I’m home—after a month of intense teaching of our two Earth Activist Trainings—one in Bellingham, one in Vermont, followed by a short vacation with my partner and stepdaughter’s family on Martha’s Vineyard.

Now—home to San Francisco with visits up to our land in Sonoma County.  Most things seem to have survived my absence—although I’ve finally conceded defeat around ever actually having a summer garden on the land when I’m not there to take care of it.  None of the many folks I’ve had over the years as caretakers ever seem to truly get it as far as the watering regime goes, in spite of my instructions, and at this point I’m just happy if they keep the trees alive.  Do I sound bitter?  Let’s just say I’m shifting my priorities to devote more time to the urban gardens in Bayview Hunters Point, where the squash vines are pumping out produce and where, this winter, I’ll be training garden coordinators and youth in permaculture, garden management and skill building.

My most immediate new adventure?  Next week I’m taking an exciting course in Aquaponics—the system of integrated fish farms and greenhouses that hold immense promise for urban food production.  Last February I visited Growing Power, http://www.growingpower.org/,  in Milwaukee, which has pioneered the system on a large-scale inner city farm that produces greens and veggies in the middle of a Midwest snowy winter.

Below is the information on the course—if you’re interested, there’s still time to sign up!  If you scroll down, you’ll notice a discount you can get as a friend of Earth Activist Training.  I know the course is pricey—but I’m thinking of it as a good investment in skills and knowledge that can help us with the work we’re doing in the inner city, to provide both real food security and economic opportunities.

I’ll blog about the course, and post some pics.

Next adventure after that?  I’ll be going to Dandelion, the semi-annual gathering of Reclaiming, my extended spiritual network.  We’ll have rituals, meetings, workshops—I’ll be offering a few and taking more!

http://www.dandeliongathering.org/

And then I’ll be off to Europe for a month!  Poland—a Goddess Conference in Spain, workshops in England and Sicily—check out the details on:

http://www.starhawk.org/starhawk/schedule.html.

Now—for some hammock time while I have a chance!

Growing Power greenhouse in Milwaukee

Dear Friend,

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August 25 – 28, 2010

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For More Information Click Here <http://livingmandala.com/Living_Mandala/Aquaponics_Course.html>
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More Information
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Heated by compost--Growing Power

US Social Forum—Resilience

I’m home now—and how I love my own bed!  But it was worth foregoing it for a week to go to the US Social Forum—even though by the last day I saw very little of the meetings or formal process.  The best part of these things is always what happens in the hallways—and I was never able to get through the lobby of the Forum without having half a dozen intense and fascinating conversations.  But if I sum up what it all meant to me, the theme that emerges is around diversity and resilience.

In nature, diversity of the right degree confers resilience, and I saw that in Detroit.  The Forum itself was tremendously diverse, offering us a precious chance both to learn from others’ experiences and to recognize that others from all different races and cultures and situations are dealing with the same damn things as we are.  And that they might have some new and illuminating approaches that can enrich what we’re doing—or even have made some mistakes we can learn from and avoid.

Over the many, many decades I’ve been a political activist, I’ve seen many movements overcome huge divides.  I remember earnest debates in the ‘seventies about whether gay women and straight women could ever really work together in the same organization with any sense of trust.  Now, in the days of LGBTQ alphabet soup (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer—I suggest we add fluid, uncertain, confused and kookie—check our that acronym!) that’s no longer much of an issue.

But the race thing has continued, often, to keep us divided.  Too many times I’ve sat in meetings having the same conversation, over and over again—where are the people of color?  The answer is not to go comb the streets, dragging in random people to make our group look more diverse.  Nor is it to stop doing what we’re doing, if it’s the work we’re called to. An effective answer  involves drawing a bigger circle, like this Forum has done, that includes all of our multiple movements and issues within it as allies, and if we have resources or skills or connections, saying to our brothers and sisters, “We’re on the same mission—how can I be of service to you?”

The Forum has allowed me and Lena and Jasmine to hang out a bit in one another’s worlds in a way that is actually harder to do at home in San Francisco, where we’re entrenched in our responsibilities.  We’ve gotten to meet each others’ friends and have time for relaxed conversations.  I know that Lena likes her coffee strong and she knows I’m addicted to English Breakfast Tea.  Jasmine has confessed that she likes Sex in the City—they know of my inability to tolerate the volume at which hip-hop is performed, and they are willing to sit through at least ten minutes of a Bob Dylan-style folksinger at the Anarchist Convergence.  Ultimately, these experiences will put our work together on a stronger foundation.

Resilience—on Saturday Shea Howell from the Boggs Center takes us on a tour of some of the gardens.  Detroit is a living example of that old anarchist slogan “Building the new world in the vacant lots of the old.”  Detroit itself contains a huge expanse of vacant lots, and many of them have been turned into gardens.  We see small plots and large expanses, fruit swelling on the trees, tomatoes not yet ripe on the vines, food growing out of the waste.

Shea Howell pointing at the wind generator on the barn.

We visit the Catherine Ferguson High School for pregnant teens and teen mothers–with a garden, a farm, a barn and a horse.  The girls there learn parenting skills, bring the babies to class, and learn their lessons through gardening and growing food.  97% of them go on to college.  The city had the school on the top of its list to close–but the community rallied around and saved it.

Shea takes us to the Heidelberg Project, where artist Tyree Guiton has turned a whole block of devastated houses and lots into a living and ever-changing exhibit of found art: sculptures of scrap metal, houses painted with faces and polka dots, stuffed bunnies hanging crucified on telephone poles, abstract pyramids of old doors, and more.  Trash becomes art: resilience!

In one vacant lot, the Code Pink women have buried a hummer, and painted it pink.  I meet Rae and Medea and Tighe, and hear about their harrowing experiences when they tried to cross the border into Windsor, Canada for lunch.  They were stopped—Medea Benjamin has been turned back from Canada before on the grounds of her lengthy arrest record for various acts of civil disobedience—but instead of simply being turned away they were detained for hours, as were two groups who came to support them.  Everyone eventually got back, except for Tighe who was held for two nights.  When they asked on what grounds he was being held, they were told, “Your government does this all the time.  Except instead of holding people for forty-eight hours, you hold them for years.”

Rae, Medea, Tighe and me.

Another chilling moment—Shea gets a call that someone has disappeared–one of the Latino members of an organization from my own Mission District back in San Francisco.  We don’t know if he’s been picked up by the police or by the immigration police or what—and I still don’t know if he’s been found.

In Toronto, protestors against the G20 have been rounded up and arrested by the hundreds, beaten and the women threatened with sexual assault.  The police violence begins long before a single window is broken—but many windows do get broken and six cop cars are burned.  Of course, the hundreds of people arrested are not the ones who broke the windows.  I have a lot more to say about this topic—but that will have to wait for a later time—at the very least, until the arrestees are out of jail.  Then, maybe, we can discuss whether or not window breaking is strategic.   Now, I’m home and the day has begun and I have work to do.  So this will be my last post about the Forum.

As joyful as the Forum has been, it takes place in the midst of a world daily growing more grim, more controlled and vicious.  Uniting across our differences, building this movement is no longer optional—it’s necessary if we are to survive.  And as we do, the great powers of creativity and resilience become our allies.

Okay, now that that’s over with, let me give you some highlights of yesterday:

–Our morning workshop on Organizing for the Long Haul, with Grace Lee Boggs, who is ninety-five, and me, and Carlos Alicea Negron, Shea Howell, and Vincent Harding, who worked with Martin Luther King.  A great morning hearing some of my own elders talk about what keeps them going.  Margo Adair moderated, and talked about her battle with a form of cancer that standard medicine has no cure for.  She’s used chemotherapy, but also a natural treatment she goes to Canada for—and mostly, the power of mind and visualization and community support.  And she looks remarkable well.  Her energy has changed, too—Margo and I have known each other for decades, and I’ve seen her lead many a meditation, but now she has a deepened sense of presence and an openness that strengthens the work.  Margo will be at our upcoming Earth Activist Training in Bellingham for part of time, as her energy allows.

–After a too-quick lunch, a second workshop on Vison-Based and Solutions-Based organizing.  Me, Margo and Lena anchor this one.  We move outside under a shady tree, and talk about vision and story and drama in how we frame our issues.  Our time runs short, but something comes clear to me that I’ve been pondering for a long time about reframing the story around Israel and Palestine—I promise to write more on that soon.

–At the end of the workshop, Shea steals me away for a boat ride.  She’s got an old inboard/outboard motorboat and we cruise down the river while a couple of the Detroit Summer folks make a music video.  The river is blue and cool, the sun is hot, I even get a short nap and come back refreshed just in time for the ritual.

–The challenge with the ritual is finding the space for it—the Canopy village is located on the river but just far enough away that people can’t find it.  Lots of the political groups simply moved into Cobo Hall and rumors have been floating all week that the canopies were taken down.  I resist all suggestions to change the location at the last minute, and somehow over a hundred people find it.  We do a simply ritual, making an offering to the land, calling in the elements by asking people who work on issues involving air, fire, water, earth, etc. to come into the center.  Grove does a beautiful, simple grounding for us.  I lead a short meditation, using an image Shea spoke about in the morning when she described being six years old, and seeing a spiderweb covered with dew illumined by the sun, and suddenly knowing what ‘beautiful’ meant.  We raise energy for the web of connections we have and are creating—like a spiderweb, we don’t always see them until the light hits them just right.  The forum has been like that light, allowing us to link up with others working on the same issues or facing the same challenges.  And like that dew melting back to earth, the energy from those links will flow into solid work and manifest change.  We imagine the water flowing, pooling underground, rising through springs to become streams and great rivers, bringing healing to the land and spilling out into the oceans, sending special healing to the Gulf.  We dance a spiral, leaving the pattern on the grass, raise a cone of power and ground it back into the earth, and end with gratitude to all we’ve invoked and to each other.

–By the time we find food and make our way to the party, it’s after midnight.  The party is spread over a whole street of warehouses, with lots of tables out on the streets and music and dancing inside.  All the music is at a volume far too loud for me—my hearing is so bad currently that I simply can’t risk any more damage.  But Lisa and I enjoy cruising around outside, seeing such a beautiful mix of people filling the space and enjoying themselves.  We find Jasmine and Oya, another young woman, sitting at a table and join them.  It’s a joy just to watch the interactions around me—everyone feeling good, a table of young black kids performing hip-hop, a couple in a long kiss, a mix again of every race and color.  Why can’t we have this in San Francisco?  Why can’t we have it everywhere?

A short blog today as we have a workshop to give at 10 AM.  Some highlights from yesterday:

–Hearing Grace Boggs and Emmanuel Wallerstein, two elders of the movement, in the morning.  Most memorable quotes:

Grace:  We have to use the negative to advance the positive.

Wallerstein:  We want a world that’s relatively democratic and relatively equal.  I say ‘relatively’ because nothing is ever perfect.

–Lisa Fithian’s workshop in the afternoon.  Of course I know Lisa well and work with her all the time but rarely have a chance to just listen to her lay out her approach to organizing, or see slides of some of her union organizing work.   I also want my friends from the Bayview to hear her, because we may need to start a new form of organizing to protect our major garden from being bulldozed by developers.  Lisa starts off by saying she’s tired—but Lisa tired still has twice the energy of any ten ordinary people.  No time to say more about the workshop now—but check out her website www.organizingforpower.org for her own notes and lots of resources.  A really incredible resource!

–Meeting up with friends and going out to the food booths to grab some quick dinner.  Connecting with some of the folks I haven’t seen much of from actions long ago.

–Finally meeting my old friend Marta Benevides, who does community organizing in El Salvador.  Reclaiming, my extended spiritual network, has had a long term solidarity project to help support her work, ever since she came to a gathering of ours back in the ‘nineties.  http://www.reclaiming.org/resources/elsal/circleoflove.html

We end up sitting in a circle of chairs near the entrance to Cobo Hall, talking with some of the young people who have been working with Marta.  In El Salvador, she’s started an Ecohouse and a museum.  She works with communities striving to build a culture of peace amidst the growing violence.  In El Salvador, as in Mexico, as in the Bayview, the lethal combination of drugs and violence opens the door to even more lethal police violence and intertwined corruption—and in El Salvador it’s gotten much, much worse in the last few years.

A couple of the young men are from Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, another community plagued by violence, where a Texas company is planning to move sixty thousand workers in to open up a huge natural gas field.  As we sit, one person after another comes by.  There’s an open chair in the circle and it gets filled over and over again with another amazing person doing great work.  My old friend Grove Harris turns up—she has been doing lots of interfaith work and was a major organizer of the World Parliament of Religions.

We go on to Grace Lee Boggs’ ninety-fifth birthday party in the ballroom.  It’s a beautiful tribute to her life and work—and sweet to see how much she is loved and respected.   Marta wants to dance—her style of organizing requires much dancing.  I remember one great day when I visited her in El Salvador.  We were cleaning up and rebuilding a school to be used for technical training.  But before we started work, we had a gathering and some of the organizers were  honored and given certificates.  Then a local band played.  After that we put on some music and danced the Macarena.  Then we worked—and blasted through a lot in a few hours.  Then we had lunch.  Then we went to the beach and swam and played in the waves.  At the end of the day, I led a ritual.  By then we felt we had known each other forever.  “If it’s not fun, why do it?

Listening to Grace Boggs, connecting with the wonderful people she and her late husband James Boggs collected around them, I am struck by how unafraid they are to talk about love.  With all the anger, our own frustrations and the violence we face, they still put love at the heart of their work.  So do the other great organizers I know—Marta, and Lisa, and Lena in the Bayview.  Anger is real and vital but you can’t sustain a life built on anger as its sole foundation.  There’s a sense of love and joy that permeates this gathering.  Very little grumbling—although there are things we could grumble about—and lots of radiant delight.  If we can knit these strands into a whole with a unified sense of purpose, what a power we can be!

Today—two workshops and a ritual.  Here’s the details:  all are here in Detroit, Michigan!

Organizing for the Long Haul—10 AM at Woodward Academy room 1470

Grace Boggs is coming to this one—along with Shea Howell, Margo Adair, Carlos Alicea Negron, and Cathy Sanchez!

Vision-Based and Solution-Based Organizing—1 pm at Woodward Academy 1472

myself, Margo, and others.

Full Moon Ritual 8 pm at the Spiritual Healing Space in the Canopy Village—to find it, from Cobo Hall go down to the river, turn right and walk up along the river about six blocks.

“That’s why I can’t get a job,” she says.  “We’re spending a million a day on those wars.”  She goes on to talk about the oil spill, tells me how her heart was wrenched by those pictures of the oil-drenched pelican.  This is why it’s hard for me to get anywhere on time—there are so many great side conversations.

I run into Shea Howell who works with the Boggs Center and Margo Adair, my old friend from Tools for Change in Seattle.  Margo, her partner Bill and I will be working together on our upcoming Earth Activist Training in Bellingham, which will have a special focus on social permaculture.  We go out to lunch with a few others at the Cass Café, way up on Cass Street—another local business which has excellent food.  Rich Feldman, from the interfaith committee, has hooked me up with a projector for our workshop—and between him and Shea, they also hook me up with a ride to go get the projector, the computer, and all the other pieces.

We show our video of the permaculture work in the Bayview—which you can see for yourself at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bdKgBt6LbE

All the technology works perfectly—which was the only part really worrying me.  Lena talks about Hunters Point Family, the agency she started when she was only twenty three.  When I was twenty-three I was travelling around on a bicycle mooning about the drug-addict boyfriend I’d just broken up with and trying to Find Myself.  She created a program for girls, Girls 2000, to help be a safe haven from the violence around them, to build their skills and self-esteem and to provide the resources that might be lacking in their homes.  Lena is an impressive speaker—she’s honest and passionate and people respond to her sense of vision, the same vision that drew me in to help support their work with the gardens.  Then Jasmine talks—and she is awesome, too!  She has such an engaging, confident, radiant personality—she tells us about coming up in the program herself and now being a Case Manager for the girls.  She runs the Girls Group and she’s young enough to be kind of a big sister to them, and she genuinely loves them.

I talk about our Earth Activist Trainings and how we came to be involved in the Bayview.  One part of EAT’s mission statement is “To bring the knowledge and resources of regenerative ecological design to communities with the greatest needs and fewest resources.“   When a friend introduced me to Lena, and I heard her vision of the Bayview becoming the ‘green jewel in the crown of the Emerald City”, I knew we could support that work.  We talk about what has worked well in our collaboration—a strong, shared vision is the beginning.  Respecting the community—coming in with questions, listening rather than slapping down ready-made solutions, employing that permaculture principle of thoughtful and protracted observation—all that is key.  And most of all, something that has come clear to us through our late-night conversations as we’ve talked about the workshop, keeping the goal firmly on capacity building for the community, on transferring knowledge and skills even when sometimes that means sacrificing efficiency or immediate results.

Then we open it up to questions and discussion.  Aresh, who started Homes with Gardens in the Bronx is there and talks about some of the legal issues in New York and their efforts to defend community gardens.  Shea talks about some of the Detroit Summer gardens and offers to take us to see them.  A young woman who is organizing against mountain-top removal coal mining asks some thoughtful questions.  All and all—a great time!

The evening, like everything, is double-scheduled.  I catch some of the plenary, to hear Grace Boggs, an amazing organizer now in her nineties.  She and her husband, Jimmie Boggs, who is now dead, have been the center of much of the creative and transformative work here for decades.  She and other great organizers from Detroit talk about the movement history of the city.  The point they make, over and over again, is that Detroit is a strong center of resistance and resilience.  With all that’s happened to the city, Grace says, “we continue to come back with something new.”

I walk over to the Doubletree to meet up with Lena at the Green for All reception, hosted by Alli Starr and Ash who do great work in inner city Oakland.  I run into some other old friends—like Gerardo who took our social permaculture course a couple of years ago, and is running a program for inner-city Latino and black youth which mixes arts and rites of passage and cultural identity.  David Korten, the writer who has written A New Economic Agenda, The Great Turning, and When Corporations Rule the World.  He’s talking with a young man from Zimbabwe who is involved in democratic, sustainable development.

When we get chased out, finally, I end up back at the plenary sitting next to Jim Haber.  We decide to go out to the Anchor Bar to hear David Rovics and Anne Feeney, and walk out in the rain.  The bar is crowded and noisy, but I decide to have a beer—mostly out of fear that my bad ears, which make me want to avoid noise, and my tendency to fall asleep if I imbibe even the smallest amount of alcohol, together are turning me rapidly into an old fuddy-duddy who never does anything fun.  So, warding off fuddy-duddyness with beer in hand, we squeeze into the back room.  Up front a man with a guitar is singing a country-rock version of Solidarity Forever and everyone is standing and singing.  Someone grabs my hand and holds it up—Dave whom I met on the Gaza Freedom March.  We’re all singing together, the whole crowded room, crammed with old comrades I’ve marched with so many times and with so many people I’ve never met but who have nonetheless been marching together, whether we knew it or not.  We’re singing that old song that raises the ghosts of so many marches and strikes and struggles, and I’m happy.  “We will build a new world from the ashes of the old,” we sing, “Solidarity forever.”  I believe it.

We arrived—and attempted to reach our motel by the river—just at the moment Detroit’s Riverfest culminates in a massive fireworks display.  A million people go down to the river to watch—which made reaching out motel a challenge.  We finally had to abandon our taxi and walk the last block, with all our bags.  But we got there to find the streets humming with people, a party in progress in the parking lot, barbecues going on patches of grass by the sidewalks, and the sky alight with the thunder and a rain of light and color.

We got settled and headed out to find food.  I have to say it was a different experience for me, walking down the street in those crowds and crowds of people, mostly young, mostly black, all of them dressed to look good.  The whole city was drenched in heat haze and pheromones, and I enjoyed seeing it a bit through the eyes of much younger women who were looking pretty good themselves—and definitely attracting far more male attention than I ever do on my own these days.  Jasmine, who is twenty-three, was so excited!  “I can’t believe it—all these black people out on the streets, just chillin’, having a good time, and nobody shuttin’ it down!  Why can’t we have that in the Bayview?”  And it’s true—with all the economic devastation of Detroit, there are thousands of people out here enjoying themselves, wearing short shorts and gold platform shoes.  A trio of trumpeters in an empty lot blast out a riff.  A couple of trombone players across the street answer them—and they play back and forth, a musical conversation in the street.

Why can’t we have it in the Bayview?  There’s a long history, that goes back to the bulldozing of San Francisco’s Fillmore District back in the 60’s for redevelopment, destroying a thriving and lively Black community.  To the closing of the naval shipyard, once the big employer in the Bayview, and the resulting unemployment and poverty and the residues of toxic wastes.   And most immediately, to the intertwined gang violence and police violence.  More people die violently, per capita, in the Bayview than in Iraq, or so I’ve heard.  The infant mortality rate in the Bayview is on a par with Haiti or Bulgaria.

As I’m writing, Jasmine and Lena are gossiping and the conversation moves to all the young men they know who are dead.  Jasmine says, “My whole age group is gone.  All the boys I grew up with—they’re all gone.”  Dead, or in prison.

We spend a lazy morning, sleeping in, and finally make our way down to Cobo Hall, the big convention center that houses registration for the Forum.  The line to register stretches about a mile back.  We take turns waiting.  In line, I meet a man named Leonardo, from LA.  He turns out to know my buddy Lisa, who is part of our training collective Alliance of Community Trainers.  Lisa is slight and blonde and always charged with energy—after ten minutes of acquaintance, Lena calls her “A soldier of the movement.”  She’s biked down here and is holding a place for us.

Leonardo tells us how he’s organized his community in East L.A.  They’ve managed to get a whole progressive contingent elected in the neighboring town of  Maywood,    and they threw the whole police department out.  The cops were corrupt and abusive, harassing the Latino community, setting up checkpoints for cars and confiscating them from illegal immigrants.  So, they simply fired them all.  Every one.  Now they will create a police department—if only so the city can get insurance—but it will be under the direction of a civilian police commissioner, not a chief of police.

So, I’m already inspired by the time I get my registration armband.   Then I meet up with Bill Aal from Tools for Change—with whom I’ll be teaching the Earth Activist Training in Bellingham with a focus on social permaculture, and Carlos, from New York, who does popular education and is part of a men’s healing group.  We all go to lunch at the Avalon Bakery, a small bakery started by two women, Anne and Jackie, to bring a thriving business alive in one of the city’s dead zones.  Now it’s the anchor of a street of cafes and shops.

Then Bill, Carlos and I go on to the march, while Lena and Jasmine go back to rest up.  The march is quite wonderful—colorful, lively, not painfully loud, but mostly what’s wonderful is the incredible diversity of people.  The organizers of this event have really done it—they’ve brought together a truly diverse crowd.  As Lena puts it—“It’s not only every type of person, but every shade and variety of every type.”  Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, every race, age, style of dress and political persuasion seems represented.  There are environmentalists carrying sunflowers and a contingent of domestic workers in magic T-shirts.  There are a couple of anarchists with black flags and Revolutionary workers selling newspapers and big puppets of Martin Luther King with recordings of his speeches playing.  A brass band plays and four young people in pink T-shirts dance.  Two clowns walk by on stilts, and drummers play a samba beat.

The march is a beautiful vision of what a real social movement could be.  Ironically, we march through downtown Detroit, an area blasted and blighted by the city’s economic losses.   Vast areas are simply empty—full of weeds, with here and there a burned-out carcass of a house.  Beautiful stone churches, relics of a time when there was money and jobs, loom over vacant lots.  The old Detroit Free Press building, a dignified stone castle, is now boarded over with a sign offering free rents to any enterprise that would venture to locate there.  Faded signs grace the tattered marquis’ of boarded over department stores.  London had more signs of life after the blitz.  Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any enemy nation inflicting more damage on a city than has been done here by capitalism at its most irresponsible and brutal.

Through the devastation winds this lively and beautiful march, a sign of hope and resilience.  If there’s any hope for our poor country and our battered world, any chance we can turn our direction around toward real justice and balance, it lies in the people here, this beautiful coming together across all the divides.

Now we’re resting.  Maybe we’ll go out to a party tonight, maybe we won’t.  But I’m so glad to be here.

I’ll be here for six days—and I’ll do my best to blog each day.   Stay tuned.

A brass band always livens up a march!

UK Guardian article:  Gaza Flotilla Activists Were Shot in Head at Close Range

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/gaza-flotilla-activists-autopsy-results

Michigan Peace Team–link to French video

https://app.e2ma.net/app/view:CampaignPublic/id:32698.6694108302/rid:ff20c2491d81c4a6c99e39e0224754d8

I have at least four friends on that flotilla, all women.  They are part of a group of seven hundred activists who include members of parliament from many European countries, retired US diplomats, a nobel prize winner and many caring, committed human rights activists.

Both actions had the same intent—to break Israel’s siege which has turned Gaza into one giant, open-air prison since 2007.     Israel has long surrounded Gaza with fences and barbed wire, and Israel controls all the openings, save for the Rafah crossing where Egypt is nominally in charge but answers to the tune that Israel calls.   The siege has destroyed the Gazan economy.  Students cannot leave Gaza to take up scholarships and the sick cannot leave to get medical care.  Almost half the Gazan people are dependent on humanitarian aid for bare survival.  Since the Israeli assault in 2009 that killed fourteen hundred people and destroyed over four hundred homes and eighty public buildings,  building supplies have been embargoed.  The flotilla carried needed construction materials, children’s toys and humanitarian aid.

Israel has captured the ships, forced them into harbor at Ashdod in Israel, arrested the activists and embargoed the media.  They have not released the names of the dead.  I believe and hope that my friends are okay—but I don’t know for sure.   Let me tell you about them:

Huwaida Arraf is one of the organizers.   She’s a brilliant Palestinian-American law student, married to an Israeli American Jew.  It could have been a romeo-and-juliet romantic tragedy, but she and her husband, Adam Shapiro, easily cross the cultural divide and work together for justice.  They were among the founders of the International Solidarity Movement, which brings internationals into the West Bank and, at one time, Gaza to support nonviolent resistance against the Occupation.

Col. Anne Wright—I met her first with Cindy Sheehan when they came down to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  Anne’s a tomboy crone with a down-to-earth sense of humor.  She still carries a slight aura of her years in the military and the diplomatic corps—you sense she’s on a mission.  And she is, now—ever since she resigned her diplomatic post in protest against the Iraq war, she’s been on a mission of peace.

Hedy Epstein, eighty six, was on the Gaza Freedom March.  She is a Holocaust survivor.  She told me her story when we were stuck in Cairo, kept back from Gaza by the Egyptians.  She was just a child when the Nazis took over Germany, and one day the principal of her school came and told her she was no longer allowed to go to school, because she was Jewish.  She went home to find her house locked and boarded up.  Her father was arrested; her mother in hiding at her aunt’s.  After weeks of terror, she was sent to England on the kindertransport, the special trains that took children to safety.  The rest of her family was murdered.  I heard Hedy on the radio a few days ago—just a snatch of an interview.  “Don’t give me your tears about the Holocaust,” she said.  “I lost my entire family.  Don’t desecrate their memory by using it to justify Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.”

Caoimhe Butterly—she was our contact in the Balata refugee camp when I first went to Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement in 2002.  She spent a year living in Jenin, standing as a witness whenever the Israeli army invaded.  I can still picture her, striding throught the camps like a red-haired Celtic Amazon Goddess, larger than life, towering over the rest of us and utterly fearless, with the kids from the camps calling after her…Cuiva! Cuiva!  She would walk up to a tank and place her hand over the muzzle.  She’s been shot once, already, in the leg—and thrown out of the country.   Whatever is happening to Caoimhe, I know she’s glad to be there.  She would feel much, much worse to be somewhere else, reading about it happening to other people.

I could have been on that flotilla—might well have been had I not gone on the Gaza Freedom March last winter and expended all the time and energy and money I could spare at the moment.   Instead, I’m in the most idyllic place imaginable—the Village Building Convergence in Portland, Oregon, one of the most creative and inspiring political actions anywhere, ever—with hordes of sweet, beautiful, loving young people transforming neighborhoods with natural building.  The sheer contrast is making my head ache.

Partly, I feel horrible that I’m not there with these four brave women I feel proud to call my friends.  Partly—if I’m honest—I feel relieved and grateful not to be.  And partly, I feel guilty for feeling relieved and grateful

So, I do what I can do.  I write—as if I could pin them with words, fix them into existence, bring them alive on the page and hold them to life.  That’s what I do.  It’s very little.  But this is one of the moments when all of us are called to do at least some little thing, to raise our voices against a huge injustice.

Below are some links—to information, suggestions for actions.   Call, write, go to a demonstration—at the very least, read and educate yourself.  This world is too bright and beautiful a place to collude by our silence with murder.

Website of the Free Gaza flotilla:

http://www.freegaza.org/

Video and breaking news:

http://witnessgaza.com/

What to do, who to call and a template letter to send:

http://palsolidarity.org/2010/05/12586/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+palsolidarity+%28International+Solidarity+Movement%29

What have I been doing?  Working on some long-term writing projects.  Working on something big, like a book, for me is a bit like diving underwater.  It requires a kind of ruthlessness, putting everything else aside—as much as that is possible.  I’ve had a few months now—a rare period of not travelling and diving into bigger pieces of work.  And honestly, I’ve loved it.  It’s what I thought a writer’s life would be like, and so rarely is.  For the reason that writing, as a career, as a way to make the house payments and put food on the table, is not really about writing, unless you happen to be Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.  It’s actually a career of lecturing and teaching, punctuated by short periods at the computer.  Lecturing and teaching require answering emails and writing up course descriptions and sending out announcements and a thousand other details that eat up time.  Then there’s catching cold and being forced to retire to bed with a whole season of Grey’s Anatomy.  I love medical dramas—no matter how much your sinuses ache, at least you’re not being helicoptered into Seattle Grace with a spike through your abdomen.  No matter how unsympathetic your housemates and partners might be, at least Doctor House is not ordering thousands of dollars worth of invasive, painful medical tests and ordering his beleaguered interns to try some drastic, toxic treatment that will kill you if he’s guessed wrongly about the obscure cause of your suffering.

So, underwater with a big project, when you occasionally surface for air you’re also subject to constant demands to write this little thing or that little article—none of which you’re getting paid for but which have some promise of good to be attained.  The internet is a great way to get people who once maybe made some kind of living by writing to work ten times as long and hard for free.

The result—the blog falls on the back burner.

So, what can I say?  I’ve been doing Helpful Things to Change the World.  Someday you might get the benefit of those longer term projects—or they might sit in my Documents file forever and never find a publisher.  I’ve been teaching kids in Bayview Hunters Point how to garden.  I bought a bellydance workout tape which sometimes I actually put on.  I’ve been taking long walks in this beautiful green spring.  My favorite wild irises, white with a blush of lavendar, have bloomed and faded.

And now that I’m about to start in on my summer travels, I’ll try to do better.

I wasn’t with Rachel when she died, but I went down to Gaza a few days later to support the team that was with her.  I heard their debrief by Doctors Without Borders—the eyewitness descriptions of what happened.  Rachel had been talking to the bulldozer operator just a few moments before her death.  She was standing in front of him, clearly visible in an orange fluorescent vest.  He proceeded forward—she went down.  The Israeli military conducted a perfunctory investigation, and exonerated him, as they have done in all but a very few cases of civilian deaths, whether of international activists or of Palestinians.

Today, Rachel Corrie’s  parents are in Israel and Palestine pursuing a civil suit against the Israeli government, to hold them accountable for Rachel’s unlawful death.

http://rachelcorriefoundation.org/2010/03/871

Another suit is being waged by the parents of Tristan Anderson, another ISM activist and a long time friend of mine who is still recovering from severe brain damage suffered when an Israeli soldier shot him at close range with a tear gas canister.  http://justicefortristan.org/

These deaths are a window into the larger culture of impunity that pervades the Israeli military.  According to figures provided to the Israeli Human Rights organization Yesh Din, during the years of the second intifada, between September 2000 and June 2007,  90% of investigations of criminal offenses in which Israeli Defense Forces harmed or killed Palestinians ended with the files being closed and without indictments being filed.  And out of the 239 investigations on killing and injury of Palestinian civilians, less than 7% resulted in convictions—only 16 cases.

http://www.yesh-din.org/site/index.php?page=criminal&lang=en

Impunity compounds injustice.  When the powerful are not held accountable for their crimes, two standards are created.  There’s Good Violence—which is what the state and the more powerful do to the less powerful, and Bad Violence, which is what the less powerful do to resist.  Good Violence is heroic while Bad Violence is vile, cowardly terrorism.  When the Hammas in Gaza fires rockets and kill three Israeli civilians—that’s Bad Violence (and it is bad, a war crime.)   But when Israel in retaliation invades Gaza and kills fourteen hundred Palestinians and destroys four thousand homes, that’s Good Violence, and anyone who opposes it or asks for accountability is most likely Bad and Violent themselves.  Even nonviolence is Bad Violence when it opposes the Good Violence of the state.  So Israel continues to imprison the organizers of the nonviolent civil resistance that continues to grow in the West Bank.

http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/publish/article_1253.shtml

Critics of Israel are always taken to task for singling out Israel when other countries also commit injustices.  So it is only fair to say that Israel is not alone in its culture of impunity.  Britain, for example, has recently cracked down with draconian sentences for the Muslim and non-white protestors who participated in a march for Gaza during the Israeli invasion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/25/anti-muslim-hatred-threat-to-all

And, of course, Israel could not continue its policies without the blanket support of the United States.  We fund and support the violence, and until we withdraw that support, it will not cease.

But why should we hold Israel accountable when we have let Bush, Cheney and the other authors of our own human rights crimes go free?    While the young people who organized meeting spaces and housing for the protests against the Republican National Convention in 2008 are still facing trial for ‘terrorism’.

http://rnc8.org/

The moral would seem to be—if you want to kill, maim and torture—do it on a big scale.  The larger the scale, the more likely you are to get away with it.

But if you stand against violence, if you believe that every human being is sacred and precious and deserves dignity and respect, if you champion the weak against the strong, the powerless against the overwhelmingly powerful, watch out!

Nonetheless, something in us continues to cry out for a better world.  Seven years ago, Rachel Corrie took a big risk, and paid with her life.  Today, do a small thing in her memory.  Call the White House and urge Obama to send Middle East envoy George Mitchell to Gaza, and to end the siege that prevents food, humanitarian aid and rebuilding supplies to enter.  A warning—it will take you a long time to get through—there’s a lot of us raising our voices today.  And more tomorrow, and tomorrow—until the justice is done!  Here’s the number: 202-456-1111.

Jewish Voice for Peace:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/301/signUp.jsp?key=4966

Amnesty International report on Gaza:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/impunity-war-crimes-gaza-southern-israel-recipe-further-civilian-suffering-20090702

International Solidarity Movement:

http://www.palsolidarity.org