R.I.P.

Charity Hicks, a Detroit social activist and policy director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, died on Tuesday in a New York hospital. Early on May 31^st, Charity was waiting for a bus to take her to a panel discussion when a car veered off 10^th Avenue, slammed into a hydrant and the bus stop sign, which fell on Charity’s head. She never awakened from her coma. Despite having his car, eyewitness descriptions and a first name, the police have not yet arrested the driver who fled the scene.

I met Charity several years ago at the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont. She was wearing, as she always did, African clothes of bright colors and speaking in rhetorical cascades about the world’s injustices. Heir more to the Black Power than the Civil Rights movement,  she fought for dignity for all people. She devoted her life to Detroit’s oppressed, focusing on food and water security, supporting her extended family on a part-time university stipend. In May, while demonstrating against the city shutting off water to the poor, she was jailed. “The conditions,” she said, “are meant to shame you, demoralize you, criminalize you and break you down.”

She was a fighter with a very human heart, filled at times with self-doubt, subject to depression, yearning for peace in places she would never visit. “My work is in the city,” she once said. “But my heart is in the wild.”

Charity was my friend. I will miss her big heart. 

Cut Off From the World

Yesterday morning, with the sun still low in the southeast and the temperature barely into the teens, two inches of fresh snow stretched beneath a cloudless blue sky. There was no hint of wind, and the smooth white surface was broken only by solitary animal tracks and the long, intricate shadows of the trees. There were no sounds but the intermittent chirping of birds, singing not with the exuberance of spring, but quietly, as if in awe of the day and grateful for life itself. A yellow wheelbarrow lay on its side, at rest from its seasonal labors. The world seemed totally still. At a wedding last summer, my son Daniel met one of Jose Padilla’s lawyers, who described to him a living man who no longer existed. Padilla, you may remember, was convicted of aiding overseas terrorists after being held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” and subjected to a menu of “sensory deprivation” techniques that cut him off completely from the world in which he had once lived. Confined to a 9’x7’ cell without natural light, denied sleep, bombarded with loud noise and bright lights, he lost all sense of time and place and self. Whenever he was moved, he wore earphones and a blindfold. “I looked into his eyes,” the attorney told Daniel, “and there was nothing there. I was looking into a shell.”

To be severed from the beauty of a world that comes through our five senses seems the most unconscionable torture of all.

Those Poor Poor

In an apparent coincidence, Warsaw is hosting both the International Coal and Climate Summit and the United Nations’ Convention on Climate Change. Guess which one the Poles, who rely on coal for 90% of their electricity, like better? While the two meetings have little in common but the word “climate”, both emphasize the impact of coal on “the poor”. Unsurprisingly, they see things differently. There are “1.3 billion people in the world who live without electricity,” said Godfrey Gomwe, of the World Coal Association. “A life lived without access to modern energy is a life lived in poverty.” Coal is here to stay.

Across town, representatives of some of the world’s poorest countries argue that, far from paving the way out of poverty, coal is the major contributor to climate change, whose impacts are already overwhelming the poor. They talk of “climate injustice” and demand compensation.

There seems little likelihood much will change. “Lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy makers and their publics,” said Todd Stern, America’s climate envoy. Meanwhile, the U.S., which has scaled way back on domestic coal use, now exports millions of tons to Asia.

So we are left with a conundrum: the only path to prosperity we understand is an economic growth so dependent on energy extraction that it threatens to become our road to ruin. In either case, the primary victims are the poor, real people who have become an abstraction. We need a different way.

Context Matters

To understand something, you must know the context in which it occurs. Take, for example, the phrase, “No need to dress for dinner.” Its meaning differed markedly when uttered on 1930s Park Avenue or 1960s Haight Ashbury. In the former, it meant, you don’t need to put on white tie and tails – what Bertie Wooster called ''the full soup-and-fish”. In the latter, if you came over in anything more than your sandals, you’d probably be overdressed. So too with Obamacare. Some people are so pathologically obsessed with it that they drown out rational debate with barrages of invective against the law and the man for whom it is named. Others, however, talk reasonably about the program’s huge future costs and the unseemly legislative process that turned a good intention into a garbage bag of special interests. We should listen to them. But I hope we also consider the full context of the national conversation. America has over 48 million people without health insurance, which among other things causes 48,000 preventable deaths annually. Estimates of covering them are high: a 5% increase in health spending, about 1% of GDP. The costs of not covering them are staggering on two levels. The first is the impact on our economy from the combination of ultimately higher treatment outlays and lost productivity of the uninsured, both of which are eventually borne by taxpayers. The second is the impact on our community from tolerating the presence of such a large marginalized group. Life is short; dignity is precious.

Public Rights and Private Parts

Those who insist the Supreme Court did not eviscerate the Voting Rights Act last month, when it declared a key part of it unconstitutional, argue that the five-justice majority simply demanded that Congress update the data to reflect the realities of 2013 instead of 1965. They believe the South is being unfairly labeled as racist long after it has changed its ways. Maybe so, but much of what I read makes it clear that if you are poor and black, you do not want to live in the deep South – although it's pretty hard to get out. The latest case in point: a study of upward mobility, released by the Equality-of-Opportunity Project and analyzed by 24/7 Wall Street, found that the 10 cities in which the poor are most severely trapped in poverty are: Memphis, Tenn; Clarksdale, Miss; Greenville, Miss; Columbus, Ga; Auburn, Ala; Wilson, N.C; Montgomery, Ala; Albany, Ga; Spartanburg. S.C; and Atlanta, Ga. All 10 are in the old Confederacy and all have significant African-American populations. Does this prove they violate the Voting Rights Act? No. But it does help us understand why Congress left the old formula intact when it extended the act for 25 years in 2006. The increasingly activist court majority overturned that legislative decision in June. Meanwhile, we learn that Anthony Weiner, under the sobriquet of Carlos Danger, continued to text photos of his crotch to unsuspecting women while undergoing therapy for texting photos of his crotch to unsuspecting women. And while he is polling second in New York’s mayoral race, it’s not even fun to make fun of him anymore. He needs help, not attention.

The People’s Parks

What is it about parks? From People’s Park in Berkeley to Uhuru Park in Nairobi to Gezi Park in Istanbul, governments have violently suppressed grassroots opposition to plans to convert public land to private use. At 4:30 a.m. on May 15, 1969, “Bloody Thursday,” California Governor Ronald Reagan’s unannounced decision to send troops to take back “People’s Park”* left one student protester dead, another blind and hundreds more hospitalized. In 1992, Kenyan President Daniel arap-Moi ordered his thugs to beat Wangari Maathai unconscious for protesting the proposed construction of a 60-story office complex in Uhuru Park. (Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize 12 years later.) Last Saturday night Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the storming of Gezi Park, where protests against replacing the last significant green space in Istanbul with “an Ottoman-themed shopping mall” had escalated into broad rage against the government.

Three parks, decades and worlds apart, become epicenters of popular protest, which three elected officials brutally crush. Why? Parks are the epitome of the people’s land, open to all, owned by none. They are some of the last refuges from the chaos of modern urban life. And the public insistence on their sanctity threatens the growing determination of corporate and political institutions to sell off what little remains of the commons.

These places of tranquility have become battlegrounds for all who oppose privatizing the public square. Parks are the antithesis of the gated community, and their protection is everyone’s fight.

*The University of California at Berkeley owned the land.

American Terror

“Please, Daddy, please get up!” Fifty years ago last night, Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, shot in the back by Byron De La Beckwith of the White Citizens Council. Because it collides head on with our national myths of liberty, democracy and equality, it is hard for white Americans to fully grasp – or accept – the often-subterranean violence that erupted into the open in the early 1960s. “They hate our freedoms,” George Bush told the nation after 9/11, “our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” These were precisely the freedoms that black Americans were demanding 40 years earlier and that led to a backlash of terror – a terror that so disfigured the tortured body of 14-year-old Emmett Till that his mother insisted on an open casket to wake up the world; that bombed the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls; that kidnapped and killed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner one night in Mississippi. It was, in fact, the kind of terrorism we associate with al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas.

In the face of that terror arose one of the most extraordinary movements in history, as thousands of anonymous people rode buses, sat in at lunch counters and registered to vote, endured beatings and bombings unprotected by the state and unsupported by the public, and maintained a disciplined commitment to non-violence in the greatest demonstration of courage this country has ever witnessed.

“We Lost Our Compass”

“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases. We lost our compass.” James Jones, co-chair, Task Force on Detainee Treatment. Almost a half century ago, when I was stationed in Europe, I asked a Dutch friend how she had learned her flawless English. She told me that, after the Allied liberation of her country, all Dutch schools taught English from kindergarten on. “We loved everything American,” she said. Our subsequent efforts at liberation haven’t gone as well. The images of hands desperately grabbing at helicopters lifting off from the embassy in Saigon in 1975 remain vivid, and they have been updated in Afghanistan by stories of interpreters who cannot get exit visas and fear for their lives and the lives of their families. Are we to think that Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghans are less able to understand their own liberation than Europeans were? Or has something changed in how we wage war?

After World War II, the United States pushed for the prosecution of Nazi officials for war crimes, including torture, at Nuremburg. According to the bipartisan report on detainee treatment released yesterday, “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture,” which was approved by the president. Our actions, it concluded, were both unjustified and ineffective. Above all, they violated our values. “The United States has a historic and unique character,” said Asa Hutchinson, task force co-chair and undersecretary for Homeland Security in the Bush Administration, “and part of that character is that we do not torture.” Unfortunately, according to his own report, we do.

They Endure

The last words of The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s tale of aristocratic family disintegration and underclass survival, kept running through my mind as I flew home last week. “They endured,” he wrote of Dilsey, the matriarch of the black family that had served the Comptons for generations and witnessed the white family’s self-destruction. I was trying to make sense of my short visit to Burma (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar), and those two words seemed to offer a clue. The Burmese have endured half a century of one of the world’s most repressive military governments, one that brutally crushed any dissent and created an Orwellian surveillance network that kept its aptly named Insein Prison overflowing. Actually, life hadn’t been that great before: Burma was ravaged by Japanese and Allied fighting in World War II, which followed a century of British rule, when the “white man’s burden” was carried on the brown man’s shoulders.

Last year, “the generals” shifted gears. Without explanation, they loosened their harsh rein and opened up the country to the outside world. The speculation is they need both hard currency and a counterweight to China. People in Burma talked more freely than I had expected, but their answer to any question about the future was a fatalistic, “We don’t know.” As a tourist I went where I was told and saw what I was meant to see, but still I carried away a deep respect for the resilience of a people who endure.

Dystopia

Imagine a future with no past. It’s impossible to do so because time doesn’t work that way, and yet this is the great totalitarian dream, manifest most recently in the efforts of fanatical Islamic rebels to destroy the rich manuscripts and artifacts of the Golden Age of Timbuktu. Reminiscent of when the Taliban dynamited the magnificent 6^th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan’s central valley 12 years ago, the rebels sought to eradicate the centuries of history and foundation of an ancient culture that live for their people in the sacred books and statuary. While we naturally and rightly save our most empathic horror for the atrocities committed against living people, there is something almost as appalling about the destruction of a people’s cultural past. It is what makes us who we are. It is why we write books and create art in the first place. And totalitarian regimes – Stalin’s purges, Mao’s cultural revolution, the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero – strive to eradicate all vestiges of it. In fact, it is the goal of most Utopian visions – even the American melting pot: Henry Ford used to have his company’s workers participate in a pageant in which they would march into a huge black pot, dressed in their impossibly backward ethnic costumes, and march out the other side purged of their Old-World idiosyncrasies and looking exactly alike. In Mali, where they have been risking their lives to save their identities for centuries, people know firsthand that the totalitarian’s dream is the human’s nightmare.

"Trustworthy, loyal, helpful . . .

. . . friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Full disclosure: I have never liked the Boy Scouts. Many years ago I joined the Cub Scouts, mostly to get the blue-and-gold uniform so I could reenact western cavalry campaigns in the back yard. I was an indifferent scout, forever behind in the pursuit of my next badge or arrowhead. Born during World War II, I found the image of smiling blond adolescents and their adult leaders espousing the strenuous life, dressed in uniforms that featured short pants and chest medals, frightening even then. Anyway, my mother was hardly the den mother type, so I always had to go to meetings in other boys’ basements.

Later, when I published a newspaper in rural Pennsylvania, the Boy Scouts were a constant thorn, demanding coverage but refusing to recruit minority members – even after the United Way defunded them for discrimination. The Girl Scouts, by contrast, reached out to everyone, eagerly seeking Spanish-speaking members among the growing population of migrant workers.

Yesterday’s reports that the Boy Scouts are considering lifting their longtime ban against gays seem suspect. Under intense corporate pressure (UPS threatens to stop its funding; the Family Research Council counter-threatens to boycott UPS), the Scouts appear ready to punt on a national policy change and kick the issue to the local level. It’s time for an organization that suppressed thousands of internal files documenting decades of sexual abuse to clean up its act and open its doors.

Courage

I missed the president’s inaugural speech yesterday because I was part of a panel commemorating Martin Luther King’s visit to a small boys’ school in 1963. As I listened to the tape of King’s speech, I thought of the impact his presence had on me then, and I also thought that, despite all the changes of the intervening years, including the events in Washington, King could have given much the same speech today. As I listened to my co-panelists – Bill Forsyth, who spent 1964-5 in Mississippi with the Congress of Racial Equality, and Roger Daly, who registered black voters in Alabama with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – I was reminded of the courage of so many people of all races in those years. Bill was arrested three times. Roger, who was arrested four times, was finally driven from the South after one man held a gun to his head and three others beat him to a pulp. He had been our football captain, and a want of aggression had not marked his character, but nonviolent resistance was the hallmark of the civil rights movement, and for Roger, who had always hated bullying, nonviolence was the cornerstone of his commitment. We should not forget that all the violence of those bloody days was perpetrated by one side, and Roger spoke of living in constant fear, of being a double outsider – hated by whites and mistrusted by fearful blacks – and of being ashamed of leaving. I write to honor both his courage and his honesty.