Thoughts and Words

A few etcetera poems

2009-07-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

A sonnet:

Sommeil
Rose fades to velvet midnight, streaked with cloud
Silently burning, our star retreats west
Your eyes dilate at encroaching night’s shroud
The world soundless, the pulse paused in my chest
A sudden cease of rushing, throbbing life
We exchange our earth for a place of rest
Melt and meld; air uncut by quiet knife
Mother Moon holds us dear in her embrace
We draw close together, forget all strife
Children beneath stars and Luna’s good grace
Your body my cradle, and mine for you
Our rhythm, our breath, our dreams to erase
Error of noise, of day, of what to do
Serenity beneath velvety blue

The following is a prompt piece written based on a piece by photographer, Suza Scalora.

Talisman of the Unprotected

A twinkle of light guides me to her, fragments of a fallen star dusting our earth,
Imaginary aeroplane has flown overhead, golden powder grated and released
Resting like a chemical on the tropical growth.
A shimmering sheen of luminescence glows from within her,
So fragile, neonate in her vulnerability,
Close enough to touch, the very idea an evil.
Her butterfly wings pulse the rhythm of her hummingbird heart,
And I remember what was said about the delicacy
Of crosshatching interconnectedness
A membranous growth of gossamer
The fragile wing and its twitching beat.
She sleeps, curled inside a cocoon of dream,
Her face a child’s, her folded hands a pillow in prayer,
It is April 17th, 7:00 pm.
Among the volcanoes, blushing hibiscus, emerald overgrowth, and honey creeper song,
She has made a nest of the ground, beads of light surrounding her, exposing her,
A child locked in sleep.
A blanket of petals outline her shape, she rests in a bed of ferns,
A child, a nymph, a goddess, an echo of witchcraft, crone, mother, and maiden…
The sacral cup of the feminine, a druidic icon, incomprehensible in her malleability,
Her purpose like clay molded into the necessary niche.
A cinnamon-stick finger wrapped in blueberry velvet hair, bronzed face and limbs,
Body wrapped in angel lace and mermaid silk.
She is serene and surreal, and I wonder if I too am dreaming.
I am reminded of Miranda’s epiphany, to see such sweetness in life.
A vision, and rightly named so, daughter of sweet rain, purple sunset, of firefly flight
This child of lavender, of dream, drowses defenseless at dusk.
Does she know what she is, her eyes relaxed shut, her breath inaudible,
Hushed slumber beneath moonlight, fragrant earth and creature smells, the air warm…
Does she know what she means, to the world, to me? Not now, not here, here in the grasp of the King of Dreams. Afraid, but still I am drawn to her.
When she sleeps, I dream with her, unguarded, unprotected. She is trust incarnate,
Challenge to choice, she is my testament.
She, talisman of the unprotected, is my talisman.
With her I have found resolve, my understanding.
A being of naïve innocence is a being unprotected,
At the mercy of the world, her core is a light, a warm organ of hope, its pulse a flicker.

untitled
The feeling is a quirk, one idiosyncrasy of many
Which courses in the same vein as the rest
Like my attraction to gasoline fragrances
And I mimic the babinski reflex and coo
It exists in my irrational senses
Remembering the symptom of hypersensitivity
To the physical realm
The feeling is an auditory one, kind of
It is a condition
Evoked between hush and murmur
With an emphasis on the whisper
Commonly occurring during day commutes
Amidst the studious librarians and their ilk
At homes left behind
But only during times of sunlight and warming
The muteness of hazy days
Volume as a pattern, it will not build without breath
Quiet snores from a corner or a girl with clogged nose
The breathing of the close-to-sleeping mouth
Nature noises, machine sound, all are muffled
A faint laugh tickles at my inside
When the conditions are met,
It erupts within me
Warm and unexplained arousal
I lower my eyelids, suddenly heavy
My lips part slightly in the pleasure of it
This internal feeling of sound and warmth
Sweet sleep brushes her lips over my eyes,
And I refuse the teasing; shake my hair like a stubborn child
The only key to the experience is consciousness, I know this
How unfortunate then, the feeling never lasts beyond the hush
And the hush will never stay
Though I wish it would

Tangent 1

I am, in fact, not real.
Scratch that.
I am, in fact, you.
That’ll do.
I am, in fact, you
Just as you are, in fact, me

The you that is I is the I that is you
A terribly confusing conundrum of collaboration
And I instead believe that we are just we
And letting that being that will do just fine

The concept of I am you is a frightening one
It is the stuff obsession is made of
And obsession is not we
And we are not it

Yet I wonder which is worse
You as I as you as me
Or the concept of possession

Once a man told me that I was his
And I wondered at this, because how
Could I be his when I was clearly my own
Or at the very least a commodity of my country
Because really now, who is actually their own

I never wanted to own a man, and I don’t think I ever shall
Just as I will never own a land because no one can own a land
The Indians knew this and this is why they were savage
They didn’t get it and neither do I

Perhaps I am uncivilized
Perhaps I speak to trees

I may yet be an Indian Princess.

Once
When I was a child
I thought my father was black
And I announced this to my kindergarten class

He is not black
But I may yet be an Indian Princess.

(alll poems copyright Brittni Aislinn Reilly)

Kahlo Poems

2009-07-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

These are three poems I wrote based on reactions I had to the Frida Kahlo painting, "What the Water Gave Me."

Bounty
Cornucopia of memory, spilling across linen over hardwood
Rotten fruit stinks in the air, before scents lost
A bitter longing to remember faces fades to pale
A stubbed toe on the porcelain bleeds into the water
Her momentary safe-keep, the liquid milky pink; catharsis comes
Aztec pyramids side by side with skyscrapers; closer to clean
Women on women, children of children; they erupt
Spilling over her body’s linen

Bleach
Here there is a stain, where once there was an origin
Spiders crawl forth and reclaim the empty nest
The very thing which made me she
Copper stain on the linoleum, on the silk, on the grass
Where I have been, the stain has followed
Like a river during rainfall
Creeping higher, higher
I wonder when the flood will come
And drench me with its rust water
Día de los Muertos. Ash rains down
And my grey hair disintegrates when I touch it.
A skeleton bleached white by sun and heat
Even it had once been red.

Borderland
The home of my mothers, my fathers, my children
Where has it gone, where will I find it?
In Atlantis I search, through ruins, through oceans
I touch like a thief and it knows this
Scattered among the junk, I have found a memory
Dry-lipped petals give way to trampling stomp
Steel-toe boots and hard hats, destruction obediently follows
Snail trail slime follows in their wake
Here, once, there had been a home. Now, now
Cuckoos implant their alien eggs; the children claw at ribcages
Rabbits and flies, crops of sparse life
Pavement, window, hammer, nothing
A wrecking ball has burst through my mirror
I had looked into the eyes of my father and my future sons
Before the glass had splintered faces to shards
It pierces my face and I am torn.

(all poems copyright Brittni Aislinn Reilly)

GCD Reflection 3.12.09

2009-03-24T09:11:00.001-07:00

Prior to doing these readings, I found myself struggling to understand how what we will be doing will be any different than traditional charitable volunteering. In truth, I am not certain of how GCD will exercise what we’ve been learning so far, but I’ve come to understand that not having an exact idea of what we will be doing is part of the process. The readings for this week were helpful in allowing me to understand that wanting to know exactly what our group will be doing and knowing the details of the community we’ll be visiting is part of my own oppressive thought processes on working in communities other than my own. It’s become clearer to me now that it is the role of Cape Charles to set the agenda of our visit and introduce their communities to us, rather than the role of our facilitators.
The reading, “Acompañar Obediciendo” by Simonelli was particularly instrumental in clarifying the objective and methods of community service learning. “We balance observation and participation; learning and helping; teaching and being taught; immediate results and sustainable activities; practice and research.” (p. 9). The journal entries of the college students who visited Ivanhoe reported on the experience of community service learning: “We came here to help them, to work hard, and instead they’re doing so much more for us. We came to give of ourselves but they’re giving us so much more.” (p. 285).
Prior to this week’s readings, I could only think of how we would be useful to Cape Charles as supports, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they would want us there to get to know us and spend time teaching us. I’ve been dreading experiencing resentment from our host community towards us, and being a representation of the oppressive forces that have created poverty through racism. The readings have helped me to open my mind to the possibility that perhaps Cape Charles might actually want us there for more than just manual labor.
In the chapter on Ministry in It Comes From the People, the authors touched upon what I was worried about representing to Cape Charles. “Some who had worked closely with the students began to feel uncomfortable, wondering if they were being taken advantage of, perhaps even being subject to ridicule… They made people feel inferior… Could they prevent the students’ presence from perpetuating the degradation and dependence that is all too often the lot of ‘charity’ recipients?” (p. 287-288). This was my big question about our own ASB trip. Could we enter a community such as Cape Charles or Ivanhoe and be more constructive than charities?
Balancing practice, method, and theory is critical. Without the content of the course, the insights of the readings, and the tools that we have acquired so far, I think the ASB trip would be unsuccessful. Coming to grips with my own privilege and the circumstances that have created my own social status and at what cost this status has been granted to me has been critical for me. Understanding agency and community service learning has allowed me to open myself up to what I might learn and gain from Cape Charles, rather than fearing how I will hurt the community. Simonelli’s article reminded me of how to use my academic training on myself. “Moving beyond feel-good resolutions to the inequitable distribution of wealth and privilege, anthropologically informed service-learning shows that we can be involved in the reconfirmation or ‘testing’ of critical theory… Anthropological models of learning and service are a gentle critique of other programs where a subtle, but deadly ethnocentrism still guides the provision of service.” (p. 14).
This has helped me to let go of guilt and fear, and rather approach the ASB trip with humility and to receive whatever it is that the Cape Charles community has to teach me. Quoting Gayatri Spivak, hooks provides sage advice for an individual in a social position of unearned privilege who is trying to learn how to an active anti-racist and ally: “She explains that ‘what we are asking for is that the hegemonic discourses, and the holders of hegemonic discourse, should dehegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other.’ Generally, this process of repositioning has the power to deconstruct practices of racism and make possible the disassociation of whiteness with terror in the black imagination.” (p. 177).

***

In the situation of being confronted by members of the community about our role of privilege and our intentions and motivations, it’s difficult to imagine the reality of the response I would be able to give, especially if I’m tired and dirty and under the impression that things have been going well. In reality, under these circumstances, it is quite probable that I would be shocked, my heart rate would accelerate, and I would become inarticulate and too anxious to really formulate a response. This is a problem I have with direct, hostile confrontations; I react by having a panic attack.
Ideally, however, in the event that I am able to work myself through the initial anxiety and panic of being confronted, I would hope to be able to engage in dialogue with the group, and hopefully do so with the support of my teammates. I would want to remind them that we were invited into the community, and that if the community feels that what we’re doing in their community is unwanted, then they should let us know. This to me feels like although it might be too defensive of a comment, it would be important to make it clear that the community is in control of the agneda and that we are simply guests who are here on their terms.
I would like to be able to ask the group of men if they would be willing to talk about this issue further, and if given consent, it would be a good opportunity to engage in a dialogue. I can’t predict what my teammates would do in this situation, but I would want to ask what gave them the impression that we were only here to assuage guilt and feel good about ourselves. If given the space to, I would hope to share with them that I’ve personally made a goal for myself to attempt to see everyone as sharing a common goal and common right: to be happy.
According to the Dalai Lama in his essay on Compassion and the Individual, “Because we all share an identical need for love, it is possible to feel that anybody we meet, in whatever circumstances, is a brother or sister. No matter how new the face or how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people. It is foolish to dwell on external differences, because our basic natures are the same.” This is different than wishing for a color-blind society. This mode of thinking asserts that we all share a common goal: to be happy. To be compassionate is to see people as having the right to be happy, and therefore respecting the cultural and individual perspectives of the pursuit of happiness. Equally important is to understand why people have become unhappy, filled with anger, or express hatred towards others.
If it became possible to engage in dialogue, I would want to know where these men were coming from when they made the comments, and under what circumstances they have been led to think this way. I would also want them to know my own perception and why I am here in this class. I’m not a spoiled rich kid, and I could share my own experience with being on the recipient end of charity. I remember very well my own feelings of resentment towards the college student volunteers who worked with Habitat for Humanity to build my family’s home.
I would want to stress that we are here on their terms, and we are here to learn from them so that we could go forward in our attempts to reconstruct the system that has granted unearned privileges at the expense of other equally deserving peoples. I would want them to know that we’re not here because we feel bad for people with a worse lot in life, but rather that we are sincerely invested in changing the power structure. Simonelli explains that “Theoretically, our work was guided by the notion of ‘agency’, and deriving from this, the act of giving agency to those to be ‘aided’, as a creative response to the colonial experience, of which anthropology was a part.” (p. 13).
It would be important to make it clear that we are not here to apologize and right the wrongs of our ancestors so that we can go to bed happy. We are here to work towards change. The aim of the group working with the Zapatistas is what we are hoping to achieve: “In the end, rather than a commitment between a place and a place, as is the usual notion of a sister city relationship, we developed an on-going relationship between an outcome and an outcome.” (p. 13). We are hoping to learn from them how we can change our own oppressive behaviors and help to liberate others from internalized oppressions. I would ask them how we could change this system and create social justice, and how we would be able to do it on their terms. I’m not sure of the reality of this conversation, but it’s a conversation I’d like to be able to have.

GCD Reflection 2.26.09

2009-03-24T09:09:00.001-07:00

I think Maxine Waller gives a solid answer to the question of “Why is Ivanhoe poor” in her Thanksgiving 1987 speech: “The Constitution of the United States of America is not for the people of Ivanhoe.”(p.71). Law making and policy making rarely has been made in the best interest of the poor. Reflecting back to Johnson’s Privilege, Power, and Difference, it is important to recall that: “Privilege is always a problem for people who don’t have it and for people who do, because privilege is always in relation to others… Everything that’s done to receive or maintain it – however passive and unconscious – results in suffering or deprivation for someone.” (p.8). Laws and policies are designed and upheld by those who have established privilege and prioritize the maintenance of their privilege.
Comparable to many other places where poverty is a contemporary issue, Ivanhoe is located on land that was once rich in resources. Natural resources are valuable, especially to those in power. The dominant power has historically been capable of deciding who those resources would be used for and for what purpose. This is how things played out in Ivanhoe. “Outsiders (capitalists) with money or vision or maybe both, saw a chance to get rich quick and took advantage of the situation.” (p.19). The powers that be were able to build furnaces and mines to remove and use the resources in the land that Ivanhoe was built upon.
People came to Ivanhoe to work for the powers-that-be to do the labor necessary to extract the resources for popular use. Immediately, this set up a power relationship that awarded privilege to the companies and dependency to the residents. This power relationship determined the fate of the people to become oppressed and impoverished. “When a town or region is dependent on one industry, the people and the community become powerless and dependent, isolated from important decision making.” (p. 30). The community was dependent on the jobs provided by the mines and plants, and when they shut down, they created a poor town.
Ivanhoe remains poor because of their oppression by the three faces of power, as we learned according to Ganz. If the first face of power for Ivanhoe is first, the companies who were able to decide how to allocate the resources and also able to decide that there were better(cheaper) places to get the same job done. Once the Ivanhoe Civic League was established and they attempted to take some power back, they were faced by a new representation of the first face of power, agencies and organizations, the county officials, other members of local and state government.
When the Ivanhoe Civic League was confronting the first face of power and were met by nice sounding words and praises, the second face of power was at work ensuring that the issues of the people of Ivanhoe stayed off the table. “Despite all the accolades and words of encouragement from politicians and government officials, there was little material help or resources readily available to the community of Ivanhoe.” (p.67). The Ivanhoe Civic League discovered that there were many bureaucratic limitations to help and guidelines that they had been unaware of preventing their issues from being resolved.
The third face of power is at work in the establishment of the power relationship between the haves and the have-nots of Ivanhoe history. The company was able to get away with destroying most of the vitality of the community because the community suffered from internalized oppression and a feeling of helplessness and dependency caused by the loss of their jobs and the loss of their pride. This is why it took so much and so long before Ivanhoe was able to finally protest the damage being inflicted upon them. Because they had been so damaged already, this was held against them, as agencies and organizations were reluctant to assist Ivanhoe because they had no capital.

***

I think one of the most important strategic actions taken by the Ivanhoe community is to educate themselves. This is important because it has allowed the Ivanhoe Civic League to see the bigger picture of oppression and privilege in the world. Maxine Waller describes what she was able to see once her eyes had been opened: “We didn’t get in this situation overnight… The depression is a world problem and there are people all over the country, and all over the world, bringing about these little changes just like we are.” (p.81). Before she became educated about the connections between poverty and government, she was a less effective leader because her goals were addressing the immediate problem (lack of jobs due to lack of a factory) rather than the root of the problem (community dependency on industry).
Because the immediate needs could not be met, the community benefited greatly from understanding why their demands would not be met and what they could do instead. “There was less of a sense of helplessness and more of a growing sense of power about the future and possibility of controlling it.” (p.86). Without educating the community to empower themselves, they would not be able to preserve the community.
Before the Ivanhoe Civic League embarked on the Community Education Program, they recorded their victories as well as their failures. An important tactical action used by the Ivanhoe Civic League was the event, Hands Across Ivanhoe. Especially early on in the development of an organization, having such a symbolic and empowering event was particularly useful. The first thing the group needed to do was come together to show that the group was willing and committed to working together to solve the community’s problems.
Maxine put it well when she said: “We didn’t just need something to raise funds. We needed something to join people together, to bring people together, and let them stand up for something they believe in.” (p.53). As the Ivanhoe Civic League was in it’s early stages here, it really did need to show the community something physical and tangible to express the sentiment of working together. The result of this was strengthening the bonds of the community and providing them with hope and excitement for the future of the Ivanhoe Civic League and the town itself.
This is part of what turned into what I consider one of the important and defining strategies of the Ivanhoe Civic League. The use of theatre to develop community, strengthen relationships, and to express the voice of the people seems to have been especially effective with Ivanhoe. “Theatre, which builds on the storytelling of oral tradition, is another way in which the community members are able to tell their story and reflect on and learn from their experiences.” (p.111). Using theatre and poetry and other creative techniques not only honors the heritage of the community, but empowers the people through the encouragement to use their voices and to tell their story.
The theatre project was useful to the Ivanhoe Civic League in the lessons learned about the relationships between the members of the community and the outside forces that choose to work on behalf of the people of Ivanhoe. This conflict, although it only affected a few, was a beneficial experience in that it taught both Maxine and the outsider director that it is important to understand how much is too much. By this I mean that it is incredibly essential for the success and health of those involved in community development to recognize when they are spreading themselves too thin. When a select few take on more responsibilities than they can reasonably handle and remain healthy, then the goal of the event

GCD Reflection 2.19.09

2009-03-24T09:08:00.001-07:00

The Allan Johnson readings from his book Privilege, Power, and Difference were very effective for me in terms of thinking of new ways to explore social justice and the role I play in this work. The language that he used I found to be useful in that they articulated many ideas that I have tried to communicate to myself and to other people, but have been unable to find the words to express the intent. Throughout the course of the four chapters we read, I noticed feeling gratitude at having been provided a way to say what I want to be able to say.
I recognize the fact that Allan Johnson is situated in a role of having unearned advantages to his various overlapping social statuses (white, male, heterosexual, nondisabled, middle class), and that it may be as a result of my own internalized socialization to allow the viewpoints of the dominant groups to be received as the “right” way to say things. I did not find Barbara Love’s article to be inarticulate or in any way “inferior” to Johnson’s writing style, quite the opposite actually. However, I feel that the language used in Privilege, Power, and Difference was more accessible and graspable, and even if this is only because of the fact that Johnson has been able to benefit from the resources of academic training and development of language use and writing ability because of unearned advantages. This is something I would like to remain observant of throughout further research and readings.
I found a few quotes of his particularly resonant and useful to clarify my own ideas and opinions. “Privilege is always a problem for people who don’t have it and for people who do, because privilege is always in relation to others… Everything that’s done to receive or maintain it – however passive and unconscious – results in suffering or deprivation for someone.” I found that statements such as this and others were particularly useful to me in discovering a way to speak about social justice to those who benefit from unearned advantages due to social characteristics. I know from personal experience that I have been afraid to discuss sexism with men because of being accused of being a feminist. This reaction stops conversations before they can even begin. I feel somewhat more prepared to address the idea of the word “feminist” being an accusation or insult, however I do not believe I have the language set needed to be able to help guide those who have learned to become uncomfortable by words such as “sexism” or “privilege” to open their eyes to the idea that their discomfort is caused by social construction.
One of the very important concepts that I took away from the Johnson article was the idea of reclaiming the words used to address oppression. “We have to reclaim these lost and discredited words so that we can use them to name and make sense of the truth of what’s going on.” This point reminded me of the Inga Muscio book, Cunt, in which she is adamant to help the reader understand that fearing words gives words power, and that if women want to in anyway deconstruct the patriarchy, then they need to discover how to use the language of oppression constructively.
This is the beginning of developing a liberatory consciousness. I am beginning to understand that although I have been enmeshed in trying to make social change happen and deconstruct oppressive hierarchies, I have been falling short in addressing where I have been failing. Love’s guidelines to enabling a liberatory consciousness I have found useful in that I was able to read the Johnson article with awareness of the privilege he has in that he is able to write such a work, and analyze the usefulness of his language in that it will benefit me to use it to communicate with those who benefit from unearned advantages. Hopefully, I will be able to proceed with the action and accountability aspects of her guidelines by actually attempting to use the language he is presenting to engage in discussions with people whom I otherwise would be afraid of being accused as being an upstart feminist/activist.

***

I believe that it is essential for any method of grassroots organizing to address privilege and class, and especially how these are interconnected. As we learned in Bridging the Class Divide, a peace organization could not have been successful if it did not address privilege and class. I believe that the future of activism and social change is in bridging the divide between “isms” and movements. An interdisciplinary approach to organizing and activism is the only way that change will be made.
Barbara Love provides a useful toolset for anyone hoping to work at something related to social justice or organizing. I think that even if the goal of the organization is not specifically geared towards moving the dominant culture towards embracing social justice (such as environmentalist organizations or peace work), it is still crucial that if the group is hoping to work together and to be effective on a larger scale, the individuals of the group need to attempt to work towards developing a liberatory consciousness. This is because the current world state is in interdisciplinary trouble, and it will therefore require an interdisciplinary solution. If we as a people do not even grasp the idea of interdisciplinary work, then it is going to be significantly more difficult for the human species to come together to solve the multiplicity of troubles that plague the Earth.
Of course, certain issues can be embraced by the dominant culture and they can attempt to create solutions that are designed with only the dominant culture in mind. The “Go Green” movement is a good example of a serious problem (climate change and environmental degradation) that affects interconnected people who are separated by social construction and is caused by interconnected sources that are also separated by structures of oppression already in place. Although there are a lot of grassroots efforts going on that tackle environmental justice and the connections between social justice and sustainability, there is also a lot of manipulation of this issue by people with unearned advantages. Such as expensive products marketed to the white liberal middle-to-upper class bracket that allow this demographic to feel as if they are doing something to create a “solution”, and that other people, who are unable to perhaps afford such products or have access to resources that would help them make choices that favor sustainability, are part of the “problem”.
This is why a lot of the time movements and organizing efforts can have a one step forward, two steps backward effect. Awareness is raised about a particular issue, and if enough people seem to be interested about this issue, rest assured that the dominant culture will be able to use this issue as a way to benefit dominant culture whether it be through profitability of “hot topics”, production of “justifiable” methods of consumption, or the further pulling of the veil over the eyes of those who belong to dominant culture. “Privilege increases the odds of having things your own way, of being able to set the agenda in a social situation and determine the rules and standards and how they’re applied… It allows people to define reality and to have prevailing definitions of reality fit their experience.” So it is that those with privilege are able to decide what the issues are and are therefore the ones who decide what the solution will be. This is what is keeping a lot of people from waking up to the reality of what is hurting this world, and from developing their own liberatory consciousness and being able to create real change.
Grassroots organizing is the venue in which interdisciplinary approaches to gigantic interconnected problems can be understood and the individuals who participate in grassroots movements are able to free themselves from internalized oppression and learn to face their own privileges and unearned advantages and begin to understand the history and reality of privilege and oppression. Because interdisciplinary models of grassroots organizing, such as the Piedmont Peace Project, integrate the issues of class and privilege into their main goals (peace work) they are able to function as a unit and help each other understand the concept of interconnectedness and the relationship between problems (environmental degradation, unfair treatment, military spending) and privilege.

GCD Reflection 2.12.09

2009-03-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

Reading the first chapter of Streets of Hope, I kept encountering a theme of powerlessness. The power over where to live and the safety and security of their homes and livelihood seemed to be entirely outside of their hands. Bothwell comments on how this affected the community: “It was like a sense of having no allies. People were really powerless.” As a reader and encountering the information that instilled a sense of despair as to the hope of the community that I was learning about, approaching this assignment of discovering the power map of the Dudley Street Neighborhood is daunting. It seems that no matter the intent of the community to serve the interests of the constituency yet they are still unable to make any progress because they are unable to get past the “gatekeeper” as Ganz puts it.
However, if power is going to be defined as being “not a thing, attribute, quality, characteristic, or trait – it is a relationship,” then I can begin to understand how to go about thinking of the power of the Dudley Street Neighborhood. The issue I am examining is the housing issue. The interests of the community I would assume to be to own or rent properties that are in adequate conditions and free from institutional methods of discrimination and debilitation against tenants and homeowners. Bothwell is quoted as saying “We were trying…to figure out some way to build some sort of a land trust… that would place control of the land in the hands of community people.”
The needs of the community are for the most part able to be satisfied through acquired resources. The city, the realtors, and policy makers, benefactors hold the resources needed to address these interests from the public and private sector, and philanthropists. Unfortunately, educational resources need to be made available to the Dudley Street Neighborhood in order for them to recognize the avenue of finding support from philanthropists or other external organizations/individuals. As we saw in Bridging the Class Divide, the town of Midway was unable to acquire power in order to change the relationship between their neighborhood and the forces that effect it until the community of Midway had been provided access to educational and informational resources that would allow them to begin to formulate how to go about finding balance and justice.
The members of the community who are attempting to have their issues heard and recognized represent the first “face of power” of the Dudley Street Neighborhood. The specific individuals would be the organizing team led by Bothwell and aided by the person from the Department of Agriculture. However, comparable to the African Americans of the civil rights movement, their urges for recognition and assistance with the housing issue were blocked by the “gatekeeper”.
The city officials who laughed at the people of the Dudley Street Neighborhood are the people responsible for the disparity of power of the community, because they act as the third “face of power.” These are the forces that maintain the feeling of hopelessness that the community is met with and reinforce internalized oppression. The power in the hands of the city officials is removed directly, by having the issues blocked up front through neglect as well as through resistance to cooperate. It is also removed indirectly through the use of accusations of the character of the group attempting to obtain a balance of power. In the 1979 BRA report, the Dudley community is accused of being apathetic, lacking organization, and lacking commitment and willingness to change the state of their community. This paints the Dudley street community as being responsible, and by presenting them this way, policy makers, philanthropists, and other outside supports are less likely to aid the Dudley neighborhood by providing resources.
It is not that the Dudley community does not to improve their community or that they are not organizing themselves to do so, rather, the problem is that the power is being withheld and made unattainable to the community. The decisions of policy makers and federal agencies such as the FHA and the Boston city officials hoping to profit off of the destruction of a community because they are racially and economically biased, makes it an extremely daunting endeavor for the community to obtain safe and secure homes. Not only that, but these are people who are economically disadvantaged due to the racist institution that constricts the options of the community, and thus have limited time and existing resources.
As power is being withheld from the group by officials and by the constraints of the community’s resources, the ability to meet the needs of the constituency is handicapped. I believe that the group is going to have to use the model illustrated by Linda Stout with the PPP in order to find a new avenue in which to obtain their goals of having the land be in control of the community.

***

In both the Kretzman and the Stout readings, it is made clear that the change that low-income disadvantaged communities deserve to see come to fruition is not going to come from the top down. Stout discusses at length how it is important that the community first empower themselves and educate themselves before they are able to make change first to the immediate needs such as safety and hygiene of the community (trash dumping, road access, etc.) and then later to make the changes to policy and national issues that will affect the vitality of the community from the top-down. A multi-directional approach does not need to be seen as binary (top-down vs. bottom-up), rather it could be seen as cyclical and more of a closed loop. This should be the goal of philanthropists, community organizers, and social justice activists.
Stout tells us in Bridging the Class Divide that she had aversions and resentments toward the upper middle class white organizers who wanted to make decisions for the benefit of the communities they were working with. This restricted the interests of the communities or issues they were working to support, by placing the interests of the organizers in front of the interests of the community. Additionally, the majority of these sorts of organizations are using the model described by Kretzman and McKnight as being a “Needs-Driven Dead End.” By using this model, the lives of the individuals are made easier and yes, small improvements do happen.
A friend of mine is working on a project in Springfield right now that reminds me of the successes of working to benefit the homeless and reduce homelessness in the city. Project Homeless Connect originated in San Francisco and has been spreading city to city to reduce homelessness and help serve the individual needs of those who do not have shelter for the night. She told me that they go out on Monday nights and stay out nearly the whole night trying to find people sleeping on the streets to give them blankets, food, and help them find shelter. This seems like one of those “leaky pipe problems” of attempting to put a band-aid on a gaping wound, and that more people should perhaps be directing their efforts at reforming policy and working from the top down to address the issue of national homelessness. However, Project Homeless Connect has only been in operation in Springfield for a little over a year, and already there is over 40% less people sleeping on the streets than their was before the project began. The motto of Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco is that “It will take all of our collective help to end homelessness in San Francisco – help from government, from business, from non-profit agencies, and from individual community members.”
This organization is another example, like the Piedmont Peace Project, of an attempt to make the community better for all involved in the community by using a closed-loop and all-inclusive approach to achieving the goals. This is the capacity-focused development approach in work. The capacity of the individuals of the community might be limited due to lack of resources, however if the education and information is provided to the immediate community to achieve both the immediate needs as well as working towards a long-term goal through the building and negotiation of relationships (the definition of power according to Ganz), then the community might become enabled to work towards a goal that is in the interests of the constituency rather than having external agencies decide what the interests of the constituency is.
Having worked as a teacher, I find myself often experiencing confliction over what direction to work from. Do I want to get involved with reforming policy by advocating for these underrepresented groups and making public their issues through the use of publications of written works? Do I want to be in the classroom helping to teach those most in need? What I have realized is that I cannot advocate for a group that I have not become a part of myself. It is more important for me to involve myself in a community by providing the resources that are withheld from low-income urban neighborhoods, and helping the individual members of the community discover how to meet their goals on their own terms.

GCD Reflection 2.6.09

2009-03-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

Internalized classism is one of the many results of institutionalized oppression. Stout describes institutionalized oppression as being “when a prejudice is supported by all the systems of society with all the power to back up that prejudice, so that it becomes the canon – the accepted way.” Because of the acceptance of classism in dominant society, members of all economic classes are subject to internalized classism, be it privilege or oppression.
Kadi mentions a few of the tools that have led to the general acceptance of classist beliefs. “Class socialization begins early. Material possessions, home environment, and neighborhood provide information about our present situation and our future. Family members’ sense of/lack of entitlement and expectation provides more. Social constructions of class, put out by institutions such as media and school are a third factor.” From an early age, we are led to believe in classist stereotypes such as that poor people are stupid and that is why they are in poverty. Because of these structures in place that maintain class difference and retain class privilege, the majority of people living in a classist society remain unaware of the ways they are oppressed by it or the ways that they benefit from it. Same as a white person may believe that they are not a racist because they have not learned to understand the ways in which they benefit from white privilege, a middle or upper class person may not recognize the privileges they have due to class nor understand the daily oppression of the poor.
Internalized oppression is important to understand and come to grips with in order for those who experience what Kadi describes as having the feet of the privileged on the necks of the oppressed, to empower themselves and grow as individuals and as a community towards creating justice. Recognizing and understanding institutionalized oppression (classism, racism, sexism, etc.) and how we as individuals internalize the mechanisms in place that reinforce the canon of social structure is the first step that has to be taken before a group can come together to explore ways to make social change happen.
While doing these readings, I was forced to come to terms with my own internalized oppression and classism. I identified with Kadi and Stout, having grown up in poverty. I can remember very clearly feeling separated from my peers because of class socialization. My father is a working class child of working class parents. He had a 9th grade education and has worked as a carpenter for his entire life, from when he dropped out of high school until the present moment in which he is in his late fifties. My mother was a first generation college graduate, but even having a degree would not save her from poverty. She has worked as a preschool teacher for her entire adult life, and now she is 60 and retirement is not an option that is foreseeable for her.
In my life experience, I was socialized to believe that my family was not as good, and that I could never be as good as the middle and upper classes. One of the damages I have withstood as a result of growing up poor in a classist society is a lack of confidence in myself socially. When I was young, my mother decided to move us out of urban and predominantly low-income Lynn, and to move into one of the segregated low-income housing neighborhoods in the predominantly white and middle-to-upper class town of Ipswich. Before, I hadn’t experienced the enormous disparity between classes, as almost all of my peers and neighbors in Lynn were in the same economic status as my family. However, in Ipswich, it was made abundantly clear to me that I was an outsider, somehow different from the other students. The other children’s parents brought them shopping regularly for new things, their families went on vacations; my mother’s four children relied on hand-me-downs from older cousins, and my mother couldn’t afford a car, much less a vacation. My upper-middle class friends would be afraid to come to the apartment my family lived in. My two brothers, sister, and I all internalized these things growing up, and each one of us struggled with academic failure in the public schools, depression and anxiety, low self-esteem and self-destructive habits, debt, drug addiction, and bad decision-making.
I dropped out of high school and wanted nothing more from life than to sleep through all of it. The conditions in which my family lived made me hate myself and hate my mother. Four teenagers experiencing an assault of institutionalized classism and taking the blame out on their single and clinically depressed mother for not being middle class and married sums up the environment in which I lived for the majority of my adolescence. I like to think of my mother as being “accidentally poor” though. She raised her children with values commonly associated with the more economically privileged. She raised her children vegetarian, refused to allow junk food into her house, provided us with intellectually stimulating toys, media, and books, and encouraged all of us to do well enough in school to go to college.
Because of my mother’s diligence to turn us into critical thinkers and expose us to the pleasures of the middle class that many others in poverty to not have exposure to (such as healthy nutrition or literature), my siblings and I have all come out of our experience growing up poor with an awareness of the injustice of institutionalized classism. This is not true for most children who are raised in poverty, however. Unless their community or parents are able to provide the resources for them to learn how to talk about, investigate, and thus make change to these social injustices, than the children of poverty are only able to internalize this oppression as anger, confusion, or self-loathing.

GCD Reflection 2.6.09

2009-03-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

A peace organization would fail if it did not address issues of social justice and community building. If the word “peace” can be loosely defined as being the absence of hostility, healthy interpersonal relationships, and the acknowledgement of equality between political relationships as well as personal relationships, than a peace organization would then need to be capable of dealing with social justice and community building.
Although the Alinsky method comes into critique in Bridging the Class Divide, I think that there is a truth to the connections Alinsky made between international peace and community empowerment. Stout sums this up as “if you take care of local needs and empower people locally, social change on a national level will happen.” This is where community building becomes an essential component of an agenda for national peace and social change. It also seems to make sense to me that if the community is unable to see the connections between what is going on in their immediate and daily life to what is happening in the national sphere of policy and politics, than it is going to be incredibly difficult to rally your local community to vocalize and take action to change the national issues.
This is where Alinsky’s model falls short, and Stout’s model improves upon his. By providing the resources and support to her community to help them “see the connections between national military policy and local problems so that they understood how their own lives were affected…” than she would be able to help the community to “find their own voices to say what they thought was wrong or right about these national policies.” This is where the connection between peace work and community development occurs. Through PPP’s literacy programs and get-out-the-vote programs, Stout’s community was able to develop despite the forces against them, such as classism and racism. By educating the community about the relationship between poverty and injustice and national policy and military spending, the communities are able to help themselves vocalize and take action. One of the most memorable stories from the book was the story of Midway, the segregated town within the town of Aberdeen. Stout points out that “it was absolutely essential that the folks in Midway do it for themselves,” referring to organizing themselves to go to the town council to demand a dumpster.
By making the connections to injustices going on locally to policies that occur nationally, the community is able to develop practically on a local scale while the awareness of peace work is given the opportunity to develop. If the community was not given the opportunity to empower themselves and take care of the immediate needs (as was the goal with Alinsky), then the community is not able to care about an agenda for national social change and international peace. If the members of the community are burying their trash in their backyards and barely able to afford the basic necessities, than there is simply no use in going into the community to ask them to be mindful of military spending and to take action in policy making.
Social justice is also an incredibly important part to community development, especially when the larger goal of the organization is to work towards peace. If peace inherently implies equality, than the goal of an organization needs to make clear that if their agenda is going to be to achieve peace or bring humanity closer to peace, than they need to address issues of social injustice. I think it was especially important for Stout to include social justice as a goal within her organization.
Again, this is how community development is essential in peace work. “I don’t believe we can win the change we want without first building an organization whose inner workings reflect the same commitment to equality and mutual respect that we strive for in our organizing work.” Stout makes it clear that she and the PPP need to be the change they want to see in the world. If racism, sexism, homophobia, or classism is tolerated within the organization, than social justice and thus peace will not be an accomplishable goal, even on the local scale.

GCD Reflection on Pre-Readings

2009-02-07T19:19:00.000-08:00

In my personal experience of life in the university setting, I have come to the realization over the years that there is a class assumption made by students and staff alike. Having experienced the majority of my life living in impoverished conditions, or rather, as the word poverty changes meaning depending on place and time, the conditions of my pre-college life would be considered impoverished in comparison to the status quo of white American society. If I had asked myself before these readings the question, “why are people poor”, my answer would have been that people are poor because of greed and oppression. Poverty is a symptom of a world governed by the misguided and greedy elites that usurp land and labor from those who have lived life according to simplicity and with mindfulness of the members of their particular society and culture.

After these readings, not so much has changed about my impressions of class disparity and the condition of poverty, however I feel I have received clarification and more articulate ways of expressing this impression. What has been particularly clarifying to me has been the examination of the perpetuation of poverty caused by the education system, as bell hooks explores in her dialogue. This reading was especially important to me as I began a class this semester titled, Pedagogy and Power, where we will be spending the remainder of the semester attempting to understand the role of educators and curriculum in perpetuating broken systems, and what needs to be done to make this change.

The children and situations examined in the Kozol reading were all too familiar, and the struggles of the community against the racist structures in place brought up the sting of discouragement that I have personally experienced as a teacher. Although I only spend a few intermittent years of my early life in the urban setting, I have made the decision as an adult to return to the urban setting to teach. What I found particularly important about this reading was the portrayal of real people experiencing real struggle. As a white male journalist, Kozol did everything I believed he could to portray these people honestly and with minimal objectification.
There were a few points in this reading where I questioned the author’s ability to write in a way that was true to the people of Mott Haven. The challenge of white academically educated journalists working with low-to-no income predominantly non-white communities is practicing mindfulness of objectification and using the theory described in the Parenti reading, that “it is up to the rich nations of the North to help uplift the ‘backward’ nations of the South, bringing them technology and proper work habits.”

This theory does not only apply to the relationship between the North and the South, but also to the relationship between classes. This is where the need for educational work in community organizing comes in. A significant percentage of charities and non-profit groups approach working with communities plagued by poverty in the U.S. as well as the overexploited non-U.S. world using an outdated imperialist agenda, the “white man’s burden”. The objectification of these peoples and the reductionistic approach to working with them as a statistic rather than a unit of individuals creates more harm than good. Kozol made effective use of his literary style in creating a set of individuals facing their struggles and doing everything possible as a community to overcome the challenges of structural racism. One example in particular is Becky, Isaiah’s mother. She “coaches the team he plays on in the summer, organizes a reading group of children from the building, and gives support to a number of the boys who live downstairs when she has extra food.” Here is a woman that recognizes the limitations in place against the children of her community and is still doing all in her power to cultivate happiness and thoughtfulness.

In the bell hooks dialogue, she touches upon progressive pedagogy. Education systems need to be rearranged more in this style. Working as an art teacher for the past several summers, I realized that the oppressive structures in place, the No Child Left Behind Act of the Bush administration, prohibited these urban non-white children from succeeding in the traditional academic setting by enforcing a restrictive curriculum. Although in the school year, the children did not experience art education, I witnessed their progression throughout the summer as we used a more progressive approach of confessional narrative, digressive dialogue, and open-ended projects. Children not only enjoyed the time they were spending, but they also learned and thrived from it.

Identity and community are essential components in effective education. Teaching a biased Western patriarchal history to the groups that have experienced the most destruction as a result does nothing to cultivate learning. Despite what Eleanor Jackson told Kozol, that “We know the way things are,” does not mean that that is the way things have to be. Educators are charged with the mission to teach for the benefit of their students, not the benefit of a colonist agenda. Progressive pedagogy needs to be embraced in public schools immediately.

CFS Journals: 11/23, 11/30, 12/7

2008-12-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

Last class for Community Food Systems is today... here were my final thoughts:

11/23

Williamsburg, besides being a welcoming and nurturing facility with a beautiful student-run garden, proved to be a school with warm and helpful teachers and well educated and enthusiastic students.

We all sat down together with Karen, their teacher, in their circle area. Some kids were shy, others were gushing with excitement. I sat between a little affectionate girl (she was hugging my side after less than 20 minutes!) and a short-attention spanned young boy who gave the impression of being a child who requires more effort from the teacher.

I think sitting besides Anthony and showing him patience and understanding while simultaneously teaching the lesson was most valuable to me. I could tell that even with sitting in between myself and Karen, he still needed a lot of help in order to take something away from this lesson. It was so exciting for me that when we did the taste test, and he showed reluctance about some of the veggies, he changed his mind about the no-thank-you-bite he took out of the rutabaga slice and instead chose to eat the whole thing!

Some of the kids were eager to let us know about what they've learned. When we sat down with them and announced that we would talking about food miles, one little girl immediately shouted out that she had learned about this already.

And even if they did already know about what we were discussing, they seemed to really enjoy playing our game, tasting the vegetables, and getting to know Hannah, Pesha, and myself as teachers. They really took to us, which was great. It's amazing to spend some time with children and their confidence to say what is on their minds, express affection easily, and behave in a happy and healthy way.

Most of all, I loved spending time in the garden at Williamsburg. It really showed me how children can learn more effectively about history (we discussed how one of the grades had wanted to build tee-pees when they began learning about native american history, but upon finding out that this was culturally mis-representational they instead made a meeting circle and trellis structure) as well as math and other frameworks.

The system can really be changed from within if we just use innovation and creativity and bring this into the education system!

11/30

My family celebrates Thanksgiving in a very small way, being financially restricted and also completely vegetarian (although on special occasions we'll eat shellfish and fish). A lot of the issues that we have been examining this semester came to light at my mother's dinner table. First came the issue of hunger: A lot of the food we ate had been provided by the church where my mother works as nursery teacher. I remembered the Andrew Morehouse visit when my mother was showing me what had been donated, about his worries of food shortages this winter. I couldn't help but wonder about families across the country who might not be able to enjoy the charity bestowed upon ours for the holiday.

Whenever I am with my family I want to talk to them about food systems, but time and time again the barriers of class stop me from getting overly preachy to them. So I had to look at the small victories that my family has enjoyed:
-We now have a home with yard space, thanks to the charity of Habitat for Humanity.
-We are now able to have a small garden to grow our own vegetables and fruit during the production season.
-Thanks to the generosity of friends of the family, we now have a compost system at our house to reuse our waste.

And what about foraging?
This is a favorite activity for my family. Whether it's foraging in the wild, or foraging in the urban landscape, we do it.

My little brother and I have been dumpster diving since we were in middle school, reclaiming perfectly good food that has been thrown out like trash. This is a food system which we have not really gotten into at length in our class, but it is an important one. I work occasionally with Food not Bombs, helping to distribute recovered food to those who need it and it is remarkable to witness the amount of good food that goes to waste; what is more remarkable however is the amount of need for this food and the blatant insanity of the fact that it had ever been tossed in the first place in the face of such a need.

And as far as foraging from the natural world, this is another technique that my family has enjoyed to stay food secure. In the late summer, we enjoyed a bounty of Puffball mushrooms. We found one this summer that was larger than a soccer ball and fed my mother's home and my home for more than a week. I would go so far as to say that one of my favorite dishes is Puffball Parmesan. And then there are dogwood berries which make a delicious jam, acorns and other nuts, as well as dandelions, violas, and plantain greens which make a perfectly good salad. I was brought up in a way to recognize the safe and the not-safe in the natural world, but this isn't the typical path for most young people in this country.

It is sometimes a little shocking to encounter someone who expresses a dislike or fear of nature. It's difficult to not feel concern for these people in the face of the challenges to our global community. If there is anything that we should truly know, then it ought to be how to take care of ourselves in the wild.

Pollan, on his journey to reclaim this heritage which has been disappearing, proved that our familiarity with the natural world has not been entirely lost from us. We are not entirely hopeless as a species. There is such bounty in the natural world (just as there is bounty in the dumpsters of the urban world) that is available to all of us to enjoy; we just need to open our eyes to our own deep connection to the Earth which has borne us. Even if we might sometimes forget this, we are all still creatures of this planet capable to know our world intimately.

12/7

The semester is at it's end, and I've been doing a lot of reflection. As is appropriate for this last year of classes, I have realized that everything that I have been learning throughout my life from college and before has been snowballing into this incredible wealth of knowledge and experiences, and for that I am extremely grateful. Community Food Systems is a huge piece of where I am at now. So this treasure chest is full with lectures and books and community service experiences, but how do I intend to cash this all in?

Putting the theory to practice is key. It's unfortunate for me to have acquired a serious stomach flu last week and miss out another opportunity to practice what we preach! This class, along with others I have taken, and books I have read, and all the conversations and dialogue I have participated in thus far, all of these things point to the necessity for major change of the mental models of our nation. How we eat, how we learn, how we live: why do we allow people we have never met or shared a moment with decide how we are supposed to do these things?
It's about time for us to take back our rights to eat the way that is best for us, to learn in the way most effective for us, and to live in a way that makes us healthy and happy!
But we can't get angry, and we can't just tell people that they are BAD for eating, learning, living in the standard industrialized way! We can't condemn those who do not have access to knowledge, or access to means!
This is the start of our journey. What we can do is provide tools and resources to the public. It is the public's choice to listen to what we have to say or to use the tools we offer to make the change in themselves. Let us not feel anger or spite to the world for the confusion and aggravation it struggles against, and for the ignorance that breeds freely in our broken system. Anger and spite will deter us from bringing positive change.

Always remember:

"I have just three things to teach:
Simplicity, Patience, and Compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world."

-from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu

MUCH LOVE TO ALL OF YOU, YOU ARE ALL BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE DESTINED TO DO AMAZING THINGS!

Namaste,
Brittni Reilly

A few poems

2008-11-17T17:11:00.000-08:00

Fashion Tips from Atlantis 2

My buckets are filling too fast, certainly

Middle toe, left foot, points and reaches, I feel it through my bones
it nudges a bucket over the side, too close to spilling over
I’m at that point of devolution, recruiting all limbs for that absolute truth
Yet for each one thrown back, another floods over

The shanty just wasn’t made for waves like this.
Rusted nails squirm loose from grey planks
And the tiller broke before it was even mine

It is true that I could have dressed the part better
But here I am in a crème negligee

On my body it is tattered, soaked, only minutely tangible
Of course I wear it so distressingly with flip-flops and a trash bag
What if I had waited, strapped on the seatbelt, bit my tongue?

There was a chance lost in history
to leave it on the rack
preserve it in plastic, waiting timelessly as carbon
for me to make an assumption
into ladyhood.

I could have ordered a uniform instead
Done up so shiny with badges, tassles, and heroics

Had the days been different that would have been me
But here I am all shivers, out of fashion’s favor

It took till now to get it.
I never wanted words with the waves
Had just tolerated how it tossed me
Pushed me onto my back
Pulled my hair down
And I looked it straight in the face

I had laughed when it lapped at my toes.

The thought that comes to me now,
Watching the shanty splinter away
Watching the buckets flood over
The ocean in my lap now
My body struggling back
Wrapped in lacey crème.

The thought that comes to me now,
Is that he, the wrong one, the new and the strange;
He would have definitely given me a compass,
A treasure map, and a good pair of oars.
He would have paid for my oxygen tank,
My flippers, wetsuit, and snorkel.
He would have given me a walkie and
He would have done it all with a smile
He would have sealed it with a kiss.

But I was born in August beside the ocean,
And those waves,
Those waves they whispered my name.

My Own Universe

Ascension to the empyrean cycles decline into the abyss:
Within the body, there is a universe
Within the universe, there is a never-ending cyclone
A whirlwind of plasticity, it personifies ouroboros
Never-ending, like the story; didn’t I see that snake there?
And didn’t he want to brand his own skin with it?
In the universe, there is a cyclone and a serpent, yes
But I swear I’ve seen a child there before
And I swear I’ve seen him there before
And I swear I’ve seen me there before
But I don’t swear on any of it
Because I don’t swear at all
Except when frustrated
Or crushed

CFS Jourals 11/9 and 11/16

2008-11-17T17:06:00.000-08:00

11/9

Well, I'm glad I'm going to be getting back into the classroom, and through preparing this project I've felt a lot of nostalgia towards working directly with children. With the growth and clarification of my career aspirations, I have written myself out of the role of a classroom teacher, even though I had spent years molding myself into that shape. My problem is similar to many teachers who begin in the classroom who leave to enter the non-profit world, or the out-source education approach. The bureaucracy of the Public school classroom, especially with the urban demographics that may have higher non-dominant race percentages than suburban, has entirely failed teachers working towards social justice and innovative education approaches. I've turned my back on the public school classroom with the hopes to somehow infiltrate the policy making sector through non-profit and out-source option programs. I have a glistening hope that post-inauguration, reform will begin and initiatives to improve public education will launch: I hope to be a part of this initiative.

But what about now? What about before I graduate, before I enter the real world? I've been yearning to continue my work in education in one way or another lately. I would really love recommendations for education programs, especially non-profit programs and especially programs involved in targeting social justice and how racism fits into sustainability. Internships, summer jobs, anything that might fit the bill; it's hard to not to feel the pressure of the desperate need for hands and minds within the education system after having been a part of it for so long on both the teaching and the learning end.

***

11/16

So it's finally the week of the project and I'm very excited. What each of us are going to be doing with the various classrooms is amazing. It is amazing that we are collectively taking back spaces: Taking back the space of the land to experience nature directly and to discover a healthy relationship with it; taking back the economic space through creating localized economies and self-sustaining communities; and taking back the space of the curriculum to value holistic learning that has existed as part of global communities for thousands and thousands of years before we standardized the concept of education.

We are all going to be doing something huge on Wednesday. We are taking back the public space which should always have belonged to the public and has been unlawfully taken away. We are collectively saying that this land really is ours, which means that it is all of ours, and that we all should have a say about how it is treated and how we are treated.

Even though our project is simple and small and fun and will only last for a meager forty minutes, our project is huge because of what it means. Beyond conveying an introduction to the concepts of food miles and food systems, we are providing children the stepping stool to liberate themselves from structures that do not give them the space they deserve.

I am greatly looking forward to joining Hannah and Pesha in the classroom on Wednesday and sharing such an incredible experience together. I am looking forward to reflections we will be able to have and the direction that we will all take our experiences after this semester is over.

Community Food Systems: November 3

2008-11-03T19:44:00.001-08:00

I'm really excited about bringing what we've been learning into the elementary classroom. I was raised by a teacher, and both me and my sister have been working in the education field since we were old enough to work. In recent years, I've been getting frustrated with the education system, witnessing more and more bureaucratic decisions that negatively effect children passing through the public schools. So I started researching ways to work around the bureaucratic idiocy in order to provide a quality education to children that not only exposes them to new and exciting knowledge, increases their intelligence and critical thinking skills, but also engages their true basic interests and keeps in mind the importance of health and the importance of play.

Integrating food education into elementary schools is incredibly important, so I can't wait to get some practice at relaying what we have learned in Community Food Systems into the classroom setting.

When I worked at a Montessori Preschool for the children of UMASS Faculty and Students, I tried to integrate basic sustainability learning into the classroom. We started using a compost bin as part of the lunch and snack structure. Once my preschoolers had gotten a hang of what goes in the compost and what goes in the trash, they really embraced the idea. I would supervise while the little ones who first grasped the concept would take up the teaching role, and when they noticed one of their friends going to throw food scraps in the trash, they'd let them know where to put it. We would talk about how important it is that we feed our Earth, and that when we give our compost to the ground, she gets a little healthier. I told them about how much the worms that they liked to look at and dig up outside liked to eat the compost, and how many other little creatures would benefit from throwing our food scraps outside rather than in the trash.

We talked a lot about other issues relating to sustainability. We started a little garden for them to work with. Along with the other teachers, I read Richard Louv's book "Last Child in the Woods," which became our bible at that preschool. With the Montessori style of teaching, we were able to let our kids decide what they wanted to learn about the world and nature and about treating the planet and their communities with care.

Of course, this was made easy for a few reasons: We were a research based preschool. Being that we were located on the UMASS campus, we had the benefit of being in the midst of learning about more effective teaching techniques and improving early childhood education almost as a requirement. We had the benefit of progressive educated parents willing to work with us to create this kind of environment, and lots of funding. We had the space, the tools, and the education to know how to provide positive sustainability learning experiences for children.

Working in a private and well funded school is way different than working in the public school system. So I am hoping to get a lot out of our visit to the first graders of Williamsburg, to further educate myself on effective teaching methods that can be used in a public school setting.

I still have in my mind a vision of being able to teach sustainability in urban public schools, so every step closer to realizing this vision is exhilarating.

Community Food Systems: 12 and 19

2008-10-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

Journal Entry 10/12

Rachel Slocum’s article was profound to me: this article as well as the other readings provide me with a foundation for the work I am hoping to get into post-college. The questions she poses to the prospective non-profit organizers are the types of questions that are incredibly important, yet they are the questions that are typically not even addressed in this line of work.

I have spent two summers working with an extremely distressed community, New Bedford. Working with the predominantly Latino and Black children of the community, I felt exposed to something that I had never stumbled upon before in my experience as a teacher.

When I had worked in predominately white upper-middle class Ipswich, I was working with children who have never seen racism. The children of color in that community were treated equally, maybe with fascination at times because of the novelty of their skin, but otherwise, the children shared similar economic experiences and the same quality education.

The New Bedford children, on the other hand, were certainly more aware of the forces working against them. They didn’t trust their teachers (mostly Portuguese immigrants) who would forbid them from speaking Spanish in school despite speaking only in Portuguese to each other. They didn’t trust their curriculum, which blamed them for their low rankings, and instructed them to believe that education is entirely standardized and not designed to keep interest, but instead to achieve score standards designed for the dominant culture. They didn’t trust their parents, who fell victim to drugs deliberately circulating in their community as yet another method of oppression; parents who instill values of gang membership and loyalty, money-making schemes (I met one fifth grader employed by his father to push drugs onto his peers at school), depression and self-degradation (many young girls I met had family members and friends who were prostitutes), and low self-esteem and self-expectation (to my question “What age do you think is appropriate to have children?” I was met with the common answer “15”).

The experiences I had in this community inspired me to redirect my focus away from a purely environmentalist perspective towards an approach to making change via social justice work. But I hadn’t begun to flesh out the how-to aspect of this focus. Not until this semester, taking classes such as this one and a few other classes I am taking at this time on the topic of racism and white privilege.

I want to be able to leave this school with a well-formulated plan to bring back into that community and to create real change for the community by the community. These articles are a way for me to begin learning how to do this.

Journal Entry 10/19

Having worked as a teacher with young children and be it that I am intending on continuing in a career as an educator, the articles this week were especially important to my goals in integrating sustainability in the classroom.

Beyond the Garden showed me a thorough and logical way to infiltrate the ridiculous bureaucracies of the education system to encourage legitimate learning. I’ve been teaching for a while now. I’ve worked at the YMCA in Ipswich as an elementary ages art teacher as well as preschool teacher; a Montessori Preschool in Amherst; a YMCA in New Bedford as an art teacher; an out-source non-profit art program available to at-risk 5th graders in New Bedford; a non-profit art outreach program in New Bedford that visited different scheduled sites such as projects, parks, and summer programs. I have spent a lot of my time with youth and I have always sought to address issues such as sustainability too them.

Here, I have had many results. I’ve been disappointed at the lack of education and lack of caring about this topic with my kids in Ipswich (although I suspect that things there are different now, as in the last several years Ipswich has undergone a serious “greening” in all areas); I was surprised at the amount the preschoolers of UMASS faculty and students knew about climate change and local organic foods; and I was horrified about the ignorance imposed upon my New Bedford kids as a result of their poor quality education.

My New Bedford kids knew what school was about: School is about getting sufficient MCAS scores and nothing else. School is about humiliation and depression, about peer pressures and peer conflicts. School is a place to feel out of place, stupid, and insufferable.

I would try to tell them that this isn’t how it is everywhere, that some schools weren’t all about the MCAS, some teachers out there really wanted them to learn what is important to them, to their culture and their goals.

But what good is it to tell them about these great institutions and people when they aren’t an option for these children? I have thought a lot about how I can bring gardening experience to these kids like Nuestras Raices does in Holyoke. I’ve used art education as a tool to break down barriers of hate created in their community and to support self-confidence and to improve self-worth. I have talked to these children as people with beautiful ideas and valuable intelligences, not as a group to be pushed around and told what to do and punished when the scores aren’t good enough.

These kids so badly need an escape from the highly unjust No Child Left Behind act. I have not spoken to a single teacher who is in favor of this act that is destroying any interest a child may be able to experience in school. I have seen children learning from the practical application of art projects, and translating these skills into their other intelligences. I know for a fact that these children would benefit so much from school gardening and from learning more about self-sufficiency and sustainability.

But how do you instill values of learning that are the most beneficial from school when there are no teachers available to instruct and facilitate this learning? How can a school raise a garden when they receive less and less funding for the most basic things such as facilities and industrial food? How can a school produce healthy and versatile students when the schools are being built on dumping grounds permeating with PCB and other highly toxic agent? (*as is the case with New Bedford’s middle and high school, as they could afford no other space)

I think that the Farm to School program and these articles are detrimental to schooling. But how can schools that are treating children as less than people and are being allotted critically damaging funds hope to implement these programs?

This is the task I have given myself. It is my goal to achieve an education and to be able to bring what I learn to this area and give these children the education and tools for self-sufficiency and justice that they so dearly deserve, but have been robbed of by their federal government.

2 by Me

2008-10-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

Fashion tips from Atlantis

You do look good in grey
And I don’t look bad in blue.
So I guess that this is just another highlight
For this thing.

I’ve taken the kitchen sink, the carpet, the desk, the cat.
You, though,
you have a DaVinci sprawl over the futon
a foot points to the mountains
another to the sea
An empire claiming dominance over an IKEA piece.

I stake out the couch in my fort of grief and blankets
I’ve claimed it tonight: It is mine tonight.
Tomorrow will bring new war.

Me, the aggressor, will charge at you there
I’ll trap you in a titanium Hercules grip
You will see what I see

Me, the victim, will lure you down into my sage hide
A salty place of seaweed and clams
My hurt is going to soak you
You will feel what I feel

You remain the agitator
You remain the instigator
A golden-haired Perseus, full of hope and stupid

You’re going home this time, after this war
But my binoculars are expensive, marvelous

In this division it is a wonder
what about partners?

Mama

With pale hands frail from her starvation,
She grasps desperately at her failing breath

It’s been awhile since she inhaled
She breathed in deep once, deep into her lungs
She breathed so deep once that she became full.
So round like that great mother Gaia-
a pregnant anticipation
- waiting for the rain to spill into her crooked places,
Seep down deep into the body of it all
She was made ready.

It’s been awhile since this was easy.
Back then, everything was in, out, in, out…
The breath came out quick, in spurts
It was so sustained, that breath
She could suck it all in with a gulp,
She could spit it all out with a sigh.
She had it figured out.

The ghosts of her limbs tremble like an aspen in winter
Gravity has proven a greater obstacle than expected
It’s still there: the fat infant gnawing at a shriveled breast
Heavy with awareness, it gnashes tiny teeth at her skin
now grey.
Plump fingers dig into places where once there was meat-
It leaves her torn and red.
She is milkless; it is hungry.

This long exhalation is coming to an end.
Her meager fingers reach for her chapped mouth;
Maybe she thinks she’ll pull the breath out
Out from the bruised lungs so crowded
by cracked bones.

Ice bone fingers grope inside her, into the drought.
Meanwhile, the infant wails.

City Trees and a few quotes

2008-10-14T18:42:00.000-07:00

One of mine and a few readings, thoughts, resources, and recommendations:

City Trees

A small calico girl
huddles under the meager shadow
of a dying honey locust.
(City trees are always dying.)

The slide is fried
The monkey bars burn
But there’s nothing else here
Home is close but
You can’t go there, no

Your noise wakes her up,
And damn near everyone knows
That she don’t wake up until
The sweaty heat has passed.

You, barely more than toddling,
Say this with such nonchalance
Such everyday normative regularity
Apathy I thought had to be learned
Apathy that is inherent to you

And if she’s locked up like
a Disney Princess
(except she would never be
a Disney Princess
not with skin so dark)
then who will remember you small,
calico child,
who will ever know about you?

Time flies, and next thing
you’re pregnant

An older child, alone on the schoolbus
Speaks of her mother:

“My ma, she can’t read and
this is just fine
she gots a job and
she got pregnant and
she got pregnant again and
this is just fine
she can’t read and
this is just fine”

And looking at you,
And looking at the rest of you
And by god, here in the north,
We were all innocent bystanders to that big civil mess, no never us,
Just a stones throw away
From the cradle of liberty

It’s like Will Simmons is laughing
While the President Wilson claps
At how amazingly profound
of a joke is being told
and better yet,
the dumb mouthed party
of the guffawing stupid
applauding how brilliant
this joke is.

And listening to you,
A calico child, a lonesome girl,
And knowing that you know
Just how sick the joke is

I feel nauseous.
But I pay the Klecktoken
And we all gather round
To read from the Kloran.

“In 1492, Columbus discovered America.”

“Slavery in the United States
ended in 1865.”

***

Memory and (comm)Unity: Black Liberation Poetry

“In a new world where African people were transported to labor, die, and disappear, we’ve needed unbound voices to reformulate our destiny—voices refusing to be ensnared by somebody else’s terms. … Listen to them, to ourselves, to the best we’ve managed to write and say and dance and paint and sing. African-American culture, in spite of the weight, the assaults it has endured, may contain a key to our nation’s survival, a key not found simply in the goal of material prosperity, but in the force of spirit, will, communal interdependence.”
-John Edgar Wideman

Not unlike the African Griots, the Surrealists or the Chicano poets, the practitioners of liberation poetry approach language with great suspicion. They know that any motivated social, religious, ideological or ethnic group can use and manipulate the attributes of a given language for its own agenda—and it usually works for the benefit of the most privileged… In this respect, poets as diverse as Gary Hicks, Mutaburuka or Jack Hirshman have manipulated the English language to say things other than what it was originally invented (and intended) to say: a discourse of disruption that goes overboard of both the confines of academic dogmas and the mystification of prejudiced truths.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry

Beauty is relative; its pretended universal splendor, as represented in the ruling classes’ standard of valor, is a fraud: its false transcendence is revealed, denounced and devalued by the not so endearing occurrences in practical reality.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry

Governments and political systems come and go, but people continue to live the dream of being with hope in a better tomorrow even in the middle of abysmal horror
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry

A poet has no way of shaping and shifting such tectonic plates surrounding his life, and he can be so unlucky as to be helpless over his own personality, that is personality and not self. I take the two entities to be quite different. In fact, I suppose personality to be an obstacle to realization of self and that realization of self prerequisite to a poet’s ascension to the sublime.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver

[Is there] still a choice to be made regarding the role a black male poet should choose? Perhaps, but that implies the ideal of leadership, which is a problematic holdover from centuries of male domination. The black poetic tradition is defined, to a large extent, by the accomplishments of black women, accomplishments that never came to black men.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver

Notable Voices of Black Liberation Poetry
Phillis Wheatley
Jay Wright
Robert Hayden
Langston Hughes
Amiri Baraka aka Leroi Jones
Henry Dumas
Gwendolyn Brooks
Jayne Cortez
Eugene Redmond
Mumia Abu-Jamal

Highly Recommended Manifesto on Liberation Poetry:
http://www.tanbou.com/1996/LiberationPoetry.htm

“The Black Narrator” –Ahmed Alhamisi, 1966
1
White poems
Are daggers, guns, cops.
piercing hearts in weird designs. Ofays
beating niggers to their knees. Coloured
girls with wigs passing & cutting Afro’s
minds. Or black poems judged by whitey’s
standards….
…
2
Black poems are beautiful…
…A
poem for wooly-haired brothers, natural-haired sisters.
Bimbos.
boots & woogies. Or nappy-headed youngsters
Cause they want what i
Want: blood from revolutions…

3
Here in america i want black thoughts, in forms of con
crete skies
tumbling down
on dingy ofays. on negro
middleclass heads (konked-haired hipsters. wig-wearing
whores…)
Crush their minds & lives thoughts. Talk to them in
chinese
vietnamese
Or
black language

“Black Art” by LeRoi Jones, 1966

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks.

Community Food System: Old Thoughts

2008-10-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

These are entries that I have previously written in response to a class I'm taking at UMASS in the Plant, Soil, and Insect Science department titled Community Food Systems. We have been reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and recording our thoughts on the readings and the content of the course.

9/7

The information within the CFS Primer acted as an organizing tool to a scattered knowledge that I have been learning and discovering, creating a coherent method to deliver an idea that seems to have been forgotten for so long. It feels unfair that a large part of our human nation has managed to collectively and voluntarily undergo an amnesic state about something that was once so integral to our species. The act of consuming energy in the form of food is the essential trait of our animal kingdom. Pastorals and Agriculturists alike. And so having been able to cultivate plants to our liking and sustain our growth over time by the means of agriculture has serious implications towards our relationship with the natural world. This is an implication that to be human is to inherently know the plants we consume. We distinguish the beneficial from the toxic, we utilize our distinctly human trait of manipulating fire to cook the food, through trial and error we have found which foods complement what and what properties they have in regard to our health; these are discoveries that are incredible and unforgettable to our species.
It feels strange, then, that myself and many other human beings have only recently rediscovered how sacred a relationship it is that we have with our food.
Our society makes it easy to grow up with the belief that food is an easy commodity, that it is found wherever there is a supermarket. Feeling disconnected with the food we eat is common; the food we eat is easily wasted as it is easily replaced by something more fitting to what we crave.
Outranked only by tobacco use, the leading ultimate cause of death amongst Americans as found from a 1990 and 2000 study is poor diet and physical activity [Mokdad et al, American Medical Association 2004). There is something seriously wrong with how we are eating.

I am in this class because of the threat of the popular eating habits of our nation on the public health of our nation. I am here to further educate myself about something that I should have always known, being human. It is vital to my well-being to remember the connection I have with the food that is grown to feed myself, my family, and my community as a whole. I want more people to wake up and remember that we are connected deeply to what we eat and that we can't allow ourselves to accept amnesia and to blindly consume food that originates in a lab rather than a field. I am taking this class to educate others about the importance of our community food system and why it is we need to know what we are eating. It is essential to me.

9/14

My mother is a preschool teacher, and part of the curriculum she teaches includes a week of learning about farms, farm animals, and the food grown at the farm. Picture books, games, and toys are the tools used to represent and educate. Visits to local farms are usually included. I remember when I was young and my mental image for agriculture looked more like Mr. McGregor's garden or Zuckerman's Farm. It seems disjointed then, that what is taught in schools and what children learn to be agriculture includes no connections whatsoever to the food that we purchase. Children don't learn about the enormous monoculture plots that provide the coveted junk food in the middle of the supermarket. That stuff has to be made with magic, and indeed there's plenty of commercials showing Elves using secret ingredients and spells to make sugary, fat loaded treats to reinforce this notion.
The fact that the vast majority has no opinion about The Farm Bill and the impact made by it suggests that the idea that food comes from a magic place that none of us can see or visit (Iowa) is shared by the masses.

I would imagine that children would be outraged to learn that there is no magic land that makes cookies and treats and snacks. Instead, there's just rows upon rows of the same plants: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice. And that these massive plots of the same plant encroach upon Mr. McGregor's garden and Zuckerman's farm and put them out of work. I would think a child would tell their parents no, if you buy that happy meal then the farmers they learned about in school won't be able to keep their farms. The only reason we don't see children doing this is because they aren't being taught about the relationship between their local farmers and the giant industrial monocultures.

The Farm Bill and the topics that Michael Pollan writes about in his article are shocking when they shouldn't be. Our nation is by and large ignorant about food and this needs to be changed. People need to recognize the decisions that are being made against public well-being as well as against environmental well-being. Beginning in early education, our national eye needs to open if it ever hopes to recover from a long coma of ignorance towards the decisions made by the select few that affect he majority.

With that, I'm looking forward to the opportunity in this class to present the concepts of community food systems to local schools.

9/21

Really, truly: not all carrots are created equal. Humans should know this by know. We, more so perhaps than any other species, celebrate the fact of a naturally occurring uniqueness. We’ve spent centuries congratulating ourselves for being able to produce the kind of individualistic qualities that we celebrate in our hallmark geniuses, engineers, scientists, and those who go out there and “discover” the world we forgot we belonged to for the rest of us.

We let ourselves become overwhelmed at this capacity for diversity. We were so obsessed with our own potential that we somehow distanced ourselves from the very ecological diversity that we co-evolved with, the logical chaos of the natural world. Without that biodiversity, we simply would not be.

This can be certain: there is a very good reason that a plant thrives best under certain conditions; a particular animal has an inherent motivation to eat a certain set of plants; and those who enjoy life at the top of the food chain have evolved side-by-side with the particularities of those animals, plants, and microbes.

Examine the different regions of the world and you’ll find a deep relationship between the cultures of the native peoples there and the foods that they have evolved side by side with. The various peoples of India did not up and decide that they as a people really enjoyed the spice mix that resulted in curry and masala and that they would thus cultivate this from now on; Indian cuisine is a result of the relationship between the plants that occurred in that particular geographic region and climate and the people who established themselves there.

Is there not something strange then about someone living in New England eating grapefruit in September? The grapefruit in question was purchased by one of my housemates. We had made a mission as a household to minimize the damage we wrought on the world. Our produce came from the share we bought at the Hampshire College farm. We were going to work hard to be “sustainable”; we talked about it and decided on setting up a communal food system. We would buy from the farmer’s market, get our milk and eggs from the farmer’s hands, order our bulk grains and oil through the Hampshire student-run food co-op Mixed Nuts… I really thought that we were going to take a collective step in the right direction. Our communal food purchases we agreed to split the costs between all six of us living together…

Then came the $87 receipt from Whole Foods. Grapefruits? Imported ginger? Almond butter? Not to mention the sudden appearance of non-communal packaged USDA certified organic mixed greens and asparagus and so on. But the amount of food we picked up from farmshare was more than enough to feed all of us…

I suppose it isn’t my place to begrudge those who wish to eat grapefruit in Amherst of this great fortune. It was bought at Whole Foods (surely a better choice than Stop & Shop) after all, and the fruit (originally cultivated in Barbados, a hybrid of the pomelo and the sweet orange) is certainly packed with antioxidants and all sorts of the stuff that we’re supposed to give our bodies. But according to whom, nutritionists in the unique position of having an entire planet-worth of menu options to choose from?

There was a reason the first grapefruit was grown in Barbados. And I’m almost positive that it had nothing to do with feeding the inhabitants of a temperate broadleaf and mixed mesophytic forest of the northeast United States.

I’ve never bought from Whole Foods before; I always considered it out of my budget, not to mention a big scam. Sure I play into the organic thing when I’m unable to get my veggies from local sources. “At least it’s better than conventional farming,” I say to myself when caught between a sore desire to eat something green and the lack of a local source.

I thought it was a little outrageous, those grapefruits. I’m used to eating apples in the fall, maybe peaches and pears too. “At least they’re organic.” Hmm. Well. Whatever that even means.

Reading about the Goodmans and Gene Khan raised an awareness of transience. They were like us. They wanted to live in harmony with nature, live in a self-sufficient and waste-free way. They existed outside of the mainstream, capitalist bullshit… for a moment. Then the world shook all the soul out of them and turned their ideals into industrial organic.

I feel privileged to be here in this time and in this place, in a community of like-minded individuals eager for change. But the grapefruits on the kitchen counter have me stumped. There are so many of us who see that there is something so wrong with the way our nation eats. We change our diets; we reject the ways our parents ate. The thing that gets me though is how half-assed we do this. We’re experiencing this buzz for change, but there are way too many who believe what the label says and settle for the story they want to believe.

Change, I believe, happens in waves, in little progressive increments. We’ve opened our eyes to the fact that the big-time industrial has damaged our health as well as our land. So we switch to shopping at Whole Foods and opting for the big organic. It’s so popular these days, it’s hard not to get caught up into it. But all the self-celebration has stopped us from fully opening our eyes.

I didn’t get how bad the industrial organic really was until Michael Pollan confronted me with it. It is now hard to avoid a strong aversion to eating anything that would be improbable to eat in this season, in this region. The real problem lies in getting my housemates as well as other members of my community to realize that the big organic isn’t good enough; it’s a step in the right direction but it is NOT ok to think that the problems created by agribusiness are just going to go away if we buy into the story fed to us on the package marked by the USDA organic seal.

9/28

Everything is connected; this is more than the law of ecology. This is the law of life, of history, of the future: it is all so detrimentally connected. If more chickens are introduced to the land, then a pollution problem will arise. When balance is lost, that is when there is a problem.

According to traditional Taoist belief and Chinese herbal medicine, the human spirit and health depends upon the balance of the yin and yang. This is described variously: too much fire in the liver; excess wind in the skin. These aren’t mystical concepts, as these terms might lead western thinkers to believe. Rather, these particular descriptions are a means to describe how things function in relation to each other and to the universe. This is the system of thinking that Joel Salatin promotes. There are many philosophies of Lao Tzu (considered the founder of Taoism) that describe this balance of yin and yang:

In order to contract,
It is necessary first to expand.
In order to weaken,
It is necessary first to strengthen.
In order to destroy,
It is necessary first to promote.
In order to grasp,
It is necessary first to give.

This principle is the method of recovering the gross global imbalance that Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan are prescribing to. In order for our species to heal the damage we have done to our spirits, bodies, health, and our environment, we need to restore balance. Salatin is attempting to regain balance through his efforts at Polyface Farm. He commits his farm and life to mimicking natural ecology by maintaining his farm in four dimensions, time as well as space. He practices the laws of the natural world, and by doing so is rewarded with the bounty of earth. His life is devoted to honoring this pact.

How would the rest of us go about to restoring balance? We are in a position that makes it approximately impossible for us all to live like Joel Salatin, not at our population growth rate, ecological degradation, and resource deprivation. It will take so much time for our people to cease the damage we inflict and globally implement healing. So many mental models would need to adjust. Many of us have begun changing our systems thinking to reflect the laws of ecology, but there are still so many people who are unable to change because of the pressure of socio-economic factors.

Social-Environmental justice is crucial to our education of community food systems and environmental restoration. Before we can hope to implement wide-scale revitalization of our planet and people, we need to first address the level of imbalance in our economy and society at large.

The first day of October

2008-10-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday's installment of Community Food Systems left me with a whirlwind of emotions. A lot of what I felt was tied deeply into my personal experience with an economically imbalanced society.

Myself, my two brothers, and my sister were raised by my mother. My mother graduated college with a bachelor's in Early Childhood Education and has never been unable to find work. As soon as we were old enough for daycare, my mother has worked and continues to work to this day as a full time Head Preschool Teacher. Despite being hardworking, educated, intelligent, and motivated, my mother has never been able to fully support herself and her four children alone. Because of this, our family has received an insane amount of charity. She has been provided a share from local food pantries since we were babies till now. The first house we've ever owned was built for us by Habitat for Humanity about seven years ago. Even though my older brother and I have left home and have become financially independent does not mean that our family has escaped poverty. My mother has, since having children, lived just below the poverty line, despite working a full time respectable job while supplementing her income with part time work for catering companies and church nurseries.

What I wonder, these days, is how unfairly this charity has been distributed. Because we were so fortunate to belong to the socio-economically dominant race and be able to move to a town that was majorly upper middle class (Ipswich, MA - median income: $57,284), we were considered a novel representation of the 4.1% of Ipswich families living below the poverty line. Because we were white and well educated, we were given the help that the immigrant Latino population of Ipswich is refused.

Andrew Morehouse talking about food stamps, pantries, and other food service programs created this eruption of hot shame while I sat and listened to him in class. This feeling could be attributed into an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness. I felt like I was an invader in this discussion, because we were all talking about a population that I have come to UMASS to represent. What was being discussed was a population that existed not within the classroom, not within the context of that insightful discussion, but entirely on the outside. Even though this was not something mentioned, the feeling I had was of division: us (the upper-middle class college educated) and them (the impoverished in need of assistance).

There is no us and them when it comes to class barriers and economic injustice. There is, rather, cause and effect. Obese black and Latino children in closed off urban food deserts is the effect of socially ambivalent lawmakers and monoculture surplus. Uneducated and drug addicted urban youth is the effect of a corrupt and racist society. The amount of charity bestowed on my family to ease the hunger and homelessness we experienced is a direct effect of a predominantly white sense of guilt and responsibility to relieve suffering, if only minutely.

Why is it that Habitat for Humanity (an organization very much so based around Christian principles) is able to construct a home for the white working single mothers of affluent North Shore communities, while there are still so many displaced victims (impoverished and mostly black) of Hurricane Katrina waiting three years after the fact for some sort of compensation for that disaster and the government's apathy towards their entire community?

After class, I called my mother while she was on her break from work. I told her the class had left me feeling upset and overwhelmed with my own memories of experiencing poverty and hunger. We talked a little about the bail-out plan. My mother laughed and told me that she isn't worried about it, because it just means that there's more people who are going to have to live the way we always have.

I have been thinking much more on the subject of social and environmental injustice. I saw the film 'Trouble the Water' on Saturday, which addresses this very topic of racism and injustice. This movie impacted me in a way that I cannot formulate into words. In my adult life, I have devoted two summers to working with urban youth in the port city New Bedford. The people in this movie, the children and families that I worked with: these are the people that need the most help, the most nutrition and education but they are always the last people on the mind of our country. My mother, white and educated, was able to raise her children vegetarian, emphasize the importance of healthy eating, activities, and the utmost importance of our educations. What about those people who are kept under the thumb of society, without even enough wiggle room to question why this is happening to them?

Yes, our national food system is in shambles. But one of the biggest issues that needs to be addressed before we can go about changing the way we eat is who is being hurt the most by this system, and why is it that they are being kept ignorant about this. Is it because (like Kanye West famously said) President Bush doesn't care about black people?

Go see 'Trouble the Water' and visit downtown New Bedford or Holyoke or Springfield. The answer should be obvious.