DEPLOYMENT

TO AFGHANISTAN

We were doing 60 mph on 580 heading to East Oakland, me and one of my best friends  who came to visit; who I had not seen or heard from since he got deployed to the War in Afghanistan.  I am always hella happy to see friends from Melrose Elementary in Oakland.  I was happy to see him 'cause I knew he got deployed couple years ago. It was good to see him alive.  He asked about our homies (friends we knew) and the neighborhood so I broke it down, told him what I knew.

I felt my homie different from the homie I grew up with in elementary, who joked around a lot and laughed like clown. He seemed serious, more quiet, strict….I guess the basic training and war can make you a different person.

When my homie from 4^th grade told me he is getting deployed to Afghanistan again…I replied “ No chingues guey otra vez” “are you kidding”

I felt sad, anger.  As a writer we are supposed to show and not tell with words. I felt empty, anger--I don’t know how to explain it.  In my mind I said damn you military industrial complex.   I felt  like telling him to not go back to war. Have the sons and daughters of politicians who started the war go and fight. Rich people make war and poor people fight.

But I kept It to my self after knowing that by the end of this month he will be in Afghanistan.   I told him I disagreed with the wars that the United States had started, but I wished him well and to be safe and that I will write to him.

Be all you can be

We don’t need to go to war, to be all we can be

We can start here by helping our communities

We don’t need to show our manhood by carrying guns and

Taking others people land

We don’t need see those kids cry for their parents that lost their lives

We don’t need to see those kids die by missiles that struck their lives

I wont be part of that

I wont be brainwash by your college funds

I opposed to be part of the master plan

I wont kill people to secure your homeland

I don’t need to be in the battle field to knows how war feels

I can take look my own city and get sense and feel how war might

Feels

I trying to say is don’t need blood in our hands to become man

Am trying to say is stop this non sense

Of

Kids killing kids

Hate killing love

And

War killing peace

Despliegue a Afganistán

Veniamos como 60 (MPH) millas por hora en 580 en dirección Del Este de Oakland yo uno de mis mejores amigos que vino a visitarme, que yo no habia visto ni oído hablar de él, desde que lo mandaron a la guerra en Afganistán, siempre me hace feliz de  ver a los amigos de la primaria de Melrose, en Oakland. Yo estaba feliz de verlo porque yo sabía que lo habian mandado ala Guerra hace un par de años, fue bueno verlo con vida, Él preguntaba acerca de nuestros Homies (amigos conocidos) y el barrio, le dije lo que sabía.

Sentí que mi amigo hera un poco diferente, ya que el amigo que habia crecido

conmigo en la primaria, que bromeaba mucho, y reía como payaso, parecia mas serio, más callado, mas estricto .... Creo que el entrenamiento del ejercito y la guerra puede hacer que una persona cambie.

Cuando mi amigo del 4 º grado me dijo que lo ban a mandar ala Guerra en Afganistan otra vez le dije "No chingues guey otra vez" "¿Estás bromeando"

Sentí rabia, tristeza, como un escritor se supone tenemos mostrar y no decir con palabras, me sentía vacío, con miedo no sé cómo explicarlo, en la mente que me dije, maldito complejo militar-industrial, sentí decírle que no volviera a la guerra, senti decirle porque no los politicos que empezaron las guerras Mandan a sus hijos y hijas a pelearlas ellos., ¿Por qué los ricos hacen la guerra y los pobres las pelean?

Pero me lo guardé en mi pensamiento, después de saber que a finales de este mes estará en Afganistán, yo le dije que no estaba de acuerdo con las guerras que Los Estados Unidos habian empezado, pero le deseo lo mejor y que se cuide y que le hiba escribir.

From Marina Drummer

A3 Newsletter

International Campaign to Free the Angola 3

Transition of a Soldier

On 2 June 2011 we lost a soldier....geronimo ji jaga. It's no exaggeration to say that without geronimo's initial efforts, the Angola 3 Coalition would have never existed.  In 1997, Colonel Bolt, who had spent 20 years in CCR with Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King, went to geronimo's release party to talk to him about the Angola prisoners, and so the campaign to free the Angola 3 was born.  

From that moment on, the effort took on a life of its own, but geronimo ji jaga was always there to support. In 2001, geronimo provided us with a statement of support for the Angola 3 Coalition's first newsletter. It barely seems possible that just a few weeks ago, geronimo attended the commemoration of Herman and Albert's 39th year in solitary confinement in New Orleans.  

geronimo's generous nature and philanthropic efforts were given full reign during his fourteen years of freedom. His work through the Kuji Foundation, which he founded, and his deep ties to Africa are just two of the many highlights of what he contributed during his years in minimum security.   

We are thankful that his passing was swift and know that those of us whose lives he touched will forever keep him in our hearts. To the thousands of political prisoners in America's Gulags his contribution is an inspiration and his warrior spirit lives on wherever freedom struggles continue.

(*His way of being humble, geronimo never capitalized his name, so out of respect for him here, we spelled it as he did.)  

In 2001, geronimo issued the following statement in support of the Angola 3:

Robert King Wilkerson, Albert Woodfox, and Herman "Hooks" Wallace are very dear to me because they come from my home state of Louisiana. The Louisiana chapter of the Black Panther Party was one of the best chapters we organized and they were some of our best, most disciplined soldiers. They were the kind of soldiers who never cried out to anyone for help, even though they were facing life imprisonment.  

Understand that after being in that kinda situation for so long, I can personally attest to the highly disciplined and dedicated nature of these askaris. They endured, and they survived, over all the years, with very little help from the outside world. They are the kind of unsung heroes who we must come forward to help, because they never asked for anything from us in exchange for suffering what they have suffered.  

To Struggle for the People and not expect anything selfish in return is a rare thing and this is what King, Wallace, and Fox have personified throughout all those hard years. They most certainly deserve our strongest salute.

There will be a memorial service at 10AM on June 18 at the Morgan City Auditorium in Morgan City, Louisiana, geronimo's hometown. For more info call Jones Funeral Home at: (985) 384-8643.

There will also be a memorial service for geronimo at the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland on July 15th at 6pm. This is a celebration of the life of a Revolutionary. East Side Arts Alliance is located at 2277 International Blvd. For more info call  Billy X at (916) 455-0908. 

Urban myths hold secrets only revealed
by hidden cameras mandated by the state
while also underneath lies a vast underground so cruel

Our families can try to remain hidden in body armor
or venture forth with no weapon but trust,
a mission possibly ruinous
hiding in oceans swirling in hate propelled by
imagined flippers until we disappear
or to stay behind in smoking ruins, blacking out

There is no chance without maps, our only weakness denial

As for survivors we fathom these waves chancing on treasures
or a fetid corpse

There is little nourishment but hard tack left by others
who have drowned

Their fouled compasses left revealing lost chances,
in communal ruin.

Will you venture forth to stand your ground?

Monday, April 29, 2002;

Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia and her mother, Dee Gray, take exception with the phrase "those people," as in those homeless people, or those poor people, or if only those people got their act together.
In their minds, this seemingly innocuous phrase divides society and diminishes the humanity of a set of people, particularly men and women who find themselves among the have-nots.
As founders and editors of Poor magazine, they have decided to tackle this expression and the thinking behind it. Setting themselves apart from mainstream media approaches to covering the poor, the duo reports and writes about poverty, and trains its staff to find the universal "I" in them, as in "those poor people." Hence, we.
"I stress that people write in the first person so they don't feel separate from the people they're writing about," explains Dee. "They may not have the experience of sleeping in the doorway, but they may have had the experience of being afraid to speak out or feeling like they couldn't speak out." Both experiences, Dee says, are a form of alienation that most can relate to.
Tiny, Dee and the San Francisco magazine's four staffers and 10 volunteers see themselves not only as journalists, but as advocates, challenging misconceptions about poverty and a system they believe does more to keep people in their place than to help them rise.
A variety of nonprofit organization and private donations provide support. They also get support from the San Francisco Department of Human Services, which sends a handful of welfare-to-work clients to the magazine's Journalism and Media Studies Program for training. Their budget last year totaled $85,000. This year, they're not sure if they will make it through the end of 2002.
Tiny, 30, says she and the staff live in constant crisis. Many of the staff are homeless or living in dire situations and constantly struggling to survive. Tiny tries to advise and support them. She and Dee always worry about the operation making it to the next month. In the midst of these crises, they manage to produce an online publication ( www.poornewsnetwork.org ) weekly and a glossy magazine. Mothers was the theme in the last issue. Others include, "hellthcare," "homefulness" and work. They have published four times so far, one a year.
" 'Poor' usually means we're the subject of the news," Tiny says. "We don't get to shape the news. Until we are heard, there won't be any real change."
From the time Tiny was in sixth grade to about five years ago, she and Dee shuffled from evictions to squatting in abandoned buildings to living in their car.
As a single mom, Dee had always struggled to stay afloat, but when she was struck with severe asthma, she was no loner able to work as a social worker. They were evicted from their apartment in Los Angeles. Tiny dropped out of school. They started living out of their car.
"Mom was an orphan. She had no family," Tiny says. "When you have no family, it's one tier from having no money. In some ways it's worse."
They trekked up to the Bay Area and, for many years, eked out an existence selling T-shirts and soliciting change for their street performances, which usually involve acting out issues related to homelessness.
The year she turned 18, Tiny landed in jail. She and Dee had racked up a bunch of unpaid parking tickets, citations for sleeping in their car, driving without car registration and failure to appear at the hearings on those offenses. Tiny calls those crimes of poverty.
The judge ordered her to perform community service. She hooked up with a Berkeley nonprofit called Community Defense Inc. The man running the operation, civil rights attorney Osha Neumann, asked her what she could do. She told him she could write. He told her to write a piece about being poor. She came back after a few weeks with a piece on the experience of being evicted.
"It was sort of surprising," Neumann says. "Many people say they can write, and you never know what you'll get. She was an incredible writer."
She submitted the piece to East Bay Express, which published it. Tiny calls it an intervention, one of a series that would ultimately take her to Poor magazine. "Oh, my God, I was alive," Tiny says. "It was like someone threw me a life jacket."
She felt the power of being heard and craved more.
Writing had provided a lifeline for Tiny from an early age. She has kept journals, written short stories and chronicles of her life. Being published buoyed her hopes, but the misery in her life continued. She wanted to avoid welfare - in her mind, then, it carried too much shame. But she broke down and applied.
She never gave up on writing, though. While in a Berkeley bookstore in 1996, flipping through the magazine rack, it occurred to her no one spoke about the lives of poor people. She got to work, raising money from artist friends and poor friends who sacrificed what they could. She and Dee conducted writing workshops in shelters, community based organizations and advocacy agencies serving poor people. Within nine months, they had raised $2,000 and enough material to publish a 65-page glossy issue of Poor, with color art, poetry and prose - and no advertising.
It cost $10,000 to print 1,000 copies. They forked over what money they had, and paid the remainder with magazine sales. The latest edition, a run of 3,000 copies published in December, cost $15,000 to produce.
As always, half the run was distributed free to low-income readers; the rest sold for $3.95 each at Modern Times Bookstore and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco and Cody's Books in Berkeley.
"We wanted to create a pretty product that yuppies would want to pick up," Tiny says. They also wanted a magazine that would raise the value of poverty issues to the status afforded mainstream magazines.
When the welfare-to-work program rolled out in 1998, case workers told Tiny she had to get a job, insisting that she apply for a receptionist position. She explained to the counselors her desire to become a reporter, but they kept telling her she didn't have the education. She told them she'd be willing to go back to school. She says she was told that would take too long.
Tiny developed her own welfare-to-work program. The Department of Human Services signed on. Now, Poor magazine staffers are training welfare recipients basic reporting, writing, graphic design, Web design, investigative reporting and advocacy at a South of Market union hall. It may be the only welfare-to-work training program that focuses on journalism. In the past four years, 15 people have completed the program.
Amanda Feinstein, a project manager for Human Services, says Poor and its media studies program gives clients skills that transfer to other jobs. Clients have gone to work as a desk manager, an administrative assistant and as a peer adviser for a juvenile-justice advocacy group.
"They've had some real successes," Feinstein said. "People get hands-on training in computer software and writing skills, which are helpful in a variety of ways, including self-expression."
From Osha Neumann's perspective, the magazine has a greater social impact.
"We tend to talk about the homeless as a collective noun, as a definite, generic homelessness or homeless condition," he says. "It's a political act to insist on individuality and humanity of a person. ...Tiny and Poor magazine (are) at the center stage of that battle. Giving voice to the poor is both a literary program and a political project."
The politics assert themselves at the start of each article. Every Thursday, Tiny and Dee lead a community newsroom meeting at the union hall. All are invited, especially anyone who has lived in poverty. About 105 people have taken part either in meetings or in producing the magazine.
"The establishment says it's wrong to be poor, and it's something to be ashamed of," Tiny says at the beginning of a recent meeting. The group listens intently. A Poor News Network promotion poster behind her head reads, "Driving While Poor, Part II." The folks at Poor want people to take pride in their ability to survive the toughest of circumstances. During the introduction, Tiny invites people to admit their poverty status.
Twenty people sit in a cramped circle. The group is a mix of races, ethnicities, ages and economic classes. Some participants are City College students or writers interested in social justice issues. Others are "poverty scholars" whose life experiences have made them experts on the subject. As introductions go around the circle, veteran staff members openly state their poverty roots or status.
They throw around story ideas, searching for the poverty angle in each one. The first is about coverage of a Free Tibet demonstration that overpowered an affordable housing protest on the same corner. The issue is finding the connection between the Tibetan cause and the affordable-housing movement. The consensus is that society seems to have more compassion for the oppressed in other countries than the oppressed in their own country.
They eventually map out an angle for the story, which ultimately includes the history of China's takeover of Tibet and draws ties between the Free Tibet movement and the struggles of poor people in the United States.
And so they jump from one poverty issue to the next: the disabled poor may lose their rights; medical marijuana clubs, which often serve the poor, are being shut down; San Francisco is set to renovate and expand a decrepit juvenile hall, in which many poor youth have been held. Every story gets assigned. In some cases, Tiny lets the subjects of the piece become co-authors of the article.
Isabel Estrada, 18, a media intern, has two stories in the works. One is a piece examining the "real" story behind the shooting death of Jerome Hooper in Chinatown in February by an off-duty cop. Though she may not be as poor as some of the other interns, she finds her universal "I" in this story. She tells how, as a child, she watched her mother get into a shouting match with a police officer over a parking ticket in the Mission District. He arrested her, and she went to jail.
"Since then, I'm scared of authority figures than most people, even though I don't do anything wrong," she says. Her distrust of the police pushes her to find answers in the Hooper case.
She also has been assigned a piece about an Oakland family that is being evicted.
A week after the meeting, Tiny and Estrada sit in the living room of Javlyn Woods. Woods and her father, Scott Sloan, recount the Byzantine story of how they got to the brink of eviction. Evidently, Sloan's mother owns the property, but the county took guardianship of her estate a few years ago. Now the county wants to evict the family since one of Woods' children got lead poisoning. Graying beige paint flakes off the walls. The stairs outside sag, and the wood floors are snarled and worn.
Tiny later explains that the interview is more like a conversation, a "crisis dialogue." Before Woods begins her story, Tiny sets the tone with a pronouncement:
"My mother and I were evicted on and off," she says.
Woods shows relief, as if she's found kin, someone who understands. After Woods and Sloan tell their tale, Tiny explains how she believes this is a pattern in Oakland: landlords evicting tenants for small reasons or none at all.
"We'll help you find and attorney and put it in the article that you need a lawyer," she tells Woods. "And we'll picket. We can take action."
Tiny says later: "That's what we mean when we say media advocacy. Connecting the dots for them and, in this case, for her getting an attorney. It means getting involved in her life as much as possible to solve the problem."
For more info
To read Poor Magazine online, subscribe or find out how to donate, visit www.poormagazine.org. Call for the time and location of the weekly community newsroom meetings. (415) 863-6306 or send e-mail to deeandtiny@poormagazine.org.

A year or two ago the San Francisco-based The Bay Citizen flexed its muscles, joining the ever-growing on-line newsworld, with a nice mainline shot o' green from financier Warren Hellman. Now the “Bay Citizen” provides Bay Area news for issues of The New York Times that include our part of the world.

Minister of Information JR of the San Francisco BayView paper, and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Robles of POOR Magazine, wrote, at the time, of the GentriFUCKation of the on-line wwworld—the Bay Citizen was one of their main targets. Warren Hellman, unsurprisingly, is not content to merely PAY for news content on computer, cellphone and other screens, he makes news too...and not in a good way.

The Bay Citizen's section of the New York Times recently covered an on-going bit of the all-the-time Budget Brawl In City Hall which resurrected a phrase I've never heard before: “The City Family”. People got tired of “brawling” in general in City Hall, or that's the story being sold on E-Bay these days, thus San Francisco ex-Supervisor Chris Daly is the blackest sheep in the city “Family”, the invisible elephant in the corner, made irrelevant by fiat.

The Budget Brawl seems to be mutating into “this is how it's gonna be, see”, aka “play ball by my rules or you'll see Hell before I do!”. Interim Mayor Ed Lee and others have gotten in bed with Twitter and are eager to get in bed with other devilish partners, among other things. It feels like I live in Chicago instead of San Francisco!

I've said it before, I've never had a union job. I'd love to have one, if there was a union out that with real sharp teeth. Unions have been hamstrung by politics since day one back in the day in the 1930's when they were raising hell for working folks' rights. They are constantly under attack in San Francisco and everywhere else. The MUNI bus drivers' union is constantly in the crosshairs, and City of San Francisco government workers have had bullseyes spray-painted on their backs for some time now.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi got into this particular aspect of the 24/7 Budget Brawl with a plan to take an axe to the pension plan of city workers, and he's still at it. Interim Mayor Lee and others have their own plan, apparently less hostile to workers than Adachi's, with Hellman on board as a big bucks supporter. Less hostile doesn't mean friendly.

Especially when the undead rise from the grave, aka the “City Family” thing. I don't really care who wins or loses in most of these Brawls, the winners and losers tend to not be friends of the poor—except that Adachi has been doing really good work defending SRO hotel tenants from the San Francisco Po'Lice, who have been performing illegal home invasions and stealing property from tenants and getting caught on video tape doing it.

Adachi has been threatened with Chris Daly-like irrelevance if he continues to push his pension plan. Is the campaign to stop the SFPD's abuse of SRO hotel tenants (among others they routinely abuse) the real reason for the attack on him?

City. Family. No family is “normal”, no family is without its own disagreements. Words are important. If you're gonna use those two words together, best not to leave anyone out of the family, best not to attack and hack 'n slash away at the crumbs doled out to the family members on Welfare. My yahoo and facebook identities are “redbeardedguy”. Coming into this story I felt like a storybook character who wanders in from the woods to an empty house with three steaming bowls of porridge on a table: one bowl marked “Hellman”, one marked “Adachi”, the other marked “Lee”. Which one do I eat?

It's a new day, bohemian breakfast was like a work of art. Ooh, the coffee crowd is on the way, ready to read.  Aah, try to stay mellow, like cinnamon, yellow sun or gray rain, it don't stop. Straw hat or umbrella.  It don't stop.  Hear the train sang, hear the ferry sang, hear the bus sang.  There a loyal street paper vendor calling out in exstacy and pain. "Fresh off the press. Get your paper today."  Like a merry-go-round.  The vendor's musical mind spin on real-time, hyped up on hot coffee from bitter grinds. On a hope and a mission to help the homeless. It's showtime to survive in the month of May and Beyond!!!

LA Times
Monday, July 23, 2001;

Home Edition 
Section: Southern California Living 
Page: E-1
SAN FRANCISCO

Dee Gray would probably want this story to start with the word "I". Dee thinks the best stories are told in the first person. Her daughter, Tiny, doesn't always agree.
This is what it might look like, if Dee had her way:
I first heard from Lisa Gray-Garcia, also known as Tiny, in a long, long message on my voicemail machine about living poor in America's most expensive city. "A lot of us are affected by gentrification and poverty and how that translates to having to leave this area," she said, in a voice somewhere between nasal and squeaky. "Oftentimes, poor families are the ones who are leaving."
Other mothers and daughters may wrangle over literary license, current events and how the media shape the news, but their ruminations don't often make it into print. Dee's and Tiny's usually do. You can read them online at http://www.poornewsnetwork.org/, a weekly news service with the motto: "All the news that doesn't fit."
Or in the pages of POOR Magazine, where they write under headings like "Editors' Statement by Dee and Tiny." You can catch them on the last Monday of every month on the Bay Area's KPFA radio, if you wake up really early.
Or, if you are on welfare in the San Francisco area and fortunate in your misfortune, you can listen to them in person as part of their New Journalism/Media Studies Program. Many media and public-policy experts believe the program, which receives some funding from San Francisco County, is the only journalism welfare-to-work effort operating today.
Tiny and Dee—30 and "I'd rather not say," who describe themselves as "formerly homeless, currently at risk"—have a few goals. They want to change how the mainstream media portray poor and homeless people. They want to give voice to those who have long been silent, or at the very least not been heard. They want to change how the government gets people off of public assistance and into jobs. And they'd like to make the rent.
They are as likely to march in a demonstration as cover it. They regularly lash out at the institutions that they feel harm poor people in the name of helping; Child Protective Services is Dee's current favorite target, although Pacific Gas & Electric, the welfare system, the California penal code, most police departments, and City Halls on both sides of the bay come under regular attack too.
Their work—and articles by other PoorNewsNetwork reporters—appears in other alternative publications and has graced the op-ed pages of this city's two mainstream newspapers. The star graduate of their first year in welfare-to-work has a job writing regularly for the San Francisco Bay View, a small community paper covering the region's African American population.
Their brand of journalism favors advocacy over explanation. But if there is a place in the american media for the likes of conservative commentator William Kristol and his Weekly Standard, there's a place for Tiny, Dee and POOR.
The question, of course, is whether taxpayers should foot the bill for teaching poor and homeless people to be writers, when most welfare-to-work programs stress far more basic job skills. Not surprisingly, Tiny and Dee say yes. And San Francisco County agrees.
With funding from the county Department of Human Services, which administers welfare benefits here, the Media Studies Program trained eight people over the last year and will likely train another eight in the next fiscal year, says Amanda Feinstein, the agency's project director for work-force development.
"They're tutoring and mentoring one person at a time," Feinstein says. "It's small. We expect it to be—small and intensive for the right type of person."
Mother, Daughter Spiral Into Homelessness
Berkeley, 1993. Tiny spent three days in jail for driving without a license, having too many unpaid parking tickets, no registration for the car in which she and Dee were living, and failure to appear on similar earlier charges—what she now refers to as crimes of poverty.
She was eventually sentenced to hundreds of hours of community service, which she worked off at a small nonprofit called Community Defense Inc. Osha Neumann, who runs the organization, asked her what she wanted to do. Survive. He asked her what she knew how to do. Write. Had there been a Media Studies Program at the time, Tiny would have been a perfect candidate.
"She was struggling at that point to just keep it together and needing every moment of her time to try and survive with her mom," Neumann recalls. "I said, 'I tell you what. Why don't you do that writing as your community service for us?" We do advocacy for homeless people. She wrote this article. I read it and realized that this is a really good writer."
A surprisingly good writer for a young woman who had dropped out of school in the sixth grade as she and her mother spiraled into homelessness. Dee was a social worker who lost her job, became disabled and then couldn't work. Their savings ran out in three to four months. Dee was an orphan who had been raised in a series of foster homes and institutions. Tiny's father was long gone. They had no money and no family.
They were evicted 21 times in Los Angeles and Oakland, Dee says, recalling a time in which they had just enough money to get an apartment but never enough to pay the rent for long. Each time their welcome would wear out, they would look for another temporary home. Lisa, too young to have a bad credit rating, would do the hard part. "I would dress Lisa in a dress and gloves at 13, say she was 18 or 20, and she'd get us an apartment," Dee says. "We'd stay as long as we could and save enough money to get another apartment. We moved up here, and it wasn't much better."
Tiny's first article was about being poor, and it was published in an East Bay alternative paper, an event that became a turning point. "Not only was I heard as a writer and an artist," she says, "but I was heard about this."
Standing in front of the magazine rack at Cody's Books in Berkeley one day, she realized there were no publications that talked about the lives of poor people—the kind of revelation that would happen only to a person with little interest in advertising revenues.
So, Tiny got together a small group of financially stressed people with artistic or literary bents to meet each month and figure out "how to make literary art out of our lives." With the help of a group of artist friends, she raised some seed money and POOR was born. One Theme Per Issue
Vol. 1 of the intentionally glossy, almost-annual magazine came out in 1996.
Vol. 4 hit bookstores in April. Each edition explores a single theme—"Homefulness", "Hellthcare", "Work", "Mothers"—through art, fiction, poetry and first-person narrative. Each is an effort to define, and suggest solutions for, the obstacles facing poor people. The writers are poor people. The artists are poor people. The experts are poor people.
Like the Web site, which is updated weekly, the magazine has a mix of harrowing accounts of life on the street and sad tales about the lengths to which men and women are pushed simply to "Survive." In these pages, the word is often capitalized, a sacred verb, a statement.
The journalism training program for welfare recipients evolved out of the "Work" issue and Tiny's own experiences on welfare in the years after the Clinton administration passed welfare reform legislation. It was 1998, and San Francisco had implemented its Personally Assisted Employment Specialist program to move men and women from welfare to work in part through skills assessment and counseling.
Tiny was told on several occasions that she would make a fabulous receptionist. She had told various job counselors that she really wanted to be a reporter or writer and that, although she lacked formal education, she would be interested in pursuing a college degree program. The response, she wrote in an article eventually published on Poor-NewsNetwork, was that given her lack of education, earning a degree would take too long.
"'And besides, is that really a practical career choice for someone in your position?' I don't know ... was it?" she wrote. "My mother and I were endlessly battling homelessness—we were deeply entrenched in the so-called cycle of poverty ... one crisis snowballing into the next until you are never really able to fix any one problem, because you are just catching the last one, barely."
While still receiving welfare herself and working on POOR Magazine, Tiny dreamed up her own welfare-to-work program, which eventually was funded by the San Francisco Department of Human Services. At its heart are the mother-daughter team's strong beliefs about what is wrong with welfare today.
It is impossible, they say, for extremely poor people--especially those grappling with homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness—to learn any really useful skill in the short time most government training programs allow. That same government, they say, shoves poor people into any job that comes along just to get them off of welfare, whether there's a future in it or not.
Their welfare-to-work program includes a lot of basics: reporting, writing, grammar, graphic arts, Internet design, desktop publishing. And some more advanced skills, such as investigative and advocacy journalism with a focus on race and class.
Along the way, they lecture daily on what they call "poverty scholarship"—the belief that poor people who have lived it are experts in it. And they insist that their students write from their own experiences, acknowledge their own homelessness, banish their own shame.
For Dee, this means using the word "I".
"Some write in the third person," she complains. "They don't have the confidence to tell their story. They write about poor people as if they weren't one of them. We want to hear their voice.... We teach first-person narrative rather than poverty voyeurism—people from the outside writing about being poor." 'Povery Voyeurism' by Mainstream Press
Alan Weil of the Urban Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, believes that the folks at POOR and the Media Studies Program are right about a lot of things, among them that most states emphasize moving people from welfare to work as quickly as possible, "which means [take] the first job you can find."
"I think they're right in a different way, which is that our society's attention to the reality of life for poor people is very shallow," Weil says. "If they can offer a more complete picture of that life, then they are doing something that not really anyone else is doing."
Most publications put out by poor and homeless people—among them the 40 members of the North American Street Newspaper Assn.—share a single, central goal: reframing the news, because their staff members believe that the mainstream media either patronize or ignore poor people.
To Dee, it is "poverty voyeurism". Chance Martin, editor of Street Sheet in San Francisco, argues that stories about poor and homeless people in the traditional press tend to be formulaic, with the ones that actually talk to the homeless as "the most offensive".
"They serve to reinforce the personal deficit model," which says that poor people are broken and need to be fixed, argues Martin, who is on the executive committee of the newspaper association.
Gray, Gray-Garcia and Martin argue that such a model ignores the complexities of lives lived in poverty. The mainstream media, they say, have a responsibility to report those lives fully—whether or not poor people vote, shop or take vacations—and that everyone from employers and teachers to legislators would benefit.
The personal deficit model, they say, emphasizes the failures in poor people's lives, instead of their tenacious coping. It ignores the fact that those living on the edge might be late for work because old cars break down and buses are unreliable, not because of slovenliness. That poor parents might not show up for parent-teacher conferences because they have multiple minimum-wage jobs, not because they don't care.
What about the stories that don't talk to the poor but simply talk about them? In a January report, the Harvard Family Research Project evaluated more than 2,000 articles on health care and welfare issues from 29 electronic and print sources between 1999 and 2000.
The most frequent welfare issues discussed included job training and declining caseloads. The media's most common sources were researchers and policymakers, the project reported, but current and former welfare recipients were among the "sources rarely or not used".
Shawn Fremstad, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, looks at the Harvard report as evidence that the media need to improve their coverage of poverty. If POOR's Media Studies Program succeeds, he figures, it can be only a positive thing both for its students and American readers.
"The tricky part," he says, "is to what extent can this deliver in terms of someone ending up in a job in the journalism field?"
Many Struggles for Program Participants
On a purely philosophical level, the people in the program believe that any time a poor person speaks out in print, it is a small success in its own way. On a more practical level, the program is probably too young to judge. It has been funded for only one full year, and its students face many hurdles. Some are struggling with homelessness, some mental illness, some substance abuse and past incarceration. They have a lot to learn about work and journalism.
In this second year of their publicly funded effort, Dee and Tiny want taxpayers to shell out $8,600 to cover training costs for each future journalist in the program. And then they want those fledgling reporters, photographers and graphic artists to get paid $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, for a year as apprentices.
Feinstein didn't bite for the whole package; it is, after all, a Cadillac request from a government with a used-Hyundai budget. But San Francisco funded them once and will likely fund them again at some level. Feinstein believes the Media Studies Program offers "just the start some people may need."
Benny Joyner, 51, pen name Kaponda, was the star graduate of the Media Studies Program's maiden year. POOR taught this former legal secretary and former prison inmate how to write a story, and he learned well.
For various POOR publications, Joyner has written about California's "three strikes" law and covered a recent demonstration against lodging laws that forbid sleeping outside in public places.
And now he has job writing for the San Francisco Bay View, a small community paper focusing on the Bay Area's African American population. He has written about environmental justice, police issues and a local black micro-radio station. His biggest accomplishment? Probably the story, based on recent census data, about how San Francisco's black population has dropped 23% in the last decade. Joyner's story came out May 29. The San Francisco Chronicle followed Joyner two weeks later.
Joyner is happy; his new boss is delighted.
"This is not fluff, not society news, not feel-good news," says Mary Ratcliff, editor of the Bay View. "This is real, important hard news, and we're just thrilled.... We really need good news coverage. Benny is our lifeline."

Political activists around the country are still absorbing the news of Geronimo ji Jaga’s death. For those of us who came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s were in many ways a gateway for our examination of the history of Black political resistance in the U.S. Geronimo ji Jaga (formerly Geronimo Pratt) and his personal struggle as well as his contributions to the fight for social justice were impossible to ignore. His commitment, humility, clear thinking as well as his sense of both the longevity and continuity of the Black Freedom Movement in the U.S. all stood out to those who knew him.

I interviewed him for The Source magazine in early September 1997 about three months after he was released from prison, having served 27 years of a life sentence for a murder he didn’t commit. Three things stood out from the interview, all of which have been missed by recent commentary celebrating his life and impact.

First that famed attorney Johnnie Cochran was not only his lawyer when ji Jaga gained his freedom, but also represented him in his original trial. They were from the same hometown and, according to ji Jaga, Cochran’s conscience over the years was dogged by the injustice of the U.S. criminal system that resulted in the 1970 sentence.

Second, according to ji Jaga, he never formally joined the Black Panther Party. As he remembered it, he worked with several Black activist organizations and was captured by the police while working with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

And finally, his analysis of the UCLA 1969 shoot-out between Black Panthers and US Organization members that led to the death of his best friend Bunchy Carter and John Huggins is not a simple tale of Black in-fighting. Now is a good time to revisit all three.

Misinformation is so much part of our current political moment, particularly as the 24-hour news cycle converges with the ascendance of Fox News. In this climate, the conservative analysis of race has been normalized in mainstream discourse.

This understanding of racial politics, along with the election of Barack Obama and a first term marked by little for Blacks to celebrate, makes it a particularly challenging time to be politically Black in the United States. Ask Jeremiah Wright, Shirley Sherrod and Van Jones – all three serious advocates for the rights and humanity of everyday people whose critiques of politics and race made them far too easily demonized as anti-American./p p If we have entered the era where the range of Black political thought beyond the mainstream liberal-conservative purview is delegitimized, Geronimo ji Jagarsquo;s life and death is a reminder of our need to resist it./p h3 strongExcerpts from the 1997 interview/strong/h3 p Q: How did you get involved with the Black Panther Party?/p p A: Technically, I never joined the Black Panther Party. After Martin Luther Kingrsquo;s death, an elder of mine who was related to Bunchy Carterrsquo;s elder and Johnnie Cochranrsquo;s elder requested that those of us in the South that had military training render some sort of discipline to brothers in urban areas who were running amuck getting shot right and left, running down the street shooting guns with bullets half filled which they were buying at the local hardware store./p p When I arrived at UCLA, Bunchy was just getting out of prison and needed college to help with his parole. We stayed together in the dorm room on campus. But we were mainly working to build the infrastructure of the party./p p Q:You ended up as the deputy minister of defense. How did that come about?/p p A: They did not have a ministry of defense when I came on the scene. There was one office in Oakland and a half an office in San Francisco. I helped build the San Francisco branch and all of the chapters throughout the South ndash; New Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Memphis, Winston-Salem, North Carolina and other places. We did it under the banner of the Panthers because thatrsquo;s what was feasible at the time./p p Because of shoot-outs and all that stuff, the work I did with the Panthers overshadowed the stuff that I did with the Republic of New Afrika, the Mau Mau, the Black Liberation Army, the Brown Berets, the Black Berets, even the Fruit of Islam, but I saw my work with the Panthers as temporary. When Bunchy was killed, the Panthers wanted me to fill his position [as leader of the Southern California chapter]. I didnrsquo;t want to do it because I was already overloaded with other stuff./p p But it was just so hard to find someone who could handle LA given the problems with the police. So I ended up doing it, reluctantly. And this is how I ended up on the central committee of the Black Panther Party. I never took an oath and never joined the party./p p Q: What was your role as deputy minister of defense?/p p A: The ministry of defense was largely based on infrastructure: cell systems in the cities, creating an underground for situations when you need to get individuals out of the city or country. When you get shot by the police, you canrsquo;t be taken to no hospital. You gotta have medical underground as well. Thatrsquo;s where the preachers, bible school teachers and a lot of others behind the scenes got involved. When Huey got out of prison in 1970, this stuff blew his mind./p p Q: What were the strengths and weaknesses of the party?/p p A: The main strength was the discipline which allowed for a brother or sister to feed children early in the morning, go to school and P.E. (political education) classes during the day, go to work and selling papers in the afternoon, and patrol the police at night. The weak points were our naiveteacute;, our youth and the lack of experience. But even at that I really salute the resistance of the generation!/p p I have a problem saying it was just the Panthers lsquo;cause thatrsquo;s not right. When you do that, you x out so much. There was more collective work going on than the popular written history of the period suggests. And when you talk about SNCC, you are talking about a whole broader light than the Panther struggle. So you have to talk about that separate; thatrsquo;s a bigger thing. They gave rise to the intelligence of a whole bunch of Panthers./p p Q: What was Bunchy Carter like?/p p A: He was a giant, a shining prince. He had been the head of the Slausons gang. He was transforming the gangbangers in Los Angeles into that revolutionary arm. He was my mentor. Such a warm and lovable brainy brother./p div class="img alignleft size-full wp-image-20422" style="width: 403px;" nbsp;/div p At the same time he was such a fierce brother. He was very dynamic, was an ex-boxer, and he was even on The Little Rascals probably back in the lsquo;50s. His main claim to fame was what he did with the gangs in the city. And that was a monumental thing. All that was before Bunchy became a Panther./p p Q: Because of the death of Bunchy Carter as a result of the Panthersrsquo; clash with Maulana Karengarsquo;s US organization, even today rumors persists that Dr. Karenga was an informant./p p A: Not true. Definitely not true./p p Q: What was the Panther clash with US all about?/p p A: We considered Karengarsquo;s US organization to be a cultural-nationalist organization. We were considered revolutionary nationalists. So we have a common denominator. We both are nationalists. We never had antagonistic contradictions, just ideological contradictions. The pig manipulated those contradictions to the extent that warfare jumped off./p p Truth is the first casualty in war. It began to be said that Karenga was rat, but that wasnrsquo;t true. The death of Bunchy and John Huggins on UCLA campus was caused by an agent creating a disturbance, which caused a Panther to pull out a gun and which subsequently caused US members to pull out their guns to defend themselves. In the ensuing gun battle Bunchy Carter and John Huggins lay dead./p p Q: Whatrsquo;s your worst memory of the 27 years you spent in prison?/p p A: I accepted the fact that when I joined the movement, I was gonna be killed. When we were sent off to these urban areas, we were actually told, ldquo;Look, yoursquo;re either gonna get killed, put in prison or if yoursquo;re lucky we can get you out the country before they do that. Those are the three options. To survive is only a dream.rdquo; So when I was captured, I began to disconnect. So itrsquo;s hard to say good or bad moments because this is a whole different reality that had a life of its own./p p Q: Many people would say that during those 27 years that you lost something. How would you describe it?/p p A: I considered myself chopped off the game plan when I was arrested. But it was incumbent upon me to free myself and continue to struggle again. You canrsquo;t look back 27 years and say it was a loss. Irsquo;m still living. I run about five miles every morning, and I can still bench press 300 pounds 10 times. I can give you 10 reps (laughter). Also I hope Irsquo;m a little more intelligent and Irsquo;m not crazy. Itrsquo;s a hell of a gain that I survived./p p Q: What music most influenced you during that time?/p p A: In 1975 I heard some music on a prison radio. I hadnrsquo;t seen a television in six years until about 1976, and it was at the end of the tier. I couldnrsquo;t see it unless I stood up sideways against the bars. When I really got to see a television again was in 1977. So I was basically without music and television for the first eight years when I was in the hole./p p When I was able to get on the main line and listen to music and see TV, of course the things I wanted to hear were the things I heard when I was on the street. But by then those songs had to be at least nine years old. So I would listen to oldies./p p And the new music it was hard to get into, but I slowly began to get into that. But when hip-hop began to come around, it caught on like wildfire. It reminds me how the Panthers and other groups started to catch on like wildfire. It reminded me of Gil Scott-Heron. He would spit that knowledge so clearly and that was the first thing that came to mind when I heard Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, Paris, Public Enemy and Sista Soulja ndash; the militancy./p p Q: What type of books were you reading?/p p A: We maintained study groups throughout when I was on main line. Much of the focus was on Cheikh Anta Diop. He was considered by us to be the last pharaoh. We also read the works compiled by Ivan Van Sertima. Of course, there were others./p p Q: In terms of a spiritual center, what helped you to get through?/p p A: Well the ancestors guided me back to the oldest religion known to man: Maat. We also studied those meditations that were developed by all of our ancestors ndash; the Natives, the Hispanics, the Irish ndash; not just the ones that were strictly African./p p emThe youngest of seven children, Ji Jaga was born Elmer Pratt in Morgan City, a port city in southwestern Louisiana, two hours south of New Orleans, on Sept. 13, 1947. One hundred twenty years earlier marked the death of Jean Lafitte, the so-called ldquo;gentlemanrsquo;s piraterdquo; of French ancestry who settled in Haiti in the early 1800s until he was run out with most other Europeans during the Haitian revolution. Lafittersquo;s claim to fame was smuggling enslaved Africans from the Caribbean to Louisiana during the Spanish embargo of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, often taking refuge in the same bayous that were Prattrsquo;s childhood home./em/p p emPratt was dubbed Geronimo by Bunchy Carter and assumed the name ji Jaga in 1968. The Jaga were a West African clan of Angolan warriors who Geronimo says he descends from. Many of the Jaga came to Brazil with the Portuguese as free men and women and some were later found among maroon societies in Brazil. How Jaga descendants could have ended up in Louisiana is open to historical interpretation, as most Angolans who ended up in Louisiana and Mississippi and neighboring states entered the U.S. via South Carolina. Some Jaga were possibly among the maroon communities in the Louisiana swamplands as well. According to Pratt, the Jaga refused to accept slavery; hence his strong identification with the name./em/p p Q: What were some of your earliest early childhood memories?/p p A: Well, joyous times mostly. Morgan City was a very rural setting and very nationalistic, self-reliant and self-determining. It was a very close-knit community. Until I was a ripe old age, I thought that I belonged to a nation that was run by Blacks. And across the street was another nation, a white nation. Segregation across the tracks./p p We had our own national anthem, ldquo;Lift Every Voice and Sing,rdquo; our own police, and everything. We didnrsquo;t call on the man across the street for nothing and it was very good that I grew up that way./p p The worst memories were those of when the Klan would ride. During one of those rides, I lost a close friend at an early age named Clayborne Brown who was hit in the head by the Klan and drowned. They found his body three days later in the Chaparral River. And, we all went to the river and saw them pull him in. Clayborne was real dark-skinned and when they pulled him out of the river, his body was like translucent blue. Then a few years later, one Halloween night, the Klan jumped on my brother. So there are bad memories like that./p p Q: Does your mother still live there?/p p A: Shersquo;s gone off into senility, but shersquo;s still living ndash; 94 years old this year. [She died in 2003 at 98 years old.] And every time Irsquo;ve left home, when I come back, the first person I go to see is my mama. So, thatrsquo;s what I did when I got out of prison. Mama has always stood by me. And I understood why. She was a very brainy person. Our foreparents, her mother, was the first to bring education into that part of the swampland and set up the first school./p p When I was growing up, Mama used to rock us in her chair on the front porch. We grew up in a shack and we were all born in that house, about what you would call a block from the Chaparral River. She would recite Shakespeare and Longfellow to us. All kind of stuff like that at an early age we were hearing from Mama ndash; this Gumbo Creole woman (laughs). And she was very beautiful. Kept us in church, instilled all kinds of interests in us, morals and respect for the elders, respect for the young./p p Q: What about your father?/p p A: My father was very hard working. He wouldnrsquo;t work for no white man so he was what you could call a junk man. On the way home from school in Daddyrsquo;s old pickup truck we would have to go to the dump and get all the metal that we could find as well as rope, rags, anything. When we got home, we unloaded the truck and separated the brass, copper, the aluminum, so we could sell it separate. Thatrsquo;s how he raised an entire family of seven and he did a damn good job. But he worked himself to death. He died from a stroke in 1956./p p Q: With an upbringing so nationalistic, what made you join the U.S. military?/p p A: I considered myself a hell of an athlete. We had just started a Black football league. A few years earlier, Grambling came through and checked one of the guys out. So initially my ambition was to go to Grambling or Southern University and play ball. Because of the way the community was organized, the elders called the shots over a lot of the youngsters./p p They had a network that went all the way back to Marcus Garvey and the days when the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was organizing throughout the South in the 1920s. My uncle was a member of the legionnaires, the military arm of the UNIA. Of the 17 people in my graduating class, six of us were selected by the elders to go into the armed forces, the United States Air Force. The older generation was getting older and was concerned about who would protect the community./p p Q: Many of the brothers that went to Vietnam have never gotten past it. You seemed to have made a progressive transition. How have you done that?/p p A: Irsquo;ve never suffered the illusion that I was aligned to anything other than my elders. And my going to Vietnam was out on a sense of duty to them. When I learned how to deal with explosives, Irsquo;m listening at that training in terms of defending my community. Most of the brothers that I ran into in the service really bought into being Americans, and ldquo;powrdquo; ndash; when they were hit with the reality of all the racism and disrespect, they just couldnrsquo;t handle it./p p Q: What was it like to be a Black soldier in the U.S. military in 1965?/p p A: This was my first experience with integration. But I was never was a victim of any racial attack or anything. During the whole first time I was in Vietnam ndash; throughout 1966 ndash; I never heard the ldquo;Nrdquo; word. And all of my officers were white./p p When I went back in 1968 thatrsquo;s when you would see more manifestations of racial hatred, especially racial skirmishes between the soldiers. But first off there were so many battles and we were getting ambushed so much. Partners were dying. We were getting overrun. I mean it was just madness. If you were shooting in the same direction, cool./p p Q: You were very successful in the military. Why did you get out?/p p A: On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. I was due to terminate my service a month later. I wasnrsquo;t gonna do it. I was gonna re-up lsquo;cause I had made sergeant at a very early age, in two tours of combat, so I could have been sitting pretty for the rest of my life in the military./p p I was loyal and patriotic to the African nation I grew up in who sent me into the service. And after Martin Luther King was killed, my elders ordered me to come on out of the service./p p King was the eldersrsquo; Messiah. Malcolm was our generationrsquo;s Messiah. And now that their King was dead, it was like therersquo;s no hope. So they actually unleashed us to do what we did./p p This is why when Newsweek took their survey in 1969: It was over 92 percent of the Black people in this country supported the Black Panther Party as their legitimate political arm. It blew the United Statesrsquo; mind./p p emBakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on the CNN, FOX News (the Orsquo;Reilly Factor), C-Span, PBS (The Tavis Smiley Show) and heard on NPR. Hersquo;s currently senior media fellow at the Harvard Law-based think tank, The Jamestown Project, and the CEO of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop. Email him at a href="mailto:bakari@bakarikitwana.com"bakari@bakarikitwana.com/a and visit his website, a href="http://www.bakarikitwana.com/"www.bakarikitwana.com/a. This story first appeared on a href="http://newsone.com/nation/rap-sessions/bakari-kitwana/remembering-geronimo-pratt/"NewsOne/a./em/p

The following are six different "reparations" narratives by six anonymous authors excerpted from the chapter... From Removal to Reparations in the upcoming book: Poverty Scholarship #101 The Population Brings the Popular EduKashun- a PeopleSText which will be released in 2012

1) Blood Money from People with long-term memory loss...

blood money from people with long-term memory loss. for whom forgetting, not looking back, is the only way to reconcile. land-grabs from indigenous people, that’s literally where the root of my money is. white european settlers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. the captors of pocahontas, mr. founding father thomas jefferson himself - this is my blood, passed down and down, but still in mine, trickling directly through the centuries of a family tree to present day. milking capitalism, too - taking part in the rat race and winning. using privilege to make more privilege - a tip off before the great stock market crash of 1929 saved my great-grandmother’s bank account. privilege begets privilege.

i think my family - the whole extended networks of ancestral aristocrats -  doesn't oft remember this. in fact i think they choose to forget (sometimes i do too). the past is in the past. true to the WASP form, there is little emotion, even little attachment. what’s done is done, that’s what they say. we can only do what we do now. it’s a learned pattern, so i’ve learned to forgive them. it’s not their fault - it’s not my fault.

thinking of all the resources i have overwhelms me - a trust fund, a savings account, a stable job, healthcare, an apartment, my parents’ house. a father in politics, a doctor for a mother. a lifetime of consistent (western) healthcare, vaccines, TLC and ample time off when i’m ill. always a multitude of vegetables, fruits, local foods and wholesome options. enough space and time in my life to cook food and enjoy it. enough space and time in my life to sleep for 8 hours a night and enjoy it. braces when my teeth were crooked, eye exams when my vision was questioned. specialty therapists when i felt depressed, specialty therapists when i had an eating disorder. uncles and grandfathers in high places at prestigious universities, who’ve hobnobbed with presidential candidates and their ilk. a network at wesleyan and beyond of professors, academic resources, bright-eyed young people with a college education and a background like mine. 40 hours a week (at least!) spent connecting with other young wealthy folks. innumerable friends with apartments, innumerable family members and extended community members with homes with extra beds.

parents who love me, whom i love fiercely right back. who would take me in and hold me - emotionally and financially - for as long and as deeply as i ever needed. a sister who who do anything for me. friends who i can call when i go on a shitty date, or when i hear a funny joke, or when my grandparents pass away.

2) I will never be without a food or home

Rich people traded pieces of earth among themselves as if they were theirs to trade, and someone I love facilitated those transactions for a percentage of the sale costs, and a small share of that share was passed along to me. But even that sliver of a sliver of huge dollar amounts is big enough that I have the safety net of knowing that whatever I might do, whatever choices I might make, through no work or effort of my own, and on the backs of people who have been displaced, gentrified out of their longtime homes, whose entire neighborhood, where their families in many cases had lived for generations, was completely changed without their consent, I will have a chunk of money coming to me that means I will never be without food or a home. On other people’s backs, my basic needs, for the rest of my life, will be met.

What makes sense within the dominant economic system makes no sense when all the lives, people's and earth’s included, are acknowledged. What seems to make sense within this system—that earth can be divided up and owned and traded, that people can profit off other people’s housing and have so little responsibility to them—just doesn’t. There are so many unacknowledged costs: stories upon stories, lives, life, of people who were shoved out, displaced, disrespected, disregarded, unacknowledged—the people buying and selling have to blame them or make them wrong when they manage to notice them at all in order to justify to themselves what they are doing—stories upon stories, lives, life of land partitioned and owned, traded, with no regard for its life and needs and wholeness outside of its utility to whoever happens to “own” it at a given moment, then whoever comes next, with no regard for the people who live there without the entitlement ownership confers, whose payment for their housing enriches the very owners who are unaccountable to, unconcerned with them when the time comes for another trade.

I could consider as “mine” money that streams to me through an accident of birth in the context of white supremacy, colonialism, earth exploitation, and capitalism, but only if I shut my heart, spirit, and mind to huge pieces of the story, only if I am willing to not notice impacts, not register the whole. I could consider this money “mine” and use it as such only if I were willing to not be whole and I am not.

To be whole, to even move or aspire or dream toward wholeness within a context of thousands of years of violence enabled in part by fragmentation and disassociation, requires facing the fact that the entire earth is a whole, that each aspect of it is connected to each other. That it is all and we are all in some senses already whole, but we have been violently disassociated from that fact, and there is no true wealth or security or fulfillment in “benefiting” from violence and disassociation.

I make reparations through POOR and many other projects and people because what else would you do in the face of interconnectedness? Because interconnectedness is the truth and the obfuscation of that truth that makes exploitation and violence of all kinds a reality is trauma on trauma on trauma and reparations are one piece of healing that, and healing from that.

And while I make reparations and put heart and time into collaborative experiments toward interdependence, I learn from people who may not have the “privilege” of financial resources earned at other people’s and the earth’s expense things about love and mutual support and family and spirit that the money I have been given, the famous and powerful people I have known, have not given, could not possibly give, me. Reparations are part of dreaming for communities, for the earth, for the truth of interconnectedness, in waking life, in action.  

3)Unlearning the Lie

In my life I have made money and not made money. Sometimes living off the inherited stolen profits and wealth from my family. But class privilege and wealth is so much more than the material things. I have an effervescent positivity and optimism, generated by never having to worry about money. I have a sense of freedom in how I move about the world that lets me enjoy confidence, that is reinforced because people respond well to confident energy. I can afford to share resources, including time, with friends and aqcuaintences, and get a lot of credit and praise for “being there” for people and being a “good friend” because I can afford to consistently prioritize people I care about, not needing to hold on to a job or save money on transportation to get places. My relationship  to wealth, stolen capital, affects every relationship I have. It is direct access to often invisibilized power, a power that is seductive to hold onto and that so many folks, even with tight anti-capitalist analysis, are also attracted to. It makes me feel and makes me get treated as super-human, superior. Someone who’s time actually is more valuable than other people’s, just like I was told everyday growing up that I was one of the “best and brightest.”
 
Unlearning that lie can’t happen just in the classroom, even in peopleskool. It’s going to take practice. Living without direct access to wealth. It’s going to take vulnerability, anxiety, disappointment, and loss. I won’t ever experience Poverty Scholarship (probably). There is money in my name I don’t have control over, but will be available for emergencies, including medical emergencies. I could live with either of my parents—I won’t go houseless even if I can’t work and make rent. I am learning from peopleskool that I need to let go of this extra extra privilege. I need to let go of enough that I can start experiencing my humanity. Asking for help. Not being the hero at the meeting who takes on huge tasks because I have limitless time. Disappointing friends that I can’t see whenever we both want. Not being able to buy whatever I want whenever I want it, or live anywhere I want, or spend my time however I want. I am afraid to give these things up. But I know the cost of these privileges is a separation from what it is to be human in this world, and an allegiance, no matter how subtle, with the system of capitalism.

4) Class Ascendance

My father and our family returned to the US from Turkey, and he got a degree at UC Santa Cruz. He was a member of the first graduating class at this experimental college. Like my Grandpa, he was the recipient of state-subsidized financial aid before the days of affirmative action, and got through school basically for free because he had traveled through Europe, Asia and the US, accumulating experiences that signified his complex and unique perspective on the world. Inheriting my Grandpa's legacy as a world traveler, he was able to use the paths that US imperialism had carved before him to advance academic interests in obscure and exotic subject matter. He and his revolutionary ideas learned from time spent with Italian Socialists took off for Cornell Graduate School (Dad was a legacy now), where he became  a scholar of Antonin Gramsci and Socialist organizing. He didn't have a lot of spending money, but he was provided a stipend to cover food and housing through various fellowships and loans thru his Akkkademic networks. He got to travel to Italy and finished his dissertation, after which he was hired to teach politics at SUNY Albany, where he and my mom met. He was a professional now, living cheap in the de-industrialized city of Albany NY. There are lots of pictures of my parents' earlier life together in bucolic upstate New York, dressed in dapper '70s tweed and silk prints, or bakcpacking through the granite-faced, deep green Adirondacks during summer break, or sitting with healthy, tanned friends around the coffee table.

Through my ancestors' experiences of world cosmopolitan travel and research, I have inherited financial security directly tied to the caste/apartheid system we have here in the US, and worldwide tourist and academic institutions. From my Jewish great-great grandparents, who could easily find jobs in the racially-charged industrial economy of World War I; to my grandparents, who were eligible for loans to buy a house during the 1940s and 1950s white flight; to my dad, whose increasingly exclusive education had been financed by US military and academic imperialism....with each generation, my family's class ascendence has been subsidized State institutions designed to support white families at the expense of everyone else. I have grown up caring deeply about my parents' stories of travel, study, and adventure, hoping to emulate their curiosity about the world and their wish to make it better. My head is filled with some very complex questions about how I can best transform the culture of imperialism and entitlement that my family has grown wealthy within. I need to repair the patterns of inheritance, to challenge ideas about what a rich life of knowledge might mean, and to heal some of the wounds that my family's extraction of resources have inflicted.

5) Because Capitalism is so Violent

As i write this, i realize more and more that i don’t really understand what my mom does, how her work fits into this economic system. the company she works for now, the company she’s paid to legally protect, trades in things that aren’t real, that i can’t touch. insurance, annuities, portfolios. these are ways to make rich people’s money “grow,” and to provide rich people with the feeling that Certain Financial Decisions will keep us safe until we die, without having to rely on anyone else. the  company's website says: “how much is enough? how much would you need to accumulate over time to fund a 20-year retirement?” 

money “growing” means that people, somewhere, are working without being paid what their work is worth, and that that money is being siphoned into financial markets, which contain things like ‘annuities.’
because capitalism is so violent to so many people, and because it doesn’t make sense for the things our souls long for, it takes intense labor to keep it standing. so the kind of work that people in my family do, that help keep these enormous companies and structures intact and humming smoothly, is crucial to the system. and so my mom gets paid more than almost almost almost anyone else in the world.
some of the reparations i owe, at least the ones i can trace directly through my immediate family, are vague, enormous. it’s the heart of this economic system, of people trading in non-tangibles, in things that don’t help anyone meet their basic needs. some are a little more specific: affirmative action, which brought my mom where she is today, grew from civil rights and freedom struggles that demanded something much bigger, and whose visions are still visions—visions that demand reparations from me and my family.

6) For Class Privileged Peoples

I think it’s crucial to draw connections – between media storytelling and the stories we tell in our families; between the racism of politicians and legislators and the insidious, institutionalized racism that affects us without our even realizing it; between the paternalism of philanthropy and the privilege that we as individuals unconsciously enact; between the oppression by obvious perpetrators like police, military, and sweatshop-owning, union-busting multinational corporations and the oppression underlying our personal family fortunes.
Anti-capitalist social justice movements continually inspire me to challenge myself as a rich person and to challenge other rich people, because they situate us as players in systems that deeply harm the majority of people on the planet. It’s crucial to me to incorporate a radical critique of capitalism into both my understanding of my own wealth and privilege and into the donor organizing work I do. The “progressive philanthropy” world tends to take a stance that resists truly challenging capitalism and oppression in order to accommodate more moderate wealthy donors. Much of the landscape of social change philanthropy seems designed to make rich people feel better about ourselves and to channel some funds to progressive (or even radical) organizing without actually challenging the roots of inequality.

You don’t have to look hard to find clear explanations of how capitalism is inextricably linked to multiple oppressions: racism, through (for example) slavery, imperialist acquisition of land and raw materials, and dividing white and POC workers to keep them from organizing; sexism, through exploiting the labor of women (who are already culturally devalued) and relying on women’s unpaid and unrecognized labor; ableism, through laws allowing companies to hire people with disabilities at less than minimum wages; and so on.

We should talk about these things when we talk about having class privilege, because as the beneficiaries of capitalism we are implicated whether we like it or not. For white folks with class privilege, the history that gets erased when we tell our simplistic “pulled-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps” money stories is the (continuing) history of explicit and institutionalized racism in the U.S. Some of us can trace our inherited wealth to slavery or other systems in which white people directly profited off of the stolen labor or land of people of color. Even for those of us with “new” money, previous generations of our families are more than likely to have benefited from racist policies and institutions that helped white people and discriminated against people of color (Homestead Act, G.I. Bill, land grants, New Deal, loans, jobs, contracts, unions…). Throughout U.S. history, people of color have been explicitly prohibited by racist government policy from building assets; and since the most important indicator of wealth is how much money your parents had, cultural myths about a “level playing field” start to look pretty empty.

For class-privileged people to be allies in social justice movements, we have to take responsibility for the bigger picture behind our own wealth. Our personal decisions about money and the stories we tell (to ourselves and others) have reflections and repercussions connected to our place in the larger class system. Challenging these decisions and narratives, and challenging ourselves to look deeper, is a good way to start shifting our participation in oppressive systems.

Monday, July 21, 1997

Lisa Gray-Garcia is poor. She lives with her constant companions, fear and pain. She is on a first-name basis with despair. Yet the 26-year-old and her mother, Dee Gray, have not given in to hopeless silence. They decided they have stories to tell, and by God, they're going to tell them. Out of next to nothing, they created a glossy literary magazine, called, appropriately, Poor. They are now distributing it on the street and in bookstores such as Borders, City Lights and Cody's. "People who are poor don't generally get heard," said Gray-Garcia, who goes by the name Tiny. "We're saying these people and their stories and their crises deserve to be heard." Her eyes a thin blue, her hair carrot-colored, Gray-Garcia perches on a makeshift30 desk in her 5-by-10-foot office and talks about the project that drains her energy and fills her soul. Though she dropped out of school in the sixth grade to help support herself and her disabled mother, Gray-Garcia taught herself to write. Then she went to the library and found out how to apply for grants. She succeeded on her first try. The San Francisco Art Commission gave her and her mother a $10,000 grant last year for the magazine. In May, they got another $8,000 from Vanguard Foundation. Donations of artwork and design services from friends also helped. But the grants covered only the printing of the magazine (1,000 copies per issue), a computer, some of the office rent and small payments to contributors, Gray-Garcia said. "Poor is, in fact, poor," she said, laughing the way she often does at herself. "Poor needs a budget." The magazine sells for $3.95 for those who can afford to pay. Gray-Garcia said they give away about half the copies. Osha Neumann, a Berkeley attorney who helped Gray-Garcia with a legal problem, said he is astounded at what she has done with so little money. "It was completely amazing," he said. "I don't know what the hell she's living on. She wrote the grant to Vanguard and didn't put any money in for herself. Usually that's the first thing people think of." In addition to considerable determination, Gray-Garcia clearly has talent, Neumann said. "There are a lot of people who have extraordinary experiences but can't necessarily write about them," he said. Neumann's own organization, Community Defense Inc., agreed to be Poor's nonprofit sponsor. Gray-Garcia credits her creativity - and survival - to her mother. A personal history on her resume begins, "I am the daughter of Dee . . . because of her extreme sacrifice and resourcefulness, I am alive, I am a writer, I am an artist." The mother-daughter pair have re-created themselves into the mythical figures "Dee and Tiny," through which they have fashioned art installations, performances and the magazine itself. The story behind the two characters is even more fantastic than their real-life history. In the myth, Dee and Tiny are sisters, and the lone survivors of a shipwreck that killed their parents and 11 siblings. They are rescued by a "Hindu Tamal Coast Guard cutter and brought to San Francisco, where they worked for 17 years painting clothing and saved $780," according to their written "history." In reality, which Gray is inclined to deride as too linear, she was the illegitimate daughter of an Irish woman who came to the United States hoping to become an actress. Gray's mother abandoned her to foster homes. Gray, who declines to give her age, eventually ended up in Los Angeles, married to a doctor. The marriage failed after 10 years, and she and 12-year-old Lisa were out on the street - sometimes forced to live for months in their '79 Ford Fairmont station wagon between evictions. Then they really did paint clothing, using the sales to help make ends meet. Skipping back into myth territory (or maybe not), Gray insists that her persona, Dee, "has been married 12 times, including the doctor, and she is now happily looking for No. 13." Reality seems, at times, to be a slippery concept for the two women. Questions can be dangerous things when you are poor, when the world looks for ways to turn the truth against you. But Poor magazine's stories and poems cry with candor. The pair's own experiences provide plenty of material. In the first issue, Gray-Garcia describes her humiliation at trying to cash a check at a bank where she had no account. Poor people can't get two picture IDs, she said, and middle-class people don't know this. In the latest issue, she writes about her desperate search for low-cost dental treatment - about how she felt forced to resort to lies and fraud ( "crimes of poverty" ) to free herself from excruciating pain. In all of her writing, Gray-Garcia weaves an intricate fabric of details. Some are enough to make readers cringe. Other writers and artists, one of whom lives out of a shopping cart, contribute articles, poems, drawings and paintings. But the magazine is not just a litany of sorrows, Gray-Garcia said. It also offers solutions: where to get free or low-cost meals and health care. How to organize a poor people's "bank" by pooling resources. And how to take advantage of Poor's other projects, such as low-cost counseling and writing workshops for private groups, at-risk children and prisoners. "What people would like to see" when they look at poverty "is ugliness," Gray-Garcia said. "Everybody who sees the magazine says it's beautiful. I will not do it if I cannot do it in that beautiful way." In spite of what they've accomplished, Gray-Garcia knows she is still at risk. The pain batters her regularly, like a car that keeps backing up, then lurching forward again. If it's not the latest threat of an eviction, it's her office-mate yelling at her ( "I have TOLD you to keep this door closed!" ) or the ache, sometimes low, sometimes screaming-loud, of her rotting teeth. She and her mother share a one-bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin with the other member of the family, Gray-Garcia's 13-year-old sister. They constantly work to scrape together the rent money through sales of their artwork, T-shirts and the magazine, as well as loans from friends. "It's just hard to constantly struggle," Gray-Garcia said. "I do the art and sell dumb T-shirts. We know we can't go anywhere with that." Plans for the third issue of Poor, which will focus on the subject of work, are stalled for lack of money. For Gray-Garcia, there is a kind of salvation in writing. As an example, she cites a story about her family's 22 evictions, which appeared in the first issue of Poor. " "One Court Date Away From Homelessness' was extremely cathartic and important for me," she said. She was able to sort through the terrible memories of sheriffs at the door, of throwing Hefty bags full of belongings out a third-story window, of losing precious things - like all the photos from her childhood - forever. On the day the story appeared in print, she said, "I cried." For details on submissions or donations to Poor magazine, call 415-541-5629 or write to the magazine at 1326 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA 94109.

WRAP (Western Regional Advocacy Project) has been documenting the increases of mentally ill people in local jails as a result of diminished funding for mental health treatment and housing, escalation of “nuisance crime” enforcement by police and private security, and expansion of mental health courts.

The scale of this issue is enormous: it is reported that the LA county jail alone houses 3,000 mentally ill people a night. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, as many as 64% of people in jails nationwide have mental health problems.   In the 1980s and early 1990s, people with severe mental illness made up 6-7% of the jail population. In the last 5 years, this percentage has climbed to 16-30%. Nationwide, there are three times as many people with mental illness in prisons as there are in hospitals; 40% of people with severe mental illness have been imprisoned at some point in their lives; and 90% of those incarcerated with a mental illness have been incarcerated more than once and 30% have been incarcerated ten times or more.

We at WRAP see this ever-increasing incarceration of mentally ill people as part of a trend toward using the criminal justice system to address health and socioeconomic needs.  On the ground, this means that mentally ill homeless people who lack adequate access to housing and treatment services are vulnerable to getting caught in the criminal justice system, especially arrest or citation under local “quality of life” or “nuisance crime” laws that include sitting/lying on sidewalks, panhandling, and loitering. Oftentimes, the seriousness of these infractions is escalated to “failure to appear” bench warrants, which require jail time.

To gain a clearer understanding of the scope of the problem, we are conducting outreach to self-identified mentally ill people, service providers, justice system employees, lawyers and researchers.  We have also conducted a literature review of Department of Justice reports and periodical pieces.  We were stunned to learn that never before has there been systemic outreach to self-identified mentally ill homeless people about this issue.

During the month of August 2010, WRAP did street outreach with 253 self-identified mentally ill homeless people in six cities (Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Denver).  The National Consumer Advisory Board of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council is doing 350 more in seven cities across the country. We currently have a small sampling of online surveys from 36 frontline service providers.  If you or your organization would like to participate in either of these surveys contact staff at WRAP.

The initial responses tell us we need to bring together all the concerned members of local communities and finally start to reverse this trend.

Here’s just some of what the street outreach found:

• 76% reported being stopped, arrested, or cited due to “quality of life” offenses.
• 60% reported being harassed by private (Business Improvement District) security.
• 35% reported having ignored tickets issued against them.
• 59% reported having Bench Warrants issued for their arrest.
• 22% reported having outstanding warrants at the time of the survey.
• 21% reported being incarcerated while 5% reported being referred to a program when brought before court.
• 29% reported losing their housing or being discharged from a program due to incarceration.

This closely mirrors the initial service provider experiences even though they were not all in the same cities:

• Almost 20% of service providers report that their clients’ interactions with police occur because they appear to be homeless.
• More than 60% of service providers report that their clients’ interactions with police occur because of drinking related offenses
• 30% of service providers report that their clients interact with police because they are loitering, 16% report interaction because of jaywalking, and 16% for trespassing.
• 53% of service providers report that approximately 20% or more of their clients have bench warrants against them.
• 44% of service providers report that 50% or more of their clients have outstanding tickets.
• 74% of service providers report that at least 70% of their clients have been arrested.

By looking at and analyzing the experiences of the clients and of the service providers and relating these to the research that been done on issues of decreasing access and increasing criminalization, we will lay the foundation needed for all of us to come together and finally begin to dispel the myth that mental illness and homelessness are the result of people choosing a lifestyle and that service providers are incompetent. These claims have gone unanswered far too long and the result, as we all see, is killing us.

While re-funding housing and treatment services might seem to be a logical response, local and state governments, with the support of the Federal Department of Justice have instead been implementing Homeless and Mental Health courts. In the last 10 years, the number of Mental Health Courts in the U.S. has increased from 4 to 120.

In theory, the mental health court system is a collaborative effort between judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, caseworkers, and mental health professionals aimed at figuring out an appropriate treatment plan for the offender. Some recent studies suggest that mental health courts substantially reduce recidivism, and others have shown that participation in mental health court increased defendants’ access to long-term care. Which would seem to disprove the whole services resistant argument, which is so prevalent in the creation of these courts.

However, mental health courts also have significant drawbacks.  In order to gain access to the mental health court, defendants must plead guilty to the crime they are accused of and agree to adhere to the courts recommendations or be remanded to the traditional court.  These conditions are coercive and can also perpetuate the criminalization of people with mental illness. As one service provider noted, “in Mental Health court, people are often “remanded to custody” for non-compliance with court case management, which includes medications. To jail someone for not taking medication, especially if it is medication that causes extremely adverse side effects, is questionable from a legal standpoint, and from a treatment standpoint, it is barbaric. Everything described above then happens ⎯ people [lose] their income, health insurance, housing, and everything else.”

WRAP seeks to ensure that jails do not replace community-based mental health treatment services and that the hundreds of millions of dollars that are currently funding the whole bureaucratic process of criminalizing people instead be applied as an initial down payment towards the housing and treatment that is not only much more humane, but in the long run, much more affordable as well.

We’ll use our collective strengths, organizing, outreach, research, public education, artwork and direct actions. We will continue to expand this network of organizations and cities and we will train ourselves to ultimately bring down the whole oppressive system of policing poor people and poverty as a non-human broken window to be discarded and replaced.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius won the San Francisco Weekly's "BEST OF SAN FRANCISCO" issue.  That amazes me.  It makes me scratch my head more than I already do.

Nevius is notorious ("neviustorius"?) for being a professional hater of houseless and other poor people.  He hates non-profits that help them, even non-profits POOR Magazine includes in the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Poverty Pimpologists preying on the poor more than actually helping them.  He really hates how many of them operate in the Tenderloin neighborhood.

I'm not sure if Nevius won because there weren't many votes for anyone else, or if too many San Franciscans don't know enough journalistic folks.  I mean, we've got El Tecolote, the S.F. Bay Guardian, the S.F. Bayview, the San Francisco Bay Times, the San Francisco Bay Area Reporter, POOR Magazine, the Street Sheet and however many other news reporting entities there are on the wwweb.  Are they all undercooked liver and onions?

I'd ask for a recount, or a re-vote, but there aren't any hanging chads to get anyone's goat overcooked and, well, there have been other BEST OF SAN FRANCISCO and (S.F. BAY GUARDIAN) BEST OF THE BAY reader votes that have blown my tiny little mind out of my ears for less good reason than this one.

C.W. Nevius?  Seriously?  You like a guy with all the depth of Amerikkkan Idol?  Ewwwww.

Eating is an Agricultural Act

Last year Poor Magazine spoke to Matthew Robeson, a young African-descended brother who honors Pachamama with his hands, heart and mind.  Matthew welcomed us into his garden, a “Garden in the ghetto” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoXUO2qaV0U) in the Visitation Valley/Sunnydale neighborhood where he resides.  He grows a bounty of vegetables that include pumpkin, garlic, green beans, onions, zucchini and potatoes .  He spoke of the challenges of planting; of community--sharing knowledge of indigenous vegetables, working side by side with Filipinos, Vietnamese, Samoans—all kinds of people who honor our earth mother.  Poor Magazine honors this planting and tending to the earth--a conscious effort to take back the land. It is also a resistance to mainstream media that would have you believe that the only thing that grows in Sunnydale is crime and violence.

When I was growing up, my parents prayed before each meal

                        Gracious lord we thank thee

                        For these bounties of thy

                        Providence and pray thee to

                        Sanctify and to nourish our    

                        Bodies and God Bless the

                        Hands that prepared it

I uttered those words not savoring its meaning--the syllables that connected letters, words, forming a stew that was poetry, song, praise.  It was a quick utterance without thought of the ties between family, me, the land and the creator. 

My life travels in dual realities.  One reality is that of an indigenous human being with indigenous values that have been passed to me through the poetry of my uncles (their street language, the only language that holds meaning to me), the words of my grandparents and the example of hard work sketched in their hands and faces.  The other reality is one whose hands have been disconnected, chopped off at the wrists, propagandized and disassociated from the life-giving soil that is the basic source where natural processes merge to give the miracle of life. 

Looking at my brown skin, I see the history of the land written on it, moving like rivers that refuse to stagnate—whose memory is alive in the pores.  Yet, I know by looking at my hands that I have not planted a seed, picked a melon, fed chickens or bent down--like my ancestors —and met the earth with the sun pressing down, searing poems on my bent back.  I think of the poet/children’s author Jorge Argueta who wrote about coming to the US from El Salvador (http://www.childrensbookpress.org/our-books/latino/movie-my-pillow):

                        Here in the city there are

                        Wonders everywhere

                        Here mangoes

                        Come in cans

                         In El Salvador

                        They grow on trees

                         Here chickens come

                        In plastic bags

                        Over there

                        They slept beside me

I recently came across a book of essays by writer/activist Wendell Berry—essays that address subjects such as the food economy, responsibility of the poet, reasons for not buying a computer (http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berrynot.html) and the ultimate question: What are people for? (http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/pleasures-eating)

He writes: “I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act.  Eating ends the annual dream of the food economy that begins with planting and birth”.  An agricultural act—how often does one think of eating in these terms?  One doesn’t have to delve too deeply to know this is a reality—as tangible as rain—but we are inundated and assaulted by messages propagated by the food industry—an industry whose profitability is more or less contingent on people seeing themselves participating in the agricultural act—as, what Berry calls, “passive consumers”, buying what they’ve been convinced they want and need without asking questions such as, “is it fresh?”, “is it healthy?”, “how pure or clean is it and how far was it transported?”  For most of us, Berry’s assertions are not earth shattering—yet thinking oneself as part of an agricultural act takes conscious effort—physical and spiritual—a process that gives back to the earth and the creator.  That process can start with two words:  Thank you.

As in all of American society, the bottom line is, invariably, the bottom line.  The food industry has 2 overriding concerns as Berry points out:  volume and price rather than quality and health.  Berry writes: Increased volume presumably reduces costs.  But as scale increases, diversity declines, so does health. As health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals increases.

We have seen the effects of industrialized food on the population.  Berry refers to this as a “walled city surrounded by values that let merchandise in but no consciousness out".  He cites Sir Albert Howard who asserted in “The Soil and Health”: how we eat, determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

I grew up in a time when corporate logos began encroaching on high school hallways and cafeterias--in addition to our minds.  We thought it was great.  I recall seeing students eating twinkies and potato chips for breakfast—washing it down with coke, pepsi or sprite.  In the documentary “Super Size Me”, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVErU0eJAWU) filmmaker Morgan Spurlock visited a public high school where much processed food was being served to students.  The film included interviews with school administrators, cafeteria workers, teachers and policymakers who agreed that the corporate food giants have infiltrated the schools, reaping enormous profits at the expense of the health of young people—hooking our kids on their products, yet immune to the health consequences of their products.  With the preponderance of fast food and processed foods made with unhealthy amounts of fat and sugar—coupled with the whittling down of physical education programs in schools, is it any wonder why obesity rates are at their current levels, or that diabetes is on the rise.  Said one physical education teacher in “Super Size me”, “In America we have sick care, not healthcare”.

Wendell Berry writes that it is “possible to escape the trap of industrialism, to be liberated from the old food economy voluntarily, by reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy.  He suggests the following:

1.  Participate in food production.  Grow something to eat if you have a yard, a porch box or a pot in a window.  Compost kitchen scraps and use it as fertilizer.  In this way you will be fully responsible for any food you grow yourself and you will know all about it.  This will acquaint you with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal (IE: entrails and organs of a butchered animal) to decay and round again.

 2. Prepare your own food

3.  Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy food that is produced closest to your home

4.  Whenever possible, deal directly with local farmers (Farmers markets such as the Civic Center Market are good places to meet growers face to face).  In doing so, you eliminated an entire fleet of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers and advertisers who thrive at the expense of producers and consumers.

5.  Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrialized food production.  What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?

6.  Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening

7.  Learn by direct observation and experience, if possible, the life histories of food species.  Were animals raised in crowded spaces, did they have good water and bountiful pastures?  Were fruits and vegetables grown in good soil and not in huge factory fields rife with chemicals?

My family still prays at the table before eating.  I have yet to plant, to grow my own food but I intend to start.  I begin by planting the seeds of thankfulness in the mind of my 7 year old son, who said the following at the table this evening:

                                    I want to thank

                                    The buffalo

                                    For giving his body

                                    To us so we could

                                    Eat dinner

My son’s words tell me that eating is not only an agricultural act, but a spiritual one.  To the creator we say two words: Thank you

© 2011 RWS

Recently Willie Brown (California ex-Speaker of the House and Da ex-Mayor of San Francisco prior to Gavin the Gruesome Newsom) wrote an op-ed piece for the San Francisco Chronicle.  He said Arnold Schwarzenegger is "human, just like the rest of us".  Schwarzenegger hid the fact that he'd made a baby with his housekeeper 10 years ago.

It's okay if a Republican movie-star-turned-politician becomes a secret SuperBabyDaddy, it isn't okay if you're a single mother (or father) on Welfare.  Schwarzenegger sure didn't think so, he put single mamaz and their children in the California budget crosshairs many times.

How often does a very visible (Republican) public figure pratfall to Earth at warp speed and gets a pass from those who should know better?  Too often.

It's always a good time to get a grip and change the channel.  Stop attacking and blaming poor people, and poor mamaz.  Stop defending The Gropenator and others like him.

The same people who said that nuclear power would be so cheap we wouldn't  need meters to measure its use have written more chapters in the on-going  private for-profit power producing fairy tale.  PG&E wants to charge its customers $3 a month to have a smart meter.

Smart meters cause neurological problems (as well as cancer and possibly sterility) for many people initially forced to have one attached to their home.  There has been tremendous controversy over the so-called "smart" meters, including one attached to a home which transmitted information about the wrong address (plus, the homeowner was never informed about the installation...). 

The CEO of PG&E should take an 8% salary cut before even hinting about this kind of tomfoolery.  Try to live on a budget of $200 a month (after paying the rent).  I either have to not pay PG&E, or cut back on food or medicine.  If a bunch of customers show up at PG&E's door with buckets of tar and pillows, it ain't a sleepover!

May 26th, 2011, 750 people filled a room at a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) meeting.  The PG&E Vice-President-in-the-room wore a suit that looked like it cost enough to feed the room steak-and-potatos.  This dog-and-pony show will eventually result in a yes vote for public power in San Francisco.

Guess who has the most to lose if that happens?  Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir is PG&E's biggest source of power generation.  It belongs to San Francisco.  When that happens the VP's clothing budget might be more in the range of Goodwill than Gucci.  Hopefully the shareholders of the company won't get the idea to have a tar-and-feather-themed sleepover.