Category: Articles

As the People’s Park 30th Anniversary celebration approaches, the substantive issues and conflicts concerning the Park and the surrounding community are no less relevant now than they were in the past. Who controls the land, and how and by whom the streets are used, are issues still played out in the Southside political theater and elsewhere. They are issues that strike at heart of the kind of society we live in.

On one side of the conflict are the forces of repression, homogeneity and capitalist property relations. On the other you have utopian elements of personal freedom, universal community, and disregard for the dictates of outside authority and the rule of law. Merchants, the University, and the political machinations of the City of Berkeley are united in their constant quest for a definition of social order that defines away certain people and the legitimacy of the uses they have found for the streets and the Park.

Merchants vs. The People

1998 witnessed three waves of crackdown on Telegraph Avenue. The first in February at the height of El Nino, the second last summer–Operation Ave Watch which resembled more of a military occupation, and the third, also known as the November Round-up, a post-election wave of arrests mostly for marijuana. All three periods shared a common goal of ridding the area of people who merchants and the powers that be deem a detriment to economic viability. The police’s job is to do whatever they need to to harass–through arrest, intimidation, and selective enforcement of petty infractions–those people into leaving the area. The November Round-up in particular saw the issuance of many court ordered “stay away orders” for youths on the Avenue. People were also told privately by police officers that they should go to Oakland or San Francisco. Many went to downtown Berkeley.

While the first two crackdowns of ’98 saw the police acting largely on their own, though with the tacit support of City administrators and the Telegraph Area Association, the November Crackdown was unique in that it elicited almost universal institutional support. Even local Councilman Kris Worthington signed on to the use of police repression, moving two motions on the council floor (seconded by Maio) which authorized a larger police presence–in effect legislating the crackdown. Cody’s Books went beyond the call of duty and turned their third floor over to the Berkeley Police to use as a virtual substation for the month of November. It was there that numerous officers would gather in a kind of spy nest for one part of the crackdown, a buy-bust trap in front of Amoeba Records that netted over 50 young people, almost all for marijuana sales.

Berkeley’s Marijuana Initiative, passed in 1973, instructs Berkeley Police to make “no arrests and issue no citations for violations of marijuana laws.” Spending vast amounts of police resources on marijuana enforcement, as the Berkeley Police did in November, is a clear violation of this Initiative. It amounted to a ‘war on marijuana’ campaign by a “progressive majority” run City of Berkeley and the renowned ‘independent’ Cody’s Books.

Allies and Enemies

In January, the People’s Park free box was threatened with removal by the University of California responding to pressure from an allegedly new group on the Southside scene called ‘Safe Streets Now.’ This group of drug war/crime war boosters got neighbors to threaten UC with a lawsuit if they didn’t clean up People’s Park. In actuality, though, it was a convenient excuse to attack a certain class and race of people who hang out in the park and by the box and fits in perfectly with a UC supported master plan for economic cleansing of the area.

Another prong of attack coming from the establishment is the soon to be released Southside Plan. Judging by what has come out of two other recent City Plans–the West Berkeley Plan, which led to 4th Street’s redevelopment, and the Downtown Berkeley Plan which facilitated Shirley Dean’s revitalized (read chainstored) downtown–there is reason to fear a Southside Plan. The Southside Plan differs from the others, though, in that it is billed as a joint effort between the City and the University: the University being a big landowner in the area. In actuality though, the Plan is a joint venture between the University, who dominates the Plan’s process, and the Telegraph Merchants Association whose interests dominate the central theme of the Plan–profit.

Noteworthy in draft papers for the Plan is sentiment against young people and the homeless. An excerpt reads that “the area has periodically attracted large numbers of young non-students, accompanied by increases in drug trafficking and street crime…” as though all non-student youth can be equated with drug dealing and crime. Later it talks of the need to “address problems of crime, drugs, homelessness, noise and trash” as if homelessness is a problem like the others, not of people not having a home.

In an ‘Economic Development Issues Paper’ the “owners and managers of the largest businesses on Telegraph…say they need an older clientele who largely come from outside the Southside. Working adults have money to spend on their products while the younger people by and large don’t.” This sentiment may help some to explain the attacks on street youths that has been a major component of this year’s crackdown. From the merchants’ perspective, youth without a lot of money are useless and might as well be driven out of the area so that older people with money can be attracted. The entire Southside Plan and its process is dominated by commercial interests and the unspoken, though underlying, theme is how to make more money for Avenue merchants.

Police Solutions

The powers that be have persisted for more than a year now with their most recent efforts to rid Southside of that plague of humanity that was installed here by the political and countercultural movement of the 60s. But attempts to rid the area of the unwanted and unwashed are misguided, not only in terms of the immorality of wanting to exclude and discriminate against people based on class, race, or lifestyle, but also because it is not the way to a better society.

one of resources or knowledge. It is a problem of political power, of who makes decisions in this society and who doesn’t. The problem is with the owners of this capitalist state who run society as a workfarm for the rest–the working class.

The people in power who own and operate corporate America don’t care to cloth, feed and house the poor. It is in their interest that people be ground into so desperate a state they will be happy to work a dehumanizing job in order to buy back survival. Others are left to fester at a substandard level of existence as an example to the wage slave to keep working or else. The owning class need to attack, demonize, and criminalize the potential resisters to their scheme, for the denial of their humanity helps keep wages low. It is an intentionally disfunctional system perpetuated by the profiting class.

The Federal Problem

The ‘war on crime’ is thus a conscious, federally orchestrated war program that has been deliberately grafted onto this society because it serves a purpose for those in power. It’s a domestic war launched by the government whose target is not just a few bad apples, but really society itself. It is repression of and a clampdown on the entire population. When some people’s freedom is taken away, everyone is less free. When the standards for acceptable treatment of some people in society are lowered, the standards for all people are lowered. If they can come for you in the morning, they can come for me at night.

Crime hysteria now rules American society. Employing a war-level amount of media propaganda about drugs and crime as an ideological battering ram, the population has been successfully inculcated with the belief that the current or an even greater level of domestic security apparatus
is necessary to ‘take back our streets.’ A police state consciousness has consumed us.

The 90’s will be remembered historically as the decade that saw the rise of the “criminal justice” system to the level of the preeminence in domestic social policy–the criminalization and confinement of American society, or a segment of that society. ‘Safe Streets Now,’ ‘Zero Tolerance for Crime,’ ‘War on Drugs’–these have become the dominant themes and programs of our time, to the exclusion of all others. The criminal justice system has silenced discussion and has defined the realm of the possible as so narrow that the only debates that can take place are between “more repression soon” and “way more repression immediately.” Anyone who disagrees is accused of being ‘soft on crime.’

We are faced daily with homelessness. People sleep in doorways and beg for loose change. Mentally ill people scream at unseen enemies. Homelessness challenges us personally and as a society. If a homeless person asks us for money we feel the conflict. If I give where does it go? If I don’t give, how will that person get by. Yet panhandlers are only a small percentage of the homeless. Homeless families are a significant percentage of the total homeless population. What will the future hold for the children who have known little stability and have seen their families crumble under unceasing stress. How can a nation so rich leave some people so poor? The numbers are staggering. According to an Urban Institute study in the late 1980s, 500,000-600,000 Americans are homeless on a given night.

It wasn’t always this way. For those of us whose memory stretches back at least as far as the 1960s and early 1970S. the sight of homeless people was rare and the presence of homeless families was unheard of. Indeed, homelessness was uncommon throughout the post-World War 11 economic boom. Our industrialized economy accommodated many workers without specialized training or education. For people on the margins of the economy, large skid row areas provided the resources to stay off the streets, On skid row even a poorly educated alcoholic could find a cheap room, get occasional day-labor work, and eat at the rescue mission. A portion of the increase in homelessness, both nationally and in San Francisco, can be attributed to the loss of skid row housing.

How did it happen? By the early 1970s, de- industrialization led to more unemployment and longer periods of time when people were unemployed. More households fell into the poor and near-poor brackets. Skid rows were vulnerable, since their residents were relatively powerless.

At the same time, San Francisco was responding to the changing economy by expanding the financial district south of Market Street and by constructing the Moscone Center. The result was the same in San Francisco as in other cities. Construction in the South of Market Area resulted in the loss of thousands of units in residential hotels. With fewer good-paying jobs and fewer cheap rooms, very poor people resorted to new survival strategies: scavenging for cans, blood banks, panhandling, and the occasional use of shelters.

As the economy underwent this change. the welfare state contracted. Payments from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) began lagging behind inflation. At the same time, more administrative barriers were placed in the way of access to AFDC. In the early 1980s, many recipients of Supplemental Security Income, which aids disabled people including some people with mental illness, were purged from the rolls. Nationally, 300,000 beneficiaries, including perhaps 100,000 with mental problems, lost their benefits.

By the late 1980s, researchers began to examine this emerging social crisis. At the University of Chicago, Michael Sosin compared 536 users of feeding programs, some homeless, others very poor but housed. He found very few differences in their personal characteristics, except that homeless people were much more likely to have been living alone and paying higher rent before becoming homeless. Furthermore, a high percentage of the homeless were either refused welfare or had been cut off from their benefits in the six months preceding their homeless episode. From these findings, Sosin concluded, ‘If-the homeless are just like the rest of the very poor, then dealing with poverty is the best way to ameliorate homelessness.”

This research notwithstanding, most cities around the country have treated homeless people as though they were fundamentally different from the rest of the poor. Consequently, cities responded to homelessness with shelters. The national shelter population rose by a factor of five between 1980 and 1990, reflecting both the growth in homelessness and in shelters them selves. The rise in shelter construction, in my view, reflects a fundamental miss-diagnosis of the problem. This diagnosis does not see homelessness as the result of fundamental shifts in the economy and in the housing structure, combined with the shredding of the social safety net. The problem analysis that usually underlies shelter construction identifies human failing, usually substance abuse and mental illness, as the cause of homelessness. Consequently, in this view, shelters must be constructed not only to provide a safe place for home less people, but to provide counseling to change their flawed character.

Today’s homeless shelters are similar to the 19th century poorhouses, where the aged, the mentally ill, poor families, and out of work laborers, were shut away. The original sponsors confidently predicted that poorhouses would promote the work ethic while saving the state money. The 19th century poorhouses proved to be expensive, cruel, and incapable -of transforming human lives, Michael Katz summed up their failure in In the shadow of the Poorhouse: “Miserable, poorly managed, under-funded institutions, trapped by their own contradictions, poorhouses failed to meet any of the goals so confidently predicted by their sponsors.” You would think that we would have learned our lesson, but the poor house has reared its ugly head again in the guise of homeless shelters.

In the modem version of the poorhouse, conditions are often very poor. In San Francisco, the Mission Rock Shelter is located in a dilapidated warehouse. Rows upon rows of cots are draped by dreary gray blankets. Bathrooms and showers are temporary. Only five hard working caseworkers serve the 600 residents. In New York City, shelter residents were asked to compare the shelters to their experience in prison. Prisons were rated as superior in personal safety, privacy cleanliness, and food quality. Prisons, as you might expect, were inferior mainly in personal freedom. It should be noted that family shelters in San Francisco are cleaner and better staffed than the Mission Rock shelter.

Like the 19th Century poorhouses, homeless shelters are expensive. Mission Rock costs $3.2 million a year. That comes to $5,400 a bed per year or $450 per bed per month. Compare that to General Assistance, the City’s main cash assistance grant to single adults who are not classified as disabled, which pays $345 per month, or $279 for those not in the work program. Even that small payment fends off homelessness for most recipients. Two-thirds of General Assistance recipients are not homeless.

If not shelters, then what? To close down shelters immediately would result in hundreds of people walking the streets, but we should work to make them as unnecessary as possible. Since major research suggests that homelessness is not a personal trait, but an economic status, our response should be to help homeless people gain access to tangible goods. With this approach in mind, here are a few ideas to reduce homelessness in America, beginning at the federal level down to the local level:

Create universal programs at the federal level, such as full employment, full access to health care, and guarantees for housing.

Expand the federal Section 8 program.

Provide ongoing rental subsidies for renters who take in friends or relatives who would otherwise be homeless.

Protect General Assistance Payments.

Increase day labor, including government day hiring.

Michael Padding is executive director of the San Francisco Council on Poverty and Homelessness. This article original appeared in the SPUR newsletter, SF, and was shortened for republication.

Last year’s “pieing” of Mayor Brown is a perfect metaphor for the impotence and futility of the radical left’s approach to homelessness in San Francisco. Instead of pushing serious proposals to actually solve the problem, radicals engage in self-righteous exhibitionism that, in this instance, only made an increasingly unpopular mayor a sympathetic figure.

The most visible advocates for the homeless have been the people at Food Not Bombs. They feed the homeless but seem to have little interest in challenging the status quo.

The city’s “alternative” press takes the same approach, when it takes any interest in the issue at all. “Leave Them Alone” was the cry of the S.F. Bay Guardian during last year’s police sweep of the homeless from the city’s parks. Instead of launching a weekly campaign to convice the city to invest enough money to solve the problem, the alternative press, like the folks at Food Not Bombs, engages in moral posturing: We are the Good People, and the cops and the mayor are Blue Meanies.

Once the police sweeps were over–and there were no more headlines in the dailies–homelessness became a non-issue, and the left withdrew into its customary smug acquiescence in the status quo. The implication is that the city’s poorest residents–perhaps as many as 16,000 people–belong in the streets and that they and we will just have to accept it. In the meantime, Food Not Bombs, the Bay Guardian, and Frontlines will try to make it easier for the homeless to stay in the streets, while insisting that the authorities not do anything to make it harder.

By failing to implement a comprehensive, city-wide policy to actually end homelessness, establishment liberalism–the mayor, the board of supervisors, the unions, the Democratic Party–tacitly accepts the idea that this is the way we have to live in San Francisco in 1999. Like the left, liberalism has also lost its way. Since Mayor Brown ordered the police to get the homeless out of the city’s parks late last year, there’s been little movement or debate on the issue. The homeless have simply been pushed downtown and into the neighborhoods, where they are still a problem for working people, renters, homeowners, and small businesses.

100 homeless people a year are dying in the streets of San Francisco. Posturing by the left and the timidity of our mainstream political leadership have created the worst possible situation: degraded neighborhoods and life-threatening circumstances for the homeless themselves.

The politically dicey and expensive–what happened to the city’s $145 million surpllus?–solution that the city and advocates for the homeless don’t want to face: that hard-core substance abusers, runaway teens, and the mentally ill–the overwhelming majority of the homeless–need to be taken into custody and compassionately dealt with according to their specific problems and needs. The fact that people find themselves living on the streets is evidence that their lives are out of control. This is not just another lifestyle choice. A government that supposedly represents all the city’s people has to intervene to defend both the well being of the homeless themselves and a civil society for the rest of us.

The principle that the city must uphold is simple: no one has the right to live in the city’s parks or on the streets. These are public spaces that belong to all the people.

If and when the city puts this policy into practice, the radical left will be outraged by the violation of the “rights” of the homeless, and they will inevitably be branded as heartless fascists. This is when our elected officials need to stand firm and to insist on enforcing both civility and compassion on the streets of the city.

The status quo is bad for both the city and the homeless. Sooner or later the people of San Francisco are going to understand that we don’t have to live this way.

Susan Crane has been released from prison! In 1997 Susan Crane, along with 4 other people, boarded a navy ship at Bath Iron Works in Maine. In a symbolic, nonviolent Swords into Plowshares action against the ship’s nuclear weapons arsenal, the activists poured their blood on and pounded on the weapons bays of the Navy’s Ship. Susan had already served a previous sentence for another action in which she and Steve Kelly effectively disarmed a Trident nuclear missle casing at a Bay Area nuclear weapons manufactory (Lockheed Martin).

History of Plowshares

Morale and activism in prison

To learn more about the Ploughshares actions and prisoners.

American Indian Movement activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier has been framed by the U.S. Government for a crime he did not commit. His constitutional rights were denied. His appeals for a new and fair trial were denied. All of this happened because the U.S, Government sought to distract the people from the truth and to cover-up the U.S. Government’s continuing policies against indigenous people and the suppression of those that resisted. To try to silence Leonard, the prison authorities have continuously harassed him and even tried to assassinate him. Now they are refusing him medical treatment.

Leonard is currently suffering from complications of a previous maxilla-facial surgery at the Springfield Medical Prison facility. In that surgery Leonard almost died, Not only did that surgery not improve Leonard’s condition, it made it far worst, Leonard is now in continuous, excruciating pain, He cannot open his mouth enough to bite his food or chew. Leonard, for very good reasons, does not want to go back to Springfield. The renowned maxilla-facial surgeon Doctor Keller of the Mayo Clinic has written to the prison telling them that he is willing to treat Leonard Leonard. But so tar, the federal Bureau Of Prisons (BOP) has refused to let Leonard be treated. If the government, for political reasons, causes and allows a prisoner to suffer great pain, there is no other word for that than torture. We are calling upon all people who believe in social justice to help in the campaign to end the torture of Leonard Peltier NOW!

Please send e-mails to: Ms. Kathleen Hawk, Director, Bureau Of Prisons at.- e-mail khawk@bop.gov or swolfson@bop.gov, or write to her at: 320 First St.NW, Washington, DC 20534, or fax: 202-514-6878, or call: 202-307-3198 and ask that Leonard be allowed treatment by Dr. Keller at the Mayo Clinic.

If the task of the nineteenth century was to overthrow slavery, and the task of the twentieth century was to end legal segregation, the key to solving this country’s problems in the twenty-first century is to abolish the white race as a social category –in other words, eradicate white supremacy entirely.

John Brown represents the abolitionist cause. Nominally white, he made war against slavery, working closely with black people. Those who think it saner to collaborate with evil than to resist it have labeled him a madman, but it was not for his madness that he was hanged; no, it was for obeying the biblical injunction to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. For those who suffer directly from white supremacy, John Brown is a high point in a centuries-long history of resistance,- for so-called whites he is the hope that they can step outside of their color and take part in building a new human community.

John Brown’s body lies a-mould’rin’ in the grave, but his soul calls out to the living. He is buried alongside family members and comrades-at-arms near North Elba, New York, in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains, which he often said had been placed there to serve the emancipation of the American slave. For many years African Americans and others celebrated May 9th, the anniversary of his birth, by gathering at his grave site. We call upon those who share the vision of a country without racial walls to join hands there on that date in 1999-his one hundred ninety-ninth year-to honor his memory and the memory of the others, black and white, who fought alongside him, and to rededicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the tasks for which they laid d

John Brown Day ’99 will be a day of ritual, reflection, remembrance, and renewal.

For further information, contact: EAST COAST,
John Brown Day, PO Box 400603,
Cambridge, MA 02140/ johnbrownday@hotmail.com.
WEST COAST, John Brown
Day, PO Box 24869, Oakland, CA 94623,
johnbrownday@amandia.org

The 1999 Primate Freedom tour is a three month caravan across the United States against primate experimentation. Stopping at the seven regional primate research centers in addition to a variety of other primate research facilities, the 1999 tour will consist of educational activities including teach-ins, protests, vigils, and more.

The tour will stop at the California Regional Primate Research Center at Davis, Calif. June 11-14, in Beaverton, Oregon June 6-9, in Seattle June 1-4, and across the us at Mesa, Az, San Antonio, TX, Mobile, AL, Atlanta, GA, Columbus, OH, Madison, WI, Ann Arbor, MI, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Bethesda, among other places.

Your involvement is crucial for the tour to reach its full potential You can order materials from the address below and distribute them in your community.

If you live in an area where the Primate Freedom Tour will be stopping, contact the Coalition to End Primate Experimentation to connect with others in your area. The tour is also seeking donations of camping equipment, vegan food, buses, vans, cars, laptop computers, performers, musicians and artists.

The tour is also looking for fund-raising help.

To get involved, contact CEPE at PO Box
34293, Washington, DC 20043, 888-391-8948,
CEPEmail@yahoo.com.

We are justly outraged at female circumcision throughout the world, but how many people seriously consider male circumcision, almost universally performed in America? We think of ourselves today as sexually liberated — after all, we are a country that can openly talk of our President’s sexual liaisons, right? However, I doubt that among the identifying features of William Jefferson Clinton’s penis according to Paula Jones was the fact that he is uncircumcised. If it is, it certainly would be an identifying characteristic, because most American men are circumcised. Could it be a sign of our secret sexual repression that no one discusses the sexual mutilation of infant boys in a common procedure called male circumcision?

However, our attention is drawn to female circumcision. An estimated 70 to 90 percent of Egyptian women have had their genitals mutilated in the various practices known as female circumcision. Women in Egypt and other parts of Africa are mutilated “for cleanliness” and to control their sexuality. Mutilated girls and women live with the dire physical and psychological consequences. Bleeding, infection and even death can occur after the surgical procedures (sometimes performed on the street) in which the clitoris may be removed, or the clitoris along with the labia minora and or labia majora. Oftentimes, no anesthetic is given the female child during the procedure. The remaining skin around the vagina is often sewn up leaving only a small opening, and must be reopened in adulthood if the woman wishes to give birth. Barbaric, isn’t it?

In the United States, most baby boys are circumcised for the same frivolous reasons. According to some parents and doctors, it is “cleaner” not to have to worry about the foreskin, or a circumcised penis “is the way it’s supposed to look.” They “don’t want their boy to be different.” The father himself may say, “It was done to me, so it will be done to him.” Has anyone ever thought to ask the baby what he would like done?

One of Canada’s leading ethicists says that circumcision of baby boys is technically criminal assault and that doctors should stop circumcising babies. “It is a bodily wounding on a tiny infant that has given no consent itself, and it is not . . . medically necessary,” asserts Dr. Margaret Summerville, founding director of the McGill Center for Medicine, Ethics and Law. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatricians decided in 1971 “There are no absolute indications for routine neonatal [newborn] circumcision.” Why are these surgical procedures still done then on mostly newborn boys?

John A. Erickson has a cynical response: “When you circumcise a baby, you are cutting off a part of his penis that you can cut off only because the person you’re cutting it off of can’t protect himself because he is a baby. Infant circumcision is foreskin amputation by force. No medical organization that subscribes to the ethic of ‘Do no Harm’ [one of the principals that doctors swear by can possibly support cutting off any part of anyone by force.”

Gloria Steinem connected male and female circumcision during a 1997 forum on female genital mutilation in New York: “I would like to remind us that we all share patriarchy, which is the pillar of almost every current political system, capitalist or socialist. And it has a rock bottom requirement, the control of women’s bodies as the most basic means of reproduction. . . These patriarchal controls limit men’s sexuality, too, but to a much, much lesser degree. That’s why men are asked symbolically to submit the sexual part of themselves and their sons to patriarchal authority, which seems to be the origin of male circumcision . . . speaking for myself, I stand with many brothers in eliminating that practice, too.”

However, evidence suggests that male circumcision is not such a small thing. The natural penis is a mucous membrane, like the female clitoris. In an uncircumcised penis, the foreskin shields the sensitive glans (tip) from irritation of any kind: against fabric and diapers, or possible infection from urine and faeces. The foreskin has specialized nerve endings that enhance sexual pleasure. It also secretes a substance that keeps the glans lubricated and protects the glans from trauma and injury. Without this covering the glans penis becomes dry, calloused and desensitized from exposure and chafing. Contrary to popular belief, the uncircumcised foreskin needs no special attention or cleaning in infancy. Later in childhood, the boy child may wash the penis and foreskin with soap and water just as easily as without a foreskin.

In circumcision the foreskin (prepuce), the natural sheath of skin which covers the penis is removed in a surgical procedure often done in the hospital within 24 hours after the baby is born, or in an outpatient operation shortly after birth. A cauterizing needle used to be used to remove the foreskin, and there were cases of infant penises being accidentally burned off in this procedure (see the Dec. 11 1997 issue of Rolling Stone for a harrowing case history, “The True Story of John/Joan,” by John Colapinto.) There are a few different procedures that are used today, one done with a Gomco clamp, another done with a plastibell instrument (the boy baby wears home a plastic thing on his penis).

Although current procedures are safer than cauterization, sometimes disfigurement, injury, and, in rare cases, death may result. Even a successful circumcision may be uncomfortable or dangerous to the baby short term. The raw, open wound where the foreskin was attached to the penis is subject to infection from exposure to urine and excrement while the cut heals. Hemorrhage (excessive bleeding) and pain, ulceration, urinary retention, swelling, skin loss, and deformities of the glans and urethral opening can also result from current methods.

Oftentimes anesthesia (pain medication) is not used on the baby, and if it is there can be complications from its use. The pain of the procedure and its aftereffects even if anesthesia is used may traumatize the baby. Painful erections may be a consequence of circumcision, and sometimes skin grafts may be necessary. And the long term effects of desensitization cannot be ignored. All this for a procedure that is not even medically necessary!

Although circumcision started as a Jewish ritual, it became adapted into the mainstream population in the Victorian age in the late 19th century as a way to discourage masturbation and to curb sexual promiscuity among males. In 1900 the editor of Medical News declared: “Finally, circumcision probably tends to increase the power of sexual control. The only physiological advantage which the prepuce can be supposed to confer is that of maintaining the penis in a condition susceptible to more acute sensation than would otherwise exist. It may increase the pleasure of intercourse and the impulse to it: but these are advantages which in the present state of society can well be spared. If in their loss increase in sexual control should result, one should be thankful.” (see the other quotes from the history of circumcision on the side bar).

Just because past generations of American men have been mutilated, let’s not keep this unnecessary practice up. If you ARE led to perform circumcision for a religious reason, could another ritual, like a blessing, be performed instead? Are we really more enlightened than those who practice or tolerate female circumcision in allowing male circumcision for sanitary or aesthetic reasons? Men who have already been circumcised may never know what they have lost in the way of sensation of the penis. Maybe this is why the mostly male sexual enhancing drug Viagra has achieved so much popularity in the U.S. The desensitized American penis needs artifical stimulus.

Circumcised men who are curious at what they may be missing need not despair totally, however. Dr. Jim Bigelow (Ph.D.) has written The Joy of Uncircumcising. For $19.95 ($2 shipping and handling a
nd $1.45 CA tax) you may order it from UNCIRC, P.O. Box 52138, Pacific Grove CA 93950. You can also receive information about uncircumcising at this address, or to order by phone call 408-375-4326. There are ways of stretching the remaining skin on the penis to reconstruct a foreskin, according to Dr. Bigelow.

In addition to UNCIRC, there is NOCIRC, the National Organization of Circumcision Information. Their address is P. O. Box 2512, San Anselmo CA 94979-2512 phone 415-488-9883 FAX 415-488-9660; www.nocirc.org Executive director is Marilyn Fayre Milos, R.N. Other WEB resources are listed in the box accompanying this article. You can receive a NOCIRC Resource Guide listing books, articles, pamphlets, picture sources, order information, and other organizations from NOCIRC. The book Say No to Circumcision! : 40 compelling reasons why you should respect his birthright and keep your son whole, published by Hourglass Books in 1996 by Thomas J. Ritter, MD, and George C. Denniston, MD, may be ordered from NOCIRC for $9.95 plus $3 shipping and handling, and offers a brief and cogent guide for those wishing information about the practice.

For parents who may perform a circumcision on their infant son, beware! An issue to be decided in the coming century is the extent of children’s rights. Child advocates, ethicists and lawyers agree that circumcision should be considered something that only an individual can decide for himself. In other words, one day a child may be able to sue his parents for performing a circumcision without the child’s consent. Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC) is a new non-profit network of attorneys founded to address the legal issues behind genital mutilation. ARC has an office at 2961 Ashby Ave., in Berkeley, CA; phone is 510-848-4437. They seek to make provisions for male victims of botched circumcisions, especially those who were circumcised without their parents’ consent, parents whose sons were circumcised below the “standard of care,” and parents whose sons died as a result of circumcision. They wish to expand provisions already in place to prevent or punish female genital mutilation done to minor children in America to male minors. J. Steven Svoboda, Esq., founder and director, says, “The medical profession, which has perpetuated this tragic disfigurement of baby boys’ genitals, will be challenged by an organization of legal professionals whom they cannot afford to ignore.”

On November 23, 1998, in response to the federal injunction that removed Free Radio Berkeley from the air, and in light of the heavy-handed seizure tactics used by the FCC against other microbroadcasters, free radio activists decided to reclaim their airwaves by taking their station literally out of the FCCs reach – 50 feet up a redwood tree in a Berkeley city park. Three platforms set by Earth First!ers held the battery-powered equipment, food, people, and gear. The activists accomplished 11 days of nearly 24-hour-a-day broadcasts before ending the project voluntarily. Two FCC agents visited the site but took no action other than leaving behind a letter. The action received considerable local news coverage in print, TV and radio media, and droves of community supporters visited the park bringing gifts of food and money, including a 10-year-old boy who donated his allowance and a family from across the street who shared their Thanksgiving dinner. Solar Powered Urban Radio Transmission (SPURT) of Berkeley/Oakland returned to the air in solidarity for one afternoon, setting their antenna in a neighboring tree. The interest and goodwill shown to us by the community at large was overwhelming. It clearly demonstrated the need for non-commercial community-based radio, and inspired us to continue in the struggle.

In January, after years of public pressure from Tri-Valley CAREs and local residents on Livermore Lab demanding that the Lab determine how high levels of plutonium got to a park near its facility, Livermore Lab released additional sampling results from the park.

High levels of plutonium were found at numerous sites in the park, near (but not in) a creek which runs through the Lab, along the ball field and by a little grassy hill between the park and the sidewalk. Somewhat elevated levels of plutonium were also found behind an apartment complex between the Lab and the park. Most of the plutonium was found in the top two inches of dirt. The way the plutonium is distributed suggests that it may have traveled by air to the park, possibly released from the Lab during leaks or in the course of normal operations.

Plutonium is a man-made, radioactive metal used to create the atomic explosion that is at the core of a modern nuclear weapon. Plutonium 239, the bomb-grade isotope found in the park, has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years. The Lab has around 880 pounds of it on hand, enough for nearly 100 modern nuclear weapons. There is no safe level of plutonium exposure. A microscopic particle, if inhaled, can cause cancer and other diseases.

Plutonium pollution was first discovered in Big Trees Park in 1995 when the EPA analyzed a single dirt sample there, one of 3 taken near the lab. The agency expected all three to be at “background,” (.001 to .01 picocuries of plutonium per gram of soil) and to use them as a comparison for known plutonium contamination at the Lab. All 3 samples came up dirty, (between 16 and 160 times “background”) and the one from Big Trees Park contained the highest level of plutonium. Big Trees is about one-half mile west of Livermore Lab. Since then, other test results turned up even higher levels of plutonium, including a finding of 1.02 picocuries per gram, up to 1,000 times higher than attributable to global fallout. Lab officials have rushed to assert that there is no harm to human health or the environment from the plutonium, and that no cleanup or follow up action is warranted.

Tri-Valley “CAREs is demanding that sampling should be done of other likely “hot spots,” including east of the Lab where plutonium has been found in off site air monitors. Samples should be analyzed for particle size to help determine the amounts of plutonium escaping through the filtering system. Livermore residents also demand that “Hot spots” should be cleaned up. There is no excuse for the Lab leaving elevated levels of plutonium in a park. The Lab should institute changes in its filter maintenance and operational procedures in the plutonium facility to help minimize further releases.

Finally, Tri-Valley CAREs recommends that the plutonium facility should rapidly be phased out of operation.

For more information, contact Tri-Valley CAREs at (925) 443-7148.

Article excerpted from Tri-Valley CAREs’ February 1999 newsletter, Citizen’s Watch