time is that in our desperate incapacity to cope with the complexities of our world, we oversimplify every issue and reduce it to a neat ideological formula. Doubtless we have to do something in order to grasp things quickly and effectively. But unfortunately this "quick and effective grasp" too often turns out to be no grasp at all, or only a grasp on a shadow. The ideological formulas for which we are willing to tolerate and even provoke the destruction of entire nations may one day reveal themselves to have been the most complete deceptions....The American conscience is troubled by a sense of tragic ambiguity in our professed motives for massive intervention. Yet in the name of such tenuous and questionable motives we continue to bomb, to burn, and to kill because we think we have no alternative, and because we are reduced to a despairing trust in the assurance of "experts" in whom we have no real confidence.

Thomas Merton
On Vietnam
*********

During the last three years U.S. armed forces have been used repeatedly to defend our interests and achieve our political objectives....The reason for our success is that in every instance we have carefully matched the use of military force to our political objectives. President Bush, more than any other recent President, understands the proper use of military force. In every instance, he has made sure that the objective was clear and that we knew what we were getting into. We owe it to the men and women who go in harm's way to make sure that their lives are not squandered for unclear purposes.

....But we also recognize that military force is not always the right answer. If force is used imprecisely or out of frustration rather than clear analysis, the situation can be made worse.

Decisive means and results are always to be preferred, even if they are not always possible. So you bet I get nervous when so-called experts suggest that all we need is a little surgical bombing or a limited attack. When the desired result isn't obtained, a new set of experts then comes forward with talk of a little escalation. History has not been kind to this approach.

Colin Powell
On President George H.W. Bush and
Operation Desert Storm
October 8, 1992
*********

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved….

Our most important recommendations call for new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region, and a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly.

The Iraq Study Group Report
December 6, 2006
*********

Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed….Rather than deploy additional forces to Iraq, we believe the way forward is to begin the phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
Letter to President Bush
January 5, 2007
*********

There is no question that the situation in Iraq is very dangerous and not improving, particularly in Baghdad with respect to the sectarian violence….I don't believe that increasing U.S. forces in Baghdad in the way and size being discussed— with a temporary surge of between 10,000 and 40,000 troops— would secure the city. I think it would be the wrong way to go.

Representative Heather Wilson, R-NM
January 5, 2007
*********

I ask the government: Is there any hope of success or are we pressing on without any probability of victory?

Lieutenant Matsuoko
Imperial Japanese Navy
1943
*********

The war horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great weight it cannot save.

Psalm 33:17
*********

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Jesus the Christ
Matthew 5:9
*********

He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

The Prophet Isaiah
Isaiah 2:4
*********

Peace always seems a weary way off. As Jeremiah lamented, “We looked for peace, but no peace came.” But to give up on peace is to give up on God….

Peace does not come rolling in on the wheels of inevitability. We can’t just wish for peace. We have to will it, fight for it, suffer for it, demand it from our governments as if peace were God’s most cherished hope for humanity, as indeed it is.

William Sloane Coffin
Credo
*********

If you’re at the edge of an abyss the only progressive step is backward.

William Sloane Coffin
Credo
*********
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Where Have All the Flowers Gone
Pete Seeger
1961

Respect

2007-01-06T16:38:00.000-08:00

Respect! It’s a word I learned to use in a new way once a long time ago in Europe. It is, I learned, not just a leaden noun, but an honorific salutation, used to address someone, like a professor, of proven intellectual prowess, or, better yet, someone whose demonstrated decency and integrity commands just that – respect. It was the first word that came to mind Tuesday night, when I heard that Gerald Ford had died. And, soon enough, other words – decency, integrity, kindness, humility, and moral courage – came rushing forth.

Playing on the “what ifs” of history – What if he had not been appointed vice president to replace a disgraced Spiro Agnew? Had not been called to replace a disgraced Richard Nixon? Had not pardoned Nixon and beat Jimmy Carter in 1976? Had run as Reagan’s vice president? – a commentator on MSNBC likened Gerald Ford to Forrest Gump.

Hearing that, I was reminded how, a few years ago, someone, glancing up from my biography during a failed foray into Vallejo politics, had also likened me to Forrest Gump – so often in the shadows of great events, in the company of great men and women, but always vaguely out of focus. And, as I struggled for sleep in the midst of a howling windstorm, I recalled how our lives – Gerald Ford’s and mine – had crossed so briefly, so tangentially in that unlikeliest of places – Krakow, Poland.

It was 1974 and I was consul in Krakow, struggling to reestablish an American presence in southeast Poland for the first time since 1946. Personally and professionally, the twin weights of Vietnam and Watergate were draining our morale and haunting our efforts… like some menacing Golem stalking the alleys of the ancient city. The nightly news on the BBC, my station of choice, (the Voice of America having lost all semblance of credibility) was a depressing drumbeat.

Then, late one August night, there was Alistair Cooke, reporting from America that Richard Nixon had resigned and that Gerald Ford would momentarily be sworn in as our 38th president. Overjoyed, I got up early next morning and rushed to my office well before the arrival of our Polish staff. Behind my desk – as behind those of all ambassadors and consuls – there hung a picture of the president, until then Richard Nixon. Ripping it from the wall, I tossed it upside down into the trash basket beside the desk. Rushing to our ground floor reading room, I retrieved a 1973 Sports Illustrated. There on the cover, shortly after he had replaced Agnew as vice president, was a youngish Gerald Ford in his University of Michigan football uniform. Putting it in a frame, I placed it in our street front display case, flanked by an American flag and a vase of red flowers. Below it, I placed a bold, stencil-penciled sign: Nasz Nowy Presydent (Our New President). Pride and hope had returned to America and to this American in Poland.

And less than a year later - on July 29, 1975 – that new president was to pay a visit to Krakow on his way to Helsinki to sign the historic agreement that was as close as we ever got to a peace treaty ending World War II in Europe and that opened the way to the human rights movement that lead to the unraveling of Soviet rule on that continent.

We had a week to prepare, with the advance team arriving with but twelve-hours’ notice. I’ll never forget calling Krakow’s mayor, Jerzy Pekala, back from his vacation in the Tatra Mountains or informing the colonel in charge of the Polish Air Force base outside town that a USAF C-141 would be landing at dawn with tons of equipment and a White House team of dozens.

In the blur of preparations that followed, three events remain vivid in my mind. First was the large meeting at city hall among three overlapping, competing teams – the President’s; that of Poland’s Communist Party boss Eduard Gierek; and the Mayor’s. I was surprised to see seated across from me the head waiter who had catered so many dinners at my home…surprised that is until the introductions began. “Colonel ---, UB (Secret Police),” he announced. We both smiled.

Then there was the head of the President’s traveling Secret Service detail who had developed a nasty infection in, of all things, his trigger finger. Before week’s end he required minor surgery. It was carried out at the Pediatrics Institute – the “American Children’s Hospital” – by Dr. Jan Grochowski, a friend who was second in command at the Institute.

Finally, there was the detailed walkthrough at the Wawel, the ancient castle where Gierek would host the official luncheon for the Fords. One detail to be nailed down was the designation of a quiet room, where Mrs. Ford, still undergoing chemotherapy, could catch a short nap. Another thing to be “nailed down” was the carpeting over the wooden floors, especially where there was a step or two. Whether there was any truth to the Chevy Chase routine or not, the President’s political team did not want to see a repeat of that stumble on the airplane steps.

As the day of the visit approached, the consulate was transformed into an electronic nerve center, crawling with officials from Washington and our embassy in Warsaw. We were even issued calling cards, a few of which I still have, that proclaimed us the “Krakow White House.”

The visit itself proceeded without a hitch, including the moving tribute at nearby Auschwitz under a banner that proclaimed Nigdy nie wiecej (Never Again!). Henry Kissinger was there and, as he insisted, his young son David. So, too, was a young Dick Cheney, then-White House Chief of Staff, who, at the time, seemed so friendly and reasonable. I always wondered whatever happened to that reasonable demeanor. Funny, last night on MSNBC, Tom Brokaw wondered too.

There was one last speech before the packed thousands on the city’s square, Europe’s largest. Standing with St. Mary’s Church over his shoulder, he invoked the memory of Krakow’s native son Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Kosciuszko was, the President said, not only a “hero of America’s war for independence and America’s war for liberty,” but also of “the independence of Poland and the freedom of all Poles.”

There was a motorcade to the airport, a raucous “wheels up” party, and the quiet dismantling of the “Krakow White House.” And I was left with the pride and hope and a suddenly easier task in downtown Poland.

And, this Wednesday morning, I’m still ruminating over the “what ifs,” including one that occurred barely a month after President Ford returned to the States. It was September 5, 1975 on a visit to Sacramento. In an assassination attempt, the first it turned out in as many weeks, Lynette “Squeaky Fromme had cocked her pistol before being wrestled to the ground by a brave and familiar looking Secret Service agent, Larry Buendorf, his hand now healed. Before I left Krakow a few weeks later, I made sure Dr. Grochowski got a copy of the New York Daily News front page emblazoned with the picture. When I visited several years later, it was hanging proudly on his wall.

What if? What if, indeed? What if we didn’t get our “accidental President,” a simple, decent man, who had the moral compass and found the courage to heal a wounded nation? Who had the guts to pardon his predecessor and, two weeks later, to grant amnesty to those who had resisted the draft? Who had the sense to end a senseless war? Who reassured a nation wrought with fear and confusion? Oh, how I remember the innate commonsensical rightness of the words of his first address to Congress: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” Would that we could call up such wisdom and humility today?

Recalling, too, how he refused to allow that pompous “Hail to the Chief” to be played before his appearances, I trust they’ll find something more appropriate to play at his funeral. Might I suggest “Fanfare for the Common Man?”

Whatever they play, as they lay him to rest, I’ll be off in my distance, praying a Gump-like “Respect, Mr. President. Respect!”

Surprise! Surprise!

2006-10-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

Surprise! Surprise! The Times-Herald supports Wal-Mart in its effort to ram a 393,000 sq. ft. “supercenter” down Vallejo’s throat. Forgive me for choking…on my laughter.

Evidently, all it takes to buy the support of the Times-Herald are a few full-page ads, all “Paid for by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc..” Or was there more? How much did that “Multi-Media Slide Show” touting the “supercenter” on the T-H website cost? Or was it a freebie like the two front-page puff pieces September 21 and 23?

One doesn’t expect objective reporting from the Times-Herald when it comes to big bucks developers or small time good ole’ boys. And the editorials? Ever get the feeling that you’re reliving Groundhog Day? Playing “Whack-a-Mole” with a gang that never seems to run out of bad ideas? Didn’t like LNG? How about dumping dredge spoils in the backyards of $800 million homes? How about three football fields crammed onto a downtown corner at the edge of a lagoon we’re trying to rehabilitate?

As the paper’s October 1 editorial demonstrates, the T-H – and Wal-Mart – intend to reprise the LNG debate with the same ugly tactics employed by the T-H and Shell-Bechtel four years ago. Yes, “some of the same people [are] lined up” against this project. Yes, I and Council Member Gomes - “one of those people” - are among them. And, yes, we have no need to meet behind closed doors with Wal-Mart’s flacks, to conclude that outright rejection is what is called for. For what we are dealing with in Wal-Mart’s White Slough proposal is a clear-cut, pure-and-simple land use issue - whether the people and government of Vallejo will determine our General Plan and associated zoning or whether a claque of free-booty capitalists in Arkansas will.

Yes, Wal-Mart does own the White Slough site. And, when they bought it – eyes wide open – two years ago, they knew how it was zoned. If they want to come back with a proposal that meets the zoning and other requirements of the White Slough Specific Plan, then – and only then – should the Council consider whether or not to begin an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and/or the Economic Impact Analysis (EIA) required by the Big Box Ordinance the Council passed last year.

If Wal-Mart’s proposal does not meet the requirements of the White Slough Specific Plan, the company must formally submit a request for a variance to staff, which amendment should be considered by the Planning Commission with public input prior to Council consideration. Any attempt to short circuit this process or to conflate it with an EIR or EIA would be tantamount to misfeasance.

And what is the proposal on the table– only fully revealed to the public the Friday before the Council hearing? It is a new iteration of Wal-Mart’s proposal last year for a 160,000 sq. ft. store at the same site. Even at that size, the planned big box was inconsistent with the zoning and design requirements of the White Slough Specific Plan which calls for multiple low density mixed use buildings with a maximum floor area ratio of 25 percent. Those buildings, moreover, are to be clustered around public spaces such as landscaped areas and pedestrian plazas that visually and physically open up to the water. This, it should be added, is not Council Member Cloutier’s “concept;” it is a Council-approved decade-old Plan. And Wal-Mart was told last year to come back with something more in keeping with that plan.

It has now come back with something more than twice as large as what was earlier proposed – larger than anything it has attempted anywhere else in California – a huge, ugly box of 393 sq. feet, a floor area ratio of 75 percent, and otherwise totally inconsistent with the White Slough Specific Plan.

In doing so, Wal-Mart has dissed Vallejo and, in effect poked a finger in our eye. It has said “We have done our research. Vallejo is a pushover for a fast buck. We couldn’t get away with this in Sausalito, Berkeley, or Walnut Creek. But Vallejo…no sweat!”

My question for the Council and the people of Vallejo is this: Have we no self-respect, no vision, no ambition? Are we not as good, as wise, as forward-looking as the people of Sausalito, Berkeley, or Walnut Creek…or Hercules, Turlock, or Inglewood?

The City Manager and Staff admit in their September 26 memo to the Council that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” for any big box to meet the standards of the White Slough Specific Plan. Vallejoans for Responsible Growth agrees and urges outright rejection of this proposal.

Why, then, did Staff recommend approval of a conflated resolution “to proceed with the processing of the White Slough Specific Plan Amendment, the Unit Plan, and Major Use application for a new Wal-Mart Superstore, including the required Environmental Impact Report and Economic Assessment” – that is, as Wal-Mart’s flack Kevin Loscotoff put it to the Council in a rare moment of candor, to give Wal-Mart a “Green Light?”

Let me repeat, any attempt to short circuit this process or to conflate it with an EIR or EIA would be tantamount to misfeasance.

Once again, the citizens of Vallejo, lacking an open process and a fair and balanced press, are being denied the opportunity to adequately debate an issue crucial to our future. It’s an old, old story we are no longer willing to accept.

When the Council takes this up again, “all eyes will be trained on” not only Mr. Davis, but also on other Council members who may wish to reconsider their pro-Wal-Mart votes after careful consideration of the facts. And to those who voted “No” – Stephanie Gomes, Tom Bartee, and Gary Cloutier – you have our respect and gratitude.

The Colors of Fear, The Sounds of Grief

2006-09-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

A REFLECTION FOR SEPTEMBER 11, 2006

It’s September 11 again – five years on – and, once again, electoral season. And my fear today is that politics – the politics of fear – will stain our sacred memory, our shared, close-held grief.

One thing I’ve learned - very personally - about grief is that, over time, it changes…but it never goes away. There is every day an unexpected moment when the memory returns, the pain sharpens once again, the tears form behind the eyes. Today, I expect, we will in our millions experience many such moments of freshened, very palpable grief…both personal and shared. We cannot escape it. Nor should we try. We should instead embrace it as an opportunity to reach back and recall the timbre of the stunned silence that embraced us all those first days and weeks, when we related – for an all-too-brief but shining moment – in honesty, humility, and compassion…as family…sharing our grief and our strength. United we did stand. And the world stood with us. It felt good and right and full of promise. In mid-October five years ago I tried to bottle the moment in a short poem:

A month's gone by.
We're not the same
and no different from all others.
We've found a certain comfort
in discovered vulnerability,
a sharing oneness in our grief,
compassion in the face of fear.

The little flags are everywhere.
But, now, they signal something new,
a loss of hubris,
and new found gravitas,
a sense that, after all these years,
we're finally growing up.

Today I grieve not only the dead but also the death of innocence and hope – hope that, in new-found maturity, we would search our souls and react in ways we’d recognize as worthy. But, even before I put my poetry to paper, another writer, a Time essayist had ridiculed any thought of introspection and angrily demanded that we lash out in “purple rage.”

Such rage, of course, is the childish opposite of maturity; it appeals to and draws strength from our basest instincts; and it is, in the end, self destructive. But, by the time I visited Ground Zero and my niece just blocks away in March 2002, that purple rage – and wounded pride - had over-powered reasoned thought. Fear was abroad in the land.

But, standing at that gaping hole one chill night, the grief cut through the fear, and, amidst a collage of lights and sounds, I struggled to make sense of my emotions. Next morning, St. Patrick’s Day, I attended morning Eucharist in Trinity Church, still standing, still an island of calm, “in the shadow of no towers.” The Old Testament reading was from Ezekiel 37 – “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” – the communion hymn a wordless “Danny Boy.” Breathing in, I felt a breath of life and recognition…a shiver…understanding…and incredible peace.

Outside, I walked the labyrinth, then sat on a stone bench among the tourists in the still sooty graveyard. I pulled a notebook from my purse and wrote again:

Two blue beams
amidst the white,
incessant din.
They pierce the black
and merge
with low gray clouds.

And, in those beams
of blue and white,
smaller clouds
of wispy dust
arise from
that awful gaping hole,
from sources yet unseen
and still unknown.

Amidst my wonder
and my pain,
and all the noise
of city life,
yea, death’s dark presence,
a floodlit, rusted cross
brings unexpected peace.

An ancient prophet
makes it clear
among the half-filled pews
a block away.
“I will put breath in you,
and you shall live….
I will open your graves
and bring you up.”

Outside,
the dust still rises.
The lights?
They are no more.
They’ve faded
in the light of dawn.
But, now, I understand.

The understanding? The fragility of life. The nobility of a life well lived, worthily lived. The ignobilty, futility of fear. The peace that surpasses all understanding, overcomes all fear. The need to face our fears, not hide from them, and, facing them, to react not as frightened, vengeful children but as moral, ethical, and intelligent adults.

Since then, however, we have regressed into some debilitating national childhood, boogey men under every bed, seeking a blanket to hide under, a womb to return to, imploring others to save us, offering in payment our rights, responsibilities, and dignity as adults. We have allowed others to manipulate our grief and allowed that legitimate grief to be transmorgrified into something unworthy - fear and rage.

Purple rage rules the land and, in our childishness, we’ve even assigned colors to our fears – yellow, orange, red, or, someday, ultraviolet – divided into camps of red states and blue states, eyeing each other warily, drowning in a sea of yellow ribbons. How wistful our thoughts of blue, of confidence, normality, optimism. Remember those once-upon-a-time times, when all we had to fear was fear itself?

It’s not too late. Those times need not be gone forever. Can’t we try again – to grasp the opportunity we once had five years ago this morning and can have again…to grieve in peace, to arrive at honest understanding, to seek our hope, to build our future, to live well and worthily?

And to our politicians – all our politicians – shut up! For once and at last, shut up! This is a sacred moment. It is no time for swiftboating the truth, for manipulating our traumatized emotions, for toying with our sacred memory. Please, please, let us sit with our grief in peace. Let the silence speak in the autumn winds.

“Come from the four winds, O breath,
and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”

The Militarization of the American Language

2006-08-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

Once was a time when we used to joke that military justice is to justice as military music is to music. You musicians get the point. Trouble is, military justice is no longer a joking matter. And we have moved a pace in other regards. Now we must add: military language is to language as…well…Orwellian “newspeak” is to reality. And unfortunately for those in the “reality-based community,” military newspeak has replaced standard American English as the lingua franca of the United States thanks to the spinmeisters in the White House and a pusillanimous press corps eager to lap up whatever Karl Rove, Tony Snow, and Ken Mehlman feed them.

What is military newspeak? It is a mumbling, numbing speech by an Al Haig or a George W. Bush. More subtly, it is a TV ad by Boeing – soft music and soothing voices over images of bombers gliding noiselessly through the clouds. Their mission? To defend our freedoms. How? We don’t need to ask. We know. They will soon be dropping bunker busters on un-shown apartment blocks, producing…well…“collateral damage” – all off screen of course. Military newspeak is, in short, a mélange of obfuscating euphemisms designed to hide the truth, desensitize our sense of morality, and re-image reality. Like that Boeing ad, it can manifest itself in non-verbal, sometimes subliminal, forms such as that little American flag that keeps flapping in the upper left hand corner of the Fox News screen or the steady drum beat (literally) that opens each CNN newscast, virtually shouting “War, War, War! Terror, Terror, Terror! Fear! Fear! Fear!” It’s all designed to jangle your nerves, disorient you, instill fear…and conflate fear with patriotism.

One danger of military newspeak is that it conditions the mental muscles in much the same way that video games do – to react instinctively, violently to perceived threats. Enemies are not to be understood or reasoned with. They are to be bombed – killed – as quickly as possible. No questions, no regrets. The worst danger of all, however, is how it creates obstacles to clear thinking. For clear thinking – critical thinking – is necessary to a well-functioning democracy. And, in the current circumstance, our democracy is crumbling under the weight of military newspeak just as surely as Lebanese democracy has been battered by American-made bombs. Our capacity to resist has been dangerously eroded by the rapidity and thoroughness with which the militarization of the American language has proceeded and there is no Edward R. Morrow or Walter Cronkite out there to shout “Wake up, America! Before, it’s too late, wake up!”

None of this is to say that, to one degree or another, we haven’t experienced such things in the past. Remember that Strangelovian Cold War doctrine Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD? Funny thing, it was so mad, it was sane, allowing us to traverse a nearly half-century long nuclear standoff. Closest we came to losing it was Cuba 1962, when we called a blockade – an act of war - a quarantine and, doing so, averted war. Then there was Vietnam where we used to throw about terms like “vertical envelopment,” “pacification,” and “free fire zone,” the latter being an enemy-controlled area where anything was a “legitimate” target. You could kill anything that moved – a water buffalo, the farmer directing a plow behind it, or a child playing in the nearby village. It was a misuse of language that clouded our thinking and numbed our morals to the point of producing a My Lai…and countless other My Lai’s from the air.

In the current circumstance, however, the abuse of the American language has reached pandemic proportions. If we are to resist, we must recover some sense of what’s happening. Let me give just a few examples to encourage you to look more closely at – and behind – the now steady diet of obfuscating euphemisms we are being fed. It’s called the hermeneutic of suspicion.

Where to start? How about a simple word like “war?” We used to know in our bones what that meant. You know opposing armies – in uniform, carrying flags, representing countries, taking territory, attacks and retreats marked by shifting lines on a map. To be sure, there were always fuzzy exceptions to the rule. There were, for example, civil wars, brother fighting brother to be king of the hill within a country. And there were always guerrilla wars – literally little or demi-wars – in which oppressed local inhabitants – often lacking uniforms – fought more powerful outside armies. In many ways, the American Revolution was a guerrilla war. Much later, after a conventional war with Spain, we became the powerful outside army pitted against Filipino guerrillas fighting for their independence. And, throughout the Cold War, there were any number of limited wars – as opposed to total, hot, or world war – and, lest we forget, a “police action” in Korea.

In many ways, the Cold War over-lapped and merged with the anti-colonial wars of the fifties and sixties – usually against our British and French allies. Vietnam was one such war. There were others – in China, Malaya, Algeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Angola, the Congo, to name a few. As a class, they became known as wars of national liberation. The Cold War being what it was, we normally sided with our colonial allies in seeking to thwart these local struggles for self-determination, while the Soviets usually provided support to the home-grown “freedom fighters.”

Lacking the resources of the occupying colonial armies, many of the “freedom fighters” adopted terror – the “poor man’s bomb” - as a weapon and a tactic in increasingly unconventional, always “asymmetrical” wars. Thus, in the eyes of the “civilized world” – i.e., the colonial metropoles of Europe – “freedom fighters” became “terrorists.” But, as we saw in Algeria and Central America, the colonial armies learned well how to be terrorists themselves – witness, the “Contras” in both Nicaragua and Algeria and the death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador. And it was in Algeria that the French elevated the use of terror and torture to an art form, transforming their vaunted “civilizing mission” into a grotesque caricature. In this regard, I highly recommend General Paul Aussaresses’ memoir, The Battle of the Casbah. And, too bad our leaders watched “Patton” rather than Pontecorvo’s masterful “Battle of Algers” before invading Iraq. Had they learned their French lessons, they might have learned how much such warfare can corrupt the would-be overlords…and we would not have to learn how to pronounce such words as Abu Ghraib and Haditha.

So what is the nature of this new “asymmetrical war” we’re involved in. No, I don’t mean Iraq, which began as a conventional limited war and has now deteriorated into an equally conventional guerrilla or civil war. No, Iraq is an unfortunate sideshow to what the President and his Secretary of Defense (Hard to believe Rumsfeld’s still there!) insist is a “Global War on Terrorism” or GWOT. Oh, it’s real enough. Too many people have died already. But, in the minds and mouths of our leaders, it takes on an other-worldly air of fantasy. As we try to wrap our minds around the concept, we find ourselves adrift in a sea of newspeak, on shifting ground, increasingly unsure of what is real and what is unreal, our fear approaching panic. And our leaders are no help, as they rush to feed the fantasy and the fear.

How is it a war? Where is “terrorism?” What is its capital? How is it “global?” Have disparate, unrelated grievances merged into what the Newt Gingrich’s of the world see as “World War Three,” into a cataclysmic “clash of civilizations,” or into some millennialist Armageddon. To be sure, there are some on the religious right who pray for Armageddon and are cheered by each new manifestation of death and destruction. Others, on the secular right, have their own Bible - Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.

Huntington’s is a truly dangerous book, a sort of Mein Kampf for the GWOT. Written in the mid-nineties, when the military-industrial complex was searching for a new “enemy” to replace the collapsed Soviet Union, it depicts the by-definition culturally superior West in a “civilizational war” with Islam and, to a lesser degree, China. All is black and white, life and death, kill or be killed…good and evil. No need for nuance. No need for understanding beyond “they” are bad, we are good. Simple minds latched on to such simplicity as an explanation for all the bad happenings in the world, missing even Huntington’s recognition of the causative tension between modernization and fundamentalism.

In the hands of our leaders, Huntington’s thesis was fashioned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the wake of September 11 – the work of a fanatic spawned by the fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia – we faced, we were told, an “axis of evil” comprised of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, none of whom (save perhaps Iran) had anything to with the attack on the World Trade Center. A nice pre-election catch phrase, it bore, however, no relationship to the real nature of the threat we faced from the Middle East. Arabs – and Iranians – don’t “hate our freedom” or our “way of life” (save perhaps the coarseness of our materialism). They hate a century of deception, colonialism, occupation, exploitation, and humiliation visited upon them by the West.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, we properly attacked Afghanistan to root out al Qaeda (which had attacked the World Trade Center and other American targets around the world such as the USS Cole and the American Embassy in Nairobi) and to take down the Taliban who harbored al Qaeda. An irony – lost on the American public – was that the Taliban had - a bare two decades ago - comprised the mujaheddin or “freedom fighters” that we had armed and trained to resist the Soviet invaders of the time. Fighting us, they became terrorists.

Unfortunately, we quickly lost interest in Afghanistan, never deploying enough boots on the ground, allowing Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership to slip through our fingers at Tora Bora, and allowing the Taliban to reconstitute itself as a credible fighting force in what has become a forgotten war and a side show in the GWOT. Equally unfortunately, the deaths of American soldiers there continue – four last week, three the week before…forgotten – worse yet – never noticed – except by their families.

For still unfathomable reasons, our Commander-in-Chief and self-styled Decider (formerly known as the President), who, he allows, doesn’t think much about Osama bin Laden, decided it was time to move on. It was time for a “war of choice.” So he decided to invade Iraq. We opened this pre-emptive war (formerly known - in places like Nuremberg - as aggressive war) with an aerial campaign of “shock and awe.” Despite our best use of smart bombs, this surgical strike produced extensive collateral damage in the form of thousands of civilian dead in a burning city. Stuff happens!

Within two months, however, the Commander-in-Chief could declare the “end of major fighting.” Mission Accomplished! And, over the next three years, we succeeded in transforming Iraq into the Central Front in the Global War on Terror - another singular accomplishment requiring the recruitment and importation of thousands of foreign fighters to bolster the Saddamist dead-enders who have been in the last throes for the last year or so…ever since the Decider issued his “Bring ‘em on!” challenge and pinned those Medals of Freedom on the architects of success – George Tenant, Tommy Franks, and Jerry Bremer. For nearly that same time we have been “on the verge of civil war.” Freedom is on the march! The progress is palapable. Only last month, for example, we posted a new monthly record for Iraqi civilian dead – 3,438! And the total of young American soldiers killed in Iraq now approaches the number of deaths on September 11. All we need do now is stay the course. Now, there’s a winning strategy!

So steady has been our progress into sectarian violence (aka civil war) that, by early summer, a clear majority of Americans had lost interest in the project, many entertaining “cut and run” as an antidote to their boredom. We no longer wanted to hear about IEDs and car bombs and even the diversions of Paris Hilton, Baby Suri, airborne pedophiles, and assorted serial killers proved to be insufficient distractions. Even such Republican patriots as William Buckley, George Will, Pat Buchanan, Chuck Hagel, John Warner, and John McCain started to yearn for something more than “stay the course.” And, despite the stalwart “Democrat Party” support from Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and others, the need to change the subject became clear to Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman and, through them, the Commander-in-Chief.

Enter a welcome Deus ex Machina in the form of Hamas, Hezbollah, and a neophyte government in Israel intent on proving its collective manhood. Down in Gaza, some Hamas hotheads took hostage a hapless Israeli soldier, while up north Hezbollah kidnapped two other members of the Israeli Defense Force or IDF and started lobbing World War II-era Katyusha rockets into the Galillee. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who was still in the midst of his on-the-job training, were faced with several choices: launch commando raids to rescue the captured soldiers, negotiate for their release (as had been done on several occasions in the past), unleash some limited proportionate response such as destroying the offending rocket launchers…or do what they had apparently been itching to do for some time (even, according to Sy Hersh, going so far as to tout their plans at the Pentagon) – impress the world, especially the Arab/Muslim world with the crushing power of “asymmetrical deterrence,” the Israeli version of shock and awe. A strategy designed by Ariel Sharon, asymmetrical deterrence demands a wildly disproportionate response to impress upon an aggressor and future aggressors the ability of the IDF to inflict unacceptable pain at will. As the Israeli Defense Minister put it, he would insure that the Lebanese “will remember the name of Amir Peretz.”

Despite the fact that such disproportionate response is generally viewed as immoral and illegal (cf. Just War theory and the rules of war), the temptation proved too great. Thus, with not only another green light but active support from Washington, the Israeli Air Force was unleashed by IDF Chief of Staff Gen. Dan Halutz on the whole of Lebanon and a hapless Gaza. In Lebanon, within days, whole neighborhoods and towns were turned into rubble, the country’s infrastructure destroyed, more than a thousand civilians killed, and the “Cedar Revolution” left reeling – the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” In Gaza, the entire population was thrown into darkness in the middle of the sweltering summer with the destruction of the main, American-financed power plant and some twenty members of the democratically-elected Palestinian government were arrested to join the 10,000 or so other Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners already in Israeli jails. (Allow me here an aside on the power of words as illustrated by treatment of these captives in the American media. Good guys are “kidnapped” or “taken hostage.” Bad guys are “captured” or “arrested.”)

As the destruction proceeded, the American left went mute, the media, by and large, became cheerleaders for the IDF, and neo-cons like Bill Kristol declared this “our war.” And George W. Bush made it “our war” by air-lifting to Israel re-supplies of bunker busters and the cluster bombs, thousands of which remain scattered around southern Lebanon in what a UN mine removal expert called “an angry and very volatile state. More importantly, he ordered Secretary of State Condi Rice and our interim-appointment UN Ambassador John Bolton to thwart efforts to secure a cease-fire…even a humanitarian 48-hour cease fire to remove refugees and provide medical assistance. The Decider had decided that it was the role of the United States to provide Israel time to “finish the job,” to destroy Hezbollah once and for all.

This time, however, the IDF was not up to the job. In the twenty-four years since its last real war, an ill-trained, poorly equipped, ineptly led IDF – seventy percent of which is composed of reservists – was not up to the job. Occupation duty does not translate easily into combat competence. This came as a surprise to the Israelis and to us. Even now, we are scrambling to cobble together a face-saving cease-fire and wondering aloud who “won” – Hezbollah? Iran? Syria?

More important questions are “Who lost?” and “What did we lose?” The Lebanese lost – not only in their deaths, but in the destruction of their infrastructure and the damage to their “Cedar Revolution.” The Israelis lost – not only in their deaths, but also in the damage done to the IDF’s aura of invincibility. Above the United States has lost. We have lost our preciously guarded role as an “honest broker,” leaving the “peace process” and the “road map” in shambles. We have deepened the hatred – throughout the Middle East – of the United States and increased the numbers of young men willing to act on that hatred. And, by allowing the strengthening of Hezbollah, Syria, and, above all, Iran, we have weakened our ability to defend our interests in the area and to prosecute our vaunted Global War on Terror.

Five years after September 11 – five years full of babble about “Homeland” Security, yellow and orange shades of fear, and the “ideology of terror” – we are far less secure than we were then. Our military is hollowed out, demoralized, just plain broken. It is no longer capable pursuing our most basic – and most worthy – interests much less the grandiose dreams spun of the White House’s overblown rhetoric. And no amount of words – newspeak or otherwise – is going to change that reality.

Words, however, retain meaning, because they reveal a culture’s understanding of the world, attitudes toward it, and sometimes serve as predicates to action. For these reasons we should study how others use them. And we should be far more careful about how we use words, for they are being studied by those “others.” And subtly and over time they work their effect on us. They can incite, in their heat, unwise actions or, in their subversive softening where clarity is needed, can benumb us and weaken our resistance to the same unwise actions.

Take a word like torture that must – for the sake of our souls - remain clear in its meaning. It finds meaning not so much in the eye of the beholder – eyes do not easily lie – as in the mind of the beholder, for the mind always entertains the possibility of rationalization. John McCain knows what torture means. Unfortunately, Alfonso Gonzales and Donald Rumsfeld do not, or will not. They stretch the limits of grammatical parsing, declare “quaint” settled standards of morality, and allow the President to append an unworthy signing statement to his signature on the tough anti-torture legislation sponsored by Senator McCain. No wonder we’ve become inured to Rush Limbaugh’s and Bill O’Reilly’s high school humor about “Club Gitmo.” No wonder we fail to protest when General Geoffrey Miller – Miller of Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib - retires “honorably” with a Meritorious Service Medal on his chest.

And take our easy acceptance as “robust” such phrases as regime change and pre-emptive war – un-American phrases that have found their way into the pages of the National Strategy Strategy of the United States of America. Take also the President’s embrace of so offensive a term as Islamo-Fascist, a term popularized by a hate-mongering talk show host and softened only to Islamist-Fascist in the President’s mouth. Does he know how that sounds in the Middle East? Does he care? I doubt it. For in the closed mind of our Decider, there is no need to understand or talk with our growing number of real and potential enemies in the Middle East. Iran? Syria? No need to talk with them. “They know what they have to do.” We’ve told them.

And, if they don’t do what we’ve told them? In our militarized lexicon, they’ll “suffer the consequences.” We’ll bomb them. We’ll kill them. We know how to do that. That’s all we know any more. Trouble is, we can no longer follow through on our threats. It’s time to stow the “newspeak” and to start speaking truth to our friends, our enemies, and, above all, to ourselves.

Vallejoans for Responsible Growth and Wal-Mart

2006-08-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Vallejoans for Responsible Growth is a grass root citizens’ group that seeks to keep our fair city “supercenter”-free.

What do we have against Wal-Mart and its “supercenters?” Oh, you know, all the usual reasons – low wages, insufficient health benefits, export of American jobs, discrimination against women, exploitation of immigrant labor, union-busting, cheap foreign goods, deceptive “come on” advertising, saturation marketing, etc., etc., etc.

But there are local, Vallejo-specific reasons for our opposition. Let’s begin with saturation marketing. The “supercenter” Wal-Mart wants to put in Vallejo is just one of several it plans to cluster in close proximity to each other in Solano, Contra Costa, and Napa counties. Indeed, as I wrote here last year, if it gets its way, we might as well change the name of Solano County to “Wal-Mart County.” The “supercenter” it intends for the old K-Mart site at Redwood Street and Sonoma Boulevard would be 3.5 miles from the one it’s building in American Canyon and, I hear rumored, the one to come in Benicia; about seven miles from one it plans for Suisun City; nine from another in Fairfield; ten from the one Hercules is fending off; maybe a dozen from another in Richmond’s Hilltop Mall; and only slightly further down the road from other stores in Antioch, Concord, Dixon, and West Sacramento. Get the picture?

It is a business plan Wal-Mart has put into action around the country…with disastrous effects for local communities. Wal-Mart having saturated an area with cheap goods and predatory-priced produce, competing stores and markets, that offer employees decent wages and benefits move away, leaving the field to Wal-Mart which then proceeds to close several of the newly-opened “supercenters.” Local communities are then saddled with derelict blighted properties, low-paying jobs, long commutes to shop, reduced choice, and higher prices than originally promised.

Think of the businesses and jobs that would be threatened by a Wal-Mart “supercenter” at Redwood and Sonoma – Mervyn’s, Raley’s, Albertson’s, the Seafood City we welcomed with justified fanfare just a few years ago. Concerning Seafood City, just across the street from the proposed Wal-Mart store, good friends have said to me “Don’t worry, Wal-Mart wouldn’t sell fish or Filipino specialties.” But that’s precisely what they would sell…and at predatory prices designed to undercut Seafood City.

And, then, there’s the nature of the site itself – an environmentally sensitive property on the shores of the White Slough we are attempting to rehabilitate. It is a site that is protected in the White Slough Redevelopment Plan which restricts development to residential/small scale commercial mixed use – the sort of development that, in business terms, also jibes with the city’s plans for the commercial renaissance of Sonoma Boulevard.

But VFRG is opposed to a Wal-Mart “supercenter” anywhere in Vallejo. Why? Because Vallejo is a city that is on the cusp of commercial developments that portend a marked upswing in the economic well-being and quality of life for all its citizens. I have in mind the development of our downtown, our waterfront, and Mare Island. Indeed, Triad’s plans for downtown and Lennar’s plans for housing, tourism, and light industry on Mare Island have drawn front-page attention in recent editions of the San Francisco Chronicle’s real estate section. These are developments which will, at last, make Vallejo a quality place to live and tourist destination worthy of its people and location. Accepting a Wal-Mart “supercenter” in our midst, however, would earn us the sobriquet “Cheap Town” and set us back a decade or more. Can you imagine Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Nugget, or Barnes and Noble wanting to invest in a downtown only a mile or so from a “superstore?” Accepting a “supercenter” would be the kiss of death for our downtown development. Were we to do so, we would kill that Golden Goose or at least the golden egg we’re incubating.

Hopefully, however, our City Council will have at least the same vision and gumption shown by those in Hercules and Turlock. As in Hercules and Turlock, Wal-Mart’s blue-suited bullies have barged into town and arrogantly claimed that they know better than we do what’s good for our city. Will we plan our city or will they? Will our City Council members stand up as their colleagues did in those other towns? They will if you get involved and tell them what you want. The message? “We live here. We know what’s best for Vallejo and what we want and don’t want. And we don’t want Wal-Mart!”

How can you get involved?

* Come to Planning Commission and City Council meetings and let the members of the Council know that you don’t want a Wal-Mart “supercenter” in Vallejo.

* Send your tax deductible donations to: Vallejoans for Responsible Growth, PO Box 4570, Vallejo, CA 94590.

* Help us circulate our petitions at the Saturday Farmers’ Market and elsewhere.

To be sure, we will never have anywhere near the money that Wal-Mart will pour into this fight, but we have people power. Remember, it only takes a little over 6,000 votes to get elected to the Vallejo City Council. When, as in the LNG struggle, we presented them will more than 10,000 signatures in opposition, they got the message. Let’s send them another message. We can do it!

The Fifth of July

2006-07-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

How was yours? The Fourth, that is. Mine was pretty good – sleeping late, a walk with the dog, some TV time with a shuttle launch and the World Cup, some gardening, and, of course, the obligatory barbecue and a backdoor seat at Vallejo’s fireworks show at the end of the day.

And – through it all – my flag flapped proudly out front… as usual and unfortunately, one of the few in my neighborhood. But, as the Chronicle’s editorial on the Fourth (“Patriots, awaken”) put it, “The health of American democracy…is not measured by how much red, white, and blue is displayed on any given day. It is the sum of all who stand up to be counted when the defining freedoms of this republic are under assault.”

And, since they are, I’m back – after eight months of weary silence – to stand up and speak out for those freedoms and for all that is good and just and under assault in this dear country. As Alfred Camus once said about his country in a time of trial, “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” For my part, I refuse to let anyone force me to choose between the two.

I fear, however, that the “liberty and justice for all” that we proclaim in the Pledge of Allegiance – too often unthinkingly and in smug self-satisfaction – is being eroded daily. As we profess to fight for freedom abroad, the ground, it seems, is being cut out from under it here at home. You know what I mean. It’s hard not to feel uneasy in the face of a now seemingly endless string of what the Chronicle correctly calls “intrusions on civil liberties and usurpations of power by the White House;” to wit:

* Launching an aggressive war without just cause;

* Lying to the Congress and the public to build support for that war;

* Conducting warrantless domestic wiretaps and searches on unsuspecting Americans;

* Compiling a vast data bank of our phone, e-mail, and financial records and sifting through it in an apparently resurrected version of John Poindexter’s illegal “Total Information Awareness” program;

* “Disappearing” suspected “terrorists” into an American-run gulag stretching from Bhagram to Guantanamo;

* Disregarding, in the case of American citizen suspects, the requirements of habeas corpus, the right to speedy trial, and the right to face one’s accusers;

* “Rendering” others to unknown locations in Eastern Europe and to countries known to torture prisoners as a matter of course;

* Exempting ourselves from the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, international treaties ratified by Congress and, therefore, having the power and weight of law in the United States;

* Engaging in the torture of captives in our hands;

* Evading the President’s constitutional obligation to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States” through the vehicle of more than 700 “signing statements” in which the President arrogates to himself the “right” to decide what portions of the laws Congress has passed and he has signed he will actually execute;

* Propagandizing the American people by paying “independent columnists” to parrot the administration line, peddling faux news stories, and seeding faux reporters in the White House press pool;

* Leaking classified information about critics within the government;

* Undercutting the First Amendment, most notably, freedom of the press by attacking and intimidating journalists who would seek to investigate or simply question such erosions of our freedoms; and

* Spreading debilitating fear throughout the land for narrow political gain, trivializing and postponing the addressing of the profound issues facing this nation, and labeling “unpatriotic” those who disagree.

Where is the outrage? Where are the real patriots this first day after our 230th Fourth of July? Where are the true conservatives who would defend the Constitution and that Declaration of Independence, the signing of which we just celebrated, against the radicals in the White House who would so cavalierly ignore or trash them? Let me repeat what that Chronicle editorial had to say by way of closing:

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not doing so to commission an annual party. They were making a covenant with history that requires day-to-day- vigilance to defend the liberties it asserted. Honor them by speaking out.

I undertake to do just that. I have been silent for too long. I can no longer do so, lest - again to paraphrase the words of the Chronicle - the absence of outrage on my part be taken as a nod of assent.

I hope, as we proceed in the months ahead, you will share my outrage and speak out yourself on the local, national, and international issues that will be addressed on these pages. You might begin by sharing your comments below.

I hope, too, you will share my abiding and profound love for our country and for justice. They are indivisible and worth fighting for.

Thank You, Vallejo

2005-11-12T16:32:00.000-08:00

Thank You, Vallejo

As someone else once said, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. And I want to thank all Vallejoans who came out to vote last week. The turnout – far heavier than normal – was heartening and bodes well for democracy in this city we all love.

I especially want to thank those of you who opened your hearts and your homes and who supported me with your time, your talents, and, yes, your hard-earned dollars. You were the wind beneath my wings and I am deeply grateful.

I also want to thank those thousands of you who put your trust in me – and Stephanie - on election day. Your votes and her election have sent a strong and hopeful message. It is morning in Vallejo and change is coming.

That change, however, will not come easily and not without our continued involvement. Please, please, stay involved – for a better Vallejo, for our children. I pledge to be there with you.

Thank you, again. Maraming salamat. Gracias.

An Elegy for Rosa and a Dream

2005-10-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

Last night, October 25, 2005, a 92-year-old lady died in Detroit. We never met, but she changed my life…and all our lives. She was 42, when she boarded that Montgomery bus in 1955. I was 16, a sophomore in a New York City high school, coming of age at the end of an age, oblivious, as was she, of the shape of the new age just dawning.

I’m speaking, of course, of Rosa Louisa McCauley Parks, who, of a December day in 1955, refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus to a man – a white man – and who for that “crime” was arrested, booked, and photographed, her “mug” shot numbered 7053.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was then but 24, fresh from Boston University, full of himself and Reinhold Niebuhr, and intent not so much on social justice as on balancing the budget at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church as a brand new pastor. Dr. King had been at Dexter but a year and, as Charles Marsh noted wryly, “understood that ministerial success depended on polish in the pulpit and people in the pews.” And, so, he preached…forty-six times that first year at Dexter, seven guest lectures at other churches, and another thirteen at colleges around the country.

Montgomery at the time was the same size as Vallejo – 120,000 – but, although forty percent of the population was African American, not one sat on any city board or commission. The average annual income for a black family in Montgomery was $908 and every aspect of life there was strictly segregated by the Jim Crow laws that ruled the South of the time…including where one could sit on a bus.

Two days after Rosa Parks, already a ten-year veteran of the NAACP, got herself arrested on that bus, plans were launched for a boycott of Montgomery’s buses by the city’s blacks. Ralph Abernathy set about organizing the city’s black clergy behind the effort and focused on recruiting the new young preacher at Dexter. Dr. King resisted, citing the need to tend to Dexter’s annual meeting and preparing the church budget. Abernathy prevailed, however, and, on December 5, 1955, Martin took the reins of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Montgomery bus boycott. His and our lives would be changed forever.

And our lives – Martin’s and mine – would come together in August 1963, when, beneath a tree near today’s Vietnam Memorial, I listened to Martin’s Dream.

Recalling the youthful optimism of that dream, I shed a tear tonight for Rosa Parks, for Martin, and, yes, myself, as I remembered what Rosa said in 1988: "I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die - the dream of freedom and peace."

That’s a dream we can’t let die, I won’t let die. On my desk, in constant view, there’s a short poem by Langston Hughes. It reads:
I take my dreams and make of them
a bronze vase and a round fountain
with a beautiful statue in its center
and a song with a broken heart
and I ask you:
Do you understand my dreams?

Sometimes you say you do,
and sometimes you say you don’t.
Either way it doesn’t matter.
I continue to dream.

Won’t you, too, continue to dream…of that “fulfillment of what our lives should be"?