Category: Articles

Slingshot awarded its 4th annual award for Lifetime Achievement to Gerald Smith at our 21st birthday party in March. Gerald has been a key member of the direct action, grassroots radical scene in the East Bay since Slingshot started in 1988, and long before that. In addition to writing for Slingshot over the years, he frequently drops by our offices for spirited discussions. Gerald challenges lazy assumptions and offers sharp critiques in a funny, comradely and engaging way.

Slingshot created our lifetime achievement award to recognize direct action radicals who have dedicated their lives to the struggle for alternatives to the current system. Front-line radicals frequently operate below the radar and lack recognition, which is too bad. While awards can be part of systems of hierarchy, a complete lack of recognition for long-term activists robs us of chances to appreciate and learn from the contributions individuals can make during a lifetime of organizing. Thanks, Gerald, for your continuing contributions to the struggle. Here’s a short biography of Gerald.

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Gerald was exposed to radical activism and ideas at an early age, and he’s stayed engaged and active ever since. “When I grew up, there was an existing social movement in progress. The civil rights movement was not limited to the South. We had become a mass movement in the North. That social movement made it relatively easy for me to connect — because it was large, because it was clear, it was urgent.”

Born in 1949, he grew up in the South Bronx and went to see Malcolm X with his father when he was 10. “I was enamored of Malcolm X – I thought he was the best thing since sliced bread.” But Gerald didn’t find Malcolm’s religious rhetoric convincing — Gerald had already read and rejected the Bible and religion by the time he was 10.

When Gerald was 14, he joined the NAACP youth group but he found it to be bureaucratic and timid. “The NAACP was afraid of young people — we never made decisions on our own.” So Gerald joined CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] and started organizing rent strikes in Harlem during 1964 and 65. He contrasts activism in the mid-1960s to activism now, noting that at that time, just hanging a flier in a building advertising a tenant’s meeting would bring a significant portion of the tenants to a meeting, ready to go on strike. “It was easy because the buildings were falling down. It was very clear that unity in action – you could actually win things. Now there is extreme alienation – people on the same block don’t even know each other.” Back in 1960s “even in a 14 story project, we tended to know each other.” The rent strikes in Harlem proved extremely effective, as building after building struck and won improved conditions.

In 1967, Gerald entered Manhattan Community College. “That’s when I really started to get political.” He worked on a broad range of political action on the campus. In 1969, he joined the Black Panthers, inspired by the Black Panther 21 case. “It was so clear that they were being framed up. I thought, if they’re framing them up, these guys must be revolutionaries.” Gerald notes that the Panthers were the best people he ever worked with. He worked on the takeover of Lincoln Hospital with the Young Lords and helped run the Martin Luther King, Jr. Liberation School, a free school run by radicals. He also sold the Black Panther paper and continued working on housing protests and strikes. But mostly, he worked on the Panther 21 case.

When the Panthers split in 1971 with ugly arguments broadcast on mainstream TV, Gerald entered a period of serious study trying to understand what had gone wrong. He became more committed to the radical struggle. During this period, he moved away from a black nationalist position and moved towards a class analysis. While he knew that “the oppression is all intertwined” he concluded that “blacks alone couldn’t overthrow capitalism by themselves” and he rejected the multi-vanguardist ideas of the times. He became a socialist.

In 1975 Gerald moved to the Bay Area and soon became involved in the Camp Pendleton 13 case. Black soldiers were facing years in prison after they defended themselves against KKK activity. The campaign achieved complete victory with all charges dropped. He met other activists through the campaign and ultimately joined the Peace and Freedom Party. During the 90s and in the last decade, Gerald has run for statewide public office a number of times as a PFP candidate.

In 1984, Gerald worked on the Longshore Union’s refusal to unload South African ships to protest apartheid. That drew him to the anti-apartheid movement at the University of California, Berkeley, which saw a huge, on-going sit-in in 1984 and a militant shantytown protest in 1985. In 1990, working with activists he met during the anti-apartheid struggle, Gerald was one of the founders of Copwatch in Berkeley, which eventually spread worldwide. He’s worked with Copwatch in Berkeley ever since.

In the mid-1990s, Gerald was one of the early DJs at Free Radio Berkeley, an unlicensed micro-powered radio station at 104.1 FM. Gerald has also worked with KALX, on the Amandla Program, and volunteered at KPOO and KPFA. In 1999, helped organize street protests against a Pacifica takeover of KPFA. Currently he is running for the KPFA board.

He’s also stayed involved supporting political prisoners including imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu Jamal and more recently, ex-Black Panthers charged with murder known as the SF8.

A high point of his activism was when he helped organize a one-day, West coast-wide longshore strike to protest the imprisonment of journalist Mumia Abu Jamal. Seeing the power of collective action, he reflects “this is what keeps you going–this is real. [The action made clear] what this could be — people joining together for a just world – that stays with you.”

It isn’t easy to keep struggling, year after year, avoiding burnout or getting discouraged and bitter. On a trip to France for a worker’s festival, Gerald realized how backward the US struggle was compared to rest of the world. “But I wasn’t discouraged. I thought ‘I’m going to measure up – I’m going to improve.'” Perhaps it is that ability to look at the historical moment and see an opportunity for struggle — rather than a hopeless situation — that enables Gerald to keep on keeping on.

Tristan Anderson is a long-time Bay Area activist and photojournalist who was documenting resistance to Israel’s separation barrier in the Palestinian village of Ni’lin. The weekly demonstration against the wall was winding down when Israeli Defense Forces fired a high velocity tear gas canister at his head, critically wounding him. He was taken to Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv, where he has undergone several surgeries to reconstruct his skull. I spoke to his partner Gabby on the six month anniversary of his shooting.

Dee: When you first met him, what was your impression?

Gabby: It’s strange to think back to our old life. We met in a tree, at the top of an occupied tree at the Oak Grove Tree Sit in Berkeley. This might be uninteresting to anyone who’s not a tree sitter, but he made an impression on me early on as an excellent climber, with a very cool, very unique climbing style. And it was so interesting because he was completely comfortable free climbing, but was mistrustful of the ropes; whereas I was always very comfortable with the gear and freaked out about the free climbs (moving with no safety line). I can remember him doing this crazy ninja crap, then almost losing it over a simple traverse. I think it says a lot about him. Tristan has a way of being very capable and very confident, and then very humble and goofy at the same time.

Eventually we became partners. We had such a funny awkward start to our relationship. I had this idea that a boyfriend would just slow me down and make me co-dependent, so I was a real pain in the ass to go out with in the beginning. And Tristan was so shy, he used to say “girls are scarier than riot cops”.

D: What are his odd quirks that people find endearing?

G: Oh shit, there’s a lot of odd quirks. For one thing, Tristan at heart is an archivist. He is a collector of things–some useful, some completely strange. And he’s very interested, not just in the preservation of other people’s reclaimed junk, but also in the preservation of radical histories. He’s been very slowly writing a book about his experiences in the anti-globalization movement. The book is part travel diary, part criticism of neo-liberal economics, part riot porn. But he’s had two problems with writing the book. One: he’s too busy running around being a crazy activist to work on his book about activism, and two: that archivist nature. The writing encapsulates every tiny detail of everything that was happening at that time, so what you get is more of a time capsule than a functional story. But this is his nature. It’s highly detailed, highly researched, highly accurate- and almost impossible to read! I love it, but I’m biased.

D: What are his talents, interests, hobbies, inspirations?

G: Tristan’s parents are Back To The Landers. He grew up in a series of stone houses in the woods and he lived with no electricity until he was 12. When Tristan was about 20, he moved to the Bay Area to find other punks and have an exciting life. He’s done a lot of world travel, but he always comes back home to the Bay.

Tristan is tremendously knowledgeable about California wildlife. He builds bikes and goes to protests, he screens patches, digs in dumpsters, eats weird food, reads history books, he watches birds, takes photos, keeps archives, does complicated math in his head, swims in cold funky water, climbs trees, stuff like that. We like each other a whole lot. Tristan’s facinating to hang out with.

He’s a person who believes in putting his beliefs in line with his lifestyle, scavenging food and participating in anarchist struggle. He’s been arrested over 50 times. I remember when he came when the Berkeley Tree-sit was going to be evicted saying, “Okay, I’ll get arrested with you guys but I have to start my new career on Sunday.” We all laughed about that because we knew it was going to be ridiculously dangerous, but he managed to face a 3 day long cherrypicker assault, get arrested, get out, post all the pictures of it on Indybay (search “cricket”), get arrested again, get bailed out, run to work sweaty and exhausted, only to get scolded by his boss for being 10 minutes late. Some people would not understand his lifestyle thinking it must be difficult to plunge into a dangerous, unpredictable situation, but it he took great emotional satisfaction and pride in collective empowerment through street mobilization. He especially has a history of going up against walls, i.e. the Israeli separation barrier, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the fences they built at the Oak Grove tree-sit.

D: Can you talk about some of the struggles he’s been involved in? Some of the places he’s been? Even a quick list would be great.

G: Yes. Tristan’s gone to more crazy protests than anyone I know. And beyond just the local stuff, he lived in El Salvador at the end of the war in the early 90s during the death squads, he reported for Indymedia from Iraq shortly after the invasion, he was in Oaxaca… And he made it out. It’s still hard to believe he got shot while we were just standing around, relaxing. I mean ok, we were standing around in Ni’iln, but still, we were just standing around. We were away from the main body of the crowd. No one was throwing stones. Nothing was happening.. He learned a lot at Genoa during the G8 mobilizations. He’s done a lot of Latin American solidarity work and has strong ties with El Salvador and Mexico. He said the heaviest shit was Oaxaca. His friend Brad Will was a videographer covering the teacher’s strike in Oaxaca in fall 2006. He had plans to meet up with him, but when Brad was killed he flew there right away. He said it was the most amazing thing he ever experienced in his life. The level of solidarity and revolutionary feeling he experienced in Oaxaca was unlike anywhere else. He was out against the WTO in Seattle. Ecuador, Sweden. There are Justice for Tristan posters all over the squats of Berlin. He was in England for an extended period of time. He always joked that in Germany the feminists ran the scene, while in Greece he was often told “You should not talk to girls who believe in feminism”. He was in Argentina during the bank crash. Nicaragua. He’s been heavily involved in the anti-globalization movement. Pretty much almost all of the major mobilizations from the summit-hopping heyday, he was always there. He was a fixture. He also cared deeply for nuclear disarmament, and was arrested protesting the Afghan/Iraq War. The cops got so used to arresting him for San Francisco Food Not Bombs they would stop their cars and greet him with enthusiasm.

D: I remember he would love squatter christmas, which is the time when the students leave their “trash” at the end of the semester to go home. Are there any memorable garbage finds he seemed particularly proud of?

G: Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes he attached value to the most absurd things. I remember when we first started dating, and I was checking out his room full of weird stuff, I noticed he had a whole shelf full of bubbles- children’s bubbles- that he saved because he figured he could bring them to a Reclaim the Streets type party sometime, although I never saw him actually take them anywhere. And on the shelf he had several jars marked “BAD”. So he had found these children’s bubbles in the trash, tested them, seen that several jars didn’t work, labelled them as “BAD”, and then lined them back up on the shelf! We tested them again and indeed they were BAD bubbles. Grudgingly, and I think it was only because we were a new relationship and he was still trying to impress me, he got rid of the “BAD” bubbles.

D: He’s been a committed vegan for 10 and a half years, travelling to other countries where such dietary restrictions are a little bit unreasonable. What kind of weird food has he eaten in the name of keeping veg? This could also be expanded to generally rotten nasty food he’s eaten for the sake of not letting it go to waste.

G: Tristan was born with almost no sense
of smell and therefore a greatly reduced sense of taste. I’ve seen him eat the craziest, most unreasonably rotten things, and love it. He normally keeps a special spoon in his pocket so he can scoop vile rotting things up everywhere we go and eat them. He’ll eat things out of the compost pile! Sometimes he’s not even hungry, he just considers it his solemn duty somehow.

But on travelling: One time, towards the end of the war, I think in El Salvador, he was in the mountains with the guerillas. He was watching a pot of soup being cooked for hours trying to see what they were putting in it. He was so hungry. Everyone was hungry, and what food there was he sometimes wouldn’t eat because he’s that kind of pain in the ass — I mean highly principled — vegan. So, he’s watching this pot of soup all day, and it’s almost ready and it’s perfectly vegan, and he’s licking his lips and then all of a sudden they drop a whole cow’s leg in the pot! And he says “Wait! Wait! you said no meat!” and his friend says, “What? Not meat, flavor.”

D: The people of Ni’lin and surrounding villages have suffered heavy casualties in their resistance to the separation barrier. A surprising thing I’ve noticed from videos of past demonstrations is the involvement of children in the struggle, which indicates to me the deep threat their community is facing. What are the demands of their movement? What does the Wall represent to their current way of life?

G: The Wall is an escalation of the Military Occupation which dominates every facet of life for Palestinians. To live under an occupation with no end in sight is an impossible situation. Villages that have organized to resist the wall being built through their land have been incredibly courageous. They’ve made important gains, and have also suffered a high price. The Occupation affects everyone, including children. It’s not uncommon to see young boys at the demonstrations.

D: In the time you spent in Palestine, what were the wishes of the Palestinians you met? What is their general attitude towards international activists?

G: We were here for only about a month before Tristan was shot, and our time was divided between Palestine solidarity work and hanging out with internationals and Israeli anarchists. I don’t feel qualified to speak for Palestinians, although some things are obvious. This is a struggle for national sovereignty and self-determination. There are people who will tell you that the Israel- Palestine conflict is infinitely complicated, but it’s not. They want reasonable things, like basic freedoms and control of their land and resources.

A large part of this struggle is invisibility and the general anti-Arab racism of the Western world. Internationals are very welcome. You will be fed until you can’t walk, you will marvel at the Arabic language, the beauty of the land, and you will make friends. But it’s dangerous here, so think about it hard before you decide to come.

D: As a Jew, do you see any parallels between the atrocities of the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine?

G: I see that in Israel the right wing exploits the Holocaust at every turn, and then attacks anyone on the left who tries to draw parallels between the vicious right wing militarism of the Israeli State and the right wing militarism of places like Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, etc. The bottom line is that Israel does not get a free ride to human rights abuse because of Jewish suffering in World War II.

D: There seems to be a certain difference in the militarized societies of the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. fights its wars of conquest abroad and, with the help of corporate media, largely out of view of the American public, making it easy for the average person to claim ignorance, whereas the conflict in Israel is played out much closer to home. Does this geographical closeness bring it closer psychologically to the Isareli people? Or does it force them to distance themselves from it even further? Does it seem like the average person there is unaware of the plight of Palestinians, or are they aware of the atrocities and simply justify it as necessary to their national security?

G: I don’t understand Israelis. Invariably the first thing out of every Israeli’s mouth when they hear what happened to us is, “What were you doing there?” Most people here don’t know what’s happening in the Occupied Territories, but more importantly than that, they don’t want to know.

D: What is the experience of Israeli anarchists living in a highly militarized, socially conservative society?

G: It’s a difficult life for Israeli anarchists. First off, you have the draft. Every able bodied Israeli at the age of 18 (with exemptions for the ultra-orthodox) is expected to do several years of military service. The options are principled refusal (which means going to military prison), pretending to be crazy, or going along with it. Either way, this choice that they make as a teenager follows them around for the rest of their life. Those who opt out of the army have a very hard time getting jobs and are heavily stigmatized by mainstream society.

The struggle here is very high stakes. The activists I’ve known here (Palestinian, Israeli, and International) have been the most committed people I’ve ever encountered in my life.

D: When you see the weakness and debility Tristan’s injury has caused him, what do you feel? What does “Justice for Tristan!” mean to you?

G: I have been profoundly affected by this experience. I feel like shit all the time.

There will be no justice for Tristan. Our best hope is a harm reduction approach, trying to make this situation as least bad as possible. This includes access to top quality medical care for the rest of his life, accountability for those personally responsible, and errrr…ending the occupation?

D: Would he be alive right now if he were Palestinian?

G: No. We would have gone to Ramallah Hospital and he would have died, like Basem who was killed with the same high velocity tear gas canister that injured Tristan. He is missed dearly by Palestinian and Israeli peace activists alike.

D: What do the Israeli nurses think of your activism? Do you find yourself biting your tongue in the interest of ensuring adequate healthcare?

G: Some people here know who we are, others don’t. During the ICU time I was a completely traumatized lunatic and I wasn’t eating or sleeping and I was doing all kinds of creepy PTSD things. I used to think that every lazy nurse or uncaring doctor was a self-appointed agent of the state here to finish the job. They used to call security on me about once a week. Now I’m less crazy, no one’s called security on me in months.

D: How has your life been as his constant caregiver and companion? Frustrating, rewarding, both?

G: I believe that eventually life will get better than this for both of us. It’s a very difficult situation, not just because he got shot in the head, but because Tristan came to the Rehabilitation Center and got worse. Everyone else is getting better, and he’s gotten worse.

We waited a long time for a surgery to address the medical complication that was ruining our lives. He’s improved since the surgery, but has suffered other complications. Eventually, the stars will align in the correct way and we’ll be able to get on with the Rehabilitation process. But it’s been very slow going, and for better or worse, my health and well being is very interconnected with Tristan’s.

D: When did you make the decision to stay with him through the hospitalization process?

G: Of course I would stay with him.

D: What kind of support have you seen from the Israeli anarchist community?

G: We’ve gotten a lot of support not just from the Israeli anarchists, but also from their families. They cook for us, visit us, help us with translating, transportation, and countless annoying logistical things. They have been
wonderful, which is a good thing because my relatives here have completely disowned me, and our Palestinian friends can’t get across the border. Without the support and friendship of the Israeli anarchist community, we would be totally fucked.

D: There were a number of demonstrations across the U.S. and the world expressing street solidarity with Tristan in the days following his shooting. Do you feel these played a role in exerting political pressure against Israel to provide medical care?

G: The solidarity demonstrations have been very important. Tristan and I went out into the streets for Carlo Giuliana killed in Genoa and Brad Will killed in Oaxaca, and I’m glad that our community has come out for us. There may come a time when we need to start the demonstrations again. Please support us if we call.

D: What kind of medical support is he going to need long-term?

G: Fuck if I know. But whatever it is, it’s going to be expensive.

D: What are the best ways for someone Stateside to support him?

G: The most important thing is to mobilize for justice and continue the Struggle. In smaller ways, we try to keep Tristan company here and surround him with comfortable, familiar things. Writing letters or sending photos, posters, art or music that he might recognize or enjoy helps keep Tristan tethered to his old life and his old self. It’s important in that way, and also it helps to improve our quality of life here and keep things interesting. (The best kinds of letters are not of the “sorry this terrible atrocity happened to you, free Palestine!” sort, but are personal anecdotes that are interesting or funny. We have quite a lot of freedom about what art to put on the walls of his hospital room and what music to play, but we try to keep his room a space free of police violence or allusions to police violence. And we can’t afford to alienate anyone who works here with free Palestine propaganda.

Of course there’s also the money thing. Money helps, benefit shows help and it’ll make a big difference to us, but we’d rather have you out in the streets.

Letters, photos, stories, and bad jokes about Ronald Reagan can be sent to Tristan Anderson c/o

Jonathan Pollak

10 Elazar St.

Tel Aviv, 65157 Israel

Cutten, South Cascadia: the McKay Tract canopy. The landscape below presents itself as a patchwork quilt of war.

Looking West one sees the suburb, which is Progress enacting its will upon occupied land. More ‘development’ is slated, but is being blocked. We have met primarily friendly people here who enjoy hanging out in the forest. We’ve asked them if they want their suburb to grow, and they emphatically do not.

Among the second- and third-growth trees to the South lie a few erroneous mini-mansions with stumps in their yards wider than any of the three SUVs in their driveways. The residents enjoy a quiet life, until one of them starts running power tools.

We look East and see the tops of enormous old growth redwoods towering above the hundred-year-old second growth trees. Some friends live here including spotted owls, ospreys, turkey vultures, black bears, newts, voles, flying squirrels, and the occasional arboreal human.

To the North lies a clearcut. Three years ago, Green Diamond came in and cut down every last tree in the marked ‘unit’, leaving a few huge burned-out snags. Pampas grass and milkweed grow to human height in the trees’ absence; this area is dry and becoming dryer. The company planted a few baby confiers, redwoods and others after cutting the area; but those young trees are waiting until a couple more units are razed, then all the land will be re-zoned from ‘timberland’ to ‘residential’, bringing more mini-mansions, more people. So it goes…

Except the forest friends disagree. They want to live, and the forest is their home. For the past several months we’ve been occupying two tree villages in the McKay Tract, tying in as many Giants as possible with traverse ropes to protect them, with our own bodies, from being cut down. Tree-sitting has been used to defend forest land in Humboldt for decades, and traverses enable a few humans to defend large numbers of trees without descending from the canopy one hundred feet off the ground.

We chose this grove because the trees stand directly against the march of Leviathan in the form of suburban development, and the neighbors, human and nonhuman alike, stand with us to give us love and support. One of the groves scheduled to be clearcut features an osprey nest, at least one spotted owl nest, flocks of turkey vultures circling overhead, a trail and campsite used frequently by bears, and a creek that serves as watershed for the Humboldt Bay’s healthiest population of coho salmon. Surely, not just timber-land. The critters have shown much love for our efforts, particularly the flying squirrels and owls who provide moral support and watch us climb.

Green Diamond (GD), formerly Simpson Timber Company, is now the most active transnational timber corporation remaining in Humboldt County. They have clear-cuts scheduled each year all across the Northwest, and have largely escaped public scrutiny by a process of the 21st-century called Greenwashing (see: their name + their website) and alliances with the State.

Example: the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for spotted owls, which gives the owls a vague, constantly shifting zone of ‘habitat’ on GD land and a few selected remaining ‘wildlife trees’, usually of low monetary value. In return, the GD gets a bunch of ‘Incidential Take’ permits for owls, basically, a license to kill them at will. The GD’s plan for the McKay Tract is clear-cutting, followed by residential development to double the size of Cutten, of course adding more residents to the city of Eureka and more overall stress upon the environment.

So far no chainsaws have fallen upon the McKay Tract this year, so tree-sitters are still needed to live in the canopy to protect this refuge of wildlife from the perpetual war that is Human Progress. Anyone wishing to join us in the forest or in town are encouraged to contact Earth First! Humboldt at (707)-834-5170.

The bus arrives just in time. Many people who have had a chance to see and spend an evening in the innocuous white whale of a vehicle have gone to bed a little richer. The bus which has no official name, is a former city bus that was converted into a rooving indy media center. It primarily showcases live music of the underground variety and it rarely disappoints. Maybe it’s a bore, or a catastrophe occurs, like the PA system blows up. In fact people will most likely have a memorable time if a minor dilemma arises. On its maiden voyage across the country, it had just made it out of Alameda county when its bio-diesel engine caught on fire. According to Zach Houson, who went on that particular trip and who does not drive or know nothing of auto mechanics, “I learned that anything you need to fix a car with you can probably make the parts out of gum and garbage and it will hold–even if it’s only temporary.” Stories like Zach’s abound with those who come in contact with this phenomenon.

The bus has been having events for the last three years and has made its way across the country twice. An aborted trip into Mexico does not rule it out as a future possibility. And what of Alaska? China? Prague? The imp-like maintenence man John Benson, who is the bus’ primary keyholder, would probably egg on the most impossible ideas as a calendar item for next month. Fans of the bus often will only hear of an event hours before it’s happening. And many people get drawn to it as they haplessly pass it by chance.

But ambuiguity is probably a boon in this hyper–tense–where’s your permit–open air prison called America. Like guerrilla fighters, the networks of underground artists, striving to express themselves, do not bother to open their dream club, café or bar, knowing that the restrictions and fees will stifle their fun. House shows and temporary storefronts are just as much a part of a touring schedule as a teen center or any place listed in an alternative weekly. Many bands also go to play in empty fields, toxic waste sites, or in abandoned structures–places hard to get to, but once there the tension of the Man’s gaze is gone. The bus operates on this ethos–and may I add, eliminates all those pesky service charges levied that are the result of being so entangled in capitalism.

The story of the bus origin is a parable on how to face adversity. When John Benson’s communal house, known to host shows, decided to take a break just as the touring band season began to spike, he looked into other avenues. While scouring the world’s bizarre market, a notice of a half-built bus lead to a transaction. The bus was a remnant of city public transportation and was then purchased by the Oakland Police Dept to convert into a mobile cop base. Windows were fortified with metal sheets and an odd-looking tower added, but the funds needed to put it on the street dried up. The first road trips and shows were being planned before the stage was built, lights installed, and veggie oil engine tinkered.

I’m sure the OPD doesn’t fancy the end result of their endeavors. Ah the fossils and failed dreams of the police state only creates the playground to romp in. It’s almost too good, like this reality is one of those boring political tracts written by some splinter group like the Situationists International or CrimethInc. But most of those at a show are not engaging in a conscious act of anti-authoritarianism. Much like those Obama parades on election night, people are pleased to take the street and that’s the end in itself. I am often reminded that the constant visits from traveling musicians is a form of barter that predates the exchange of culture for money. And what these tribes of far away artists share is their ideas–however strange. And when the hometown gets a little too small, the arrival of the bus with new faces and ideas for an hour, will change the dead night into a spark of light.

The bus has been in traction back East from the second U.S. tour. A replacement bus has carried the torch for us all the past couple months. Just as we lost hope in seeing that strange funky blob amble on down the road. Proof that the idea and action of taking public space is more important than any one vehicle.

The death of Samantha Dorsett came as a terrible loss to all of her friends in the queer and trans- community, the punk community, and the anti-war movement; also to the clerk at the South Berkeley post office, the waitress at the Vietnamese restraurant, and to all of us on the Slingshot staff. Her life (and death) touched many, including those she had never met, who knew Samantha only through her creative and institution-building work.

In the 90s, in Bloomington, Indiana, Samantha founded Plan-it-X Records and the Secret Sailor bookstore (now Boxcar Books), both of which continue to thrive today. She published a fanzine, Strap Yourself In. After touring with her puppet troupe and several bands, she moved to Pensacola, Florida, where she worked tirelessly to organize protests (and a culture of resistance) against the war in Iraq. She also staffed Subterranean Books, and packed orders for the local Books Through Bars program.

Samantha came to the Bay Area next (“settled” was never the right word for Sam) and was actively involved at the San Jose Peace Center, the Long Haul, and the Book Zoo. She continued to write articles, fanzines, poetry chapbooks, broadsides, and a novel (“Troubled Sleep”) under her own name and several pseudonyms. One of her final published pieces, about the Women’s Choice clinic, was on the cover of the last Slingshot.

Plagued by physical and mental ailments, unable to overcome or escape from the scars of her difficult life, and unable to find a dignified, fulfilling place either in the larger society or in the alternative communities she’d help foster, Samantha took her own life in June 2009.

She was a sweetheart, a troublemaker, a rabble rouser, a scholar, a lover of bunnies, and more. We will miss her always.

“For the record, there is no valid phytoremediation method for [lead].”(1) That’s how Rufus Chaney began a recent email regarding a contaminated community garden. Chaney would know — he was one of the original researchers in the promising field of phytoremediation, or the use of green plants to remove contaminants from soil. He believes that current phytoremediation strategies offer few solutions to people concerned about lead levels in yards and gardens. Questions lingered in my mind as well, after I documented activists uses of phytoremediation for Slingshot Issue 99. How long does it take to clean up lead with plants? Is this a practical strategy? Plants and mushrooms can remove or break down other contaminants, like arsenic and petroleum products, relatively easily. Getting plants to take up meaningful quantities of lead is tricky.

Successful lead remediation involves a multi-faceted approach, suggests Anita Malpani, the Research Coordinator at Worcester Roots Project, a community group in eastern Massachusetts with a great track record in neighborhood lead remediation. What makes the Worcester Roots Project stand out is their ability to combine activism and science to tangibly improve community soil health. With guidance from experts in the field of lead remediation, like Rufus Chaney and Sally Brown (Univ. of Washington), Worcester Roots conducts their own field experiments. They have strong connections with the UMASS soil testing laboratory. Youth comprise a large part of their organization and are the primary purveyors of the free soil test kits. In fact, neighborhood soil testing is specifically written into their budget and is a cornerstone of their mission “[t]o struggle for a world where everybody is able to access the necessary resources to live a healthy, dignified life, without prejudice, exploitation or toxic environments.”

Malpani took time out from moving offices — their old office in Worcester’s Stone Soup community center recently caught fire — to answer my questions and explain her organization’s new angle on lead remediation. After years of experimenting with lead phytoremediation using Pelargoniums (scented geraniums), the Roots Project is now looking into chemically immobilizing the lead right where it is.

Although Malpani says they’re still hoping to find practical phytoremediation techniques, and are running new experiments with Indian Mustard, she says their new strategy focuses on phytostabilization. They are experimenting with adding phosphate rock, ferrous materials, and compost to the soil, assessing each soil amendment’s ability to bind up and stabilize lead. After adding the amendments, they plant Pelargoniums, which act as a ground cover and keep down dust, in addition to possibly sucking up some lead.

Phosphorus is key to the problems associated with lead phytoremediation, and also to the potential success of their new tactic. A necessary plant nutrient, phosphorus (P) also binds with lead (Pb) in the soil to form the non-toxic mineral pyromorphite. EPA scientists and other researchers like Chaney find that lead joins with phosphorus to make pyromorphite rapidly, and that “pyromorphite will rarely be absorbed if ingested.”(2) The Worcester Roots strategy now depends not on taking the lead away, but on reducing it’s bioavailability. Bioavailable lead is the lead that can damage our bodies when we absorb it. Scientists estimate that only 30% of the total amout of lead in soil is bioavailable.(2) The rest is already sitting tight in complexes with phosphates, sulphates, and organic matter naturally in the soil. Instead of trying to divorce the lead that’s already bound up, why not try to immobilize the rest of it?

“No plant naturally accumulates really high levels of lead from soils,” Chaney points out. Plants physically can’t absorb lead when phosphates are around. He suggests scientists get good results — i.e. experiments showing that plants do absorb a lot of lead — by growing plants in a laboratory and feeding them nutrient solutions that don’t contain phosphates and sulfates. This loophole guarantees that the lead stays soluble instead of forming pyromorphite or other mineral complexes. But a plant growing in a phosphorus-deficient environment is unheathy and won’t give a good yield. Successful phytoremediation depends on a plant’s ability to remove a lot of lead, which is directly related to how large the plant grows. To negotiate this catch-22, Worcester Roots is experimenting with spraying the Pelargoniums with a foliar application of phosphorus. This helps insure the Pelargoniums grow densely and are an effective groundcover, regardless of the amount of lead they might be extracting from the soil.

Despite Chaney’s grim prognosis on the future of lead phytoremediation, other researchers are still trying to find the right plant–soil chemistry combination for significant lead removal. If scientists aren’t using the “no phosphorus in nutrient solution” trick, they’re probably using the chemical EDTA. EDTA is a chelating agent, meaning it surrounds the lead molecules and prevents them from absorbing onto the soil particles, or even prys the lead-mineral complexes apart. Malpani let me in on an interesting conundrum: it’s illegal in all 50 states to use EDTA in phytoremediation projects, because it’s essentially a recipe for groundwater contamination. Once the EDTA frees the lead, the lead can travel easily through the soil and into the groundwater. So why do scientists and remediation companies pursue research with EDTA and other, biodegradable additives like citric acid anyway? Because phytoremediation is potentially so much cheaper than traditional clean up methods, like excavating tons of contaminated top soil and dumping it elsewhere.

The threat of groundwater contamination is real. Minnesota sued a Superfund lead cleanup project at a Twin Cities ammunition plant when the state discovered lead migrating into the groundwater. The EDTA applied to the experimental phytoremediation plot of corn and mustard plants, to increase the plants’ ability to access and remove the soil lead, was instead helping the lead move deeper into the soil and reach the groundwater. The remediation contractors had failed to obtain a permit for using EDTA in the first place.(3)

Back east amidst a sea of old clapboard houses covered in layers of lead paint, the Worcester Roots Project began their foray into lead clean-up with a series of experiments in 2003 and 2004. They set up 8 test plots, tested for lead content, and planted mostly Pelargoniums, with some corn and pumpkins thrown in for variety. They also looked at how the simple addition of compost to the contaminated soil affected the lead content. Malpani told me the experiments were basic, mimicking the lack of control experienced in peoples’ yards. But the concept was proven: lead content was reduced by about 30% in three of the Pelargoniums test plots, which started out with between about 1,000-6,000 parts per million lead. Adding compost also seemed effective. In 17 community gardens and 1 residence with relatively low lead levels (ranging from 48-323 parts per million), no lead was present after annual additions of compost. And in the one compost-only test plot, lead was reduced 41%, down to about 3,500 ppm, after Roots Project volunteers removed the sod and added 1 inch of compost.

These results are great — they make home-scale lead remediation look easy! I wondered, though, if you could really pull out all the lead after planting Pelargoniums for 3 years, or if less and less lead would be taken up each year. Perhaps that 30% was the fraction of the soil lead that was unabsorbed and easy for roots to access.

I found cautious optimism in the scientific literature regarding phytoremediation with Pelargoniums. I also found the time estimate for lead phytoremediation that I had been longing for: a whopping 150 years to remove all the lead from a contaminated field
in northern France!(4) With 1830 mg/kg lead, the field was not that different than some of the backyards tested by Worcester Roots. Even if you were only trying to reduce the lead to below 400 mg/kg, the EPA limit for yards (not playgrounds or vegetable gardens), it would still take upwards of 110 years. That’s a long time to harvest yearly crops contaminated with lead. To make Worcester soils safe for vegetable cultivation and children’s games, Roots Project activists would have to plant, harvest, and dispose of Pelargoniums for more than a century!

Hence the fundamental change in the Roots Project approach. However, a quick search of the scientific literature revealed that there are, of course, still questions about remediating lead with phosphorus and other soil amendments. For instance, what happens when you add phosphorus to the lead-rich soil of a firing range? After 32 months – almost 3 years – only 45% of that soil lead was bound into pyromorphite.(5) Immobilizing more lead would probably require understanding and changing the soil pH. Plus, it’s important to use a less soluble source of phosphate, like bone meal or rock phosphate, to avoid turning any ponds or streams in the area into bright green algae blooms as inorganic phosphate fertilizers leach into the water.

While they’re researching new methods of lead cleanup, what does the Roots Project recommend in the mean time? “If the lead levels are really high (more than 2,000 parts per million), you have bare soil and you have children who play in the yard, we advise you to use barrier methods like building patios, landscaping fabric with mulch, raised beds, and maybe other lead-safe landscaping methods we use,” suggested Malpani. “If it is between 400 to 1200 ppm you could add layers of compost and phosphorus to bind lead and grow Pelargoniums and dispose of them safely.”

For more information, contact Worcester Roots Project at info@WorcesterRoots.org or visit www.WorcesterRoots.org.

Footnotes:

1. Email from Rufus Chaney, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, to Barbara Emeneau, regarding lead remediation in a community garden in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada http://mailman.cloudnet.com/ pipermail/compost/2009-May/015737.html

2.

3. EPA (2001). Providing Solutions for a Better Tomorrow : Reducing the Risks Associated with Lead in Soil. EPA/600/F-01/014 www.epa.gov/ORD/NRMRL

4.

5. MPCA Settles Alleged Violations at Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant, 06/09/2004. http://www.pca.state.mn.us/news/data/newsRelease.cfm?NR=263167&type=2

6.

7. Arshad, M. et al. (2008) A field study of lead phytoextraction by various scented Pelargonium cultivars. Chemosphere, Vol 71, Issue 11, pp. 2187-2192.

8.

9. Chrysochoou, M. et al. (2007) Phosphate application to firing range soils for Pb immobilization: The unclear role of phosphate. Jour. Haz. Matls. Vol 144 Issue ½, p. 1-14.

10.

As state shortfalls have led to severe budget cuts for public universities in the United States, I was amazed recently when I walked into the building that housed my academic department here in Florida. In the atrium, students waited, legs crossed, to meet with their professors or study for their classes. What was peculiar was that a television was now mounted overhead in the atrium on a platform (there was none there before) for all of the atrium’s inhabitants to behold: an altar of a cubic god demanding unwavering gazes as tithes. At first I wondered why or how this university expense, a wide screen television, could be justified given the university’s economic situation (it has already considered cutting 21 academic departments and roughly 300 faculty and staff from the payroll) but I thought that this scene, a television in an academic building, indicated a yet greater manifestation of culture: our undivided, unyielding allegiance to the screen or electronic mechanism as the standard way for conveying information and exhausting free time.

Not only does the television blare in school lobbies or invade classrooms posing as “instructional tools”, they have also become permanent fixtures in banks and grocery stores. While standing in line recently to cash a check at the Bank of America, I noticed a television, mounted high above everyone, seize the glances of many people in the room. But if the television did not draw everyone’s attention, other more ‘personal’ screens did. Some impatient customers frantically thumbed their cell phone keypads as if twiddling to a tune from a 33 1/3 record running at a 45 rpm setting; if not, they repeatedly flipped open their phones to scan for text messages from a confidant, family member, or business partner. The screen, although handheld, still occupied their attention to the point where they were not aware of the movement of the line: because of their fixation with their personal screens, these individuals ignored the dynamic social space of which they were a part. Needless to say, when the teller announced his or her availability to assist a customer, the teller relied upon a screen, in this case, the screen of one of the bank’s workstations to relay account information to customer. But soon it was announced that the server was down and that it would take a few minutes to reboot. To “fill” this “empty” moment, everyone resumed their gaze of the television screen or cell phone display. Strangely enough, during this “empty” moment, actual human interaction was to be avoided at all costs unless, of course, the line was being held up by someone either staring at the television for too long or wearing out his or her fingers sending text messages.

Now as I reflect on the camera screen and observe its images, I am astonished how the screen affects the longevity of events. Two ladies have asked me to take their picture on the campus at Landis Green. In physical time, the moment of their embrace came and went, but the need to capture it for progeny persists, and the snapshot preserves that moment indefinitely in a two dimensional representation. There is perhaps nothing inherently bad about using the snapshot to capture an intimate moment: for the snapshot provides to future generations a vague intuition about the pictured person’s personality, a personality that is eventually chomped to shreds by the shark’s teeth of time.

Now let’s look at how the television screen captures the death of a famous politician or rock star. The death came in an instant: it happened and now the person’s life is over. Unfortunately, corporate media preserves the moment of death: the moment of death must not be let go of for an indefinite amount of time. You, the viewer, are supposed to get an idea of the dead person’s life through a collage of images, sound clips, and interviews with the deceased person’s family, friends, and colleagues. From this pre-packaged, media construction your idea of the dead person’s life ought to be similar to the idea you have of a person that you know personally. A myth technology wants you to hold is that its ideas of a person or thing can be just as “real” as yours: in fact maybe even more real. So aside from the questions about a technologically created/dictated morality that I posed in the previous section, how does the technological extension of events well beyond their actual occurrence distort our views? Because technology allows us to represent events indefinitely, we come to view time as something that we can manipulate or ultimately control. The cell phone seems to give us ubiquity: we can be contacted at any hour, any day, at almost any point on earth. The desire to be godlike is perhaps a universal endeavor and nothing serves this desire better than technology. The most important question to ask is whether we believe our humanity can be fully appreciated when it is embraced in the now. It is perhaps a sad state of affairs when an event cannot be grasped or enjoyed for what it is, but rather how it either can provide some future benefit (by extension) or fit into some preconceived representation of a past whose veracity we do not seek to challenge but only confirm.

So what we have in these cases are instances of not simply the ubiquity of the screen but the human willingness to offer, as a sacrament, an entranced stare or absolute attention without question or reservation to the screen: no matter if the social space is dynamic enough to require active engagement with it. But, taking an evolutionary perspective on this, I would contend that what is necessary for any organism to thrive (i.e., to enjoy its environment for whatever life affirming benefits it may provide) is to be able to consciously engage the whole of its environment. Failure to do so would, in aesthetic cases, amount to ignoring the orchid in the garden, or in a more disastrous scenario, ignoring the predator behind the bush. Now the screen is a part of the environment, as the orchid and predator are also parts, but is the screen or technological trinket which fixes our mental and physical attention so significant that it would require us to completely ignore the remainder of our social or environmental dynamic: a dynamic that enables us to thrive in the first place?

We vroom comfortably down the autobahn of indefinite technological modification (thanks in part to the inexhaustible need for indefinite profit by the corporations that produce, market, and standardize these items) and I’m not sure if our ideas of appropriate social behavior, in relation to technology, have caught up with technology or ever will. The guy who is talking loudly on his cell phone in a public space will probably become more belligerent if we ask him to lower his voice or move to another area. The fundamental error in our relationship with “personal”, handheld technological devices (or perhaps any mode of technology) is that we think they license us to claim the public space for ourselves instead of sharing it. Every piercing bleep that startles the relative quiet of a library, each “Top 40” ringtone that slices through a dinner table conversation, or every careless, earphone encouraged stroll into a busy intersection is an invasion of or an imposition upon of the dynamic public space.

I want to avoid quaint commendatory statements about old-fashioned modes of communication or social practices that seemingly new technologies improve, minimize, or make obsolete. But there is still plenty to criticize. We call our employer to apologize profusely for being late when the automobile breaks down. Any breakdown of the machine almost always seems to obscure human error or responsibility (perhaps the car broke down because the owner failed to schedule regular maintenance), while its success must always reflect human ingenuity, foresight, or intelligence. The point here is that technology can enable us to make good predictions (or offer excuses for inefficiency if a required task goes undone) but that it can also, through our absolute dependence upon
it, cut us off from information that would otherwise enable us to make better judgments or predictions about the world.

If it is not our conscious awareness or intellectual capacities that we sacrifice to the flash of the screen, then it is our unwavering obedience to mechanical efficiency that goes unquestioned. We allow the answering machine to screen our calls: to put people into discrete 0/1, accept/reject, yes/no, pleasure/pain categories where they are to be viewed as objects to be sorted. You switch off the answering machine to talk to the desired caller but find out that they have bad news or are unpleasant and not worth the time to converse. Likewise, the voice that sounds like a telemarketer may actually have a check for you for a million dollars with no conditions attached but you would never know that because you either hung up on the call or erased the message before hearing it in its entirety.

The deity of the screen, our religious gaze, and praise of the technological aesthetic has finally drowned good advertising sense. While our cities and now countrysides are littered with static billboards and signs, the screen, with its compelling display of moving, “lifelike” images, has now invaded natural landscapes. Of course this may have been the real dream of machines in Blade Runner: recall the animated Coca Cola advertisement of the winking woman who enchanted us. We seek the “lifelike” in our mechanical confections, but often at the expense of other organisms or resources. Once the landscape is cleared to make room for our flickering displays, how many human or animal communities will be displaced or simply annoyed? Where will we obtain the electricity to power these signs?

While no contemporary barroom or tavern would be complete without a television or jukebox, some drinking houses now display monitors solely devoted to showing ads endlessly: often advertising other bars or restaurants where the same types of monitors reign from overhead thrones. These monitors are sometimes situated in odd spaces. At one particular establishment in my town, if you are sitting at the bar but angled away from the main television (in the center of the bar), you nevertheless are able to look squarely at the ad monitors which are mounted at angles away from the center of the bar. So if you are not inundated by the flurry of ads on regular television, your restaurant or bar can provide you with ad-only television. Clearly this is the height of materialist insanity: the idea that advertisements, in addition to work and leisure, should occupy time.

The Best Buys, Circuit Cities, Radio Shacks, Staples, Targets, Walmarts, Alltel and Sprint stores have now become our art galleries where the gallery attendant, the retail clerk, marks out an assembly line existence: to unpackage the product, mass market the product, and repackage the product when it is sold. In an assembly like fashion, the product is then unpackaged by the consumer, mass marketed to his/her friends, and the process is once again set in motion. I jokingly suggested to a lady friend who was having trouble getting her husband to do “cultural things” that if you want to get middle aged husbands out to traditional art galleries, the art galleries need to ditch paintings in favor computer monitors, LCDs, and flatscreens. Or new cell phone prototypes.

As a species that produces and contemplates art, we have nonetheless begun to reject the contemplative power or interpretive mystery of traditional art in favor of art that has “ready-made” or practical virtues. In other words, technological value. Yet technology in itself has no value. But as long as we favor technological efficiency above all other values (for example, the value of protecting and contributing to the social dynamic) and think of the machine’s way as the only way that matters, we only seem to be deifying the screen or the flickering electronic display, which is merely to place faith in the mechanical.

I am somewhat awestruck as my eyes trail the staccato of words I type across my monitor: I am reminded of a stock exchange ticker flowing across the tube. And herein lays the perceived irony of the situation: I have appeared, by using the screen, a computer, its word-processing programs, and internet servers (in a word, a system of machines and/or automated mechanisms) to undermine technology: the very system I rely upon to communicate ideas.

“Technology,” you say, “has provided greater life expectancies than before, cured disease, reduced travel, reduced work, and enabled us to communicate at great distances easier and faster than in the past. It has given us these things and more!?” This I do not deny but these benefits come at a cost to our humanity, resources, and integrity of our natural and social environments. I only ask us to consider our relationship to technology and discern whether or not the efficiency or personal convenience it offers must always supersede community interests and harmony. This is obviously a question about what types of social values we are going to accept as we relate to technology, and whether we would rather have technology to dictate or create such values. I believe that allowing technology to construct and dictate our values for us–is always a mistake. Increasingly, culture links technology to the so-called absolute or physical sciences, which are presumably governed by immutable laws. No student of science or the history of science would ever think of such a connection or describe the history of the physical sciences as an unproblematic, mistake free progression towards absolute truth.

Churches recently convinced enough Californians that gay people getting married will ruin marriage for straight people that they were able to amend the state constitution to prohibit gay marriage. The exact mechanisms were not exactly diagrammed, but the church people seem to feel that they invented the institution of marriage in order to make sex not sinful, but according to their doctrines, gay sex is always sinful, so gay marriage is wrong. A lot of reasonable people have challenged this line of reasoning, because there is a lot of hypocrisy and bigotry guiding it, but the battle lines have been drawn and it is hard to reach the hearts and minds of the faithful with reason. Instead I advocate revolution. Bring back the jubilee!

A little known fact outside of bible study circles is that God had quite a lot to say about how people should run their political economies, and our modern capitalist system is far from what God intended. Perhaps if we adopted some of God’s principles on political economy, without being dogmatic, sanctimonious, or absolutist about it, the faithful would be so confused that they would forget the great importance of God raining on gay parades.

There are only one or two lines in the entire Hebrew Bible, and only a few more in the Christian scriptures calling gay sex an abomination, but there are two entire chapters and a commandment calling for a complete cessation of all industrial and agricultural labor every seven years.

In Exodus 23:10-11, right after Moses comes down from Mt. Sinai, right after he gives the “10 Commandments”, he gives a few more, including, “For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.”

Chapter 25 of Leviticus, and Chapter 15 of Deuteronomy are entirely about how to observe the sabbath and jubilee years, which occur every seven and fifty years respectively.

In my humble opinion, you may credibly doubt that God really intended to make gay people miserable, but there is no room for doubt that the Supreme Being really did want people to give it a rest from time to time.

Rest is a big theme in the Bible’s recommendations for a healthy economy. People should take a rest day once a week, something like Muslims do on Friday, Jews do on Saturday, Christians do on Sunday, and anarchists, atheists and communists should do on Monday. But also, according to the Hebrew bible books Leviticus and Exodus, every seven years, all agriculture should cease. The owners of the fields can eat whatever grows, but they should share it with whoever else needs it, for instance wage laborers and slaves, the poor, our neighbors, and animals, both domestic and wild. The purpose of this rest year, the “sabbath year”, is to give the land a rest, the laborers a rest, and to give the poor a break. (Ex 23:10-11, Lev 25:5-7)

There is no land ownership in God’s political economy — you can only hold land for a fifty year lease, then you have to give it back to the original owner. These rules don’t apply to people’s homes, which the bible calls “houses in walled cities”, but only properties used for production or agriculture. “And when you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not cheat one another.” (Lev 25:14)

That fiftieth year is the Jubilee year, and everyone observes it together as the ultimate sabbath year. As part of the observance, indentured servants and slaves should be set free forever and all debts should be erased (Lev 25:8-54). Today that might be equivalent to erasing student loan debt, mortgage debt, and debt to the World Bank to set all the world’s debt slaves free.

Even though it seems like blasphemy to our modern capitalist world economy, it’s in the Bible, almost exactly as I am saying. Of course now we have an industrial economy, not an agricultural economy, so instead of fields we should be thinking of factories, mines, and customer service centers. What if corporations could only lease them for fifty years, and had to let whoever wanted to use them every seven years? Would that be enough to slow the flow of capital into corporate hands, so that people had the chance to use all the high-end sewing machines, type-setting equipment, fast computers and Internet connections, and other fancy stuff that corporations hoard? Would it give energy companies a chance to rethink the absurdity of mountain-top removal and oil extraction from tar sands? Would it give people all over the world a chance to see what the world is like without industrial pollution of our air and drinking water every seven years? What if industrial agriculturalists had to let the pigs and chickens out to roam free in the fallow fields once every seven years? What if they had to give back all of the land they siezed up to grow monocrops?

As far as we know, no country or sizable community has ever put God’s political economy into practice in a consistent and enduring way, so we actually have no idea how this would work out. What I like about it is that it resembles in some ways the Marxist notion of continuous revolution, so that no one group can sieze enough of society’s resources to have permanent, coercive control.

If you heard about sabbath and jubilee years in Sunday school, you may have been told that they are irrelevant, because when Jesus came he freed people from cumbersome Mosaic laws laid out in the last three books of the Hebrew Bible (except the stuff about gay sex being a sin, the disciples of Jesus say ‘keep it’), so we don’t need to do all that stuff any more. If you heard about it in Hebrew school, someone may have patiently explained to you that the counting of the sabbath and jubilee years would resume when the moshiach comes. But in the interest of religious plurality, since not all of us have accepted Jesus as our lord and personal savior, and since even the faithful do not seem immune to trampling the rights of the poor and downtrodden, maybe it’s time to take all of the Bible seriously, instead of just the parts that justify our silly crusades.

I understand there might be some resistance to my suggestion that we enact God’s schemes for political economy, since cultural norms and civic laws derived from biblical laws have historically been repressive to the max and their adoption has caused lots of suffering, and since crazy right wing organizations like Focus on the Family will stop at nothing to make simplistic notions of morality based on bible verses into laws that would persecute women and gay people. So please don’t lobby your legislatures. The thing to do instead is to refuse to work periodically, and encourage your friends and religious leaders to do the same. Let’s create social movements out of communalism and anti-capitalist exchange. Let’s boycott banks that profit enormously out of impoverishing people and keeping them in debt. Oh wait, you say, we already are doing those things. It’s called the anti-globalization movement. Right. Well then continue with the blessing of God. Go fourth with new notions of what religion endorses instead of letting bigotry and hypocrisy spoil the whole world.

Health care reform has received much lip service from high ranking politicians in recent months. It seems that public health care is a topic with more relevance to a greater number of citizens than most political topics have had in the past eight years. Health care reform, along with a handful of other topics which Obama campaigned for, seems to have brought millions to view those currently in political power as generally benevolent. And compared to the neo-con nightmare, Obama does sound and look pretty benign and caring. But proliferating goodwill is not a high priority for the Wall Street puppets currently in power. In the health care reform proposal, monetary profit will still remain the dominant force in decisions regarding health care.

Ultimately the best health care policy would be one that promotes wellness, but that is not possible in the context of the current debate. Since it is clear we cannot look to the government to promote our well-being, maybe it’s time to consider how we can insure our own health without government help for the long term. Making invasive medical practices more accessible will not spread health to the masses. Psychological and philosophical concerns continue to remain the barrier to the incorporation of health and well-being in our communities. Overcoming the capitalistic monster is the only way to bring about better health overall.

Having a real community, regularly expressing oneself creatively and using wisdom in the ways that we treat our bodies (and our planet) would more positively impact health than socialized health care and an increase in the application of allopathic medical practices. Government run health care proposals should be viewed with the utmost skepticism – if the current regime is in typical form it is likely that insurance companies will end up making even greater profits after a reform takes effect (as giant conglomerates have been the beneficiaries in most of the administration’s actions). If society continues to tumble along on its current stupefying path, well-being and health will continue to suffer. A society free of Paris Hilton, frat boys and trillion dollar military expenditures would do more for public health than a public option. Imagine how much less frequently psychiatric medication would be prescribed if toxic elements like celebrity worship and consumerism were not the staples in the society.

A problem with health care, aside from the lack of availability and cost of care (which certainly is a huge burden for many), is the guiding philosophy of allopathic medical practices. Allopathic medicine is defined as the practice of using remedies that produce effects either different from or incompatible with the syndrome that is being treated. (This is as opposed to homeopathic medicine which uses remedies similar to the ailment to be treated.) In allopathic traditions, a narrow perspective is taken when viewing illness and invasive methods dominate (such as surgery or the ingestion of artificial chemicals). Though these approaches can be therapeutic and life saving, these type of techniques are best used more sparingly than they are currently. Too frequently allopathic practitioners do not give enough regard to the body’s innate tendency to heal itself, nor to the body’s subtle expressions of internal discord that can later result in disease. Allopathic practitioners tend to think of body parts as existing in relative isolation from each other, looking too little at relationships between elements of the body. These practices and philosophies will remain even if the health care delivery system were to change. These traditions uphold the status quo both explicitly (via prescriptions and surgeries that allow individuals to continue to live lifestyles of consumption and distraction), and tacitly (via the attitudes and biases of practitioners who frequently live lives of consumption and distraction).

If you simply pop vicodin to kill pain, there is no need or motivation to heal. If each time you feel anxious you eat a xanax there is little pressure to overcome your internal conflicts causing anxiety (not to mention the problems that can arise with long term use of chemicals like this). In the allopathic model, treatments that would be best for overall long-term health (for example specific dietary changes) are often not employed, because symptom elimination overrides most other considerations (too often healing and reconditioning is left partially or completely out of the equation). These medical practices utilize a one size fits all approach, which has many drawbacks, including upholding the dominant traditions of the culture.

Due to toxins in the air, water and soil, residues build up inside of our bodies (i.e. in the liver, colon, etc.). Fasting or cleansing from time to time helps to flush these out. Many highly accessible herbs (i.e. ginger, nettles, garlic, valerian) treat common ailments or help to detoxify the body, and the tradition of using plants for health is rooted deeply in our species. Having some basic understanding of anatomy and nutrition goes a long way in knowing yourself more intimately, and in helping you heal when the time comes. Also simple stretches, yoga poses and considerations towards the energy flow of our bodies can help improve one’s quality of life. Many average Americans are treated for symptoms that are normal and healthy reactions to current circumstances, though many in the general public would expect that one can repeatedly fuck over the people sitting across the conference room and not suffer from headaches, addictions, high blood pressure, anxiety and other ailments. The majority have been so brainwashed that they believe it when they hear over simplified ideas like “your symptoms are a medical condition”. Without constant brainwashing people might actually realize that their actions, experiences and lifestyles cause many of their “medical conditions”.

Even more ludicrous than using synthetic chemicals to treat symptoms caused by societal and economic norms, is the writing of prescriptions in order to eliminate symptoms caused by symptoms caused by the social and work environments. For example the prescription of a medicine used to combat high cholesterol prescribed to the individual using Big Macs to help distract from or override feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration. Capitalistic competition causes unease (when getting fucked over), guilt (when fucking over), trouble focusing and much more. I wonder what it might take for us to challenge the dominant practice in America of selling shit during work time in order to buy shit during free time.

When you walk into my house, chemicals waft from your clothes. I know right away that the laundry detergent you use is toxic (most are) and that if I am around you for long I will get a headache. Should I tell you? Are social mores and privacy more important than the health of both of us? I am often confronted with this dilemma. Many everyday products now make me sick and may make you sick if you are around them long enough. I write this to try to warn politely.

Modern American living exposes us to toxic chemical storms daily. Lotions, antiperspirants and deodorants, perfumes and after-shaves, sunscreen, shampoos, laundry detergent and softeners, scented soaps, bug sprays, hand sanitizer, dish-soap, new carpets, incense, “air fresheners”, auto exhaust (including from bio-fuels and veggie oil!), herbicides and pesticides, glues, fresh printer ink, nail polish and remover, and paints can all contain chemicals that can cause adverse reactions. Some of us have become “chemically sensitive”, becoming aware of physical reactions to various chemicals. Maybe we should be considered canaries in the coal mines, and used to warn of exposure to something dangerous. We could be more reliable than information, or rather lack of information, you may be getting from the chemical industry.

Mammal bodies have only recently been exposed to these artificially rearranged molecules. There is little doubt that cancer and other disease is connected to exposure to these new substances, most only developed since the 1950s. Our bodies have not had time to adapt. And there are more and more new chemicals. There is also the very real likelihood that new genetically engineered organisms and new nano materials will wreak havoc with the living creatures of earth as well. And there’s not much regulation out there to protect you, especially in the United States.

According to the Congressional General Accounting Office, the Environmental Protection Agency “does not routinely assess the risks of the roughly 80,000 industrial chemicals in use. Moreover, TSCA [Toxic Substances Control Act] does not require chemical companies to test the approximately 700 new chemicals introduced into commerce annually for their toxicity, and companies generally do not voluntarily perform such testing. Further, the procedures EPA must follow in obtaining test data from companies can take years to complete.” The European Union requirements for regulating toxic chemicals are much more stringent than in the United States. In Europe the burden for proving non-toxicity lies with the chemical producers.

There is a theory that at some point of exposure to toxins, some people’s bodies just cannot resist anymore and become much more sensitive to chemicals. We start to have adverse reactions to chemicals that other people might not notice. It seems important, therefore, for all people to limit their exposures to as many chemicals as possible even if they do not yet have physical reactions to them. Hence we who notice toxins should tell others. And it behooves others to take note and consider protecting themselves.

Unfortunately our medical system has been hijacked by the pharmaceutical chemical makers to the extent that the paradigm of toxic exposure related dis-ease has been censored and discredited. Instead we are sold drugs to solve our problems. Witness how many of the corporate sponsored (Avon, Energizer) events to help breast cancer are to “find a cure” rather than the causes of breast cancer.

And the drugs we are prescribed may be making us worse. There are many and growing numbers of adverse effects and deaths from prescription drugs. Chemicals from pharmaceuticals are showing up in water supplies and wild animals because when humans pee after taking drugs, their urine contains chemical residues, or the actual pharmaceutical drugs themselves.

Healthcare needs a new or at least optional paradigm of trying to analyze what is causing illness rather than focusing on drugs. Who is studying whether genetically engineered foods may be causing obesity or health reactions? It is very difficult to track the results of mass exposure to genetically engineered food over the last few years because the government caved in to industry demands that genetically modified food products should not be labeled or tracked in the US. Unless you buy organic or are very astute about what products contain genetically modified ingredients, you may be exposing yourself to something genetically new in the food supply. Food, cosmetics and cleaning products can also include myriad artificial chemicals. We may be better served by deciphering and trying to avoid toxins rather than ingesting toxic drugs to mask our symptoms.

I have found my own health enhanced by avoiding food with additives, trying to eat organically produced food, removing myself from toxic environments, not using products with artificial fragrances or toxic chemicals, and getting fresh air. Try to avoid the extra stress on your body that chemicals may cause in order to keep up your resilience to exposure. It will enhance your health, my health and the health of the planet.