Dove's Eye View

Prayers, not Blogs

I keep saying that following politics on the internet is bad for my liver. I keep saying I'm going to swear off the internet, blog less, and focus on healing.

The events of the last two days in Lebanon convince me that now is the time for the Dove to shut up. I am going to pray, for myself, my relatives, my father's compatriots, my own compatriots, the salmon run in California, the people of Palestine, Iraq and Egypt, Myanmar and Darfur. I pray for the rainforest and the oceans, the polar ice caps and the polar bears, the honey bees, the mountain snows, the wheat crop, CO2 levels and the restoration of harmony on the planet.

I have nothing more to say for the moment on the subject of Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, America, Iraq, Iran or anywhere else. May God help us all.

Today was a good day in chemotherapy. I laughed and talked with another young woman who has metastatic breast cancer, as I do. Her son is three, my two are six and eight. We have everything to live for and we intend to survive. Afterward I ate at my favorite Middle East deli, King of Falafil on Divisadero Street; the proprietress is from Ramallah and gave me some green almonds to taste; I promised her I'd get her fresh grape leaves from my secret Oakland source. Then I came home and saw the news.

Only God can heal me of what I have got, and only God or Ultimate Life Force or Universal Intelligence can heal the people of the eastern Mediterranean; only God could knock some sense into George Bush/Dick Cheney/Condi Rice. So I'm signing off and giving it all up to God. (The Great Mystery/Ultimate Unknown/The Tao/Your Favorite Big Prime Mover Term here)

Pray for me. Pray for all of us.

And don't forget to plant a food garden, use your bicycle, turn off the lights and conserve water.

Farming Urban Asphalt

Create business profits for poor people, feed the city, and reduce carbon emissions, too: City Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market - New York Times.

more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

...One key to financial success is having customers with the wherewithal to buy your goods. In New York, Bob Lewis, the head of the city office for the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, helped make this happen by getting 21 farmers at 16 sites approved to accept checks from the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, a supplement to the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and senior nutrition programs.

...

But land and demand are not all that successful farmers need. They have to know how to run a business or a farm.

So Growing Power, the Milwaukee group, offers several training sessions each year, and Just Food’s City Farms project holds an annual series of workshops on running farm stands.

For more formal training there is the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1967, the center runs a six-month course for 39 students each year on its two farms.

Patricia Allen, the center’s executive director, said roughly three-fourths of her students today were interested in urban growing.

“We’re not looking at a back-to-the-land movement in any sense,” she said.

The article reports that the Wilkses of Brooklyn sold $3,000 worth of produce last year, and a high school group in Brooklyn sold $25,000, while a co-op in Philadelphia sold more than $60,000 worth of home-grown food. Look at the piece for more info and great pictures of a two acre farm in abandoned Detroit's "urban prairie."

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I remember when New York City began mandatory recycling of paper and cans. Nobody thought New Yorkers would ever cooperate, but within a few months everybody was bagging or tying up newspapers and setting them at the curb. Those of us who used to set out redeemable cans for the homeless to collect now put them in recycling bins. It seemed miraculous that citizens could change their behavior so quickly.

San Francisco diverts 70% of its trash from the landfill, but wants to do even better: A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More - New York Times.

Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city’s environmental programs, addressed one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle. “The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper,” Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent to China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and toys sold in big-box stores.

It's sad that a once-great industrial power now exports mostly scrap and raw materials. To save the planet we all need to reduce what we consume so that we reduce what we trash (and reduce our carbon emissions). But I admire Gavin Newsom for fighting this good fight.

Here in Oakland we recycle paper, glass, plastic and kitchen scraps. The county subsidizes expensive back-yard compost bins for those of us who want to make our own mulch; we also have green bins for yard wastes, kitchen scraps and paper contaminated with food (i.e. pizza boxes and cardboard egg cartons).

In my father's hometown, Sidon, Lebanon, the municipal garbage dump keeps falling into the Mediterranean; it's a long-running, slow-motion environmental crisis. Naples has a similar, horrific garbage problem, and the press is full of reports of massive electronic waste dumps in Africa and South Asia. Being rich is a sickness that causes ill-health to the sea, the soil, the climate, and ultimately to ourselves. Fish, insects and birds are part of an interconnected web of life that supports our own life; we cannot survive long in a monoculture. We need all manner of bugs and life forms we don't even know. Garbage pollutes the world that is supposed to sustain us.

Mundane and stinky, garbage is still important. We can't just "throw it away" and forget about it. We have to confront our garbage if we want to survive as a species.

Alternative to Siege and Bloodshed

Medical supplies convoy to Gaza - the alternative to siege and bloodshed - Gush Shalom - Israeli Peace Bloc. Via my husband's cousin, Art Lipow.

Tomorrow morning (Sunday, May 4) there will be transferred to the Gaza Strip, after many delays due to bureaucratic problems in the granting of military permits, a consignment of medicines and medical equipment which was purchased through the sum of about 60,000 Dollars collected all over the world at the call of Gush Shalom and the other groups involved in the Israeli Coalition Against the Gaza Siege.

The medical supplies were purchased from Palestinian suppliers in Nablus, with the help of the Tel-Aviv based Physicians for Human Rights (which also undertook the obtaining of permits from the IDF military bureaucracy). The consignment will be passed on the morning hours of Wednesday, through the Bitunia Checkpoint near Ramallah and to the Gaza Strip border. There, it will be received by representatives of the Palestinian-International Coalition Against the Gaza Siege, in which the psychiatrist and human rights activist Dr. Eyad Sarraj is involved.

Members of Gush Shalom will accompany the consignment all the way to the Gaza border, with the truck decorated by huge signs reading “Stop the siege of Gaza, stop the bloodshed, cease-fire now!”.

Israeli says: Our Defense Forces, our war crimes, our terrorism

An Israeli journalist and IDF veteran writes: Our Defense Forces, our war crimes, our terrorism - Haaretz - Israel News.

I want to apologize for the unforgivable.

It is time for us to stop "understanding" why we kill so many Palestinian civilians. It is time for us to stop explaining away the deaths we excuse as the unfortunate and incidental by-product of a terrible war.

If it had been only an isolated incident, a tragic aberration, I would have kept my peace, said nothing, just moved on.

But the same crime, the same - let's call it by its real name - atrocity, has been committed time and again, under the same circumstances, for the same reasons, with the same indefensible result.

Someone in an IDF uniform, in a position of responsibility, gave an order. We will probably never know who. Nor will we know who loaded the shell into the tank gun, if that was, indeed what happened, or who armed the air-to-surface missile, if that was what happened, who sighted the target, who gave the order to fire, who carried it out.

What we do know is that a mother in Beit Hanoun, a devastated area of northern Gaza from which Qassams and mortars are fired at Israel, was seeing to the breakfast of her four small children Monday morning when their world exploded.

We know that they are all dead. -- Bradley Burston in Ha'aretz

Israel has been making excuses for such murders since I was a child 35 years ago. But no American government has ever held her to account. Only her citizens and her supporters in the West can force Israel to change.

Cease the murder. This will lead to peace. Violence has not curtailed violence in this war. Only negotiation will. Hamas has offered a ceasefire. talk it out. Now.

Hat tip to Philip Weiss for the above.

May Day: Oakland On Strike

Why didn't my local paper cover May Day in my hometown? Oakland Teach-In Looks at Budget Cuts and the War - New York Times.

a daylong act of educational disobedience undertaken on Thursday by about two dozen teachers across Oakland, who set aside their normal lesson plans in favor of topics like the war in Iraq, racial inequality and a recent 10 percent cut in the state schools budget.

Craig Gordon, a social studies teacher at Robeson and the author of the day’s curriculum, said the goal was to raise awareness among students who may not have a firm grasp of the relationship between what happens at home and what happens “out there.”

Also - unions up and down the West Coast struck in protest of the war. Why no local coverage? Sheesh!

Not celebrating

Regarding Israel's 60th anniversary and the Palestinian Nakba, British Jews and others write: Letters: We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary | The Guardian.

Hat tip to Philip Weiss, who is running a Nakba watch at his blog. He celebrates Lila Abu-Lughod and her book, Nakba, published last year.

As'ad Abu-Khalil alerts us to this letter to Nadine Gordimer from a professor in Gaza whose students are literally starving while reading her books.

My cold and hungry students have divided themselves into two groups, with one group adamant that you, like many of your courageous characters, will reconsider your participation in an Israeli festival that aims to celebrate the annihilation of Palestine and Palestinians. The other group believes that you have already crossed over to the side of the oppressor, negating every word you have ever written. We all wait for your next action.

All Palestinian Factions Agree to Ceasefire

From The Hindu News Update Service.

all the Palestinian militant factions have agreed to an Egypt-mediated ceasefire with Israel, "starting in the Gaza strip".

"All the Palestinian factions have agreed to the Egyptian proposal on a truce with Israel," Egyptian state news agency, MENA said citing an unnamed high level Egyptian official.

The Egyptian proposal included a "comprehensive, reciprocal and simultaneous truce, implemented in a graduated framework, starting in the Gaza Strip and then subsequently moving to the West Bank, the official said.

The BBC also gives details.

I find this stuff by checking Google News occasionally.

Who is the real menace to America?

Regarding the alleged perfidies of Reverend Wright, Obama's former pastor, Balloon Juice says:

If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

Until then, I just can’t seem to get all worked up about the crazy scary black preacher that Obama has to “throw under the bus.”

Yes indeed. Remember that Wright served in the Marines in Vietnam for six years and has been feeding the hungry in Chicago ever since. Meanwhile, Bush, who served at a desk in Texas during Vietnam, guts the Constitution, sells the government to his cronies, and kills hundreds of thousands of Arabs with his war.

Tell me who is really a menace to the Republic? Tell me who has done more for this country? Tell me who is the real patriot?

Hat tip to Kevin Drum for spotting this link.

Scraperbikes

Local kids - two miles from my house - turn old bikes into colorful showpieces; they do tricks and parade around in formation. The song lyric says "don't need no car"; they make bicycles into a pop culture phenomenon.

I need a new category called "My Oakland": Local scraperbikes ride into global consciousness. From the Oakland Tribune.

The video shows the intersection of High Street and Foothill - about two miles southwest of my house. Last year I was driving on 35th Avenue at Foothill when I saw a Latino youth on a three wheeled bike just like the ones in this video - decorated with metal foil and colorful paint. I rolled down my window as I waited at the stop light and spoke to him. "Did you build that yourself?" I shouted. "It's amazing. You could sell it for a lot of money! Great job!" The young man looked a little bewildered - middle-aged white ladies driving through East Oakland normally don't call out pleasantries from their cars to passing youth.

I had no idea this was a cultural movement in the making in my front yard. I don't "hang out" in that area much, usually just drive through on my way somewhere else, or pop in and out to visit a library branch or a friend, so I have only spotted the one scraper bike in real life.

This phenomenon is good for the planet (bikes, not cars; recycled materials), it's locally-grown, it's fun, it builds community and it features pop music. The Dove has always liked hip-hop since the late 70s in NYC, and I appreciate the high spirits and creativity of these young men - not only do they fix up bikes and careen around on them, they made a video and started a contest.

Update: Oakland Parks and Recreation Dept. has been offering Earn Your Bike since 1994 - where kids learn to fix up old bicycles, and upon completing the course earn their own bicycle to refurbish. Also several local recreation centers offer film and video courses. These scraper bike entrepreneurs could have gotten their skills at the local community center.

Go, Oakland!