I suppose I'll just pick up where I left off. But first, I'm going to cross-post (and back-date) some posts I wrote this fall for WagingNonviolence.org. I hope that's not too confusing.
I've been applying to law school recently. That's right, I want to be a lawyer, with the goal of using the legal system to pursue justice and ya know, kick ass - reminiscent of this New Yorker cartoon:
No offense to optometrists, who really do kick ass.
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
The imprisonment of 2.3 million American citizens, comprising 1 in 99 adults, has been a “success,” according to columnist Ross Douthat in the New York Times:
For a generation now, conservatives, not Dukakis-style liberals, have been making policy on crime. They’ve built more prisons, imposed harsher sentences and locked up as many lawbreakers as possible. Their approach has worked. The violent crime rate has been cut by nearly 40 percent since its early-1990s peak. The murder rate is at its lowest point since Lyndon Johnson was president.
Except… facts are stubborn things.
Mass incarceration has indeed lowered the crime rate, but not by much. According to The Sentencing Project (pdf), three-quarters of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to factors other than incarceration, such as economic opportunity and treatment programs. Between 1998 and 2003, for example, states with stable or decreasing incarceration rates experienced the same average drop in crime as states with increasing incarceration rates.
In addition, “80% of the crime prevented by the incarceration of each additional prisoner is for nonviolent offenses,” continues The Sentencing Project, citing research. That undercuts Douthat’s implication that lower violent crime and murder rates can be attributed primarily to increasing rates of incarceration.
Douthat also ignores the “war on drugs,” a conspicuous oversight given its centrality to the lock-‘em-up ideology. The war on drugs is by most accounts a policy failure with no end in sight. While drug offenders packed our prisons, drugs became deadlier and more widespread. “If anything,” writes Georgetown law professor David Cole, “the war on drugs has probably increased the incidence of crime; about half of property crime, robberies, and burglaries are attributable to the inflated cost of drugs caused by criminalizing them.”
Mass incarceration is a human rights disaster that exacerbates race and class disparities. It would be widely condemned, Cole hypothesizes, if its effects weren’t “concentrated on the most deprived among us.” Ending this shameful chapter in American history involves not just alternatives to prisons, as Douthat ultimately recommends, but an honest account of their impact on crime.
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
Low-wage workers and community supporters gathered in more than forty cities across the U.S. on Thursday to condemn wage theft, the illegal underpayment or non-payment of wages. The National Day of Action to Stop Wage Theft was organized by Interfaith Worker Justice, a national alliance. Wage theft is a national crime wave that robs millions of workers of billions of dollars.
Low-wage workers in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles were cheated of an average $51 a week, according to a recent report co-authored by several universities, entitled, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in America’s Cities.” Among the workers surveyed, 1 in 4 were paid less than the legally-required minimum wage, and 3 out of 4 who worked overtime hours were not paid the legally-required overtime.
Employers were creative in stealing wages: promising higher wages but paying only the minimum, paying less than minimum wage, not paying for all hours worked, misclassifying workers as exempt from overtime pay, deducting equipment or transportation “fees” from paychecks, stealing tips, misclassifying workers as independent contractors, or simply not paying workers at all.
In July, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) introduced the Wage Theft Prevention Act (H.R. 3303), which begins the statute of limitations from the date the employer is notified instead of the date of the theft. Under current law, delays result in permanent loss of back pay. Legislation is also moving at the state-level. In Ohio this week, State Senator Morano introduced the Wage Protection Act, empowering the state commerce department to investigate more complaints.
But advocacy for workers happens at the day-to-day level by affiliates of the national Interfaith Worker Justice, such as the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers’ Center, which canvassed yesterday across the city to reach low-income workers. Since 2005, the small organization has taken over 500 wage theft reports and helped recover over $500,000 in unpaid wages. The Cincinnati group aims to empower workers to challenge dangerous working conditions and educate workers about how to defend their rights, including the rights of immigrants.
“I had to make decisions on whether to pay rent or buy food,” said Cincinnati resident Frazier Kidd, who explained his struggle after being cheated of promised wages. “Thou shalt not steal,” said Kim Bobo, Director of the national Interfaith Worker Justice. “It’s a pretty straightforward message.”
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
“America’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, whose cruelty we profiled in July, will be making fewer arrests on behalf of America.
Last month, the US Department of Homeland Security restricted Arpaio’s 287(g) contract. Named for section 287(g) of the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act, the 287(g) program authorizes police officers of participating agencies to act as immigration enforcement agents. Under the new contract, Arpaio’s deputies may no longer make immigration arrests in the field, only among inmates in his jails.
Nevertheless, Arpaio appears poised to continue harassing communities of color with his notorious, racially profiling “sweeps.” That’s not surprising given previous investigations showing Arpaio would rather use limited public safety funds to round up taxpaying people instead of promptly replying to 911 calls.
In restricting Arpaio’s ability to make immigration arrests, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparently responded to numerous complaints, including a high-profile letter to President Obama criticizing the entire 287(g) program. In a feat of organizational prowess, the letter was signed by over 500 advocacy groups organized by the National Immigration Law Center.
But stripping Arpaio of his full contract does not go far enough. Rampant abuses of police power across the U.S. (such as in Cobb County, Georgia, as the ACLU documented) indicate that Arpaio was not just a bad apple, but that 287(g) is a racist and counterproductive program that should be terminated altogether.
287(g) undermines public safety because immigrant communities stop cooperating with the police, even hesitating to call the fire department, according to law enforcement groups like The Police Foundation. As L.A. Police Chief William Bratton explained, “My officers can’t prevent or solve crimes if victims or witnesses are unwilling to talk to us because of the fear of being deported.”
The Hispanic Congressional Caucus recently sent a letter to President Obama asking him to terminate all 287(g) agreements and end the program because the “misuse of the 287(g) program by its current participants has rendered it ineffective and dangerous to community safety.” For similar reasons, a government task force of national security experts also panned the program.
Federal officials have pledged greater oversight of 287(g) including directing police to focus on serious crimes and to abide by anti-discrimination laws (as if police were not bound by anti-discrimination laws before). Numerous task forces, reports, and personal accounts of victimized people indicate that 287(g) programs endanger our safety and codify racist abuses. But under the Obama Administration, the flawed program is slated to persist and sadly, even expand.
Follow the National Immigration Law Center for a smarter immigration policy.
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
The high walls of prison complexes don’t just keep prisoners in; they keep the public out. That’s nowhere more true than in long-term solitary confinement – prisons within prisons – where people can spend years alone and forgotten.
The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Rights For Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities, have long organized against solitary confinement, often euphemized by administrators as “segregation” or “the special housing unit” but known to prisoners as “the box” or “the hole.” Thanks to one ACLU lawsuit, it is now illegal in Indiana to keep mentally ill prisoners in extreme isolation.
Atul Gawande called long-term solitary confinement nothing short of torture in a powerful New Yorker article, “Hellhole.” I sought to add to Gawande’s account by describing ordinary life in solitary confinement. I interviewed Ohio inmate Sean Swain who’s had “seven or eight” stints in solitary confinement since 1991, as well as Shirley Pope, director of Ohio’s Correctional Institution Inspection Committee (CIIC), authorized by the state legislature to inspect prisons.
In Ohio in 2007, approximately 1 in 25 prisoners lived in isolation at any one time. It’s not known how many people live in isolation at some point during their sentence. Some 25,000 U.S. prisoners are isolated at “supermax prisons,” with another 50-80,000 at other prisons, according to Gawande’s article.
Swain detailed the conditions: Insects swarmed around lighting fixtures. Tube-lighting was never shut off. Soap and toilet paper were sometimes lacking. Prisoners used bedsheets as towels. And as the CIIC confirmed, prisons have begun to double-bunk solitary cells due to overcrowding. Prisoners can now spend 23 hours a day with another person, in a cell designed for single occupancy.
The article also looks at why the mentally ill end up in isolation, “in spite of the known mental-health deterioration stemming from long-term isolation.” As one expert explained to me, “Their behavior is destined to deteriorate under those conditions. Then their poor behavior is used to justify why they should be there.”
Read the article at the International Network of Street Newspapers. It appeared in Cincinnati’s Streetvibes, published by the local Coalition for the Homeless.
Image: “Captive” by Todd Tarselli, American Journal of Public Health.
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
M
entally ill youth routinely suffer neglect and violence at juvenile prisons. At the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility in rural Ohio, reported the New York Times, a mentally ill teenager screamed obscenities into the padded walls of his solitary confinement cell. Such scenes are as tragic as they are commonplace.
Disturbingly, the number of mentally ill youth in juvenile prisons is expected to rise – not only in Ohio but in at least 31 other states where legislatures have slashed the budgets of already-strained mental health systems. These systems provide access to supported housing, medications, case management, counseling, diagnostic assessments, crisis intervention and crisis residential services.
I spoke with a psychiatrist at the same Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility last fall while registering residents older than 17 to vote. He lamented that many of his patients would lose access to psychiatric care when they returned home because their parents couldn’t afford their medications.
A strong community mental health system would defray these treatment costs for families and thus help protect these kids from re-offending for lack of health care. Research indicates that model community-based mental health services reduce arrests, jail stays, and hospitalizations. Yet last month in its biennial budget, Ohio cut funding for such programs by an astounding 34%.
Before the budget vote, hundreds of advocates rallied on June 24 at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, warning that the proposed cuts would come at a heavy price for the state’s vulnerable citizens. Their placards proclaimed that “Treatment works, people recover.” Ohio legislators did not heed their call.
Predictably, parents, clinicians, and courts have nowhere else to turn but to the juvenile justice system. But that system cannot handle an influx of mentally ill youth. A class action lawsuit settled last year against the Ohio Department of Youth Services, S.H. v. Strickrath (pdf), revealed unconstitutional levels of mental health care, among other problems, in these so-called “new asylums.”
In this recession, legislators across the country have eliminated programs that support the poor and the mentally ill. These budget decisions are not inevitable; they are our choices, our responsibilities. When we treat sick kids as criminals, we don’t just set them up to fail but intimate, falsely, that the failure is their fault.
Yes, I've been quiet. I've left the computer to attend weddings or explore historic cemeteries or idle on famous bridges on cool summer nights. I still follow the news - Israel continues to evict Palestinians from their homes, meaningful health care reform hovers near the brink, poor women die in childbirth because men don't have uteruses, and children get tried as adults. But there's hopeful news, too: despite the economic slump, 13 states have expanded children's health insurance, and just yesterday, North Carolina legislators passed the Racial Justice Act, which allows death row convicts to challenge their death sentences on the basis of racial disparities.
I've also been writing at Waging Nonviolence - an inspiring blog about nonviolent movements to rectify social injustice. "Waging nonviolence is anything but passive," the About section states. "It’s an intensely active struggle for justice by the only means worthy of the goal." I've written about reducing the number of prisoners to combat overcrowding, about organizing to oppose the racist abuses of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and about the psychological scars of war on soldiers.
Finally, I wrote about the Ohio legislature's "insane budgeting decisions" for Streetvibes, the bimonthly newspaper of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless. The article looks at the dire impact of Ohio's budget cuts to our community mental health system. As one parent advocate told me, "There is so much outrage when a severely mentally ill person commits a crime, but few resources to help them day-to-day so a crime doesn't get committed."
So it's been a busy summer, and I'm thankful.
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
How do wars impact the soldiers who fight them?
An astounding 37% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans entering US Veterans Affairs hospitals between 2002 and 2008 received mental health diagnoses, according to a new study of 290,000 veterans in the American Journal of Public Health. Over one in five (22%) were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 4 to 7 times the pre-Iraq rate; 17% were diagnosed with depression. Some veterans were diagnosed with both or other conditions. Those with greater combat exposure were more likely to suffer from PTSD.
Meanwhile, an investigation by the Colorado Springs Gazette, entitled, “The hell of war comes home,” found a sharp rise in violent crime among Iraq War veterans. One former soldier, Anthony Marquez, “used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.” Since 2006, ten members of Marquez’s 3,500-soldier unit have been arrested for murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter.
The battalion is overwhelmingly made up of young men, who, demographically, have the highest murder rate in the United States, but the brigade still has a murder rate 20 times that of young males as a whole.
The killings are only the headline-grabbing tip of a much broader pyramid of crime. Since 2005, the brigade’s returning soldiers have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.
The 15,000-word, two-part article tells haunting stories from the war:
“Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,” Freeman said. “You came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley.”
If soldiers were hit by an IED, they would aim machine guns and grenade launchers in every direction, Marquez said, and “just light the whole area up. If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ’em.”
Other soldiers said they shot random cars, killing civilians.
“It was just a free-for-all,” said Marcus Mifflin, 21, a friend of Eastridge who was medically discharged with PTSD after the tour. “You didn’t get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong. And that was hard. So things happened. Taxi drivers got shot for no reason. Guys got kidnapped and taken to the bridge and interrogated and dropped off.”
What must be done?
Obviously, reducing violence would be the surest way to prevent PTSD.
Beyond that, mental health screenings for returning veterans would “help overcome a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ climate that surrounds stigmatized mental illness,” according to another American Journal of Public Health study. A 126-page report on the Fort Carson violence recommended “enhanced reintegration support” including protecting soldiers seeking behavioral health or substance abuse treatment from “humiliation or belittlement.” The base has reportedly “doubled its number of behavioral-health counselors and tightened hospital regulations to the point where a soldier visiting an Army doctor for any reason, even a sprained ankle, can’t leave without a mental health evaluation.”
Behavioral health care isn’t Cadillac care. Advocates hoped that awarding the Purple Heart to soldiers suffering from PTSD might “normalize” the illness, but the Pentagon decided in January to reserve the Purple Heart for physical injuries.
As we figure out how to care for people coping with “deadly echoes” of exploding grenades and dismembered bodies, perhaps we ought to start counting the domestic victims of these injured soldiers among the casualties of war.
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” has made a name for himself by being tougher on prisoners than on crime. Since 1993, he has overseen law enforcement and county jails in Maricopa County, Arizona, an area of nearly four million people that includes Phoenix. William Finnegan profiles (subscription only) the 77-year-old sheriff in The New Yorker’s July 20 issue.
Arpaio seems to delight in dehumanizing others. After winning his first election in 1993, he built a tent-city jail in an area where temperatures can rise to 135 degrees. He banned cigarettes, hot lunches, coffee, and salt and pepper, rejecting a study he had commissioned when it found harsh jail conditions ineffective at reducing recidivism. He gave inmates just two meals a day, each at 30 cents a head. He instituted black-and-white striped uniforms, but added pink underwear and pink socks. Several times he humiliated prisoners by marching them between facilities in the pink underwear alone. The prisoners nicknamed him “Hitler.”
Deaths and injuries in Arpaio’s jails have already cost Maricopa County taxpayers $43 million in court and settlement expenses. Arpaio’s officers have used stun guns against prisoners who were already immobilized in restraint chairs. As Finnegan writes, “The Phoenix New Times found that, between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angles, and Houston, which together house more than six times as many inmates as Maricopa, were sued a total of forty-three times. During the same period, Arpaio’s department was sued over jail conditions almost twenty-two hundred times in federal district court.”
Inmates in Maricopa County’s jails have shaken off the threat of retaliation and engaged in civil disobedience. In one of the largest US prison hunger strikes this past Cinco de Mayo, 500 inmates refused the morning meal and 900 refused the evening meal. Activists outside the jails have organized candlelight vigils, written letters, demonstrated at county meetings, and picketed Arpaio’s offices. On February 28, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and El Puente Arizona organized a “March to Stop the Hate” focusing on Arpaio’s treatment of undocumented immigrants. Some 3,000 people rallied in downtown Phoenix.
Zack de la Rocha, of Rage Against the Machine, spoke (youtube) at that march:
In the latest Arpaio investigation, the US Department of Justice is reviewing his discriminatory profiling in the arrest and treatment of possibly undocumented people. Perhaps we might one day thwart this mockery of a ‘public safety’ official, who takes pride in the detestable quality of his jail food and in situating his open-air tent-city jail beside a dump, who diverts limited county dollars away from investigating violent crime or even responding promptly to emergency calls, to instead raid workplaces in search of undocumented yet taxpaying immigrants.
Who the real “criminal” is, one hardly has to wonder.
Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.
We’re number one. The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate, five times higher than the U.K.’s and almost nine times higher than France’s (p. 35). One in every 99 American adults, or 2.3 million people, resides in state or federal prisons or in local jails. One in every 31 American adults is involved in the criminal justice system, whether parole, probation, or incarceration.
Despite the exceptional number of prisoners in the United States—indeed, because of it—some states have sought to build more prisons. Current prisons are overcrowded, they say. That’s true. Ohio prisons, for example, hold 50,919 people, but have the capacity for just 38,665. It becomes impossible to provide adequate medical, psychological, educational, or vocational services – or focus on anything beyond food, housing, and safety. Violence also appears to rise.
But there’s another, often overlooked, way to confront prison overcrowding. Instead of building more prisons, we need to reduce the number of prisoners. Advocacy groups like Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility, with their Prison Alternatives Initiative, have highlighted the counter-productive aspects of incarceration. Lawsuits, criminal justice research, and growing awareness of the increasing costs of incarceration, have spread that message.
1. Legal action: Legal groups have used the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison overcrowding. In California, after the Prison Law Office filed suit, the court ordered the release of 57,000 prisoners. The Southern Center for Human Rights recently filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama. The facility, designed for 968 people, was holding 1,681 in December 2008, operating at 173.7% capacity. The lawsuit explained:
Because of overcrowding, three men are crammed into cells that were designed for two. These cells measure approximately 8 x 12 feet. Men do not have enough room to sit upright on their beds or to dress. … The smell of feces often permeates the cells, and overflowing toilets back up into adjoining cells. … Prisoners are packed so tightly into cellblocks that the tension and volatility results in weekly stabbings, fights, and assaults.
2. The criminal justice research also challenges the lock’em-up approach. Incarceration appears to have accounted for only a fourth of the decline in violent crime in 1990s. Drug treatment and school completion programs, meanwhile, have proven more successful and cost-effective than incarceration. In addition, incarceration has significant negative effects—such as fraying family ties and destroying employment prospects—that contribute to future criminal behavior.
3. Budget woes. Some states, facing shortfalls, have sought cheaper alternatives such as greater use of probation and parole, and “specialty courts” that emphasize treatment over incarceration for offenders with addiction, mental illness, or DUIs. These programs save money. The Pew Center on the States calculated that nationally, criminal justice costs averaged $29,000 a year for prisoners, compared with $2,750 a year for probationers and $1,250 a year for parolees. Monitoring probationers in the community is 23 times less expensive than locking them up.
The budget-crisis may be an opportunity to finally do the right thing.
To those who read beyond the American media, it's well-known that the Israeli army regularly demolishes Palestinian homes for lacking building permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain.
These actions constitute ethnic cleansing. They're intended to clear space for settler growth and create a new "demographic reality." To understand the bureaucratic violence that maintains the Israeli occupation, watch this must-see video from South Mt. Hebron in the West Bank. It documents the demolition of a Bedouin home and the arrest of Ezra Nawi (in green), an Israeli human rights protester who nonviolently defended the home alongside the Bedouin family.
"The only thing that will be left here is hatred," Nawi, sitting handcuffed, says to the snickering Israeli soldiers. It's shocking how little compassion they have for the lives they're destroying.
You can read more on Ezra Nawi here. You can attempt to shame the Israeli government here.
Not long ago, Obama flew to Cairo and declared, "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed." But I have this other dream in which Obama flies to Israel for a grand speech to the Zionist/Jewish world. And he tells the Zionists, with the same unmistakable intonation, "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed."
And they yawn, because they know that it does.
The Israelis (like the U.S.) understand that a state can use the rhetoric of "terrorism" to mask its own violence. What, after all, is worse than war but terrorism, the indiscriminate killing of civilians? That's partly why the Zionist lobby constantly asserts its victimhood: to claim, even as they gleefully turn an unarmed Arab family homeless, that they're simply acting in self-defense.
Under a 42-year occupation, Palestinians also understand that Israeli violence works, as one person explained: "Palestinians can be successful software engineers, they can have an espresso in a café and blog on their MacBooks, but they cannot hide from their children that they are powerless in the face of an Israeli teenager holding a gun who may or may not be in a good mood.”
Nonviolence can win - but only if the international community encourages it, or at least ceases to ignore it. For years, Palestinians have protested every week in Bil'in against the wall built on their farmland. Communities rally in seconds when Israeli bulldozers arrive to demolish homes. I saw it with my own eyes in 2005. Palestinian nonviolence exists despite Israeli efforts to intimidate nonviolent protesters (indeed, four peaceful protesters have been killed in the past year) or escalate nonviolent rallies or arrest nonviolent Palestinian leaders like Azmi Al Shoukhi. It exists despite Zionist efforts, like this Forward editorial, calling Palestinian nonviolence "a fantasy."
"Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?" is a distraction intended to hide Israeli violence.
In May, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock sentenced an HIV-positive pregnant woman to just enough days in prison to coincide with the end of her pregnancy. Both the prosecutor and defense attorney had recommended 114 days, which would have allowed Quinta Layin Tuleh, 28, of Cameroon, to leave prison with time served. But the judge sentenced her to 238 days.
She had been convicted of possessing fake immigration documents. Following her prison term, whatever its length, Tuleh will be deported. The judge said he would have sentenced her to time served if she had simply been pregnant. But because she could potentially transmit HIV to the fetus, he extended the sentence. Only in prison, he reasoned, would Tuleh have access to the antiretroviral therapy that would reduce the risk of HIV transmission from 25% to 1-2%.
Judge Woodcock explained from the bench:
“My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant, and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she’s carrying. I don’t think that the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault. If I had — if I were to know conclusively that upon release from imprisonment a defendant was going to assault another person, I would act in a fashion to prevent that, and similar to an assault, causing grievous injury to a wholly innocent person. And so I think I have the obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm.”The unusual sentence outraged some feminist and civil liberty advocates. Zachary Heiden of the Maine Civil Liberties Union said, “[J]ailing someone is punishment -- it is depriving them of liberty. That deprivation has to be justified, and illness or pregnancy is not justification for imprisonment.” Jessica Valenti of Feministing wrote, “I fail to see how Tuleh's inability (if that really is the case) to procure affordable, decent healthcare is an ‘assault’ against her fetus, rather than the system's assault of Tuleh.” These views, I think, while important, ignore the harm done by transmitting HIV to the child (avoidable as it is), as well as the mother's own interest in procuring prenatal care.
Why you should eat only one fortune cookie:
Fortune cookie #1:
"Be patient. Good things come to those who wait."
Fortune cookie #2:
"Good things come to those who wait but only the things left by those who hustle."
Now my head hurts, though after two cookies, my stomach feels a bit better.
When I wrote about compassion/"giving a damn" as a capacity to be developed - by incorporating others' wellbeing into our own - I was thinking of a friend Hope's comment on love. She wrote last week that love isn't simply something we find; it's something "we can choose to cultivate":
I have a wonderful friend who had an amazing love of his life, and he’s scared he’ll never fall in love again. ... I remind this friend (and should remind myself): among other things, love is a capacity. And the ability to fall madly, maddeningly, terribly in love with someone isn’t just about meeting someone who tickles your fancy, it’s about your ability to feel that kind of love... And I encourage him to take heart in this–the fact that he’s had that kind of intense love doesn’t make him less likely to have it again, rather it proves he’s got that capacity. And another thing: lovingness is something that we can choose to cultivate, and the more we do, the more love we get to have in our lives. It’s not all chance.She wrote something related, I think, about self-discovery vs. self-determination:
I’m sick of all this American tragic myth about “finding yourself”. People my age (and people having so-called “mid-life crises”) seem so attached to the notion. They say they’ve got to travel around and find themselves, or work in a coffee shop in some liberal city for a year and find themselves, or not date anyone and find themselves, or go to therapy and find themselves. They’re got to “figure out” who they are. Talking that way makes it sound like “who you are” is some unmalleable, pre-made item, like a TV dinner Salisbury steak. And so narcissistic–this obsession with the idea of “self”, or worse, “true self”. But we don’t “figure out” who we are; we decide.I think there's a parallel between the empty rhetoric of finding one's own "true self" and finding one's own "true love." And so I thought of this passage from Richard Russo's The Risk Pool:
‘He’s such a good man,’ my mother said [speaking of a suitor]. ‘How I wish I loved him.’I can't possibly provide the deeper exposition these snippets deserve. Not only do I lack the vocabulary, but I have little idea of what I'm talking about (really, why are you still reading?). But briefly, I'm thankful for Hope's push for love as a capacity to be cultivated. It restores a sense of personal agency to the practice of love - something too often hijacked by the idea of fate.
‘He’s certainly crazy about you,’ I said, trying to make carefully chosen words sound casual.
‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘It’s horrible.’
‘It’s horrible that someone loves you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking off somewhere. ‘I want… my own true love.’
Her own true love. The outrageous simplicity, modesty, and arrogance of it took my breath away. It seemed to me, then and now, a wish that everyone had a right to, but that only the very foolish or the terminally naïve trouble themselves over. (313)
Over half of US prisoners report a mental health concern, and nearly one in five suffers from a serious mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Nearly three quarters of those have a co-occuring substance abuse problem. In my work life, I advocate for proper reentry planning for this vulnerable population who have, unjustly, been caught up in our incarceration epidemic.
I am not mentally ill, or criminal justice-involved, or suffering from substance abuse. So I can't actually empathize. Why then do I bother? Don't we live in a world in which we all, myself certainly included, value others according to how well they advance our own individual projects?
It's been a few years, but I decided to break out Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought. According to her “theory of compassion,” we act compassionately for others (1) when we see they've suffered a terrible misfortune, (2) when we judge that misfortune to be undeserved, and (3) when they occupy an important place in our scheme of goals (321). That third element of compassion, what Nussbaum calls the “eudaimonistic judgment” (meaning: human flourishing), requires seeing others' wellbeing as important to our own. It's a capacity worth cultivating.
Empathy, interestingly, doesn't get a spot in her threefold equation. The concept has received a lot of attention since Obama listed it as a requirement for the next Supreme Court justice. Aristotle included it in his own threefold theory of compassion. He put a “judgment of similar possibility” (316), where one considers oneself susceptible to a similar misfortune, in the (3) spot.
Nussbaum replaced it in part because empathy doesn't seem to drive some compassionate behavior. It doesn't explain why those who can't imagine themselves as beggars still give. But that's not to jettison empathy entirely. Nussbaum calls it an “epistemological aid.” She gives the example of a Nazi officer who refused to participate in a mass shooting “because there were children among the Jews ... and at the time I myself was a father of three children.” She says empathy is “not necessary, but usually very important” (321) and “does important moral work by extending the boundaries of that which we can imagine” (388). That was my experience, tutoring in a prison.
What's most important, though, is that I see my own flourishing as connected to the flourishing of others. Their misfortune becomes my misfortune and their success my success. So I don't need to imagine myself in the place of a prisoner to lend a hand. Some might criticize this self-referential theory of compassion as ultimately self-serving. But as Søren Kierkegaard wrote in Works of Love, the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” means you have to love yourself first. Hence the eudamonistic judgment, incorporating others' wellbeing into our own scheme of goals.
I don't think it's just something individuals have or don't have. It's there to be cultivated.
Dr. George Tiller was murdered this week by an anti-abortion coward with a gun.
But maybe he wasn't a coward, but a bold principled warrior for the anti-abortion movement.
Suppose you believe unequivocally that "abortion is murder," just as the bumper stickers proclaim. You see would-be mothers as accomplices to murder and abortion providers as mass-murderers, with sometimes thousands more victims than the cruelest serial killers. Dr. Tiller was "the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day," as the killer, Scott Roeder, wrote in 2007.
You also recognize that stopping this mass-murder through peaceful legal means has largely failed. Abortion remains legal 35 years after Roe v. Wade, despite the occasional successes of anti-abortion advocates (e.g., the recently repealed global gag rule, the ban on 'partial birth' abortion, the Henry Hyde amendment that screws poor women by restricting federal Medicaid dollars, etc.). Of course you'd prefer peaceful legal advocacy, but in 35 years, the anti-abortion movement has failed to reverse the law. So you begin to examine other options to combat the status quo. After all, nearly everyone believes in the occasional necessity of war and violence.
You could slow the mass-murder of the unborn by murdering just one person - and not just any person but a murderer who promises to murder again (excuse "murder" but I'm working within their paradigm). Why not pick up a gun? Most people would also murder one person to save many (that is, the person who'd be responsible for the death of many - not any random passerby) - or at least respect someone who did (or tried). In Tiller's case, it really was that straightforward. Fewer abortions will happen now that he's gone, if only because fewer doctors, fearing violence, will provide the procedure. So Tiller's murderer seems more savvy and principled than deranged. In fact, unless you believe all killing is wrong (very unlikely), the killer's actions made sense.
Abolitionist John Brown, who understood in 1859 that slavery could not be ended peacefully and organized the still-controversial raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, might sympathize.
My question: Why did so many anti-abortion activists rush out on the Sunday afternoon of the murder to denounce the action? The National Right to Life Committee announced it opposes "any form of violence to fight the violence of abortion." Americans United for Life stated that "the foundational right to life that our work is dedicated to extends to everyone," and disowned the killer completely: "Roeder is most definitely not part of the pro-life movement." Sarah Palin wrote that "the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life."
Were they worried about their own criminal liability, perhaps for inciting violence? No, I think not. Bill O'Reilly stood by his anti-Tiller crusade (video): "Nazi stuff," "operating a death mill," "executing babies for 5,000 dollars," "if I could get my hands on him," etc. And it's certainly not that the pro-life movement actually believes in life. The same people support the death penalty (and war). Nor were they merely concerned for their image (though they were). Perhaps they condemned the murder out of respect for the rule of law. That's possible, though I imagine that abortion opponents see themselves as answering to a higher power.
No, they condemned the murder because deep down, I think, the vast majority do not actually equate the abortion of a fetus with the death of a human being. Abortion isn't murder after all. Or it's murder with an asterisk.
Still, there are always a few principled literalists who take the "abortion is murder" slogan seriously. It's terrifying to think that another abortion provider could be gunned down by yet another religious zealot. These stalwarts of the anti-abortion movement will not be swayed by appeals to women's rights. Dr. Tiller's murder has forced us to return to the basics - the dreaded "when does life begin" question and the "personhood" debate (ugh) that I'd rather see disappear - and to explain (somehow) that fetuses are not entitled or actual lives, and that while our obligations extend to future people (both in particular cases and as a society), they do not extend to potential people. And until the woman decides to carry to term, a fetus is nothing more than a potential person.
But America isn't suddenly going to come around. The mainstream "pro-life" movement has not only harnessed the power of conservative hate speech but is also politically savvy enough to have disowned its hitman, Scott Roeder. Perhaps abortion foes will one day have the courage to admit that abortion, however undesirable, is something other than murder. Until then, let's hope they continue to disregard the meaning of their slogan and the dangerous imperative it may present.
It's been two weeks since the Obama Administration refused to release the now-infamous photographs of Al Qaeda detainees being tortured in US custody. And the topic's already moved out of the news cycle due in part to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court.
But torture will haunt us if we keep pretending it didn't happen or it's all just hakuna matata.
A couple years ago, when I answered phones for a suicide prevention hotline, my supervisor used to say, “Go for the jugular!” That is, don’t ask, “do you want it to end?” but more directly, “do you want to kill yourself?” Don’t shy away from a disturbing experience or a loved one’s death. Ask. It can be profoundly healing to confront grief or a harsh reality or something others might prefer to leave buried. Let it all hang out, not just for the sake of transparency and accountability, but for our collective national sanity. We don't need to wait decades to examine this disgraceful chapter in American history. Choosing to ignore or dismiss these crimes with graceful language about preferring to look forward, not backward, will not, in the end, allow us to move on. It will haunt us.
I've written before about the disaffection wrought by George W. Bush - that it went deeper than politics, that it was a coming-of-age, that as a result, some among the pre-Obama generation have come to think of themselves more as “global citizens” than as Americans. Why? Well notably, there was the disastrous unnecessary war in Iraq, predicated on a willful lie and sold through fear-mongering about WMDs. But looking back, now that the Iraq War has become a fact of life too ordinary for the front pages, it's torture that stands out. For me, torture wasn't the root of this alienation. But it's so wrong, so fucking disgusting, that it's come to symbolize the shift.
Yeah, I understand this photo decision appears a small tempest. That it's "merely" symbolic. That Obama will and should be judged first on whether he ends the war, restores the economy, brings health care to the uninsured and lowers prices for us all. To the boots on the ground, these policy goals matter. Really, who's going to care about some torture photos, relics of George W.?
But the American use of torture was disgusting not only because it inflicted gross suffering on fellow human beings, not only because it violated international conventions on human rights (now defiled and rendered weak), but because it was used maliciously to sell the Iraq War (see the recent report of the Senate Armed Services Committee). Prisoners were tortured until they "admitted" a (false) link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Wouldn't that be relevant to a president who denied that very link as a rationale for his much-touted early opposition to this war of choice, this "dumb war," as he put it? So it's disappointing to see Obama (in particular) refuse to prosecute or investigate the people who committed these serious crimes at the highest levels of government.
The photos will come out eventually because a federal appeals court, reviewing the FOIA request, ruled it so and because you just can't stop the truth (indeed some photos have already been leaked). And other photos have come out, such as the covers of Department of Defense reports prepared by Donald Rumsfeld for President Bush and headlined with creepy Biblical quotations, essentially framing the post-9/11 'War on Terror' as a Christian religious crusade against infidels. But torture reports deserve not a trickle, highlighted on liberal blogs, but direct, comprehensive attention.
Torture isn't new. Sadly, the US has a history of backing and bankrolling dictators who tortured, including Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, who ruled from 1930 to 1961. Author Junot Díaz calls him "one of the U.S.'s favorite sons, one of its children. He was created and sustained by the U.S.'s political-military machine." Díaz illustrates Trujillo's brutality in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In the fictional tale, Trujillo tortured Abelard, Oscar's grandfather, and Oscar grows up in the shadow of this wrong. Abelard had been an illustrious surgeon before he was arrested for the capital crime of “slander and gross calumny against the Person of the President,” after he refused to hand over his beautiful daughter.
“In 1960, at the height of the clandestine resistance movement against Trujillo, Abelard underwent a particularly gruesome procedure. He was manacled to chair, placed out in the scorching sun, and then a wet rope was clinched cruelly about his forehead. It was called La Corona, a simple but horribly effective torture. At first the rope just grips your skull, but as the sun dries and tightens it, the pain becomes unbearable, would drive you mad. Among the prisoners of the Trujillato few tortures were more feared. Since it neither killed you nor left you alive. Abelard survived it but was never the same. Turned him into a vegetable. The proud flame of his intellect extinguished. For the rest of his short life he existed in an imbecilic stupor, but there were prisoners who remember moments when he seemed almost lucid, when he would stand in the fields and stare at his hands and weep, as if recalling that there was once a time when he had been more than this. The other prisoners, out of respect, continued to call him El Doctor.” (250-1)Fearing socialism and left-wing movements, the US meddled in Latin American politics for decades, undermining democratically-elected governments and supporting dictators who crushed dissent and had their critics "disappeared." How healing and productive it would have been to have broken cleanly and honestly from that era. Instead, the legacy of our meddling, left unspoken, haunts us. But the White House doesn't see it. It is sometimes suggested that releasing the photos will provoke anti-American sentiment in the MidEast - and at a particularly inopportune time, just as Obama seeks to build bridges. Of course there's never a good time to release graphic images of torture. But that doesn't make it any less necessary. It's idiotic to build bridges on shaky foundations.
“[H]ow are they not related? ... Oscar, like Lola, like Yunior, is one of Trujillo's children [perhaps, as Díaz suggests earlier, just as Trujillo was a child of the United States]. His shadow, his legacy, is upon them all in ways that none of them understand. Trujillo is a local version of the legacy of the New World, which all of us who live in this hemisphere carry upon our heads. The novel's question is: How do you deal with this legacy? Do you run from it? Do you ignore it, deploy existential denial? These are strategies that add to the legacy's power, that guarantee its perpetuation. Or do you look into the silence and actually say the words that you have to say?”
See xkcd's latest comic, titled, "Unsatisfied": (click for larger image)
Interpretation #1:
Regret, doubt, "shoulda woulda"... He wishes somehow he was dating the other gal.Interpretation #2:
The text behind the image says, "Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a search function, you'd break the nlogn barrier." With no objective measure for relationships, we can only compare to what we already know. Imagination aside, he doesn't actually want to be with the other gal. It's just that she somehow became a benchmark.Interpretation #3:
The tragedy is not, despite first appearances, the incorrect choice of partner or the limiting structure of monogamy. It's that we really have no basis for comparison at all. It's just impossible - barring of course, a time-traveling machine allowing us to live out alternate realities. As much as we might dream about it, we simply cannot know what might have been if we had dated someone else, gone to a different school, or pursued a different career.Interpretation #4:
He's just one of those chronically unsatisfied people. In general, I don't think that's such a bad orientation in life... Unsatisfied people, perhaps in yearning for more, tend to be more politically engaged. They "dream things that never were," as Ted Kennedy eulogized RFK, "and say why not." But politics aside, maybe that's not such a great model for romance.Interpretation #5:
Here's the "grass is always greener" interpretation. No matter what, he'd be unsatisfied.
Not much of an "interpretation," but stick-figure sex is actually quite hot.
Warning: Serious spoilers. Ignore this post and first go read the book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of Dominican-American author Junot Díaz.
Seriously, if you haven't read the book, put down the blog.
The book centers around a fat Dominican boy named Oscar de Leon growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, and just dying to get laid. Though we don't know it for several hundred pages, the seemingly omniscient narrator is actually Yunior, Oscar's college roommate and the former boyfriend of Lola, Oscar's sister. Yunior narrates several generations of Oscar's family, going back to mid-1900s Dominican Republic under dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo haunts both the book and the family: "He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up" (2).
Oscar, a prolific lonely writer, seems like his own caricature: He's obsessed with science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and women. Oscar can't escape the "fukú," the curse that's plagued his family and according to a footnote, perhaps all of Latin America since colonization. It's tormented his sister Lola, his mother Beli, and his once-illustrious grandfather Abelard, killed by Trujillo.
Though it went a bit overboard at times, I loved the writing as much as the saga.
As Yunior narrates, Oscar just couldn't find love:
“Dude weighed 307 pounds, for fuck’s sake! Talked like a Star Trek computer! The real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so fucking bad. I mean, shit, I thought I was into females, but no one, and I mean no one, was into them the way Oscar was. To him they were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel.” (173)Oscar, though effectively celibate, did manage to torment himself with close female friends:
“Oh, they got close all right, but did they ever kiss in her car? Did he ever put his hands up her skirt? Did he ever thumb her clit? Did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty voice? Did he ever stroke her hair while she sucked him off? Did they ever fuck? Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he’d fallen into one of the Let’s-Be-Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love’s version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and of women. Perhaps.” (41)After college, he worked as a substitute teacher, naturally identifying with the little guy.
“Every day he watched the ‘cool’ kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the feminine, the gay – and in every one of these clashes he saw himself. … Sometimes he tried to reach out to the school’s whipping boys, offer them some words of comfort, You are not alone, you know, in this universe, but the last thing a freak wants is a helping hand from another freak. These boys fled from him in terror.” (264-5)Yunior is the opposite sort of persona. He dates Lola and yet can't seem to help himself. He's the classic anti-feminist villain, and Lola finally bids good riddance. Years later, Yunior reflects:
“Lola’s hair is long now and never straightened; she’s heavier and less guileless, but she’s still the ciguapa of my dreams. Always happy to see me, no bad feelings, entiendes. None at all.Some might criticize this book for Yunior's raunchy narration on sex and female anatomy, but justice, in all its cruelty, reappears at the end: The womanizer can't keep the one he truly loves.
Yunior, how are you?
I’m fine. How are you?
Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, that we would be in bed together like the old times, with the fan on, the smoke from our weed drifting above us, and I’d finally try to say words that could have saved us.
______ ______ ______.” (327)
“They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak. The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybon and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they’d started to dream the same dreams and say the same worlds. He told then that it was only because of her love that he’d been able to do the think that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop, them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn’t be no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he’d be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.” (321-2)Yes, they killed him, but Oscar, that fat New Jersey geek, somehow emerged the hero. He feared nothing, not even death, for love (nevermind, I guess, that his pursuit also imperiled his lover).
“Turns out that toward the end of those twenty-seven days the palomo did get Ybon away from La Capital. For one whole weekend they hid out on some beach in Barahona while the capitan was away on ‘business,’ and guess what? Ybon actually kissed him. Guess what else? Ybon actually fucked him. Praise be to Jesus! He reported that he’d liked it, and that Ybon’s you-know-what hadn’t tasted the way he had expected. She tastes like Heineken, he observed. ... He wrote that Ybon had little hairs coming up to almost her bellybutton and that she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of sex - it was the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the backroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he’d been a virgin all his life. He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this so goddamn long. ... He wrote: So this is what everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d know. The beauty! The beauty!” (334-5)I am sure I've missed some key themes, discussed in a Slate interview with the author: masculinity, diaspora, family dynamics, the haunting legacy of the Trujillo regime. But more immediately, I walked away with the tragic, almost cosmic, sense that there is such a thing as a better or a worse life. That love is liberation and "fukú" all at once. And that Oscar, in boarding an airplane back to the Dominican Republic in the ultimate act of desperation, determination, and death - indeed, the very epitome of Free Will - seems bound instead by family history and the "laws of nature":
“Yunior?
What?
Are you awake?
If it’s about Star Trek –
It’s not about Star Trek. He coughed. I have heard from a reliable source that no Dominican male had ever died a virgin. You who have experience in these matters – do you think this is true?
I sat up. Dude was peering at me in the dark, dead serious.
O, it’s against the laws of nature for a dominicano to die without fucking at least once.” (174)
Friend Jen took me out to the hip, vegan-friendly Strong Hearts Cafe in Syracuse a couple weeks ago. Check out their milkshake menu below - with shakes named for famous activists. I had the Harriet Tubman (vanilla, maple, Oreo) in honor of Upstate New York, where she settled in 1859. Jen had the Roberto Clemente (peanut butter, Oreo). Clemente, the Baseball Hall of Fame's first Latino, died in an airplane accident in 1972 intending to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He arranged and then boarded the flight himself to make sure the aid reached the victims. The previous three flights had been intercepted by the corrupt Somoza government.
Do you know all these activists? I've got to spend some more time on Wikipedia!
Click on the photo for a larger size.
My dad and I visited Harriet Tubman's home in Auburn, NY, last August. I took these photos:
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