Unsubscribe me, Uncle Sam

They tell me to strip and put on a flimsy gown. They have me lie on my back on a slab with my head in a vice-like cradle. I am told I may not move a muscle. They stick me in a tube that blocks my vision, then assaults my ears with a series of unbelievably loud noises. Some are so loud the slab trembles.

As the seconds go by, the panic begins. My heart races; I can feel it pounding in my chest and my throat. I struggle to control my breathing. Bile rises in my throat and I fear I will vomit. Stars burst before my closed eyes. I fight fainting.

This goes on for twenty minutes. It is nearly unbearable and I almost squeeze the emergency alarm they gave me before the ordeal began.

To my insurance company, this was an MRI on my brain.¹ To my central nervous system, this was torture.

Coincidentally, a few days prior to this procedure, I heard a news article on NPR about the on-going debate in Washington (DC) about the use of torture by the military. To be precise, the newscaster said it is a discussion “about the use of torture, versus those interrogation methods that sometimes result in the death of the prisoner.”

Talk about nauseating spin. If the latter isn’t torture, what is it?

As I was lying in the MRI machine, hoping I wouldn’t throw up in my mouth, I remembered this broadcast. I thought to myself that anyone advocating the use of “enhanced” interrogation methods on prisoners should have said methods tested on themselves to help them decide whether or not they are torture.²

Well, I read today that journalist and Iraq war-supporter Christopher Hitchens literally took the plunge. He allowed himself to be “water-boarded,” the Bush Administration’s current interrogation method of choice at Guantanamo Bay. Unlike some of the Gitmo detainees, however, Hitchens lived to write about it.

His description of the experience sounds all to familiar to me, from the racing pulse to waves of nausea to near fainting. And guess what he concluded?

Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

So, enhanced interrogation supporters, let’s just stop the spinning, grow a pair, and call a spade a spade, shall we?

Righteous Ribs, in honor of our country’s birthday this year, I ask you to put your foot down and Unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe is a movement of people united against human rights abuses in the ‘war on terror’. The threat of terrorism is real, but trampling over human rights is not the answer. From Guantanamo Bay, rendition, torture and waterboarding – we unsubscribe.

Tell the government they cannot continue to torture people in your name.

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

1. Alright, alright. I’m having problems with muscle fatigue, and my doctor wants to rule out a lesion-inspired multiple sclerosis since there is a history of it in my family. To quote Ahnold in Kindergarten Cop: It’s not a tumor. [↩]
2. Not likely to happen in Washington, given politicians’ history of hypocrisy, such as getting handy deferments for themselves and their children from wars they start. [↩]

Not a dry eye in the house

I know I had to get out my hanky just reading about it.

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon made history - again - at 5:07 p.m. Monday when they were declared “spouses for life.”

At that moment, standing next to each other in the mayor’s office in San Francisco City Hall in front of cheering friends and relatives, the couple of 55 years became the first same-sex newlyweds in San Francisco and among the first in California under a new right bestowed by the state Supreme Court.

In a now-famous speech from 1995, Hillary Clinton said “Women’s rights are human rights.” Verily, I say, gay rights are human rights, too, and few people alive have done more for both than Del and Phyllis.

I am so happy for these heroines that gay marriage has been legalized in their lifetimes.

Technorati Tags: gay marriage, human rights

Bar Girls: An offer they can’t refuse

After 9/11, Kevin was deployed for a few months to Thailand.¹ He says one of the most disturbing things he saw there had nothing to do with the military operation.

It was the local watering hole and its female staff, young women known officially as “hostesses” and euphemistically as “bar girls.”

One look at Kevin’s uniform and these gals were on him like white on rice. When he demurred, they would always say, “Ah, you good man.” Which was immediately followed up with eyelash-batting and “I wish I had good man.”

Funny… until you realize that most of these girls were sold into their jobs by their own families, and that their nasty, brutish and short lives will most likely end with AIDs.

Human trafficking is very lucrative and thus epidemic in poor countries; Thailand is only one among many.

Most (70%) of the 600,000 to 820,000 people trafficked across international borders are women and children. Though they can be forced into everything from organ donation to religious cult membership, most are forced into prostitution. ²

And since most of the trafficking is done by organized crime, if the merchandise complains, they just make her an offer she can’t refuse.

But don’t go thinking this horror is all happening “over there.” An estimated 14,000 people are trafficked into the United States and 600-800 into Canada every year.³

I can’t believe that almost 150 years after Lincoln freed the slaves, people right here in my country are purchasing other human beings.

So every year, I donate to the Amnesty International campaign to end human trafficking, and today, I’m proud to join other bloggers as we Unite for Human Rights.

All of the non-governmental organizations below work to end the suffering. Act Uppity and donate. It may not seem like much, but I promise you — every little bit helps.

After all, if we don’t speak for the voiceless, who will?

• The American Anti-Slavery Group
• Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity
• Transitions Cambodia
• Ansar Burney Trust
• Anti-Slavery International
• Project to End Human Trafficking
• Free the Slaves
• The International Justice Mission
• HumanTrafficking.org
• Shared Hope International
• Not For Sale
• Stop the Traffik
• Love 146
• The Redlight Children Campaign
• The Red Light Movement
• The Salvation Army - Human Trafficking
• Project Rescue

Technorati Tags: human trafficking, Bloggers Unite for Human Rights

1. For those who don’t know, Kevin is an Air Force reservist. And yes, he does make me call him “Major.” [↩]
2. Source: Wikipedia. Because of the nature of trafficking, exact statistics are difficult to get. [↩]
3. Source: Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery - Canada [↩]

Because thirty-six years ago, “choice” was just another word for nothing left to lose.

I couldn’t find the place at first. I drove around and around, checked my directions a dozen times, but it wasn’t there.

At the spot where the clinic was supposed to be was a building that looked exactly like the 1970s-era apartments I lived in when I was a kid - the kind of building that looks like a motel, with stairways on the outside leading to each floor.

Not knowing what else to do, I parked and walked over to the building. The doors all had numbers on them, but no signs. Windows were closed.

I checked the suite number I had been given, then followed the doors until I found the one marked 213. It was tucked far back from the street. I tried the door handle. Locked.

I must have the wrong directions, I thought. I was just about to leave when I saw a sign in the lower corner of the window, so small you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it: Women’s Health Clinic.

I pushed the door buzzer and a woman’s voice answered, “Yes?”

“I’m here for an eleven o’clock appointment,” I said, and gave her my name.

The door knob clicked and I pushed it open. The waiting room was tiny, empty, and eerily silent. No patients wandered in and out. No sounds of sick kids crying in exam rooms or medical personnel talking in the halls. Not even any musak playing.

The rather grim-looking woman behind the reception desk looked up as I entered. She handed me paperwork to fill out and return. Soon a nurse called my name and we went through a door into the bowels of the clinic.

In another tiny white room with two chairs and a rack of literature, the nurse and I discussed the purpose of my visit. She asked me a few questions, but it was clear early on that I was well-informed and had made up my mind, and she didn’t try to dissuade me. She actually seemed a little relieved and I could tell she was skipping entire sections of a well-rehearsed speech.

Finally she explained the procedure to me briefly, then told me the doctor would see me now.

We went to a tiny exam room, where she handed me a paper gown and left. As I undressed, I looked around. The room seemed over-stuffed with furniture and equipment, but that was probably because it was so small. There was nothing unusual about the room’s contents, I thought, until I noticed the contraption in the corner.

It looked like an alien, with a dull green reservoir and a long tube snaking out the side, and I admit I did not relish the thought of playing Ripley.

The doctor entered a few minutes later. He was short and stocky, with dark hair and mustache. He spoke very little to me and made no eye contact. His movements were brisk and he performed his exam at lightening speed (compared to others I’ve had, anyway). He confirmed the diagnosis, turned on his heel and left.

I got dressed and after a few minutes, the nurse came for me and we went back to the reception desk so I could make my next appointment. I told Grim Lady I wanted to have the medical procedure.

“You are just in time,” she said. “One more day and you’d have to have the surgical.”

I nodded, remembering the alien.

She clicked her pen and scribbled on her calendar. “August ninth.”

I smiled at the irony. My birthday.

Grim Lady gathered up some paperwork and handed it to me. I took it and turned to leave.

“Wait, one more thing,” she said, handing me a bulky manila envelope. I looked at her quizzically, but she dropped her gaze and busied herself with her work.

As soon as the door shut behind me, I opened the envelope. Inside was a VHS tape labeled “From Conception To Birth, A Fetus’s Journey.”

On the way to my car, I dropped the tape into a street corner trash can.

—

Two days later, on my birthday, I came back to the clinic and got a shot in my hip. I returned a week after that for the final step: two tablets placed as close to my cervix as the doctor could get them.

As I sat up on the exam table, the doctor took me by the shoulders and for the first time, he looked into my eyes. I saw compassion in his.

“OK?” he said.

I smiled and nodded. He let go of me and walked out.

—

Not so long ago, the health care clinic I went to and the procedure I paid for were illegal. In a town like Salt Lake City, with its uber-conservative origins, they are still at risk of annihilation in some way or another.

A sobering thought for me, a thirty-something Seattlite who took for granted her shiny liberal bubble until she left it.

What would it be like to be an unhappily pregnant kid living in a community so filled with misogyny that its “women’s” clinics must be hidden to keep from being bombed?

What would it be like to go to work each day knowing that you could be shot at with jihad-like zeal by people who pledge to love thy neighbor?

What would it be like to be a doctor whose patients often have such guilt and fear that you must distance yourself from them, allowing only a brief moment at the end to show you care?

Today I’m Blogging For Choice in the fervent hope that these questions will someday soon be made unthinkable, just as 35 years ago, “Pregnancy or jail and possibly death?” was for me.

Never forget how precarious Roe v. Wade really is. Use your vote to make sure a woman’s right to sovereignty over her own body remains the law.

Technorati Tags: abortion rights, Blog For Choice

Smile

I spent many of my formative years in small towns, being raised by small-town women who’d led small-town lives. It was then I learned the small-town custom of smiling at pretty much everyone.

In a small town, you smile at people because you know them, and if you don’t know them, they must be guests in town which makes you their host, so smiling is your job. And people usually smile back, even if the weather sucks or they’re late for work or they’re just travelers stopping over in your podunk small town.

Now I live in a big city and few people smile back. In fact, you are much more likely to be viewed with suspicion than goodwill. I don’t know you - why are you smiling? What are you selling? What do you want? Only the nuts or the needy smile at strangers.

But old habits die hard and even though I know I run the risk of having security called on me, I still tend to smile at people. And once in a blue moon, I smile and they smile back and for a brief shining moment, we see a glint of recognition in each other’s eyes. We share a secret, we belong to the same tribe. Greetings, fellow smiler. Keep calm and carry on.

The other day I was exiting a Starbucks, my usual soy latte in hand, when my glance fell on a baby stroller on the sidewalk. In it was slumped a tow-headed kid, sitting perfectly still, staring off into space. He looked almost too old for a stroller, and certainly too young for the lifelessness in his eyes.

Standing nearby was a man I assumed to be the boy’s father. He was young, skinny and unkempt, with a two-day blond stubble on his chin and a faint, scraggly mustache. He looked at me, looking at the boy.

I smiled.

“Hey lady,” he muttered, rolling the stroller toward me now. “Do you have any money..somethingsomething…get something to eat?” His voice was so low I could barely understand him.

I spoke reflexively: “I’m sorry.” I smiled again, dropped my eyes, and began walking.

He followed.

“I’m just trying to….” he continued muttering. The stroller wheels squeaked as they rolled over the pavement behind me.

I walked faster.

His voice grew hard. “Oh well. I guess I’ll just go steal something then.” The squeaking faded slowly away.

I thought of all my unreturned smiles.

Later I tried to assure myself that the man and the boy with the haunted eyes had somewhere to go. There are many shelters in my area, and there’s the YMCA. I imagined them there, where smiles come with a meal and a bed, and everyone is part of the same tribe.

Technorati Tags: homelessness

Dumb and Down-Under

Just in case you thought America was the only country with stupid, paranoid, racist people running the show, consider Australia.

The Australian government has decided to ban alcohol and pornography. But only for those naughty Aborigines.

It seems that the (white) Australian government has recently unveiled a report called “Little Children Are Sacred” (cows?) that concludes alcohol and pornography are to blame for pedophilia among the country’s Aborigines. So in addition to imposing restrictions on how the Aborigines may spend their welfare checks, they are also going to make it illegal for them to possess alcohol and pornography.

There are so many things wrong with this - where do you start? But I could not possibly express this inanity better than Susie Bright has already in a blog post filed under “When Prudes Attack” (best category name ever):

Let me get this right:

1. You enter a new continent and colonize it, murdering thousands with superior firepower;

2. You steal the indigenous people’s land, dispossessing them forever;

3. You rape their women, kidnap their children and put them in “homes” to rape them, too;

4. You bring the booze in, of course—

6. And you exclude “the blacks” in every aspect of your new government.

Three centuries later, what do you do for a encore?

Apparently, you announce that you’re shocked— simply shocked— by the rampant violence, despair, and alcoholism, in the original people’s culture. It’s got to be stopped! It’s time to ban pornography! You’ve finally gotten to the root of the thing!

Well, finally! And they’d better act on it now, before those silly black people really get out of hand.

Everybody knows that pornography leads to pedophilia. Yes, watching ugly-as-sin white guys have sex with fake-boobed, fake-orgasming women always makes men want to run right out and have sex with children. But…only Aborigines men.

And alcohol is the tool of the devil, of course, although not because it makes one want to have sex (no one escapes the ravages of whiskey-dick). Rather, the report “shows” that alcohol leads to child neglect, and is also used as currency, i.e., alcohol offered in exchange for sex. But….only by Aborigines men.

The white community of Australia, which doubtless has the same problems with alcoholism and child abuse as any other community, is somehow exempt from this scrutiny and discipline. White people are on welfare, too, but no one is worried about how they are spending their checks. Porn is just as rampant in the cities and home computers of white Australians as anywhere else, but there are no hysterical sociologists rushing to report on its affects on their children.

The Australian government could have done a “report” on the utter poverty in which the Aborigines live, and how that may contribute to social problems they may have. But no, it’s not their destitution and dispossession that must end; it’s the alcohol and pornography that need to go.

Brilliant solution, considering how well banning vices has worked for other countries: “I voted for Prohibition and all I got was this lousy mafia.”

Even more outrageous than the Australian government’s deluded assessment of and answer to the Aborigines’ problems is their patronizing, plantation-owner attitude toward them in general. I’m flashing back to a time I never even lived in, a pre-Civil Rights world where white men believed “colored people” just weren’t hard-wired with certain intellectual and practical skills. If they have problems, it’s because they just don’t know how to handle things.

Daddy knows what’s best, that’s why he makes the rules. Rules that never seem to apply to Daddy’s people, only to the marginalized who have been stripped of their ability to give him any lip.

So be good and let Daddy finish his wine and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in peace.

Technorati Tags: Australian Aborigines, Australia, racism, paternalism

Racist Fucktards Is Us

OK, you’re probably really tired of pictures of plants by now, so I promise this is the last one for a while (barring the irresistable, like a 400-pound tomato in the garden or something). This is a hens-n-chicks I’ve had for a few years, and it keeps growing tentacles and stuff. I’m waiting for it to leap onto my face and deposit eggs in my mouth.

You may also wonder what’s with the disappearance of all the Deep Thoughts on my blog lately. Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ve been taking a break from the insanity for the past couple of weeks. Usually when shit gets me down, I just reach into my trusty Fucket Bucket, grab a piece of candy, and keep on blogging. But the other day I ran across something that made me crawl head-first into the Bucket and not want to come out.

Around about the last week of May, the writers of the blog Pandagon informed me that there are still some racist fucktards in the good Old South. I know, I know - like, duh. But it’s always hard to face racist fucktards, and even more so when some of them are children. You may have already heard about this, but in case you haven’t and don’t have the stomach to read the (excellent) blog post itself, here’s the gist:

Some black students in a high school in Jena, Louisiana decided to partake of the shade of a tree that grows in a part of the schoolyard traditionally claimed by the white students. The next day, a noose or three were hanging from said tree. The white kids who hung them were suspended for three days for “playing a prank.” Then some of the white kids got into fist-fights with some of the black kids. Within hours of one such fight, three black kids were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder. If convicted by their all-white jury, they face probable life imprisonment.

So the hoisting of nooses is a prank that gets three days, and the fist fight is attempted murder that gets life. Right.

The tendency when reading about atrocity is to shake one’s head and mutter, “How horrible. Those damn racist southern fucktards.” It’s a way of distancing, an attempt at self-protection which is ultimately quite delusional. As Lydia Bean, founding member of Friends of Justice, put it so well on their blog:

Many bloggers across the nation are clicking their tongues about Jena as a vestige of the old Jim Crow, and despairing that progressive politics could ever flourish there, in that muggy, exotic, backward place we call “The South”. What progressives don’t realize is that the South is Us. Repeat after me, progressives: The South is Us.

[There’s] nothing exotic about Jena, Louisiana, except that the white kids got away with hanging three nooses in the public school. The sad truth is that young black men are routinely demonized by police and prosecutors all over America. Our nation has set up a direct pipeline from high school to prison for young poor black men, so that we have more black men in prison than in college. And for the most part, nobody cares unless someone does something exotic like hang up a noose. Without the nooses, nobody would have cared if these young men had been prosecuted on bad evidence on a petty charge, and thrown away for life like so many of their generation.

Ouch.

The silver lining in all of this, I guess, is that due to the awesome power of this newfangled Information Highway the internet, this incident is getting a lot of really bad press which is reaching a lot of people, and maybe in the long run, it will help things get a little better.

Maybe the fact that this kind of slavery-era shit - black kids facing life sentences for fist-fighting with white kids - will make us realize that it’s our children that pay the price of adults’ hatred, and as their protectors we are obligated to climb out of our Fucket Buckets, step up to the plate and enact federal hate-crime legislation.

That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m all out of brandy truffles anyway.

Technorati Tags: Jena Louisiana, hate crimes, racism

Calling all Ribs: save the date!

Next Saturday, I’ll be contributing to the Take Back The Blog blogswarm, hosted by Bruce at Crablaw,

…in support of the rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging but indeed everywhere and at all times, day and night, without fear of harassment, intimidation, sexual harassment, online stalking and slander, predation or violence of any sort.

Bruce, you are a righteous rib, as is Renee in Ohio and her kick-ass TBTB logo.

However, dear Readers, you may be a little distracted at this point by the peculiar term “blogswarm.”

A “blogswarm” is when a bunch of people blog about the same crap ON PURPOSE! It is a premeditated thing, as opposed to the usual randomness that tends to rule the Internet. Order from chaos. Entropy. Call it whatever you want.

I want to call it an attempt to herd cats, but an ingenious one.

Now that we have context, I invite you to resume contemplating the delicious uppityness of a global blogorama entirely devoted to giving the big, feminist fuck-you to sexist online cowards everywhere.

If you have a blog, I also encourage you to join me in this most excellent blog-in. It just takes an email to Bruce, some bandwidth, and a little bit of your own personal uppity.

See you then!

Technorati Tags: blogswarm, Crablaw, Take Back The Blog, sexual harassment, sexism, feminism

March 8th is International Women’s Day

And don’t say “Hallmark” unless you want Marx to do a backflip in his grave:

In 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. In accordance with a declaration by the Socialist Party of America, the first National Woman’s Day (NWD) was observed across the United States on 28 February.

International Women’s Day is still a national holiday in many European countries and the US. The United Nations has pledged in 2007 to “end impunity for violence against women and girls” and has a site devoted to it, including a list of facts about female infanticide, sex trafficking, domestic violence, sexual abuse & rape, FGM (female genital mutilation), systematic rape as a weapon in war, and the links between HIV infection and violence against women.

Oy - just writing that list is depressing. Yet that’s the unvarnished truth of many, many women’s lives around the world.

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I realized so many people are unaware of what life is like for people, especially women, outside their immediate vicinity. How can that be, in this age of information? I suspect “information overload” is involved; saturated, we begin to tune out those things we feel we cannot affect or control.

Well, no need to be a Negative Nelly (or a Cynical Cindy). A little goes a long way, and we can do it if we work together. Just keep swimming…just keep swimming…

How can we help make the world a better place for women?

• Donate money to a charity of your choice that assists women or children.
• To really feel it, donate elbow grease - volunteer. Teach a teenage girl to read at a literacy center, mentor an elementary school girl, help out in a women’s or street kids’ shelter.
• Join an organization such as NOW, NARAL, Amnesty International and many others that actively work for women’s rights in the US and around the globe.
• Write letters to your congresspeople about women’s issues, including those involving women in other countries; remember, yours may be the only voice they have.

Anyone of the above goes a long way toward changing the world. But sometimes it’s the not-so-obvious things, the day-to-day acts of conscience that are the most powerful agents of change. The catch is: they’re uppity.

• When we find ourselves thinking or speaking in sexist generalities (Boys are icky!) - we can stop. Maybe even try to figure out where that’s coming from and fix it.
• When someone we love says something demeaning about women in our presence, call them on it. Grandpa might not like it, but you can out-run him.
• Resist the urge to be “cool” when someone says or does something offensive. Ironically, “feminist” perspectives are considered old-fashioned in some hipster circles these days, but so what? If it’s on our turf, we can tell them to take that shit ouside and if it’s not, at least we don’t have to pretend we agree.
• Start writing a blog.

It’s not easy being uppity, I know. But if not you, who?

Technorati Tags: International Women’s Day

Why I oppose the death penalty

Imagine being forced to spend 15 years of your life in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. That’s 15 years of your one-and-only life completely wasted. Then you get killed - by electricity, hanging, or lethal injection. A few years later, DNA evidences proves your innocence. You receive a posthumous pardon. Says the state with a shrug, “Oops.”

Sound beyond horrible? Happens all the time.

As an article in the New York Times says:

Modern DNA testing is steadily uncovering a dark history of justice denied. More than 190 DNA exonerations in 18 years show ever more alarming patterns of citizens, wrongly convicted, suffering in prison.

Suffering and - arbitrarily - dying at the hand of the citizenry. That means us.

DNA evidence is now proving that many of those death sentences are terrible miscarriages of justice. According to Amnesty International, “To date, 123 wrongfully convicted inmates have been released from death row in the United States.”

It’s no secret that our justice system is flawed; science has been proving that for years (Gary Dotson, convicted of rape, made headlines in 1989 as the first person to be exonerated by DNA evidence).

We all know there is racial bias in our courts (studies show that the death penalty is more likely to be sought if the murder victim is white than if they are a person of color).

We are aware that when it comes to defending themselves, the poor have a big problem (there are no rich people on death row).

We even know that the law’s protection of the mentally ill is often ignored (the mentally ill account for 1 in 10 executed).

It is truly chilling to me that we know all of these facts, yet the majority of Americans support state sanctioned killing, more interested in assuaging our fear than serving the truth.

And some of us appear to be a lot more afraid than others. Total executions since state’s reinstatement of the death penalty: Washington-4. Texas-381.

If this bullshit is as appalling to you as it is to me, take heart: we can act uppity.

And the good news is, it works.

“There is no compelling evidence that the New Jersey death penalty rationally serves a legitimate penological intent.”
– New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission, 2006

Check out Amnesty’s pages on abolishing the death penalty and what you can do to help.

Don’t let “an eye for an eye” make our whole country blind.

Technorati Tags: human rights, death penalty, Amnesty International, miscarriage of justice, DNA evidence