Ellen LaConte : A Really Scary Story for Stephen King

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Time to be scared straight?

Dear Stephen King:
An open letter to one American who really
could scare the rest of us into action

By Ellen LaConte / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2011

I’ve been participating in an email discussion group that’s tackling urgent issues like population, climate change, and peak oil. There’s one particularly curmudgeonly member who persistently protests the doom and gloom vision members of the group generally share. Recently he suggested that we might as well just get Stephen King to write our posts because fear-mongering is his business and he’d take the doom and gloom up a notch. Which inspired me to write the following open letter to Stephen King.

Dear Stephen King,

Most of your books are too scary for me. They give me nightmares. Call me over-sensitive. But when my son was a teenager and I still lived in Maine (Stockton Springs, not far from you) he devoured your books. So I bought a batch of raffle tickets from the local library, partly to support a good cause but more than a little because a signed hardcover copy of your latest book (I think it was The Stand) was the drawing prize. When I won and gave him the book, for about a week he thought I was the best mom ever.

Well, he’s almost 35 now and along with a lot of other young Americans, he’s wondering what our generation was thinking all these years we didn’t notice we were spending down his only meaningful inheritances: a habitable planet, the company of congenial species and functioning ecosystems, and enough natural resources to get a living on in an economy that doesn’t devour its young.

Even though I edited a national small-farm magazine, wrote scads of articles about organic gardening, homesteaded, heated and cooked with wood, grew most of our veggies, raised some of our meat, put food by, composted, and recycled through the years of his childhood, I was still complicit in and beneficiary of the systems that thoughtful young people like my son now believe have robbed them blind and put their very lives at risk of being nasty, brutish, and short.

And despite my best intentions, I was complicit. We all are who have been fortunate enough to live the American Dream.

In my book, Life Rules (as in, “we don’t”) I write that “we’re stealing our present pleasures from tomorrow’s children.” It’s easier than taking candy from a baby. Like William Catton wrote in Overshoot back in 1982 — which apparently didn’t shake enough folks up because we’re still overshooting the planet’s capacity to support us, living as far beyond Earth’s means as many of us are living beyond our own — “Posterity doesn’t vote and doesn’t exert much influence in the market-place. So the living go on stealing from their descendants.”

The problem is that most Americans don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. They think they’re trying to grab hold of a better future for themselves and their kids and grandkids. They don’t realize that all that grabbing has dramatically reduced what they and their grandkids are going to be able to get. They haven’t caught on to the finite planet thing, the idea that on a finite planet, every resource except sunshine and other forms of radiation from outer space is either a one-shot deal — like fossil fuels, water, minerals and metals — or a timed-release one — like forests, fisheries, topsoil — that we haven’t been giving Life enough time to re-release.

They don’t get it that we can’t keep treating species like pop-up critters in a state fair shooting gallery and ecosystems like toilets and all-you-can-eat buffets. They’ve got it in their heads that some-magic-how, our population can keep growing and so can “the” economy, as if we had a whole bunch more Earth’s we could import stuff from when we run low (like we have now of cheap-easy oil, water, food, minerals, metals, and money) or move to when this one’s used up or its weather is havocked.

Now I know, Mr. King, that you’re familiar with the predicament we’re in, which is scarier even than the hot-housed version of some of our present quandaries you offered up in Under the Dome, which is saying a lot.

And I suspect you’re not any more thrilled than I am or millions of other Americans are with the bickering and dithering of our present crop of leaders who, if they’ve seen the handwriting on the wall — the pending end of Life as we know it if we keep trying to do business as usual — are as clueless about its meaning for them and for us as Babylon’s King Belshazzar was in the book of Daniel when that dead hand, like something right out of one of your stories, wrote mene, mene, tekel u-Pharsin on his palace wall.

And given that you’ve never quit the kindly, off-the-beaten-track, small-town, good-neighbors environs you were born in for the bright lights of a big city, I suspect you also know that where surviving creeping chaos, a critical mass of crises, and pending systemic collapse are concerned, small is not only beautiful but sustainable. And local is a lot more manageable — even when it comes to identifying and punishing the bad guys — than global or even national, whether we’re talking economies or governments.

And it seems to me that, given your influence and the speed with which you can turn out a blockbuster, you might take my feeble attempt to point out the error of our ways, turn the truth of it into fiction and a few million Americans into Committees of Correspondence, planners of a new Declaration of Independence, this time from the global economy and the Powers that run it, and get the lion’s share of the benefit out of it.

So, here’s my contribution to your plot outline:

It’s 2011. The global economy, like any successful meme, has gone viral. It’s doing the same thing to the planet’s human and natural communities that HIV does to the human body. Really. Check this out. Point for point, the economy’s a dead ringer for the virus (pardon the pun).

  • HIV is a tiny package of genetic information, an RNA code without any body attached to it. The global economy is a big package of socio-economic information, a set of ideas about a particular kind of economic system (without any body attached to it).

  • HIV is held together by a protein wrapper like the sugar coating on a pill that makes it taste better. The wrapper acts like a camouflage, making it “taste better,” or at least not taste bad, to the bodies it hopes to infect so that they don’t reject it on first pass. The sugar coating that makes the viral economy taste good and camouflages its intent is a capitalist ideology of perpetual growth and progress and universal prosperity — an easy sell to communities and nations lacking in material well-being

  • Though it has some of the characteristics of living things, HIV is not a living thing. It’s a parasite, a taker. It lives off its hosts’ resources. In the process it weakens and sometimes kills them. Without workers, consumers, and believers, without Earth’s raw materials, other-than-human species and ecological services, the economy couldn’t feed itself, expand or grow. It’s a parasite — a taker — too.

  • As a group, disease-causing agents like viruses are called “pathogens.” The directors, managers, promoters and primary beneficiaries of the global economy are traditionally called “the Powers That Be,” or simply “the Powers.”

  • The secret of a virus’s success is mobility. Viruses need reliable methods of transportation to move them from host to host. Many viruses are airborne. HIV is liquid-borne. It gets around in bodily fluids like semen, blood, and breast milk, and through contact between mucous-lined — moist — tissues. Ditto the global economy. It spreads from community to community, nation to nation, by means of liquid assets and fluid exchanges of money, credit, loans, “floats,” entitlements, tax breaks and incentive, and through money-lined contacts between its participants, particularly the Powers.

  • HIV targets and takes over — it dominates — the immune system, a system distributed throughout the body that protects, defends, heals, and restores health to the body. By means of this domination of the immune system it dominates the whole body. The viral global economy targets and takes over — it dominates the Earth’s equivalent of an immune system — the natural and human communities that in the past have been able to protect, defend, heal, and restore health to themselves, their ecosystems, and the biosphere, the whole body of Life on Earth.

  • HIV invades immune system cells, disables their protective and healing capabilities, and reprograms them to make millions of copies of itself. After it has used up a cell’s resources, its copies disperse to other parts of the body and other hosts, destroying captured cells and whole organ systems in the process. The global economy persuades, buys, cajoles, coerces, or forces its way into human and natural communities. It undermines their ability to provide for and protect themselves, and reprograms them to support its growth and expansion. When it has depleted local resources, it moves on, leaving communities and nations in ruins.

  • HIV makes the body vulnerable to all manner of infection and disease. The global economy makes every place on Earth vulnerable to the environmental, economic, social, and political symptoms that result from contracting Earth’s equivalent of AIDS.

  • Left untreated, the human immunodeficiency virus morphs into AIDS and dies when the host does. Left untreated, the viral economy becomes too big not to fail. It consumes all it can of its host — Life on Earth as we know it — and dies when it’s host does.

In your page-turner, you could turn the viral economy into a virus that attacks the human brain, affecting people according to their adrenalin levels, making some more aggressive and self-interested and others merely more attracted to comfort, convenience, and consumption.

Of course the virus would mutate as it evolved and spread, turning off parts of the brain given to reason and clear perception of reality. You get my drift. As the virus got stronger, humans would become less intelligent and more susceptible to it.

You’d have no end of crises, villains, causes of death, and scenes of mayhem to work with. Bankrupt state and local economies, millions living in the streets of un-TARP-covered cities, killer storms and broke emergency management agencies, the unemployed and homeless wandering zombie-like in the streets, kudzu and ivy growing over Main Street, species going belly up everywhere you look, suicides, murders, thievery, empty store shelves, cars, and trains and planes stalled for lack of fuel, no more plastic anything, people dropping like flies for lack of food and medicine, money worth the paper it’s printed on, governments closed down, their staffs, lobbyists and legislators walking home (like that guy in Cold Mountain who walked home after the Civil War before there were cars and planes), brownouts and power grid failures, invasive species, mutated bacteria and pandemic MRSAs, mass migrations…

The end of Life as we know it has got to be the scariest story you’ve attempted, despite the fact that it’s coming true. And while we non-fiction hacks try desperately, book after book, post after post, and page after page to persuade the not-yet-converted that Americans need to get together and work together to take our future back before there’s nothing left worth taking back, you could pull it off in a thousand pages or less before the 2012 elections.

And you could even give it an uncharacteristic happy ending, where a critical mass of little American cities like Bangor, Maine, and neighborhoods in big cities like Seattle figure out how to ward off and survive the infection. Their leaders and people could become sort of like antibodies — that was Paul Hawken’s idea in Blessed Unrest — dedicated to healing, protecting, and providing for themselves and their natural support systems. And they could discover the joys of resourcefulness, resilience, reciprocity, recycling — and survival against the odds.

But, then, that wouldn’t be a very Stephen King ending, would it? You’ll come up with something better. And scarier. Feel free to take this plot line and run with it.

All best,

Ellen LaConte

[Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, gregarious recluse, and freelance writer living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic. Her most recent book, the controversial Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010), is available on order from bookstores and online booksellers. You can learn more about the book, read her recent posts, or sign up for her bimonthly online newsletter, Starting Point, at www.ellenlaconte.com. Read more by Ellen LaConte on The Rag Blog.]

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Ted McLaughlin : The Death of Juvenile Justice in Texas

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo by Robert Essel / Corbis.

It’s a crime:
The death of juvenile justice in Texas

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2011

Juvenile Justice in the state of Texas has been on a wild ride for the last few years. It all started when some abuse was discovered in a West Texas state juvenile facility. The newspapers and other media jumped on it and made it sound as though abuse was rampant throughout the system administered by the Texas Youth Commission (TYC).

This was not true, but a good story is better than the truth for many.

Was there abuse at that facility? Yes. But what many failed to report was that several people at that facility reported the abuse and tried to get it stopped. The ball was dropped by the agency’s leadership in Austin, who did not immediately deal with the situation. If they had dealt with it promptly (as previous administrations had done when abuse was uncovered), the current mess might have been avoided. But they didn’t, and the story quickly spiraled out of control.

The Texas Youth Commission has never dealt with a large number of young people in the state. Only about one-half of 1% of juveniles in the state ever came in contact with TYC, and fewer than that were actually incarcerated by the state. At the time the scandal broke there were slightly more than 5,000 students incarcerated by the state (and a few thousand on parole). About half of these juveniles would eventually make their way into prison after becoming adults.

When you think about it that’s a pretty remarkable success record for TYC — considering these were the worst juveniles the state had (and churches, schools, probation, and drug and other treatment programs had not succeeded with them). But that was ignored in the rush to “fix” the system after the scandal broke.

In a way, the perfect storm was created by the convergence of several things — a storm that would result in the virtual destruction of the juvenile justice system.

First was the West Texas scandal. The abuse was not widespread, but media accounts made it seem like it was. Second was the desire of some on the left to reform the system. This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. All justice systems (both juvenile and adult) should be continually examined for ways to improve them.

But in portraying the juveniles as “helpless children,” these reformers ignored the fact that all of them were criminals who had committed serious felonies and posed a danger to their communities.

The third element was the huge budget problems in Texas. While the Republicans (who control the state government) might not agree with the reformers on a philosophical level, they saw the opportunity to save a lot of money by gutting a state agency (in the guise of “reforming” it).

These elements resulted in cutting the number of juveniles incarcerated by half. This was done by cutting the amount of time a juvenile was incarcerated (ignoring whether they were ready to be released or not) and closing down some facilities.

Just last Friday it was announced that an additional three facilities would soon be closed (and many parole offices would be closed). The justification for this was two-fold. Legislators said that juvenile crime was dropping (therefore fewer facilities were needed), and more juveniles would be dealt with on a county level instead of referring them to TYC.

Both of these are bogus arguments.

While it is true that juvenile crime has been falling by a small amount (single-digit percentages), the amount of bed space in the agency has been reduced by a huge percentage (at least 70%). The assumption is that the counties will now deal with most of these juveniles. The problem with that is that the counties were given very little more money (and the money for drug and other treatment facilities was actually reduced). Also ignored was the fact that the counties had already done everything they had the capacity to do before referring the juveniles to TYC.

So the counties have done what they can, and the state has very little capacity for housing the juveniles the counties can no longer control (which is resulting in sentences as short as 90 days — and 30 days for those referred by parole). It is ludicrous to think that a juvenile criminal can be rehabilitated in 90 days (after many local agencies failed to do it in a much longer period of time).

Now the legislators and reformers may think they have done something good by preventing the incarceration of these young criminals, but they haven’t. The police and courts still have to deal with them, and many of them cannot be left in the community (because it would endanger the community).

What is going to be done with them? The answer is obvious and is already starting to take place all over the state — they will be sent to an ADULT PRISON. They might not receive as much help there, but the community will be safer and they will be kept longer.

The truth is that the juvenile justice system in Texas has not been reformed — it has been destroyed. And juvenile justice in the state has been thrown back to the time when most serious juvenile criminals would be sent to a prison rather than a juvenile facility. This means that more juveniles will be abused and placed in danger, not less. And the counties should not be blamed for doing this, since it has been forced on them by the state legislature.

There will be talk of wonderful reform in the coming days. Don’t believe it. What we are really witnessing is the death of the juvenile justice system in Texas.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that I have spent most of my working life in various forms of law enforcement — including 15 years in the Texas Youth Commission (eight years working in a correctional institution and seven years working in parole). I am currently retired.

[Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin at The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Toni Tipton-Martin and the Politics of the Kitchen

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

The many faces of Aunt Jemima. Image from The Jemima Code.

The Jemima Code:
Toni Tipton-Martin explores the
politics of the kitchen, past and present

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2011

AUSTIN — In the cafeteria-turned-classroom at UT Elementary School, Toni Tipton-Martin struggles to keep six restless boys focused on hot cocoa, the day’s nutrition lesson. She starts with a store-bought cocoa mix, guiding the students through the list of “all those crazy ingredients” — the tongue-twisting list of scary-sounding additives and preservatives — before explaining how they will use four simple ingredients to make their own.

The students are eager to measure and mix, but Tipton-Martin is also teaching critical thinking — and patience — in her SANDE mentoring and training program. She has them examine various kinds of chocolate, encouraging them to “taste with your sense of smell — the cinnamon makes it Mexican chocolate,” trying to engage these youngsters of the digital age in a more embodied way of knowing.

When she is satisfied that they understand what they are doing, the boys go to work with their measuring cups and mixing bowls, producing their cocoa creations that will go home with them in a plastic bag.

When the lesson is over, Tipton-Martin walks the students back to their homeroom, past the vegetable-and-herb garden that is also part of SANDE (the acronym stands for “Spirit, Attitude, Nutrition, Deeds, and Emotions”). She isn’t just trying to teach young people to cook healthy food and understand nutrition, but to understand where food comes from and why it all matters.

Folks in the United States are coming to understand that all this does matter very much. Industrial agriculture and fast food still dominate, but more and more people are shopping at farmers markets, seeking out healthy food, and recognizing the social costs of reckless eating habits.

For Tipton-Martin — an African-American chef teaching mostly black and brown kids — it’s a particularly opportune moment to be working on these issues, as Michelle Obama is using the First Lady’s pulpit to focus attention on childhood obesity. Last June, Tipton-Martin was one of the chefs and nutritionists on the South Lawn of the White House to promote Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, and this week she’s front and center at the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals being held in Austin (she’s chair of the host city committee).

So, all in all, it’s been a good year for Tipton-Martin, as her career takes a turn around another of several bends. Her resume includes newspaper journalism (a food writer/editor, first at The Los Angeles Times and then the Cleveland Plain Dealer), cookbook writing and editing, and non-profit work (a four-year stint at Southern Foodways Alliance , a center dedicated to documenting and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the American South, housed at the University of Mississippi).

Since moving to Austin in 1999, she’s created a niche for herself as a writer/activist/social entrepreneur, a status marked by the Community Leadership Award she received from the University of Texas in 2010.

Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature — the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup — but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.

That’s why, no matter which of her current enterprises is consuming her time, Tipton-Martin is always working on cracking “The Jemima Code,” her phrase for getting past the caricature to the real lives of those women.

Drawing on varied sources — oral and written histories from both slaves and slave-holding families, old cookbooks, and people’s stories — Tipton-Martin has for the past two years been adding stories of those women to her website by that name, convinced that there’s a deep lesson in how white Americans, especially in the South, have dealt with these women.

In one of her blog entries, Tipton-Martin explains that “Aunt Jemima became the embodiment of our deepest antipathy for, and obsession with, the women who fed us with grace and skill.” Many white families depended on Jemima and despised her at the same time, leaving these women who cooked and cared for families on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Rather than merely pity such women as exploited laborers or romanticize them as the ultimate maternal figure, Tipton-Martin wants to tell the stories of their skill and creativity:

Why don’t we celebrate their contributions to American culture the way we venerate the imaginary Betty Crocker? Why wasn’t their true legacy preserved? Can we ever forget the images of ignorant, submissive, selfless, sassy, asexual despots? Is it possible to replace the mostly unflattering pictures of generous waistlines bent over cast iron skillets burned into our eyes? Will we ever believe that strong African women, who toted wood and built fires before even thinking about beating biscuit dough or mixing cakes, left us more than just their formulas for good pancakes?

Tipton-Martin’s interest is not merely historical; by telling the stories of these women, she hopes not only to remind the black community of their strength but also to give white people an opening for honest self-reflection.

When Tipton-Martin says she is haunted by those women, it is really the racism, sexism, and economic inequality they faced that haunt her. And it’s not really those historical forces, but the enduring presence of those inequalities in American life that Tipton-Martin can’t shake.

“These women create ways for me to interact with my own past,” she says, and struggle with the present.

Toni Tipton-Martin talks to UT Elementary students as they head to the garden. Image from UT Blogs.

Tipton-Martin grew up in the middle class in Los Angeles at a time when more opportunities were opening up for some blacks, especially those who were trained to fit into white society. Tipton-Martin was one of them, a good student who took to journalism and early on learned how to live “in costume,” offering a profile that wouldn’t scare white people.

That kind of bargain with the dominant culture can be soothing but is rarely satisfying, and Tipton-Martin’s own struggles run through “Jemima Code.” For example, she tells the story of Vera Beck, who was the test kitchen cook at the Cleveland newspaper. Tipton-Martin writes that Beck “forced me to circle back and confront [my] ‘contrary instincts’”:

I thought I was contented — a thirty-something food editor living far away from home on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, enjoying amazing and exotic world cuisine — the daughter of a health-conscious, fitness-crazed cook whose experiments with tofu, juicing and smoothies predated the fads. In the few short years we had together at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Vera taught me a few life lessons while showing me the way to light and flaky buttermilk biscuits.

Among those lessons was the recognition that Tipton-Martin’s upbringing in a more integrated world also had cut her off from a tradition based on observation and apprenticeship in the kitchen, which was about more than cooking. “It was entirely possible that I would stumble blindly through the rest of my life without ever discovering the Aunt Jemima spirit living in me, if it hadn’t been for Vera Beck,” she writes.

Tipton-Martin is blunt in describing the complexity of the race and gender politics of her life. Being light-skinned with naturally straight hair — “I look like the Jezebel house servant mulatto girls of slavery” — made it easier to enter the middle class, she says. But at the same time, her appearance meant she had to “overcome the stereotype that I’m Barbie, too.” She speaks about the advantages she’s had, but doesn’t ignore either the racism or sexism of the culture.

As time goes on, Tipton-Martin is less willing to don the costume, less interested in presenting herself and her work in ways that make it easy for others. Rather than cashing in on the moment by writing a breezy recipe book that exploits the women of the Jemima Code — something along the lines of “Mammy’s sassy lessons for healthy cooking” — she wants to write a book that confronts the social and political issues. “Everybody’s intrigued,” she says, when she takes the idea to agents and publishers, but wary.

Tipton-Martin knows well how the white world rewards people of color who fit in, rather than challenge, white norms. But she finds it more and more difficult to smile away the racist or ignorant comments.

An example: At the opening event for the new Foodways Texas project (she’s a board member), Tipton-Martin said a white woman told her that this work on food and nutrition is so important because “those people” come from cultures with bad diets. “I used to just smile” at such comments, she says, “but that day I told her the problem was not ‘their’ cultures but fast food and processed food, which is an American problem.”

Tipton-Martin has increasingly less patience for what we might call “the ignorance of the privileged” — the desire of people with status and wealth to explain away problems of inequality as simply the failure of “those people” rather than think about the injustice of the system, from which the privileged benefit.

But she also recognizes that people struggling in difficult circumstances — especially the kids from poor neighborhoods, disproportionately black and brown — need more than political analysis. She rejects the simplistic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” prescription of conservatives but believes that young people need role models. That’s where the women of the Jemima Code come in:

For me, they are important role models. They’re the closest I can get to saying to this [younger] generation that there are women who had it harder than you. Even though you think your life is really hard — and it is, and there are all these forces against you — you can persevere. The women of the Jemima Code took control of their lives under circumstances in where they didn’t even have control of their own bodies, but they were able to claim their dignity.

For Tipton-Martin, those women are not just potential role models for young people but for herself as well. She writes, “I discover that the woman I am becoming is a mere shadow of the women they were: patient and loving; smart, talented, hard-working; strong physically and emotionally, compassionate; multi-tasking.”

Tipton-Martin has a habit of engaging in the critical self-reflection that she asks of others, which leads to a professional and personal restlessness. She was raised to assimilate, to fit in, to prove to the dominant culture that she could make it under the rules written by white people, by men, by the wealthy. She was fitted for “the costume,” but found it increasingly uncomfortable.

“As long as I could just keep popping from costume to costume, I didn’t have to reconcile any of this and find out what it is that I hoped to accomplish,” Tipton-Martin says.

Negotiating life without a costume means talking honestly about a history — collective and personal — that the dominant culture desperately wants to ignore. That means not only highlighting the skill and accomplishments of the women of the Jemima Code, but facing the pain, anger and shame that comes with living in a system that still values white people, men, and the wealthy over others.

For Tipton-Martin, that conversation can start at dinner by giving a voice to the women who for so long put food on the table.

LINKS:

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted on June 2, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

In this report from Paris, The Rag Blog’s David Hamilton contrasts the French and U.S. healthcare systems and it turns out there’s simply no contest. The World Health Organization has France at number one, and the U.S. lags at 37th. On the other hand, our health care is the most expensive and we’re way up there in number of uninsured. David tells us how the French system works and why it’s so successful.

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David P. Hamilton : French Healthcare is the World’s Best

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Yale Journal of Medicine and Law.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Letters from France III:
The French healthcare system
is the best in the world

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

“There are no uninsured in France. That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs.” — Victor Rodwin, New York University

[This is the third in a series of dispatches from France by The Rag Blog‘s David P. Hamilton.]

PARIS — President Obama dropped the healthcare “public option” like a hot potato at the very onset of last year’s debate in the U.S. over reforming healthcare. Despite polls of average citizens to the contrary, Obama asserted there wasn’t enough support for it, meaning that there wasn’t enough support among the economic elite, health insurance corporations, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, and other medical capitalists, and hence, not enough support among members of Congress beholden to those interests. Let’s take a look at what they’re so afraid of.

The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the French health care system as the best in the world. The U.S. system ranks 37th. The complex details of the procedures used to determine these rankings are available on the WHO website. The WHO has hundreds of rankings on health related topics as specific as beer consumption by country. The U.S. fails to distinguish itself favorably in any of them.

Of particular note is the ranking by total health care expenditures as a percentage of the GNP where the U.S. at 15.4% leads the world, only exceeded by the Marshall Islands and far ahead of any other major industrialized nation.

Hence, while the U.S. health care system produces mediocre results, it is the most expensive. For France, with a system rightists consider far too expensive to maintain, the corresponding figure is 11.4%. Different studies show this disparity even greater, at 16% and 10.7%. In the U.S., $6,400 is spent annually per capita on health care costs while the average French person spends barely over half that amount, $3,300.

Other health care assessments tell much the same story. Infant mortality is a principal indicator of the quality of health care. In France, it is 3.9 per 1,000 live births. In the U.S., the rate is nearly 80% higher at 7.0. Life expectancy is 79.4 years in France, two years more than in the U.S. Death from respiratory disease, often preventable, is 31.2 per 100,000 in France while in the US it is 61.5, despite the fact that nearly twice the percentage of French adults smoke tobacco compared to the U.S.

France also has many more hospital beds and doctors per capita than the U.S. A more recent study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured “amenable mortality,” a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care, in 19 industrialized nations. France again came in first. The U.S. was last. Not surprisingly, French citizens’ satisfaction with their system is 65%, the highest level among all European countries, compared to 40% in the U.S.

The French pay for their healthcare primarily by paying taxes that cover medical services. These taxes are high. Americans don’t pay as much in taxes, but pay much more when one counts insurance costs and their expenses for medicines, doctors, and hospitals.

The French system offers universal coverage and everyone is required to participate. In the U.S, 15.4% (46.3 million people) have no coverage at all and about twice that many are underinsured. Hence, there are roughly twice as many Americans with inadequate coverage as there are people in France.

The French system doesn’t cover everything. Co-payments in France range from 10 to 40% for most medical services. Hence, 92% of the French have complementary private insurance. This private health insurance makes up 12.7% of French health care expenditures. All private health insurance in France is required to offer guaranteed renewability, so you cannot be dropped if you get sick.

Most private health insurance is provided by non-profit organizations and their “modest” premiums are usually paid by employers. Furthermore, the more sick one is, the higher percentage is paid by the insurance system, 100% for 30 serious and chronic illnesses such as cancer and diabetes.

This feature is known as “solidarity,” a consciousness of community almost altogether absent in the hyper-individualistic U.S. Victor Rodwin, a professor of health polity at New York University states, “There are no uninsured in France. That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs.”

How are the French able to accomplish this? First, the insurance system is run by quasi-public, non-profit agencies that cover different sectors of French society. These agencies directly negotiate prices for medicines with manufacturers, homeopathic medicines included. They also negotiate compensation schedules with doctors. Doctors are free to charge whatever they want, but the amount the system will reimburse is fixed.

Another reason for the lower costs is that, in the words of Kerry Capell in Business Week, “France reimburses its doctors at a far lower rate than U.S physicians would accept.” French doctors earn about a third as much as their American counterparts who are the best-paid group of professionals in the world. But French doctors have no student loans to pay since their medical training was paid for by the state.

In addition, France is not tort-friendly, so malpractice insurance is negligible. The French government also pays two-thirds of relatively high social security taxes for doctors. In France, general practitioners are specifically mandated to be concerned with prevention, public health education, and epidemiology.

In France, unlike in the U.S., getting rich is not the principal motive for pursuing a career in medicine. (I have as much education as a typical doctor, but the most I ever earned as a public school teacher in the U.S. was less than $45,000 a year. Stupid me.)

The French health system is financed primarily by a 13.55% payroll tax on income, of which almost 95% is paid by employers. In addition, there is a 5.25% “general social contribution tax” on all forms of income that contributes to health care. This tax is reduced to 3.95% on pensions. Special taxes on alcohol and tobacco also support the health care system.

Most Americans assume that universal coverage means losing one’s choice of doctors. This is not the case in France where one can go to any doctor one chooses. A patient can even go directly to specialists without referral, although the level of government compensation is higher if one goes through a general practitioner to get a referral. Furthermore, there are no lengthy delays in getting an appointment.

Recent cost-cutting “reforms” in France now require mandatory co-pays; 1 euro ($1.42 at today’s exchange rate) for a doctor visit, .5 euro ($.71) for prescriptions, and 16-18 euros ($24) a day for hospital stays. I pay several times more than that at the VA.

According to Joseph Shapiro on NPR, “the French live longer and healthier lives… because good care starts at birth. There are months of paid job leave for mothers [and now fathers] who work. New mothers get a child allowance. There are neighborhood health clinics for new mothers and their babies, home visits from nurses, and subsidized day care.”

How did the French achieve the creation of this system? The simple answer is that they elected governments led by socialists and communists who advocated these programs.

In 1930 the CGT (Confederation Generale du Travail), the largest labor union confederation, began to press for a healthcare program for workers. The CGT was then controlled by the French Communist Party. In 1934, the Communist and Socialist Parties formed the “Popular Front” and two years later won the national elections leading to the presidency of Leon Blum, first socialist and first Jewish president of France.

The Popular Front government instituted a program of healthcare coverage similar to Medicare, but for workers, not the elderly. This system was abolished during the Nazi occupation, but the Free French in London developed plans for an expanded system in the postwar period. Those involved included many CGT leaders, principally communists.

(It is probably necessary to point out to the American reader that after its initial treasonous collaboration during the period of the Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact, Communist Party members comprised the principal element in the French Resistance.)

In 1945, the provisional government established Securite Sociale, a program of health care and pension benefits. It was a compromise negotiated between Gaullist and Communist representatives in the new French National Assembly. The conservative Gaullists were opposed to a state-run healthcare system, while the communists favored a complete nationalization. The compromise laid the foundation for the current system. Subsequently, expansions in the system have principally occurred during Socialist Party-led governments.

In 1958, a survey of the French asked, “Should the healthy pay for the sick or should everyone get back only what they put into the system?” Eighty-six percent answered that the healthy should pay for the sick and 95% approved of the compulsory nature of health insurance.

This points to a central problem for the implementation of universal healthcare in the U.S. Americans lack social consciousness. Capitalist culture denigrates social solidarity and glorifies individualism. This, of course, favors the highly class conscious capitalists who are quite well organized and who exhibit admirable solidarity.

The “reforms” instituted by Obama represent what the healthcare industry was willing to accept in return for the mandate requiring everyone to buy their defective product. Those measures won’t budge the figures that clearly show the defects of the U.S. system where healthcare remains a commodity. In France, it is an inalienable right that no politician would dare to violate.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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David P. Hamilton :

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Letters from France III:
The French healthcare system
is the best in the world

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

“There are no uninsured in France. That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs.” — Victor Rodwin, New York University

PARIS — President Obama dropped the healthcare “public option” like a hot potato at the very onset of last year’s debate in the U.S. over reforming healthcare. Despite polls of average citizens to the contrary, Obama asserted there wasn’t enough support for it, meaning that there wasn’t enough support among the economic elite, health insurance corporations, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, and other medical capitalists, and hence, not enough support among members of Congress beholden to those interests. Let’s take a look at what they’re so afraid of.

The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the French health care system as the best in the world. The U.S. system ranks 37th. The complex details of the procedures used to determine these rankings are available on the WHO website. The WHO has hundreds of rankings on health related topics as specific as beer consumption by country. The U.S. fails to distinguish itself favorably in any of them.

Of particular note is the ranking by total health care expenditures as a percentage of the GNP where the U.S. at 15.4% leads the world, only exceeded by the Marshall Islands and far ahead of any other major industrialized nation.

Hence, while the U.S. health care system produces mediocre results, it is the most expensive. For France, with a system rightists consider far too expensive to maintain, the corresponding figure is 11.4%. Different studies show this disparity even greater, at 16% and 10.7%. In the U.S., $6,400 is spent annually per capita on health care costs while the average French person spends barely over half that amount, $3,300.

Other health care assessments tell much the same story. Infant mortality is a principal indicator of the quality of health care. In France, it is 3.9 per 1,000 live births. In the U.S., the rate is nearly 80% higher at 7.0. Life expectancy is 79.4 years in France, two years more than in the U.S. Death from respiratory disease, often preventable, is 31.2 per 100,000 in France while in the US it is 61.5, despite the fact that nearly twice the percentage of French adults smoke tobacco compared to the U.S.

France also has many more hospital beds and doctors per capita than the U.S. A more recent study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured “amenable mortality,” a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care, in 19 industrialized nations. France again came in first. The U.S. was last. Not surprisingly, French citizens’ satisfaction with their system is 65%, the highest level among all European countries, compared to 40% in the U.S.

The French pay for their healthcare primarily by paying taxes that cover medical services. These taxes are high. Americans don’t pay as much in taxes, but pay much more when one counts insurance costs and their expenses for medicines, doctors, and hospitals.

The French system offers universal coverage and everyone is required to participate. In the U.S, 15.4% (46.3 million people) have no coverage at all and about twice that many are underinsured. Hence, there are roughly twice as many Americans with inadequate coverage as there are people in France.

The French system doesn’t cover everything. Co-payments in France range from 10 to 40% for most medical services. Hence, 92% of the French have complementary private insurance. This private health insurance makes up 12.7% of French health care expenditures. All private health insurance in France is required to offer guaranteed renewability, so you cannot be dropped if you get sick.

Most private health insurance is provided by non-profit organizations and their “modest” premiums are usually paid by employers. Furthermore, the more sick one is, the higher percentage is paid by the insurance system, 100% for 30 serious and chronic illnesses such as cancer and diabetes.

This feature is known as “solidarity,” a consciousness of community almost altogether absent in the hyper-individualistic U.S. Victor Rodwin, a professor of health polity at New York University states, “There are no uninsured in France. That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs.”

How are the French able to accomplish this? First, the insurance system is run by quasi-public, non-profit agencies that cover different sectors of French society. These agencies directly negotiate prices for medicines with manufacturers, homeopathic medicines included. They also negotiate compensation schedules with doctors. Doctors are free to charge whatever they want, but the amount the system will reimburse is fixed.

Another reason for the lower costs is that, in the words of Kerry Capell in Business Week, “France reimburses its doctors at a far lower rate than U.S physicians would accept.” French doctors earn about a third as much as their American counterparts who are the best-paid group of professionals in the world. But French doctors have no student loans to pay since their medical training was paid for by the state.

In addition, France is not tort-friendly, so malpractice insurance is negligible. The French government also pays two-thirds of relatively high social security taxes for doctors. In France, general practitioners are specifically mandated to be concerned with prevention, public health education, and epidemiology.

In France, unlike in the U.S., getting rich is not the principal motive for pursuing a career in medicine. (I have as much education as a typical doctor, but the most I ever earned as a public school teacher in the U.S. was less than $45,000 a year. Stupid me.)

The French health system is financed primarily by a 13.55% payroll tax on income, of which almost 95% is paid by employers. In addition, there is a 5.25% “general social contribution tax” on all forms of income that contributes to health care. This tax is reduced to 3.95% on pensions. Special taxes on alcohol and tobacco also support the health care system.

Most Americans assume that universal coverage means losing one’s choice of doctors. This is not the case in France where one can go to any doctor one chooses. A patient can even go directly to specialists without referral, although the level of government compensation is higher if one goes through a general practitioner to get a referral. Furthermore, there are no lengthy delays in getting an appointment.

Recent cost-cutting “reforms” in France now require mandatory co-pays; 1 euro ($1.42 at today’s exchange rate) for a doctor visit, .5 euro ($.71) for prescriptions, and 16-18 euros ($24) a day for hospital stays. I pay several times more than that at the VA.

According to Joseph Shapiro on NPR, “the French live longer and healthier lives… because good care starts at birth. There are months of paid job leave for mothers [and now fathers] who work. New mothers get a child allowance. There are neighborhood health clinics for new mothers and their babies, home visits from nurses, and subsidized day care.”

How did the French achieve the creation of this system? The simple answer is that they elected governments led by socialists and communists who advocated these programs.

In 1930 the CGT (Confederation Generale du Travail), the largest labor union confederation, began to press for a healthcare program for workers. The CGT was then controlled by the French Communist Party. In 1934, the Communist and Socialist Parties formed the “Popular Front” and two years later won the national elections leading to the presidency of Leon Blum, first socialist and first Jewish president of France.

The Popular Front government instituted a program of healthcare coverage similar to Medicare, but for workers, not the elderly. This system was abolished during the Nazi occupation, but the Free French in London developed plans for an expanded system in the postwar period. Those involved included many CGT leaders, principally communists.

(It is probably necessary to point out to the American reader that after its initial treasonous collaboration during the period of the Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact, Communist Party members comprised the principal element in the French Resistance.)

In 1945, the provisional government established Securite Sociale, a program of health care and pension benefits. It was a compromise negotiated between Gaullist and Communist representatives in the new French National Assembly. The conservative Gaullists were opposed to a state-run healthcare system, while the communists favored a complete nationalization. The compromise laid the foundation for the current system. Subsequently, expansions in the system have principally occurred during Socialist Party-led governments.

In 1958, a survey of the French asked, “Should the healthy pay for the sick or should everyone get back only what they put into the system?” Eighty-six percent answered that the healthy should pay for the sick and 95% approved of the compulsory nature of health insurance.

This points to a central problem for the implementation of universal healthcare in the U.S. Americans lack social consciousness. Capitalist culture denigrates social solidarity and glorifies individualism. This, of course, favors the highly class conscious capitalists who are quite well organized and who exhibit admirable solidarity.

The “reforms” instituted by Obama represent what the healthcare industry was willing to accept in return for the mandate requiring everyone to buy their defective product. Those measures won’t budge the figures that clearly show the defects of the U.S. system where healthcare remains a commodity. In France, it is an inalienable right that no politician would dare to violate.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Democrats, Medicare, and the ‘Jaws of Victory’

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Jaws: Leaving an opening for the Republicans.

From the jaws of victory…
The Democrats, Medicare and
the ‘winning message’

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

“In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.” — Confucius, Analects VIII, c.500 B.C.

I share the great joy of the progressive community at the Democratic victory in the New York 26th District. All of the pundits appearing on TV news, amid the pharmaceutical commercials ad nauseam, inform us that the Democrats have a “winning message” relative to Medicare come 2012. Pause for a moment, please, and consider how in recent years the Democrats have shown an aptitude for grabbing defeat out of the jaws of victory.”

Yes, maintaining Medicare, and Social Security in their present forms is a very inspiring message. But we have some 17 months ahead for the message to be distorted and overwhelmed by the Republican smear machine. We must recall that we are not dealing with a terribly well informed, cognitively alert population.

I have worked in the area of educating the public about single payer health care for some years. At many a seminar I have been approached by a senior citizen who heatedly informs me, “I don’t need government health insurance; I have Medicare! ” A similar situation exists among many of the elderly who have Medicare Advantage plans and feel that they are on Medicare.

They do not realize that they were conned by slick salesmanship into giving up their Medicare and signing up for a private insurance plan underwritten by the government at 17% more per year cost to the Medicare Trust Fund.

They are unaware that their “benefits” are set by a profit-making insurance company (why have an insurance industry except to profit the owners and stockholders?) who have by slight-of-hand modified their “benefits” in a manner that appears on superficial examination to provide something better than Medicare per se.

They overlook the deductions, the exclusions, the co-pays, that are not inherent in regular Medicare. I wonder how many Medicare Advantage members will have their way paid to the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins should they wish? My regular Medicare does not restrict my choices. Many Medicare Advantage plans do limit choice save within a specified area or to specified doctors or institutions.

In any event, the current health care legislation progressively reduces the payout from the Medicare Trust Fund to private insurance companies for underwriting the Medicare Advantage plans. Rest assured that the Republican spin machine will play on the naive Medicare Advantage customers with the slogan “the Democrats are going to cut your Medicare.”

I would hope that the Democrats will immediately take up this discussion and explain in very simple terms that Medicare Advantage is not Medicare and, indeed, in the long run Medicare Advantage plans will worsen the fluidity of the Medicare Trust.

Granted Medicare expenses, when compared to income from the current wage tax, have become excessive, especially in view of the high unemployment. Medicare costs must be reduced. There are many factors involved, but let us begin with a paragraph from Maggie Mahar’s book, Money Driven Medicine:

All too often, hospitals employ some of their most sophisticated tools crudely, even callously, in futile end-of-life care. While roughly 80 percent of Americans hope to die at home, 75 percent end their lives in hospitals or nursing homes. Of these, a third die after 10 days in an ICU. This helps explain why roughly one-quarter of all Medicare dollars are spent during the final year of a patient’s life, thanks in part to the cost of drugs and devices that prolong not just life but pain and suffering.

Perhaps this is a place that rational, fearless, public servants can begin cutting expenses. Here are some suggestions:

  1. A presidential panel consisting of medical ethicists, perhaps from Georgetown, Princeton, and The New School, joined by specialists in geriatric medicine and internists or family doctors with university connections (pray not Liberty or Pat Roberts universities) to study a rational end of life program to be incorporated into the Medicare law. Of course the Republicans, who turn away from the 45,000 Americans who die each year sans health care insurance, will shout “death panels!” There are situations, however, where we must turn to rational planning and ignore the cries of the idiots.

  2. The wage tax must be extended to all income levels and not be arbitrarily cut off for those with an income of $100,000 or thereabouts.

  3. A reasonable additional fee must be enacted for Medicare coverage for those with a joint retirement income over $150,000.

  4. There must be subsidized medical school tuition for those candidates who contract to do general practice, internal medicine, or pediatrics for a period of 10 years after graduation, while at the same time fees paid by Medicare for physicians in these specialities must be increased, and the disproportionate fees for those in the “invasive specialities” must be reduced to reasonable levels.

  5. The payouts of billions in Medicare funds to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries under Medicare Part D must be curtailed.

  6. Medicare fraud must be curtailed and we must take a close look at medical equipment companies that advertise extensively on TV. Are all these gadgets necessary?

  7. A rational plan for prescription medicine costs, like they have in Canada and Europe, must be enacted as a part of the Medicare law.

  8. The cost of procedures must be reviewed. For instance, a CT Scan in the United States costs more than twice what it would cost in most developed nations, and the same can be said for MRI scans. Of course the reason our scans cost more is that every hospital that possibly can has invested in the equipment in the hopes of increasing their profits.

In the meantime another player has appeared on the scene. The hospice industry is now being commercialized. Some 40 years ago the hospice movement began to provide humane end-of-life care to those facing death. This was a movement started by compassionate, dedicated volunteers. Happily, we in Erie, Pennsylvania, have one of the outstanding programs in the country.

Now big business has entered the scene and once again will profit from the dying and their grieving families. Read more about this at the Physicians for a National Health Program website. This article is based on a more detailed study in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. I felt for many years that the predatory burial industry had stretched the limits of decency in the United States but the advance of corporatism into the realm of dying is beyond my ethical comprehension.

Once again ProPublica is at the forefront in exposing the collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and sections of the medical establishment. We never see generic medications advertised on television — only brand name products, many of which are remakes of older products. Some we see advertised have had limited clinical trials, like the anti-inflammatory medication that was widely marketed several years ago, but was — after prolonged clinical testing — found to be a cause of heart disease and is no longer on the market.

Again quoting Money Driven Medicine:

In 2002, when Families USA, a non-profit health care consumer advocacy group, reviewed the financial reports submitted to the SEC by nine of the largest U.S. based pharmaceutical companies, the group’s analysis showed drugmakers investing only $19 billion in R & D, while shelling out some $45 billion for marketing, advertising, and administration. Meanwhile the industry pocketed $31 billion in profits.

Finally, our elderly population must be informed — and then informed once again — that the Ryan Plan will do away with Medicare as we know it, with its “vouchers” for buying health insurance from private companies. We must remember that no private insurance company is required to insure any specific individual, and that currently private insurance companies do all in their power not to insure the elderly.

So, if an older person is even able to obtain insurance, in all probability with a large deductible, the voucher will be sent directly to the insurance company. Some estimates suggest that, on the average, the individual will be required to spend $6,000 out-of-pocket to supplement the voucher.

I close with a sobering quote from Mahatma Gandhi: ” You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees.” Let us encourage the average citizen not to fall for the blather of the politicians who are in the pay of the corporations.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Dr. Stephen R. Keister on The Rag Blog]

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FILM / William Michael Hanks : Turk Pipkin’s ‘Building Hope’

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


Turk Pipkin’s Building Hope:
A story of how little it takes
to make a big difference

By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

Building Hope is the third of a trilogy of films by Austin-based filmmaker Turk Pipkin exploring the challenges facing the youth of the world today.

The first film, Nobelity, gathered together the ideas of a number of Nobel Laureates. The second, One Peace at a Time — subtitled “a film about a messed up world… and how we could fix it” — visited projects around the world that were making a difference for children’s rights, and featured Muhammad Yunus, Steve Chu, Desmond Tutu, and Willie Nelson.

Pipkin’s latest, Building Hope, is the most compelling of all. By following one single project through from concept to completion, the film illuminates the lives of the participants around the light of the event itself.

Beauty is the first emotion that the film evokes. Set in the mountains of Kenya, among some of the most dramatic scenery on Earth, the film reveals the land, the wildlife, and the people as the spectacular photography unfolds. Through good composition and editing, the viewer enters a place of wonder and brighter vision. The photography by Turk, his wife Christy, and his daughters, Katie and Lilly, reveals the love both given to and returned by this rural community.

The project began when Turk met Wangari Maathai while working on One Peace at a Time. She started the Green Belt movement in Africa and Turk went there to plant trees. But what he really wanted to do was plant trees at a school. That’s how he met Joseph Mutongu and visited the Mahiga Primary School. It had mud floors and slat walls. Nevertheless the school’s motto was — and is — “Hard Work Pays.”

After planting his tree at the school, Turk returned home and, through the Nobelity Project — Turk and Christy’s Austin-based nonprofit — raised some money to build a water system for the primary school. The kids and parents did the work.

Two years later Turk returned to Kenya and the Mahiga Primary School to see the finished water system. The electricity needed for the water purification also made it possible to have a computer lab. So he helped put that in place as well. He saw that there was no place for the students to go after they finished primary school so, with a call back home to Christy, they decided to help build a high school for the kids at Mahiga.

The financial requirements were daunting. Turk decided to combine the release of One Peace at a Time, a film about securing children’s rights, with building the high school. He wanted it to be known as “the movie that built a high school.” So he did fundraising for the school at showings of One Peace at a Time. He knew that a bigger school would require more clean water so he decided to build a basketball court to catch rainwater and purify it using solar power.

He recruited his friend, Willie Nelson, to help. Willie’s response was: “That’s a choir I want to sing in.” The court would cost $100,000 so he called on the Nike Gamechangers Award who, together with Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity, began to design and build the school and basketball court, The whole Mahiga community enthusiastically participated with ideas and labor.

Greg Elsner, was selected to be the on-site architect. He would live in the community and see the project through. As Greg said, when he first came to Mahiga he didn’t know anyone and the future location of the school was an open field. When he left he was part of the community and a two-story stone school house and full rainwater basketball court stood where the field had been.

The project was not without it’s setbacks. Cost overruns, poor roads, and an AWOL contractor all had to be overcome. With the project a month behind schedule, Turk took the only sensible course — a road trip. He wanted to see some of the partnership programs in other parts of Kenya.

One was Comfort the Children which works with special needs kids — some of them going out in the community for the first time. In the Mukuru slum, Nairobi, Kenya, the SIDAREC Community Center will be a model for kids achieving freedom from poverty. And, while he was there, Turk visited with President Obama’s sister, Youth Counselor Auma Obama. She works with the “Sport for Social Change and Youth Empowerment Initiative,” concentrating on building community infrastructure.

On returning, Turk, who is six-foot-seven himself, undertook to teach the kids basketball — a sport they had never played before. Fortunately, the first adult mentor at the school was Ester Diaga, who had toured Africa playing for the Kenyan women’s basketball team. She had the moves, and with the kid’s enthusiasm, Mahiga was well on it’s way to being a serious contender.

One of the students, George Abrahams, was given a journalism scholarship. While Turk was away, Abrahams shot the sequences of raising the rainwater basketball court with a pocket-sized Flip video camera. They built a giant 30-foot-high scaffold from eucalyptus poles to winch the steel trusses in place for the rainwater court. After dropping a truss, a storm came through and shut the operation down. It was a good time to have a safety meeting. George’s scenes cut well with the rest of the film and really show what can be done with very low-cost equipment and a hopeful attitude.

The climax of the film comes with the ribbon-cutting for the school and the first game is played on the new rainwater court. It hadn’t rained in two months and as the game neared the finish it began to pour and the water tanks began to fill. It was like a cosmic alignment of community, time, and place.

Mahiga Hope High School, with capacity for 320 students, is now part of the Kieni West Education District. It will provide a healthy learning environment and pure water for the children of Mahiga for generations to come. Leave the world a little better place? I’ll say. The music and photography alone make the film worth seeing. But seeing the miracle of positive change and feeling in some way a part of it is even better.

Building Hope opens Friday, June 3, 7 p.m., at the Violet Crown Cinema, located at 434 W. 2nd Street in Austin, and is scheduled to run through June 9. The Violet Crown is a lovely new downtown art house theater that features independent films. There are several showings a night, but it would be wise to get tickets early. This is one to see. It will restore your faith in people and in cinema, all for the price of a ticket — not a bad deal all the way around.

Also on The Rag Blog:

Links:

[William Michael Hanks has written, produced and directed film and television productions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The U. S. Information Agency, and for Public Broadcasting. His documentary film,The Apollo File, won a Gold Medal at the Festival of the Americas. Mike, who worked with the original Rag in Sixties Austin, lives in Nacagdoches, Texas. Read more articles by Mike Hanks on The Rag Blog.]

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Martha Kempner : The Patronizing Lectures of ‘Private Practice’ and Texas Law

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

The four central female characters of Private Practice: Addison, Naomi, Charlotte and Violet.

Private Practice and public law:

Reproductive rights, and the patronizing lectures that television depicts and Texas now requires.

By Martha Kempner / truthout / May 31, 2011

Last Friday afternoon, I watched an episode of Private Practice that had aired the week before and was not all that surprised when one of the story lines focused on abortion.

The show, which follows the lives of a group of doctors in Los Angeles, has dealt with the topic a number of times before. It is clear that the writers and producers don’t just support a woman’s right to choose but are willing to risk alienating some viewers in order to use the show as a platform to promote reproductive rights.

In fact, though I often find the writing predictable and overly melodramatic (the show is one of those guilty TV pleasures), I think the writers have done a great job with the abortion debate. They have given characters a chance to express both sides of the issue but in the end they always present well-reasoned, and even well-researched, arguments for why the right to “safe, legal abortions, without judgment” is so important.

Still, I was struck by one scene in this episode which reminded me of the mandatory “counseling” some states are now making women go through before they can exercise their legal right to terminate a pregnancy.

The episode, “God Bless the Child,” focused on the clashing views of two OB/GYNs, Dr. Addison Montgomery, who performs abortions (and has had one), and Dr. Naomi Bennett, who is opposed to abortion for religious reasons.

A patient, Patty, comes to Addison with uterine cramping and stomach pains about a month after having had an early abortion. It turns out the procedure was not done correctly and the woman is now 19 weeks pregnant.

Addison explains that she can still legally have an abortion but that at this stage of the pregnancy it is a more complicated procedure. Patty decides to do it, but Naomi approaches her in the waiting room and pretty blatantly tries to talk her out of terminating her pregnancy.

During the scene to which I am referring, Naomi is bouncing her one-year-old granddaughter on her knee. Patty explains that she is not ready to have a baby:

Naomi: No one is ever ready to have a baby. You just do it. My daughter was 16 when she got pregnant with Olivia here, she hadn’t even finished high school and I almost, no I tried, to force her to have an abortion and I’m so grateful that she didn’t. (She looks lovingly at the baby.)

Patty: She had you to help her. My boyfriend, Charlie, couldn’t get away fast enough.

Naomi: That just proves that he wasn’t ready to be a father.

Patty: I can’t be a mother. I have nothing. I have to work all the time.

Naomi: Being a mother isn’t about what you have. It’s about who you are.

So, basically, a wealthy, well-educated woman is trying to convince someone who has had to put off graduate school to work two jobs that being a mother will be fine despite her lack of resources. If that wasn’t bad enough, she moves on to some of the manipulative tactics common to crisis pregnancy centers.

Naomi: At 19 weeks do you know that your child can hear you? It can be startled by loud noises. Your child already has vocal chords, and finger prints, and air sacs in her lungs. She can move her arms and legs not unlike Olivia here. (She looks lovingly at the baby again.) I know you’re confused, which is why I think you need a little more time to think about it.

First of all, a 19-week-old fetus is nothing like a one-year old child. The comparison is unbelievably manipulative, as is having this conversation with a baby in the room to begin with.

Moreover, the character of Patty was not at all confused. She knew that she wanted to terminate her pregnancy. She had made a rational decision based on the circumstances of her life; she had determined that she did not have the emotional or financial resources she needed to carry the pregnancy to term or become a parent.

Suggesting she was confused just because she wasn’t making the same choice that Naomi would have made is patronizing, belittling, and insulting.

And yet, state lawmakers all over the country are doing the same thing when they impose 24-hour waiting periods, mandate ultrasounds, and require “counseling” sessions.

I don’t know if it was irony or coincidence (or totally unrelated) but while I was watching this scene and becoming infuriated — the governor of Texas was signing a law that will force women in his state to sit through a similarly humiliating lecture before they will be able to have an abortion.

The new law, which goes into effect on September 1, says that at least 24 hours before an abortion is performed, a doctor must perform an ultrasound and then provide “in a manner understandable to a layperson, a verbal explanation of the results of the sonogram images, including a medical description of the dimensions of the embryo or fetus, the presence of cardiac activity, and the presence of external members and internal organs.”

Exceptions are made for women who live more than 100 miles from an abortion provider (they only have to wait two hours between procedures) as well as for women who were raped and those who are carrying fetuses known to have “irreversible medical conditions that will cause a disability.” Most women in the state, however, will have to endure the sonogram and the lecture.

When pushing for such laws (Texas is not the first state to enact one), abortion foes argue that they are just enhancing informed consent, making sure women know what they are getting into, and protecting the life and health of the mother (and the fetus, of course).

It’s obvious to me that what they are really doing is trying to put as many roadblocks between women and legal abortions as they can while they work on other fronts to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the right to abortion altogether. What bothers me most about it, however, is how demeaning it is to women.

Most women who seek abortions are like Patty, they have made a well-informed, well-reasoned decision based on their own unique circumstances. Nonetheless, doctors are now forced to say, essentially: “Okay, but are you really sure? Before you really decide, look at this picture of your baby and listen to this description of her development. I know you think you want this, but why don’t you go home and sleep on it and come back tomorrow?”

These laws suggest — not so subtly — that women are not capable of making such decisions on their own. I can’t help wondering whether those who support these laws think women are capable of making any rational decisions. (And, on a slightly different note, whether anyone would ever impose a remotely similar restriction on men.)

In the end, the character of Naomi came through. When Patty affirmed her desire to go through with the procedure but admitted she was scared and lonely, Naomi came into the operating room and held her hand.

Somehow, I doubt the supporters of the Texas law will ever show women that much understanding or compassion.

[Martha Kempner is a writer, consultant, and sexual health expert. She has authored numerous publications for young people, parents, educators, and policymakers. This article was first published at RH Reality Check and was distributed by truthout.]

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BOOKS / Paul Buhle : ‘Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder’

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder:
The Jack O’Dell Story

By Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / May 31, 2011

[Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, edited by Nikhil Pal Singh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), Hardcover; 298 pp., $34.95.]

Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder is an important document in political history, even more so in exploring the intimate political and cultural history of the left so often undiscussed, or discussed only among trusted friends.

Speaking as a teacher of social movement history (the 1960s in particular), I often advised students that the simplest primary research they could do was right there on the library shelves: the bound volumes of the preeminent African American progressive quarterly journal Freedomways (1961-85).

There hangs a tale, and not a simple one. It is very much the story of Jack O’Dell, if not by any means his whole story, because he became Freedomways’ associate managing editor early on, wrote a great many of the unsigned editorials, and did much to provide its framework and its connection with the activists and political actions of the time.

A former intimate advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but also a member of the Communist Party during the 1950s, O’Dell represented and also exemplified the survival of what we may call the Popular Front, actually surviving repression to fight on another day.

We need some serious backstory here. Nikhil Pal Singh, one of the outstanding younger Marxist thinkers of today’s academy and an active participant in many projects, intellectual and activist alike, is the perfect editor for this volume. His Introduction provides rare insight into O’Dell’s life and work.

We can start the story with Hunter Pitts O’Dell (his birth name), a blue-collar Detroiter and then Xavier college student, along with his new friend, future New York rent-strike leader Jesse Gray. O’Dell left college to fight fascism, joining the Coast Guard in 1943 and the racially integrated, radical-minded National Maritime Union.

On ship, he read Du Bois and learned more about the complications of colonialism, communism, and the New Deal.

Coming back from the war, O’Dell enthusiastically signed up with “Operation Dixie,” the ill-fated effort to organize Southern workers, black and white, and thus to transform the most conservative region of the country. But, in the new mood of the Cold War, most labor organizations were busily going backward, and the great hopes for the South died with the purge of the CIO’s once-powerful left.

O’Dell moved into that dangerous, volatile region and quickly demonstrated his leadership skills, earning a “Citizen of the Year” award from Miami’s African-American press for his successful mediation of a racial incident in a local grocery store, turning mob rage into an effective boycott.

He got himself invited to a conference of the still-strong Southern National Youth Congress (where he met or came indirectly into contact with some leading African American militants and intellectuals, including Angela Davis’s mother, Sallye Davis).

But it was Du Bois’s address to this 1946 meeting that really hit home with O’Dell: Reconstruction had been betrayed, and now it was time for a new Reconstruction.

These were not socialistic ideas, necessarily, but they were certainly radical, and, as late as 1946, they were vitally alive among the notions within the New Deal coalition that seemed, despite the death of Franklin Roosevelt, still very strong.

Then the tide turned suddenly, and all sorts of public figures who had been treated with respect and admiration found themselves assaulted with red-baiting and, especially in the South, with black-baiting and new anticommunist laws, as well. Lynching was not quite back in style, but Northern liberals of the Truman variety did not seriously object to FBI pursuit of civil rights activists, if they happened to be tainted with “red” records.

Many prominent liberals, including Senator Hubert Humphrey and his sometime speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., made it clear that isolation and prosecution of anything resembling sympathy for the Soviet Union — or even resistance to the Cold War machine — was a prerequisite to racial progress. Only the brave or foolish would actually join the Communist Party at a time like this.

Mark O’Dell down among the brave. And not entirely reckless in his bravery. The wider following of the Popular Front — surrounding the Communist Party but less demanding in many ways — in the South stubbornly held on in Birmingham, Alabama, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, New Orleans, Louisiana, and a scattering of other spots. O’Dell did what civil rights organizing could be done, at a time when the Alabama legislature banned the NAACP.

The pressure from authorities was severe, and arrest could come at any time, so O’Dell lived and worked under a variety of pseudonyms, moved often, met secretly with other activists, and moved on. Snagged in 1958 by the FBI at a job with a black-owned insurance company, he used his constitutional right against self-incrimination and refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, gaining almost instant notoriety as “one of the most belligerent” witnesses ever called.

Leaving the South, he joined his old pal Jesse Gray in tenant organizing and tactically took on a new first name, Jack (his father’s name). Even as the repression got to him, the ground was shifting; the Southern work of Dr. King and others had made all-out suppression of black rights more difficult. Meanwhile, leading liberals now fretted aloud that if the United States could not bring some kind of equality to its minorities, it would face rough going in a world where the new nations were mostly nonwhite, and anticolonialism translated easily into anticapitalism.

Thus O’Dell, the formal intellectual-organizer, emerged and swiftly found himself in the lead, creating, for protest sit-ins, a benefit concert — featuring the likes of Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, and Sidney Poitier.

By the time the 1960 presidential campaign opened, he was asked to coordinate get-out-the-vote efforts in the Bronx for Kennedy, and soon thereafter, joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). That is, close to King and not far from the FBI’s vendetta against King, which intended to unseat and replace the great leader with someone more malleable.

On the verge of becoming Executive Director of the SCLC, O’Dell was instead forced out by the pressure that Kennedy administration operatives put on King.

A new life began with Freedomways: no one wrote more often, across the next 20 years, essays and unsigned editorials alike. O’Dell was hugely valuable for his contacts with activists, artists, and intellectuals. Freedomways was a truly gorgeous-looking magazine, not large in format but slick and full of illustrations, photos, and art of various kinds. A bit like the old pre-1920 Masses magazine or the New Masses at its late 1930s peak, it also resembled the magazines and newspapers of the “New Negro” in Harlem, 1910s to 1920s, saluting black achievement and style.

To say that Communists were involved was obvious to anyone knowledgeable, and looking closely at the masthead: the editor was Esther Jackson, Southern Negro Youth veteran and wife of Communist leader James Jackson. But “Communism” rarely appeared in print here, and the real topics at hand were in the freedom struggle; likewise in antiwar sentiment and mobilization; also in varieties of Pan-Africanism, from Mother Africa to the Caribbean, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada.

It was not a Black Nationalist magazine, an aspect for which it earned considerable criticism and real hostility (Harold Cruse’s polemical attacks, famous at the time, attacked the magazine for failing to credit black capitalism), but which was also the legacy of the Popular Front.

Freedomways carried the dream of the New Deal 1940s resiliently, no matter what others might do or say.

O’Dell’s work was not confined to Freedomways, nor did it end with its demise in 1987. As a close advisor to Jesse Jackson and the PUSH organization, a member of U.S. delegations visiting sites across the troubled Third World, a key intellectual figure in campaigns, from discrediting South African Apartheid to advancing the Nuclear Freeze, he was especially key in the Rainbow Coalition and Jackson’s run for president in 1988. He decided to leave the United States shortly after, and continues his long-lived engagements from Vancouver, Canada.

By including a selection of his writings, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder saves much of O’Dell’s work from being left in libraries and forgotten. These essays were not shortened or excerpted: they are historical documents deserving to be understood in their own time and in ours. Each essay is carefully and tellingly introduced by Singh, who modestly takes on himself the task of explaining its context.

These essays are not easily summarized because the political and historical points are so numerous and so precise that readers are urged to take up particulars especially useful to themselves. Singh observes that Marxism is a major source of insight for O’Dell but by no means the only source; as someone wrote about C.L.R. James, his black Marxism is not an adjunct of Marxism but something different, closer to the overlap of two intimately related, but not identical, trends. Nor, of course, is it limited by what he learned in a decade or so of being in or around the Communist Party.

One crucial thing O’Dell did learn, in my view, more a product of the Popular Front than Marxist ideas or Communist interpretations: that current political wisdom always rests on a careful strategic and tactical assessment of the balance of forces. The Democratic Party, to take the obvious example, is never out of the picture — or the whole of the picture.

Understanding class, racial, and cultural dynamics of social movements offers an organic approach to how things stand and may be changed. Understanding the world picture provides the widest-angle view of the possibilities and dangers.

Thus, the essays here, and Singh’s annotations as well, illuminate a long history of American racism, its connection to slavery days and to colonialism — legacies painfully alive into the present day.

O’Dell lucidly describes the rise of the civil rights movement, and the brutal response of authorities to the late 1960s uprisings, as a second Reconstruction, and a second project to overturn the consequences of Reconstruction. Strategically, O’Dell sees the political world around the Rainbow Coalition as dangerous, but promising, territory; and the narrowing of the movement to electoral politics (worse, the seeking of foundation money to accomplish social change) as part of a downward spiral.

Is there a road back upward? In an optimistic Afterword, written in 2009, O’Dell notes the mass enthusiasm for a certain black presidential candidate. The enthusiasm was more real than the candidate, as it now appears in history’s rearview mirror. But O’Dell was shrewd enough, as always, to point to the movement of history. Things never stay the same.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhle is professor emeritus at Brown University. He publishes radical comic books and graphic novels, and is a contributor to Monthly Review, where this article was also published.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Austin-Area Funeral Homes Mislead the Public

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Illustration from Third Eye Blind.

‘Compassionate care’:
Austin’s Charles Walden and
SCI funeral chain mislead public

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / May 31, 2011

SAN MARCOS, Texas — Austin funeral service icon Charles Walden lent his name to a misleading open letter that appeared, apparently as a paid advertisement, in the Austin American-Statesman, page A6, on May 26, 2011.

The purpose of the letter seems to be to convince Austin area readers that the five Cook-Walden funeral service locations in the Austin area are the same now as they have been for the last 100 years. Of course, this is not the case. Cook-Walden originally had just one funeral home 40 years ago. It is now owned by Service Corporation International (SCI) — the largest funeral and cemetery chain in the world.

According to the history of Cook-Walden funeral services published at its own website, in the late 1800s a funeral home was opened in downtown Austin by Samuel E. Rosengren. In 1920, Charles B. Cook purchased that business. In 1971, Charles Walden purchased Cook Funeral Home. The name was changed to Cook-Walden.

Shortly thereafter, Charles Walden bought two adjacent cemeteries in the Pflugerville area. In 1985, he bought Davis Funeral Home in Georgetown, then Forest Oaks funeral and cemetery in 1992. The two funeral homes at the Pflugerville cemeteries location and on Hwy. 183 at Anderson Mill were built more recently.

In 1997, Cook-Walden sold all of its operations to SCI. The recent open letter in the Statesman claims that in 1993 the Cook-Walden chain joined the Dignity Memorial® network (a registered service mark of SCI). But Cook-Walden could not have joined the Dignity Memorial® network until 2004 because that network did not exist until then, and that network is used only by SCI-owned facilities.

Since SCI’s purchase of the Cook-Walden chain in 1997, Charles Walden has continued to provide some consulting services, though the exact nature of his relationship with SCI is not clear. It is clear that SCI focuses mainly on making profits, which is the primary responsibility of all corporations.

If, as its ad claims, it can provide “compassionate care” in doing so, that is a benefit to families. However, it has a reputation for being extremely uncompassionate to its employees, even when those employees are trying to provide compassionate service to grieving families.

In various on-line forums, employees have long complained about working conditions at SCI. Here are some examples. In May 2011, SCI fired a Washington state employee because she helped transport the body of a five-year-old child to a cemetery after the girl’s family conducted its own home funeral. The employee failed to obtain a needed permit for the transportation of the child’s body, but this is merely a minor “paperwork” violation of state regulations.

Other former employees of SCI have posted notices on-line about their opinions of SCI (these are reproduced with typos intact as written):

“I am a funeral director and embalmer for SCI. It is a terrible company to work for, and I would discourage anyone from applying with them. The management is terrible, from the top all the way down the the location manager. You have no home life, you are expected to get the work done, but get in trouble for getting overtime hours. There is no such thing as christmas bonuses or raises in this company. You are not respected as a professional in your field. Bottom line, in my oppinion, this company cares about nothing but money. I got into this field to help people, not rob them without a gun.”

“This place is horrible! We got baught by SCI about 3 years ago and its been down hill from there. We’ve had 4 different managers. The average employee leaves within a few years. Im on my fourth year and havent even broke a dollar as far as raises. Micro-management, Micro-management. You work your ass off just to keep your job. They will suck the life out of your ability to care for grieving families. STAY AWAY!”

“I worked for this Hell Hole for 6 months…..IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY….NOT THE FAMILIES!”

“I also worked for this company. When Alderwood was bought out by SCI I thought all of these big box companies were alike. I found out how wrong I was. The families were served no longer mattered. I was expected to put in as many hours as it took to do my job, with not compensation for the overtime, and once worked 2 1/2 months without a day off. As the only director/embalmer at my location, I was responsible for every aspect of the funeral from first call to burial alone. I wasn’t even allowed to hire out the night time removals and was accused by my market manager of being too lazy to get out of bed at 3 am to take a call. I don’t care how much money they pay… I would never go back.”

These mostly anonymous posts may be viewed as biased or dishonest, but they are in line with the reputation of SCI that I have heard for the last 15 years. I would not suggest that all the claims made in Charles Walden’s open letter and advertising are false, but many of them are.

Given the personal experiences that I have had with SCI on behalf of my family and others, it is difficult for me to accept that SCI provides “world-class services” or offers “the best value.” Without question, the Dignity Memorial® network has not served “the Georgetown Community for 100 years” as claimed in Charles Walden’s advertisement for SCI.

I am sorry to see Charles Walden allowing himself to be used in such a dishonest way. The only time I recall having contact with him, he was courteous and forthright. He used to have a reputation that such corporate puffery belies.

Local families who need to plan a funeral would be wise to ignore SCI’s self-promotion and shop around. There are many good and fair-priced funeral services available in the Austin area. Cost comparisons are made simple by the annual survey of funeral costs published by AMBIS — the nonprofit Funeral Consumers Alliance affiliate serving central Texas. The 2011 survey can be found online here.

Be sure to read both the narrative and the chart to understand what services are being described.

For example:

  • While some SCI funeral homes charge as much as $2800 for Direct Cremation, that identical service is available for as little as $775 by another funeral home. From personal experience, I can say the lower-cost funeral home gives just as high a quality of service as the most expensive SCI funeral home.

  • For a full-service “traditional” funeral, a family can pay some SCI funeral homes as much as $10,860, while several other funeral homes charge $2,000 to $6,000 less for the same thing.

  • Four SCI funeral homes charge $4,295 for their basic service fee (making arrangements, coordinating with others, and covering overhead costs), while some competitors charge as little as $525 for that service . Likewise, some SCI funeral homes charge $1,395 for embalming (an optional service, not required by law), while others charge as little as $425.

Families have a choice in the Austin area market. With a little research, anyone can find reasonably-priced alternatives to price-gouging. While funeral shopping at a time of grief is no fun, it can be less onerous if you know where to look for information and advice. It’s even better to make these decisions and compare costs ahead of time.

But it is seldom necessary to pay ahead of time. You can set aside funeral funds in a pay-on-death account that names a recipient who will use the money for your funeral upon your death, or you can name a beneficiary of other investments who can use the proceeds for funeral arrangements. You can beat the high cost of dying if you choose to do so.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Clancy Sigal : Resisting War Takes Guts

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

“No More War!” Art by Iván Lira /MRZine.

In our war-loving society:
Conscientious resistance takes guts, bravery

By Clancy Sigal / AlterNet / May 30, 2011

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. — John F. Kennedy

I lost a friend recently with whom I’d grown up. As adolescents, we’d shared enthusiasms, and death-defying leaps into Lake Michigan off the Adler Planetarium, and chased the same girls. He had a puckish sense of humor, sometimes ghoulish, the kind of stuff you laugh at only when you’re 15.

He could crick his neck with a loud snap, as if being hanged from a gallows, a party trick that revolted grownups but we thought hilarious. He could pick out a tune on a banjo on first hearing and sing political parodies of pop songs. As we grew up, we shared a history, not only of our acne-scarred, ego-obsessed selves, but something broader and deeper I best call anti-fascism.

We ran wild in the streets of Chicago itching for showdowns with anyone who disagreed with us — we were young Communist-fronters and couldn’t wait to enlist or be drafted. In the middle of the second world war, it was patriotic to be a red — “communism is 20th-century Americanism,” went the slogan.

Passion, not cynicism or detachment, was our deal.

With his death, I’ve lost a big part of the thread, a connection to the original meaning of things. I’m not alone in this broken thread on Memorial Day.

If you’re in the United States while reading this, try a little test: ask someone, anyone, what Memorial Day memorializes? I’ve queried several friends and none could tell me that Memorial Day, once called “Decoration Day,” began in the aftermath of the civil war to honor the more than 600,000 dead Confederate and Union soldiers — the deadliest war in U.S. history.

Once, Memorial Day was a fairly solemn occasion when local communities lowered the courthouse flag to half-mast in salute to the “fallen,” with jamboree parades to follow. In the 1960s, Congress changed the date to the last Monday in May so that people might have an extra day off on the weekend. Hence the current barbecues and shopping mall mania — and national amnesia.

Except for the boy and girl Scouts, who still place little American flags on grave sites in our veterans’ cemeteries, like the one almost within sight of my house, and a few soldiers’ and sailors’ relatives who come to visit, the original meaning of it has fallen into dust.

Curious, this. Because the publishing industry continues to pump out torrents of civil war books to feed a niche audience with pop biographies of bearded generals and Pickett’s charge-type battle studies. Historians continue to debate the core cause of the war, and movies get made like Glory, Gettysburg, Cold Mountain, and Robert Redford’s recent The Conspirator.

No matter, most of us like to go on a Memorial Day shopping spree, warm up the coals, pull out the cooler and slap shrimp tacos on the broiler.

I don’t care how Memorial Day is spent, whether in a relaxed holiday mood or a visit to the dead. I’ve walked through the military graves at my nearest military graveyard, the 114-acre national cemetery near UCLA with its huge adjacent Veterans Administration hospital and old soldiers’ home, full of sick and traumatized ex-combatants, and a homeless encampment of veteranos under the 405 freeway, a grenade’s throw away from cemetery where some of their buddies lie under white crosses or stars of David.

Meaning no disrespect, but on this “war heroes’ weekend,” isn’t it time to also honor those who have “fallen” in a different battle — against the slaughtering wars?

Over time, my attitude to conscientious objectors and deserters has shifted. Once, I held them in contempt. But the Vietnam war, when I came into contact with war resisters, changed me. I saw then, and see now, that often it takes a different kind of moral and, yes, even physical courage to resist a call to serve your country in a war you believe is a crime, when all your family, friends, teachers and the vast American majority support joining up.

When I was called to my war, I went with shining eyes and revenge in my heart and couldn’t wait to get my hands on a .30-calibre machine-gun to wipe out those Nazi bastards.

But what about those “cowards,” “traitors,” and “slackers” who don’t want to kill other people? They’re an odd breed who count among their number such as Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Sergeant York, David Hockney, three U.S. weapon-refusing combat medics who won the medal of honor, and the 27 Israeli air force pilots who refused orders to “track and kill” civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.

I continue to be amazed at the stupendous bravery of any currently serving soldier or marine who goes out on foot patrol in Afghanistan knowing beforehand that his command — after spending $20 billion on an “anti-IED” project — still has no clue how to protect him from a cheap roadside bomb that causes 80% of our casualties. (On Wednesday, seven Americans on a single patrol were blown up and killed by an IED in Kandahar province.)

But what kind of guts does it take for war objectors, whether they’re Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mennonites, or secular, who simply don’t want to kill?

On this Memorial Day, it might be a time to think about the outcasts who refuse to take life.

[Clancy Sigal, is a screenwriter and novelist in Los Angeles. Chicago-born, he has worked precincts for Democratic candidates since his teens. He emigrated to the UK during what David Caute calls the “Great Fear” and returned to America after the 1984 miners’ strike. He is a reformed Fleet Street journalist. This article was distributed by AlterNet.]

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