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September 29, 2006
Good evening, everyone, and thanks for tuning in. Tonight's lead story is one of mystery, heartbreak and biological improbability. Let's go without further ado to our correspondent in the field, Steve Ají, for more. Steve?
Thanks, Jim. Pleasure to be with you tonight. First, though, a clarification: I'm not in a field, rather on the second-floor balcony of a house in an urban neighborhood. Which makes this story all the more unusual.
What is it we're seeing here, Steve? It appears to be, on one hand, plants growing out of a pair of shoes. The third shoe, if my eyes serve me, is full of peppers. Am I right?
Exactly right, Jim. And this is just one of many examples we're discovering here in Santo Domingo. People get up in the morning and find their shoes filled with produce. Sometimes the shoe-toting plants are found halfway down the stairs, or as in this case, attempting to escape from the balcony.
I don't understand, Steve.
Let me see if I can explain. It has long been thought that the plant world operates from the perspective of cooperation and collective intelligence. We're talking about a highly organized, interconnected network that communicates via channels unintelligible to most humans. What's new, Jim, and more frightening, is that plants have begun to develop the powers of ambulation.
Pardon?
You heard me, Jim. The concept of take up your bed and walk is acquiring new meaning.
I see. Tell me more.
The international biology community is concluding that humans have pushed nature to its breaking point. To the veritable brink, Jim. For thousands of years, our species has been sacking the planet, appropriating the Earth's communal property for individual gain. What we're seeing here, I'm afraid, is the beginning of a major counteroffensive on the part of the nonhuman community. In this largely symbolic but telling act, Nature has begun to reclaim some of her resources.
But shoes, Steve. Why shoes?
What good are modern humans without shoes, Jim? Think about it. We're so insulated that our feet have become soft and tender. We go barefoot, we cut ourselves. Taking our shoes is an ingenious strategy for immobilizing the human species.
Any suggestions for the folks back home?
Lock up your shoes while you're sleeping, and even when you're in the shower. You never know when a wily aloe vera plant will slide under your door and plant itself in your loafers. And vegetables. Eat as many vegetables as you can.
Last question before I let you go. Can you explain this next photo?
It appears she has a sense of humor, Jim.
September 21, 2006
Today I'd like to start a series on Myths and Lies About Our World, because how we perceive the world is very closely linked to how we prioritize our lives. Living in the Dominican Republic and being part of Justicia Global have helped me see how limited and skewed my worldview was (and to a degree, still is).
We're taught in the US that affluence is the norm, while poverty is abnormal. It turns out that in terms of sheer numbers, slums and filth and not getting enough to eat are much more "normal" than personal computers and two-car garages.
So how do we come to assume that either everything is okay with the world, or if it isn't, it's not our responsibility to change it? It has a lot to do with how power manifests itself today.
Throughout most of history, power meant being able to conquer your enemies and occupy their territory. The Romans, the Crusades, the two World Wars, etc. The Cold War brought us a new kind of power - during that era, power came to mean the ability to destroy your enemies multiple times. Yet in the age of transnational corporations, it's no longer in our financial interest to wipe entire nations off the map. In the Middle East now we're relearning the lessons we supposedly learned in Vietnam - that brute force cannot control a population.
So now, power is much more psychological. Now power is the ability to make people accept your worldview as the only true and natural worldview. Thus people feel they have free choice, but their range of choices is confined to the narrow parameters you define. So I can choose between CNN, CBS and Fox News, but I can't choose a news network that's not controlled by corporate interests and inundated with messages to consume.
What the governing class and their speechwriters have done so well is come up with a whole sack full of euphemisms for their projects of violence and domination. Now we're all in the crosshairs. If their terms define the debate, they can more easily manipulate well-meaning citizens.
"Free trade agreements? Sure, that sounds all right to me. I mean, I like free things. I'm in favor of freedom. Free trade should be good, right?"
Those of us who have studied free trade a bit more know that most of the freedom being enjoyed is being enjoyed by huge corporations to stomp on the laws, environment and people of other countries.
Another one of these sugar-coated inventions is "economic development." They sell us a bunch of bright, shiny statistics about how well the developing world is developing. (Developing into what? is a question for another day.)
The Dominican Republic is the development poster child right now. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was even here this summer to congratulate us on what a great job of developing we're doing.
Gross Domestic Product increased an impressive 11 percent in the first seven months of this year. That's great on paper. But it's not the real story.
Public spending in the DR is still among the lowest in Latin America, and the ITBIS (sales tax) has been increased to a whopping 16 percent. That means more strain on poor people than ever (who make up 53 percent of the population at last count), while the national and international elite praise the DR Model of development.
Well, you might say, people still have a choice whether or not to embrace the development model, to move to the cities and become wage earners, to buy Nikes and eat at McDonald's.
Let's set aside for now the fact that advertising agencies spend billions of dollars a year figuring out the best and most subtle ways to manipulate the nodes of our brains to make us think we need their products. Let's set aside the fact that ad agencies have defined our conceptions of "success" and "beauty" in terms of buying and having many expensive things.
Okay, so we believe in people's capacity to make choices. Here are some nice choices. Let's talk about dumping: Companies from the US and other industrialized nations come to the Third World in the name of "humanitarian aid" and flood the market with cheap products. When a company under-sells local producers by taking a loss itself for a while, that's called dumping, and it's illegal. But international courts are often sluggish or look the other way.
Here's an example. The US implemented a fascinating "humanitarian aid" program in Ecuador in the 1970s. They gave away US-produced grain for years to anyone who wanted it, in a country that had previously grown all of its own grain. This bankrupted all Ecuadorian grain producers, as the market value of their product suddenly fell to zero. Most were forced to sell their land and find other employment.
After the "aid" project ended there was great demand for grain, but the local farmers were gone. Who came to the rescue to fill the demand, at well above the previous prices? Surprise -- the same US corporations who had given the aid. Today Ecuador imports a whopping 85 percent of the grain it consumes.
I see very little of people choosing a development model in this example.
Karl Marx illustrates a similar point about the brutality of the wealthy by narrating the history of land ownership in England. Through unjust laws, discrimination and outright violence, England went from an agrarian nation of land-owning, self-sufficient farmers to one of large landowners and subsistence-wage-earning factory workers.
The capitalist class couldn't function in a place where there was no one desperate enough to work in their factories, so they created the conditions: methodical appropriation of common lands, high taxation of agricultural products from the countryside and the use of physical force to illegally drive farmers off their land.
This happened in England between the 15th and 18th centuries, but according to the physicist/scholar Vandana Shiva of India, similar abuses are still taking place in her country in the form of development projects implemented by the West. Shiva calls development "the new colonialism," a project of the violent capitalist patriarchy.
For example, poverty erradication programs run by the the giants of international development - the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, etc. -- without fail serve to increase hunger and worsen living conditions among the poor.
In traditional economies people may fall under the $2-a-day poverty line, but most of their needs are taken care of outside the monetary economy, through subsistence farming and bartering.
The bigwigs crunch the numbers and see "high poverty rates," since the only thing they take into account is monetary income. So they give huge contracts to foreign investors to plunk down mines or sweatshops in the area, which destroy the land and water table, forcing people into the low-wage jobs they never needed when they could provide for their own needs.
This is no accident, according to Shiva. This is exactly what the "developers" want to happen - and so resources continue to flow from the open veins of the Third World into the economic centers of the West.
Choice. I talked about choice earlier. Our choice, if we choose to accept it, is to wake up and realize that the world is a lot uglier and more sinister than we've been taught to imagine it.
Remember the ad agencies spending billions to make us want Nikes while hiding the sweatshop conditions in which the shoes were produced? These are the same guys who are selling us the wonders of "development," "the free market" and "the war on terror." That is, the guys who benefit from the suffering of the silenced majority and the miseducation of the middle class.
Our next choice is to act -- and act together -- according to this new understanding of reality.
How do we go about this? You, dear readers, and I are most likely geographically challenged. We are possibly on different continents or even planted somewhere on a tropical island.
Because most of us can't get together for coffee on a regular basis, my suggestion is to start an online group to read and discuss articles, perhaps about the current state of the world and our alternatives.
If you're interested in participating in a group like this, drop me a line at shenkti (a) earlham.edu, and we'll make it up as we go along.
I know many of these groups don't work, but I am certain this one will. We will read ravenously, write passionately about our reactions and weave all this in seamlessly with the experiences we're living now. We will be magnificent.
September 11, 2006
Open Letter to the People Who Exploit the Twin Tower Attacks of September 11, 2001 For Political or Financial Gain
You suck. What a better way to honor innocent victims than to start wars in two countries, make blockbuster films and sell billions of dollars worth of red-white-and-blue t-shirts and bumper stickers.
All this while the people of Chile still grieve their own September 11, in 1973, where a CIA-backed military coup overthrew democratically elected president Salvador Allende and murdered over 10,000 Chileans.
All this while yesterday, today, and every day, thirty thousand children die of hunger and illnesses such as diarrhea and pneumonia. That's ten US September 11's or three Chilean September 11's, if you're keeping track. Every single day.
Yet you're not interested in making summer smash hit movies about that, are you, People Who Exploit Human Suffering For Political or Financial Gain? Because you're in the business of hiding reality from us. You make a better profit off a brainwashed, alienated, insecure public who you've taught to only care about bombings in Beirut because of the possible effects on gas prices and their 401(k).
You could give a fuck about six-year-olds with distended stomachs lying in the dirt, vomiting up parasites. Maybe if they'd studied a little harder in school they wouldn't be in such a tough spot. Maybe if their parents had voted, or written their local congressperson a letter.
You suck, People Who Make a Profit on War and Poverty. Once we have built a sufficiently strong international movement of people who are fed up with you, we will come for you. We will come to your offices, arm in arm, distended stomachs and all. We will eat your pastries and drink from your water cooler, and then we will make you give us our world back.
Open Letter to The Other Half of My Orange
You are one of the more fantastic things I have had the pleasure of getting to know in the past year. You rank right up there with My Second Bunch of Seedless Grapes, My Slightly Soggy Bowl of Corn Flakes With Honey, and My Last Bite of Salami and Avocado Sandwich.
I already miss the First Half, and I have only now finished ingesting it. I can only imagine what it will be to miss all of you. I do not expect to encounter another Half an Orange as citrusy as you.
You are so refreshing, so ... orange. Your name, while identifying you succinctly to the disinterested spectator, fails to describe your fullness, the width and breadth of your being. You are so much more than a half an orange, in the same way that a child is so much more than a messy face and small shoes.
The describing of your Fruit Essence is not to be attempted by amateurs. For this reason I have invited trusted botanist Dr. Beverly MacMillan to our program. Doctor?
Dr. MacMillan: Thanks for having me today. What we recognize as the orange is the common name for a citrus fruit produced by a surprisingly wide array of tree species. Among the most common varieties of orange are the sweet orange, the sour orange and the mandarin orange.
The fruit is often spherical in shape, usually of a yellowish or orangeish color. It consists of various easy-to-separate half-moon sections. Each section contains seeds and a juicy, succulent pulp of variable color and is enveloped in a fleshy pocket. The orange can be enjoyed in juice form at breakfast, in the afternoon as a healthy snack or, as the fast-food restaurant Wendy's has so successfully demonstrated, as the perfect complement to a chicken salad with croutons.
Thank you, Dr. MacMillan. Your knowledge of your subject matter is at once mind-boggling and mouth-watering. Yet the oranges you have described do not approach the grandeur and beauty, the nearly overwhelming sweetness and goodness of The Other Half of The Orange in whose company I am honored to be during these moments.
Is it true that oranges and all manner of fruit taste better down here? Or have I just gotten more perceptive – or sappier – in my old age?
September 9, 2006
Hello, friends,
All is well in The Land of Neverending Summer. We laugh, we cook dinner, we grow vegetables. We get bitten by many ants.
There is much to tell, much to be proud of.
Justicia Global's September newspaper hit newstands last weekend. It's a back-to-school issue analyzing the high cost and deceiving content of Dominican textbooks. Below are two examples of the many ways the educational system contributes to false and dangerous perceptions of reality.
Textbook encourages child labor:
Child labor is a violation of the human rights of children and adolescents, but it is presented in one Language & Literature text as natural, even good. There appears a photograph of a young boy in torn, dirty clothes, working with many dangerous car batteries in a garage. The caption reads: "The job of the mechanic is very useful to society." Instead of denouncing it, the book promotes dangerous and exploitative child labor.
Textbooks don't mention women:
The headline of the introduction to "Chemistry I" says, "Man modifies the environment." Throughout the entire book there are photographs and cartoons of men working and doing scientific experiments.
There is only one photo of a woman, and she appears passively observing some cans of paint. In this book women do not exist. The way the editors use language and images continues transmitting the false idea that only men can be scientists.
This is only one example of how school textbooks contribute to the false idea that men are the only victorious heroes in history and the only ones who make contributions in our society.
Justicia Global's response to our deficient, even deceiving educational system is to open our doors to students wanting to develop critical thinking skills and dig deeper into the subjects they're studying. We'll hold free homework clubs in three places, including at our community house, following the school curriculums.
Read the full newspaper in English or in the original Spanish.
This summer we've begun work in several new communities throughout the Dominican Republic: with children and students in Las Terrenas, with farmers in San Cristobal, and with children in Los Botao of Boca Chica.
Read more about the Convite, the farmers' collective of San Cristobal.
Read more about Sunday afternoon puppet shows with the children of Los Botao.
We've also gone truly international! There are Justicia Globallers planting seeds of love, hope and justice in Goshen and Richmond, Indiana; Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; New York City; Toronto; Paris; Madrid and Buenos Aires. If you're in or near any of these places and would like to get in touch with a local Justicia Global group, drop an email to justiciaglobal@gmail.com.
I've officially started my year as a Fulbright Scholar studying economic development through urban gardening in neighborhoods in Santo Domingo. If that's of interest to you, they're featuring my project on the Earlham College Alumni Spotlight page.
As always, you can check up on the goings-on of Justicia Global at www.escueladeformacion.org and read my take on things at www.escueladeformacion.org/timindr.htm.
And despite my often marked deficiencies in personal correspondence, I'd love to read your take on things as well.
Tim
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