New Orleans Lower 9th District April '07

If the Upper 9th is a sort of Wild West, the Lower 9th is a sort of post-bomb Hiroshima. It is quiet with very few people around save for the tourists driving around with cameras like myself- over 18 months after Katrina. There are many vacant lots where houses have been razed and tall grass has reclaimed the plot after a lengthy interruption. Zac says that each time he has come to see it, there are fewer structures; more open land. Hand written, makeshift streetsigns have been put up on poles, since the old ones have vanished. The levee wall is standing again and what once was a neighborhood is now like a field splattered with misshapen houses that crumbled in on themselves or floated to new resting spots and positions. The doors are usually gone and you can look in to see washers and dryers, toilets, bicycles, couches, desks, mattresses, light fixtures overturned or jumbled together. There was a water heater that had somehow floated up to an attic. In one house you could see some clothes hanging neatly, totally anomalous to the mashed potato crunch of most everything else. It is voyeuristic, peering in to the empty broken rooms searching out the everyday articles that belonged to other people’s lives before the last hours when they had to flee or drown. Like the broken watch that was laying on a mattress, every house was a picture of time standing still and broken.

There's a Facist Preaching in my Backyard

Last week I attended a lecture by Chris Hedges, a longtime New York Times war correspondent, and most recently, the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." Hedges told us about his father, a Presbyterian minister in New England who tried to shut down the one local bar, but who was also a progressive, opponent of the Viet Nam war. When Chris was only 12, his father told him earnestly that if the war was still going on when he became 18, he would go to prison with him. To this day, Hedges says, that he carries a rather gloomy image of having to sit with his father in a jail cell while the war raged on.

Hedges says that there are 10's of millions of Christians who are part of the religious right, angry about taxes, entitlement programs, and government regulations in addition to the usual stuff about same sex marriage, creationism, and abortion. He said that they see the war in Iraq as part of an apocalyptic battle between Christianity and Islam. The "Christian Embassy," a Washington D.C. based fundamentalist organization has many ties in the Pentagon. Forty generals attend the weekly bible sessions. Fundamentalists account for about 50% of military chaplaincies. There is a conscious effort to infiltrate the military and law enforcement.

A number of fundamentalist organizations are fighting against hate crime legislation, because they don't want to have to reign in their diatribes against gays and lesbians and immigrants on the hundreds of radio stations they run across the country.

He says that the mainstream media are not examining this humongous story.

Profits and Loss.... Earthstory

Did Nero actually fiddle while Rome burned? Could people actually continue to stoke our "modern" economies and lifestyles until all the glaciers and forests and coral reefs are gone? Until cities disappear under water and societies wither from famine? There's an episode (12/5/03 - "Middle of Nowhere") from This American Life, my favorite radio show, that left a huge impression on me. It's about a South Pacific island, Nauru, whose 12,000 or so people were surrounded by trees, many that bore fruit. In the late 1800's an Australian man brought back a piece of what looked like petrified wood from the island and used it as a doorstop. Another man at his work discovered that it was actually a rich phosphate and Nauru became very conspicuous on the world map. One colonizing country after another came to mine the phosphate during the 20th century. When colonialism went out of style and gave way to globalization the citizens of an independent Nahru continued to sell off their valuable phosphate rich parcels until the tiny island was almost completely denuded of topsoil and trees. For awhile, in the late 80's, the "Nauruinians" were the richest people per capita on the entire planet. By the late 90's, except for some trees on the perimeter, the entire surface of the Manhattan-sized island is all dusty gray-white coral. All food and even drinking water must be flown in.

(The story gets into the crazy and barely legal ways Nauru has schemed to raise money without any natural resources to sell.)

To me, this little island is a total metaphor for the larger group of us inhabiting Planet Earth, which is just a bigger, more spherical island. Have we reached the equivalent of the late 80's in Nauru?

That's my son!

I went to Flickr.com, a site where people post their photos. I searched for "New Orleans + tornado" and found some photos from three different photographers. I noticed that one had two shots of a house where two walls were blown out. When I enlarged the second one, I saw it was my son Zac standing in front of it. That's the house he'd told me about that I mentioned in my previous blog entry. Yet another example of the internet shrink-wrapping our world.

My own photos on Flickr can be found at: here.

Tornado in New Orleans 2/13/07

My son Zac just called to tell me his New Orleans neighborhood was hit by a tornado at 3:30 AM last night. The whole house was shaking, a couple of windows shattered, transformers were exploding outside, and the porch railing was blasted apart by some flying debris. Apparently, his house fared much better than those of many neighbors. At first light, he and his roommate went out as did many others to find the streets covered with broken phone poles that had snapped in half and a swarm of electrical, phone, and cable wiring weaving through the streets like a high-tech spider web. In five hours, all the neighbors had cleared the streets. Zac helped various people board up their shattered windows. He helped one man remove valuable doors and windows from the two walls that had been blown entirely off his house. Others are missing their roofs, while nobody has electricity or landlines for phones. Zac used his cell phone to tell his employers at Habitat for Humanity that he would not be coming to work today. Speaking only partly as his dad, I think Habitat should have all their workers out in that neighborhood (a portion of Uptown) for the next day or so and count it toward their work hours. Apparently some of the Habitat volunteers who heard what Zac (their supervisor) and his roommate were up to, came out and lent a hand today as well. New Orleans seems like a magnet for natural disasters. I'm so proud that Zac knew instinctively what he needed to be doing today.

Wikipedia: Got Truth?

A few of us were talking about the amazing phenomenon of Wikipedia, the comprehensive, peoples' encyclopedia, that anybody can help to write. One voiced his concern that since participants can change entries to reflect their own opinionated positions on any controversial topic, eventually few sites would be credible. I said that school textbooks also reflect prejudices and world views of the people in power and the popular perspective of their time and place. My friend said that ideally you'd like people who are actually from a specific community to write the entries about their reality. I pointed out that physical communities are frequently the greatest practitioners of self deception particularly when they feel threatened by the community "on the other side." So where you gonna go for "truth?"

Meditation Novice

I went to my first meditation class and sitting. It was peaceful sitting and breathing and noticing that. It wasn't long before I was thinking that I hadn't finished my Starbucks coffeecake earlier at home, and where the heck had I put it down? Then I noticed my digression and refocused on my breathing. Minutes later I was mentally reviewing scenes from a famous fight between Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard that had been playing on a sports channel as I'd eaten dinner that evening. I sharpened the focus on my breathing again, but not before noting that thoughts are often a lot like TV shows for me, a source of endless amusement and distraction.

"Live in Peace" March and Rally in East Palo Alto

Today I went to the "Live in Peace" March and Rally in East Palo Alto. Since late December there have been 20 shootings including several murders of teenagers in the community of 30,000 Latinos, African-Americans,
Tongans, and Caucasians. Two young Tongan girls are among the dead. The relatively new police chief Davis has emphasized communications and community policing and the crime rate had gone down dramatically last year. But the violence - most of it youth violence - just erupted with a momentum of its own. Perhaps a couple of thousand from the community - all ethnic groups were represented - and perhaps a hundred or so from neighboring, affluent Palo Alto, participated in the march and rally. The poetry and raps from the young people who took the stage were most inspiring of all. Some of them were close to someone who's been shot or killed. The march, noisy with conversations, a Tongan marching band, and spontaneous whoops of joy, made a clear statement about the community's intention to reclaim the streets and Jack Farrell Park. Today the dangerous park was filled with balloons and hot dogs and people of all ages and backgrounds. There were even some normally intimidating, weathered, motorcycle guys wearing their decal-laden leather jackets. Everybody saying "stop d'a violence." Faye McNair Knox, the Executive Director of One EPA, was introduced as the "Mother of East Palo Alto." I wondered how she felt about that because, not that long ago, it was the generation before her - Ms. Mouton and Ms. Wilkes who would get introduced like that, but immediately she shouted out, "I'm a Grandmother now!" She said that there's talk that some of the shooters have "put down their beef" and put away their guns. Even they are affected by a community outpouring for peace and safety. Perhaps they want to be part of it, if indeed, everybody perceives a vibrant community in EPA.

"Rose" and my "Bubbie"

Last night we saw a one woman performance called "Rose", from the Traveling Jewish Theatre. Rose recounts her 80 years beginning with her life in a "schtetl" (Jewish village) in Poland, moving to the big, culturally vibrant Warsaw as a young woman, falling in love with someone she meets at a party, having a baby - only to crash into "realpolitik" as the Nazis invade Poland and create a crowded ghetto for the Jews in Warsaw. Her husband and child are killed. She manages to escape and after time in a refugee camp, ends up on the famous ship "Exodus" that is refused entry to Palestine. She outlives two more husbands in America. She has another child who ends up moving to a kibbutz in Israel. She is living alone in an apartment on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach when she has a poignant, angry, telephone exchange with her Israeli son.

It's amazing how little he knows of his mother's life.....all the pain she carries and the yearning for her first love, Yossel, and their child, her life in Warsaw or the refugee camps etc. It is reflected in his remarks about how Israelis resurrected the Hebrew language and discarded Yiddish as a relic of a rootless, victimized past. "Israelis look to the future" he says, and between that dynamic and the fact that she never shares her past with her new husband(s) and child, there is an internal life that gets erased from the books even before she's passed away.

It is a familiar story, repeated many times over. My own "Bubbie" (grandmother) somehow escaped the Nazis and made her way to Chicago, America where she and her daughter met my "Zadie", a widower with two daughters, who worked in the stockyards as a "shochet", slaughtering cows by the kosher method of a sharp knife across the throat. I know nothing of where she came from or how she got to America. They spoke Yiddish to each other and lived in a religious Jewish neighborhood called Albany Park (long after all the younger families moved north to West Rogers Park). Bubbie and Zadie obviously took pleasure from our visits at holidays, lavishing us with food, but there was little conversation, at least with us grandkids. It was like going to another planet, though the food was great. They had a red wagon that we played on for hours, but not much else in the way of toys. We played games with nuts since they had many of those.

She outlived my Zadie who died one year after retiring from the stockyards and continued her work as a kindergarden teacher in an Orthodox school. She eventually married another Orthodox man who had a job as a "mashgiach" at a Miami Beach hotel (a mashgiach certifies that all the food at the hotel is strictly kosher). She outlived him and ended up in an apartment by herself on Collins Avenue, just like Rose. I barely ever kept in touch after my stint in Chicago at the Yeshiva and my own Exodus from orthodox Judaism. Deborah and I can vaguely remember introducing her to our baby twins and the pleasure she beamed, though we can't remember where that occurred. I know nothing of her personal story. I don't know how her first husband died and what weights she carried in her heart.

Some time after she died, I received a call from her daughter in Brooklyn. She told me how much Bubbie loved all her grandchildren and that she was able to leave each one a hefty check for $15,000.

Chasidic Wedding

I went to Israel to attend my niece's Chasidic wedding. What a surprise to see many of her friends looking like they'd just come from the Rainbow Festival. The young women wore long beautiful headscarves and a number were drumming. The young men had long hair, accented by "payis" (earlocks) and danced in that arm-waving, swaying, bouncing way that we do at Grateful Dead concerts. The Chasidic band included an outstanding fiddler and the music was mixed with strains of "Chieftains-style" Irish rock. I'm going to have to do some research on the "Breslov Rebbe" and the "Bayla Rebbe" who are at the center of the ideology. I believe the Breslov Rebbe lived in the 1800's. My 20 year old niece and her 22 year old soulmate-husband were lost in each other's eyes for minutes on end, when he lifted her veil.

Shiite vs. Sunni Question

The question I have about Iraq is never addressed in the newspapers. Who has researched it? Is all the sectarian violence perpetrated by "religious" Sunnis and Shiites, or are all Sunnis and Shiites (even secular ones) mistrustful, angry, and either participating in or supporting the violence? If it's the former, then what per cent of Iraqis are secular people who just want to coexist and raise families and get on with their lives? Also, if one is a "religious" Sunni or Shiite, then what's the likelihood that he or she supports the violence?

(I put quotes around "religious" because many fundamentalists and orthodox of every stripe are so adept at preaching love and sacrality, yet fomenting intolerance and violence "with God on their side.")

Robert Scheer, journalist with a history

Palo Alto's Peace and Justice Center sponsored a talk by journalist Robert Scheer. Many are familiar with the famous Jimmy Carter line admitting to "lust in his heart" from an interview with Scheer. I last heard him thirty two years ago when I would attend his weekly talks in Berkeley with my then-housemate Charlie. The other night, he was still wearing jeans and a "workshirt" but as though someone had hit the fast forward button, he is now a hard-to-believe 70 years old.

Scheer, the former editor of Ramparts Magazine and longtime columnist for the LA Times, is as mesmorizing, entertaining, and information-laden as ever. He runs an online newspaper-blog with his sons, called Truthdig. He spoke about Presidents since his last book is about the five he has interviewed and studied as well as Bush II who he hasn't interviewed. He recounted presidential lies in every administration, but also found some good to report in nearly every case. He reminds us that Nixon was "pink" relative to the current batch of Republicans, what with the wage and price controls he implemented and his trip to China, opening diplomatic relations. (Cheney and Rumsfeld were around then and opposed the visit to China.) Thanks to Gorbachev's proposal, it was Reagan who destroyed a chunk of our nuclear weapons after their summit in Reykovik, Iceland. Carter's experience as Governor of Georgia, with a legislature that only met 60 days a year, wasn't much preparation for president and it really showed. Instead, he became a great ex-president. There just wasn't anything good to say about George II.

Scheer wrote a column in May, 2001 (five months before 9/11) blasting the administration for sending $43 million to the tyrannical, rabidly anti-American Taliban government in Afghanistan. Apparently, because they had outlawed farming opium, they deserved to be propped up with our dollars.

There was some Q & A, but I held my tongue since mostly I wanted to know how he stayed so trim and could retain so many historical facts in his memory.

Pekin "Chinks"

I was pleased and surprised that the "Not In Our Town" conference (community responses to hate crimes) was held in Bloomington, Illinois. I grew up 40 miles away in Peoria, Illinois. I don't think of that area as a leader in the realm of diversity awareness. The town next to Peoria is Pekin, named originally after Peking, China. The high school moniker was the "Pekin Chinks!" I remember one year in the late 60's when Pekin High went all the way to the state basketball finals. I imagine newspapers all over the state carried a headline about the "Chinks Victory" without thinking anything about it. At least as a kid, I never thought about it. There was also an ice skating rink in Pekin. You guessed it..... "Chink Rink." They had a local TV commercial that portrayed a simple line drawing of an old Chinese man on ice skates, mixed with their voiceover and maybe some music. "Institutional racism" is the boring term for when racism is so pervasive it is invisible or like wallpaper. I'm sure it wasn't like wallpaper to any Chinese folks who lived around there, but I didn't know any.

I went to Wikipedia and found that there was an attempt to change the high school moniker around 1974, but it didn't actually get changed until 1980. (My family moved around 1969.) Now they are called the Pekin Dragons.

Link to a blog with more detail.

Liz Halbert, Hero

Another post about the Not In Our Town gathering in Bloomington, October 2006: Nobody knew how emotional it would be to hear the stories in a room together over two early Autumn days. The stories had already been told in the "Not In Our Town" documentary series, but many were dabbing their eyes and standing to applaud spontaneously as they met in the flesh, exchanged hugs, and listened to the re-tellings. Though it took place in a rather institutional, unadorned hotel meeting room, it breathed with the quality of a tribal campfire where great stories are repeated and passed down and beyond to the next tellers.

These were ordinary folks from several dozen communities who had done extraordinary things to confront acts of hate and intolerance. Unfortunately, the biggest local hero of all could only be seen on a videotape. She died in December 2005 from a rapid viral attack at age 26. As a 15 year old, Liz Halbert had been one of the founders of the Not In Our Town chapter in Bloomington. She exuded the passion and clarity that are often more clearly expressed by a teen-ager. She’d been a panelist at the President’s Conference on Hate Crimes. When she got to college at Eastern Illinois University, she experienced an ugly, all-too-common incident. A group of white men yelled out “Nigger” at her from a passing car. She called her parents to invite them to a forum she’d organized after the incident. They said they expected to see about 25 people there and wanted to support their daughter. They should have known there would be hundreds including the mayor and the chief of police. An African-American senior stood up at the forum and declared that Liz’s incident wasn’t all that uncommon, but it was shocking that it took a freshman to show the community that it needed to deal with it.

We watched Elizabeth, a beautiful, Miss Illinois contestant, explain on tape that, “we’re all ignorant. There’s just so many cultures we can’t fully know. But we can control our ignorance rather than let it control us.”

MLK Jr. Day in Greenville

Lottie Gibson, James Hennigen, and Sandy Lechner came from Greenville, South Carolina to the "Not In Our Town" gathering in Bloomington. This year was the very first time that their county officially celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. day with a day off for county workers. It took a bitter NINETEEN year struggle to win that recognition for MLK Jr. It was so much more than a battle for a day off. Even the largest march ever held in the county – 10,000 mostly black citizens in 2003 – had no effect on the 8 right wing commissioners who did not want to recognize the man they publicly labeled a Communist and a womanizer. The MLK Jr. Day activists needed three more votes on the commission. Greenville is an extremely Republican county and the activists decided they should focus their efforts on a Republican primary to elect moderates. The hard-fought Republican primary produced three victories against right wing commissioners, but the right wingers did not give up easily. They contested the closest race and a recount confirmed the victory. The right wingers then appealed to the party leaders and a new election was ordered for that district. A warning went out that arrests would be made if any Democrats (read Blacks) voted in the primary. That warning backfired on the right wingers. Many African Americans who risked their lives a generation earlier to gain the right to vote, saw the warning as a mean-spirited (illegal) challenge. When they found out that only Democrats who had voted in the Democratic primary were forbidden to vote in the Republican primary, they came out in force. (When a county is so overwhelmingly Republican, not many vote in a Democratic primary.) The right wing commissioner was beaten more soundly than in the previous election and recount. The new commission voted for a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and Greenville County has joined the rest of the U.S. in honoring the civil rights leader.

“It was a racist war, Lottie delared. “We had a war!”

Not In Our Town

Last month (October 6-8), I attended the first national Not In Our Town gathering in Bloomington, Illinois, as a member of the video crew. Many of the 100 who gathered were characters from the same documentary, meeting each other for the first time. Their stories had been woven together in a series of three documentaries about local heroes and communities who stood their ground against hate crimes and bias.

It all started in 1995 when veteran documentary-makers Patrice O’Neill and Ryan Miller went to Billings Montana to record a story of a community that stood in unison against hate after a brick was thrown through the bedroom window of a Jewish child where Hannukah candles flickered in the night. Since 1993, hate activities by white supremacists in Billings had been alarming folks in the community, but also triggering collective responses of unity and compassion. KKK fliers were distributed, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated, the home of a Native American family was painted with swastikas, and threatening skinheads started standing in the back of a small African American church during its services . Thirty painters from the painters' union came after their workday to paint over the grafitti at Dawn Fast Horse's family home. People from other denominations and races came to stand at the Methodist Episcopal Wayman Chapel until the Skinheads moved on. After the brick was hurled through the Jewish child's window, the Billings Gazette ran a full page rendition of a Hannukah menorah and encouraged people to tape them to their windows. Some who taped the Menorahs in their windows received threatening calls or had their cars vandalized. This only multiplied the number who displayed the menorahs, until there were an estimated 10,000 homes with the newspaper art. From the earliest signs of hate grafitti, Police Chief Wayne Inman warned skeptical community officials to take it very seriously and mobilize community awareness. Now retired, he was one of those at the Bloomington gathering, retelling the Billings story.

Perhaps this time he was preaching to the choir, but his words scattered a new generation of seeds that will blossom into continued resolve and solidarity in communities across the country when hate rears its threatening face.

In a loose fitting tuxedo, I attended a dinner event at San Jose's Tech Museum and heard Bill Gates speak Wednesday night. If you closed your eyes, you could forget you were listening to the world's leading capitalist, and many might even come away thinking that capitalism does in fact seed the best innovations that in turn uplift all people. He was that good. The event was the sixth annual awards night for Tech Museum Laureates - those innovators who have employed technology to bring positive results - often in impovershed places. One of the winners created a simple filtering mechanism that can purify water and enable women's cooperatives throughout India to sell bottled, purified water. Another winner created a portable device that uses a digital camera-voice recognition computer in a way that helps visually impaired persons know what all the signs they encounter outside are telling them. Bill Gates talked about the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to eradicate diseases that are curable yet still ravage millions in developing countries every year. He said that if we somehow lived in neighborhoods that randomly mixed rich and poor, you would notice this child is starving and that family is ravaged with malaria, and we would immediately do something about it. He was passionate and genuine. If every successful capitalist turned a significant portion of their profits to seeding social solutions, maybe it would make a big difference, but that just doesn't happen. Many of the awards presenters such as execs from Intel and Agilent have laid off thousands in recent years that far outweighs the $50,000 they gave out to the winner in their category.

I got invited to the black tie event that very afternoon because the Foothill College table had one opening. I've been working with a wonderful Sociology professor there to conduct debates on state propositions before the past two elections. She knew from some small talk that I had a "hand-me-down" tuxedo. Unfortunately, I forgot to put on the suspenders and had to hold my pants up whenever I walked.

There really ought to be museums that are organized year around on the theme of innovations for social good such as these 25 annual award winners. How different the world would be if schools were organized around solution building projects as well where students developed appropriate technologies and education materials to make a difference in the health of the planet and its people.

Solidarity Action in the wake of a Possible Hate Crime

A few weeks ago, Alia Ansari, a Muslim woman, wearing a hijab (headscarf), was shot in the head as she walked to a nearby school with her three year old to pick up some of her other six kids. The killer got back into a car and drove off quickly though witnesses got the license plate # and police have been holding a Hispanic suspect. Unclear if he was in that car. Unclear if it was a hate crime.

One thing that is clear is that Muslims are frightened and insecure in Fremont, CA where it happened and where the largest concentration of Afghani emigres have settled. ("The Kite Runner" - bestselling novel - is, in part, about that community.)

There was a public forum with the chief of police. No information about whether it looked like a hate crime was given out. A Muslim organization came up with a "Wear the Hijab or Turban Day" as a way that people in the Fremont community could show their support for the safety of their Muslim neighbors. Given that we are just across the bay in Palo Alto, I wrote an email to a number of people connected to our schools and various agencies to encourage our own participation, as a demonstration of neighborly support and a way for us to stay proactively sensitive about acts of intolerance. I got back some feedback that wearing a hijab would be uncomfortable given that some Muslim regimes force women to wear them. The ACLU Chapter Board (of which I'm a member) declined to endorse the Fremont event. I wrote a second email suggesting we wear armbands or pin a card with Alia's name on it to our shirt and that we join in a moment of silence at noon with those in Fremont, and send them emails. Tomorrow is the day. I believe there will be about six small groups of folks doing this in various places in the community, including students at Palo Alto High School and members from a couple of churches, as well as some individuals. I'll be meeting some folks at the Media Center.

You have to have a thick skin to publicly suggest a community action.

Israel - Palestine through a Lerner's Eyes

Palo Alto's First Presbyterian Church hosted a weekend with Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor/founder of the progressive magazine, Tikkun, and a co-founder with Cornel West of a movement of Spiritual Progressives. Deborah and I went on Friday night and this morning (Sunday) to hear him speak for the first time.

It was great for me to hear someone voice the feelings/opinions I hold about Israel-Palestine, but rarely articulate. In my immediate family with its divide between ultra-religious Zionists and non-observant, culturally proud Jews the easiest course has been to avoid any discussion on the issue, not get deeply involved in any movements, and just not respond to my father's mailings of pro-Israel, pro-Orthodoxy articles. I have a friend who is a progressive Cuban American whose extended family is divided between rabid anti-Castro folks (mostly in Miami) and pro-Cuba folks. He reports a similar dynamic where he just keeps quiet to avoid the deep family rift that would otherwise occur.

As a spiritual progressive, Lerner says we must start with the "I-Thou" perspective rather than the "Evil Other" perspective of those with whom we are at odds.

He talked about the need for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to model a real "intention" for peace and generosity and seeing the humanity and goodness in "the other side." When the Oslo Peace Accords were signed he encouraged Israeli President Rabin to use it as an opportunity to travel to Palestine, initiate new bonds between the two peoples, express sorrow for all the killing Israel has done, etc. Instead Rabin went back to Israel and proclaimed he signed the agreement but doesn't trust the Palestinians and would take each step very slowly and cautiously. When Lerner subsequently asked him about it, Rabin said that first he had to build trust among his own people and after re-election he could move forward with more initiatives for real and lasting peace. Instead he was murdered by Israeli right-wingers before serving another term. Be careful because "the mask becomes the face," Lerner said.

It also felt good to hear him say to those who would promote total divestment from Israel that there is a big difference between selective divestment from companies that fuel the occupation such as Caterpillar Tractors and total divestment. He said that when the left would promote divestment from at least 15 human rights violators including the U.S., then he would be fine with adding Israel to that list and joining the cause. Too often it feels to me that people on the left demonize Israel on an emotional level that goes beyond the attention they give and express about places where torture, repression, and ethnic cleansing are practiced at least as vigorously. That gets very uncomfortable.

Gang Violence hits home

My 23 year old son was pretty badly beaten last night in San Diego as he was eating a burrito at an outdoor taco stand. A witness told police that the assailants were members of a local gang. The five alleged gang members were insulted when a drunk young man at the same taco stand, unknown by my son and his two friends, threw salsa out at cars passing by. My son has no memory of the beating, but was told at the hospital that he'd been hit hard in his face, fallen to the ground, and then stomped repeatedly on his head. He'd been walking around the parking lot in a bloody daze and was unable to answer simple questions. He only remembers when he came to in a hospital ER, restrained to a gurney to keep his head immobile, with police around the bed and no doctors available. Eventually he was let go to be driven home by his friends (also beaten) with no instructions about how to deal with the aftermath of a concussion. Fortunately or unfortunately he has had several of those before from snowboarding, wakeboarding, etc. and had his girlfriend keep him awake and observe him. The paramedics had cleaned the blood from his scalp and face.

I'm sure the assailants had no thoughts about this young man's inner beauty as they beat on his head; the way he makes so many of us laugh; his tireless sense of play, his abiding friendships, ready smile and affection, his poignant, early steps into post-college adulthood; least of all that he might have parents and a twin brother who would lay sleepless with concern in their respective homes miles away after hearing about it.

I'm sure they just saw a young white guy who may have been connected to the "salsa-insult" on their car. He remembers their car pulling into the taco stand lot and was naive enough to think he had nothing to worry about since he had nothing to do with the guy on the other side of the lot who had tossed salsa.

I remember that sense of empathy-free righteousness that allowed me, as a high school student already filled with rage, to hit others who I thought were the "bad guys" in one situation or another. I see that same inappropriate, unevolved mentality in the foreign policies of our White House leaders. That's all so abstract compared to the image I can't get out of my head in the wee morning hours..... of a heavy shoe coming down on my son's unconscious, precious head.