tidings

HOSPITAL: an interview with author Julie Salamon

2010-12-09T18:13:00.005-05:00

Julie Salamon is the author of HOSPITAL: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity, a book about Maimonides Hospital in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Julie was a reporter and the film critic for The Wall Street Journal for many years and then a culture writer on the staff of the New York Times.

Maimonides Hospital is named for the 12th century Jewish philosopher and teacher, who is also known as Rambam.

One of Julie's books explores our culture of giving in the context of Rambam's teachings and meditations about generosity.

Riding the subway every day from her home in Manhattan's Greenwich Village to Borough Park in Brooklyn, she spent more than a year getting to know the innermost workings of this unusually multicultural hospital and we benefit from wonderfully intimate insights into many of the people who work there, from the highest level managers and "star" surgeons to the staff of the emergency room. She shares with us the most mundane process of note-taking and recording the interviews to how writing this book has affected her personal life.

Hospital is Julie's seventh book and, on the face of it, each of them is very different from the other. Despite the variety of their themes however, she says everything she has written reflects her abiding interest in how human beings are able to maintain their humanity in the face of the most challenging of circumstances.

I found myself thinking about this hospital in the pauses between reading the book. Now, a month after I finished reading it, Maimonides remains vivid and alive for me: I can see the place and the people very clearly, even though I've never been there!

I urge you to read it and to listen to our interview on Tidings, recently broadcast on WPKN independent radio.

It's not about 'peace': interview with Jeff Halper

2010-11-12T15:57:00.006-05:00

Jeff Halper of ICAHD, Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, spoke to Tidings from Jerusalem and gave us his take on 'the peace process' in which he makes these points:

1. Israel will never stop the Occupation (they haven't invested in all that infrastructure for nothing).

2. The US problem is not Obama but Congress--it's not just AIPAC but the war-industrial lobby which is actually bigger and stronger than AIPAC.

3. The only hope may come from BDS, the Boycott Divestment and Sanction movement, whose momentum and reach are extending daily, resulting in increasing isolation for the US which will one day be damaging enough to finally bring the message home.

4. He also says he really doesn't know how this thing will end. He can't see that far or around enough corners but believes it will happen sooner or later.

Please listen to his impassioned point of view. It's one that you won't hear in the mainstream media!

Check out this article and his most recent book too.

Tom Damiani: advocate for the birds

2010-11-12T15:07:00.008-05:00

Because I don’t know how our society would function without them, I have a particular interest in knowing more about volunteers, why people become volunteers, remain volunteers but you so I interviewed Tom Damiani, who is an especially successful leader of volunteers. As one of volunteers, I got to know Tom this summer.

This is a very local story. Tom is on the board of the North Fork Audubon Society and runs its Endangered Species Program, a project designed to protect the piping plovers and least terns on the North Fork beaches of Long Island.

He talks about an entire life devoted to learning about birds and protecting them. He is a musician which accounts for his ability to capture the songs of numerous birds. Please listen to his story. It's wonderful!

EAARTH: an interview with Bill McKibben

2010-11-12T14:27:00.005-05:00

I was honored that Bill McKibben agreed to be interviewed on Tidings from Hazel Kahan and am buoyed by knowing that his message will be heard by radio audiences in Connecticut and Eastern end of Long Island.

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, writer, educator, research scholar and activist and a significant force in raising our awareness of climate change and in directing international action through his leadership of the 350 movement, the largest grass roots environmental movement in the world. If you want to feel uplifted, please visit his site.

Bill is the author of many books, the first The End of Nature originally published in 1989 and, most recently, in 2010, the book Eaarth, spelled e-a-a-r-t-h with two a’s to distinguish it from the earth we have known. In everything he does, Bill McKibben advocates tirelessly for a kinder relationship between human beings and the planet, whether it is eating local, having smaller families, dismantling our belief that growth is good and arguing against human engineering and the moral and existential threats of a post-human future.

His message today is more urgent than ever.

Welcome, citizens of earth, his web site greets us and introduces us to the new Eaarth. Bill McKibben goes on to say:

We live on a new planet. We’ve built a new earth. Its not as nice as the old one. It’s the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever.

What happens next is up to us.

McKibben then tells us what we can do as he offers us: a guide to living on a fundamentally altered planet.

Palestinian women make music: an interview with Ayeda Ayed

2010-08-24T12:53:00.021-04:00

Background

In these unfortunate times, the word “Palestinian” often conjure up a spectrum of negative associations, from terrorists age and suicide bombers to dispossessed victims and supplicants living in rubble and political violence.

Of course some of these are accurate descriptions but they do not tell the whole story. Palestinians are also a creative, talented people, proud of their heritage, determined to preserve their culture and to join the international music community.

Ayeda Ayed tells us the other story as she paints the landscape of Palestinian music history against which we can appreciate three of its leading women musicians today.

Displaced in 1948 to refugee camps in Jordan and West Bank, Ayeda’s parents came to Canada in 1965. She was born in Winnipeg, becoming politically active after the first intifada, vowing to show the world that ‘we Palestinians do have a heritage’.

A performer herself, she now directs event programming for Beit Zatoun, a cultural organization in Toronto.

As in most cultures, music plays a significant role in Palestinian daily life. Before 1948 and the creation of Israel, Palestine was a rural, agricultural society with music marking births, marriages, funerals, olive picking and other harvests.Urbanization and modernization along with the loss of agricultural lands threatened these music traditions but women, who had always played an active cultural role, now took upon themselves the urgent task of rescuing and revitalizing ancient songs.The Palestinian liberation struggle imbued music with a nationalistic flavor to which has been added a more artistic emphasis, recreating and modernizing the idea of what a Palestinian song is.

Poetry is the common thread that runs through Palestinian songs, whether the style is hip hop, ballads, rock, folk songs, lullabies, laments or classical Arab music. Palestinian songs stretch from the universal themes of love and death to love of the land, remembering by name political prisoners and children killed by violence along with the longings inherent in exile, isolation and dispossession of land and home.

“It’s difficult to be a Palestinian artist and not be political,” Ayeda says. For women musicians, feminism and self expression, the making of art in a patriarchal society further strengthens the politicization of today’s Palestinian music.

The musicians

Ayeda tells us why she chose these three Palestinian women musicians for our Tidings program:

Amal Murkhus sings “Diary of a Palestinian Wound” on her CD Shauq (Longing), with words by Mahmoud Darwish, including the famous and beloved line:

“My country is not a suitcase, I am not a traveler, I am the lover and the land is the beloved.”

Rim Banna sings “The Carmel of My Soul “ on her CD Mirrors of my Soul, a tender song about a prisoner in which she honors Mount Carmel in the Galillee as the soul of her soul. Palestinian poetry makes frequent references to places humanizing them or making them parts of one’s body, elevating both the person and the place.

Kamilya Jubran,whom Ayeda describes as ‘my favorite Palestinian artist’, for her modern, electronic edginess combined with rigorous, classical Arab sound. She was formerly a member of the group Sabreen. On her CD Wameedd, Kamilya sings “Ghareebah” (Stranger) the poetry of Khalil Gibran, expressing the melancholy of exile:

A stranger in this world..

A stranger/In estrangement there is cruel loneliness/And painful desolation/But it makes me forever think/Of a magical home I know not…

Ayeda concludes our interview: "This is a theme a lot of people talk about inside and outside of Palestine. Exile is not physical. Often my friends in Palestine who are inside Israel tell me they feel exile on the inside. They’re exiled inside.”

This interview on Tidings from Hazel Kahan was originally broadcast on WPKN radio on August 11, 2010. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

Being a Palestinian Israeli: Dr. Adel Manna

2010-07-02T20:20:00.020-04:00

The world is watching Israel has been the focus of increasing international attention since the attack on Gaza in December 2008 but even more so recently for the attack on the flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza, for the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, for aggressive building of settlements on occupied territory, for housing demolitions in East Jerusalem, for its nuclear potential and for tension in the special relationship it has historically enjoyed with the United States.

Less attention has been paid to the 1.5 million people, 20% of its population, who are Palestinians—Arabs, Christians, Druze—and citizens of Israel.

Dr. Adel Manna, an insider as member of this Arab Israeli minority, talked with us from Israel to provide a current perspective on the situation. He is the director of Academic Institute for Arab Teacher training at Beit Berl, a government-funded institute in central Israel and Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. He is a well-published authority on the history of the Ottoman period and is now writing a book about the Palestinians during the first decade of Israel's existence. His views on the subject are available here and here.

Declaration In December, 2006, in response to the growing discrimination and denial of human rights by the Israeli Government, the National Committee of the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel released a declaration—The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel—highlighting the aspirations of the Arab minority in Israel.

The declaration reads, in part: We, the Palestinian Arabs living in Israel, the natives of the land and the citizens of the state, part of the Palestinian people and the Arab nation … the 1948 war brought about the creation of the State of Israel on 78 percent of the territory of historical Palestine. We, who counted 160,000 in our homeland, found ourselves within the borders of the Jewish state, cut-off from the rest of our Palestinian people and the Arab world, were forced to accept the Israeli nationality and we became a minority in our historical homeland.

From Dr. Manna's perspective, things have got much worse for the native population since this declaration was released, making him fearful for the future of his children and grandchildren.

Here are selected excerpts transcribed from the June, 2010 Tidings from Hazel Kahan interview which can be heard in full :

We are perceived as people who are living temporarily in this place, as second-class citizens and, more than that, as a fifth column, as part of the Arab world, part of the Palestinian people in conflict with Israel while all the Jews in the world are perceived potentially as citizen of Israel…all they have to do is come to Israel and the next day they can be citizens of Israel while myself, who was born on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, for the last 60 years or more I am experiencing this discrimination…which is getting worse...

We are perceived by the majority and their representatives as challenging the State of Israel as a Jewish state…Being Jewish means automatically Jews have more rights than others and we say we don’t agree to that. We will not acquiesce to the status since 1948 that all Palestinians particularly Arabs would be forever second-class citizens in this State...The definition of the State of Israel as of the Jewish people and a Zionist state means we are excluded from the common goods of this state.

Passports and citizenship Dr. Manna explains that traveling on an Israeli passport means that as Israelis, Palestinians are not allowed into many Arab countries. At the same time, certain notation identify him to the Israeli authorities as a Palestinian, and is given rigorous inspection at airports. This is an established, ongoing policy:

In my country, I’m an Israeli citizen, they behave to me as a stranger…they want to remind me whenever I leave this country, at the airport, that I am a foreigner in the country, I am not an Israeli citizen. Everywhere else in the world…my Israeli passport protects me as an Israeli citizen, the same way like any Jew. This passport gives me equality outside Israel. This same passport discriminates against me when I come to the airport in Israel.

An imposed divided loyalty Palestinian Israelis are faced with a profound dilemma and a conflicted identity:

I am loyal to all the laws of Israel. This is what a citizen in a democratic state should be asked for…but in Israel that is not enough. They are asking us as a Palestinian minority to be loyal to all the policies of this right-wing government…against the Palestinians or Lebanese. And we question those wars…there are other ways to solve problems. Whenever you say that, you are automatically fifth column, partners to Israel’s enemies…Loyalty to policies that exclude us? It’s like asking Blacks in South Africa to be loyal to apartheid. We can't do that... The policy is that Israel wants to bring more Jews into Israel and to get rid of us.

Unintended consequences The years of discrimination, of what Dr. Manna describes as an “ethnic democracy” are having unanticipated consequences:

Arabs in Israel are getting more and more bitter…they are getting more experience as citizens of Israel, more educated, more outspoken and less willing to accept the discrimination. They (the Government) are no longer frightening them.

As long as the Palestinian minority was a weak minority which did not challenge the identity of the State, they were able to live with that. In the last decade the Palestinians became more outspoken, they are telling the majority that…the problem is the ideology of the State—Zionism. Being Jewish and Zionist means the State has an ideology against all non-Jews and non-Zionists and since we can’t be Jews and Zionists they want to get rid of us, and if they can’t get rid of us they want us to be second-class citizens…

Dr. Manna describes it as “an unfortunate, delicate, difficult situation” where “we always have to balance our feelings and what we think with what the Israeli law is asking from us.”

We are citizens who are keeping the laws since 1948, we are good citizens. All that we demand is equality…

Unfortunately, instead of appreciating the relative silence and nonviolence struggle of the Palestinians, this government and other governments are pushing us into the corner to choose: either you are with Israel or you are with Israel’s enemies.

The future? Expulsion and transfer will not be possible, according to Dr. Manna, because “there is nowhere for us to go.” Instead:

This issue will be on the focus of the next year more and more.. rights and fair representation in all the institutions of Israel, a promise made in Israel’s declaration when statehood was declared…We are waiting this for 62 years.

Israel can’t behave to us the way they behaved in the past…Israel is paying a high price. I do hope, I really do hope, that the Jewish majority will understand that what they are doing lately is counterproductive…this heavy use of force, to try to frighten everyone is not working any more. They have to change their policy towards the Palestinians in occupied territories and towards the Palestinians in Israel.

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This interview on Tidings from Hazel Kahan was originally broadcast on WPKN radio on June 30, 2010. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

Israel through the eyes of a psychotherapist

2010-05-11T19:28:00.013-04:00

Avigail Abarbanel is an Israeli-born psychotherapist who migrated to Australia in 1991. A few months ago, she and her husband moved to the Scottish Highlands where they plan to set up their counseling practice. I spoke with Avigail from her home near Inverness. (The full interview is available as a podcast.)

I found it refreshing and interesting to talk to a psychotherapist about a subject—Israel—that I find increasingly confusing. Along with more and more people it seems, I am asking: Why do the Israelis do what they do? Why do they keep on doing it? Can’t they see what damage they are doing to themselves, to the Palestinians, to us all? I asked Avigail if she would diagnose Israel as if the nation were a client of hers and then suggest an appropriate treatment regimen.

Here, summarized as succinctly as I can, are the main threads of Avigail’s response along with her emphatic assertion that underlying everything she says is a clear distinction between explanation and excuse. (I do urge you to listen to the podcast and listen to her compelling, fluid presentation. Sometimes an mp3 is worth thousands of words of text!)

Trauma and its ramifications lie at the heart of the Israeli nation:

it is the organizing principle of the Israeli people and the psychology that has shaped its national character. But not just because of the Holocaust of World War II; rather, the seeds are already there, in the culture, the biblical stories (see Joshua, see Deuteronomy, Numbers, Exodus) and through centuries of history, including the Zionist movement in the late 19^th century. The roots of victimhood and persecution go back to a long time ago. The roots of victimhood and persecution go back to a long time ago.

Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of trauma is that it is passed on, through the generations and proliferates within the generations.

Trauma, as we know from PTSD, is a clinically-established phenomenon that can manifest whenever the suffering individual perceives existential threat. The problem is that this threat may or may not be real today. Objectively Israel, with its military might and nuclear power is one of the most formidable forces in the world; however, the irrational aspects of insecurity persist, nourished rather than managed, treated and healed, amplified now to include Iran.

With an identity forged by its enemies and reinforced by the state’s religious, education, military and cultural institutions along with the trauma narrative, Israelis are not open to seeing themselves in new ways.

Those who suggest such alternatives—you, me, liberal Jews, Judge Goldstone--are dismissed as hostile to Israel and included among the expanding number of enemies. As George W. Bush put i: “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”

Protective isolation against what is perceived as a highly dangerous world and against anyone perceived as an enemy is a natural consequence of trauma.

The huge dimensions of the wall and fence complex built by Israel in the West Bank speak clearly to just how dangerous every Palestinian man, woman and child is seen to be.

On her blog in the extensive section about Palestine/Israel, Abarbanel writes: “the story of Israel and the Palestinian people is the story of trauma being transmitted from one generation to the next” and “my people…have allowed the quality of their life and their identity to be determined by those who hated them and committed crimes against them.” But, she continues: ”Healing is a risky business that requires a willingness to change one’s identity” and not, as she puts it, an endeavor for the faint-hearted.

Abarbanel draws on the work of the American psychiatrist Murray Bowen, and the “close relationship between trauma and persecution, and a tendency to emphasize the force of togetherness. When togetherness is emphasized, those those who do not feel, think, agree, act in the way that the group does, can be seen as traitors.” Citing Bowen’s theory of differentiation, she believes Israel is a “culture of consensus” and a “very poorly differentiated society …with the sense of self very, very meshed and entangled with the sense of the group.”

Based on this analysis, Avigail Abarbanel believes “Israel cannot be reasoned with”, that it “is a traumatised society and it is therefore very dangerous.” Applying family therapy models, she compares Israel to the abusive husband, the Palestinians to the abused wife and the United States to the enabling neighbor;.

She advocates for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict but warns that the coexistence of two traumatized people will require a great deal of imagination and intelligence.

She suggests that there are enough good and skilled and spiritual people in the world whose energies can be mobilized to do the work of healing and reconciliation when the time comes. “It can be great, you know!” she adds.

The interview ends with Avigail reflecting on the ‘secondary traumatization’ that can affect volunteers and human rights workers who are dealing with traumatized populations all over the world. “Look after yourself first,” she counsels, since “you have to be well to help other people…The only way I am able to work sustainably without burning out…is because I do put myself first.”

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To hear more about this provocative and thoughtful interview, please turn to the podcast.

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To become more familiar with the body of Avigail Abarbanel’s work, here are her writings and her professional website.

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My interview with Avigail Abarbanel will be broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan , a monthly program on WPKN radio on May 12, 2010 and is also available as a podcast. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst .

The interview is also available in German.

The four questions for Seder 2010

2010-03-25T13:05:00.004-04:00

As they sit down for the Passover seder, Jews traditionally ask four questions,
each a variation on: Why is this night different from all other nights? Traditionally, the second question asks: Why on all other nights do we eat all kinds of herbs, and on this night only bitter herbs (horseradish or maror)?

In this 2010 version of the Passover seder, olives replace horseradish as the second question is asked and answered. (Thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace for bringing this to my attention.)

Zayit – Olive
(Olives are distributed to seder participants and the following is recited):

Zayit: al shum mah? – This olive: why do we eat it?

The olive tree is one the first plants mentioned in the Torah and remains among the oldest species in Israel/Palestine. It has become a universal symbol of peace and hope, as it is written in Psalm 52:I am like a thriving olive tree in God’s house, I trust in God’s loyal kindness forever and ever.

We add this olive to our Seder plate as a reminder that we must all be God’s bearers of peace and hope in the world. At the same time, we eat this olive in sorrow, mindful that olive trees, the source of livelihood for Palestinian farmers, are regularly chopped down, burned and uprooted by Israeli settlers and the Israeli authorities.

As we look on, Israel pursues systematic policies that increasingly deny Palestinians access to olive orchards that have belonged to them for generations. As we eat now, we ask one another: How will we, as Jews, bear witness to the unjust actions committed in our name? Will these olives inspire us to be bearers of peace and hope for Palestinians–and for all who are oppressed?

There's no such place as home!

2010-02-10T19:00:00.008-05:00

This is a personal story, based on conversations with my school friends from a very far away place and a very long ago time. Midge, Pat and I were children together at Woodstock, an international boarding school in Mussoorie in the state of Uttarakhand, 6,600 ft up in the Indian Himalayas, while our parents lived in India, Pakistan or other countries.

We didn’t know we were third culture kids until a few years ago in a presentation at a school reunion we were introduced to the work of two sociologists, David Pollock and Ruth van Reken, through their book “Third Culture Kids.” The audience erupted into a series of “ah-ha’s”, giggles and whispers. “So that’s who we are,” a woman said, smiling, nodding her head. Her spouse grumbled: “So that’s why you’re like that.” For us in the audience, everything fell into place: now we had a name, now we could recognize ourselves and each other.

Also referred to as global nomads, third culture kids are people who’ve spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their primary culture, the culture from which their parents came, also referred to as their home or passport culture. In the case of my school friends, this was the United States. My home culture was less clear since my parents were refugees and had neither passports nor a home culture to which they could return.

The second culture was where we actually grew up--in this case, India. The third culture was an interstitial culture, the culture that grew up between the first and second cultures and the one that we inhabited. Although my friends were mishkids, the children of missionaries, other parents worked in the diplomatic or military services or in the business sector.

This third culture is highly mobile: its people are always coming and going, their lives marked by arrivals and departures, creating a child and teenager who become skilled at developing relationships.

If you are a third culture kid, you might jump into a new relationship quickly and deeply, with an urgency born of knowing the next move is always on the horizon. Or, you might prefer a casual, superficial friendship, shying away from closeness because you already anticipate the loss as departure time looms.

If you are a third culture kid, you might feel “wrong” or out of place a lot of the time, not knowing the ropes, because you are always learning a new culture, including your home culture. Returning to America from India, my friends remember how they did not understand its popular culture, its slang and social rules, how things work, what was expected of them. Because they looked like everyone else in their home town, they were expected to behave the same too, even though they thought and felt quite differently. They felt “other” but didn’t look it.

At the same time, in India, they looked “other” but did not feel fit, leaving them confused when their second culture responded to them as though were foreigners or strangers. Feeling different wherever they are, third culture kids tell their childhood stories not realizing they may come off as arrogant or boastful to those who don’t come from a third culture.

Given this strong but sometimes murky identity, one can understand why my classmates and I have a strong attachment to our past and to each other, with connections that last for decades and that assert themselves with special strength at school reunions. You can hear us confess that other third culture kids are the only ones who “get it” and are therefore the only ones among whom we can feel truly at home. It takes one to know one; it’s a precious and enduring recognition.

The mobile third culture child can grow into a restless global nomad adult, unable to escape the need to be on the move, to always have another place in mind which can be very disconcerting to other members of our families. I call this place elsewhere.

Mobility, restlessness, a certain detachment--and it’s no surprise that some third culture kids harbor an eccentric view of home and an odd way of describing what home means to them. In his book, Paper Airplanes in the Himalayas: The Unfinished Path Home, Paul Seaman describes what home meant to him, growing up in Pakistan:

Like nomads, we moved with the seasons. Four times a year we packed up and moved to, or back to, another temporary home. We learned early that ‘home’ was an ambiguous concept, and, wherever we lived, some essential part of our lives was always someplace else.

You can hear Midge, Pat and me talk about what “home” means to us, along with fragments of wonderful Indian music.

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“There’s No Such Place As Home” was broadcast on WPKN on February 10, 2010.

Tidings from Hazel Kahan, can be heard on the second Wednesday of every month at 12:30 pm on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport, WPKM, 88.7 Montauk and streaming on wpkn.org. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

UPDATE: Should we all be vegans-PART II?

2009-12-23T12:33:00.006-05:00

The interviews, with Paul Shapiro of The Humane Society and Lauren Ornelas of the Food Empowerment Project, conducted in July, 2008 have been updated and the program rebroadcast on December 16 on WPKN and are available as a podcast.

Lauren reports:
This year we began our first effort to work on the importance of access to healthy foods in low-income communities. Using over a dozen volunteers in Santa Clara County, CA we surveyed over 120 grocery stores, liquor stores and convenience stores regarding access to fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables, as well as vegan options.

FEP have also completed the first three issues of the newsletter Food Chain—linking the issues to "help you go and stay Veg."

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Through Erin Williams of HSUS, Paul reports some of this year's major accomplishments from The Humane Society:

We have a major corporate campaign asking IHOP to start moving away from eggs from caged hens. It’s a big organizational priority now. Some other updates:
· October 2009—Michigan legislature approves bill to ban battery cages, gestation crates, and veal crates (with a phase-out).
· May 2009—Maine legislature approves bill to ban gestation crates and veal crates (with a phase-out).
· May 2009—In response to an HSUS-led campaign, Wendy’s starts using some cage-free eggs.
· November 2008—Nearly two-thirds of California voters pass the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (Prop 2), which bans battery cages, gestation crates, and veal crates throughout the state (with a phase-out).

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Link to VegGuide.Org to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant or grocer near you.

Please stop and think before you buy bottled water!

2009-12-15T21:43:00.004-05:00

See the facts!

UPDATE: Should we all be vegans-PART I?

2009-12-06T21:12:00.019-05:00

The interviews, with Nathan Runkle and Nora Kramer, conducted in July, 2008 have been updated and were rebroadcast on December 9 on WPKN and are available as a podcast.

Nathan Runkle and Mercy for Animals
Overview in this end of year video report

Since we spoke last year, Nathan has much much more to be proud of: Through undercover investigations with hidden cameras, Mercy for Animals has released three new reports. The first about what is described as "shocking abuse" at New England's largest egg factory farm, Quality Egg of New England in Turner, Maine. The second tells of the "cruel and industrialized reality of modern hatcheries at the world's largest egg-laying breed hatchery", Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa. The third documents vicious cruelty at Fann Country View Family Farms, a pig factory farm in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania.

MFA have also launched a new documentary called Fowl Play about egg factory farms which has been an official selection at more than a dozen film festivals and is available at fowlplaymovie.com I bought a copy and donated it to our local library.

MFA have also revamped their website, launched a new blog, launched ad campaigns in Denver, Toronto and New York and opened an office in New York City.

Nora Kramer and Youth Empowered Action

SInce we spoke with Nora, she has started Youth Empowered Action, vegan summer camps for kids in Northern California and Portland, OR, to support emerging young leaders who want to make a difference in the world. Their website is.www.yeacamp.org

Link to VegGuide.Org to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant or grocer near you.

Why ISN'T healthcare a human right?

2009-10-10T15:30:00.004-04:00

When I interviewed Dr. Sara Bhattacharji earlier this year, the great American health care battles had not begun in earnest and ‘health care as a human right’ was still an unfamiliar notion. Since then, I have tried to understand what it is that expectations of health care tell us about the obligations of a government to its citizens. Why, I asked, does our government not take for granted that its citizens are entitled to health care? Why is there so much argument about this fundamental question? Why is there any argument at all? I concluded that its people are seen as expense items on this country’s balance sheet. Quite simply, people cost too much.

I’ve just returned from Berlin where I learned that, along with education and an unconditional right to a basic living income, the right, that is, to live as a social being, healthcare is considered a mandatory necessity and premiums are determined by income.

What is the basis for such policies, I asked some German friends? Perhaps, one proposed, it originates in the feudal lords who considered it a matter of pride to look after their serfs and staff in a decent manner. More definitively though, we have to hand it to Otto von Bismarck. In 1883, in the first of many acts of social legislation, he was able to pass the Health Insurance Bill, followed by Accident Insurance and Old Age and Disability Bills. “That’s why we don’t have homelessness or people living in cars in Germany,” I was told by Denise Wade, who lives in Munich and who has experienced both German and US healthcare. “Everyone’s considered a valuable human being, she continued, reminding me that there’s no death penalty in the European Union. These programs she told, me in her words, “help create and maintain stability, the social tapestry is stronger and lasts longer. It’s the difference between capitalism and social democracy,” she concluded, pointing out that Marx and Lenin were alive when Bismarck was Chancellor.

We didn’t discuss other ways in which Germany has demonstrated the value it places on human life but please do rest assured that I don’t need to be reminded of post-Bismarck Germany, of the Third Reich and whatever its healthcare policies were.

Still puzzled by the moral vacuum at the heart of the American healthcare debate, I returned to the Tidings program broadcast in May of this year. Please listen or, if you’d rather read about it, you can return to the rest of the blog posting...

Why isn’t healthcare a human right? is also available as a podcast . In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it is produced by Tony Ernst to be broadcast on WPKN on October 14, 2009. Tidings can now be heard streaming live on the second Wednesday of every month at 12.30 pm EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

THE BODY TOXIC: interview with Nena Baker

2009-09-05T09:38:00.003-04:00

To hear the podcast and to read the blog posting of this interview, please go to http://web.me.com/hzelkahan/Tidings/Welcome.html

TWENTY PERCENT ON THE OTHER SIDE

2009-08-13T14:46:00.023-04:00

My first contact with Susan Nathan was seeing her book, The Other Side of Israel, in a Palestinian bookstore in East Jerusalem. After she agreed to meet with me, I traveled to Tamra, an Arab town in northern Israel where she has lived since 2003, the only Jewish woman among 30,000 Palestinian Arabs who are also citizens of Israel.

Two years later, I called her again, this time from my home, to find out how things on ‘the other side of Israel' looked to her now, across, as the cover of her book puts it, ‘the Jewish-Arab divide.”

Susan Nathan has spent the last few years writing, cataloging, documenting, and speaking about the injustices and human rights violations imposed by the Israeli government on its non-Jewish citizens who account for 20% of the population. She has brought to the attention of a worldwide audience what it means to be a second class citizen in Israel, simply by virtue of one’s race.

Seeing life from 'the other side', understanding the Palestinian narrative, meant she had to unlearn her lifelong Zionist training, to acknowledge that the flip side of Israel’s triumphant independence in 1948 was the suffering of the displaced, uprooted and terrorized Palestinians whose historic land was seized to enlarge the UN-mandated borders of the new Israeli state. For the Palestinians, this was the Nakba or catastrophe, which today, under the new Israeli right wing government, they are forbidden by law to commemorate or to mention in school curricula.

While considerable attention has been paid recently to the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza, less is known about the situation faced by Palestinian Arabs within Israel.

One in five Israelis is a second-class citizen
In her book, Susan Nathan makes vivid how these realities on the ground translate into second-class citizenship in Israel. The list of injustices has grown since her book was published and builds from the small to the momentous: identity papers coded to differentiate Jew from Arab, intense airport security including the removal of every item in the Arab traveler’s suitcase, demolition of Arab homes, refusal of permits to rebuild them, prohibitions on Arab land purchases and the resulting overcrowding in towns such as the one where Susan lives. With the loss of agricultural land outside the town, Tamra has run out of space for 'natural growth' which means the residents must build multi-story homes and keep livestock next to their houses.

The list runs on to a re-architecting of the roads and bridges so that only Jews can travel on them; gross neglect of infrastructure and services such as water, electricity, clinics and schools, especially in the Negev; exclusion of Arab workers from wealth-generating sectors of the economy at the same time that they are disconnected from their traditional agricultural economy; employment practices that include the firing of workers who speak Arabic on the job; diverting or manipulating water supplies; erasure of Arab presence and history by building parks and forests over Arab villages, removing former Arab place names from maps and roads and, as reported recently on NPR.org: When motorists head up the hill to Jerusalem, for example, the large green traffic signs say "Yerushalayim" in Hebrew, "Jerusalem" in English and "Ursalim al-Quds" in Arabic. But if transportation minister Israel Katz has his way, all three languages will spell out the word "Yerushalayim."

The use of erasure to replace one collective memory with another extends most egregiously to the school system. Palestinians Arabs have no real voice in formulating the curriculum in Arab schools which re-educates the student to accept the erasure of his own history and identity replacing it with understanding history from the Zionist perspective and sympathizing with Jewish suffering.

Activism 2.0
Since the publication of her book, Ms. Nathan has spoken at numerous events in Europe, where she reports that awareness and information levels among Europeans have increased considerably and continue to grow. At the same time, her energetic public presence have transformed how she sees her role as an activist:

There's a huge division now coming between Jews who've understood the reality of Israel and what's going on here and those who've yet to understand the reality of what's going on here, who can't accept it and find it very frightening and threatening. My role is not to continue to bash away at Israel how terrible Israel is...it's very important I've realized by being in Europe to show compassion towards Jews who are not yet able to accept that this country has turned out to be the way it is; it's very frightening actually to see Israel the way that it really is. My own position has started to evolve to understand you can't frighten people into accepting the reality here...It's important to acknowledge and understand that I was once in their position...I was very much the victim of the Zionist education which hundreds of thousands of people around the world...but the Zionist position is weakening...

Instead of the 'barrage' that characterized her earlier public presentations, Susan now prefers 'fierce criticism of our people mixed with compassion':
I've changed how I present (my argument): I'm far less aggressive but at the same time I'm far more dangerous...I have a far better view of what's going on..that's the only way you can get Jews to take on board what's happening here...a continuous barrage of criticism will not make the changes we need. I'm very fiercely critical but I'm also very compassionate. It's very difficult for people to accept that everything they've based their life on has been based on a sandcastle which is now being swept away by a wave.

Susan Nathan's new credo resonates with some of what I heard from Philip Weiss in last month's Tidings blog post and podcast. Perhaps we are witnessing the emergence of a more mature, a kinder left-wing Jewish voice, one that forcibly identifies with being Jewish, that wishes to look unflinchingly at the reality of what Israel is today and that accepts as progressive Jewish responsibility the holding up of a mirror to let Israel see what others see. Perhaps this will modulate the dialogue from invective to conversation, dial down the tone from rabid to calm and, perhaps it will lead, as Susan fervently hopes it will, 'to another country, not the country we have now.'

Comment
After reading her book and interviewing Susan Nathan I wondered if we understand the price we pay for identity, identification and identity cards. How easy would it be to create second-class citizens without ID cards?

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The Other Side of Israel: an interview with Susan Nathan is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on August 6, 2009. Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at 12 noon EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

ZIONISM UNDER ATTACK

2009-07-04T14:25:00.028-04:00

Background In November 1947, Palestine was partitioned by the United Nations into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem administered by the UN. Following its independence and subsequent war with Jordan and Egypt, 78% of Palestine was now in Israel's hands. Following the war of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and continues to do so today.While the concept of Zionism, of a Jewish state for Jews, had its detractors before the foundation of Israel, these objections were rooted in philosophy rather than in practice. The actualization of Zionism over the last 61 years has been another matter altogether.Definitions of anti-Zionism range from the religious to the political, an inflammable debate not likely to be resolved any time soon. My own definition of anti-Zionism is neither anti-semitic nor does it call for the destruction or elimination of the state of Israel. It simply asserts that it is impossible for a Jewish state to be democratic. If Israel is a democratic state, then it belongs to all its citizens, at least 20% of whom are not Jews. A democratic state does not withhold equal rights from those of its citizens who are not Jewish.

The tide is turning American Jews could turn a blind eye to the Occupation, and they did—for forty years—but Gaza, a tipping point, was much more difficult to ignore. American Jews have been forced into rethinking the unthinking, ingrained support of Israel which in turn is loosening the iron grip that AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby, has had on Congress and on Jewish institutions in this country. Recently, young Jews came together in New York for a program calledLove, Hate and the Jewish State, sponsored by several leading Jewish organizations, to facilitate discussions about the alienation and pain that Israel’s behavior is causing this younger generation, discussions that arguably will lead many of them to resolve their dilemmas by replacing their Zionism with anti-Zionism, or at least with non-Zionism. Where might these “new” Jews find solidarity if they do make that transition?

Anti-Zionism can produce strange bedfellows. My guests for this Tidings radio program (July 2, 2009) are both Jewish, curiously both with the family name Weiss and both self-described anti-Zionists. They have arrived at this self-description from two radically distinct starting points--one secular and one deeply religious.

Philip Weiss Philip Weiss is a 53-year old New York journalist, author of two books and articles in several leading magazines. For the past three and a half years he has blogged on the Middle East and Jewish identity on Mondoweiss, his increasingly influential blog not least because it provides a gathering place, a safe haven for "secret sharing," for Jews who are struggling with the tension between the image of Israel as a special place for Jews that they grew up with and the image of the militaristic, brutal occupier that Israel increasingly presents to the world.

It is in part a generational tension, a conflict between the tribal elders and the more integrated, assimilated younger generations. What we are seeing is American Jewish identity in transition as the insular, introspective orientation of "What is good for the Jews?" gives way to a more modern, humanistic, international question: "What is good for everyone?"It is a transition that is causing consternation and even panic among the tribal elders, especially within the powerful Israel lobby AIPAC. An interregnum tumult that is complex and often opaque, we are witnessing a reframing of Zionism, the blogsphere alive and unleashed with vitriol and scholarship, as events in Washington and Tel-Aviv are minutely and obsessively observed and analysed, with Mondoweiss and Jewish Peace News invaluable, authoritative sources of such reporting and commentary.It is easier now for American Jews, confused by the conundrum of being a PEP, ("progressive except on Palestine") to find solidarity with others who demand the same human rights for Palestinians as they would for any minority in the United States, or elsewhere in the world. Philip Weiss articulates his own personal role as one that includes responsibility for the Jews and Israelis:

It’s caused a cycle of brutalization…I am able and many Israeli Jews in the United States are able and should display leadership toward Israelis who have no concept of minority rights and no window at all on what they have done to their society…it’s a human rights disaster that they have had the largest power in creating…and they don’t know what to do about it.

I felt some degree of Jewish responsibility (after visiting Gaza) I can work as a writer and work on my country but I also need to work for my people to wake them up to what’s happening.

Rabbi Weiss Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss is a member of the Neturei Karta organization, a world-wide group of deeply orthodox Jews who believe that Zionism is "a terrible stain on Judaism", a corruption of the fundamental tenets of the Jewish religion. I met the rabbi in Brooklyn at a large Palestinian rally. Walking single file into a hall packed with young, educated flag-waving Palestinians, a group of black-garbed, bearded, orthodox Jewish men made a dramatic entry. Intrigued, I approached them to ask why they had come. Was it to support the Palestinians or to demonstrate against them?

Rabbi Weiss told me why his people oppose Zionism, starting with Theodore Herzl and the Zionist movement as rejecting and belittling Judaism, rebelling against God, replacing religion with nationalism and the metaphysical with the material:Further, he explained, it is written that God made the Jews swear three oaths binding them during their exile, all of which have been flouted by Zionism: not to return en masse to the Holy Land, not to rebel against the nations of the world and not to attempt ending the exile, that is returning to Israel, by their own actions, rather than as decreed by God.

Where Phil Weiss' articulates his secular mission as helping Israelis by "waking them up to what's happening", the deeply orthodox religion solution from Neturei Karta, as told to me by Rabbi Weiss, is contrition and restitution:

Being that the land of Palestine was inhabited, you’re going to destroy those people, destroy their lives… This in itself, the Torah says you’re not allowed to steal even half a penny from another human being. This flies in the face of the Torah. Every concept of the Torah gets breached by stealing this land from the Palestinian people.

What does the Rabbi want Israel to do?

It has to be one state but the speedy and total dismantlement, total dissolution of the state of Israel... The course is to approach the leadership of the Palestinian people, whoever their leaders are, to profusely apologize for the wrongs done to them, to work on a course of restitution of paying back the damages, returning the property and the houses, and ask them humbly if they would allow the Jewish people to live among them.

If Zionism is the problem, then any solution will require a profound reframing of the proposition that is Israel. Who is up to this task?

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Zionism Under Attack is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on July 2, 2009 Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at 12 noon EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

HEALTHCARE IS A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE

2009-05-11T12:00:00.030-04:00

An interview with Dr. Sara Bhattacharjee

Dr. Sara Bhattacharjee in her office

In February, 2009, after a delicious traditional 4-rice South Indian lunch in her office, I interviewed Dr. Sara Bhattacharjee, a primary care and community medicine practitioner at Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu state.

Four-rice traditional South Indian lunch

Until I saw her philosophy in action in the hospital, slums and villages around Vellore, I assumed that our first world country had invaluable advice and example to offer this (emerging? not-first world?) country. How quickly I shed those assumptions!

Grounds of Christian Medical College

Instead, I learned was that by viewing health care as a human rights issue and bringing unpaid volunteers into crucial nodes of a human network, the community itself can be transformed into an enlivened, active, effective organism in which the hospital is far more than a building populated by sick people and white-coated stethoscopes:

Shrine on hospital grounds

As Dr. Sara sees it:“Hospitals need to be seen not as worlds in themselves but as part of the community’s resource for the treatment of illness or the promotion of health,” to be educated so they know what is happening to themselves, to seek out solutions, to show them they have access they didn’t know they had.

Entrance to Low Cost Effective Care Unit

At the heart of Dr. Sara’s Low Cost Effective Care Unit are her volunteers, a small but committed group of nine women, who for the past six years have catapulted their training to enabled the disabled to self-identify their needs into expanding their own skills, initiative and self-worth so that they are now crucial members of

Volunteers and outpatients at village clinic

the community, respected 'go-to' leaders who have raised the community’s sense of self-worth and knowledge, along with their own. Dr. Sara describes it as a dynamic process that keeps giving--at the individual and community levels:

“(After the training)the volunteers were there with knowledge and skill and we thought if there were people there with knowledge and skill and good attitude, perhaps things would happen in the community. What we have found is that these volunteers are wonderful people and the knowledge and skills they have gained they have multiplied and used many times over. They’ve been very innovative in looking around in their own areas and finding resources they could use...even if they’re doing other things...they’re all keen to still get together and come together for monthly meetings and all this is totally voluntary because we don’t really pay them anything. I think it has made a change in all their lives...all of them say: ‘I’ve always wanted to serve, to help people, I always had a mind to serve but I didn’t know what to do. Now I’ve been empowered so when I’m asked I know what to do or at least I’m able to think about what to do’. I think the more they do,
the more they become innovative."

Government-provided wheelchair for paraplegic villager

In one remarkable story, Dr. Sara talks about teenage boys who, when one of their group was diagnosed with cancer, became anxious that they would also get the disease. They approached a volunteer (and, as Dr.Sara put it, “it speaks volumes for the volunteer that they felt they could go to her”) who approached Dr. Sara's team who identified the real anxieties underlying the cancer fears: typical teenage fears about HIV, sex, drinking, drugs or masturbation. The team created a life skills program for the boys who in turn initiated a garbage-cleanup program which led to contact with their elected representative and their subsequent civic empowerment.

The volunteer then asked Dr. Sara: "What about the girls? What can we do for then?" which led to teenage girls creating a program for the isolated elders of the community which in turn led to ongoing bonding of these two groups, the community's underlying network now richer and strengthened, as resilience, generosity and innovation rewarded and multiplied--living proof of what a difference a single volunteer can make in the lives of other and how this becomes amplified when several like-minded women connect to each other for shared purpose, when, as Dr. Sara puts it, "(it creates) a way of working that chimes with the forces of life that exist within the community...Our experience has been that these volunteers have been able to get young people to come together, young people to help them with whatever they do,” to start what has grown into a youth movement in the community.

Painted glass window in hospital hallway

I remind myself that we are in India, talking about slums and very poor rural people where funds are scarce and where poverty does not conflict with human goodness. What a far cry from our society’s flawed concept of
our society's health care!

She explains the difference between community and family medicine: “Community medicine involves a little more focus on health within the community whereas family medicine is focused much more on the individual but sees the individual very much in relation to where they come from; their particular environment is very important to the treatment of disease. She has her young interns spend a week visiting their outpatients at their homes in the slums and villages after which they return “gobsmacked” by what they witnessed, saying they would otherwise have had never known “that this is the condition in which this person lives.”

Temple detail in village center

I am beginning to understand what Dr. Sara means when she writes about the holistic integration “of the biological and clinical, socio-economic and behavioral, emotional and spiritual aspects of life.” Her stories reveal just how personalized this approach is, in which: “the individual is valued, the family history is known, the patient is involved in making decisions and the relationship between that individual and the staff is one of trust and friendship...In our outreach work we’ve gone beyond just the typical family medicine approach...We’ve seen enormous amounts of generosity, people helping each other in the midst of violence and chaos...we see a force and a resilience among people who are actually facing very great odds against life itself...we feel that we are not the keepers of health and life, it has to be in the hands of people but we can encourage, lift up, support, if we are sensitive...being aware, to feel it.”

Government-provided house to paraplegic villager (cost Rs. 37,000/-)

All this in India, among the poorest of the poor where, as it is with plant and man-made materials nothing is wasted: every encounter is examined for what it teaches, where choices are not made between "either/or" but seen instead as "both/and", where nothing is discarded and everything holds possibility in another time frame, if not this one. This means that sometimes results may not become visible for years and that patience and being intensely present supplant the demand for immediate gratification.

Wonderful inspiring stories but I still didn’t understand how all the elements come together in what felt to me a magical, mystical way, beyond simply the result of enlightened, patient leadership. How does it actually happen?

This is what Dr. Sara told me: “I look at it like this: people are in webs of relationship and sometimes we don’t know where we are and who is connected to us and suddenly it all lights up and people hold hands and it may light up and it may fade away and somehow you find another network...there are people who in themselves are saying I want to help somebody or I want to make life better for myself and others but I don’t know what to do and suddenly across their path comes this volunteer or somebody from the hospital and they say ‘ok we’ll join into that’..or they say ‘we have this problem, can you help us?’ Certainly it’s not one way. I have, and sometimes my team has, gained more than we have given.”

Dr. Binayak Sen

As we ended our conversation, Dr. Sara told me about her friend and colleague, the physician-activist Dr. Binayak Sen, whose work with mineworkers and tribal people displaced by the building of dams in Chattisgarh led him “to stand up and speak for the rights of people, not just for health but to look at health as a human right and approach health from the human rights perspective.” Using nonviolence, discussion and writing, Dr. Sen was openly critical of the government, who labeled him as Naxalite and put him in jail where he has been since May 14, 2007. His arrest has sparked worldwide condemnation and protest.

Does it make sense to think of the giving of health care as a human right too?

UPDATE!
On May 25, Binayak Sen was granted bail and released after spending two years in jail.

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This interview, broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan on May 9, 2009 on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport and 88.7 fm Montauk, is available as a half-hour podcast. Tidings from Hazel Kahan is produced by Tony Ernst.

MAKING SENSE OF A WORLD IN CRISIS

2009-03-27T16:02:00.008-04:00

Recordings of this series of interviews, broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan in February and March, 2009 on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport and 88.7 fm Montauk, are available as half-hour podcasts. Tidings from Hazel Kahan is produced by Tony Ernst.

In this three-part radio interview series, I asked four leading thinkers to talk about their views on the monumental changes gripping our world--the tumult, the shifting, the fall of hallowed institutions-- and what they believe the future holds.

In the first program, I had two conversations—the first with John Daido Loori, current abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, who analyses our current global crisis from a Zen Buddhist perspective. The second conversation was with Peter Russell, a writer and speaker who examines the tumult and crisis of our world in terms of our belief systems and the part that a developed consciousness can play in liberating our minds.

In the second program, Andrew Harvey, a well known and distinguished mystic and scholar, a poet and a novelist, a translator of Rumi and, as architect of Sacred Activism and the Institute of Sacred Activism, a spiritual teacher and writer. He talks about the global crisis and the choices we face between, he says, suicide and transformation.

In the third and last part of this series, you will hear my conversation with Dr. Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst, author and founder of the Assisi Institute, who uses the theories of Carl Jung to develop his Archetypal Pattern Analysis in which he provides what he calls ‘a meaningful confluence between science, spirituality and psychology’. Using these lens, he shares with us his views of the crisis in our world.

For greater understanding about who these thinkers are and if you'd like to contact them directly, please visit their web sites.

What makes an activist?

2009-01-25T13:09:00.019-05:00

Summary based on a Tidings from Hazel Kahan program first heard on WPKN on January 1, 2009.

Lately, I’ve been curious about why some people become activists while others look on from the sidelines, unmoved by situations that a committed activist finds intolerable.

We’re all against oppression and injustice and we all believe human rights are hugely important and must be defended at all cost—but not necessarily by us.. Others however hear a call that the rest of us don’t and they respond, believing that their presence is required elsewhere, sometimes on foreign soil. Somehow it’s the ‘foreign soil’ part that seems of particular significance to me. What makes such people different from you and me? Are they fearless? Grandiose? Risk-takers? Adventure seekers? Or is it something more personal? More in touch with their conscience? Perhaps they have less to lose back home? Do we each have a tipping point?

For Bill McNulty, well-known for his non-violent civil disobedience opposition to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia for which he served six months in federal prison, activism has been a progression as he came to understand that it’s is a lonely quest without the camaraderie, support and learning of community.

You never know when somebody will take the next step, increase the risk he or she is willing to take. Bill relates the story he heard first from Daniel Berrigan, the poet, activist and Roman Catholic priest whose voice and actions spearheaded the Vietnam anti-war movement:

"A river runs through a village and everyday bodies float down stream. The villagers are good people and they remove the bodies, healing those who are still alive, burying the corpses. One day, one villager realizes this is not enough. He goes to the head of the river, the place where the bodies come from, where the people who create the policy reside, where the brutality originates. The closer you get to that place, the more intense the experience becomes.”

Going to the head of the river, the place where the bodies come from, where the risk is greatest. It’s a powerful image and an apt description of the work done by IWPS, the International Women’s Peace Service in the occupied West Bank. Located in the village of Haris in the Salfit region, their regularly emailed Human Rights Reports provide witness accounts of Israeli violations and abuses. So far, they have produced 391 reports.

Why do these women activists do it? “A concern about human rights and the rule of international law,” one of them told me. Sometimes it’s risky, sometimes it’s scary but it’s also “a deep experience”: daily life in a Palestinian village, experiencing the Palestinian people and their legendary hospitality and strength, experiencing the Occupation, “being able to contribute toward solidarity with Palestinian people...peace and reconciliation in the Middle East,” experiences that “helps to do solidarity work in our own countries.”

Expressing a truly global perspective, one of the IWPS volunteers told me: “I think we as Europeans have responsibility in trying to solve the problem because we contributed to it. Besides," she added, "carrying the story beyond Palestine’s borders and the reporting by traditional media provides is also important."

So much commitment and yet no certainty that any of it will end up making a difference. The women at IWPS report not only no visible progress in the region but actual deterioration as the occupation becomes increasingly entrenched and institutionalized. Bill McNulty adds the perspective of a veteran activist: “I realize that no matter what you do, you do good because it is good. You’re not necessarily called on to be effective but to be faithful to the principles that govern what you do. You will lose friends in the process,” he warns “because you will be outside of the box of conventional wisdom.”

My friend Eleanor, who has volunteered in South America, Thailand and Burma tells me that having witnessed injustice and suffering first-hand, she must continue telling the story: “If you see it and do nothing, it’s such disrespect. They gave you their story and you have to honor them and look for ways to keep it alive.”

Perhaps that’s what it is then: motivated not by success but by conscience, activists are people of conscience and consciousness who, knowing what they know, have no alternative but to do what they do. Perhaps we’re all at different stages of that progression.

A podcast of these interviews is available on Tidings from Hazel Kahan. Tidings, produced by Tony Ernst, can be heard on the first Thursday of every month on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport, WPKM 88.7 Montauk and wpkn.org.

Dark tourism--a good or a bad thing?

2008-12-09T10:35:00.024-05:00

What is it and who are the dark tourists?

It seems that we humans are hardwired to leave our hearths and homes every now and then to discover what else lies beyond the horizon. So we turn into tourists or travelers, timid or intrepid, hewing to the known or smitten by the uncharted, more or less conscious of what we are seeing as we go. Perhaps the repetitive pressure of much contemporary life has stimulated our appetites for the authentic and the spectacular, allowing the emergence of a new genre-- dark tourism and the dark tourist, motivated by death and disaster and apocalypse rather than by sun and sea and sand and pastoral living, with even ecotourism and adventure travel no longer stimulating enough.

I came across the concept of dark tourism through Amanda Kendle, a travel writer for vagabondish, an Australia-based on-line travel zine and on her own blog,
I called her in Perth, Western Australia and she told me about grief tourism (the Paris tunnel where Diana died, Auschwitz, Pompeii, Ground Zero), disaster tourism (post-tsunami Thailand, post-Katrina New Orleans) doomsday tourism (Anarctic, Great Barrier Reef, rainforests) and, what I was most interested in, poverty tourism or ‘poorism’ (Soweto, flavelas of Brazil, slums of Mumbai and Delhi).

Some varieties of dark tourism focus on people, others on places; some focus on man-made, some on natural cataclysms; some are about living people, others about historical or recently dead people. (Dark tourism has captured the interest of academics, including at least one doctoral candidate.

Eco-tourism--dark or light?
On the face of it, eco-tourism is not dark at all but very much about the living, defined buy the Ecotourism Society as "responsible travel to natural areas which conserves the environment and improves the welfare of the local people". I include it here because it shares ethical issues with dark tourism and because some of its consequences could be very dark indeed.

Ten or so years ago I was an eco-tourist.

How noble and green and enlightened and adventurous of me, I thought, traveling to Ecuador’s rainforest and the Amazon to see nature under attack so that when I returned to New York City I could report on the fragility of it all, the poverty but also report on the wisdom of the jungle people. I would become an advocate and persuade others to go see for themselves and the world would then be a better place.

Wrong! Do not go, is what I would say now. Keep your feet and your footprints right here at home. Look at photographs others have brought back and listen to their stories. Support the efforts of the rain forest custodians or the Galapagos or the Alaskan wilderness by donating money but don’t add your presence—and the carbon footprints it will take to get there. Leave yourself at home. Let the native people and the flora and fauna be. It’s the enlightened thing to do.
But this is now and I’m talking about then. I joined a dozen or so other people on a trip offered by a New Age organization in New York City. It was the first group trip I had ever signed on for and, so far, it has also been my last. A well-known leader was going to lead us into the rain forest where we would stay with indigenous people, visit shamans, learn about the healing powers of plants and trees, do psycho-navigation, drumming and shape-shifting and, an implicit promise not verbalized in the brochure, we would be able to sample the ayahuasca drug in a country where the long arm of US law could never reach us.

Ecuador Diary
Here’s what my diary pages have to tell about one of my days as an eco-tourist:
We walked for about four hours ending up at the house of a shaman in a clearing by the river. The people were making a hammock out of palm trees and making yarn from the young leaves. It was very hot, no noonday covering. We sat around, I drained my canteen and then some of our New Age-niks went shopping. To my chagrin and deep shame, they bought the hammock, the stools and anything else that was movable. One woman walked around in her bra, another took off her jeans, as if they were in a Sheraton resort. The Indians, evangelized by the missionaries, are a very modest, prim people.
I discussed my feelings with one of the women, trying to make sense out of the fact that we were supposed to be on a spiritual journey, to learn from the Indians and instead, here we were, raping their homes, escalating their sense of materialism, shopping their homes, for God’s sake. The Jungle Mall. Nobody was interested in learning how they used certain parts of the palm tree for the hammock and others for brooms or baskets. The rush to buy continued when we went to another house to see their pottery and then went on unrestrained at the back of the settlement where we slept. Eventually the shaman intervened as what was left of headdresses, bowls, baskets, stools were being traded for sleeping bags, money, mosquito repellent, flashlights, watches and money.

If you were to ask D. (our Ecuadoran leader) why he encourages this crass behavior from his group, he would say he is trying to show them that ecotourism is profitable and that they need the money. He is on their side and doesn’t really care what we do or how we demean ourselves.

The ethics of it all
What are the ethics of offering misfortune as a commodity for sale, of paying to see poverty, of objectifying slum-dwellers and street children. not necessarily with an intent of remedying their condition? Is paying to see glue-sniffing street kids in the slums of Delhi any different from paying to see animals in the zoo? Is the “otherness” of the animals different from the otherness of the children? If you were such a child would you have any way of understanding why Western tourists come to look at you, snapping pictures and talking to each other about you? Surely there’s something slightly perverse in spending vacation time observing profound misery.

It’s not like that at all, says Chris Way, owner with his partner Krishna Poojari of Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai. (I interviewed him in Mumbai a few hours before the attacks began on November 26.) Reality Tours who offer what they call slum tours of Dharavi, reportedly the largest slum in Asia, see it quite differently. Their objective is to counteract the negative image of slum dwellers by showing their productive and energetic sides along with their sense of community. Out of respect for the inhabitants, tours are small, no more than six people and photography is not allowed. Reality Tours and Travel also return some of the profits to the community. You can hear Chris Way point to a lack of understanding that leads journalists and others to condemn slum tourism.

Too complex for too many conclusions
It’s a complex subject and, altruism and greater good or not, it raises many provocative questions about voyeurism and exploitation. Perhaps it all boils down to intention: if you pay to go on a slum tour, what is it you expect to see and why? Will you be disappointed and feel you didn’t get your money’s worth if the slum dwellers are not as desperate or hungry or poor or dysfunctional as you’d expected? Do you wonder if the glue-sniffing children in the Brazilian favelas were instructed to play up their glue sniffing when the tourists come around? Do you wonder what would happen to the poorism business if poverty were eradicated one fine day?

Dark questions. Appropriate for dark tourism.

Perhaps that is where we draw the bright line—at intention and consciousness. And nobody knows your intention better than you. Perhaps paradoxically dark tourism contains its own light, the light of enlightenment. Know thyself and understand what it is that draws you to the dark side. And once there, understand what your actions may lead to. Whether you’re being perverse, morbid or a seeker of truth and knowledge—it’s all ok when consciousness makes it so.
..............
(Dec. 20: Just came across this blog post about 'weird tourism'.)

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Dark Tourism is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on December 4, 2008. Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at noo WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

BEGGING AND BEGGARS

2008-10-27T14:16:00.028-04:00

Begging: a profession? a misfortune? a job? a scourge? a spiritual practice? an industry? a stain on society? freedom of choice?

Like tipping, the subject of my previous post, begging creates an unequal relationship between giver and receiver, an unbalanced one-way exchange with the amount of money transferred depending on the generosity and intentions of the donor with the receiver having very little to say.

Because I was born in India and spent my formative years there, begging was a normal part of my environment, when I used to go to the market with my mother or to the Anarkali bazaar with my father. I saw beggars every day, and although I found them annoying, I would always stare at those with especially startling deformities such as grotesquely twisted limbs or too many fingers or tiny microencephalitic heads, I did not feel responsible for their misfortune nor did I think I could--or should--improve their futures.

Sometimes, against my mother’s wishes I would hand out coins, knowing that this would embolden other beggars to run towards me, extending their hands and whining ‘paisa, memsahib’ but by then I felt I had done my good deed for the day and could convincingly wave my empty hands or pockets to demonstrate I had nothing left to give. These are my memories as a seven- or eight-year old child but their enduring clarity has left me curious to hear the stories brought back by American visitors to India to hear how they react to the poverty in general and beggars in particular often a defining part of their experience. Of course beggars are not restricted to India but are found in virtually every country of our planet.

I am also most curious about what it’s like to be a beggar, who becomes one and who remains one and how beggars and begging fit into Indian society today. Do the beggars of Mumbai or New Delhi have anything in common with the homeless of New York City?

That’s the thing with the subjects I choose for Tidings. Before I know it I’m burrowing around in some unexpectedly deep, complex, mysterious, weird corner of the universe. Begging has always been with us and probably always will be. It may even compete for primacy with the world’s other oldest profession. Yes, begging is considered a profession, not only by many of those who practice it but by academic researchers too. A blogger from Ghana describes begging as “one of the fastest growing sectors of the country’s economy”. That pronouncement certainly gave me pause—perhaps it’s time to rethink begging! Should I be gloomily realistic and propose that with the economy being what it is these days we may want to consider begging as a viable emerging career alternative? If not on the streets, then at least to join the swarms of beggars on the Internet here and here.

The way people feel about beggars seems to go broaden the more they’ve been exposed to begging in their lives. On first contact, they take it very personally, almost as if they themselves are the victims. They experience confusion and fear, especially when confronted and surrounded by a number of clamoring beggars in a crowded Indian city. Greater exposure to beggars over time leads to self-analysis: people ask what is my contemptuous, fearful rejection of beggars doing to me and my soul?

Amy teaches high school math in New Jersey and has a rather pragmatic attitude towards beggars. She says she feels no obligation to give money to either beggars in India or to the homeless in New York City. Compassion, yes and food or small useful gifts perhaps, but not money and then only to adult women not children. Unsure of where the money will end up, she feels giving money will only perpetuate the problem.

Isabella, a high school senior from Long Island, New York, describes her first visit to India a year ago, when she was 17. She struggles with what the right thing to do is, unsure whether giving to a beggar is a good thing or a bad thing. “I really don’t know”, is her heartfelt conclusion. Perhaps, if they were were honest, this would also be the conclusion of broader philosophical and public policy debates about poverty and its solutions in think tanks and NGOs around the world.

I wondered if maybe one gets used to beggars and develops a more resigned attitude over time so I emailed Midge, a school chum from the days we both went to Woodstock School, Mussoorie, U.P. Being an old India hand, born and raised there and currently on sabbatical in Bangalore, I thought she might have a well-developed philosophy about how she and her husband Byron behave when beggars come up to them, asking for money. Midge is troubled by how easy it is to transform beggars into “The Other”, ignoring their presence and thereby denying their existence rather than confronting them and acknowledging them as fellow human beings. Whatever we give beggars, she says, we know is ‘totally inadequate to solve their problems’ We can’t help them and so we feel “like a rat”, no matter what we do.

Another friend, Milda, had visited the holy city of Vanarsi on the Ganges River where her terrifying experiences with beggars have left her not just with vivid memories but also with new resolve: She tells me: “If I would go back...I would go back with a different mind set. It is I who failed the poor...not they who failed me. I was not prepared. And I should have been.”

However heartfelt these Western views are, they do not begin to chronicle the many-tentacled position that begging actually occupies in the narrative of Indian culture and history. For a more nuanced understanding I interviewed two native-born Indians.

I spoke with Mr. S. Swaminathan, or Swami as he asked me to call him, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, where he conducts motivational and communication workshops. I had came across his satirical article
in which his purpose was to reframe beggars as people with professional skills: they understand site selection, for example, by choosing the right place and the right time, they are skilled at “practicing the art of sustained irritation until the alms giver breaks down and puts money in the begging bowl”. They also know how to network to identify clients and learn the latest techniques, from their colleagues, all skills that could be applied to more productive ends. Begging is not a choice, he insists and demands that politicians and society accept responsibility by creating dignity for beggars through viable jobs. “Instead of patronizing the beggar”, he says, “persuade the politicians!”

I also stumbled across what its editor, Vikas Kamat, claims is the largest personal blog on the web, citing not only its 4 or 5 million page views a month but also the more than 100 person-years it represents of stories, commentaries and photographs from his India-based family . In an article written by his father before his death and translated by Vikas, we learn about the varieties of begging, ranging from inherited tradition to the temporary and circumstantial to the professional with their sharply defined and defended territorial claims. I urge you to visit this site for a fascinating and illustrated tour through the complexities of begging in India.

When we talked, Vikas explained that donors need beggars, to allow them to learn and practice humility and to provide them “a fast track to heaven” to earn punya or divine credits, sort of like the Jewish concept of mitzvah. In other words, the beggar-donor relationship is symbiotic, with a spiritual rationale, not merely a transfer of money from one person to another. Hindu ritual includes learning how to beg on entering the monkhood or taking a vow to beg for, say, one day a week as an exercise in humility. To become a successful beggar requires many skills and props, including acting, performance, storytelling, wardrobe design, training and outfitting of animals with their decorative dress. (The two black-and-white photos were taken at my parents' house a long time ago: they had brought in a monkey wallah to perform at their grandson's birthday party.)

Looking at a beggar’s life from the inside like this makes it appear suddenly colorful and a lot less drab, almost enviable, at least for a short stint.

Beggars are not doing nearly as well as they once did, however. Since the halcyon days and “due to an increase in mankind’s selfishness and small-mindedness, (the beggar community) feels they are not able to make a living”. Another factor is the institutionalization of government departments designed to eliminate or relocate beggar communities, not a good omen if you’re thinking about begging as a career track should the Apocalypse appear more imminent. But then there’s always the Internet!

I wanted to know how Vikas, as an Indian, thinks about those visitors to his country who are overwhelmed and horrified by the beggars and the poverty they witness? Agreeing over cultures, continents and generations with Isabella, he tells me there is no binary answer. It’s part of life, part of India, something he grew up with but also a sensitive, controversial subject--and a dilemma. Patronizing beggars keeps the profession alive but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to depend on our fellow humans when in need.

Whatever their personal attitudes to begging are, everyone I spoke to agrees that supporting beggars does little to help them and only adds to the social problem. If we want a beggar-free world as it is today, skill training and job creation must replace the tin cup as income and the street as home. Poverty is the cause and beggars are the effect. The question then become how to replace all those good karma chips and place-in-heaven tokens and all that soft-hearted guilt with tough love. I have another contrarian question: in a democracy, which India is, don’t beggars have a right to choose their profession? What gives us the right to take it away from them or to relocate them out of sight so they won’t offend the tourists?

After our interview, Vikas Kamat continued our discussion on his blog.

Begging and Beggars is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on October 23, 2008.

TIPPING: do we have to?

2008-10-03T16:36:00.026-04:00

Full disclosure.

I don’t think tipping is a good thing

and I don’t like what it does to people. I also believe that hardly anybody except for a few scattered bloggers will agree with me.

Tipping is deeply embedded in American culture which means we have access to hundreds of books and articles about the etiquette and how-to’s of tipping, a compendium of tipping situations with guidelines to what constitutes an appropriate tip. You won’t however find a debate about whether tipping is a good or bad thing, such controversy does not exist. But, whether I agree with it or not, the tipping industry does exist, to the tune of $17 billion a year, when last measured.

Politically correct tipping wisdom boils down to two questions:

First, when and whom should I tip? Should I tip the owner, the funeral director, the mover, the valet, the blackjack dealer, the bathroom attendant, the hairdresser, the UPS guy? Somewhere, somehow, the pundits and legislators of tipping have drawn a line in the sand so that we must tip the bartender and barista but not the barrister, the street musician but not the orchestra conductor or subway conductor, the taxi driver but not the bus driver or airline pilot, the one who delivers pizza but not the one who delivers babies.

Once these fundamental lines about who and when have been drawn, the science part if you will, we ask the second question: how much the tip should be? Here is where art and heart come in, your personal beliefs and values, your assessment of the person to be tipped, your own history, experience and standards combining with what society and tradition dictate.

These raise thorny questions about what size tip constitutes the minimum, the punitive, the reward, the insulting, the generous. Mulling over the size and variability of the tip converts us into teachers, parents, judges, soul mates, social workers, psychologists, social activists and who knows what else. Tipping's more than the tip.

Since I am against tipping, all these questions of course become moot. I can’t shake off the conviction that the employer, not the guest, should be responsible for the employee’s income even though I understand that a good service person can take home a lot more money generate than any fixed wages the employer might offer.

I’m a survivor and I try not to consciously provoke social disapproval and I quite like having friends who like me. So, I confess. I do tip. Of course I do. I have to. Reluctantly perhaps, but every single time. I’m an average tipper, doing what etiquette dictates but not expressing myself through either excessive or miserly tips. For me, tipping is not a way to applaud or chastise or bond with those who serve me. I feel uncomfortable with the idea of regulating somebody else’s behavior by arbitrarily loosening or tightening my purse strings.

If I were to paint a picture that would illustrate the tipping transaction, it would be about hands: I would have the waiter standing with his hands open and the sated eater sitting at the table with his wallet or purse open, as he riffles through the coins and bills. In this picture, power is clearly in the hands of the diner, the patron, the tipper, with a moat thrown between him and the tippee.

Michael Lynn, an authority on tipping at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, describes the economically irrational aspects of tipping—that is, the rewarding of behavior over which one has no control because it is already past. He argues that tipping reflects the customer’s embarrassment at being in a superior financial position vis-à-vis the server, a left-over from the British class system where tipping those socially inferior serves to display one’s own wealth and to underline the imbalance of status and power.

I was happy to find a kindred spirit in the person of Peter Tupper, a writer for the British Columbia-based daily online magazine The Tyee. Describing tipping as a “Class struggle, one meal at time” Tupper expands:

"Tipping is the front line in the class struggle, where pocket change for one side means a decent living for the other. The implied threat of sabotage by slighted tippees goes back to the days of vails. There are apocryphal tales of traveler's baggage being tagged with discreet chalk marks, indicating their tipping proclivities to initiated servants, or diners being pursued outside the establishment as a not-so-gentle reminder. More recently, one hears about various bodily fluids added to orders. Poor service was the more common retaliation.

Even in the Soviet Union, tipping was ubiquitous enough to prompt disdainful editorials, calling it a "survivor of capitalism" that "humiliates the honor of men."

Many etiquette guides preface their sections on tipping by saying that the practice itself is disagreeable. Not only does it add an extra expense and element of complexity to dining out, it reminds people of a time when servants were dependent on the generosity of their social superiors. Others say that management has somehow shifted the responsibility for servers having living wages to the customers.”

Tupper ends by saying: “I've lived mainly off freelance work for the past few years, and if there's anything worse than working for tips, it's freelancing.”

But Gail Podstupka confidently disagrees with me—and with Tupper. I interviewed her on the waterfront deck of one of my favorite local restaurants, The Old Mill in Mattituck, New York, where she is a successful waitress. She likes her work and feels that she is as much if not more in control of the relationship with the people she serves as they are. She does not feel at all oppressed or condescended to although sometimes international customers can create differences in expectations.

I’m glad Gail is my waitress and I’m glad she feels her tips even out in the end to twenty percent but that doesn’t deny the existence of tipping anxiety, a dynamic that in my experience women are much more heir to than men.

How many times have I been with my women friends, a group of three or four of us huddled, looking at each other, staring at the bill in front of us, intimidated by the calculations that await us, voices lowered, brows furrowed, wondering what happens if we double the tax and add a bit, what’s that, let’s make it another $5, divide by four, what’s that, she was really nice, she brought the bread and drinks so quickly and she didn’t complain when I spilled the wine, god that was so embarrassing…this is probably not an unfamiliar scene to you!

Empathizing because once upon a time they themselves may have been on the other side of the table, my friends remember their own experiences, righting the wrongs done to them in those former lives, while our harried but patient waitress pretends to be oblivious to the small passion play being enacted behind her back.

But whatever my peculiar quasi-socialist beliefs may be, tipping in our culture has become mandatory, a fact of life, a social contract. By going into a restaurant you agree to tip the service staff. By violating the agreement you are a curmudgeon at best and unethical at worst. In America today, you ignore the conventions at your peril.

Consider the meaning and provenance of the word ‘tipping‘. It is said that the word T-I-P-S has its roots in ‘To insure prompt service’ which may indicate that once upon a time tips were offered as an incentive before service was provided. In Germany, Trinkgeld, or drinking money is the word for tips, the same idea as the French pourboire. In the Middle East it’s baksheesh. To me at least, all these terms have an air of condescension or trivializing about them.

I visualize the word being accompanied by a pat on the head or a turning away as the patron leaves the Trinkgeld on the table or hands it to the taxi driver. Tipping is not usually accompanied by a fulll-faced eye exchange as it is, for example, in when one gives a birthday gift or presents the hostess with a bunch of flowers. This suggests to me that a tip is an unequal exchange—on one end is the donor, benefactor, patron, on the other is the grateful recipient, metaphorically at least raising his hand to touch his forehead in a weak salute or perhaps a tug of his forelock in fealty or deference.

The waiter (and I include here all the people who expect a tip to augment their income, bell boys, messengers, taxis, croupiers, belly dancers) does not know in advance to what extent his special attentiveness or his perfunctory or even neglectful service will bring a reward. In that sense, it‘s a loose relationship between cause and effect and an unpredictable business proposition (even though there has been much academic and field research about what increases or decreases tip size—bending on one’s knees while describing the menu is apparently a good thing to do).

Ultimately the size of the tip depends on the mood of the one signing the cheque. The waiter has no choice in the matter—except perhaps to refuse the tip but I’d be surprised if that happens very often.

Anthony Nigrel does duty both as bartender and waiter in the same restaurant where I found Gail. His friendly open manner and his enthusiasm about the positive relationship between the way he performs and the way he is rewarded does not prevent him from acknowledging the tension that can surround the ritual and reality of what happens at tipping time, when actual money is transferred from one person’s hand to the other. He describes it as ‘demeaning’ and ‘awkward’ to wait and watch as the diner riffles through his wallet or her purse, deciding whether to pull out a $5, $10 or $20 bill.

So, tipping's all about power?

Urban legends abound (and maybe some are urban truths) about the secret ingredient that might be added to a dish sent back to the kitchen. You know what I am talking about. What is TIPS spelled backwards? That was the sly question asked by one waiter who seems to know what he’s talking about. Complain at your peril! or resign yourself to anxious uncertainty when the waiter comes back from the kitchen with the newly improved dish you rejected. Rather than make yourself crazy you may very well decide to keep the dish, not to complain and, perhaps—or not—reduce the size of your tip. Now who has the power?

Tipping is one thing in America but can be quite different in other cultures where it is shaped by fewer assumptions and rules. Sociologists point out that tipping tends to be more widespread in countries where people feel uneasy in the physical presence of unequal relationships and clear status differences. Think about tipping, as a kind of very temporary income redistribution and you can see how it might work to briefly reduce that inequality although ironically the tip is itself a statement about that unequal relationship.

American tourists are often confused by tipping etiquette in other countries and feel more comfortable doing what they are used to back home which in turn has altered the cultures in those countries.

In former or presently Communist regimes-- China, Russia, Kosovo, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Cuba for example, tipping is not expected. This is also true in Israel, whose early settlers arrived in the country with socialist principles. In some European countries, where a service fee is automatically included in the bill, tipping is considered unnecessary although sometimes small coins may be left on the table as a token of appreciation.

In some Asian countries, tipping for services other than food can be frowned upon. Although globalization is changing the tipping landscape, tips have not traditionally been expected or required in Malaysia, Phillipines, South Korea, Taiwan Japan, Iceland or Norway. In New Zealand and Australia, tipping can be considered condescending, rude or insulting, raising the specter of servitude, In England one might tell a taxi driver to “Keep the change” although the driver may be as likely to round the fare downwards!

Psychological theories and international anthropology aside, I would much prefer not to think about money—my wallet or the server’s income-- while I’m eating at a restaurant, even if the menu prices make such thinking inevitable. The complexities of tipping create an unpleasant finale to a meal, with money the last thing one processes after draining the coffee cup and before standing up to leave. I will always think tipping is not a good thing!

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Tipping is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on September 25, 2008.

DISAPPEARED: The Palestine Olive Tree

2008-07-26T21:38:00.021-04:00

You can't make olive oil without olives and you can't get olives without olive trees and you can't have olive trees without land and you can't get abundant harvests of olives from these trees without the farmers who know and understand them and who have tended them over generations.

The ruthless destruction of any tree fills me with anger and sadness but there is something about the deliberate savaging of olive trees in Palestine that amplifies my anger. I am especially affected by the irreversibility of the destruction: you have to wait 500 years to have more 500-year old olive trees.
For me, olive trees are not only ancient but noble, patient, quiet and very beautiful, their colors harmonious with the dusty, muted terrain. I respect these trees because for sometimes hundreds of years they've been the primary livelihood for Palestinians.

The olive farmers of Palestine are by no means an agribusiness, consisting of small, family enterprises using farming practices and equipment that are not at all helpful in a global economy. Combined with the additional obstacles created by Israel's occupation, it is nothing short of miraculous that we have the privilege of buying and using Palestinian olive oil.

Today, they are under terrible threat. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has created a cruel attack on the land, the cutting down of olive trees to build the enormous separation barrier, the annexation of agricultural land to build roads and the theft of land to build illegal settlements. Millions of olive trees have been uprooted while others have been separated from their farmers by the occupation's various pernicious tactics, including severely restricted access to the trees and to the harvesting of the olives.

Farmers are prevented from tending their trees by a series of punitive rules that regulate the hours during which Israeli soldiers allow access through guarded gates and the issuance of permits to who will be allowed this access. Uniformed soldiers are a threatening presence in the olive groves and heavy equipment a terrifying weapon that uproots, slashes and burns the trees.

It is estimated that as many as four million olive trees have been taken out of production, by one or other of these means.

These pictures tell the story. There is no need here for my explanatory words. I must however express the deep outrage I feel as a Jew that people of my 'tribe', a people for whom a belief in justice has always been fundamental, can destroy these ancient, beautiful living things and at the same time deprive another people of the right to their traditional livelihood.

When we buy olive oil from Spain or Italy or Greece, we don't think much about the journey from the olive tree to the bottle on our kitchen counter.

And when we think about olives we probably don't think about Palestine and many of us don't even know that we can buy Palestinian olive oil in North America. And even if we know all that, we may not realize the many, many obstacles that stand between those Palestinian olive trees and the Palestinian olive oil that is available to us in this country. I owe my first bottle of this excellent olive oil to Zatoun, (zatoun means olive in Arabic), a grass roots organization in Toronto and its founder Robert Massoud. Please listen to his story on Tidings from Hazel Kahan and visit the Zatoun website to place your order. The olive oil is also available from the American Friends Service Committee .

Even if you are at war with a city...you must not destroy its trees for the tree of the fields is man's life. Deut.20:19-20

Related sites:

International Women's Peace Service

SHOULD WE ALL BE VEGANS?

2008-07-06T18:09:00.001-04:00

Portraits of four animal activists

What inspires and motivates people to be animal rights activists and vegans? Until I interviewed four young American activists I had not realized just how intimate--and necessary--the connection is between the vegan and animal movements.

Although I know quite a number of vegetarians, I know rather few vegans. I’m aware of course that neither vegans nor vegetarians (although there’s also the puzzling concept of “almost vegetarian”) eat meat but there’s always been something rather mysterious about those who chose the vegan way: in my mind they were somehow more exotic, more serious, more disciplined, perhaps more ascetic, more willing to put up with deprivation. Or so I thought. I didn’t understand until I interviewed the four "superstar" activists for my radio program Tidings from Hazel Kahan that veganism is actually the linchpin of the animal movement. If you’re serious about protecting the rights of animals, especially the rights of farm animals, that is animals who are farmed for food, then you would find it difficult to argue against the logic of being a vegan.

Being an activist in the animal protection movement means not only protesting—and protecting-- the way farm animals are born, raised and killed, but also making explicit the profound connections between factory farming and our own health, the health of the environment, the health of workers and, last but not least, the ethics on which our society is based.
The four people whose stories I heard had all developed a compassionate consciousness of animal suffering when they were much younger. Often without the benefit of support from family or their peers, this compassion led them not only to make life-long food choices but also to a belief that these choices could make a difference. All of them are now leaders in the broader animal movement, shaping it through advocacy, legislation, undercover investigative work, outreach in national and international organizations as well as the forming of new organizations.

I have been inspired and moved by the ways in which they have integrated their values into their lives and their work. I hope you will be too.

Each of the activists I spoke with can recall exactly when and how they had their first awakening about animal suffering. When they talk about it, their memories have the feel of an epiphany, the day on which their lives were changed--it may have been a teacher, a video, a book or a conversation.

One of the myths about vegans is that their diet is boring at best, that they are malnourished at worst. Listen to these interviews and you will hear that myth debunked with dispatch! Rather than a marginal counter-culture phenomenon, veganism is growing and entering the main stream and general consumer consciousness. Although conclusive research evidence is difficult to come by, the capitalist proof lies in the capitalist pudding: greater demand has led to greater supply so that more products are now available in more places. If further proof is needed, Oprah herself has announced that she is embarking on a three-week vegan experience.

Fundamental to the animal protection movement is a strong sense of injustice tempered by compassion. Other vegans have told me that for them the suffering of animals is so palpable that they believe that by eating meat they are actually ingesting the suffering into their own beings. I was curious to see if such thinking was shared by these activists and if they also saw participation in animal abuse—witting or unwitting—as somehow staining our entire society. Although this may not use quite those words, they are passionately logical about the ethical ramifications of animal suffering and food choices that create and extend such suffering.

Although the various groups within the animal movement differ in emphasis and style and connotation, they are bound as witnesses by the documented horror of animal suffering and their belief that a vegan diet makes an important contribution to change. This is an energetic movement, galvanized by exchange of people from one organization to another, the forming of new groups and organizations, increased collaboration, the relative youth of its members and the increasing salience of its vision on the broader planetary stage.

Perhaps it’s time to think about why we aren’t all vegans already!
Podcasts of the two-part program are available: Part 1 and Part 2

Please visit their websites to learn more about these activists and their work: Nora Kramer www.humanecalifornia.org, Nathan Runkle www.mercyforanimals.org, Lauren Ornelas www.foodispower.org and Paul Shapiro www.hsus.org.

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Interviews with the four activists were broadcast on June 26, 2008 and July 3, 2008 on WPKN 89.5 fm Bridgeport and 88.7 Montauk, totally independent and listener-supported radio stations. This and all other Tidings from Hazel Kahan programs are produced by Tony Ernst..

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The four larger photos: cockerel, pigs, sheep and chickens were taken by me in Paraguay and Guernsey! The two smaller ones are web downloads.

HOW DOES A COUNTRY CRUMBLE?

2008-07-06T15:33:00.020-04:00

I AM ALWAYS GRIPPED by the ways in which political forces affect the life of a single individual. Even when printed headlines expand to a few minutes of real time video capturing the mother, man, child or dog against backgrounds of raging fires, rampages or collapsed houses, I want to know more. I want to get as interior as I can. How does one man, this Donald Fraser, feel as his country crumbles around him, his cat is lost, his laptop battery has run out of juice and his passport is stolen? What did he manage to forage for lunch? Can he count on his neighbors?

I met Donald (he asked us not to use his real name) in Tanzania where he was a safari guide. He was born in what was then Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia, went to school in what is now Zimbabwe and lives in Harare, its capital. He is a white man, approaching 60, an artist and writer and one of the millions of Zimbabwe’s citizens struggling to exist in increasingly apocalyptic times. Remembering his idyllic life as a child and young man on very same land he lives on now lends a special poignancy to his story. How did it come to this, I ask him. What makes a country crumble?

When we spoke, courtesy of Skype, it was two or three weeks before the last ‘real’ election, March 29, 2008, that is one where there was still an opposition candidate. Since then, Zimbabwe has occupied headlines every day and become a target for international sanctions, rebuke, analysis; none of this has, so far, lessened the terror experienced by its citizens, black and white.It’s the 21st century, it’s the year 2008 and arguably we’ve become somewhat immune to stories of collapsing countries, failed states, genocide and suffering populations. They’re on every continent, especially in Africa. When Zimbabwe is mentioned in the media, many of us shrug it off as just another one of those countries, distinguished perhaps by stratospheric inflation rates. Just like Nazi Germany. Oh, and the fuel shortages? Just like Gaza. And the corrupt dictators? Just like so many places in the Middle East, Africa, South America. We shake our heads and let our attention continue its wandering.

How do countries collapse with such speed and drama? What does it take to transform a nation from an effective, self-sustaining, creative, thriving place for all of its citizens to one where the vast majority of its people have to forage for food and water, narrowly concentrated on survival, vigilant to enemies and living from moment to desperate moment? Countries are huge entities yet they are also delicately-balanced systems, each with its own irrevocable, irreversible tipping point. We watch with alarm as our own country, the proud and powerful United States, confronts the fall of towering institutions and respected leaders. How did Zimbabwe go from good to bad?Can Zimbabwe be put together again? Is Donald waiting for its reconstruction and reconciliation? Why doesn’t he run away? I think I would!

He’s hoping, he says, for a return to law order, for the economy to return to profitability, for people with skills to return to the country to make the place work again, for the violence to stop:

“My family have lived in Africa since 1820 …I feel Africa is where I belong...people, traditions, history, how everything works…So for me to feel as if there isn’t a future in Africa is turning my back on a hundred years of continuous existence on this continent…a serious statement. It’s easy to say I’ve had enough but I’ve lived here a long time and for me to say I’ve had enough is a significant thing. In the last couple of months I’ve said what is there to live for… when your body starts to crack up and you need medical supplies…it’s more and more difficult to find that over here.”

Since we spoke in March, these hopes have the appearance of delusion. Violence and chaos have multiplied, inflation has soared beyond calculation and Donald has left for a short work spell in Zambia where he is beyond the reach of email and telephone.

Like Yusuf, a Palestinian man demographically quite dissimlar from him, Donald is trapped in a country where everything that once gave him life has turned to poison. Like Yusuf, there is no other country reaching out to extend him permanent shelter.

That’s what happens when a country crumbles.

You can hear Donald describe the dénouement of Zimbabwe and the accompanying unraveling of his life by listening to him talk on this Tidings from Hazel Kahan program.

LIFTING THE VEIL OVER CUBA

2008-06-06T14:36:00.018-04:00

Forbidden Cuba! Hidden by a veil of myths and misconceptions, romanticized, villified, desirable, tempting, waiting…

Most Americans have never been to Cuba and many, many would very much like to. Others say they wouldn’t dream of visiting that communist country run by Fidel—now Raoul--Castro and his evildoers. Still others conclude that any country that produces so much good music can’t be all that bad. People tell me it’s as dangerous to enter as it is leave Cuba as it is to leave.

No wonder then that the country remains a mysterious, forbidden but also enticing place in American minds.I’m not easily impressed by celebrity, McMansions, power, bling or people who make money from making money. I’m not even that impressed by people who speak many languages or publish many books or who have access to high places. What does impress me are people who believe deeply enough in an idea to nourish it and to give it form-- over the best part of a lifetime and against long odds.

One such person is Sandra Levinson and the organization she has devoted much of her working life to is the Center for Cuban Studies in Manhattan. Her idea is to show Cuba as it really is.

A native of Iowa, Sandy Levinson’s background includes a Fulbright scholarship, Stamford University, City College New York, Ramparts magazine and a group of academic friends, the “NY Review of Books crowd” she says, who, in the '70s, started a research library and media center to correct the grievous lack of information about the country, especially material that came directly from Cuba. Her knowledge of Cuba includes more than 300 trips to Cuba in the past 40 or so years.

Sandy raised money for these efforts by writing “The Venceremos Brigade: Young Americans sharing the life and work of revolutionary Cuba”, a collection of diaries published in 1971 by Simon & Schuster. She is currently at work on another book, "Thicker than Blood: the Cuban Revolution and Divided Families" to be published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

These ventures in the 70s culminated in The Center for Cuban Studies, which opened in May/June 1972 in a Greenwich village loft on West 4th Street and Barrow. The Center has moved three times since then—a dramatic story which is told in detail on the Tidings podcast. CCS is now newly ensconced on West 29th Street, a bright, sunny loft that may be the next best thing on the East Coast to being in Cuba!

35 or more years have gone by since the Center for Cuban Studies came into being and yet nothing has much has changed. Their mission then as now was to reach opinion leaders, journalists, teachers and professionals, to inform and educate them about Cuba so that they in turn could broadcast it to their own audiences. A whole new generation has grown up since then but US policy has not changed and the same stunted view of Cuba prevails with very little new being taught in universities or written about in newspapers. What has changed however is a huge increase in good information, making it much easier, Sandy says, to channel it to the Center’s audiences.

Fluctuating Cuba policies implemented by the Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations, with windows of opportunity for trade, travel and communication opening briefly before they were closed again, created unstable times for the Center. The lively travel program that had kept the place alive was now in jeopardy but, in her indefatigable drive to survive, Sandy drew on her Cuban art expertise, and, using the value she placed work that uniquely declares “I am Cuba”, was able to replace that revenue stream with an art gallery and an important collection of Cuban art.

Sandy’s thirty years of frequent travel to Cuba, her contacts, her vision and her journalist’s perspective help us to clarify the confusion and contradictions in our own views and to lift the veil so we can see Cuba as it really is. Please listen to her interview on Tidings from Hazel Kahan.

If you want to know more about the legal ways you can visit Cuba, please contact Sandy Levinson at 212-242-0559, visit the Center’s web site or visit the Center itself at 231 West 29th St., #401, NY 10001.

You can read my own impressions of Cuba "The Idea of Cuba".

REFLECTIONS ON THE WALL

2008-04-22T11:45:00.004-04:00

This is a short audio commentary--my reflections about the wall--as a Jew, an artist, a human being. It was heard on In the Morning with Bonnie Grice on WLIU, 88.3fm www.wliu.org, a public radio station in Southampton, New York on April 9, 2008.

You can hear the commentary on

http://homepage.mac.com/hzelkahan/filechute/Hazel%20Reflections.mp3

RESISTANCE ART

2008-04-02T17:03:00.000-04:00

One of the unintended consequences created by the wall built by Israel to separate Israelis from Palestinians is the canvas it has provided for resistance art by Palestinian as well as international artists.

Unlike the anodyne paintings on the Israeli side of the wall, intended to decorate and beautify rather than to politicize, art on the Palestinian side often dominates the wall with aggressive displays of enormous, bold, vibrant, powerful paintings, often scaled to the 25’ high concrete structure, although others trail off into less dramatic, skillful graffiti.

This is resistance art, art that expresses the anger, militancy and hatred of occupation as well as a yearning for freedom and fantasies of liberation.

Using their imagination to conquer the wall and to fantasize getting to the other side, artists have painted such things as stepladders, stairs, balloons and footsteps. Sections of the wall have been painted to show the wall being breached, to pretend one can see beyond the concrete via windows, curtains, jagged holes to views of the ocean, mountains and fields. I have collected images of paintings, posters and children’s drawings that are not on the wall but also of and about the wall in which the wall is often depicted as a monster or serpent, surrounding and strangling the Palestinian town or village.

I am writing a book about the art and what it signifies about the mind, spirit and psyche of the Palestinians trapped behind the wall. I have also been invited by WLIU, a Long Island-based public radio station, to record a commentary for the daily show about the arts hosted by Bonnie Grice. It can be heard streaming live on wliu.org or on 88.3 fm in the eastern Long Island listening area on Wednesday, April 9 at 8.55 am.

The work is also available as a slide presentation "Facing the Wall" which I will be pleased to present to small groups in the New York area. Please contact me if you are interested.
leafages@optonline.net

TWO SIDES OF THE WALL

2008-03-05T22:00:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION
Designed to separate its people from the Palestinians, Israel began construction in June, 2002 of the wall, also called the fence or separation barrier by Israelis and the ‘apartheid barrier’ by Palestinians, a huge complex of concrete walls, fences, checkpoints, ditches, watchtowers and electronics that runs partially along the Green Line, the border between Israel and the West Bank but also, increasingly, east of that demarcation and on occupied land. The barrier is planned to stretch 400 miles through urban areas and agricultural land. Today it is 57% complete.

Although world opinion, including the International Court of Justice, has condemned the barrier, Israel maintains that it is essential for security, citing the dramatic decrease in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks following its construction.

The reality of life is very different on each side of the wall: for Israelis, it provides security and peace of mind; for Palestinians, it separates them from not only their land, families, schools and neighborhoods but also interrupts the continuity of their history and geography.

I’ve recorded conversations with people on both sides of the wall: with Yusuf, a 52-year old Palestinian living in Batir, an ancient West Bank village southwest of Jerusalem and west of Bethlehem-- and also with seven Israelis living in Tel-Aviv, Haifa and in and around Jerusalem. Among them are activists, artists, a psychoanalyst, an architect, a storyteller, a professor and a physician.

YUSUF REVISITED
Yusuf’s story is relatively simple: before 1967, Batir was in Jordan. After the Six Day War, it became part of Israel’s occupied territories. Until two years ago, Yusuf was able to move and work between Batir and Israel. Today, Batir is enclosed by the wall and Yusuf has to pass through tunnels and checkpoints to get to work.

A year and a half ago, in June 2006, I interviewed Yusuf, wanting to hear his story and to hear what he and his villagers were sensing about the impending construction of the separation barrier. At that time, he was anxious about the path the wall would take and unsure what the as yet unknown details would mean for his family and the other villagers: he was dreading the feeling of imprisonment and the severing of his life from his land, his work and family and friends in Israel and the West Bank.

One year later, in July of 2007, I met Yusuf again. By then, construction on the wall had begun around Batir and two other West Bank villages, enclosing approximately 18,000 villagers on one-quarter of the land that they had formerly occupied. The only entrance and exit now is through a tunnel and a checkpoint. He drew a map in my notebook to illustrate how the landscape and his life had been altered. It shows the wall around the village and the tunnel as the only exit into the world.

To what extent is the reality of the wall different from what Yusuf had imagined?
In his words:

Now we can see the new wall, where they are building the wall, the implications of how much it will limit us. We feel surrounded, we see the wall, we see how difficult it is, we see the dirt all around us and on us, we're shut in, we can't walk about freely, we can't come and go. How difficult all this is.

This is not just a tunnel, not a regular tunnel. If anyone wants to visit us from somewhere else, they have to go through all sorts of controls and inspections, checkpoints This is the only way to get into Batir. You can’t come and go freely.

Since most of the villages’ agricultural land will now be on the other side of the wall, the villagers will have to go through checkpoints and gates in the wall to tend to their land. The only exit from the villages will be through a tunnel into Palestine. To enter Israel requires police inspection before the tunnel and another checkpoint inspection on the other side, along with a taxi ride. Before the wall was constructed, Yusuf told me, he walked for half an hour, breathing the fresh air, so close that he could see Aminadav, the Israeli village where he has worked for 18 years, from his house.

To arrive at his destination now means getting up two and a half hours earlier, going through inspections and checkpoints, waiting in the queue with hundreds of others, paying fifty shekels or ten dollars for taxi transportation, traveling 25 kilometers and then having to go through the whole thing again in the evening after work. “Two and a half or three hours. It’s a waste of my time”, he says indignantly, “this is no way to live.” He continues:
Everyone has to go to work. To get to Jerusalem, you first have to leave the village, then go through inspection at the tunnel, then enter the Palestinian Authority, then another checkpoint at Rachel's tomb. Every day thousands are waiting in the queue, two hours, soon there will be two checkpoints.

Once the tunnel is completed, the only cars allowed through it and into Palestine, will be Palestinian. They will now be totally separated from Israeli traffic and the two peoples will no longer be able to see each other—except for the Israeli soldiers that Palestinians will see at checkpoints. If they want to enter Israel from, say, Bethlehem, they will have to go through additional checkpoints, similar to passport control.

The three-quarters of their land that now lies outside the wall, land the villagers had never agreed to sell, will become a mandatory sale to be negotiated with Israel. But, Yusuf says, it’s not financial compensation that preoccupies them. Rather, they grapple with how hard it’s going to be to live within the wall and without their land. He shakes his head as he tells me:
“This is their livelihood and their only livelihood. They've always lived from this. They're thinking about how to get their freedom so they can earn a living.”

Yes, you might say, if life is so impossible, let them leave. But where should they go? What kind of work will they do? Other Arab countries are not exactly extending a hand of welcome. And once they leave, they may not be able to return.

Permission to work in Israel is granted only to men over 35 who are married with children but even this permission can be easily and capriciously withdrawn. Life has become not only harsh but unpredictable and precarious.

A year ago, Yusuf could not understand how it had come to this. What has he done to create this situation? What has he done wrong? Why are they all being punished? It is unfathomable.

A year ago, he questioned the rationale of collective punishment and punishment that seemed in no way to fit the crime. “It is hard and bitter for me to leave my birthplace, I’ve built my life here,” he says and I tell him is very hard for me to listen to his story.

Today, his voice rising in anger again, Yusuf is uncomprehending at the injustice that is dismantling his life. In his frustration, he addresses Israel through my recorder:

You can get yourself a stronger army, do something else powerful, I don't know what. You have cameras, you can see everything these days. You don't need to come over here and lock me up in my house. If you're afraid of us, why not build a wall around your house instead of around mine? Why do you take my land away? Before, you had suicide bombers, now you have rockets. What have you gained?

THE ISRAELIS
Every country has a right—and an obligation—to protect its citizens. This is an irrefutable argument that Israel and Israelis make whenever the security barrier is criticized. The deeper criticism—that such security is not justifiable when it imposes collective punishment on people like Yusuf and when it flouts international law—is more difficult to refute.

Those who live and want to remain in Israel are caught in the complexities of these arguments. Liberal and open-minded by nature and conviction, the people I spoke with are confused, tormented even but deeply engaged by the issues. Although they reserve the right to live in safety and in peace in their own country, they also insist they want justice for the Palestinians. Although they are appalled by and often actively protest the brutality of Israel’s occupation, recent images of suicide bombs and the more distant legacy of the Holocaust color and shape their beliefs, perceptions and actions.

The enormity of the security barrier’s presence goes far beyond its physical size—it is also a powerful socio-psychological force. As such, it both attracts and repels, creating legends, myths, contradictions and ambivalences—some of which might be reduced if the wall was built entirely on the 1967 Green Line rather than on occupied Palestinian land.

Some of the Israelis I spoke described the terror that the suicide bombings brought into their lives, the up close and personal nature of the attacks and their unpredictability: living in Israeli cities before the construction of the wall meant you could never be sure you would come home that night. A bomb could get you anywhere any time. In this context, they supported the wall or security barrier, however reluctantly, as, on balance, a necessary solution to the problem.
The proof lies in the pudding, the end justifies the means and Israelis point with restrained and reluctant triumph to the fact that terrorist attacks and suicide bombs have dwindled to virtually nothing. In other words, the wall works. But it also leads to soul-searching, discussion, divisions within families—the far-reaching consequences of what Israelis call ‘the situation’.

The Holocaust
Inevitably, Israelis point to the Holocaust—which in Hebrew is called the Shoah- to explain and justify their fear. If it can happen once it can happen again, they insist. They do not see the parallels with what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948 with the establishment of the state of Israel.

More than 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed during and after the 1948 war, resulting in 750,000 Palestinians becoming refugees. The land of these destroyed villages (along with other Palestinian land) was confiscated by the new state of Israel and Jewish settlements, parks and nature reserves were built on top of the ruins. An Israeli organization, Zochrot, the name means “remembering”, is making this history available in Hebrew so that Jews can engage with Palestinians in what Zochrot calls “an open recounting of our painful common history.”

Since most Israelis pay little attention to the Nakba and to Palestinian history it’s not surprising that the larger context for reacting to suicide bombers includes not only personal and national experience with suicide attacks but also expands to the Jewish narrative of the Holocaust and to the uprooting of Jews in Arab countries. Overlaid on this, is a visceral reaction to the very concept of a suicide bomber, an act that Israelis find particularly abhorrent and incomprehensible, as something that stands in profound opposition to the central values of Judaism.

In this context of deep-seated fear in which Palestinians are seen as not only dangerous but as alien and ‘other’, these Israelis grapple with alternative solutions-- weighing the plausibility and possibility and risk of coexistence, of dialogue, of ending the occupation, of remaining within the Green Line, rather than annexing Palestinian territory, of the quandaries inherent in removing Israeli settlements such as Maale Adumim or French Hill.

Many more questions than answers but In the meantime, Yusuf and his family and the villagers of Batir remain behind the wall, with the occupation deepening and thickening its antagonistic infrastructure around them.

A year and a half ago, as we ended our first conversation, Yusuf had very graciously invited me to visit his home in Batir, telling me I would always be most welcome. This time there was no invitation. How do you in good conscience invite a guest who has to traverse checkpoints and inspections to come to your home?

An expanded version of this essay, with interviews, was broadcast on WPKN, an independent radio station in the Connecticut area, on February 28, 29008. It can be heard at:
http://homepage.mac.com/hzelkahan/filechute/Tidings4-Feb28-b.mp3

MOVING SETS YOU IN MOTION

2008-02-06T22:11:00.000-05:00

I’m thinking of moving

I’ve set myself in motion.

It’s a very big move. It’s the doing of it that’s big, not so much the getting there or being there. It’s pulling up eleven years of roots and hoping not to kill the tree. It’s pruning, shedding, clipping, grafting, transplanting—and taking root again in another soil.

From in here to out there, from crowds to solitude, from concrete to mud, from skyscrapers to woods. I’m moving from one life to another, leaving behind a stressed professional and becoming a person without portfolio or known source of income. I’m going away from neighbors, family and friends to a place where I know one or two people. For all I know, I may be moving from one planet to another. A move, it feels to me, of great consequence. More so because I have not spent much time in planning it, thinking it through, predicting, calculating, being thorough. I am making this move the way I have made many moves in my life—without great consideration and with relatively little thought to the consequences since I had always believed consequences were, for the most part, unknowable. This impulsiveness has led me to live a sprawling, rather untidy life.

The reality of the move rises to meet me and I am consciously gathering my strengths to meet the task. A solitary task it must be and an intensely personal one, like dying or giving birth. Helping hands abound but in the end I realize I do it alone. Of course family and friends will sit with me, will offer advice and help me pack. Movers will lift boxes, the post office will provide change of address forms and the telephone company will convert my area code to one to more accurately reflects my new coordinates. But in the end it becomes a very personal migration, it is me who is taking my body from one life and moving it to another that has not yet been created. I take courage from believing that although the shape of this other life is unknown, it has in a sense always been there, waiting for me to step into it at the right time. Perhaps the drama with which this is playing out comes from the feeling that I am moving into the third—and last—stage of my life. From child to adult to crone. From growing to producing to dying. From gathering to spending to divesting.

Birds and herds and nomads do it
Or, perhaps I simply like the way drama allows me to make more of what some might say is an inevitable, mundane aspect of our hard-wiring. Birds do it, herds do it, even nomads and their yaks do it, we all do it, we move—driven by the seasons, the availability of water or pasture, the ebb and flow of real estate prices, the lure of a new love or job or the lacuna carved by a sudden loss. It’s well known that stress accompanies what sociologists rather flatly refer to as “a mobility event” and what 20% of America, 43 million people do every year, half of them between Memorial Day and Labor Day. What’s the big deal? Moving is something that, on average, Americans do eleven times during their lifetimes. But frequency can’t trivialize the experience nor can the commonplace rob moving of its solemn thumbprint on an individual’s life: people say it takes them at least six months before their new surroundings feel familiar and two years to feel properly settled.

Every time I see a real estate sign planted on a lawn that announces a house is for sale or that it has been sold, I imagine the moving ripples as they spread through a life, a family, a community. Statistics that document this movement are available from numerous sources—local and federal government, the realtor and movers associations, the retail trade where moving creates energetic and lucrative movement of its own from warehouses into consumers’ new homes—40% of people change their brand of toothpaste when they move, opening new doors not only to their new homes perhaps but to a range of new options.

These macro-level moving patterns, interesting and well documented though they are, reveal very little about the real story, about all that actually happens in the internal life of the mover. Certainly I had no idea what I would experience once I had decided to sell my loft in Manhattan and move to a house in the woods, eighty miles east and a thousand lifetimes away.

Living in limbo
All I did know was that my true address belonged neither to the place I currently owned nor to the place I hoped to own but rather that I was living in limbo, where anxiety grew like mold between my twin roles of buyer and seller.

I was still waiting for final mortgage approval for the house I was hoping would become my home. And I was hoping that the final contract signed by the unknown, unseen buyer who had decided my loft would become his home would arrive not too early, not too late but at just the perfect time to coincide with the approval from my bank. I hoped the gods of impeccable sequencing would roll the dice in my direction.

Writing my anxieties would, I thought, contain and dilute them and in my search for an empty notebook I found an old cahier with 48 recycled pages, European-sized and yellowing. On its brown cover inexplicably covered with Australian aborigine beasts and designs, a small crudely drawn alarm clock logo declared le reveil qui sonne. This seemed an appropriate enough wake-up call to which I responded on the first page that: I want to document the move I’m making, to record my ways of doing it, the choices I face and how I resolve them. This will be my meditation, a closing so there can be a new opening which cannot be until I’ve closed the old exit.

I’ve been waiting for the legalities, the final sentence from the bank that is lending me $204,000. They have to type one more clause before the approval is signed and diligently sealed. I’ve been waiting with great anxiety: approval is not an easy thing for a person to wait for. It’s very all or nothing: ‘Yes’, you live. ‘No’, you die. (I guess that’s why they call it ‘the final sentence’!) The lending institutions in this December of 1998 are filled to capacity with demand—I imagine the loan applications piled up, jamming the doors and windows, desks buckling under their weigh, clerical workers, contemptuous of deadlines, arriving late for work and leaving early, so onerous has the paper onslaught become.

I wait and wait for telephone calls that don’t come, harassing my patient mortgage broker who has now transferred my file to his wife, a better candidate for absorbing my daily dose of neurosis which I cannily disguise as pleas for clarification, request for best- and worst-case scenarios, despair over deadlines
missed that now require expensive legal intervention. I imagine the man from whom I’m buying my house in his restless suspicion plotting to tear up our contract and start again, with a buyer who is less lethargic, whose wheels move more smoothly. I am, at this stage, quite unable to turn the tables on myself, the tables I have personally created.. For am I not just a buyer but a seller too?

I think of Polonius and promise myself that in the future I shall neither a borrower nor a lender be, neither a buyer nor a seller ever again. A gypsy maybe, moving with my caravanserai, bonded forever with my tribe, wandering from well to oasis, my camels forever free of lending institutions lawyers and real estate brokers. But for now I am both buyer and seller, eternally captive, forever it seems, in limbo. Yet this same limbo affords me shelter, the refuge of not having to anything just yet, not having to search for the beginning of that ball of yarn that will start the grand unraveling.

But philosophy can sustain and defer only so much. Moving is about action and this is becoming too abstract. In the end, I need strategies, tactics, criteria, decisions and not lofty thinking. I have stuff to move and stuff to remove. How am I going to begin? What’s going to be the first step? Where’s the plan?

I listed these organizing principles, some of which made more sense then than they do now:

1. Discard the chaff which is different from:
2. Select the wheat
3. Keep it all, but categorize: keep forever; keep to sell-after I move (coward!); keep to eventually replace (coward, again!)
4. Give away now: to charity; to family
5. Sell as valuables—Christie’s; sell as accumulation—find that person
6. Garbage

It’s real
Then, in the midst of this self-indulgent strategizing, mirabile dictu! I have a buyer who is willing to pay almost the price I have advertised. (Unlike the stories that proliferated in those heady days, I am not the sort of person who would encounter a buyer willing to pay more than the price I asked. Nor do I win lotteries or receive letters from lawyers that I have been named a beneficiary in the will of a secret admirer.)

This is the seventh offer I have received. I learn the hard way for I tend to believe what people tell me (a natural “mark”, an erstwhile lover once described me). When the first offer was presented to me by J.O., my young and tenacious real estate broker, I felt panic but I was also indignant. How dare they move into my apartment, my terrified inner voice asked. I don’t want anyone else living there. It’s mine. Tell them to go away, I wanted to tell her as silence piled up on the phone lines. Four months and six offers later, I am astute and hardened. My apartment is no longer my home. It has become ‘the property’. Four months later, we count: seventy people have passed through these rooms, leaving their imprints and strangers’ energies in the walls. My home has lost its insularity, it has passed into the realm of public space. Hands in pockets, fingers pointing to this or that feature, this or that problem area, the streams of prospective buyers pinch and poke my nooks and crannies as if they’re selecting the choicest, least bruised apples from a street vendor’s cart. They leave behind the detritus of their valuations and assessments: $50,000 to renovate, $200,000 to gut, needs a new kitchen, floorboards need replacing. They pinch and squeeze the neighborhood, the neighbors, the co-op building’s financial statements. Outside, looking in, they try to imagine what it would be like to be inside, looking out. Most can’t leap over that barrier. They can’t see themselves living where I live. And I can’t see them living here either. I want to tell them they don’t belong here, never will, and what makes them think I would even sell to them?

In the beginning when the loft was first listed on the market, I mercilessly prevailed on J.O. to debrief me after each prospective buyer’s tour of ‘the property’. What did they say? What did they like? Why didn’t they like it? I speculate, as the increasingly silent, long-suffering J.O. listens, whether or not that couple will return, what kind of place such people like. I suggest why they’re not good enough to live here. All this speculation and not once have I ever met one of these people. J.O. tells me when she has set appointments and I leave the apartment to fit in with her schedule. Brokers prefer it when the owner is absent: too much interference, one more unnecessary and distracting variable to deal with. Besides, the owner is not part of the sale and could be a contaminant, blocking the crucial ability of the prospective buyer to project herself into the space, to see herself living there. I’m beginning to understand I am such a contaminant.

After a while, I realize I am becoming a mature seller. I am tired of the involvement with the prospective buyer, bored with routine and undernourished by the debriefs. Buyers as a socio-psychological group no longer interest me and I start to objectify the process. Now all I want is a contract. I don’t care who the person is, what they look like, how their divorce is going, who they vote for or whether they have good taste. Now it is their financials that interest me. And their sincerity. A series of disappointments has taught me that making an offer is not a serious step for many of these shoppers. Sometimes, they even forget they’ve made one. “Tell her $500,000”, they say and are never heard from again. I, on the other hand, felt I was committing to a marriage when I made my offer to the seller of the house I wanted to buy. It did not occur to me that such an offer could be frivolous and retractable. Do, undo. Easy come, easy go. Words lightly spoken and all that… But then I’m a Capricorn. Nest time round, a Gemini maybe?

Horribile dictu! J.O.’s messenger brings me five signed copies of the contracts from a prospective buyer turned real. Nor further denial is possible. Procrastination has lost its spine. The Transition stares me in the face. I remember being at the pinnacle of labor pains with my first child and wishing that I could stop right then and there, turn back, forget the whole thing. I want to stop the sale. But I can’t turn back. New flesh is pressing on the door and I am huddled at the exit, beleaguered, illegitimate, refugee. No help is forthcoming. What shall I do?

First, you procrastinate. I’ll come home early on Friday, I promise myself, not go out. I’ll start on Friday. I didn’t.

I’ll wake up early on Saturday and perhaps I’ll finish the whole thing by Sunday evening. Then I’ll still have two weeks before the movers come.

But I didn’t. Star Wars is playing, a friend is in from the West Coast. On Sunday night I dream that the movers have come and I still haven’t started packing.

I take myself in hand. I am stern. Think of this as a work project, I tell myself. Choose a starting place. It’s like life. The journey of a thousand steps begins with the first step I promise myself that once I start, I’ll get into it. It’ll be like eating peanuts. I won’t want to stop. After all, that is the kind of person I am—compulsive, driven, disciplined.

Start with Closet Number One, that’s what. The northwest corner of my loft. Start there and continue west and south until I come full circle to the front door. I am soothed by the imperative of this geographical decision.

I’m actually beginning to move
Christmas Eve (it’s not my holiday) and I actually do begin.

Closet Number One is the worst of all the closets—powerful coats occupy half of it with all the unyielding arrogance of incumbents. They are jostled by wheelies (three pairs-is it possible?) who nudge brutishly at old paints and long-expired Yellow Pages. One small Yellow Pages books is designed for the South Asian community and for those who want to buy what its merchants sell. I am sure, as I discard this now obsolete volume, that those merchants have already followed in the footsteps of their hardworking countrymen into more affluent pastures and now own not just the local kabab stand but a chain of all-night restaurants, a fleet of taxis, a string of newsstands. It is no longer Mohd. Khan, green card immigrant but Mohd. Khan Inc. That’s how long that phone book had settled at the back of this closet. I remind myself to think about my reluctance to throw out old phone books and stand up to tie up the first full black garbage bag, mumbling as the wounded umbrella spoke poking through its side and into my leg.

At midnight, the cupboard is bare except for three piles that I am taking (wheat separated from chaff) and one pile to stay for the new owners: apartment ownership papers, manuals for the appliances, three faded New York Times articles about the landmark building and its history. A fourth pile is for V., the super who is also moving and whose eyes light up when he sees a jam jar of assorted screws, two sheets of lightly-used sandpaper, a paint can with pale yellow rivulets down its side and a can of wood stain.

Next comes Closet Number Two, its doors three feet west of the now tamed Closet Number One. Ah, Two, a snarled testament to celebrations past. Wrapping paper and ribbons shed by years of birthday presents cohabit in exuberant disorder with new rolls of Christwas paper, empty blue boxes from Tiffany, glossy lipstick red ones from Charles Jourdan and endless rolls of ribbon from Lillian Vernon, some of them with curling ends, many of them pristine, waiting to be chosen and matched with presents not yet bought for birthdays not yet celebrated. Dozens of family celebrations replay at the back of my eyes as I remember my children, and then my grandson, impatiently humoring me as I carefully unwrapped each gift,m sliding my finger under the scotch tape not to damage the paper, and also delaying the moment of seeing what wondrous gift it concealed. They rolled their eyes as I folded the paper along its folds and wound the ribbon around my fingers, saving it all for some unknown next time. Years of this along with years of intermittent stops at Hallmark or Kate’s Paperie to find the right paper for this one or that, for Spring or Chanukah or whatever. All these decisions and shops and tissue papers later, I stand overwhelmed at the accumulation, stuffed onto the rows of shelves designed to hold large sheets of professional paper and board by the small advertising agency housed in my loft before me.

Looking at the shelves I realize how much I accommodated myself to the layout and idiosyncracies left by my predecessors. Unlike the slash and burn sentiments expressed by many of the prospective buyers, it didn’t occur to me to do “serious renovation” and ”major gutting”. Since I don’t believe perfection is either attainable or necessary, I am prepared to live with what I deem to be good enough. As a shopper, I don’t wear out my shoe leather in pursuit of the perfect sweater or tea kettle. As a woman, I have never held in my mind the idea of the perfect man and as an artist I have been too zealous in improving a piece—and damaged it irreversibly. Even if perfection does exist and is attainable, I change and with it shifts the absolute beauty of the sweater or the kettle or the man. Good enough is good enough. But it does have to be good. Not just enough.

I think of the country music song that counsels: If you can’t be with the girl you love, love the girl you’re with. Buddha would probably agree.

By midnight, I have filled six garbage bags. I drag them to the garbage room on my floor, grateful that Christmas has taken my neighbors away to their celebrations. I am chagrined by offal just as I am lightened by its removal and relocation. I silently shake my head as I walk back and sit for a moment on the stepladder from which I have been commanding my dismantling campaign and realize this move is a lot bigger and deeper than I anticipated.

Lying in bed that night, relief exchanged place with uneasiness. I wonder how all that accumulation happened. How did I keep stuffing more stuff into those narrow shelves? Where was my consciousness? Did I know deep down that one day I’d be called to account, allowing me to defer and delay until that moment?

I could not deny the evidence: I had been at least as excessive in my consumerism as those at whom I’d virtuously pointed my fingers; I’d been no less culpable than they were in infecting the planet. How empty the contents of those six black bags are! How useless all those weekends spent at flea markets or Soho street fairs or Macy’s.

Before I can move to a new place and truly move ON, I first have to move OUT.

The next morning, Christmas Day for the rest of New York, I wake up eager, excited even. This is not about garbage and packing, I realize. This is about understanding where I’ve come from and where I’m going.

I am possessed
January 1 I have made my way across the west, where most of the closets are located, and am ready to head south.

This move has become a meditation on the meaning of ownership. What is to be with my possessions, to have them? What would it be to be without them, to have the spaces between them rather than the things themselves? Would I feel emptiness, or air?

I’m at the bookshelves no and remove the twelve volumes of Sigmund Freud’s Gesammelte Werke (1924). I’ll never read them so what does removing them mean? My father’s professional preferences and training? My antiquarian bookseller brother’s desire—and resentment? Bibliofind or Bibliolose or Bibliodetach?

The antique rosewood desk that Paul bought at the Armory a dozen years ago and the leather-covered gentleman’s traveling case, replete with crystal containers and ivory-backed hairbrushes? And the life-size bronze horse from India? All impulses belonging to Paul but he’s dead and they’ve lain leaden in my life ever since. I’m moving on and they cannot come along.

I have become the custodian of others’ collections, dragging them with me, searching for bigger quarters so I can house them. Can my new house be truly my own place if these objects, objectively valuable though they may be, have to share it with me? If I own them, who am I? And if others don’t own them, who are they? And when these others own them do they then become somebody else?

Moving sets you in motion, based on these notes, was broadcast on WPKN on January 24, 2008. You can hear it at:
http://eastendreport.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/tidings3-moving-jan24-a.mp3

and for other "Tidings by Hazel Kahan" http://eastendrep.blogspot.com/2007/12/wpknwpkm-programs-for-download.html

SO YOU THINK YOU’RE NOT CREATIVE?

2007-12-11T19:10:00.000-05:00

Just because you think you're not creative

doesn't mean you aren't!

Water is H20, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
But there is also a third thing that makes it water
And nobody knows what that is.

D. H. Lawrence, The Third Thing

Creativity is a word that is full of light, it glows and it pleases—people like creativity, they admire it, they want it. How can anyone be against such a splendid word? But I am, I have my own little issue with creativity, it makes me nervous. I have seen that it discourages people who think they are not creative. It limits people who think maybe they are a little creative but not very and certainly not as creative as a friend or a co-worker or the artist next door. And I hope to show as I talk with you today we don’t have to be discouraged and we don’t have to set limits. If you don’t already believe you are creative, I hope you will leave today believing with me that creativity is not beyond your reach, that you are not born without it and that you don’t have to think about it as something that happens to other people.

What is creativity anyway, what are we talking about here? To create means to make something where before there was nothing (although I am not sure what that “nothing” would be), to make something that wasn’t there before. To create means to bring into being, to let something become. To make something new of something old. To connect two things that were separate, to make wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts, like D.H. Lawrence’s water. To create means bringing something from darkness into the light.

Where does creativity come from? Is it inside us, waiting to be stirred up or do we actually create whatever it is at that moment? Or is creativity outside us waiting to be found, to be let in? Or is it both—and maybe there is not as much distinction between inside and outside as we think? These are mysteries and I don’t know the answers to them, but I like thinking about them.

And about the ways in which our language is full of evocative phrases that describe the source of creativity, the experience of being creative: It came to me, we say, it appeared to him, it hit her, it was a leap of his imagination, I was overtaken by an idea, a light bulb went on in my head, it struck me, it occurred to me, I don’t know where it came from. “As the spirit moves you,” a teacher may say, encouraging a child to compose or paint or dance.

If our language has so many ways of expressing creativity, then it doesn’t take a leap of faith for me to assert that it’s not just the word but the thing itself, that manifests in a myriad ways and appears in a thousand guises, that creativity is everywhere and in every thing.

I’m not going to insist that inside each of us is a Hemingway or Botticelli or Miles Davis waiting to break free or that each of us is equally talented: clearly, creativity, like good fortune, is not evenly distributed. Some have more of it than others like blond hair or long legs. But I believe we all have more it than we think we do and I believe with special passion that a creative spirit inhabits each one of us, showing up in one guise or another, at one time or another. I am convinced that everyone is innately and essentially creative. Creations ourselves, we are inexorably driven to create; an imperative moves us to make things. We are built that way, creativity is hardwired into us and creative spirit comes with our territory. Bur the creative spirit can only flourish when it is recognized and saluted. Otherwise it sits in the dark, and it’s probably sulking.

If everyone is creative, then everything we do is an act of creation. Nature, the ultimate creative force, doesn’t begin or end, or pop up every now and then. Nature is at work all the time, when the snake sheds its skin and the tide rises, when the chrysanthemum flowers fade and the baby shouts its first breath. It’s all creation and with nature inside and outside us, we are each one creators, equally capable of living a creative life. I believe creativity is a force that, as Dylan Thomas would have it, through the green fuse drives the flower. It is an essential part of being human.

My nine-year old grandson Jack considers himself to be “very creative” because, he tells me: “I use my mind to make things up.” I know that Jack has a creative spirit or is it that he is a creative spirit? I have seen him sitting on the floor, twirling around, banging his feet together or he may be staring out of the window at the scaffolding around a rising New York University building, when suddenly he shouts “Ahhhh!”, runs to his room, returning some time later with a drawing or this story about, in his words, “the fantastic four endowed with super powers as they chased the bad guys including other dudes from other places.” He had clearly been inspired or the spirit moved him or an idea came to him. Something happened. That is clear. Those dudes from other places came from somewhere!

If there is a creative spirit afoot (and how disenchanted one has to be to deny the possibility!) then must that spirit not be somewhere, doing what it does—within us, about us, hovering somewhere far away? What if it shelters inside each of us, one shared spirit for all or a trace of that spirit in each of us? What if it is actually inside you, born with you in your birth but also around before you were? Maybe it’s a bit like a guardian angel, vigilant but also bit like a Muse, a sort of creativity consultant?

It’s difficult to be too specific about a spirit, the spirit, but if we can agree the creative spirit exists, then that’s good enough for me.

***

When I started to gather my thoughts for today, it was late summer and I was writing outdoors next to a tomato plant, that humbled me with its huge burden of red, bursting fruits crowding onto each other, shaping each other in their jostle for the sun. I applauded the plant for its fecundity and congratulated it on its creativity. (Nobody else was around so what I was doing didn’t look too weird.) If that tomato plant was not being creative, then what exactly would you call that thing that it was doing? Just a DNA thing? Blindly following its destiny? Maybe. But it was a lot more than that. DNA is necessary but not sufficient, a philosopher might say.

A week or two later, the splendid beech tree began its annual ritual of the exploding beech nuts--so loud when they first began their thing, exploding in the air and then hitting the ground that I thought it was hailing the first time I heard the extravaganza. Any day now it will shed its leaves and next spring, this grand old tree will recreate itself, fresh and new, born again, “the leaping greenly spirits of trees”, e.e.cummings called it. Not one new leaf has existed before, even though its forebears did, poking their way out of the same branch. Or what appears to be the same branch even though it is constantly changing. Older each year but born again newer. “How young the beech tree looks,” I wrote in my diary last May

I find myself complaining and being a victim: Why don’t humans get to be born again each spring? How come we witness their rebirth and renewal while they witness our decline and decay? It’s just not fair.

Perhaps I’m not open enough to see what is going on. Perhaps I can only see creation when it’s visible—leaves, fruit, flowers but not when it’s invisible, when it’s inner rebirth and renewal. When winter recedes, I respond to the sap rising within me by a flurry of spring cleaning, but I fail to see that I am in a continuous process of recreation and renewal--my cells replace themselves, I move and I change, my body responds to the changing light of the changing seasons, I meet new people and have new thoughts. By looking in the mirror and seeing only more gray hair, more wrinkles, more flab, I shut out the signs of rebirth that are trying to make themselves known to me. Perhaps we and the beech tree just have different ways of renewing ourselves.

***

So much for the trees, but what shall we do about animals? Are they creative? I can only speak for animals whom I know or have witnessed and I will declare, resoundingly, that I have no doubt that those animals are creative as they create relationships, subtle, wordless, complex, lasting bonds with each other and with us humans. A relationship with a horse, bird, dog, cat, fish is a creative act—it leaps to build a bridge where there was none before. A relationship is a creation just as a painting is. Compare it to the absence of a relationship if you are unconvinced. It’s the difference between nothing and something.

I don’t know if animals and insects are also being creative when they give birth or shed their skins or pupae or when they teach their young to fly or kill. By explaining such behavior as instinct or conditioning, we remove the animal as agent. We humans like to claim a unique and supreme position on the evolutionary scale. We like being at the top. We enjoy dominion. Animals and plants and trees are fine to own and earth is fine to occupy and many believe we are entitled to make life-and-death decisions about animals because they do not qualify for suffering nor do they have souls, they have no sense of humor and they are incapable of being creative. Those higher-order things, we insist, are the sole province of homo sapiens. We get to be their bosses of them.

I find it far more exciting to believe instead that the trees and the animals and we, the people, are continuous with each other. We talk about “nature” as if it is something distinct from us. Here am I and here are you and here are our children three. There, behind an invisible barrier, is nature. Nature is Other. Like animals and Nigerians and people in wheelchairs are Other.

But if we are not nature, then what are we? Unnatural? And what is nature? I’ve recently learned a monumental fact. If it’s already known to you, forgive my breathless astonishment while I tell you what it is. Our hemoglobin, the red blood that runs in our veins, is identical in structure to chlorophyll, the “blood” of leaves with the exception of one element. The only difference is that our red pigment is built around a single atom of iron while the green of the leaves is structured around a single atom of magnesium. With that one distinction, the trees and we have the same stuff coursing through our veins. With such compelling proof of continuity between the kingdoms of animal and plant, I wonder we’re not all brought to epiphany.

We are nature and nature is abuzz. I have slept in an Amazonian rainforest where the nights are so loud they make thought impossible; it’s the same sound these last days of October in the woods surrounding my house in Mattituck, not quite as loud maybe yet it is the same, the thick, impenetrable, insistent sound of creativity, everything being whatever it is, at the same time, just doing it. It would take a hundred years for me to be able to untangle those sounds and why should I want to? The sound is gone by dawn and then it begins all over again at dusk--cicadas, frogs, moth wings, birds, mushrooms, deer, acorns, sap—I don’t know. Perhaps the potted begonias listen and join in. It’s hard to tell.

All four seasons I can look out of my window and see nature recreating itself every moment. I witness reddening, withering, sprouting, shedding, curling, scrambling, decaying, birdsong. I want to place a sign in the woods that says: Quiet! Planet under construction! I look down at my hands on the keyboard of my laptop, also participating in the ongoing fest of creation. I walk around New York City and see office buildings and cineplexes, cars, newsstands, window boxes, sweaters, books and polyester bags too. Somebody made all these. Designers designed the Styrofoam deli takeout container and the metal body of the SUV. Reporters created articles for the tabloid newspaper. Hungarian women created sweaters that Ralph Lauren calls his own. People sit in meetings and create advertising campaigns and book jackets while others punch the clock to build cars on factory floors. Does it make sense to think of all these people as creators creating creations?

Nobody says creation is always a good thing nor that nature is only benign. We cannot deny creativity, spectacular creativity to cancer cells and the HIV virus—their appearance in new forms and places outwitting the most creative human attempts to destroy them. The list is enormous—parasites that destroy the eyes and intestines of African children, water hyacinths whose deadly beauty chokes the waterways of Southeast Asia, brand new creations such as SARS.

Sometimes, destruction is a deeply creative act. A phoenix rises out of the ashes, a marriage ends and two new lives emerge, an accident leaves a young woman paralyzed and a man writes an epic poem. “All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born,” as Yeats wrote.

We are all creative, in one way or another, for good or for ill, for better or for worse.

***

But that makes the point. Pictures, music, cakes, peace, war. The choice we are presented with is what to do about this or that, what to do with that. Our creative spirit belongs to us. We can choose to neglect it, we can abuse it we can ignore it--and we do. And sometimes we are kind to it, that too. We can enlist our creativity to create for good or for evil, for health or for harm; we can create to make something that is more beautiful or helpful or we can create solely to maximize the return on investment. We can create welcoming places for other people’s children or we can create hand-propelled grenades to drive them from their homes.

Misdirected though the creative spirit often is, it nevertheless is yours, it belongs to you. It has nowhere else to go, it cannot skulk off in search of a more habitable person. That is not its nature. And so it stays on with you, waiting for better times. With encouragement or good luck or at the appearance of some inexplicable circumstance, a leaf falling onto a notebook perhaps, the creative spirit arises and, if you hear its invitation, you rise to meet it and something new is born.

If life is a series of moments, one following emptily after another, then each moment can be one thing or another, it can continue empty or it can hold something, it can pass without notice or it can be made into something.

We deny ourselves by believing that it is only poems and music and quilts, or maybe a perfect bowl of pasta too, that qualify for creativity. Creating is far more than the things a painter, poet or pianist do. Creativity is the choice one makes in how each moment is lived, how a visitor is welcomed, how a birthday gift is wrapped, how a message is left on an answering machine. In a fully realized life, I believe these are all ways of being creative, of living a creative life. A thank-you letter, the farewell at the railway station, the green apples in the yellow bowl, the folded, piled laundry, the composing of a shopping list, the socks that match the shirt, all are receptacles for creativity precisely because they don’t have to be, could just as well be unthinking, unconscious acts, cast off without intention or invention or intervention.

Sadly, this is not well known.

Regard these bits of daily life instead as a place to leave traces of yourself, a clearing in which to make your mark, and suddenly a conversation with a passing stranger becomes alive, a time to see what you can make of it while you stand there, to see how you really are. Without you, there would have been no conversation, it would have been left uncreated. Without you, the solution you created for the restless child or the unhappy rhododendron bush or the broken picture frame would not exist. But because you do exist, it does too. See this small place as a place of creation and, chances are, you’ll walk away expanded somehow, because creation renews, it will not deplete the creator. There is always plenty more where that came from. The more you create, the more you create.

How could you not think you are creative?

Creativity is risky. It may not work. It may be ugly or ragged or somebody else may already have thought of it. You may expose yourself and see a frightening new face in the mirror. You may look naive and you may be rejected. True. But still you must do it because otherwise you will deprive yourself of the exalted joy that can happen during creation. The sustained, focused process of creating transports the creating person into a world whose name I do not know. What I do know is that, like the athlete who runs in order to feel the burn, it’s the creating, the process, the act of it that is the real reason people go on creating. They want to be back again and again in that crucible where creativity flows and time stops. This is why I urge you to connect with your own personal creative spirit.

I am betting you will never look back.

WHAT ARE TIDINGS?

2007-08-03T16:41:00.001-04:00

Tidings are announcements, dispatches, scuttlebutt and also, I would like to believe, illuminations and insights brought from elsewhere. Tidings are carried in the bags and pouches of travelers and wanderers, in the pocket of a stranger from exotic parts and, once upon a time so it is said, by an olive leaf in a dove's beak that told Noah the floods had receded and that land was near. www.leafages.com/store/olives/divination.html

Tidings can come in the form of a leaf but they also appear as a letter, an instant message, a knock on the door or a blog and, as I hope they will, on the waves of a radio program.

I will be posting and recording thoughts, commentaries, interviews--with political figures, refugees, authors and anybody else whose tidings I think should be heard. The thoughts will come from my own experience and from conversations, diary jottings, confusion, outrage, dreams, books--wherever they lurk and linger. If they seem to contain a tiding, I will try and capture whatever it is.

Tidings from Hazel Kahan is the name of the radio program on WPKN 89.5/WPKM 88.7 fm where you can hear these things. You will also be able to read posts on this blog that have not been recorded yet and which may never be but which have the feel of tidings about them.

I hope you will come to like them.

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