Isak

Tuesday's Headline News

My latest article over at RH Reality Check explores midwifery and home births--particularly in the light of the American Medical Association's and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' recent resolutions opposing home births.

It was a peculiarly fascinating article, one that gave me a chance to talk with many amazing folks and to learn an awful lot. I'd definitely like to follow up on this, not just with more articles, but by personally engaging with it. Forgive the vagueness, but I'll tell more once I see if what I'm thinking about is possible.

The piece begins:

While another profession might have the popular reputation of being the world's oldest, you can make a strong case that midwifery is a more realistic contender for that title. The tradition of caring for pregnant women and delivering babies in homes or community spaces is ancient the world over. And it's present today, in the providers who practice within an American medical culture in which 99% of births take place in hospitals, presided by OB/GYNs. ...

Today you need a license in the U.S. to practice psychotherapy and cosmetology, to drive trucks and to be a mortician -- but not to minister to laboring women in homes or in birthing centers. Or at least, not quite ...

Attention Must Be Paid

Now, I didn't vote for Sen. Clinton in the presidential primary. Hell, one might argue whether the vote I cast was "voting" at all (oh, Michigan). But in this case, she's absolutely, 100% right. And we all need to be paying attention.

In an exclusive column from RH Reality Check, Sen. Clinton writes:

The Bush Administration is up to its old tricks again, quietly putting ideology before science and women's health. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them "abortion." These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.

My god, what a cruel political trick this is, playing on people's emotions by using the word "abortion" to restrict their access to the absolutely vital, normal birth control procedures that allow us to live healthy lives and--when and if we're ready--to raise healthy children.

My one quibble with Sen. Clinton is the framing of this as a women's rights issue. Yes, it is one; women will be disporportunately harmed by this. But I don't think it takes a big mental leap to see how this political misbehavior hurts people of all genders, all ages. Family planning is a fundamental tool not only for the safety of our bodies, but for our neighborhoods.

Here's more from Sen. Clinton on the affect of this looming threat:

These rules ... could prevent providers of federally-funded family planning services, like Medicaid and Title X, from guaranteeing their patients access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services. They'll also build significant barriers to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most: low-income and uninsured women and men.

The regulations could even invalidate state laws that currently ensure access to contraception for many Americans. In fact, they describe New York and California's laws requiring prescription drug insurance plans to provide coverage for contraceptives as part of "the problem." These rules would even interfere with New York State law that ensures survivors of sexual assault and rape receive emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms.

Great. Leave victims of rape to birth their attacker's child because you think emergency contraception--which is a mere extra-dose of a birth control pill taken within three days of intercourse--is an "abortion." (A framing that portrays abortion as if it were something always bad for all people, by the way).

And this is the environment where John McCain can't do anything better than mumble uncomfortably when asked--by his campaign chairwoman, no less--about the ridiculousness of insuring Viagra, while not insuring birth control? That's twenty-two "no's" for family planning. And, as we see in the infamous video clip, he forgot all about it.

Katha Pollitt's brilliant analysis on the behavior of the "maverick" goes like this:

So. John McCain is so opposed to contraception he voted against requiring insurance plans to cover it like other drugs, and either so indifferent to women's health and rights or just so out of it he doesn't even remember how he voted. That's the way to show American women you really care. 

This is not a trivial issue. There's the basic unfairness of not covering these essential, even life-saving drugs and devices, so fundamental to women's health and well-being, and the added insult of denying coverage while men are lavished with cut-rate erections.

Happily, there's still some sense in this mad world. I see hope in people like Pollitt and Sen. Clinton who are calling bullshit, and those folks who--despite political loyalties and party lines--can join them on this matter of basic common sense and human care.

Here's where else I see hope:

• Catholic for Choice just launched an international campaign to push bishops to end their 40-year ban on contraception--a mostly ignored ban, but one that's vital for re-centering the Church on the community justice that it manifests at its best. They released an exploration of the ban in a fascinating (and colorful) report called Truth & Consequence: A Look behind the Vatican’s Ban on Contraception.

• Heather Corinna continues to offer the most amazing and honest sexuality resource for young people (and, I dare say, all people) at Scarleteen -- and her good word is spread even further now with her Friday column, "Get Real!," over at RH Reality Check.

• The House State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee just passed a bill that will offer the largest amount of money ever dedicated to international family planning --- $600 million. Now, if only my government didn't think I was having an abortion every time I took a birth control pill, maybe we'd get somewhere on the homefront.

The good news is good, but don't let it overshadow how important it is for us to speak up and out, spread the word high and low, about the current extraordinary threat to our health, our privacy, and--yes, I'll say it--our free will.

Here's what you can do:

Read up--RH Reality Check is all over this with what they're calling the "Contra-bortion?" series, not just with Sen. Clinton's take, but with a variety of voices, web resources, and other informational tools that will keep you aware of what's happening, how it will affect you, and how it may affect your neighbors. For the primary source, read the HHS proposal here (PDF).

Tell Sec. Leavitt to block these new rules that are currently still in draft form.

Tell your Congressional representatives what you think.

Go Web 2.0. Blog about this. Email the articles. Post them on Facebook. Post comments on the articles. Make a short video on YouTube about this. Digg the articles about this. Post them to del.icio.us. Twitter about this. Text your friends. Bring it into Second Life.

Go Web 1.0. Write an article for a print publication--a viewpoint in a local publication, perhaps. Write a letter to the editor. Make a zine. Make a pamphlet. Write a book. Write a dissertation, a thesis, a classroom essay about it. Hold a rally. Give a speech. Have a conversation. Call into a radio report about this, or a local television channel. Hold a discussion circle with your friends and neighbors over a potluck. Talk to the people you trust with your health.

Read more--The New York Times has a report on how "the Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control." This is directly related to the HHS regulations.

Join in. Count yourself among those who care by joining one of the many admirable organizations you can count on in times like these: Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Choice USA, SisterSong, Catholics for Choice, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Guttmacher Institute, and many other worthies.

UPDATE: I hear that ABC News is reporting that more than 100 members of Congress sent a joint letter to the White House yesterday "urging him to "halt all action" on a proposal they argue would change the definition of abortion, and drastically limit women's access to birth control."

On a Play, a Priest, Napalm, a Trial, and a Spiritual Base

Awhile back, I found and read a strange little play called The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. It was by Father Daniel Berrigan, the creative nonviolence activist, Jesuit priest, and poet. Among his many direct actions of civil disobedience, he's remembered for one that dubbed him a member of the title's Catonsville Nine: forty years ago, he, his brother, and six others walked into a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, took a set of draft files outside, and burned them with homemade napalm.

Here they are:

The play told the story of their trial for destruction of property, a trial that refused to allow the "why" for the action to enter the court testimony. As Berrigan tells it, in the one-act play that draws from the trial's transcript, the nine of them pointedly returned again and again to the why, and the powerful spiritual tradition that informed them. Their words of the nine come to reverberate like an ancient chant. He writes their language in verse, like a scripture, which contrasts with the unnamed court officials' prosaic speech.

The Nation profiles Fr. Berrigan, now 87, "forty years after Catonsville." And journalist Chris Hedges places Berrigan's story in its context of radical spirituality:

The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define themselves.

"Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians," he says of the founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. "She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and warmaking. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and warmaking."

Berrigan's relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton's "great contribution to the religious left," he says, "was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, 'Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.'"

Hardly packaged up in history, Berrigan resonates in our modern moment: election year 2008, an era incessantly referred to as "post-9/11," a time when we wrangle over mediocre responses to global warming and get ourselves all in a fuss over a New Yorker cover.

The current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that "if voting made any difference it would be illegal." He is critical of the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns like the Berrigans, "introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church" ... He despairs of universities, especially Boston College's decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. ...  And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him forty years ago but who have now "disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline."

"The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life," he says. "It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base."

What then is to be done? Is there nothing but mourning left for us ... or, in spiritual terms, are we experiencing our lamentation?

Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.

"The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere," he says. "I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don't know where. I don't think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go." ...

A resistance movement, Berrigan says, cannot survive without the spiritual core pounded into him by Merton. He is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith and his religious community.

"The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living--the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet--was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place," he says. "We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation."

This seems a good moment to raise a glass to Tom Lewis, another one of the Catonsville Nine, who continued his life committed to creative nonviolence. He passed away last April.

Jonah House, the Baltimore Catholic Worker that has been a home to the Berrigans, Lewis and countless other good souls, celebrates Catonsville's 40th anniversary with an interesting online library (for which all images in this little essay of mine are credited) that is still there for us who couldn't attend the films, conversations, potlucks, teach-ins, vigils and witnesses that Jonah House facilitated in May.

For your exploration, consider also "Fire and Faith: The Catonsville Nine File."

But once you're done exploring, for now, what are we going to do? There's so much that's possible ...

REVIEW: Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Michael Pollan's most recent investigative journalism wonder has got me bandying the word "nutritionism" about. I mean--he means--to describe a cultural ideology that places value on nutrients rather than food itself. That is, the parts rather than the whole. Unfortunately, decades of parsed nutritionist science--and the political wrangling that often intersected with it--have brought us to a point where most of what we're eating isn't really food. It's edible. It's chemically altered to be infused with a vitamin or fiber or what not. But as a product of nature, hardly. It's a product of a laboratory, and the scientists we are trusting with our health.

And now, as Pollan repeatedly points out, we're in the weird position of turning to investigative journalists like himself to find out what to eat; we're perhaps the first full generation so disconnected from our land and history, the great teachers of eating of those who came before us. There's a lot of profit from the widespread confusion over food--and a lot of illness too.

For my part, I find myself saying crap like "oh fish oil's really good for you" and "choose the tea with antioxidants in it," even though I have no idea what I'm talking about, and, as Pollan indicates, is playing into the food-as-parts rather than whole foods. It's a little frightening to see how susceptible I am to this food marketing, even when I've been more intentional about eating unprocessed, non-chemically soaked food in the last few years.

I think it's interesting that this book approaches food from a health vantage point; I hadn't really noticed it was missing from his other book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is a brilliant work that focuses on ethical and environmental nature of food. I rather assumed that it was all the same thing: what's ethically and environmentally good is also healthy for me. But I'm glad he's playing it out in this follow-up. He's a fantastic writer whose commentary leaves room for nuance--nothing's wholly one thing or another which is, um, just how life is. And his writing is compulsively readable.

It can be daunting to think that nothing less than a culture change is in order: Pollan is right about food not merely being 'fuel,' but inextricably tied to our social lives and work lives and family lives. I would've liked more from him on how to facilitate such a big change: he basically says, yes, food will cost more money and time, and it is worth it. I believe him. But while he makes a good case for anteing up the money (pointing out that it's not so much an issue of affordability for most of us as it is of priority, and he also advocates eating less), he gives less space to the time issue.

I'm not used to spending a good deal of time cooking my dinner and especially when I eat alone--now that I'm in my own apartment for the first time ever--I've found it difficult to create new habits where I make my meals a priority of time and effort.

I tried the night I finished In Defense of Eating. Cooked. Lit a candle. Took all the crap off the table I eat at. Even said a prayer before I dug in.

One guy I lived with at Haley House  led us through an exercise on retreat once, during a meal of lentils that he made and we ate with our hands, where he had us not pick up our next bite and hold it before us while we chewed. You merely had to swallow before preparing your next bite. And it was hard. I never realized I had this gulping habit of eating. That night Ifinished Pollan's book, I tried it again, putting down my fork between bites and it was still hard.

But I suppose there's nothing to do but be patient with it and myself. Pollan talks about mind tricks to play on yourself to adjust your eating habits (like using smaller plates, since so many of us fall victim to visual cues in our eating, rather than how we feel), and I'm thinking of one for me: approaching the table I eat at as if it were something of an altar. (The candle gave me the idea.) What if I didn't drop my shit on it, as I would never do to an altar? What if I considered it sacred space? How would that affect how I eat, whether I have guests or I'm by myself? I'm going to try.

Speaking of culture shift: there are so many skills that we've lost in this nutritionism era. There's so many finds at the farmer's market that I can't name, let alone cook. I find myself gravitating to carrots, tomatoes, the usual-looking things. But I want to learn about all that other stuff, and how to prepare it. I wonder where one can go? I need to ask friends and soon-to-be friends. Wouldn't it be cool to have an evening, or series of evenings, where friends taught each other how to prepare a food the other(s) don't know about? Not just a dish, but a dish where the primary ingredient is something the others barely recognize.

I think our culture's ready for this shift. The Food Network, all these foodie books, the popularity of farmer's markets, the rise of organic--it seems to me to be a broad-scale movement reacting against the tide of crap food and science written about in this book.

One last thing about culture: it irritated me that Pollan used "Mom "as a stand in for the "old" way of doing things, I guess because it doesn't resonate with my own experience. I've had a growing distaste for processed food for years, and when I come home to my parents, and my mom puts herself out to make me a meal that she thinks I will love, that she thinks is healthy, but that is very processed and doesn't appeal to me, what to do? Generally, I eat it anyway. Who wants to criticize a meal made for you? When I'm in their home?

But still, I'm frustrated by not being able to communicate that, after a few days, I really want something fresh. Or why I don't want to eat the canned peaches that are coated in sugar and preservatives that my dad tells me is good for me. I don't know how to follow my own instincts for how to feed myself without coming across like I'm judging my very kind and generous parents.

The Votes Are In

Check out who was voted the most shameful corporation of the year--and why--through the broad public vote hosted by estimable Corporate Accountability International.

It was one of the folks I voted for. I feel so validated.

Squirm-worthy

You know how it's unjust that health insurance companies cover Viagra, but not birth control? Yes. Well, check out how Republican presidential candidate John McCain responded to a reporter who asked him about just that, in the particular light of his Senate votes against measures that would've mandated birth control coverage as basic health care:

Hat tip to friend Mike for the link to the video.

THANK YOU, 1980s: A Grateful Remembrance of Nelson Mandela & the Anti-Apartheid Movement

Nelson Mandela spent the 1980s in prison--the last decade of his 27-years behind bars at Robben Island. His crime? He'd been a South African anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress. Notably, his arrest in 1962 was made possible by a tip from the CIA. Mandela was convicted on charges of armed sabotage. And well, yes, he sabotaged. 

From Mandela's statement at a trial before the Supreme Court in 1964:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die

As an inmate, Mandela came to symbolize international anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s--the time when the decades-long movement that goes back even further than the Sharpeville massacre--came to a head in the U.S. The movement's primary tactic was to lobby businesses and investors to cut off its financial ties to South Africa until it dismantled apartheid.

The successful nonviolent international movement was one of the greatest we've ever seen. From Susan Collin Marks' remembrance at Common Ground News:

Few people who look back at those dark days recall that militant nonviolence was the key tool in the struggle against apartheid and, in the end, precipitated a negotiated revolution instead of the widely anticipated carnage. The scope and creativity of methods employed by anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s amounted to what the theologian Walter Wink describes as “probably the largest grassroots eruption of diverse nonviolent strategies in a single struggle in human history.”

Hunger strikes ended the mass use of the detention without trial, and protests against beach apartheid showed up the injustice of segregation and the unacceptability of police action. Gandhi’s legacy loomed large as economic boycotts of white businesses, court actions that challenged apartheid laws, rent boycotts, demonstrations, and marches proliferated.

Particularly on college campuses, the anti-apartheid movement gained in momentum in the 1980s--students demanded that their universities and colleges cease investments, operations, and trades in South Africa. And the thing is: it worked. Hampshire College was the first to disinvest. Harvard began a (slow) process of ending its relationship with the apartheid government. The University of California withdrew its full three billion dollars, a move that, according to Wikipedia, Nelson Mandela credited as being a particularly strong action towards "abolishing white-minority rule in South Africa."

By 1988, 155 colleges were fully or partially divested, thanks to the anti-apartheid movement.

Cities got on board too, as activists turned their attentions to local legislators. According to researcher Richard Knight, "by the end of 1989 26 states, 22 counties and over 90 cities had taken some form of binding economic action against companies doing business in South Africa." Among them was San Francisco.

Local and college action led to federal action in the 1980s, including the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and the Budget Reconciliation Act.

Hell, the movement grew so strong in the U.S., it even showed up on television. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that it was no coincidence that in "The Cosby Show," Sandra and Alvin's twins are named Nelson and Winnie. Theo, meanwhile, had an anti-apartheid sign in his room. And several episodes of "A Different World" cheered on the movement; in one episode Kim chooses to reject a substantial scholarship from a company that hasn't divested from South Africa. She takes a second job--working nights at a funeral parlor--to earn the money to pay for her pre-med classes.

In 1990, the African National Congress was unbanned in South Africa and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. It was the first step towards years of truth-in-reconciliation and negotiations that transformed the country--and, I daresay, the world. In 1994, in a peaceful democratic election, Mandela was chosen by the people to be president.

 Again, from Susan Collin Marks' article:

This spiritual dimension is perhaps the X factor in the South African equation. “Any social scientist would expect 98% of blacks to hate whites and wish retribution, and yet the reality is the reverse,” said University of Cape Town political scientist Robert Schrire after the peaceful 1994 election. “And since we cannot explain it rationally, we will have to regard it as one of the great miracles of the South African dilemma.”

That's true. But still, though apartheid's officially ended in South Africa, and Mandela's a free man, we can't say that everything's 'fixed.' Consider the repulsive comments to the above video on YouTube, left within the last two weeks: 

ahh the things you see when you havent got a sniper rifle :(

lol at that black prick behind bars.....where he belongs!!

mandela is a pedo scum england and st george.

Nelson Mandela will celebrate his 90th birthday this Friday, July 18. Happy birthday to him, and thank you to all the anti-apartheid activists for the better world we have today. 

Image Credits: Northland Poster; St. George's Park;  much more music; Stanford News Service; the UCSC Library

And In A Knife to Your Human Rights ...

... secret wiretapping is approved by in our so-called democracy. The big telecom companies are now immune from an legal consequences for cooperating with the National Security Agency in tapping your phone and the phone of your neighbors without any due cause and without your knowledge. Your government now has the right to eavesdrop on you, without a court order.

No small irritation, this: our government has just signed away every citizen's human rights. It wasn't even close--the Senate vote was 69-28. I feel sick. Most heartbreaking of all: Barack Obama, who had stolen my heart, has now stomped all over it. He voted for this--despite saying repeatedly in the past that he supported no such thing, and threatening a filibuster if it came to a vote to give retroactive immunity to the telecoms.

From the NY Times:

But on Wednesday, (Obama) ended up voting for what he called “an improved but imperfect bill” after backing a failed attempt earlier in the day to strip the immunity provision from the bill through an amendment.

Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin stood strong against this bill til the end. And now I'm wishing I could cast my presidential vote for him.

The Curious Questions of WikiLeaks

I'm not sure what I think about WikiLeaks. On one hand, I'm all about transparency, and I applaud WikiLeaks for the palpable good it's instigated in publishing the operating manuals for employees of the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, which revealed that the U.S. had a policy of hiding inmates from the International Red Cross and using dogs to intimidate prisoners. In its litany of other meaningful publications, WikiLeaks also made public the documents that exposed former Kenyan president's Daniel Arap Moi embezzelment, causing a shift in the elections. I admire WikiLeaks' commitment to primary sources--something that many of us citizens have far too little access to.

On the other hand, as this Wired article makes clear, the good work of WikiLeaks is tempered by its habit of publishing confidential documents from unconventional religious groups, such as the Church of Scientology. The public good is a lot less clear to me here, and I worry about the ability for relgious groups that don't adhere to mainstream codes of conduct beind pressured merely for their difference. It's part of what Wired reports as a growing trend for WikiLeaks to publish a number of things without apparant news value--like, say, a tax bill for actor Wesley Snipes that included his social security number. As one critic of WikiLeaks points out in the article:, "They think all secrecy is an evil to be opposed and that is just a juvenile point of view."

The New Testament?

Barbara Kingsolver has a wonderful book of essays called, well, Small Wonder. And in one of those essays by this novelist/biologist, there's a line I don't forget. More of a phrase, really. She writes of "the religion inside a seed." I know no better or more efficient way of conveying my awe of the natural world and my gratitude to be part of it.

As a filmmaker is revealing in a documentary called "The World According to Monsanto," the company that is perhaps the world's largest agribusiness (and former chemical company, maker of the cancerous PCBs) is working its way to owning the rights to seeds. Not just *a* seed; but all seed of a particular crop, and then another crop, and then another. They do this when they genetically engineer a seed, and that seed is made/comes to be standard. This means Monsanto is working its way to controlling our food, our ability to grow things, and, dare I say, the world?

Somebody should tell Monsanto to read some Kingsolver essays.