For my service project this semester, I participated in Boston's Walk For Hunger on Sunday.
The Walk for Hunger is organized by Project Bread, the leading anti-hunger organization in Massachusetts. According to the Project Bread website, over 42,000 people participated in the walk, raising over 3.8 million dollars. This was my first year participating in the walk, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I was glad that the walk was so well-attended, despite the boil water order over the weekend.
Both Akiko and Kalinka participated in the walk as well. After meeting up at Bunker Hill, team BHCC took the orange line down to the Boston Common.
The entire walk is a hefty 20 miles, covering the towns of Brookline, Newton, Watertown, and Cambridge before returning to Boston. Every two miles, there are checkpoints with volunteers handing out water to keep the walkers hydrated.
At the 10-mile half-way point, there was an open field for walkers to take a break at. There were tents set up providing food and refreshments, as well as first aid and shuttle buses back to the Common if walkers were too tired to go on.
After walking one more mile, Kalinka and I decided to catch the next bus back, with Akiko continuing on. We made it a little over half-way through the walk, walking over 11 miles in about 5 hours.
Overall, the walk was a lot of fun, and I'll try to make it again next year.
After the historian and activist Howard Zinn passed away recently, there were a number of nice obituaries about his life accomplishments, as well as his strong character. Noam Chomsky, another well know activist and close friend of Zinns, had a made a particularly great comment on what made Zinn so special.
“People saw him as a leader, but he was really a participant. His remarkable character made him a leader, even if he was just sitting on the—you know, waiting for the police to pull people away like everyone else.”
It is exactly this quality that stands out the most to me when I think of the people I admire the most in this country. So this is what I had in mind when thinking of an “American Hero” to cover in this unit. The labor and immigration activist César Chávez is someone who fits this standard. Chávez was the founder of the United Farm Workers, a union devoted to improving the working conditions of people working in agriculture. As a Mexican-American farm worker, Chávez found the working conditions for Latinos working in farms to be deplorable. He became involved in organizing protests and eventually became a well-known advocate for the Latino community in California. He eventually took on other issues, becoming a champion for civil rights, workers rights, and the anti-war movement.
The following clip is a re-enactment of one of his speeches, protesting the Vietnam war.
This is my favorite anti-war song. "And the band played Waltzing Mathilda" was originally written in 1971 Eric Bogle. This is the version performed by The Pogues, which I find to be the most powerful cover. While the song was originally written about the Battle of Gallipoli in World War 1, there are many universal themes about war in it that make the song especially relevant today.
Although the events recollected occurred almost 100 years ago, it is just as relevant today as when it was originally based. With a much more advanced medical presence in combat areas today, the number of fatalities has been reduced significantly. As a result, the number of survivors with permanent disabilities has drastically increased as well. In the song the protagonist has had his legs blown off, and as he arrives home and is being carried off his ship, the welcoming band plays the traditional Australian folk song "Waltzing Matilda". This soldier is not unaware to the irony of this, as he can no longer waltz as a result of the war. I've always loved this metaphor, and how the lyrics are subtle in articulating it. As the song closes with the haunting question, "Who'll go-a-waltzing Matilda with me?" I'm always struck by the despair in that line. It is impossible for me to relate to the level of alienation a solider must feel upon returning from combat, especially if they've had a significant injury. Most of us will thankfully never experience the horrors of that situation, but we should never be passive to those who try to romanticize it as being something glorious and necessary.
It takes a powerful speaker to simultaneously claim two opposing standpoints, and convincingly present them as if there is no contradiction. And that is precisely what President Obama accomplished in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, where he subjected the prize committee to his rendition of the Orwellian mantra “War is Peace”.
In expressing the unease he felt about accepting the prize under his current circumstances, President Obama contemplated the words Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at the same award ceremony years ago.
“'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.' As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.”
Yet it is increasingly becoming unclear who or what that threat is, if it was ever clear in the first place.
On May 31, 2009, abortion doctor George Tiller was shot and killed during a church service by Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion activist.
On June 10th, 2009, white supremacist and Holocaust denier James Wennekervon Brunn shot and killed security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns during an attempted shooting spree at the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC.
On November 5, 2009, U.S. Army major Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree, killing 13 people and wounding 30 others at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. While his motivation remains unclear, there has been some speculation that he had ties to Anwar al-Awlaki, a known al-Qaeda recruiter.
On Christmas day, a wealthy young man from Niger, attempted to blow up the airliner he was on with explosives planted in his underwear.
On February 18th, Joseph Stack, a disgruntled software engineer, flew his private plan into the IRS building in Austin Texas. In the attack he injured 13 employees and claimed the life of Vernon Hunter, an IRS manager and war veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam.
Even as I type this, the news is reporting that an IRS office in Ogden, Utah is being evacuated after the discovery of a mysterious white substance found in an envelope.
None of these terrorist attacks were planned or commenced from the mountainous regions of the Afghan-Pakistan border or in Baghdad, Iraq. How can Obama claim to be facing the “world as it is” when this “world as it is” is not isolated to the middle-east? The words of Dr. King and Mohandas Gandhi should not be trivialized as a luxury that pragmatic heads of states cannot afford, when those very claims to realism buckle under closer investigation. It may be that the words of King and Gandhi resonated the most with the war-weary and the underprivileged, but their activism was not mere preaching to the choir. Their words apply just as much to the President of the United States as the solider fighting in Afghanistan, or the Iranian protesting in the streets of Tehran.
In keeping with his notions of moral justice and national values, the President went on to deliver this observation:
“we lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend”
I wonder now what ideals President Obama was defending when he signed a one-year extension of the Patriot Act on Saturday, with no provisions made to protect privacy. I had assumed those ideals he was referring to in Norway were the right to privacy, or as Obama himself said during his 2004 keynote speech at the DNC, the freedom to “say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door”. It now appears that what he was defending was the right of executive privilege, and of systematic invasion into peoples personal lives under the guise of national security.
When tackling the issue of climate change, this line stuck out to me the most:
“It's also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement -- all of which will fuel more conflict for decades.”
This sobering statement seemed to show that our commander in chief was taking initiative in anticipating not only the natural disasters that climate change threatens us with, but also the very real possibility of eco-terrorism. It also hinted at a reversal of the Bush Doctrine, which justified the US in preemptively declaring war on a nation that is perceived to be threatening, to what could have been a bold new Obama Doctrine, where we preemptively confront conflict with diplomacy and negotiation before they boil over into acts of terrorism and violence.
Yet only one week later, when President Obama arrived at Copenhagen for the international summit to confront climate change, this attitude of collective cooperation and bold action seemed to dissipate as well. What we got was a much different scene, a scene that journalist Naomi Klein described as:
“...a particular model of dealing with climate change is dying. It is revealing itself before the world as nothing more than a final scramble for the remaining resources of a planet in peril. That’s what’s going on at the Bella Center. And when you’re in there, you can feel it. It feels really ugly.”
The lack of a legally-binding agreement amongst nations to drastically cut emissions was seen by many as a squandered opportunity on part of President Obama. For all his talk of the US becoming a world leader in the production of green-technologies and standing up to the challenges that climate change presents us with, it seemed like President Obama's participation in the summit was at best no more than a photo op, and at worst a cop-out to corporate interests.
I say all this with Cornell West's reaction upon hearing about the Nobel Prize in mind, saying that we need to “keep [Obama] accountable and loving, and self-critical not self-righteous.” In fact, I'll end this post with a video of what Cornell West had to say, as I think he promptly sums up my motivation for writing what I've tried to express here:
Thoughts on Goodridge vs. the Department of Public Health
One of the interesting aspects of the current push for LGBT acceptance is that New England is at the forefront for legalizing marriage and other non-discrimination bills. While politically progressive, there is still a lingering attachment to our more puritan past, where talking openly about sexuality is still generally frowned upon. Of course, with every generation these standards have loosened up dramatically, it is still strange that the more culturally liberal states such as California can't get gay marriage permanently passed. One wouldn't consider my homestate of New Hampshire as having a thriving gay community compared to New York and California, yet it just passed a gay marriage bill into law through a majority vote in congress.
I remember a few years ago, congressman Barney Frank predicted that once a few states got the ball rolling on passing gay marriage, more states would follow suit at an increasing rapid rate. Fortunately, the trend seems to be going in this direction, on several different fronts.
On the awareness front, many advocacy organizations have reached out to public schools and have given students the tools to start local chapters in their own schools. I remember when the gay-straight alliance opened a chapter at my high school, and over a relatively short period of time has become one of the most popular gay rights organizations targeting young people.
On the more legalistic front, Massachusetts should be held as a model for making the legal arguments against discrimination. After all, our state constitution was also used as a model for most of the state constitutions in New England. One of the lines that stuck out to me in Goodridge vs. the Department of Public Health was towards the end: "The Constitution cannot control such prejudices but neither can it tolerate them. Private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect." California, for all its history on gay rights advocacy, seems to have systematic issues preventing it from doing the right thing. Awareness to the specific issues afflicting the LGBT community is of course important and necessary, but there seems to be a lack in making a general constitutional argument of overturning discriminatory practices.
Once the military makes the right choice and repeals “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”, and when everyone can see that there is no detrimental effect on military morale by allowing gay members to serve openly, my hope is that this will alleviate the stigma on gay marriage. It would be hard to use the same allusions of a breakdown of moral order by allowing gay marriage, when one of the most disciplined military powers in the world can maintain and even excel by allowing members to serve openly.
I've always found the contrast between the philosophies between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. very thought provoking. There is a lot more attention paid to Martin Luther King Jr. when the civil rights movement is talked about, and understandably so, as Malcolm X's earlier rhetoric is extremist and his endorsement of violence now seems naïve. Yet I find Malcolm X's story and his many transformations to be fascinating, and his speech here is an important insight into where the movement might have gone.
I can't help but wonder how big the role of the black nationalist movement was in the passing of civil rights. Often times it is the work of the more peaceful activists (the ones that I support both philosophically and strategically) that get the credit for bringing about social change. However, the lingering threat of violence must have impacted congress in some way. While there were a number of well thought-out strategies, such as spending your money within your own community, and electing only black candidates to public office, there was also an undercurrent of the threat of violence against white people as a last resort.
Eventually Malcolm X would renounce this racist sentiment, and was eventually assassinated himself for doing so. Yet, he never got absorbed into the mainstream the way Martin Luther King Jr. did. You simply don't hear many white people singing Malcolm X's praises. This is a good thing, in my opinion. There is a tendency for mainstream white America to assimilate movements and the “good” activist leaders into itself. While Martin Luther King Jr. was also seen as a radical in his time, today you would be hard pressed to find a mainstream white person who would dispute his greatness. Malcolm X does not get the same treatment. He has remained a controversial figure, and will hopefully remain this way. Because as far as this country has come in the last 50 years, we still have a long way to go. The assertion that we are all of the sudden “post-racial” because we elected Barack Obama as president is nonsense. There is still only one black member of the Senate (and even he got there under dubious circumstances). The House fairs marginally better, with 42 members in a 435-member caucus. There is also the complicated issue of “tokenism” in this post-racial sentiment. This is one of the points that Malcolm X got at that I absolutely agree with. While I strive to be knowledgeable to the various forms of discrimination that a black person has to put up with, I also am aware that I will never fully understand what it is like to live as a black person. I'm not by any means suggesting apathy towards black issues, but a more humbled attitude of not taking on black issues as my own, with the arrogant assumption that I completely understand them. On the other hand, I think it should be obvious to say that the success of Barack Obama does not represent the collective condition of every single black person in America. Yet he is often portrayed this way in the media, which I think is a form of racial tokenism. Whether this is done intentionally to obstruct debate or an actual display of ignorance by the mainstream media, I'm not sure, but regardless it is still harmful to portray race issues in this manner.
After reading Margaret Sanger's “Morality of Birth Control” and then watching Betty Friedan's interview, I thought it was interesting how much the feminist movement had changed ideologically, but at the same time the opposition to it had remained relatively consistent. When Margaret Sanger was advocating the use of contraceptives, she spoke about the claim that advocating such a thing would degrade the morality of women in society. She was quick to make the point that this has always been the claim by the church and other patriarchal institutions whenever there was a push for advancement in women's rights. This is similar to the opposition that Betty Friedan talked about, when the media depicting feminists as all being “bra-burners” and how they portray feminism as something that poses a threat to men.
When I think of what it means to be a woman today, I rely on information that woman's rights advocates as well as female friends and family of mine for understanding. One of the things I feel conflicted about is the division between the more pragmatic equal rights advocacy that is mainstream, and the more complicated feminist theory that seems constrained to the world of academia. I felt like I was more sympathetic towards Betty Friedan's interpretation of what a woman goes through, in that she included men and children as victims of the ongoing discrimination. She seemed to have advocate a more all-encompassing interpretation of woman's equality, in that we are all impacted by discrimination against woman.
As a man, I've noticed how advertising in particular tries to exploit a (in my opinion, misguided) fear that men are not only loosing their value in society, but that we need fight back against this. This is my favorite example of this, run during the Superbowl:
Now, I can relate to only one of the things listed in this ad. This ad is very effective in this way, because out of the entire list, there is bound to be one or two things that a man can relate to. Yet, it's presented as all of the annoyances listed off are things that all men put up with on a regular basis. And then there is the implication that all of these things are not manly (Personally I eat fruit in the morning because, well, I like fruit. I also shave because I look stupid with facial hair. I have had girlfriends whose mothers I got along with fine, I didn't feel forced to act civil with them.)
This is exactly what makes Betty Friedan's comments important not just for women, but for men and children as well. With the media constantly implying that I, as a man, should be able to relate to its definition of masculinity and how I should resent my girlfriend when she will inevitably try to oppress me, this has led a lot of tension between the two sexes, that in reality aren't even real problems in the first place. For my part, I think advocating awareness of this not only benefits women, but I think will liberate men as well from the damaging feelings of being inadequate in their performative role.
It seems today that the way we lump the complex issue of race relations into two options, that of the “color blind” society, which claims that race should be ignored and that we should simply stop thinking about it, and that of the “multi-cultural” society, which encourages diversity and expression of one's cultural background. I argue that this presents a false choice, and undermines the standards at which true debate about racial identity and how it relates to american values should be approached. After all, when it comes to color blindness, who is setting up the perimeters in which color blindness exists? As Sonia Sotomayor makes clear in her speech, while the overall trend of woman and ethnic minorities in a judicial position has been increasing, there is still a major discrepancy between minorities and white men in judicial oversight. This fact should make any claim of “color blindness” immediately suspect: if the overwhelming majority of judges are white men, then it is awfully convenient that they would be deemed the neutral, objective authority under the claim of “color blindness”.
One of the things that makes this country so interesting is that it's culture is so dynamic, and it's interesting to see how people react to that dynamic element. This forces each of us to have a unique perspective on what it means to be an American. One person's idea of patriotism and of justice can be deemed treasonous and unjust by another. It is upholding this, in itself, that I think should be the source of our national identity.
