Colorado Springs

I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a town I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Colorado Springs is the home of NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), which is located under a mountain outside of town where at the touch of a finger the missiles will fly towards whoever our current enemy is. It is also home to Peterson Field, an Air Force Base, and the Air Force Academy, where male cadets harass and rape the female cadets with impunity. As if that weren’t enough, in the early 1990s the town also became the headquarters of Focus on the Family, the reactionary Christian organization that lobbies against equal rights for everyone except themselves. James Dobson, the founder (who George Lakoff uses as his example of the “strict father figure of the family” that the Republican right has been so successful in promoting) is carried on thousands of radio stations and has published millions of books. Not surprisingly, Ted Haggard, another Colorado Springs-based evangelical minister, who was one of the loudest denigrators of equal rights for homosexuals, was not too long ago outed by a body builder in Denver who said the minister had paid him for sex.

My mother, who lived in Colorado Springs until her death in 1997, was a member of the Unitarian Church and used to threaten to shoot Will Perkins, a big-name car dealer who had been one of the organizers of the initiative to get an anti-gay amendment on the state ballot. She figured since she was already in her eighties, if they arrested her it was unlikely they’d execute her, and she was prepared to die in jail. She had joined PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Gays and Lesbians) after my younger sister revealed she was a lesbian, but being a Unitarian was probably enough impetus on its own. She was a Jew, actually, but came from an assimilated family, and my father, raised a Methodist, called himself an agnostic. So they joined the Unitarian Church when we were kids, and both my sisters and I became members of the youth group, LRY (Liberal Religious Youth) and learned all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll there. When some members of the Jewish Conservative temple in town decided to break away and form a Reform congregation, their kids came to the Unitarian Church for Sunday school until their building was finished. So there is that element in Colorado Springs as well, but the casual observer would never be aware of it.

Most people go there as tourists, to enjoy its spectacular setting at the foot of Pikes Peak, and visit all the sites: the cog railroad to the top of the Peak, Cave of the Winds, Seven Falls, Manitou Springs, etc. When I was in high school I was a lifeguard at one of the motels in Manitou, where tourists from Kansas and Texas all stayed. The motel was owned by a husband and wife, who were probably in their late fifties at the time, and unlike other motel owners in Manitou or anywhere else, considered it their responsibility to guard their guests while swimming. But you know how it is at motels. Families go off to sightsee during the day and come in for a dip in the late afternoon, and that’s about it. So I spent a lot of time sitting around an empty pool playing gin rummy with the owners’ son, who was about fourteen, and who cultivated a weirdness that manifest itself in black clothing and an encyclopedic knowledge of cult horror movies. I was also his designated partner for meals, at various restaurants around the neighborhood, as his parents never seemed to leave the motel. But I was compensated for being saddled with the weird kid by being allowed to have my friends come swim in the pool, getting all my girlfriends hired as maids, and essentially becoming a member of the family.

But Colorado Springs isn’t what it used to be, and the motel, actually made of Spanish-style adobe, with individual rooms and suites centered around a central plaza-like area where the original owner, the kid’s grandmother, had apparently hosted great barbecues and parties for guests who came every year to vacation at her establishment at the foot of Pikes Peak, was losing business to the more modern motels and hotels that were being built by the developers taking advantage of the booming economy. The coup de grace, however, was when the wife died of cancer and the husband didn’t have the heart to keep going. He sold the motel to investors from Texas, and the first thing they did was tell me they wouldn’t be keeping a lifeguard. They offered me a job as a maid instead. But a week into my new job I put a bedspread on sideways and they fired me.

I left Colorado Springs right after high school, although when I dropped out of college I ended up back home for a stint until I left for good for New Mexico. But I often go back to visit, of course. My mom was there, my older sister eventually came back, and my younger sister ended up living in Denver. Also, my best friend from high school, who I got hired as a maid at the motel, also came back and lived there for a long time. There are some good thrift stores, and the downtown, although rather deserted these days, is still beautiful, with its wide, tree-lined streets that run north into the neighborhood of old mansions that were once owned by those who made it rich on the gold and silver mines. Now the town sprawls to the east, subdivision after subdivision, dividing the land into tracts of ranch style or split-level houses where I guess all the evangelicals live. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe they now live in the mansions with their new-found wealth along with their new-found religion.

But I still hate the town. On one visit Mark and I went back to my high school, Roy J. Wasson, where mediocrity ruled and the sensitive suffered. I had him take a picture of me standing on a wall in front of the school name giving it the finger. Silly, but somewhat cathartic.

Solution: You can’t go home again.

Enlightenment/Progress

Sometimes, when I’m stuck in city traffic, wandering the grocery store isle dedicated to high fructose corn syrup products, or fruitlessly trying to wend my way through recorded messages on the telephone, I imagine that Henry David Thoreau, Jean Jacque Rousseau, or Simone Weil were risen from the dead and there beside me to commiserate. The shock would probably kill them again, however. Despite all their prescient warnings that have been passed down in inspired writings over the decades and centuries, even they would not believe what we have wrought.

In his famous Discourse, The Origin of Inequality, Rousseau asks what it is that created the difference between “men and brutes,” and came to the conclusion that it is the “faculty of self-improvement,” why man alone is liable to grow into a dotard and makes him “at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature.” Not a great endorsement of progress, reflection, or our entire historical record. He and Voltaire are credited with bringing Enlightenment to an 18th century European world defined by tyranny, but Voltaire didn’t believe, any more than Rousseau did, that there was much hope for the dotard: “Enlightened times will only enlighten a small number of honest men; the common people will always be fanatical.”

Apparently the American founding fathers didn’t think much better of the common people than Voltaire when they created our representative republic and established the electoral college so the common people’s vote could be overruled by the aristocratic vote. They may have thought they were throwing off their European shackles during the American Revolution, but they were quick to identify themselves as the new elites of the vast American continent, ready to conquer the “savages” (Native Americans) and the wilderness, not to mention expanding their agricultural economy on the backs of their slaves.

While the abolitionists and Transcendentalists of the 19th century sought to enlighten American society to the evils of slavery and European religion and culture, Thoreau also talks about humanity distinguishing itself from the “brute beasts” through an unsuccessful striving for “purity.” I can just imagine him, more than Rousseau or Voltaire, who both led what he would probably have called “impure” lives, plunked down in the middle of a shopping mall in Los Angeles, crying out, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

All my life choices have been based on finding that simplicity—avoiding consumer culture by living in the closest thing to its last vestige in northern New Mexico. Then I get here and I end up fighting the environmental “purists” who tell me that the indigenous folks who live up here aren’t pure anymore because they want to continue to harvest trees for firewood and graze their cattle on public lands that used to belong to them. The only thing pure is their environmentalism sin gente, which would like to consign everyone to town and consumer culture so we don’t pollute the wilderness. Civilization becomes the scourge of nature.

Raymond Williams said, in his essay Problems in Materialism and Culture, “It will be ironic if one of the last forms of the separation between abstracted man and abstracted nature is an intellectual separation between economics and ecology. It will be a sign that we are beginning to think in some necessary ways when we can conceive these becoming, as they ought to become, a single discipline.”

Thoreau, these environmentalists, and even the postmodernists fall into the trap of assigning progress an a-political, historically sweeping definition that negates the need to continually pursue a just and equitable world with small, but insistent victories. As I said in my introduction, there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves, that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. You don’t have to label it progress, but you do have to constantly evaluate it as a kind of enlightenment that allows an increasing number of us to flourish.

Success

I’m standing at the kitchen sink shelling shrimp for dinner and I’m thanking my lucky stars I’m not my famous (within certain political and literary circles) friend who is “terrified” (I know this because I’ve just got off the phone with her) at the thought of her reading later tonight in Santa Fe, where she will not only read to an eclectic group of unknowns but to her new boyfriend as well, who is also famous and flying in from out of town for the occasion.

I’m terrified only when I anticipate the nasty letters I might receive for the essay or newspaper article I occasionally write for a weekly Santa Fe paper that explore the political battles I deal with as a community activist. When the paper devoted an issue to the question of race and culture in northern New Mexico, where I live and work, I wrote about how the environmental movement fails to address issues of social justice. While I was careful not to call any particular enviros racist, I did identify the policies they effect as such. Surprisingly, I didn’t get any nasty letters for that article, but the one I called “A Question of Semantics”, which poked fun at these same environmentalists who co-opt language in an attempt to validate their positions (I questioned their use of the word “radical” to describe what I see as their reactionary politic) raised a lot of hackles.

However, this is merely a by-product of my by-default career, if one can call it that. With my “unmarried partner” (the box I checked for the 2000 Census) I write a community newspaper and organize around issues of environmental and social justice. If someone in high school had told me this would be a career, I would have laughed in her face. I was destined for academia, perhaps the law, at least “great things.” That I never got there is perhaps due to the fact that my concept of “there” was destroyed by the process of “getting”, which is essentially the substance of mine—or anyone’s—life. The “getting” took place in the late 60s and early 70s, when I and my fellow travelers were engaged in smashing the “there”—Vietnam, the military industrial complex, the nuclear family, etc.—as fervently as the times demanded.

But that’s only part of the story. My famous friend, who is “terrified” in Santa Fe, came of age alongside me, but obviously decided at some point in her life that she would dedicate it to writing books. And part of the dedication would mean being part of a national (i.e. “famous”) community that was writing and speaking to the same issues as she. I don’t know if people who so dedicate themselves to certain causes consciously say, to be successful in my endeavor I must be willing to promote myself, so that my voice becomes part of the larger voice that is listened to, that makes a difference.

Whether or not this is a conscious decision, the effect remains the same, be it Scott Nearing or Andy Warhol. I just finished reading a memoir by Helen Nearing of her life with Scott, who in an interesting twist of fate was first famous as an academic and political activist until he was banished from academia and became even more famous as a homesteader who repudiated academia and the public life (although he remained steadfast in his political life). Although a certain air of self-righteousness permeates this book and several of those they wrote together, it seems that Nearing genuinely believed that in order to share his private and political vision of what constitutes a good and moral life (he never would have embraced poststructuralism) he needed to lecture, write books, travel, spread the gospel, so to speak.

Warhol, on the other hand, dedicated his life to being as notorious as possible for the sake of that notoriety. Whether this was motivated by the Nietzschean “will to give expression to one’s personality” or simply the drive for “utter moral worthlessness”, like Colette’s first husband, Willy (from Secrets of the Flesh, Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette), doesn’t really matter. He procured his fame, just as Nearing and my friend did, and they all had or have to deal with what fame brings in our society: terror, unwelcome distractions, or attempted assassination (at least for Warhol).

It’s easier to stay home, both physically and mentally. In one of my feeble attempts to actually get a book published with the local university press, I remember telling the editor that I lacked the chutzpah it took to promote myself, and that if her press didn’t publish me this would be the beginning and end of that particular career (and it was, if you don’t count the children’s book I wrote that was published by a Santa Fe house that took 10 years to sell 2,000 copies). I’ve written some national magazine articles over the years that chronicled life in northern New Mexico, which people in mainstream America find fascinating, but the few attempts I’ve made to sell articles of import, where my voice could perhaps make a difference on critical issues of environmental justice, they were dismissed as too “local” or too hard to understand by an “eastern, urban readership.” Thus I learned that one has to pay dues, like my terrified friend, before one’s voice is heard.

I imagine that there are millions of us out here, voices that are knowledgeable, analytic, eloquent, profound (I’m not necessarily claiming all these qualities). Just like all the painters who may have been a lost link between cubism and abstract expressionism or abstract expressionism and Andy Warhol. Or composers, like the eccentric woman who hitchhikes around Taos in her mumu and straw hat and is occasionally acknowledged for her operas that are locally performed. I once wrote a short story (which sits in my bottom drawer) about her called the “Woman as Artist” (I turned her into a painter). In my story she sits on an old car seat on her back porch with her legs stretched out onto an adjacent chair to rest her varicose veins: “I’ll never be a huge success, honey,” she sighs to the narrator. “It’s not in the cards. Or should I say, it’s not in my blood. I can’t sell myself to the highest bidder to get there, like the cold-blooded ones do. Do you have any idea how many talented people there are out there in the world—painters, musicians, composers, writers, philosophers—living in places just as obscure as this crumbling adobe in El Rancho, who will never, ever see even the modest success that I’ve had in this fucked up society that defines your worth by how much you sell yourself for? Then once you’re sold they have to keep investing in you because so much money is at stake. Doesn’t matter if you’re old, stale, hackneyed and worthless—if some investment banker on the upper West side bought you for thousands of dollars to hang on his wall, by God you better double or triple by the time he’s ready to sell you to an investment banker on the upper East side to hang on his wall. ‘All the world’s a stage and we’re only the players.’”

Maybe some of this is sour grapes. I don’t have the talent that I give my Taos character, and I often lack her equanimity. But I do share her devotion to her old car seat on her back porch where she can see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the fields of irrigated pasture that have defined this view for 300 years. We also share a love for our neighbors, whose ancestors have lived here for 300 years. And I appreciate their regard for the work I do to help maintain these pastures and lives. That it is a way of life, not a career, is what I mean by “de-fault.” My friend who is terrified and famous also experiences this way of life, but it is within a different context, with an edge that, at least for me, spoils the quietness, the safety, the sameness. I don’t buy the adage that only things that terrify you are worth doing.

One day my almost grown son calls to ask me what I’m doing. When I tell him I’m working on my book about environmental justice, he says, mom, why don’t you publish your stuff. Ah, hito, if you only knew. But I tell him that I’m going to get down to work and finish up my memoirs of life as a norteño activist, my second novel, and edit my book of short stories so he and his brother can read it all when I’m dead. Mom,

I’m going to publish all if them, he says. Good luck, I tell him, you have my blessing. I won’t be around to be terrified.

Health Insurance

Preface to this blog: This posting was written in 2008. In 2009 my partner Mark had an experience with the medical industrial complex, as we now refer to it, which more dramatically reveals that it is irreparably broken, with no hope of repair beyond revolution. Stay tuned for that story.

I was fifty-six when I first got health insurance. Two years later, I’m wondering if it was more of a burden than a benefit. Here’s the story.

I have arthritis: I’ve had it as long as I can remember and in as many places in my body as there are joints. Before Insurance, which I will refer to as BI, I did what I could with over the counter pain relief, an occasional shot of cortisone, slings for my arms to relieve tennis elbow, and hiking poles for the downhill stretches. When I tore my meniscus hiking the Grand Canyon (I probably already had a partial tear due to weak joints caused by disintegrated cartilage) and could barely walk down the stairs, much less squat in the garden, I shopped around for the most affordable orthopedic surgeon, who gave me a discount for cash, and under a county indigent fund got the hospitable bill paid off. The surgery was arthroscopic, and I was hiking the trails again within a few weeks.

So when I actually qualified for insurance, through a new state program that covers the under-employed and self-employed who can’t afford private insurance, I figured I was home free, at least with the stuff that Western doctors are supposed to be able to deal with. I finally had the ugly subcutaneous benign something or other removed from my upper arm, a colonoscopy (ugh!), and a few other check-ups that I was supposed to have before fifty.

My left thumb was already in trouble before I got the insurance, but the bone spur that developed at the base of the joint became increasingly painful. If I accidentally banged it against a wall I almost fainted. So I got a referral from my doctor at the rural public health clinic, which is the only place I’d ever gone to see a doctor (other than the guy who repaired my meniscus) and off I went to the hand specialist in Santa Fe (it wasn’t really “off I went” because it took almost two months to get an appointment). He sent me for specialized x-rays, and another month went by before I got his pronouncement: I had a deformed bone between my thumb and wrist and the treatment is called arthoplasty — as opposed to an arthroscopic — surgery to remove the bad bone and either replace it with a small piece of tendon from my arm, fuse the bones together, or implant an artificial “spacer” between the bones. I opted for the tendon, and he told me I’d have to wear a cast for a month, then go to a removable brace so I could start physical therapy, and be good as new (with maybe a little less strength than before) in three months.

I kept putting off the surgery because my life kept getting in the way (should I not go back east to visit our younger son who was obviously depressed as hell his first semester at the University of Pennsylvania, should I not be able to make pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas, or should I miss cross-country ski season?). But eventually I couldn’t stand the pain, and I had the surgery January 16.


It is now the end of June and these past six months have been some of the most miserable of my life. My hand has not only not healed but has triggered a chain nerve reaction in my arm, shooting pain from my hand up to a frozen shoulder and across my shoulders and even down my back. The surgeon was prepared to recast my hand—“it shouldn’t be hurting like this”— and sent me off for an MRI for my shoulder, where they shove you into this tube that is inches away from your face and tell you to be sure not to move because then you’ll have to start all over. They give you a panic button to push (and many people do panic, you can bet on that) and then the noise begins, the whirring and pounding and whining, despite the ear plugs. I closed my eyes and didn’t move, so it was over in 20 excruciating minutes. When the surgeon saw the MRI he said I had a small tear in my shoulder tendon and some abrasion, but that it really shouldn’t be causing me this much pain, so he sent me to his partner, the shoulder guy. The shoulder guy saw me for ten minutes, max, and said the same thing: these injuries shouldn’t be causing your shoulder to freeze up, which we need to unfreeze. He didn’t even want to look at my hand until I insisted: “That’s Dr. _______’s business.” But then he looked at my hand for a few minutes, asked me some questions, and said, “I’m going to go call Dr. _______. So he spoke with Dr. ________ on the phone, came back into the room and said, “I think you have Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.”

I, of course, had no idea what Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy was, and he didn’t enlighten me, except to say that surgery seemed to have set off some nerve problems in my arm, that he wanted me to get a bone scan for diagnostic validation, and then he’d send me to the pain clinic on the floor below where they’d give me a shot in the neck. “What kind of a shot?” I asked. “A local anesthetic,” he said. “You may have to get it a couple of times but that should do it.” I got him to write down the name of this diagnosis before I left, and I went home.

Notice that he said “A shot in the neck.” What he didn’t tell me was that the treatment he was prescribing is a shot in the spine, that Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy is one of those autoimmune classifications that doctors dump illnesses into when they can’t really figure out why you’re in so much pain, that there is no definitive diagnosis (not a bone scan or a blood test or anything else), and that there is no effective treatment. I learned all of this on the Internet the next morning, of course. As soon as I saw that RSD, or as it’s also called, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, has a support group, like Sjogrens (which I already have) and fibromyalgia (which my younger sister has) and that I was consigned to a life of never ending pain and debilitation (as testimonials on the web site declared) I burst into tears.

After weeks of bitching and moaning and wishing that I’d never gotten the insurance and never had the operation, I decided to get a second opinion, which meant I had to be thankful that I could afford to do so—meaning that I had the insurance (fifty per cent of bankruptcies are triggered by medical bills). And I actually found someone who is trying to heal me. He’s a sweet Jewish doctor from New York, which immediately made me feel better, who had me in his office for two hours reading the medical records I’d brought with me from the other orthopods, listening to my story, asking me questions, looking at my whole body, recognizing me as a person with a medical history who might need some holistic treatment and gentle reassurance. He said, “Let’s not assume you have RSD, doctors don’t know everything,” and sent me back to the physical therapist, who is loosening up my arm. He also, without any request on my part, gave me a prescription for Valium, so I could sleep, and asked me if I wanted to try a new drug that might or might not work, to help relieve the pain.

So I took the drug, which does help, I’m loosening up my frozen shoulder with a physical therapist who also told me, “Let’s not go there.” I’m actually managing to fall asleep without the Valium, and the pain is diminished. So while I haven’t “gone there,” to the land of chronic pain and suffering, I still have a ways to go to the place where everyone experiences a little pain and suffering.

Solution: A complete revamping of the health care system, where everyone is covered by government, single pay, comprehensive insurance but also assigned a health care advocate who follows your course of treatment, informs herself about diagnoses and what treatments are necessary, possible side effects of treatments, what alternative treatments are available, etc. This person should be the doctor, but that probably ain’t going to happen, so let’s find someone else and pay them well to do it. The system would end up saving millions of dollars in uncalled for diagnostic tests, treatments, rehabilitations, etc. And patients might feel like human beings again.

Israel

When it comes to Israel and its position in the Middle East, there are no progressives in Congress, there are only cowards. I am an American of Jewish descent who has made it my responsibility to learn the history of the dispossession of 700,000 Palestinian people and the complicity on the part of the United States in the militarization of Israel to maintain our control of the region's resources. It's all there in the history books, but starting with the Woodrow Wilson administration and culminating with George Bush the Second’s, there has been a very calculated campaign to pervert that history to keep the American people ignorant and fearful of the so-called "terrorists" who supposedly threaten the existence of Israel and our interests in the Middle East. In actuality, the U.S. has helped create those "terrorists" in every perverted move it has made, from supporting the Muslim Brotherhood against Arab nationalism to invading Lebanon in futile attempts to squelch guerilla movements like Hezbollah, which gained the support of the Lebanese people in the conflict of 2006. The U.S., along with its other western allies who have allowed us to call the shots, is largely responsible for the abysmal situation in the Middle East and for the civilian deaths and destruction suffered by the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and the Israelis.

To my knowledge, not one Democrat (except for Dennis Kucinich). has had the guts to stand up and acknowledge the lies, distortions, and propaganda that are spewed out on a daily basis by every administration, by Congress, and by the mainstream media. How many Americans know abut the refusnik Israeli military pilots who have refused to fly bombing missions that kill civilians indiscriminately, or the editor of an Israeli newspaper who has provided a point by point analysis of how we have arrived at this insane moment in history when the Israeli government is perpetrating atrocities that turn the entire world against it (and its military supplier, the U.S.) and turn poor, disenfranchised, angry young Arab men and women into jihadists? What they do is tragic and counterproductive; what we are doing is obscene. And as one of the refusniks pointed out, as he traveled around this country speaking out about what is going on in his country, what is equally obscene is that the majority of Americans are completely ignorant of the fact that there is a peace movement in Israel and in Palestine. That knowledge would not serve our purpose of controlling the Middle East.

Until Congress takes a stand against these policies, now threatening the stability of the entire world, and the media begins to do its job of giving voice to those who try to speak truth to power, the Obama administration will have a free hand to continue its control by force. Is Iran next? I saw a film clip of the 60 Minutes Mike Wallace interview of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or really, it wasn’t an interview but an assault, the only way the arrogant octogenarian Wallace knew how to pretend to be a journalist. As Wallace asked his snide questions and acted out his grievances, Ahmadinejad, through an interpreter, actually tried to say something about the relations between his country and the U.S. in the larger context of Middle East politics, but Wallace was not about to have him appear as a statesman, with opinions based in historical context (and, unfortunately, in an Islamic fundamentalist vision of economic progress and social regression). He had to be demonized, like all the rest of the Arab leaders (except for Saudi Arabian kings and princes who cut off peoples hands as punishment but send their oil in the right direction), so that our invasions become liberations and our occupations become democratization.

How did the Jewish lobby in this country become so powerful? Why do otherwise liberal and progressive Jews sit on their hands when it comes to criticizing Israel or Zionism? Why did they allow Bush and Cheney to invoke the Holocaust at every turn in the road in their “fight against terrorism”, which has suddenly morphed into a “fight against fascism”? Why do Jews continue to let a Holocaust culture excuse Israeli and American imperialism that continues to turn the world against us and create real anti-Semitism? Before he died, Columbia University professor, author, and activist Edward Said had come to the conclusion that a two-state solution to the Palestinian/Israeli problem would never work. The only hope was for a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an elected government could actually represent the interests of the Palestinian population.

That will probably never happen in our lifetime. Palestinian political disorganization and lack of leadership are no match for the Zionist and Israeli guiding principle, aided and abetted by the U.S. Santa Fe author and activist Kathleen Christison, in her book Perceptions of Palestine, quotes Said complaining about the Palestinians’ “historical inability as a people to focus on a set of national goals, and single-mindedly to pursue them with methods and principles that are adequate to these goals.” And no American president and no American Congress, Republican or Democrat, will ever see Palestine as anything but an impediment to Israel. When as brilliant an advocate as Said becomes filled with such despair over any hope of solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, it makes us cynical as well. But I mourn the loss of his constant attention and passion to the situation. Without it, we are even further removed from a solution.

A Not Very Hopeful Solution: Create a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an Arab majority will have to find the political will to create a democratic and just society.

Invoking God

Mark and I always manage to have a Seder at Passover with whoever happens to be around and interested in attending: non-Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends from Santa Fe, family from New York, etc. One year, our friend Lisa, a Jew from Washington D.C., who was at the time living in a small Hispano village across the Rio Grande from us, decided to have a Seder and invite all her Catholic neighbors. We downloaded a liberation Haggadah from the Internet and went over to Servilleta Plaza to celebrate Passover in Lisa’s run down adobe house. Besides being the only Jews there except for Lisa and her mother, who was visiting from D.C., we were the only gringos as well. Everyone crowded into the large kitchen while we went through the ceremony and took turns reading the passages from the Haggadah before digging into a scrumptious meal of lamb, matzo ball soup, and frijoles. When it got dark we lit a bonfire outside, told stories and danced.

Mark and I also attend Catholic mass in El Valle, on Christmas and special occasions, and at funerals (or rosaries, where the penitentes sing on their knees in front of the alter). I’m not sure anyone in the village even knows we’re Jews, but they don’t care what we are as long as we come to show our neighborliness and respect for their religion and culture.

That being said, I truly hate organized religion. I hate the fact that certain friends find it necessary to “rediscover” their “spiritual” life (particularly after they become parents) that gets all tangled up in some form of religion, usually the one they grew up in, or sometimes, one they find more “liberating.” Religion is not liberating: it is suffocating. It is about taking on faith certain precepts that have nothing to do with liberation or freedom or goodness. It is about believing stories that were devised to control people by keeping them ignorant and disenfranchised. And it is about fomenting hate and intolerance. According to Voltaire: “Papist fanatics, Calvinist fanatics, all are moulded from the same sh . . . , and soaked in corrupted blood.”

This is the promo for a new video game:

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to
remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of
the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech
military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of
New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a
military mission – to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state –
especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct
physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with
extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose:
you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose
creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.

Actually, they’ve got it wrong when they target “moderate, mainstream Christians” because they’re just as insidious. This is author Sam Harris in his book The End of Religion, who is unafraid to state the obvious (although a certain political naiveté shortchanges the impact of the book):
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. . . . Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The test themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. . . . Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. . . . Moderates do not want to kill anybody in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about.”

My son Jakob, who worked in Evansville, Indiana as a photojournalism intern, told us about the church on every corner and even attended some of them to get a feel for what Midwest culture is really like. At the last one he went to, a middle-class mainstream Christian denomination that houses thousands of worshipers every Sunday, the minister’s sermon was singing a dirge for the church’s younger generation, who were not attending services with their parents and apparently showed little inclination in becoming members. So there is still hope, that the next generation, which already embraces a much more culturally inclusive lifestyle that bends gender and class rules, will eschew the trappings of organized religion and celebrate their spiritual lives through their acceptance and celebration of all human diversity.

Solution: Give all churches to their respective communities to be run as halfway houses, homeless shelters and training centers, domestic violence retreats, and dancehalls.

Some Things are Relative

When George Bush became president of the United States for the second time I remember lying on the floor in front of the TV sobbing uncontrollably. The wave of despair and misery that washed over me was palpable, even though I knew my life would go on, at least externally, in pretty much the same fashion as before. I would continue to live on my 10 acres in El Valle and irrigate my garden, orchard, and fields. I would continue to publish and edit La Jicarita News with my partner Mark, where we could pretty much print anything we wanted. Our kids would continue to attend public school and the college of their choice and pretty much say anything they wanted. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran, I read a profile of a young Iranian writer who described sitting in his room in despair, holding his head in his hands. His life, already in a state of precariousness, would certainly not go on as before. If he continued to write what he wanted to write, he would probably end up in jail. If he continued to associate with those who believed in a secular, democratic Iran, he would probably end up in jail. And if his girlfriend continued to refuse to wear a jihib, she might be whipped or end up in jail.

His suffering is more profound. My suffering is complicated by my privilege. It is only because of where I live that I have the leisure and capacity to be writing this attempt to deal with what makes me suffer, the dichotomy of the tomato in the global society. While I struggle to reconcile my faith in the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a more postmodern, unhistorical exploration of how cultural conditions figure into the equation, the student in Iran is still very much aware of a systematic, historical process that controls and dominates his life, leaving not much room for worrying about how to appreciate the tomato.

Those of us who live in privileged American society, which is responsible for much of the oppression in places like Iran, seem incapable of figuring out how to smash the power elite after losing the will of the sixties and early seventies, when the political system seemed vulnerable, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault gave up the barricades for the San Francisco bathhouses and Abbie Hoffman killed himself. A young friend of mine, who is in her late twenties and graduated from Antioch, where I also went to college, doesn’t like to hear my stories of the sixties. My best one, about the time in Berkeley the cops surrounded our house with a swat team, looking for a fellow Antioch student who was on the run after being arrested in Cambridge at an anti-war demonstration and tying up the sheriff on Telegraph Hill when he tried to arrest him, bores her silly. She bristles when we complain about the lack of young people out in the streets protesting the invasion of Iraq or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. She says demonstrations are useless, that the mainstream media subverts the intent by refusing to cover them.

But then, after a month of student and worker riots in the streets of France the government capitulates and rescinds the law that caused the riots in the first place (a labor law that would allow employers to fire workers younger than 25 without cause). It took ten years of demonstrating in the streets of the U.S. before this country pulled out of Vietnam (and it’s debatable how much of our withdrawal was due to political unrest at home, see the Civil Disobedience blog) and millions of demonstrators in the streets of all the major cities didn’t deter George Bush from invading Iraq. Why did the French government respond so quickly to its student uprising? In France labor unions remain strong and viable and a force to be reckoned with, while here in the states the unions have largely been emasculated, through a calculated campaign by the power elite and because of internecine fighting and corruption in the unions themselves. So not only are we ignored in the streets, we have no organizations with any political clout that can actually threaten the status quo of the government. Our privilege extends only as far as the marketplace: We have the power to consume but lack the power to change anything. I can write and speak out about whatever I want but my words effect nothing. Internet blogs can appear on our computer screens in a blink of an eye but we can’t stop the bombing in Iraq and we can’t make sure no person goes to bed hungry.

A lot of us spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how this has happened and what we can do about it. That doesn’t stop us from continuing our own struggles that manifest in a million different ways, but it’s obviously not enough and periodically it results in the malaise that I am now struggling with. But, as the Mexican immigrants who took to the streets during the last election to agitate for immigration reform, like to remind us, “Si se puede”—if only fleetingly, if only temporarily, if only in the alleviation of the suffering of a few at the hands of many.

Solution: Hasta siempre liberación.